The Hero King (33 page)

“There is hope, real hope now,” I said, loud enough to cut through some of the clamor. That silenced the rest momentarily.

“Where is Joy?” I asked Lesh.

“In your private dining room, sire, with the chamberlain and the others.”

“Take me there, Lesh. I don’t think I have the strength to make it alone.”

Lesh took me at my word. He damn near carried me. It might have been faster if he had. I kept stumbling in my rush, and without Lesh at my side supporting much of my weight, I would have fallen.

“Has it been bad here?” I asked when Lesh and I were on the stairs, away from any other ears.

Lesh hesitated. I knew him well enough to figure that he was trying to find the most precise way he could to tell me what it had been like.

“The terror,” he said finally. “The whole world and the sky both disappeared in an instant, like, and we was all alone. Them as was even down in Basil Town just vanished. Folks here are mostly too terrified to set foot out of the keep, fearing like they’d be gone too. It’s hard to get anything done at all.”

It was a tremendously long speech for Lesh. It took all of the way to the top of the stairs. I stopped there.

“You’d better go ahead and warn them, Lesh. Tell them I’m back.” The shock might still be considerable in two stages, but I thought it would work better that way than if I just barged in without warning.

“Aye, lord.” Lesh let go of my arm and waited to make sure that I wasn’t going to fall down before he hurried down the corridor to the small dining room. I followed more slowly, not entirely by choice.

I had taken only three or four steps before I heard Lesh announce, “He’s back,” right in the doorway to the dining room. Then I heard chairs scrape against the floor, and voices that climbed all over each other.

Joy met me at the door and flung her arms around me, almost knocking us both over. As soon as we got our balance, we went through the obligatory mad-reunion scene, replete with kisses, tears, and totally incoherent words. It was so intense that I wasn’t sure I could make it through the next minutes. Emotion? That’s too tame a word. I had long feared that I would never get to see Joy again, but there we were.

There
was right in the doorway, so the others in the dining room couldn’t get out to surround us. When Joy and I finally separated to catch our breath, we moved into the room. I finally had a chance to notice the others, a chance to get a better look at Joy.

I gave her an up-and-down look. “How long have I been gone here?’ She looked about ready to bust, she was so big around the middle.

“Five months or more,” Joy said. “It’s been hard to tell how much time is passing.” I knew what she meant by that.

“It should be late March now, spring,” Baron Kardeen said, but with less certainty than usual.

“I told everyone that I refused to have the baby until you got back,” Joy said.

Slowly, with much confusion and delay, I got everyone seated at the table. I collapsed into my chair at the head of the table.

“Is there any food?” I asked. “I’ve been on tight rations for an eternity.” Kardeen sent two pages scurrying down to the kitchen. Lesh poured me a mug of beer from a keg right there in the room. As soon as I took my first drink, he filled a second mug and set it on the table in front of me. I mentioned the horses. Timon ducked down the back steps for a moment, then came running back and told me that the animals would be tended immediately.

I drained off the first beer and started the second while Lesh refilled the first and brought it back. I looked around the table. Except for Joy, everyone looked thinner than I recalled, especially Parthet. He seemed to be scarcely more than a wraith.

“Have you been sick, Uncle Parker?” I asked.

“Not sick,” he said, very softly, “but
my
world has passed. I finished the memoir you wanted, what I could recall.”

Not that
I
wanted, that
he
said he should write: I remembered that. I stared at Parthet. The others were silent, an indication that they knew more about his condition then he was telling me.

“We can speak of all that later,” he said. “What of
your
travels?”

My
travels. I did need to speak of them, and once I started talking, it became a catharsis I could barely control. The food came—a full meal’s worth for everyone. I ate, I drank. So did the others. But mostly I talked and studied the faces and reactions of the others. The two beer mugs were refilled as often as I drained them, to keep my throat lubricated for talking and eating. But the focus was always on what I saying.

Joy sat right at my side, where she belonged, where I wanted her. Her face was pale, chalky, almost as white as Annick’s or the elflord’s. Joy held on to me and did a lot of silent crying. I could feel her trembling through the hand she kept on my shoulder. I interrupted my recital early to ask about her family. They were alive, safe—her mother was fully recovered from the side effects of her radiation sickness—but the Bennetts were all as terrified as everyone else in Castle Basil, perhaps more terrified than some.

Baron Kardeen appeared to have aged twenty years. His hair was grayer, his eyes showed the memory of his own fear. But there was still an air of competence in his every word and move … even if his hands did tremble just a little now and then.

Lesh, as sturdy as ever, tried to hide his feelings, but his face was ashen, like that of someone who has just had a serious heart attack. It was a fit color to match the infinite gray outside the castle. But although Lesh tried to hide his feelings, he gave himself away clearly, acting the page, moving to refill my mug every time I emptied one, pushing platters of food my way.

Timon was at the far end of the table, listening with transparent awe, sometimes forgetting to stuff anything into his mouth for minutes at a time. Awe and fear. They do belong together.

Mother. She was showing signs of stress too, more than I had ever seen from her before. Even when we found her waiting with father’s body she had been collected, fully in control of herself. She wasn’t like that now. There were plain lines on her face and indications that she had been biting her lips a lot.

“This was all inevitable from the moment I became both king and Hero,” I said, staring at her. Perhaps that wasn’t the right time for that kind of “I told you so.” I might have avoided any mention of it just then or glossed over it. But I couldn’t hold it back. I couldn’t be silent or consoling about it.

“The legend you and Dad were so eager to claim somehow got mixed up over the years. It wasn’t a Golden Age that had to come when the same man was both king and Hero, it was Doomsday, the end of the universe that Vara sired.” I had been bitter about the way that my parents had secretly groomed me for the twin roles, denying me any real choice in my own life. What I had gone through and seen certainly didn’t dull the anger I felt. Mother didn’t reply.

Parthet looked as frail as Pregel had in the days just before his death, and I knew that I was going to have to force that long talk with Uncle Parthet
very
soon if we were ever going to have it.

“Where’s Aaron?” I asked, interrupting myself—whatever I had been saying just then.

“Either in his workroom or somewhere with Annick,” Parthet said.

“Safe?”

“Safe,” Parthet assured me.

“But Harkane’s gone, sire,” Lesh said. “He was at Cayenne.”

“None of the magic doorways works now,” Parthet said. “Even Aaron can’t work a passage to any of the other doors, not even the ones here in Varay.”

    I talked, and then I listened while Kardeen and the others told me what they had experienced.

There had been neither day nor night at Castle Basil since the arrival of the gray limbo outside. There was still food and drink, enough to last a minimum of another three months even with the added mouths of about one hundred and fifty refugees who hadn’t been permanently relocated before the end came. Castle Basil was always stocked against the faint possibility of siege, even though it had never been invested by an enemy and the doorways had always provided a means of resupplying it.

The End (everyone referred to it that way) had been eerie at Castle Basil. A thick snowstorm had obscured most of the sights the morning the End came. The snow was remarkable in itself, heavier than anyone could remember any snowfall at Basil, where the winters are generally mild and short and two inches of snow in a month is rare. This snow had been blizzard-thick, but without the wind, obscuring vision but drawing people outside to watch it and frolic. But the snow came to an abrupt halt. Beyond the castle wall, even the flakes in the sky on their way down vanished. Inside the castle, the snow already coming down landed. Then there was nothing but the solid gray above the castle and beyond its walls. The Rock was visible, and the path leading down, but nothing beyond.

“It was a terrible day,” Parthet said. “When the world disappeared so suddenly, we knew that it was the End. The conclusion was inescapable. The End of Everything had come. You had failed. I’ve never known a time of such thorough despair in my considerable life.” He looked down at the table, his hands clasped together in front of him.

“The despair was so complete that it seemed ages before I saw the flaw in it.” He looked up at me then, but his voice remained somber.

“We
hadn’t disappeared with the world around us.” He shrugged.

“Of course, when that did penetrate my skull, there seemed to be several possible answers. The isolation might be our hell—damnation to an eternity like this. Or we might simply be the last place to fade. That seemed to be the most likely explanation at the moment—that Basil Rock actually
was
the hub of the universe and would simply be the last to fade. And, finally, there was a chance that you had achieved at least partial success.

“When the castle persisted, the second explanation became less and less likely. When the gray outside
also
persisted, the first became
more
likely. Until you returned.”

Baron Kardeen had attempted to send scouts down the trail to Basil Town, that first day and on many after, but the gate refused to open. It even proved impossible to lower men from the wall to the path outside. The gray prevented any exit from the castle.

Before long, no one would even attempt to leave, not even men who had families down in the town. People huddled together inside the castle, stewing in their fear. There had been a few suicides—a previously unheard-of occurrence in Varay. A few other people had gone raving mad. Aaron and Parthet had been able to help them, but their magic was weak, more draining than usual. There were severe limits to what they could accomplish.

Seven weeks had passed since the universe disappeared from around Castle Basil. Seven weeks … as close as anyone inside could tell.

    I already knew about the crazy way time seemed to sneak around its own backside, messing up internal rhythms and providing no external clues. Even simple references to time were apt to get screwed up by the reality. The telling of tales in the small dining room may have taken two hours or ten. We all ate and drank, if not as intently as at a “regular” meal, then at least without breaking off the “meal” completely. There was always food on the table. Anyone could grab a helping or two of anything, and everyone did, whenever.

Aaron made an appearance, but he didn’t stay long. “He spends most of his time with Annick these days,” Parthet told me. I sensed that there was something more to the statement, but—like everything else that day—Parthet didn’t seem anxious to talk about it, at least in front of others.

Even in limbo, Castle Basil needed some management. Baron Kardeen excused himself a number of times to see to one thing or another. Lesh went out a couple of times too. Now that I was back, he figured that it would be possible to reestablish regular watches on the walls. “It may all come back as quick as it went, and we won’t want to miss it by a second, right, sire?” he said. I grinned and nodded, and Lesh hurried off to see to it. Whether or not anything ever came back, Lesh seemed to have found the perfect line for us to take under the circumstances.

“If you are a true heir of Vara, you may be able to see that some portion of this world is recreated in the next.”
There had been no promises in what Xayber said. Maybe this was all I had been able to save. And there might be no next world to graft it on.

I didn’t know what to think.

Later, an indefinite later, after the urgent histories had been exchanged, I decided that it was time for me to make an appearance downstairs. “And then, I think it must be time to sleep,” I told the others. I was feeling considerably stronger after consuming a couple of days’ worth of food and beer—even by Basil standards—but ten or twelve hours of sleep would really help a lot.

“I’ll wait for you in our room,” said Joy. “I really don’t like to take all those stairs more often than I absolutely have to.” She put her hands on her belly to make sure that I knew what she was talking about.

“I won’t be long,” I promised, and then I gave her a kiss that almost became more urgent than the appearance in the great hall.

The rest of us went down to the main floor together, but Mother and Parthet both turned off to go to their own rooms. Mother had sat through the entire discussion upstairs, wearing her guilt quietly. She had never tried to argue the point I had made, never tried to shift the blame. I didn’t press the matter. I mentioned the facts. She took it from there. Parthet had also sat through the recitation, doing his share of the eating and drinking, and perhaps dozing for a few minutes a couple of times. He hadn’t seemed to miss anything important. When we started down the stairs, he had to take them more slowly than usual. He seemed to be having difficulty, but he managed on his own after refusing offers of help from both me and Lesh.

There were more people in the great hall than when I had made my first appearance there earlier. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me, as I had sensed they would.