The Hero King

by Rick Shelley

  A blink. A deep breath. The moment ends.

  I glanced at Aaron, then turned my attention to Annick. She picked herself up off the floor.

  “I didn’t drop you hard on purpose,” Aaron said. He got up and went around the far end of the table, moving slowly. “It’s just that you didn’t give me the time to do it gently.”

  Annick flashed a fierce look at Aaron. Behind her, Lesh stood up, ready to grab her again.

  “It’s okay, Lesh,” I said. “There’s no one for her to attack now.”

  That turned Annick’s attention from Aaron to me.

  “What the hell did you think you were going to accomplish?” I asked. “The whole universe is falling apart and you’ve got to stage your damn theatrics.”

  “I came back when I heard that the king had died,” Annick said. “I find a new king and a new wizard, dealing with the enemy.”

  “There are no enemies right now, Annick,” I said. “We’re all facing the same disaster.”

  “I still have enemies!”

  She had held that level of hate when I first met her. It seemed to sustain her. She had never been able to let go of her hatred for the elf warrior who had raped her mother. Her father. And her hatred for everything in and of Fairy. That was why I had never doubted any of the fantastic tales that were told about her exploits in Fairy. I knew she was capable of the most extreme of them.

  “I appreciate your help with the forest trolls,” I told her, trying to forget a chance vision of the Queen of Hearts screaming, “Off with her head!” As far as I knew, Varay had never used capital punishment. Serious crime was extremely rare among Varayans, and the Kings of Varay had always had a more potent sentence to impose, exile. People who couldn’t get along in Varay could be dumped in Fairy or in my world to fend for themselves. But exile to my world looked like capital punishment at the moment, and shipping Annick into Fairy would have been no punishment at all. It would just have given her a chance to go on with her killing … until somebody, or something, killed her.

  “But right now, you’re a distraction I can’t afford,” I told her. But I needed a moment to figure out what to do with her.

  “Aaron, have you been to Castle Curry yet?” I asked.

  “Only briefly.”

  “You met Baron Veter and his guardian, Sir Compil?”

  “We met.” He seemed unusually terse. Aaron was watching Annick as closely as Lesh was. He was learning fast. In her killing moods, Annick needed close watching.

  “I would like you to take Annick to Castle Curry and put her in the care of Sir Compil. She is to be held there through the crisis, not harshly, but with as much security as they can manage. Restrained from leaving. Have Baron Kardeen prepare a letter to that effect.” Aaron nodded. “Take Lesh with you to help keep an eye on Annick until you get her turned over to Compil, then both of you get right back.”

  If it had been up to Lesh, I’m sure he would have hogtied Annick to make sure she didn’t give him any trouble. He might even shackle her with handcuffs and leg irons, if any were available. Maybe it would have been a good idea at that. They left. Annick glared at me over her shoulder as Lesh nudged her toward the door. I doubted that Castle Curry would hold Annick for long, but it was the most distant point in Varay from both Basil and Xayber that had a magic doorway. Once Annick managed to escape from Curry, it would take her a week to ride to Basil, nine days or more to reach Arrowroot, even if she managed to steal a good horse. That bought me some time without her. And every day that Compil managed to hold her in custody would add to the margin.

  Sitting alone after the others left, I had to start thinking about what the elflord had said. This world must pass. I might be able to save a little of it—somehow add it to the next world. That was more than a little vague, but it did give me some hope to hang on to. I was ready to grab for any thread I could. Vara had managed to stick around and enjoy his new world for a time before the Great Earth Mother carved him up. If I could save enough from this world to let my mind survive in the next … if I could save Joy, maybe a chunk of the buffer zone as well …

  If not? I wondered what the end would be like. Would there be a show, fireworks and earthquakes, the wild special effects of a Hollywood disaster film? Or would we just fade to black? With a whimper or with a bang.

  Joy. No Joy.

  I thought about movies I had seen where the hero is told that he’s dying and there’s no hope for a cure. John Wayne’s last picture, The Shootist, was the first I thought of, where Jimmy Stewart tells the Duke that he has a cancer, and then the follow-up, with Wayne’s character trying to come to terms with the end and managing to go out with style.

  But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t just my death in the offing, but the End of Everything—all of creation perhaps, the far end of time, when the entire universe fizzled out. According to the cosmologists back home, that wasn’t supposed to happen for billions and billions of years, the heat death of the universe, entropy run down to its final chaos. And we hadn’t even landed men on Mars or met our first extraterrestrials yet. No E.T. No Alf. No Mork. No Starship Enterprise.

  No “Mr. and Mrs. Gil Tyner announce the birth of their first child.”

  No “Someday, son, this will all be yours.”

  Shit.

  Somewhere along the line, I noticed that tears were running down my face, quite freely. My nose had started to run as well. I sniffed and snorted and wiped at the tears. I was still doing that when Baron Kardeen entered.

  “It’s as bad as that?” he asked.

  I nodded, then gave him the short version. He took a moment to run it through his mind—the closest thing to a computer I had found in the buffer zone.

  “Some little hope, perhaps. Not much,” he said. “What will you do?”

  “Whatever I can. As long as there’s any hope at all, I have to go for it.”

  There was a silence then. Kardeen seemed almost embarrassed, and I didn’t think it was because of the way he had seen me. He had been around the royal family too long for that.

  “What is it?” I asked as gently as I could.

  He didn’t flinch. “Two things, actually. The first I hesitate to mention just now.”

  “Go ahead. It can’t be worse than what I’ve already heard.”

  “The, ah, Russian sailors. It will be impossible to get them home just now.”

  I nodded. The Russians. Of course, I assumed that the Soviet Union was behind the nuclear war that had apparently engulfed my home world. I didn’t think that there was any other nation capable of mounting an attack that could wipe out cities in the middle of the United States. And I also assumed that the Russians must have started the fray, though I admit that it was a knee-jerk reaction and not any exercise of logic that led me to that assumption.

  “I think I had better steer clear of the Russians for a bit,” I said, uncertain how I might react if I had to face Commander Sekretov just then. “And it might be better if no one mentioned the fact—the supposition—of a war back in the other world. At least for the moment. What else is there?”

  “Ah, the queen is quite distraught,” Kardeen said. “About her parents and her brother’s family.”

  “Yes, they must have been caught by the war in my world.” The other world, the one I was born and grew up in, was still the one I thought of as mine, not Varay and the buffer zone. “If they went right away, in the first minutes, they may have been among the lucky ones.” If Chicago and Louisville had gone, St. Louis would hardly have escaped attention. McDonnell Douglas, the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers with important bridges, locks and dams.

  “The queen …” Kardeen started again.

  “Where is she?”

  “In your old room here.”

  “I’ll go to her now. When Aaron and Lesh return, we’ll have to talk with Parthet. You’ll let me know?”

  “Of course, sire.”

  I stood up. I had to go comfort Joy. And I wasn’t sure that I had a
ny comfort to give.

  The room that had been mine as Hero of Varay was on a sort of mezzanine, a corridor about halfway up the side of the great hall, reached through stairways at either end. I wasn’t precisely sure of its position in relation to the king’s apartments above, but I thought that the Hero’s room had to be almost directly below the king’s private study. But, as far as I knew, there was no shortcut. I had to go downstairs, around the great hall, and up a shorter flight of stairs on the other side.

  Jaffa and Rodi were standing outside the door.

  “She’s very upset,” Jaffa said. His eyes were stretched wide. Rodi didn’t look nearly so fearful. “She sent us out.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. As if anything was okay. I told Timon to stay out with the pages, then I took a deep breath before I went inside.

  Joy was lying across the bed sobbing. She didn’t hear me come in. I crossed to the bed and sat next to her.

  “Are they all dead?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, putting my hand on her back. I started to rub between her shoulder blades. That normally relaxed her, but not this time.

  “I don’t know either, and that’s what’s tearing me up,” Joy said. She rolled over and looked up at me. Her eyes were red-streaked. Her face was wet from all the crying. “Are they dead, dying, or somewhere safe? They might be safe. I gave them all your warnings about being ready to leave the city. After my parents came here and saw this place, they might have believed. Maybe there was enough warning to evacuate.”

  “I don’t see any way we can find out, dear,” I said. “Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.”

  “We could go there, drive to St. Louis from Louisville.”

  “No, we can’t. If the basement is so messed up, the cars probably didn’t survive in the garage, and”—I made a helpless gesture with both hands—”even if the cars did survive, we wouldn’t be able to get gas anywhere, and there’s not much chance that any of the bridges survived across the Ohio or Mississippi. Not to mention the radioactivity. Louisville’s hot. We might not be able to get clear of it fast enough to avoid a fatal dose.”

  “There has to be a way.”

  The echo of what I had told the elflord knotted my gut.

  “I’ll ask Aaron if he can conjure up a spell to get news about your parents and your brother Danny’s family,” I said. “I don’t know if he can. Contacting the elflord was different. Xayber has his own powerful magic.”

  “I have to know, Gil. I’ll go crazy if I don’t.”

  I picked Joy up and held her against me. She seemed very fragile just then, close to the breaking point. I could see the hysteria lurking behind her eyes, looking for a chance to break loose. That meant that I couldn’t even begin to tell her what the elflord had said was waiting for everybody—or what I would have to do in order to save anything at all.

  “Aaron can make a spell to protect us from the radiation,” Joy said. “We can ride horses if we have to. I’ve been taking lessons, remember? And if the bridges are out, horses can swim.”

  “Aaron’s spell against radiation barely lasted the few seconds I had that doorway open, remember?”

  “I have to find out, Gil, one way or another.”

  And she had a set of the rings.

  “I’ll talk to Aaron. Don’t you go doing anything foolish. Even if there is a way to go back and get to St. Louis, you can’t go. You’re pregnant, remember. You can’t take any risk of radiation, spell or not. You can’t risk the baby.” It hurt talking about the baby, but you have to go on as if there was a certain future. It’s either that or curl up in a corner and suck your thumb until the end comes.

  “Promise you won’t do anything foolish like trying to go through one of the doors to Louisville?” I said.

  “I have to know, Gil.”

  “Not that way, Joy. Not that way.”

  She turned away from me for a moment, and I wondered if I was going to have to tie her up to keep her from doing something stupid.

  “You’ll find out for me?” she asked.

  “If there’s any way possible,” I promised.

  “If you don’t, I will try myself,” Joy said. “I have to know.”

  Baron Kardeen knocked and came in when I called. Aaron and Lesh were back. Annick was “safely” in the hands of Sir Compil at Castle Curry. The others were in Parthet’s workroom. Aaron was briefing Parthet on what the elflord had said.

  “Come on, Joy,” I said. When I stood up, I was still holding her. I let her down and put my arm around her. “We’ve got a lot of business to deal with, and not just seeing how we can find out about your family, I’m afraid.”

  I hesitated. She had to know how desperate the situation was, but I was still afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle it—and not just what I was going to have to try to do to rescue some part of our universe.

  “There’s worse trouble than World War Three back home,” I said. “There’s only the slimmest chance that I’ll be able to do anything to help, but nobody else has even that much chance.”

  She didn’t respond. As much trouble as I was having relating to the greater crisis, I couldn’t expect her to get beyond her worry over her family, not without a little time … and maybe some news.

  Parthet seemed almost cheerful.

  “What are you so tickled about?” I asked. I’m sure it didn’t sound very good-natured.

  “The news was much better than I expected,” Parthet said. “Much, much better.”

  “You think the End of Everything is better?” I asked.

  “No, no, the beginning, the beginning. Haven’t I told you?”

  “Told me what?”

  “We all recreate our past, and some people do it more effectively than others.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of my groin. He wasn’t close enough for me to need to flinch, though. “If you can find the Great Earth Mother and, ah, get close enough, you have the balls to do the job right.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Joy asked.

  Thanks a lot, Uncle, I thought. I took a deep breath. “It means that I have a chance to save something of this universe by doing what Vara did back at the beginning of time.”

  “Does that mean what I think it means?” Joy asked.

  “It means that I have to try to track down a mythological being who may or may not be the goddess who gave birth to our universe, and I have to use the family jewels we swiped from her shrines to get her to do it all over again. It’s the only hope any of us has to survive, to keep anything alive anywhere.” I had to stop to suck in air. “There are a few obstacles. First off, nobody has any idea where to find the Great Earth Mother, if she really does exist.”

  “She does exist. Count on it,” Parthet said, interrupting.

  “Next, she’s already sworn to kill me, or her ghost did, just for taking the jewels. Those are a couple of rather hefty obstacles.”

  “When?” Joy asked, not at all what I thought her next word would be.

  “I don’t know. The elflord said that it would be days, more likely weeks, before he could trace the Great Earth Mother, and I can’t do anything until I know where to find her—or even if she can be found.”

  “And remember,” Parthet said, “that it will almost certainly take more of our time than it does his. A week in Fairy can be ten days or more here.”

  “Then you have time for the other first,” Joy said.

  One track.

  “Aaron, do you think that either you or Parthet could come up with a spell that would protect a horse and rider from radioactivity long enough to ride from Louisville to St. Louis and back? Joy is desperate to find out what happened to her family.”

  “Very desperate,” Joy said, intensely enough that everyone stared at her.

  “I can put together a spell for that,” Aaron decided after a moment, “but not by remote control. I’ll have to go along to keep it up. I would have to go anyway, if you intend to go,” he said, meeting my eyes. “When the el
flord calls, I can bring us back here from wherever we are in the other world.”

  “Will you be able to stay there long enough to do any good?” I asked. “Won’t you just pop back here like you did before?”

  “I think not. I’ve found my place here. And I am a wizard now, not a lost little kid like I was then.”

  “I’ll get the horses and gear, sire,” Lesh said. “That’ll be three of us riding?”

  “Four,” Timon said from near the door. “I’m not a page to be left behind when things get dangerous anymore.”

  I looked at him and nodded. “Four it is,” I said.

  7

  The Four Horsemen

  Running off to the other world just then certainly wasn’t the most logical decision I could have made. I had a bigger load on my shoulders than going off on another crazy quest, this one to find out what had happened to my in-laws. And this looked at least as wild as the other quests I had gone on. Even if I could get from Louisville to St. Louis, it might prove almost impossible to find out anything about Joy’s family. But it did serve a purpose. Just sitting around Basil, waiting for the elflord to call-possibly for weeks, while the sky picked up extra moons and brought us closer to doomsday—would really have driven me crazy, or crazier than I already was. Worrying that Joy might slip off and try to find her way from Kentucky to Missouri alone would have been even harder to bear.

  It was just something that I had to do. I did question Aaron at length to make sure that the elflord would be able to contact us even in the other world and that Aaron would be able to pop us straight back to Basil when that call came.

  Aaron was positive. Parthet didn’t demur.

  With Lesh and Kardeen hard at work making the preparations, there was really nothing I had to do but talk with Joy. I got her to tell me about the neighborhoods where her parents and her brother lived. I had been to her parents’ place, but never to Danny’s. I asked about places they might have headed for if they had left the city. There were two places that Joy thought were possible, a state park southwest of the metropolitan area and another spot out along the Missouri River.