by Rick Shelley
“We picked her up on our way into Xayber,” I said. “She’s been a help.” Somehow, I managed to get that out without choking—probably because Dieth’s drug picked that moment to start wearing off. I guess I grunted at the return of pain.
“Are you all right?” Kardeen asked, concern immediately appearing on his face.
“Not completely,” I admitted, “but I don’t have time to worry about that. Baron Dieth had a foul brew for pain. It worked. Would there be any of it here?”
“Number,” Annick said, and I heard the same num-mer pronunciation as before.
“I’m sure your mother has some around here somewhere,” Kardeen said. “You’d best have her check you out right away. What happened?”
“A spear took him in the back,” Annick said. “He has a broken rib, maybe two, and the wound may be infected. Hadn’t been for the armor, he’d have been skewered for proper.”
“Let’s get you attended to,” Kardeen said. He took my arm and led me out of the room.
I learned something new about my mother that night. Another something new. She was something of a doctor—and I don’t mean witch doctor. I was guided back to my room. A page went for Mother. There were twenty minutes of her fussing over the injury. I got my pain medicine, and it tasted just as vile the second time. Mother smeared some kind of jelly over the wound. This preparation didn’t sting the way Dieth’s poultice had. It felt warm but not hot, soothing.
“The one rib is broken, but the other may not be. I can’t be sure without X rays,” Mother said. “You shouldn’t have any real problem with it now, but you need to stay flat for at least forty-eight hours.”
“No chance,” I said, and Mother didn’t argue.
“I have to tell the king that you’re back,” Kardeen said then. “He left standing orders that he was to be told instantly of your return, and I’m already late. You’d best get a few hours rest before you leave.”
“As long as someone wakes me three hours before dawn,” I said.
“I’ll see to it,” Kardeen promised.
Timon managed to promote a few gallons of hot water, and I took the time to get cleaned up. With a fresh dose of painkiller in me, I managed to get it done without help. Then I dropped across the bed like a dead man. Annick ended up in my mother’s room. I slept without dreams. I had no sensations at all until Lesh shook me awake. Waking was difficult, almost impossible. The last thing I wanted to do was abandon sleep. At least there was no pain yet.
“The cooks sent up breakfast and coffee,” Lesh said. A table had been set up in the room and loaded with food. I hadn’t heard any of the preparations. Timon and Harkane helped me dress. They did most of the work. My mind was still somewhere closer to sleep than waking.
Mother came in with Annick while I was chugging my first cup of scalding, bitter coffee. From the glance Mother gave me, I could tell that she didn’t approve of Annick—which meant that she had completely misread our relationship. I had seen that look before when I dated girls Mother didn’t like.
“I’m worried about Parthet,” Mother said while she took another look at my back. “If the elflord captures him, it won’t go well. The lords of Fairy take harsh measures against the wizards of the seven kingdoms when they can.”
“You mean they’d kill him?”
“Eventually. Parthet is old. It might not take him long to die under the treatment he could expect.” Then she handed me a silver flask with the family crest and some extra designs worked into it. “This is the painkiller. Only take a single capful at a time, and don’t take it at all until you feel the pain. It should be longer each time.”
“Nobody warned me how screwy time is in Fairy,” I said. I was getting used to things like that, people forgetting to mention things that were too “obvious” to need mentioning—if you knew enough about the land to start with. “Not that it would have made much difference. I still had to go,” I added. But I wouldn’t have taken the extra time to go farther north and raise hell after I got the sea-silver. And then I wouldn’t have taken the business end of that spear in the back.
“How did you get the elf sword?” Mother stared at it. I told her, very briefly. I was too busy eating to weave the full tale.
“Be careful. Such weapons can cut the hand that holds them.”
“So can everything else around here.”
“Grandfather wants to see you before you leave,” Mother said.
“Getting waked up twice in one night has got to be hard on him,” I said, hoping to get out of a pointless formality. There wasn’t much time, and I didn’t see what good it could do.
“No matter, he sleeps lightly,” Mother said. “He’s been worried. You were gone so long.”
I nodded—simple punctuation. “We’d better go see him, then.”
The meeting was short and not as gloomy as I had feared. I introduced Annick and said what a help she had been. It was easier to say this time. Pregel thanked her and asked about her mother. Annick’s bitter reply was the most painful part of the ten-minute meeting. It embarrassed everyone but her. The king had been informed about my injury. He asked me how I felt and then asked Mother for her medical opinion. She told him that I really should be flat in bed for two days but that I would likely be okay anyway as long as the injury wasn’t aggravated, that I appeared to be healing lickety-split the way my father always had. I was starting to feel pain again, but I wanted to wait until I got away from Pregel to take my next swig of that awful elixir.
When the audience was over, Baron Kardeen had my extra soldiers and everyone was armed and armored. I left my shield behind—I hadn’t found a use for that yet, despite my initial enthusiasm for it—but I did wear a helmet. Harkane had scared up a new one for me. The fact that I wore a tin pot willingly should give some idea how nervous I felt about the expedition. My Cubs cap was in my pocket, the blue bill sticking out. One bag of sea-silver was brought to the doorway that led to Arrowroot. We wouldn’t take it through until Arrowroot was secure, though. If. The other bag was taken to the door leading to Coriander and put under guard. If I succeeded in Arrowroot, I would pop over to Coriander, set up the door there, then return to Basil to start my mad ride to Thyme. I didn’t expect to need the second bag, at least not until I reached the other end, if then, but I wanted it handy, just in case.
Annick had an arrow nocked when I opened the way to Arrowroot. My bow was over my shoulder. I moved to the side and held the passage open with one hand while Lesh and the other soldiers hurried through to take up positions on the other side. Annick, Harkane, and I went through last. We left Timon behind again. He still wasn’t happy about being excluded.
Once more, the sense of danger was overpowering as soon as I opened the passage to Arrowroot. Danger flowed through the doorway like heat out of an oven. But I was ready for it this time. I gritted my teeth and moved on into Arrowroot, Dragon’s Death out and ready.
There were no torches burning in the corridor we entered. There were no watchfires on the battlements. Castle Arrowroot was silent but for the lapping of the Mist against the outer wall.
“Which way?” Lesh asked softly once we had a couple of torches burning.
“To the great hall, but carefully. We don’t know what’s waiting for us,” I said.
We had trouble skulking—ten of us in chain mail and toting metal weapons—but it didn’t matter. There was no one in the corridors, and everyone in the great hall was sound asleep. Underscore the sound. The volume of the combined snoring was incredible. A twenty-one gun salute might not have wakened men who could sleep through that din.
“These are Resler’s people,” Lesh said after we got a few more torches lit along the walls. Annick confirmed it.
“Hey, Kobe!” She prodded one of the sleeping men with her foot, roughly. His snoring changed tone for a moment, but he didn’t wake. Annick pushed his shoulder again. He still didn’t wake. Neither did anyone else. I whistled, as loud and shrilly as I could. A few men rolled over or inter
rupted their snoring for an instant, but that was all.
“Let’s find your uncle,” I told Annick. She led the way to his room. There was no answer to my first knock, so I bashed on the door with the hilt of Dragon’s Death and shouted for Resler. There was still no reply, so I went in anyway. Resler was in bed, snoring as lustily as any of the men downstairs. We got lights going and went to work at waking the baron. It took ten minutes and two pitchers of water over his head before he even started to stir, another five minutes to get him sitting up with his eyes open.
“Morning already?” Resler asked, staring blankly. He didn’t notice that he was sopping wet, or who was in his room, or anything. He yawned wide.
“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded, almost shouting in my effort to shock his brain awake. It didn’t work.
“What’s going on?” he asked back, dreamy. His eyes started to droop shut again.
“Lesh, see if you can find coffee. Or whiskey if there’s no coffee brewing.” He nodded and left.
“Wake up, Baron.” This time I did shout. Annick shook her uncle. Resler looked from me to Annick, then back at me. Something finally seemed to be getting through to him.
“What’s going on?” he asked, a little more coherently.
“That’s what I want to know,” I said, still speaking loudly. “Why won’t anyone wake up?”
“I don’t know. I was sleeping so peacefully.” Resler seemed to be speaking at about half speed, and running down. He raised his hands and started to rub at his cheeks and eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved since I left to get sea-silver. Finally, he looked up at me, more closely.
“You’re back already? We thought it would take another week.”
“Another week? I’ve been gone almost three weeks now!”
Resler shook his head slowly, then stopped. His eyes opened a little wider. “It can’t be more than three or four days.”
I was getting confused. First I was told that I had been gone twice as long as I thought, then that I had just left. I watched Resler as he continued to come awake. It was incredibly, impossibly slow going.
“Where’s my uncle, the wizard?” I asked when Resler looked as if he was finally getting his act together.
Resler’s eyebrows moved toward each other. “We have a problem,’ he said slowly. “Something came over us.” Very slowly now. “It hit the town first. The elflord …”
“What about Parthet?”
“He was—he was trying to find a way to fight—to fight the sleepiness.” Resler started to sag, falling asleep again almost in the middle of a word.
“Wake up!” I screamed. His eyelids rose. He stared at me bleary-eyed.
“I wasn’t.” He blinked several times. “I was.” He stood, moving like an arthritic scarcely able to bend his joints.
“What about Parthet?” I asked again.
“He’s here somewhere.” Resler started pacing slowly. “I can’t think. My head’s all fuzzy.”
“Harkane, find Parthet. Take one of the men with you.” Our six soldiers were standing in the hall outside the Baron’s room. I sent four of them to the great hall to start waking the garrison. I warned them how hard it would be. I kept the last soldier at the baron’s door.
All of the assurances that the elflord’s offensive magics didn’t work well outside Fairy weren’t worth dragon’s crap. Xayber had at least one dandy trick that was working all too well. Why worry about killing your enemies in battle or frying them with lightning or whatever if you can just put them to sleep and waltz in to slit their throats at leisure? That thought ripped a growl from my throat and a quick glance at Annick, but I didn’t say anything. Xayber didn’t even have to bother with finishing off sleeping soldiers if he didn’t want to. He could just leave them to the Rip Van Winkle routine until they were irrelevant. Could. My immediate worry was that he might prefer to do a more thorough job, that the grim reaper’s barbers might be on their way in at any minute. I wondered why they hadn’t moved in already if the castle had been like this for a week, maybe two.
Annick and I kept at her uncle, trying to keep him awake. Lesh arrived with a bottle of whiskey—Johnny Walker Red Label scotch at that.
“There’s nobody awake in the kitchens either,” Lesh reported. “Cooking fires are stone cold. Rotten meat hanging in the larder. Looks like they’ve been snoozing for ages.”
“No coffee?”
“I started a fire and put coffee on to boil. It’ll be ready soon, but I thought this’d help.” Boiled coffee. No wonder it all tasted so bitter.
Annick poured scotch down her uncle’s throat. He gagged and sputtered, but it did seem to help. Then Harkane came screaming back.
“I found the wizard! On the battlements, standing like a statue, arms up, staring at the sky!”
I started running.
17
Perchance to Dream
Parthet wasn’t alone on the battlements of the keep. There was also a sentry walking his circuit, a soldier who wasn’t completely asleep, though he did seem to be in a trance, sleepwalking. The sentry didn’t even notice the bunch of us who charged up the stairs and surrounded Parthet until he had walked another complete circuit, and even then he scarcely reacted. He simply detoured around us.
Parthet looked in bad shape. He was rigid, “like a statue.” He was standing with his feet spread, head tilted back, arms extended upward at full reach, not even trembling—like Charlton Heston holding open the Red Sea before Yul Brynner could catch the fleeing Israelites. When I touched Parthet’s shoulder, I got an electric shock and a fleeting glimpse of an unmistakable face.
“He’s locked in a duel with the Elflord of Xayber,” I said. That was all the explanation the people who had been with me in Fairy needed.
I had to do something. The idea of butting in and facing the elflord again turned my stomach. I was scared, and I couldn’t hide that, not from myself. But I couldn’t hesitate either. I took the elf sword in hand, got in front of Parthet, and touched my rings to his. There was another surge of electricity and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My teeth ached and I felt as if the skin on my face had tightened up about three sizes. Parthet slumped and disappeared from my view.
And I was facing the elflord on that featureless gray plain again. This time, I didn’t wait for him to start the game.
“You try my patience!” I said, with genuine anger and all the phony confidence I could muster to hide my fear. “This man is mine, and this place. Leave while you may.”
It was all bluff and bluster. I don’t think I’ve ever felt half as arrogant as I tried to sound. I held Dragon’s Death between us and took a couple of steps toward the image of the elflord. The face that looked back at me showed no emotion. I did have one advantage, maybe a couple. First, there was little chance now that I would be vulnerable to anything like the fall-on-your-sword ploy. I had seen it before and I wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. Just keep a tight rein on your head, I told myself. And the second advantage: I was outside his realm now. I wasn’t quite as certain of that one.
I also wasn’t sure how long I could maintain this bluff. I brought my hands together so the rings touched, closed my eyes, and turned my back on the elflord. When I opened my eyes, I was back at Arrowroot. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Are you all right?” Annick asked.
I looked around the battlements while I felt myself out. “I think so. Where’s Parthet?”
“Lesh and Harkane carried him downstairs. He’s in trouble, Gil.” There seemed to be real concern in her voice, and that surprised me. It was also the first time she had called me by name. “Was it really the elflord?”
I nodded. “There was no duel this time. I broke the contact.” Okay, I was bragging a little, but more than that, I was wondering what was in the painkiller I had been taking to give me that kind of gall. “How long did it take?”
“Only a couple of minutes.”
Long enough for Lesh
and Harkane to carry Parthet off the battlements, at least. “See if you can learn anything from this guard,” I said. He was still walking his post, paying no attention to anything but getting one foot in front of the other. “I’ve got to get downstairs to see to Uncle Parthet.”
Lesh had ousted Baron Resler’s chief functionary from bed, literally, to make room for Parthet. The steward didn’t seem to mind. He was sound asleep on the floor, out of the way. I checked Parthet over. His pulse was weak and erratic, his face pale but sweating, and I could scarcely see any movement of his chest as he breathed. He needed a top-notch urban trauma center—with a resident witch doctor.
“Lesh, stay with him. If he stops breathing …” That took some time. I had to demonstrate artificial respiration. There wasn’t time for a primer on CPR. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“Harkane, come with me. I’m going to open the way to Basil. Find my mother. Tell her what’s happened to Parthet and bring her back with whatever she can find to help him. She can open the passage back.”
“I know,” Harkane said. He appeared rather shaken.
I was gone only three or four minutes. Parthet looked the same when I returned. “Lesh, get that scotch from the baron’s room, if there’s any left.”
I had taken several first-aid courses while I was a teenager and I knew that whiskey wasn’t the wisest choice of stimulants, but it was all we had, and I was afraid that unless I did something fast, I was going to lose Parthet. And his new glasses. The pair he had on when we found him had huge square lenses with heavy black frames—owl glasses with lenses thicker than the bottom of a dime root beer mug. They were on the nightstand next to the bed now. I looked through them but couldn’t see anything but a blur. After I wiped off the dirt, water spots, and bird droppings, I still couldn’t see through them.
Mother arrived quickly. She had an old black doctor bag with her, the kind that went out of style when house calls did. She gestured me out of the way and examined Parthet. She lifted his eyelids to check his eyes, put a hand to his chest to check respiration, then took a stethoscope out of the bag and listened to his heart.