The Hero of Varay (2 page)

    I like an occasional night out like that, but not too often—because I always suffer from hangovers of truly heroic proportions. I need time between binges to forget how bad the hangovers are. A good drunk can put me out of action for half the following day, and out of sorts even longer. But while the glow is warming me, it’s great. I don’t even get upset when the talk turns to Annick … as long as it doesn’t turn before I’ve got at least two sheets to the wind.

People came and went from the Bald Rock. As the evening got later, it was more people going and fewer coming in. Most of Old Baldy’s customers had to get up early to work the next day—farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen. By most folks’ standards, Varay isn’t very civilized. Life is still dominated by nature, by the sun and the seasons. No electricity. Parthet, Lesh, and I were the only ones down from the castle. Most of the people who live and work up on the rock also do most of their eating and drinking up there, because it doesn’t cost them anything. Trips down to the town’s public houses are for special occasions. Of course, most of the beer consumed in the castle is purchased from Basil’s two publican/brewers.

We were well into our second keg of the evening when trouble walked in, though my danger sense didn’t warn me as quickly as it might have. It wasn’t just that I was drunk, though that contributed to it. The stranger was disguised by a powerful magic. I glanced at the man when he came through the door and didn’t get any kind of warning at all. He stood just inside the door for a moment and looked around. There were only a couple of people left in the Bald Rock besides Parthet, Lesh, me, and the innkeeper and his lads. The stranger looked rather fuzzy. I was willing to lay that entirely on the beer. Isquinted to get a better look, but the stranger didn’t come into focus.

“Ever see him before?” I asked my companions. I think I was speaking softly, but I can’t be sure. Lesh and Parthet both shook their heads. They had turned to look at the stranger too, though it had been quite an effort for Lesh. He had been going at the beer as if Prohibition were going to take effect in the morning.

The innkeeper came out from behind his bar to greet the stranger, who just waved him off. Old Baldy shrugged and went back to his place.

The stranger looked my way and started toward our table, moving very casually—at first. But then things happened very quickly.

I sobered up instantly. That was the work of my danger sense, once the danger got so close that my peril was immediate.

The fuzziness around the stranger disappeared, leaving him strongly defined in the dirty yellow light of the Bald Rock. He was an elf warrior, as tall and fair as all of them are, and his sword was making a blurred arc as he drew it from a shoulder rig—a rig just like mine. He couldn’t pull it straight over his head because of the low ceiling. The motion was more like a baseball pitcher with a three-quarter delivery. It was still a quick draw.

I leaped to my feet and over to my left, away from the table, and pulled my own sword on the move. The elf’s first blow bit into one of the beams in the wall. By the time he got it free, I was ready to meet him.

Fighting with six-foot swords under the eight-foot ceiling of the Bald Rock called for a particular concentration. Some techniques are worse than useless without full swinging room. But perhaps I had done more practicing at that sort of fighting than the elf had. It was a slight advantage, perhaps the only one I had. The elf was bigger than me, stronger, and likely a lot older and more experienced, though he didn’t look especially old. Elves don’t particularly show their age. The fact that he was an elf warrior meant that the intrinsic danger sense and the other magics of the Hero of Varay were matched or exceeded going in.

We were both humming sword chants. That was still an involuntary reflex on my part. Whenever I used the elf sword I had won on that beach in Xayber, the melody came out of my throat. The tune wasn’t always exactly the same. When I was just practicing, it sounded quite different from when I was fighting for real, and the dragon-fighting version was distinct from this one. But they were all variations on a common theme.

I was also vaguely aware of Parthet going into a magic chant. He was drunker than I had been, and I wasn’t sure that his conjuring would have any effect on an elf warrior in any case. It couldn’t hurt, though. And Lesh was too far gone to be any help. I hoped he was too drunk to
try
to get involved. He certainly couldn’t defend himself in his condition.

The elf warrior fought with the fierce abandon of someone who was absolutely convinced of his own immortality and invincibility. I had no such assurance. Heroes of Varay died regularly. I had come close enough myself in the Battle of Thyme, and before that, when I faced the Elflord of Xayber in a long-distance duel. Even after three years, I spent a lot of time in the burial crypt below Castle Basil meditating along the line of dead kings and Heroes. Even Vara, founder of the kingdom, had died. His bones were there in the crypt with all of the others. At least there was a niche with his name on the capstone.

But I had also seen one “immortal” elf warrior die, so I knew that the immortality this elf warrior seemed to rely on so heavily wasn’t absolute. That’s how I got my elf sword. Maybe I was no dragon, but knowing that my opponent wasn’t as immortal as he thought he was gave me another very slight advantage. Maybe.

Time means very little in an engagement like that. Neither of us was likely to tire soon enough to make a difference. The endurance of elf warriors goes even beyond legend, but the magic of the Hero of Varay is more than sleight of hand as well. And I had a lot of available calories to burn. Sure, sobering up quickly had included breaking out in about three gallons of sweat, but my body had converted all that alcohol to sugar, so I was on a sugar high, with more energy than sense.

The end came quickly. The elf’s sword bit into our keg, and while he was freeing his sword and wiping beer from his eyes, I swung Dragon’s Death in a flat arc that took his head completely off his shoulders. But while I was doing that, his sword came free and the tip ripped into my abdomen.

I felt a tugging, and then a fire, I spun away and through a complete circle, but it was too late to avoid damage. The elf’s head bounced off the splintered keg and came to rest on our table, right side up, eyes open and facing me, a fierce scowl frozen to the face. I lowered my blade and leaned on the hilt like a crutch, fighting against the waves of pain that were flowing up from my gut.

The elf’s eyes were moving, looking around. The mouth opened.

“Before you die, I give you the greetings of my father, the Elflord of Xayber,” the elf warrior said. Then his jaw dropped, his eyes closed, and he died.

I pressed my hand against the tear in my gut, futilely trying to hold in my blood. It wasn’t the sort of homecoming I had planned at all. …

    I had returned from my goodwill tour of the buffer zone that afternoon. I had learned something new about myself. My stock of goodwill wasn’t enough to hold me through a three-month goodwill tour. A long diplomatic gig wasn’t the kind of job that would normally be given to a Hero, but I was also heir apparent to King Pregel, so I was stuck with the job. I did my best to weasel out of it, but when Pregel insisted, there wasn’t much I could do but smile and accept the inevitable. My great-grandfather might be 128 years old and in questionable health, but he was still in charge, and when he said go, I went. He told me that the tour would be part of my continuing education about life in the seven kingdoms.

He was right, though perhaps not entirely in the way he meant it. I learned that nobody in the seven kingdoms had running water, decent plumbing, or a common magic to fend off lice, bedbugs, and assorted other pests. The buffer zone has a lot of little creepers never seen back in the real world, and the bites or stings of a few of them can produce downright peculiar effects. The only other thing I learned was that appetites and meal sizes seemed to decrease in proportion to the distance from Fairy. I wasn’t sure what the hell that meant, and my survey was hardly scientific, but it was obvious. At Basil and in the northern border fortresses of Varay, people pigged out as often as they could and nobody got fat. In my tour through the four kingdoms west of Varay—Belorz, Caderack, Montray, and Telemon, in that order—I found that the farther west and south I went, the less food people had to eat in order to get by. And in the far southwest (the Titan Mountains took a big bend to the south, so much of Montray and Telemon was farther south than anywhere in Varay), obesity was an occasional problem.

During the last two months of my tour, I had plenty of time to consider that phenomenon. After all, the actual diplomatic nonsense rarely took more than a few hours every now and then, since we were on the road most of the time, and I couldn’t spend
every
waking moment swearing that I would never let myself be suckered into such an extended stay in the buffer zone again. I was too far from the magic doors to zip back to my own world for an occasional shower and the other amenities. The primitive life is a great place to visit … as long as you can get back to civilization now and then.

When I got back from my tour, I had been the official Hero of Varay for three years and a couple of months. On the whole, they had been peaceful years, and I had managed to divide my time between the buffer zone and my own world, with the emphasis on the latter. After facing the Etevar of Dorthin, we had quite a stock of fresh sea-silver left, so I put it to good use, setting up quite a few new magic doorways to let me gad about a little more freely. Now I had an apartment, a condo overlooking Lake Michigan, in Chicago; a small castle in southern Varay, a simple tower with no bailey or curtain wall or anything, like the castle in that movie
The War Lord;
and magic doorways connected all of my places to Basil and to my mother’s house in Louisville. Yes, she still lived there, most of the time. Twenty-odd years of electricity and modern plumbing had spoiled her for the full-time primitive splendor of Varay too.

Heading west on my tour, I had been on horseback. Lesh, Harkane, and Timon had accompanied me. Letters had been sent ahead months in advance, setting up what arrangements could be made in the seven kingdoms. There is virtually no postal service in the buffer zone, particularly not between kingdoms. The occasional wandering merchant or minstrel would be hired to take letters along and find a way to direct them closer to their goal. Sometimes a letter might pass through five or six different messengers before it reached its destination. Remarkably, none of the letters setting up my tour got misplaced. The tour took us to each of the capitals and some of the other major towns and castles in the kingdoms west of Varay. In between stops, we often spent several nights in a row camped out or bedded down in village inns that were infested with a variety of unpleasant bugs and rodents.

At least getting back to Varay once we reached the far west was faster than the trip out. We hired the largest coastal trading ship available and sailed the Mist home. We started out on the west coast of Telemon, sailed north around a peninsula shaped something like Iberia, then east, all of the way to Arrowroot. The sailors of the buffer zone were cautious men, though. They sailed by day and tied up on shore every night, afraid of being blown too far out into the waters of Fairy. Even though I was in a hurry to get home by then, I kept my impatience at bay. I wasn’t entirely comfortable about the voyage. Other than a couple of short day cruises, I had never been on a boat before. At least we didn’t run into any storms or rough seas. The Hero of Varay did not disgrace himself by getting seasick.

We docked at Arrowroot after twenty-three days at sea, got our horses and luggage unloaded, made arrangements to pay the ship’s master the remainder of his fee, and went to the castle to transfer back to Basil. I grabbed a flagon of beer as we passed through the great hall, something to drink on my way up to King Pregel’s private quarters. As usual, Baron Kardeen was aware that I had returned almost before I was. He always seemed to know just who was in the castle and where. The chamberlain met me before I got to my great-grandfather’s rooms.

“How is he?” I asked, a normal question.

“Not bad, considering,” Kardeen said.
Considering—
Pregel was 128 or thereabouts, so the standards for “not bad” weren’t extremely high. The king’s health fluctuated quite dramatically at times. He could go from chest-thumping health to critical condition and back again almost overnight.

Kardeen and I went in together. Pregel was sitting up in bed reading—a book, not a scroll. Mother had been bringing him large-print books for years, something to keep him occupied. Occasionally, I brought him a few books I thought he might enjoy, things Mother would probably never think to get for him.

“Ah, you’re back,” he said when he saw me. He marked his place carefully with a Garfield bookmark and set the book aside. “Is it just three months?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘just,’” I said. “The way I itch and all, it feels more like a couple of years.”

Pregel chuckled. “Any difficulties along the way?” Even though he was in bed in the middle of the day, Pregel seemed to be at the top of one of his health swings.

“Nothing special, I guess. Nobody tried to tar and feather me or anything like that.” I gave him the stack of letters that the various kings and lords of our western neighbors had sent for him. Pregel tossed them aside without a glance.

“That’s good. It’s been far too long since we’ve done a tour of our western neighbors. I haven’t felt up to that kind of trip for years.”

“I can see why. Is it okay if we hold off on the full report for a day or two?” I asked. “I’d like to spend some time soaking in a hot tub and start feeling human again.”

“Yes, I imagine you would.” Pregel chuckled again. “What was her name again?”

“Joy.” I shook my head to keep from grinning. Pregel might be old, but he wasn’t completely out of touch.

“Ah, yes, a wonderful name for a young lady. Yes, we can wait a few days before we ask all the questions. That will give me time to read all these letters. As long as there’s nothing urgent.”