The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  “I don’t think you have to worry,” Aaron said. “Before he started working on this new magic, and back when Parthet was teaching me about being a wizard, he did a lot of talking about Pregel. He talked about how they went to the St. Louis World’s Fair together back in the beginning of the century, about being among the first people ever to eat ice cream in a cone. What your mother was talking about, that must just have been because your grandfather was already so sick.”

  That sounded encouraging. “I’d better double-check though,” I said, getting up from the desk. “Is Parthet so deep in his conjuring that I can’t disturb him for a minute?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s not in a trance or anything.”

  Parthet confirmed what Aaron had said. After that, I could hardly wait to get back to Joy. It was almost midnight in Varay, which would make it about three in the morning in Chicago, but I was almost certain that Joy would want to go through right away, get away for as long as we could, as soon as we could, before anything could come up to keep us from leaving. I took just enough time before I left Basil to tell Kardeen where Joy and I would be and to tell him that we weren’t to be disturbed unless it was absolutely a matter of life and death.

  “As soon as I tell Joy the trip’s on, I’ll be back to go up to Arrowroot for the Russians,” I told Kardeen. “The sooner they’re gone, the better. I’d hate to have any unpleasantness up at Arrowroot.” Then I hurried back to Cayenne.

  Joy was still up on the battlements, staring at the night sky.

  “You ready for that honeymoon?” I asked.

  “Aren’t any of the stars here the same as they are back home?” she asked. I looked up at the sky.

  “I’m not sure. I think they must be, but we’re seeing them from a different perspective. I know what you mean, though,” I added before she could say anything. “The patterns are different. There’s no Orion, no Dippers, nothing to recognize. It bothered me at first too, especially not being able to see Orion. But you get used to the new patterns.” As long as you avoided dwelling on the paradox of the same moon being in the sky with different constellations.

  “I wonder,” Joy said, and then she switched topics. “You mean we can go back to our world?”

  “Anytime we want. The trouble with Grandfather was that he was already so sick. He just couldn’t take the strain of being away from the source of the magic that was keeping him going. He was even in our world when I was born. He came to see me while I was still in the hospital.”

  “Can we go right now?”

  I smiled. I knew her well enough to predict that response. “I hurried back as soon as I found out. We can go anytime you want. It’ll be about three in the morning there, though.”

  “As long as there’s hot water in the shower.”

  “There should be.” And then I decided that the Russians could wait for a few hours, until morning. There was no sense waking them up now. Joy and I deserved a little treat.

  “But will it be safe? Will the police be waiting, about Aaron?” Joy asked.

  I laughed. “So I’ll claim diplomatic immunity. I’m the head of state of a sovereign kingdom.”

  The joke came at a good time. We both laughed, and we needed a laugh.

  “Okay, your high-and-mightiness, let’s go take a hot shower.”

  We went down to the bedroom, grabbed clothes to change into after our shower, and went to the doorway leading to the bedroom in the Chicago condo. I handed Joy the clothes I was carrying so I would have both hands free to open the passage. I put my rings on the silver lining …

  And nothing happened.

  “You miss the silver?” Joy asked.

  I shook my head and looked. The rings were on the sea-silver.

  Something’s wrong, I thought, but I didn’t say it yet.

  “I’ll try the door to my office in the Loop,” I said. I kept office space just to have an extra bolt hole in Chicago—and to let me get downtown and back a lot faster. My office was only a couple of blocks from the big Kroch and Brentano bookstore on Wabash, even closer to Marshall Field’s. Convenient for shopping.

  That door didn’t work either.

  Neither did the one to my bedroom in Louisville.

  “I think we’ve got big trouble,” I told Joy.

  5

  The Day

  Joy dropped the bundle of clothes. She guessed what had happened as quickly as I did. Neither of us screamed. We were beyond that. I went back and tried all of my doorways to the other world again. There was nothing, no tingling, no opening. I didn’t get a kick in the gut from my danger sense, because I couldn’t get through to where the danger was.

  “World War Three,” Joy said. She seemed to choke on the words. Who could blame her?

  I nodded and cleared my throat a couple of times. “Maybe not,” I said, even though I didn’t believe what I was saying. “It may just be a malfunction in the magic. Aaron might have shorted out the system when he created the passage back from that shrine.”

  “That was days ago. Why would it wait till now to blow? Try one of the doors to Basil.”

  “Not days ago,” I said. “Less than two days.”

  Was it really only that? I asked myself. It hardly seemed possible that so much had happened in a day and a half.

  Try one of the doors to Basil. I would have thought of that fairly soon even without Joy’s prompt. As soon as I got hold of the shock of not being able to get through to Chicago or Louisville, my first impulse would have been to run to Castle Basil to spread the alarm and start everybody working on ways to deal with the crisis. It would be a crisis and it would spill over into Varay and the rest of the buffer zone one way or another. Even without all the other weirdness going on, something that major would be reflected in the seven kingdoms. That’s how closely the realms are tied together.

  The door to my (now former) bedroom in Castle Basil worked.

  I looked through the doorway for a moment, then broke the contact. “Okay, it’s not all the doors,” I said. “I’ll get Lesh. This isn’t a time to be going anywhere without an escort.”

  I opened our bedroom door and yelled for Lesh. He may be a heavy sleeper at times, but he woke fast enough that time.

  “We’re going to Castle Basil,” I told him. “There’s some kind of trouble with the doors leading back to my world.”

  “Aye, sire. I’ll grab my things.” Lesh turned and raced back to the level where he and the rest of my people slept. Lesh was soon coming back, with his weapons—and with Harkane, Timon, and the new pages, Jaffa and Rodi.

  “We’re ready, sire,” Lesh said. It had taken me ages to break him of calling me “lord” every time he opened his mouth. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to break him of the sires and Majesties now that I was king.

  “Not all of us,” I said. “Harkane, you’ll stay here as my steward for the time being.” Giving the job a title would make it easier to accept. That lesson had taken some learning for me. “I don’t know how long we’re going to be gone, but you’re in charge here until we get back.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” Harkane was even worse about it than Lesh. Supper had been so full of titles that I’d almost choked on them.

  “When we get to Basil, I’ll need Baron Kardeen, Parthet, Aaron, and my mother. I’ll be in the king’s … in the private dining room upstairs, waiting. You know where I mean?”

  “Aye, sire,” Lesh said. “Timon and I’ll round ‘em up quick.”

  “Quickly, yes, but gently, Lesh.”

  “Aye, sire. Ah, your weapons?”

  I sighed. “Yes, my weapons.” I was still Hero of Varay, and the Hero must always be armed in public. Well, with the collapse apparently on again, it was a good idea anyway.

  Even with the delays, we stepped through to Castle Basil less than twenty minutes after I discovered that the doorways back to the other world didn’t work. It was barely an hour since I had left Aaron and Parthet in the workroom they now shared.

 
; The guard who spotted us just after we arrived at Basil snapped to attention and Lesh commandeered him to go after Baron Kardeen. Joy and I went straight up to the private dining room across from the king’s bedroom. I sent Jaffa and Rodi to stir somebody in the kitchen—one of the cooks was always on call—to make coffee and something to snack on and get them hauled upstairs. The boys knew their way around Castle Basil. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they knew back passageways that I hadn’t found yet.

  “Where do you want me?” Joy asked when we got to the dining room and got some light in the room. Timon lit a torch from one out in the hall and stuck it in a wall bracket. Then he lit the other wall torches in the room from that one.

  “Right at my side, where you belong,” I told Joy. I shifted one of the chairs around next to the royal “throne.” Physical labor. It made me feel good to do things that my people would scarcely permit if any of them were close enough to get in the way. I barely beat Timon to it, though.

  Baron Kardeen arrived almost as I got the chair in position.

  “How bad is it, Majesty?” Kardeen asked.

  “The doorways back to my world don’t work. At least, none of them from Cayenne do. I haven’t tried the ones here in Basil yet. My guess is that nuclear war has broken out back there. If the doorways are all shot, I’m not even sure how we could find out.” The idea of being stranded permanently in the buffer zone was almost as frightening as the idea of nuclear war back home—the war that everyone said could no longer happen because of the decline of Communism.

  “There are ways,” Kardeen said. “Parthet will know.”

  Almost on cue, Parthet and Aaron came in. Mother was just a minute behind them. I told the others what little I knew and what I suspected. Nuclear war wasn’t gibberish to either Parthet or Kardeen. They knew enough about my world to follow the talk without any trouble at all. And Aaron … well, he had more reason than most to know what nuclear weapons could do.

  “It seems that the first thing to do is to check all of the doorways leading to the lesser world,” Parthet said. It was the first time I had heard him call my world “the lesser.”

  “The doors in the cellar in Louisville might have survived even holocaust,” Mother said. “Unless the magic can be disrupted by EMP, like electronics.”

  “Electromagnetic pulse?” Parthet said, rubbing his chin. “It’s a distinct possibility. Carl once offered a guess that our magic might be a function of an electromagnetic force, something at the extreme short end of the spectrum. I suppose that might do it. Of course, even if there is disruption, it might be temporary. Who really knows enough about things like EMP? It’s all theory, like nuclear winter.”

  That’s right, we sat around in the middle of the night, in a medieval castle, discussing the ramifications of nuclear war—an ancient wizard, a new young wizard, and all the rest of us. And down in the crypt, we had the headless body of a dead elf warrior. We were in a kingdom that couldn’t exist by any rule of logic. Magic forces assailed us from every side and dragons the size of ocean liners sometimes flew overhead and dropped two-ton loads of crap. Our pages and two kitchen workers hauled in wooden platters of food, a pewter pot of terrible coffee, a small keg of beer, and the “tools” to handle it all.

  Joy and I were both trained in computer science and there wasn’t a computer in the kingdom. At the moment, the insanity of the entire scene seemed to have a macabre undertone of danger. There was no laughter, not even a smile, not with the likelihood that World War Three had indeed broken out back home.

  “Which of the doorways is nearest?” I asked.

  “Down the back stairs here, and off to the left,” Kardeen said without hesitation.

  I stood. Everyone else stood. That’s one of the annoyances of being king. “Parthet, Aaron, can you come up with something to shield us from radiation if the passage does work?” Aaron and Parthet looked at each other. Aaron was the first to nod.

  “I’ll let the lad take care of it,” Parthet said softly. “His magic is already much stronger than mine ever was.”

  We all went down the stairs. “The rest of you stay back here,” I said, thirty feet short of the door. “No call to take more risks than we have to.” Aaron and I went on together. We looked at the silver tracing around it.

  “Let me know when you’ve got the shield up,” I said. “And if I do get the doorway open, I may jump back in one hell of a hurry. My danger sense gets quite insistent at times.”

  “I can dig it,” Aaron said. Then he shifted to a magical chant.

  The spell he wove was visible, a shimmering in the air across the doorway. There was a slightly greenish cast to anything beyond the shield—not the most attractive shade of green.

  “Go ahead,” Aaron said quietly. I could hear the tension in his words. I looked at him and he nodded.

  I reached for the silver on both sides of the doorway. The motion didn’t merely appear slow, it was slow. I was scared. I could draw on memories of enough books and movies about nuclear holocaust to be about ready to brown out at the thought that I might be opening a doorway into the middle of one. Even in a limited exchange, Louisville would certainly be a target. Fort Knox was out there south of the city, and there were other strategic targets in the area as well.

  When I touched the silver, within the green haze of Aaron’s shield, there was a scream inside my head as my danger sense overloaded—even before the cellar room in Louisville came into view.

  The room was still there. It was a mess, but it was still there. One leg had snapped on the big table in the middle of the room and spilled everything to the floor. The floor was littered with papers, books, weapons, and pieces of armor, not all of it from the table. The antique rolltop desk seemed to be intact. I guess it would take a direct hit to destroy that. The rest of the room? Well, one door had blown in, the one that led out to the rest of the basement. But there was no evidence of fire.

  The bile-green shimmering of the shield Aaron had raised started to show orange flecks that quickly multiplied and started to overshadow the green. Aesthetically, it was an improvement, but Aaron didn’t have to tell me to break the connection before the shimmering went completely orange.

  “Radiation of some kind,” Aaron said after I stepped back and the cellar room disappeared. “I had no way to guess how much there might be. There are some weak spots in the education this place gave me.”

  “A cellar under a stone house,” I said. “I would have guessed that that room would have made a decent fallout shelter.”

  “It’s still intact, except for the door,” Aaron pointed out. “That’s wood, isn’t it?” I nodded. “I can’t say what the level of radiation is. I don’t have a scale to compare it to.”

  “Back upstairs,” I said.

  When we were all seated around the table again, we were all silent for a considerable time. Parthet was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “We’ll be picking up the backlash here before long.”

  The obvious questions would have had something to do with the kind of backlash we might expect and how long it would take to start. I had something different come to mind, though.

  “Uncle Parthet, how well do you remember Vara?”

  He started to answer automatically before he fully comprehended the question. When the question did register, it seemed to jolt him like an electric shock. He stared at me for a moment, then he seemed to slowly focus beyond me. His face went blank, his skin pale. I didn’t pay much attention to the others at the table, just enough to register the shock or surprise they felt at my apparent non sequitur and its sequel. I suspect that Aaron was affected least. And Kardeen recovered quickly, before Parthet spoke.

  “As well, I imagine, as you remember your father,” he said—eventually, and very slowly. His voice sounded as if it were coming from far off, in time if not in space.

  I had been expecting something of that nature, but the others were obviously taken by surprise … by something even beyond s
urprise. Mother’s mouth dropped open. Kardeen’s lips pressed together more tightly. Joy’s hand gripped my arm as tightly as a fully inflated blood-pressure cuff. Aaron showed no reaction at all.

  “Just how old are you?” I asked Parthet. “Straight out this time.” I had asked him often enough before, and he had never given the same answer twice. But I had never asked as king before, and never in such constricting circumstances.

  “Straight out? I can’t say precisely,” Parthet said. There was something wistful, and terribly sad, in his voice. “Time isn’t a constant. You found that out on your journey up the Isthmus of Xayber.” I nodded. “And time hasn’t always run at the same rate here as in the world where you were born. There used to be a”—he hesitated for a moment—”a considerable differential. Time ran slower here before the lesser world discovered clockmaking.

  I may have raised an eyebrow at that. If I did, Parthet didn’t seem to notice. I had started his mind down an ancient trail. The answers we needed might be buried back there, and if no one disturbed him at the wrong moment, the answers might surface. I hoped.

  “I was his second son, of course,” Parthet said after a long pause. “My brother Paterno inherited the kingdom. I came into this calling. Perhaps the kingdom would have been better served if Paterno and I had reversed our roles. His gift for wizardry may have been greater than mine. Wizards are—to a great extent—born, not made, and they are not born equal.” He glanced at Aaron, and then he shrugged. “I used up all of my envy before the fall of Camelot.”

  Statements like that didn’t surprise me any longer. Parthet had hammered one lesson home over and over since I first came to Varay. We create our own history, changing the past generation by generation, sometimes moment by moment—not just the interpretations, but the facts themselves. It’s something we all contribute to, some people more than others, according to Parthet. Call it an alternate-worlds theory turned backward. Parthet claimed Merlin as a mentor and friend. He talked about Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Prester John as freely as I might talk about people I knew in high school.