The Hero King (7 page)

    I lose track of time when I’m down in the crypt. It may have been an hour, or only ten minutes, before I got to Great-Grandfather Pregel. I put my hand on his capstone. The edges of the newly carved letters and numbers were rougher than on the older stones. I stood there and couldn’t think of anything to say to Pregel. Except, after a time, “Goodbye.”

Before I left the crypt, I stopped and looked at the blank section of wall across the room from Vara. That was where they would put me someday,
if
there was anyone left to put me there when the time came.

“You’re going to be lonely in there,” I said. “No next-door neighbors to rub elbows with.” The thought twisted my gut—not the thought of being lonely on that side of the wall, just the idea of someday
being
there behind a marble headstone with my name, titles, and dates. I had been too close to earning a place in the wall over by Dad.

I left the crypt and forced a rapid pace up the stairs toward the living precincts of the castle. I went all the way up to the royal apartments above the great hall in the keep. To the king’s bedroom.

There were no lights on in the bedroom. I left the door open until I found one of the oil lamps and lit it. Then I closed the door and looked around. As I had instructed, nothing had been touched yet. I wasn’t looking forward to moving into a dead man’s bedroom, or to sleeping in the bed where he had died, but I knew how tradition-bound Varay was. This was the king’s bedroom. This was where the king was
supposed
to sleep.

The bedroom was vast—something like thirty by fifty feet. Looking in from the hallway door down the long dimension, there were windows on the wall to the right and in the wall at the far end of the room. To the right the view was down into the courtyard. The far end looked down over the curtain wall, down the sheer northern face of Basil Rock, several hundred feet to the River Tarn that curled past the base. The royal bed was more than twice the size of a “king-size” bed. It was centered along the left wall. Three doors opened off of that wall into other rooms of the royal suite, privy, bath and dressing room, and study.

Before his health failed, Pregel had been an active monarch. There had been a big desk up on the dais in the throne room, and it was often cluttered. At some point, between the time when Pregel publicly announced that I was his heir and his death, that desk had been moved up to the study, replacing a smaller desk that had been there before. The study had been his working office, most of the time I knew him. We had shared a few leisurely chats in that office. The only person who ever dared disturb the king in his office was Baron Kardeen, and the chamberlain knew when—and when not—to disturb Pregel.

It was an old-fashioned office. What else could it be in Varay? The big desk was an antique that was probably worth many thousands of dollars back in the other world. There was a library, racks of deep pigeonholes to hold scrolls, shelves to hold books. Ah, the books. Pregel had medieval romances, modern sciences, an almost complete set of Louis L’Amour’s westerns. He had Hitler and Machiavelli, Gibran and Nietzsche. A twelfth-century Bible copied in a Norman monastery was on a stand like those that libraries use to hold their unabridged dictionaries. There were also other religious books, copies dating from the Middle Ages or before, Koran, Talmud, Zend Avesta, and others. It didn’t matter what language a book was written in, not in the buffer zone with its translation magic.

I opened the drawers in two wooden file cabinets, one at a time, wondering what exotic documents of state I might find. There were a few deeds and charters, a few letters, but five of the eight drawers were given over to magazines. I thumbed through the drawers. It looked as if Pregel had complete sets of
Penthouse
and
Playboy
, from their premiere issues up to about four years ago.

I chuckled when I shut the last drawer.

“It looks like I really didn’t know you at all,” I mumbled. I sat in the chair behind the big desk, reached out and stroked the smooth, worn desktop. The desk drawers were filled with working supplies, paper and pens, and the usual odds and ends that get chucked into drawers and forgotten.

There was a second exit from the study, leading directly out to the corridor, a way to bypass going through the bedroom all the time. Across the corridor was the king’s private dining room, for those times when he wanted to avoid presiding over a meal in the great hall, or for private mealtime discussions. Back stairs led down to the kitchens, and to Baron Kardeen’s office. Even after three and a half years I didn’t know where all the secret passages were, though I had found a few of them.

I wasn’t expecting the knock on the hall door. I jumped, then said, “Come in.” I guessed that it would be Baron Kardeen. I was wrong. It was Aaron.

“I wasn’t sure if I should disturb you or not,” he said.

“Come on in and have a seat,” I told him. “You’re not interrupting anything but my brooding, and that needs interruption.” He came over and sat in the chair at the side of the desk. So far, Aaron had shown none of the irritating “Your Majesty” routine, and that was a relief.

“You know, I’m going to need time to get used to that souvenir of our elf that you carry.”

Aaron touched the streak of white skin on the left side of his face. “Ah, that. It is more than skin deep. At odd moments, I think I have a little of him inside my head too.”

“Enough to find out what I have to do with these spare balls?”

“No. That’s the first thing I tried to find out. But Parthet is putting together some sort of special incantation. Something new, something not in any of the books and scrolls he taught me from. That’s why I came looking for you. He says that he’s going to need you present to run the spell.”

“And if that doesn’t work, we’re back to calling up the Elflord of Xayber and asking for his help,” I said.

“It may not be necessary. Despite all the doom talk, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly rotten happening at the moment,” Aaron said. “Maybe what you’ve done already
is
enough, despite what Wellivazey said.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

Aaron shrugged. “Parthet is trying hard to make himself believe it. He keeps talking about that Golden Age jazz.”

We sat and looked at each other for a bit.

“When is he going to be ready to try this new magic?” I asked.

“A day or two, he says. He’s working now, has been, just about straight through. He’s even having his food brought to the workroom so he can keep going without interruptions.”

“That doesn’t sound like he’s had much luck convincing himself that the danger is past,” I said. Aaron shrugged again. “A day or two?” I asked. He nodded.

“I’ve got to make arrangements to get the Russians back to the real world. And Joy and I would like to get a little time to ourselves while we still can. The only way we’re likely to get that time is to go back to Chicago or Louisville, and I’m not sure that I can anymore.” I told Aaron what Mother had said about Pregel.

“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.”