The Hero King (11 page)

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 elflord 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.

Once Joy was sure that I was going to do something to find her family, she was calm. We sat in the private dining room, ate, and waited. Grabbing a couple of hours of sleep might have been smarter, especially for me, but there are times when you have to forgo things like that.

Parthet came wandering in about dawn.

“There really is a chance to save quite a lot,” he said, more subdued than he had been before. “While you’re gone, I’ll try to get some of my memories written down. It’s important that I do that as soon as possible.”

“When we get through this, you can tell me all the stories over Old Baldy’s beer. That’ll be even better.”

He shrugged. “Who can tell what time there will be, especially at times like this.”

“You been skipping meals?” I asked, puzzled at his sudden melancholy.

He smiled and shook his head. “I’ve not come to that yet. It’s just that you brought back so much that I had forgotten for so long.” He stopped and shook his head more vigorously. “I’ll tell you when you return and we know where to find the Great Earth Mother.”

“We’ll have to pop back to Cayenne for a moment before I head out,” I said, more for Joy’s benefit than Parthet’s. “Going back to the real world, my guns will work at least.” There would likely be call for all the weapons I could carry. “And I’ve got to tell Harkane that he’s in charge awhile longer.”

“He’s going to want to go with you,” Joy said.

“This time, he has other duties, like running Cayenne and keeping an eye out for you. Or do you want to move into the royal apartment here before I get back?”

“I’ll stay at Cayenne. I was just starting to get used to living there.”

And even before that, I had to give Baron Kardeen a few more instructions about our Russian visitors. That was difficult, but I went out of my way to keep emotion out of it. “Have someone explain that there is a glitch in our communications with the real world. They are our guests in the meantime, and that’s the way I want it played. Watched but not too closely. Nothing hostile.” I just hoped that
I
would be able to play it that way after I came back from seeing the destruction.

    Sunrise arrived. It would be midmorning back in Kentucky. The detour to Cayenne took only ten minutes. We got everything set to go.

There were some minor inconveniences we knew we would have to work around right at the start. We were taking horses. Horses don’t take to stairs easily, but none of the doorways leading from Castle Basil to the basement in Louisville were at ground level. And getting the horses up the stairs from the basement in Louisville was going to be another problem. At least there were stone stairs leading up to the outside basement door. I wasn’t sure that there would be enough clearance for our chargers to get through easily, but options were rather scarce.

Four riders, two spare horses loaded with provisions. We wouldn’t have to eat as heavily in the other world as we would in the buffer zone or Fairy, but we couldn’t count on finding much along the way. Game would have been sparse even without World War Three through most of the area we had to cross.

Joy and I said our goodbyes in private, but she came to the doorway to watch us leave—after Aaron assured me that he would be able to keep any radiation from leaking through the doorway while we left. Parthet was there to add a spell or two of his own if necessary.

“We’ll stay with this as long as we can,” I said—a sort of general announcement. “When the elflord calls, we’ll pop straight back here.” I looked at Joy. “We may be running against a tight deadline”—a real
dead
line
—
”by then, so that will have to take priority.” I shrugged, gave Joy another kiss, and told Aaron to start spreading his shields.

There was another green shimmering over the door, a deeper green than before. The four of us who were going through, and our six horses, were covered with a similar twinkling, something closer to aqua, that settled on us and in us. We had to be protected inside and out, covered from everything, including the food, water, and air we would consume. The shield seemed to tighten my skin, like a strong astringent. I had a moment of doubt. If the shields didn’t work, we might be in deep trouble very fast.

“We’re ready,” Aaron said.

When I opened the doorway to Louisville, I couldn’t help thinking that this ridiculous quest was a properly adolescent way for a certified
Hero
to go out in a blaze of glory. And the song started to echo in my mind.

I stood with my hand, my ring, on the sea-silver while Aaron, Lesh, and Timon went through with all of the horses. I stepped through to the basement in Louisville after them, then looked back through the green-turning-orange shield over the doorway … for what I hoped wouldn’t be my last sight of Joy and Varay. And then I turned loose.

The basement was in pretty bad shape. The others had led the horses straight out into the main cellar room. Dad’s private little retreat wasn’t large enough to hold more than two horses at a time. Their stalls back in the Castle Basil mews were each as big as the “secret” room.

There were no real windows in the basement. When Dad built the place, it wasn’t that many years past the time when the federal government was actively encouraging people to build home fallout shelters. There were no windows, but there were a couple of light wells walled off with glass blocks, several feet underground, that let in just enough illumination to keep the cellar from being pitch-black.

There was more light in it now. The kitchen door was gone, off its hinges, broken in pieces and blown down into the cellar. The door leading straight to the backyard was metal, though, and it was still intact.

“We’d better go up and have a look around before we start maneuvering the horses upstairs,” I said.

Lesh and I couldn’t raise the outside door together—one of those angled bulkhead doors—so we went up through the kitchen to see what the problem was.

The house was still standing, though a lot of the interior was scorched. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been hurled toward the northeast corners. All of the windows and doors were gone, either splintered or completely lost. But from the odds and ends that were still sitting around, I guessed that no looters had been through.

Looters would have been an encouraging sign, evidence that there were still
some
people around.

“I’m going up to the second floor for a minute,” I told Lesh. I felt silly when I realized that I was whispering. “I want to see how much more damage there is. And that’ll give me a better vantage to see what the rest of the neighborhood looks like.” Lesh nodded and followed me to the stairs.

The steps were shaky, as if there wasn’t much holding them up but habit. I went from room to room upstairs. Big sections of interior walls had been destroyed. There wasn’t a trace of sea-silver left around any doorway. There wasn’t much of anything recognizable up on the second floor. The place had been gutted.

“I don’t think we should be here,” Lesh said.

My danger sense agreed. Aaron’s radiation cocoon had kept that from going berserk when I opened the passage and stepped through, but it recognized that a spell against radiation wouldn’t keep us from falling through a floor. Lesh and I went back down to the first floor and then outside.

All of the greenery, the carefully cultivated pseudo-wilderness that Dad had arranged around the house, was gone. The whole neighborhood was a wasteland, charred and empty except for ruined foundations and our house. None of the other houses in the development were standing. Of course, the others had all been simple frame houses. Ours had been the only one built like a fortress, with thick blocks of limestone instead of wood or aluminum siding.

“I’d never have believed this,” Lesh said. He walked away from the house, turning slowly, looking around once, and then again. He knew the neighborhood from previous visits, most recently from the time he waited for me to get out of the hospital after Wellivazey’s attempt to kill me.

“And this has to be some distance from the nearest explosion,” I said. We were more than thirty miles from Fort Knox, closer to forty miles. The Naval Ordnance plant and Ford were closer, over by the airport, but still some seventeen or eighteen miles in a straight line. “We’ll see worse before we see better.”

Some of the ruins in the neighborhood were still smoking. I wondered how long it had been since the rockets hit. All I could do was guess, but I doubted that it had been more than a day or two, maybe not very long before I discovered that the doorways to Chicago didn’t work.

If Joy and I had been a little quicker to take off, we might have been in the middle of it, I thought, which caused blood to drain from my head.

“Let’s get around back and see what’s blocking the cellar door,” I said.

Part of the chimney, tumbled, crumbled, was piled over the bulkhead door. The stones were shattered, so it was just a matter of lifting and shoving about a ton of rubble to the side, about twenty minutes’ work after Aaron and Timon came around to help.

The garage wasn’t as badly damaged as the house. Some of the rafters had fallen, but the roof had held and even the aluminum doors were intact, though dented. Of course, if the explosions had all been to the west and southwest, the house would have sheltered the garage from the worst of the force. The Citroën and the van were both inside, but damaged. The rear end of the van had been slammed sideways into the Citroën. I didn’t think that either of them was drivable. But the engines worked on both cars. I turned on the van’s radio and searched through the bands for some kind of working signal.