Son of the Hero (27 page)

When the audience was over, Baron Kardeen had my extra soldiers and everyone was armed and armored. I left my shield behind—I hadn’t found a use for that yet, despite my initial enthusiasm for it—but I did wear a helmet. Harkane had scared up a new one for me. The fact that I wore a tin pot willingly should give some idea how nervous I felt about the expedition. My Cubs cap was in my pocket, the blue bill sticking out. One bag of sea-silver was brought to the doorway that led to Arrowroot. We wouldn’t take it through until Arrowroot was secure, though. If. The other bag was taken to the door leading to Coriander and put under guard. If I succeeded in Arrowroot, I would pop over to Coriander, set up the door there, then return to Basil to start my mad ride to Thyme. I didn’t expect to need the second bag, at least not until I reached the other end, if then, but I wanted it handy, just in case.

Annick had an arrow nocked when I opened the way to Arrowroot. My bow was over my shoulder. I moved to the side and held the passage open with one hand while Lesh and the other soldiers hurried through to take up positions on the other side. Annick, Harkane, and I went through last. We left Timon behind again. He still wasn’t happy about being excluded.

Once more, the sense of danger was overpowering as soon as I opened the passage to Arrowroot. Danger flowed through the doorway like heat out of an oven. But I was ready for it this time. I gritted my teeth and moved on into Arrowroot, Dragon’s Death out and ready.

There were no torches burning in the corridor we entered. There were no watchfires on the battlements. Castle Arrowroot was silent but for the lapping of the Mist against the outer wall.

“Which way?” Lesh asked softly once we had a couple of torches burning.

“To the great hall, but carefully. We don’t know what’s waiting for us,” I said.

We had trouble skulking—ten of us in chain mail and toting metal weapons—but it didn’t matter. There was no one in the corridors, and everyone in the great hall was sound asleep. Underscore the
sound
. The volume of the combined snoring was incredible. A twenty-one gun salute might not have wakened men who could sleep through that din.

“These are Resler’s people,” Lesh said after we got a few more torches lit along the walls. Annick confirmed it.

“Hey, Kobe!” She prodded one of the sleeping men with her foot, roughly. His snoring changed tone for a moment, but he didn’t wake. Annick pushed his shoulder again. He still didn’t wake. Neither did anyone else. I whistled, as loud and shrilly as I could. A few men rolled over or interrupted their snoring for an instant, but that was all.

“Let’s find your uncle,” I told Annick. She led the way to his room. There was no answer to my first knock, so I bashed on the door with the hilt of Dragon’s Death and shouted for Resler. There was still no reply, so I went in anyway. Resler was in bed, snoring as lustily as any of the men downstairs. We got lights going and went to work at waking the baron. It took ten minutes and two pitchers of water over his head before he even started to stir, another five minutes to get him sitting up with his eyes open.

“Morning already?” Resler asked, staring blankly. He didn’t notice that he was sopping wet, or who was in his room, or anything. He yawned wide.

“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded, almost shouting in my effort to shock his brain awake. It didn’t work.

“What’s going on?” he asked back, dreamy. His eyes started to droop shut again.

“Lesh, see if you can find coffee. Or whiskey if there’s no coffee brewing.” He nodded and left.

“Wake up, Baron.” This time I did shout. Annick shook her uncle. Resler looked from me to Annick, then back at me. Something finally seemed to be getting through to him.

“What’s going on?” he asked, a little more coherently.

“That’s what I want to know,” I said, still speaking loudly. “Why won’t anyone wake up?”

“I don’t know. I was sleeping so peacefully.” Resler seemed to be speaking at about half speed, and running down. He raised his hands and started to rub at his cheeks and eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t shaved since I left to get sea-silver. Finally, he looked up at me, more closely.

“You’re back already? We thought it would take another week.”

“Another week? I’ve been gone almost three weeks now!”

Resler shook his head slowly, then stopped. His eyes opened a little wider. “It can’t be more than three or four days.”

I was getting confused. First I was told that I had been gone twice as long as I thought, then that I had just left. I watched Resler as he continued to come awake. It was incredibly, impossibly slow going.

“Where’s my uncle, the wizard?” I asked when Resler looked as if he was finally getting his act together.

Resler’s eyebrows moved toward each other. “We have a problem,’ he said slowly. “Something came over us.” Very slowly now. “It hit the town first. The elflord …”

“What about Parthet?”

“He was—he was trying to find a way to fight—to fight the sleepiness.” Resler started to sag, falling asleep again almost in the middle of a word.

“Wake up!” I screamed. His eyelids rose. He stared at me bleary-eyed.

“I wasn’t.” He blinked several times. “I was.” He stood, moving like an arthritic scarcely able to bend his joints.

“What about Parthet?” I asked again.

“He’s here somewhere.” Resler started pacing slowly. “I can’t think. My head’s all fuzzy.”

“Harkane, find Parthet. Take one of the men with you.” Our six soldiers were standing in the hall outside the Baron’s room. I sent four of them to the great hall to start waking the garrison. I warned them how hard it would be. I kept the last soldier at the baron’s door.

All of the assurances that the elflord’s offensive magics didn’t work well outside Fairy weren’t worth dragon’s crap. Xayber had at least one dandy trick that was working all too well. Why worry about killing your enemies in battle or frying them with lightning or whatever if you can just put them to sleep and waltz in to slit their throats at leisure? That thought ripped a growl from my throat and a quick glance at Annick, but I didn’t say anything. Xayber didn’t even have to bother with finishing off sleeping soldiers if he didn’t want to. He could just leave them to the Rip Van Winkle routine until they were irrelevant. Could. My immediate worry was that he might prefer to do a more thorough job, that the grim reaper’s barbers might be on their way in at any minute. I wondered why they hadn’t moved in already if the castle had been like this for a week, maybe two.

Annick and I kept at her uncle, trying to keep him awake. Lesh arrived with a bottle of whiskey—Johnny Walker Red Label scotch at that.

“There’s nobody awake in the kitchens either,” Lesh reported. “Cooking fires are stone cold. Rotten meat hanging in the larder. Looks like they’ve been snoozing for ages.”

“No coffee?”

“I started a fire and put coffee on to boil. It’ll be ready soon, but I thought this’d help.” Boiled coffee. No wonder it all tasted so bitter.

Annick poured scotch down her uncle’s throat. He gagged and sputtered, but it did seem to help. Then Harkane came screaming back.

“I found the wizard! On the battlements, standing like a statue, arms up, staring at the sky!”

I started running.

17
Perchance to Dream

Parthet wasn’t alone on the battlements of the keep. There was also a sentry walking his circuit, a soldier who wasn’t completely asleep, though he did seem to be in a trance, sleepwalking. The sentry didn’t even notice the bunch of us who charged up the stairs and surrounded Parthet until he had walked another complete circuit, and even then he scarcely reacted. He simply detoured around us.

Parthet looked in bad shape. He
was
rigid, “like a statue.” He was standing with his feet spread, head tilted back, arms extended upward at full reach, not even trembling—like Charlton Heston holding open the Red Sea before Yul Brynner could catch the fleeing Israelites. When I touched Parthet’s shoulder, I got an electric shock and a fleeting glimpse of an unmistakable face.

“He’s locked in a duel with the Elflord of Xayber,” I said. That was all the explanation the people who had been with me in Fairy needed.

I had to do something. The idea of butting in and facing the elflord again turned my stomach. I was scared, and I couldn’t hide that, not from myself. But I couldn’t hesitate either. I took the elf sword in hand, got in front of Parthet, and touched my rings to his. There was another surge of electricity and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. My teeth ached and I felt as if the skin on my face had tightened up about three sizes. Parthet slumped and disappeared from my view.

And I was facing the elflord on that featureless gray plain again. This time, I didn’t wait for him to start the game.

“You try my patience!” I said, with genuine anger and all the phony confidence I could muster to hide my fear. “This man is mine, and this place. Leave while you may.”

It was all bluff and bluster. I don’t think I’ve ever felt half as arrogant as I tried to sound. I held Dragon’s Death between us and took a couple of steps toward the image of the elflord. The face that looked back at me showed no emotion. I did have one advantage, maybe a couple. First, there was little chance now that I would be vulnerable to anything like the fall-on-your-sword ploy. I had seen it before and I wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. Just keep a tight rein on your head, I told myself. And the second advantage: I was outside his realm now. I wasn’t quite as certain of that one.

I also wasn’t sure how long I could maintain this bluff. I brought my hands together so the rings touched, closed my eyes, and turned my back on the elflord. When I opened my eyes, I was back at Arrowroot. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Are you all right?” Annick asked.

I looked around the battlements while I felt myself out. “I think so. Where’s Parthet?”

“Lesh and Harkane carried him downstairs. He’s in trouble, Gil.” There seemed to be real concern in her voice, and that surprised me. It was also the first time she had called me by name. “Was it really the elflord?”

I nodded. “There was no duel this time. I broke the contact.” Okay, I was bragging a little, but more than that, I was wondering what was in the painkiller I had been taking to give me that kind of gall. “How long did it take?”

“Only a couple of minutes.”

Long enough for Lesh and Harkane to carry Parthet off the battlements, at least. “See if you can learn anything from this guard,” I said. He was still walking his post, paying no attention to anything but getting one foot in front of the other. “I’ve got to get downstairs to see to Uncle Parthet.”

Lesh had ousted Baron Resler’s chief functionary from bed, literally, to make room for Parthet. The steward didn’t seem to mind. He was sound asleep on the floor, out of the way. I checked Parthet over. His pulse was weak and erratic, his face pale but sweating, and I could scarcely see any movement of his chest as he breathed. He needed a top-notch urban trauma center—with a resident witch doctor.

“Lesh, stay with him. If he stops breathing …” That took some time. I had to demonstrate artificial respiration. There wasn’t time for a primer on CPR. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Harkane, come with me. I’m going to open the way to Basil. Find my mother. Tell her what’s happened to Parthet and bring her back with whatever she can find to help him. She can open the passage back.”

“I know,” Harkane said. He appeared rather shaken.

I was gone only three or four minutes. Parthet looked the same when I returned. “Lesh, get that scotch from the baron’s room, if there’s any left.”

I had taken several first-aid courses while I was a teenager and I knew that whiskey wasn’t the wisest choice of stimulants, but it was all we had, and I was afraid that unless I did something fast, I was going to lose Parthet. And his new glasses. The pair he had on when we found him had huge square lenses with heavy black frames—owl glasses with lenses thicker than the bottom of a dime root beer mug. They were on the nightstand next to the bed now. I looked through them but couldn’t see anything but a blur. After I wiped off the dirt, water spots, and bird droppings, I still couldn’t see through them.

Mother arrived quickly. She had an old black doctor bag with her, the kind that went out of style when house calls did. She gestured me out of the way and examined Parthet. She lifted his eyelids to check his eyes, put a hand to his chest to check respiration, then took a stethoscope out of the bag and listened to his heart.

“Put the blood-pressure cuff on him,” she said then. I pulled the gadget out and set it up.

“Harkane told you how we found him?” I asked while the air hissed out of the cuff after Mother finished. She nodded. “He may have been like that for a week or more.”

“I think he’ll be okay.” Mother took off the stethoscope and put it back in the bag. “He’s tougher than a ten-year-old rooster. Did you give him anything?”

“About a tablespoon of scotch.” I pointed at the bottle.

Mother helped herself to a long swig. “It won’t hurt him. You don’t realize how hard it is to kill a wizard.”

“I’m beginning to get the idea,” I said dryly. “I’ve even got a damn good idea what the elflord put him through. I’ve been there.”

Mother’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve lost weight.”

“We didn’t eat all that well in Fairy.”

“We’ll discuss your adventures when there’s more time.” She said that the way she used to say, “Just wait till your father gets home.” I guess she was still fuming about Annick. I didn’t feel any burning urge to correct her impression.

“Right now, I think Parthet needs another stimulant,” she said. She administered this one, a larger dose. “Is the kitchen working?”

“Nothing’s working. Most of the garrison’s so deep asleep that it’s impossible to wake them. The rest are in a trance, sleepwalking.”

“The baron was sleeping again when I got the bottle,” Lesh said.

“I think that’s what Parthet was trying to fight on the roof,” I said. “Obviously, he wasn’t successful. I’m surprised that the elflord hasn’t already sent his army in to set up housekeeping.”