The Hero of Varay (15 page)

“What do I get for my help?” the elf asked, as I had known he would. “A negative thing is not enough.”

“You know what has to be done to stop this madness?” I asked.

“I know. I’ll even tell you the nature of the solution, and then we can bargain for my hire. Simply knowing the solution won’t help you. And maybe I won’t bother to tell you how to achieve the solution even. It can mean no difference to me now what happens.”

“Okay, how do we stop whatever it is that’s happening?” I asked.

“You merely have to find the balls of the Great Earth Mother and bring them together.”

It took a couple of seconds for my brains to catch up with my instincts. The elf wasn’t being a smartass. Uncle Parthet had told me the story once, the creation legend that was accepted as gospel in the seven kingdoms.

Back in the chaos before creation, the Great Earth Mother wandered around (and the legends aren’t specific about
where
she was wandering, since nothing had been created for her to wander around on), looking for a mate (and where
he
came from was glossed over as completely as where Cain and Abel found
their
wives). After looking around “from before infinity to beyond infinity” and getting hornier all the time (except that time hadn’t started to run yet), the Great Earth Mother found her stud and got laid so that the world and heavens could all be created. Then, sometime after it was over, the Great Earth Mother decided that she liked the universe they had created together but she couldn’t stand the mate who had helped make it possible, so she did a black-widow number on him, but kept his gonads for souvenirs, just in case.

And the son of the Elflord of Xayber was telling us that we had to find these family jewels in order to keep the whole shebang from coming to an end … the End of Everything, to give the phrase the same inflection that Parthet had used.

“You have any idea where we can find these … balls?” I asked.

“I know precisely where they are. But they will cost you more than you ever expected to pay for anything.”

I waited for the other shoe to drop, but the elf was waiting too, and he had more time than I did.

“What do you want?” I asked eventually.

“I would shrug if I had shoulders to command,” he said, letting his eyes wander for a few seconds. “What can you offer that makes it worth my while?”

I hesitated for a long moment before I answered. “I can see that you are properly laid out, head and body, so you can find whatever peace there is for your kind.” Parthet started to protest, but I held up a hand to silence him. “I will give you my personal promise of that, the vow of the Hero of Varay.” After that, there was nothing Parthet
could
say—if the elf accepted the deal.

“It’s not enough,” the elf told me though.

“Just what are we supposed to do with these family jewels once we get them?” I asked—a distraction, something to give me a little extra time to try to think of a cheap way to sweeten the pot.

“Now, that would be giving away too much,” the elf said. “I need something to hold back as a guarantee.”

“As a guarantee for what?” I asked.

“Ah, I just figured that out. My price is that you—you personally, Hero of Varay—take me home to my father. All of me, head and body.”

“No!” Parthet said, preempting any reply from me. “That is an impossible request. This is the heir to Varay.”

“As I was heir to Xayber?” the elf said. “Very well. You’ve made your decision. And I have made mine. There is no other price.”

Parthet threw the head across the room, off a wall. The head rebounded with a soft squish and fell almost straight down. I went over and picked the head up, by the hair, just the way Parthet had held it. I wanted to puke but didn’t. Couldn’t. I thought to say something, but I couldn’t decide what to say, so I just returned the head to its vat of alcohol and put the cover on.

Parthet and Kardeen followed me out of the workroom. I rubbed my hand on my jeans, trying to get rid of the memory of even holding that head.

“Unless you’ve got another way to locate these relics, if they exist, then he has us over the proverbial barrel,” I said once we were well away from the room.

“But we may have all we need from him,” Parthet said. “He told us what the cure is. All we have to do is find the pieces.”

“That seems to be a big enough job,” I said.

“Maybe not. We might have references here that will help. In fact, even without looking I think I can narrow the search down. The family jewels of the Great Earth Mother will be found in two of her shrines—two different ones, some distance apart,” Parthet said.

“But you don’t know which shrines,” I said.

“Not yet, but I may be able to find out, or at least narrow the possibilities to a manageable number.”

“How many shrines are there?”

Kardeen answered that. “There must be hundreds, more likely thousands, scattered throughout all three realms.

“All
three
realms? I don’t remember coming across any in my world,” I said.

“Few of those are in decent condition,” Parthet said, distracted. “Most are passed off as ancient archaeological sites and plundered. Avedell, your mother, could likely pinpoint at least a score of them. She made quite a study of it when you were a child. The ring of stones at Stonehenge was one such shrine, once upon a time.”

“Then if one of the jewels was in that world, it might have been carted off to a museum, or lost, or something.”

“Possible, but unlikely,” Parthet said. “They must be the most powerful magic artifacts in creation. Their presence would cause things to happen. And the Great Mother Earth is unlikely to have left them without suitable protection.”

“Like what?”

“I may know more after I do my research,” Parthet said, sidestepping the question neatly. “And now, I really must get at that. I don’t know how much time we have before things get too bad to stop.”

Parthet turned and headed back to his workroom. Kardeen walked on with me.

“So these things really exist?” I asked.

“If you mean has anyone actually seen them and reported seeing them, the answer is no, not in any of the records that I have seen,” Kardeen said. He shook his head. “But I would not disbelieve the story. There is
something
, there has to be.”

“You know that we’re going to have to deal with Xayber’s son before this is over,” I said.

Kardeen didn’t answer immediately. I glanced at him. He looked lost in thought.

“The king would never consent to the deal the elf demands,” he said finally. “The Elflord of Xayber has too bitter a grudge against you, and he isn’t likely to forget the reckoning.”

“None of that matters if things come down to a choice of risking me or the possibility of losing everything, which includes me. There won’t be any choice, any at all. The End of Everything sounds awfully final, while I
might
survive a close encounter with Xayber. I have before, and I know a little more of what’s going on now than I did then. There’s at least some chance in that option.” I wasn’t overly confident, but even in a worst-case scenario, it was still the only way. If we somehow managed to latch on to this pair of perhaps mythical family jewels and figured out how to use them to keep Armageddon or whatever from happening.

“Something can be worked out with the elf,” Kardeen said, but he didn’t sound overly confident either.

“What are you going to do, offer him a new pair of suspenders?” I asked. I was usually very careful not to be sarcastic with Kardeen. The chamberlain was a good guy, organized, efficient, indispensable—and a good friend—but this time, it just slipped out of me. “He wants me to take him home to Daddy,” I said, trying to sound a little more serious. “I guess part of that is concern for being laid out proper, but I imagine that it’s more because his daddy sent him to kill me and this is his only way of getting the job done. Maybe …” I stopped talking and almost stopped walking.

“Maybe?” Kardeen asked blandly, slowing down to match my reduced pace.

The idea that had popped into my head wasn’t fully formed, so I didn’t want to spring it on anyone until I had a chance to turn it over in my mind a few more times. “Look, if it comes down to actually making a deal with the elf, let me do the making, all right? I’ve got a few ideas of my own on this.”

Kardeen made a formal nod of agreement. “It’s your neck on the line,” he observed, and I nodded back.

“By the way, I think you’ll be able to pull the workmen out of the crypt for a while. I don’t think that grandfather will need it quite yet.”

“Prophecy, or a gift of healing?” he asked.

I started to treat his remark as a joke until I recognized that he wasn’t making a joke, he was serious. “There’s something in the legends about the Heroes of Varay being able to do that?” I asked. In turn, my question was also serious. I was still learning about the magic that went with my job the hard way, falling into one bit of it after another.

“Vara was said to be a healer at special times.”

“But Vara was also supposed to be of Fairy blood,” I reminded him. In the three years and odd months since I fell into the job of Hero of Varay, I had read every word that existed of Vara and his time, and I had heard the much more extensive legends that were handed down and embellished from generation to generation. Vara was something like the Prodigal Son, but he didn’t go crawling home in shame. He set up the buffer zone to cut his father and older brother off from the mortal realm, which they had been using for their personal sport—and some of
those
tales sounded straight out of Bulfinch and Homer … or vice versa.

“We all have something of the blood of Fairy,” Kardeen said. “It’s what makes the seven kingdoms so special. We come from both worlds. And in your family, the line is direct.”

“How long do you figure Parthet will need to find out where these … relics are, or to find out that he can’t find them?”

“He’ll keep at it until he exhausts all of his sources—and until I’ve exhausted mine. It may be a couple of days, probably not much longer.”

“A couple of days of everybody going into a panic at anything the least bit out of the ordinary?” Somehow, that didn’t come out too well. I had visions of Chicken Little.

“You don’t seem to take any of this very seriously,” Kardeen said, the closest he had ever come to scolding me about anything.

“I take the deaths of thousands of people back home very seriously,” I told him. “I just haven’t seen anything to convince me that dragon eggs have anything to do with nuclear bombs or the End of Everything or anything else.”

“You’d prefer to think that it’s a coincidence?” Kardeen asked.

“I’d prefer to think that it was all a bad dream. Since I know it’s not, I don’t know what to make of it, but I’m not ready to jump all the way to doomsday conclusions.”

    Parthet was busy, every minute, keeping at his work. Kardeen had loads of work to do, all of his regular work and this extra quest for information—however he planned to fit
that
in. One way or another, there would be plenty of work for me coming up, but at that moment there really wasn’t anything I could do to speed things up. I went back to the great hall. Joy was sitting by herself.

“Where’s Aaron?” I asked.

“He’s off with one of the boys from here in the castle,” Joy said. “I guess he’s exploring. Are we ready to leave?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid. It won’t be long, though.” I got a mug of beer and hung around long enough to drink it. “I’ve just got a little more to do here. I’ll be back in a few minutes and then we can go.”

I went back up to the king’s bedroom to check in with Mother. Pregel was awake and seemed measurably stronger than he had just a little while before. His smile was encouraging.

“You look better,” I told him, despite his longstanding aversion to talking about his health.

“I feel better,” he replied. Mother shrugged and nodded.

I sat with them for a few minutes, then went back to the great hall to collect Joy.

“There’s something I never thought to ask you,” I said as I plopped down on the chair next to her. “Have you ever done any horseback riding?”

“You mean on real, live horses?” she asked. I nodded, and Joy shook her head. “I don’t even ride on merry-go-rounds. They make me dizzy.”

“Well, a real horse doesn’t go in circles like that normally,” I said, ruling out any wisecracks about dizziness. “Unless it’s on a racecourse.”

“I haven’t seen any cars here,” Joy noted, figuring out where I was leading.

“No internal combustion engines of any sort. They don’t work. Besides the doorways, there are just two ways to get anywhere, foot and horse. The doors don’t go everywhere, and feet will only take a body so far.”

“I think you’re telling me that I’m going to have to learn how to ride.”

“It’s not that bad, really. A good horse is as comfortable as a rocking chair.” And then, because I couldn’t let the opportunity pass, I added, “Mostly, learning to ride is simple arithmetic.”

“What do you mean?”

“You just have to get back up in the saddle one more time than you fall off.” I laughed and ducked as she took a light swing at my shoulder.

“You stinker,” she said. Then she started laughing too. “When does all this falling off start?”

“Pretty soon, I think. I’ll talk with Lesh, have him give you lessons.”

“Why not you?”

“Something I read once said that spouses should never try to teach each other anything, that it just makes reasons to fight. And besides, you’d clobber me the first time I laughed at you falling.”

“Darn right I would. I may clobber you just for thinking about it.”

“We’ll have to see about getting you a horse here. We don’t keep a lot of spares at Cayenne.” The light mood seemed to evaporate from me then. There was no special reason that I could see, but I sort of slumped a little and felt the smile leave my face.

“You mean I’ve got to ride home?” Joy asked, not catching the change at once. “How far is it?”

“No, you don’t have to ride home, though it would be a nice jaunt if we wanted to take a week or so to ourselves. I don’t think we can afford the time right now, though. But there’s a good stable here and we’ll be able to find a horse that’s just right for you.” The conversation was suddenly an effort, and I had to really push myself to continue it. I’m still not certain what happened to me sitting there.