The Hero King (36 page)

The gate had refused to open at all from the beginning of the limbo … except for my return. I had supervised a couple of equally futile attempts to open it since I got back. We had been able to slide the bar out of the way, but no number of people could force the gate open, and no one could climb down the outside wall.

But there was no need for anyone to try scaling the wall now. The gate swung open as soon as we tried.

After all I had been through, I didn’t have the slightest hesitation about being the first to walk through the open gate. If nothing else, I had been the last one to come trough it.

I walked straight through the middle. Aaron, Lesh, and Kardeen all moved right with me, only half a step behind. Protocol. We walked across the short drawbridge that I had never seen drawn and stood at the top of the path leading down to the town. I could see people moving around in the streets below.

“I wonder what
they’ve
experienced,” Aaron said.

“I imagine that we’ll find out soon enough,” I replied. I turned to the crowd of people at the gate.

“I need four volunteers,” I said. “When I returned from the temple of the Great Earth Mother, I had to leave much of my gear halfway up the Rock. I would like to see it retrieved as soon as possible.”

There was some shuffling around, with a few men ducking back out of the front rank, but it didn’t take long to get volunteers. They went down the path slowly and came back fast. I thanked them and promised that their bravery would be remembered. When I glanced to my side, I saw that Kardeen was making sure that he knew who they were. Having Kardeen along is like having floppy-disk backups for all the files on your hard disk.

“There’s the Bald Rock Inn,” Lesh said, pointing.

“You think their brew has suffered?” I asked.

“Won’t hurt to find out.”

I laughed. “Soon enough, I imagine. Let’s make sure everything’s in order first.”

“Aye, lord,” Lesh replied.

“Okay, Aaron, let’s go see if the doorways lead anywhere.” I turned to go, but Lesh stopped me.

“Look, sire.” He pointed down the side of the Rock. “Looks like the miller’s on his way up with a delivery.” Kardeen moved closer to the edge and confirmed it.

“I’ll leave the miller to you,” I told Kardeen. “Find out what you can.”

    The sea-silver-lined doorways to the other castles in Varay worked normally enough. I tried them all, held them open while I waited for some warning from my danger sense. No warnings came, but I still didn’t go through to any of the other castles. Not yet—I didn’t want to rush anything. Conferring with the various castellans could wait until I was certain just what was going on around Basil.

But when I opened the way to Cayenne, Timon ducked through to find Harkane. I didn’t have time to stop him, so I held the doorway open until Timon and Harkane both came back through to Basil.

“Are you all right?” I asked Harkane.

“Aye, sire, right enough. Though we were beginning to wonder why we hadn’t heard from anyone for so long.”

‘How long?” I asked.

“Why, lord, since …” He stopped, surprised—
shock—
locking onto his face. It was almost as if he had gone catatonic. I waited a moment. He didn’t even blink.

“What have the last two months been like?” I asked. Harkane blinked then, and he looked more and more confused. He started to speak several times, but he just seemed to sputter a little. It was almost as if he were choking on food.

“Aaron, can you ease the way for him?” I asked.

Aaron did a short chant that seemed to tranquilize Harkane almost from the first phrase.

“Why, sire,” Harkane said, “there’s a
hole
in my mind, an empty place. What happened to us?”

“That’ll take some explaining,” I said. I smiled and took hold of both his shoulders to reassure him. “But later. We’ve got plenty of time now, I think. Go on down to the great hall and get some food and something to drink. Take Timon along. He can fill you in on a lot of what’s happened.”

“Are you going to try the doors to the other world?” Aaron asked after Timon and Harkane left.

“I have to,” I replied, though I had consciously bypassed those doorways on our progress through the castle. The doorways to the other world were the final link. They would tell me how much fantasy and how much fact there was to my memories of my encounter (my “connection,” as Parthet would have phrased it) with the Great Earth Mother.

I went to the bedroom that had been mine as Hero. Joy’s family were all there. They were still a little reticent about mixing with the locals most of the time. Everybody treated them as part of the royal family, and I think that unnerved all of them … the three adults, at least.

“Joy’s just had our baby, a boy,” I told them. “They’re both doing fine.” And then I sent them up to visit.

I went to the doorway that had led to my parents’ bedroom in Louisville before the war. I stared at the silver tracing for a moment and wiped my sweating palms on my trousers.

“This is it,” I said, looking to Aaron. He nodded.

I stretched my hands out to the silver, and hesitated again before I finally completed the circuit. The other bedroom was there, the way I remembered it from before the disaster. There was no trace of fire or any other damage.

“It’s there,” I said, and my hands were shaking when I pulled them away from the door. “There’s something there.”

Then I went to the door that had connected to my bedroom in the Chicago condo—a building that must have been totally destroyed by the nuclear missiles that must have hit Chicago.

It was just the way I had left it before the war.

“It’s as if that war didn’t even happen,” I said.

“Probably didn’t, not in this new world,” Aaron said. “Why don’t we go through and check it out?”

“Not yet,” I said—without hesitation. This time it wasn’t just my reluctance to push things too quickly, or even the fear that had come without any prompting from my danger sense.

“I want to wait until Joy has recovered enough to go along,” I said.

    Joy’s recovery took only four days—with the fourth day probably an unnecessary safety margin—thanks to Joy’s own constitution, the easy delivery, and a little help from Aaron’s magics. I spent much of my time during the wait learning as much as I could about the hole in time in Varay. I talked to the castellans and to people from Basil Town. I spent a little time back at Cayenne and in the private apartments in Castle Basil searching through the belongings Joy and I had brought along from the other world, finding the things we would need when we made our visit back to that other world—money, bank and credit cards, suitable clothing. And I spent as much time as I could with Joy and our son, Parker.

In Varay, most of the people simply didn’t realize that they had lost a big chunk of time unless they had their faces rubbed in it, one way or another, and even then many of them refused to accept it. People had superficial memories of life-as-normal, some sort of psychological defense mechanism, I suppose. Those memories wouldn’t stand up to determined scrutiny, to detailed questions, but they were more comforting than the truth.

But life picked up right where it left off in most ways. Deliveries to the castle resumed. Families that had been separated were reunited; those members who had been in Castle Basil had full memories of the time that wasn’t while their relatives who had been outside the castle walls didn’t. Life went on.

The Titan Mountains had grown back to their previous heights—though there appeared to be a couple of new gaps. Those would have to be explored in time.

In time
.

    I had one major task to deal with in those days—among a myriad of other demands on my time and attention. I was more than a little nervous about confronting the captain and crew of that Russian frigate, but I had little choice … and the longer I put it off, the harder it was going to get. I did wait until the morning following the return of everything. I took. Lesh and Aaron along and we stepped through to Arrowroot. Captain Sekretov had gone far beyond outrage.

“What have you done with my ship?” he demanded when I walked into the great hall of Arrowroot. He came toward me so rapidly that Lesh interposed himself.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to sound calm.

“My ship has disappeared. It was there yesterday morning, but last night it was gone.”

“Slow down, Captain,” I said. “A lot has happened, but no one here has touched your ship.” I had a good guess. The
Kalmikov
was an anomaly in the buffer zone, and when the new universe was born, it either didn’t include the frigate or it returned it to the world where it belonged.

But getting that, and everything else, through to Commander Sekretov took up a good-sized chunk of the day. Only my promise to get him and his men back to the other world in a couple of days even started to calm the captain down.

    “We need to get a supply of formula for Parker,” Joy reminded me when we were finally getting ready to leave for Chicago. “That powder that comes in cans.”

She had been nursing the baby the old-fashioned way pending availability of something else. I wasn’t sure what kind of powder she was talking about. My experience with babies was pretty much limited to diaper and tire commercials on television. But I nodded anyway, just to be safe.

Lesh, Aaron, Joy, and I were making the trip. Aaron had somehow persuaded Annick to wait for the next time, reminding her that he could open the passages whenever they wanted to visit. Annick could help the two grandmothers care for Parker while we were gone this time.

Despite the apparent return to normalcy, we were a nervous lot as we stepped through from Castle Basil to my apartment on Lake Michigan, but nothing untoward happened. The utilities in the apartment were all connected. None of my stuff (what remained after Joy and I had hauled off everything that we thought we might find a use for in Varay) had been carted away. That meant that the financial system still worked and that I hadn’t gone broke. All of my routine bills had been handled automatically by one of the banks I had dealt with before the “recent unpleasantness,” and those arrangements had to still be in order. My frequent absences on Hero business had demanded some sort of automatic arrangement.

After the four of us stepped through to Chicago and looked around just enough to make sure that there was a city outside the windows, I opened the passage back to Castle Basil and held the way open for the Russians to come through—all but the dozen who had decided that they wanted to stay in Varay. My apartment wasn’t nearly large enough to hold all of the sailors, so Lesh and Aaron took turns escorting batches of them downstairs. I let Commander Sekretov call the Russian consulate—not all that far down Michigan Avenue from my place—and arrangements were made quickly.

If was a little strange. We were no longer in the buffer zone, so I didn’t have the translation magic, and I don’t speak Russian. But as the conversation went on, I found that I could follow the sense of it without the buffer zone’s magic or a working knowledge of Sekretov’s language. The longer the captain talked, the closer I could follow.

“Good luck, Captain,” I told him, holding out a hand.

He hesitated, looked at my hand, then nodded. We shook. “I will need that luck,” he said.

“It may not be quite as hard to convince your superiors as you think,” I told him. Sekretov did not appear to find that reassuring.

I went downstairs with Sekretov and the last of his crew, then Lesh, Aaron, and I all went back upstairs.

It had been about nine-thirty in the morning when we arrived in Chicago. We were in no particular rush, so we took time for hot showers before we ventured out. Aaron spent some time listening to WBBM, the all-news radio station, but when I asked him what was going on, he just chuckled and shook his head.

“You’ll find out sooner than you want,” he said.

“Joy, I don’t know what will happen,” I said after we had both finished showering, “but why don’t you try phoning your folks’ number in St. Louis?” She flashed me a puzzled frown but went to the telephone and dialed.

Somebody answered. I could tell that from the look of total bewilderment on her face even before she said her first word.

“Dad?”

She half collapsed into the chair next to the phone.

“It’s Joy.” Over the next ten minutes she did a lot of crying and even more confused explaining. Her father had trouble grasping that his wife and Danny’s family were safe … and in Varay. There had been no World War Three. Papa Bennett wasn’t too clear on when or how everyone had left, just that they were gone. He finally agreed to fly to Chicago that afternoon and go back to Varay with us—though he wouldn’t promise to stay.

“Aaron, do you know your telephone number?” I asked softly when Joy seemed to be about finished with her call.

“I know it, but it won’t do any good,” Aaron said. “It was hearing that my parents were dead that sent me to Varay the first time, and hearing about my grandmother sent me back the second time.” He gestured toward Joy. “She never accepted that her daddy was gone.”

I nodded. I knew pretty much what Aaron meant. I had seen my father and great-grandfather dead and buried. Even in the throes of my “connection” with the Great Earth Mother I had only seen them dead. They hadn’t returned. They wouldn’t.

Aaron did go to the telephone after Joy hung up, though. He dialed and listened: “That number is not in service,” he reported. Then he tried his grandmother’s number and got the same recording.

“Wouldn’t have done much good anyway,” Aaron said. “They’d never believe that I’m me.”

We used the magic doorway to take us to the office I kept in the Loop to save time. Then we took an elevator down to street level and went outside. There were crowds on the streets, shoppers, workers, the normal bustle as we walked over to the State Street mall.

“It’s like nothing at all happened here,” Joy said.

“Something happened, all right,” Aaron said, giving me a look—your patent “significant look,” I guess.

“Well, I’m going to get the papers and see what I can find,” I decided. We were approaching a corner kiosk. I picked up a
Tribune
and a
Sun Times
and handed the old guy tending the stand a ten-dollar bill. He returned my change and I pocketed it without even looking at it, let alone counting it.