Son of the Hero (14 page)

This time, she waited for me to break the silence.

“That still leaves a lot of years when you could have told me. My whole life’s been based on a lie, and all I get is a note and ‘we were were going to tell you soon.’ It’s not enough. It wouldn’t have been enough if Dad hadn’t got himself killed. All those
years!
Dammit, what the hell did you think you were doing with me? I’ve got plans of my own. I’m just six weeks short of a degree in computer science. I’ve got prospects of a good job as a software engineer, maybe a chance to strike it rich on my own with some innovative software. I’m good at it, damn good. Maybe live in Silicon Valley, find the perfect wife and beat the odds on divorce. I never made plans to be king of some hole-in-the-wall country no one ever heard of. How
could
I plan for that? Nobody told me that my great-grandfather is a king. Or that funny old Uncle Parker is a wizard, for God’s sake. I’m nobody’s damn puppet to jerk around.” I ran out of steam. I was breathing hard, and I needed to slow it down. Mother just waited.

“I’m sorry about Dad getting killed,” I said. “That hurts me just as it hurts you. But if I wanted to be a soldier, I’d have enlisted in the army back home.” I walked past her, toward the door. Halfway there, I stopped and turned.

“Home. That’s where I’m going. This isn’t it. Unless I’ve completely lost track of time, I can still get back to Evanston before spring break ends.” I waited for Mother to say something, but she just looked at me. Finally, I left.

I had spotted a number of doors with silver tracing in the keep, and I knew the door I wanted. I went back to my room and ditched Lesh and Timon. I told them to go down to the great hall, and I was still mad enough that they didn’t argue. The doorway from the bedroom to the privy in the outer wall also led home. The castle didn’t really have running water, but it did have sewer pipes. There was a wooden bucket to dump water down the toilet. I stopped just long enough to get my pistol from under the pillows on the bed, then I stepped through to home.

It was late Friday, early Saturday. I flipped on the TV to see what was on. Then I went upstairs and climbed in the shower for a long, hot soak, trying to wash out a week’s dirt. I wished I could just wash out the week’s events too—or a little more. I had the radio blaring in my bedroom, trying to exclude thought. It worked fairly well. When I came out of the shower I was relaxed and sleepy. I fell asleep almost at once.

But a person can sleep only so long, and I had slept most of Friday in Varay. It was four in the morning by the clock-radio when I woke, as alert as could be—no chance of getting back to sleep.

I got dressed, took Dad’s Citroen, and found an all-night diner along the interstate east of town. I waded through two of their $2.99 breakfast specials, a half-dozen donuts, and four cups of coffee. I sat in the corner and watched other customers come and go. It was a long way from breakfast at Castle Basil, but I still had that insatiable appetite. I almost ordered a third breakfast, but the waitresses started giving me strange looks, so I paid my tab and left.

The night air was damp. Louisville had received a lot of rain in the past couple of days. I overheard that in the restaurant. The air felt wet and chilly. Dad’s car had a half tank of gas. On the way to the restaurant I had stopped at the bank and used my card in the all-night teller to get out a hundred bucks. Money was no problem. I had a trust fund. I had controlled the interest since my eighteenth birthday. Now that I was twenty-one, the principal was mine too. I had signed the papers before I left school and mailed them to the bank. Twenty thousand a year in interest—or I could take everything out and live like a king for a few years.

“Live like a king.” Poor choice of words, I told myself. You saw how the king lives, the kind of life
you
could live.

“I should live so long,” I mumbled. I realized then that my trust fund had almost certainly come from Varay. The source was another of the things my parents had never told me about.

I leaned on the steering wheel in the restaurant parking lot. I had a notion to start driving back to school. Nobody would say anything if I took Dad’s car. I could drop a note in the mail when I got to Northwestern to let Mom know. If she even bothered to come home. It occurred to me that she might choose to stay in Varay now that Dad was gone. I started driving. I was across the Ohio River, heading north on I-65, before I changed my mind and turned around at the next interchange. The sun was up by then. I had no intention of returning to Varay, but I did figure to leave Mom a note at home, collect as much of my stuff as I could pack in the car, and stop the mail and newspapers. I’d make arrangements with one of the neighbors to look after the place. The orderly mind at work. School didn’t resume until Monday, and I could make the drive in seven hours without pushing it. Even if I waited until Monday to go back, I wouldn’t miss much at school, just three lectures. Nobody scheduled tests for the first day back from break—at least none of my professors did.

I stopped for groceries on the way home, deli pizzas, TV dinners, a couple of cartons each of Pepsi and Michelob. I stashed everything, then looked through the house, just in case Mother had come along to persuade me to return to Varay. She wasn’t there, and that sort of surprised me. I was sure she’d hotfoot it home after me, or send Uncle Parker.

Maybe I missed something as a teenager, but I never had a real rebellious period. Dad and I had too much fun together. That’s all I thought it was at the time. I didn’t know that I was being bamboozled, secretly groomed to be a royal swashbuckler. Walking out of Castle Basil in a huff was my first real experience at rebellion. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Sure, I was twenty-one, legally of age, financially independent, but I still expected Mom to come drag me off by the ear. “
You’ll do what you’re told, or else.”
That was part of my anger at the whole situation, I guess.

I popped a pizza in the oven and turned on the big TV in the living room to catch the Saturday-morning cartoons—not the new gimmicky ones, but the good old ones. Wile E. Coyote was falling off a cliff when the network broke in with a big news special. Middle Eastern terrorists had been intercepted trying to attach a fifteen-megaton H-bomb below a pier in New York City’s Hudson River. The bomb had been captured before the terrorists could trigger it. No one was saying how close the call had been. There was a lot of speculation that there might be other bombs planted in New York or other cities.

Panic time.

All the networks and cable operations were covering the story. Army units were on alert. Searches were “undoubtedly” under way for other bombs. There was a diplomatic flap as we consulted with our allies and with Soviet and Chinese officials. There were thinly veiled hints of massive reprisals against any country that could be tied to the bombs if one went off. One former secretary of defense intimated that such an offending nation would be wiped off the map—without nuclear weapons. There
are
other weapons.

Even with the buzzer on the oven timer, I almost didn’t get my pizza out in time to save it. It wasn’t
quite
incinerated, but it was the crunchiest pizza I had ever had. Sitting in front of the tube, I managed to get most of that pizza, and a second one, down. It was midafternoon before the networks started repeating the interviews with their tame experts. I turned down the volume but left it loud enough to hear anything new.

“This can’t be real,” I said, getting off the couch. I was all set to get back to normal in the normal world. The last thing I needed just then was for terrorists to start playing with nuclear weapons at last.

Okay, you can add delusions of grandeur and paranoia to everything else, but I took it personally. I paced around the living room for a time, then stood by the picture window, looking out but not seeing much.

“Looks like once you go crazy, you can’t come back,” I mumbled. “It follows you.” I recalled Parthet telling me how the different worlds were tied together, how events were reflected from one to the next. Disruption on one side led to increased strength on the other, and vice versa. Any major change hurt the buffer zone. All that mumbo-jumbo. It looked like it was starting. I wondered if it was because of Dad’s death, or maybe even because I had walked off the job as Hero of Varay. It sounded farfetched, but not as crazy as the very existence of the seven kingdoms and Fairy.

A little after four o’clock, I gathered up my things, went up to the bedroom, and walked through the doorway leading back to the bedroom in Castle Basil.

9
Arrowroot

I didn’t have any solid plans when I stepped back through to Castle Basil. I hadn’t been consciously thinking about Varay’s problems. At the start, I was too upset to worry about them, and later there was the bomb in New York to occupy my mind. But once I decided to go back, a few basic premises clicked to the front of my central processing unit. Maybe some of that training that Dad had insisted on over the years was finally taking over. I might be the rookie, but Dad had drilled all of that military nonsense into me. One thing was obvious. Hero or not, there was no way one man could handle a two-front war. I had to either make sure that the Varayan army only had to face one enemy or find a way to get that army back and forth between fronts fast enough to keep both enemies at bay without wearing out our troops. That’s how the Saxons lost England to William the Bastard, among other examples. It may still be impossible for anyone to be in two places at the same time, even in a magical world, but maybe we could come close enough for government work. I had an idea …
one
idea.

There was no one in “my” bedroom in Castle Basil. I didn’t see anyone until I entered the great hall. A dozen or so people were lounging around or working—including Lesh, who was draining a tankard of beer.

“Where’s Parthet?” I asked loudly. That got everyone’s attention. But nobody knew where the wizard was, so I went to check his room in the castle and then headed for Baron Kardeen’s office. Lesh stayed with me, but I moved too quickly to give him a chance to ask the questions I could see he wanted to spring.

Parthet was just leaving Kardeen’s office when I got there.

“We need to talk right now,” I said, “somewhere private. And we need that big map.”

Parthet nodded. “Kardeen has the map.” We got it and went up a circular stairway to a room above the chamberlain’s office in the tower. I told Lesh to stay at the door and make sure we weren’t disturbed by anyone but Kardeen, the king, or my mother. I couldn’t have excluded them if I wanted to.

Inside, Parthet unrolled the map across a table that was much too small for it. The ends of the map drooped toward the floor.

“First off, I need to know more about the magic doorways,” I said. “Can I take other people through them?”

“Once you open the way, anyone can use it—while you hold it open.”

“How do I open a new passage?”

“First, you line the doorways on each end with sea-silver. If there are two of us available—and there are only four of us who wear the twin rings now—one stands at either end of the passage, rings on the silver. Then we have to concentrate on each other until the connection opens and we’re face-to-face. It usually only takes a few seconds, or seems like it. If you have to open a passage alone, you line the first door with silver, then look through the way you’ll see the room or whatever from the other end. Fix that scene firmly in your mind while holding the rings against the silver. Then you have to go to the other end—the hard way, I’m afraid—line the door there, put the rings against the silver, and concentrate on the room at the other end until it appears. Then you step through to fix the passage.”

“Where do I get the silver and how do I attach it to the door?”

“Getting
the silver is the snag,” Parthet said. “It grows only in the Mist, off certain beaches along the Isthmus of Xayber.” He pointed out several locations near the top of the map. The map showed only the nearest portion of the isthmus—I guess the part that sometimes became part of the border or something. “There are probably other areas, but those are the ones I know of, the nearest ones.”

“Behind enemy lines.”

“Yes,” Parthet agreed. “But once you have the weed, attaching it is simple. Start at the floor with one end and press it in place. If the first strand isn’t long enough, just overlap the ends the least little bit. The sea-silver adheres easily. You just have to make sure that it remains wet from the time you harvest it until you use it.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a doorway leading to one of those beaches?”

Parthet shook his head. “It’s unlikely that this magic would work in lands dominated by Fairy anyway.”

“What’s the nearest point to those beaches that I can reach by doorway?”

“Castle Arrowroot at the edge of Battle Forest and the Mist, where our north shore meets isthmus.”

“How long will it take me to get to the silver and back to Arrowroot?” One day, I would have to ask why all the castles were named after spices, but not right then.

“Eight days if everything goes perfectly, and
nothing
ever goes perfectly for mortals inside Fairy. Ten days is a more realistic minimum, and two weeks is yet more likely—if you can make it in and back at all. That’s never certain even in peacetime. And the Elflord of Xayber will know when you enter his lands.”

“Tell me about him.” I studied the map while I listened to Parthet. The map was almost devoid of detail for the isthmus, not much help at all.

“There’s little enough I can tell,” Parthet said. “He’s an elflord, quite literally larger than life. No one in the seven kingdoms knows his real name. Likely no one outside him immediate family has ever known it. Like most creatures of Fairy, he considers his name his most closely guarded secret, lest it be used to conjure spells against him. He is apparently something of a rebel in Fairy, even by their loose standards, refusing to acknowledge the authority of their king—the Elf king. But they take no action against him unless he raids the domains of other elflords. That’s pretty standard for that lot—’I don’t give a damn what you do as long as you don’t do it to me.’ Xayber has a motley army of human renegades and fairy creatures. Freebooters, brigands. Xayber has powerful magics at his command and a deep hatred for all the people of the seven kingdoms, even the turncoats who serve him.”