The Hero of Varay (35 page)

Pictures flashed through my head. I could see myself hurdling over the side of the boat into the sea, both elf swords flashing, to rescue Aaron and kill the sea serpent. The images were as sharp, as vivid, as reality, but they had to remain a fantasy. Some deeds are beyond the abilities of any Hero, and I had to think of my primary mission—especially now that Aaron had given the rest of us some chance to get on with it.

Beathe
slowly picked up momentum as the rowers strained at their oars, panic giving them almost superhuman strength and determination. I hung to the side of
Beathe
, up in the bow, and continued to stare at the spot where Aaron had disappeared. There was a frothing of the water at first, then a string of bubbles that popped as they reached the surface, and then … nothing. The sea calmed until we crossed that spot and
Beathe’s
wake rippled past to disturb the flat water. I could see the outline of the sea serpent as we rushed over it. By that time, more than five minutes had passed since Aaron’s head had sunk beneath the Sea of Fairy.

I climbed on top of the boat’s cabin after we crossed that spot and went back as far as the mast while
Beathe
continued to drive for the island. With one arm looped around the mast, I divided my attention between the spot in the water behind where Aaron had vanished and the shrine up ahead.

Our keel ribs grated on sand.
Beathe
lunged to an abrupt halt.

“Over the side,” I shouted. Only my grip on the mast had kept me from being thrown from my feet by the impact. “We have to haul the boat up on the beach, out of the grasp of that beast.”

There were thick nautical hawsers coiled in a box under the deck at the bow of
Beathe
. The crew, and my own people, dropped over the side as soon as Hopay and his men attached two of the hawsers to thick rings in the gunwale. We all dragged on the ropes as we waded through the shallows and up onto the packed white sand of the island. With thirteen of us pulling, and a little help from the sea swell pushing from behind, we got the prow of
Beathe
past the waterline, and the boat listed to starboard. Timon clambered back aboard the boat to get the elf. Lesh brandished two thick stakes he had discovered somewhere in the boat’s stores. We drove the stakes into the sand and secured the ropes to them.

It had taken the efforts of
all
of us to get the boat that far. I didn’t think that the crew would be able to free it alone, especially not if I kept Master Hopay and two of his rowers with me.

“The rest of you keep watch here,” I said. The sailors—soldiers—all had weapons, their short swords at hand, their spears lashed to the sides of the cabin. With land beneath their feet and weapons out and ready, they were less prone to panic, but they were still frightened enough by the memory of the sea serpent that none of them argued with my orders.

Timon had Wellivazey in his cage. The elf’s condition was deteriorating rapidly. His eyes no longer focused together. His mouth hung open and his tongue was darkened and swollen. He
looked
dead, finally.

We had just started marching toward the shrine when I heard heavy coughing behind us and an echo of distant thunder. I glanced over my shoulder, then stopped walking and turned all the way.

Aaron was wading ashore.

The six men I had left with the boat backed away from Aaron rapidly, fear flowing out from them in a wave I could feel. Aaron, still coughing and spitting water, stared at them for a moment, then joined the rest of us.

“The monster sleeps within,” he said. Absently, he shook off water. His eyes were bloodshot and cloudy—murky. I couldn’t tell what the cause was, but Aaron set off my danger alarm as wildly as the Elflord of Xayber ever had.

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered, trying to avoid showing him that the special sense of the Hero of Varay considered him a “clear and present” danger.

“No, not dead. I am a wizard now,” he said, just as quietly.

“Hurry up,” the elf croaked. “So little time!”

    The gold double doors, identical to those on the shrine in the Titan Mountains, were on the south side of this temple.
Beathe
had beached on the east side of the island. Eight of us hurried across the sand, through the field of scattered rocks, toward the entrance. I was waiting for soldiers to emerge from the doors as they had at the other shrine. But no one came out to bar our way. Lesh and I tried to open the doors, but we couldn’t budge them. They wouldn’t move in or out. Then Aaron laid his hands on the gold and the doors popped open-violently. One door snapped off its hinges and fell into the shrine.

We stepped inside, past the fallen door. The empty cavity hit us with the echoes of the clanging door at our feet.

“Which way?” I asked, and my voice echoed just as strongly.

“The pull is weak,” the elf whispered. “So weak.”

“Which way?” I asked again, more urgently.

The elf’s eyes wandered independently. Neither one seemed to see me. Aaron took the cage from Timon and set it on the floor. He unhooked the snaps, lifted the top off, and set it aside. Aaron started chanting as he picked up the elf’s head. He stood and raised Wellivazey’s head above his own at full reach. Then he brought it down slowly—and Wellivazey slipped over Aaron’s head like a full Halloween mask. Nothing squirted out. Somehow, the elf’s skull, brains, and everything else fit right over Aaron. Stronger eyes looked out of Wellivazey’s face. They wavered a moment, then focused together. The elf’s mouth moved, and Aaron’s voice came through, subtly changed.

“It is above us, far above us,” he/they said.

Timon gagged, then vomited. One of the men from
Beathe
went pasty white and fainted, hitting his head disturbingly hard. I didn’t feel so good myself.

White face above black neck, no jagged fit—the line between the two skins seemed perfectly smooth. A black hand pointed toward the side of the shrine’s vault.

“There,” Aaron’s voice said through the elf’s lips.

Master Hopay looked around, his head jerking back and forth as if he were having spasms in his terror. Then he bolted through the doors, running back toward his boat.

“Let him go,” Aaron said, an instant before I could start after Hopay. “Follow me.”

Aaron started walking quickly across the center of the shrine at an angle, aiming for a point along the west wall. The rest of us followed close behind him. Aaron went straight to a door that looked like all of the other doors along that aisle and pulled it open—wrenching the knob off and twisting one of the hinges in the process. Aaron showed none of the hesitation and uncertainty that Wellivazey had shown in the first shrine. We went up one long flight of stairs, through two small, bare rooms, then along a hallway that paralleled the aisle below, and up another flight of stairs, much longer than the first. At the top, we turned back the way we had come, moving back along the side of the shrine, and finally we started up one more short flight of stairs.

Those stairs came up through the floor of a room that was about sixteen by twenty-four and twelve feet high. The walls and ceiling were totally crusted over with precious gemstones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and others I couldn’t identify by sight—and more were piled on the floor, in the corners, as if they had simply been swept aside and left. The stones were real, all of them. I knew that without scientific tests, a jeweler’s loupe, or anything else. I simply
knew
. It was a fortune in faceted and smooth jewels.

Aaron/Wellivazey scanned the walls. Aaron’s hand came up and pointed.

“That oval emerald,
there.
”

I went to the wall and touched a gem.

“This one?” I asked.

“That one,” Aaron’s voice assured me.

At first, I couldn’t get a grip on the emerald. Only half of it was away from the wall, and it was fixed firmly and bounded by other gemstones. I tried to find some purchase with my fingers, without luck, and I was just about ready to use Dragon’s Death to pry it loose when the emerald decided to pop off the wall on its own. It dropped right into my hand. The stone was warm, and it matched the ruby around my neck in size and shape.

I held the jewels next to each other, and the ruby slid out of its gold setting. When ruby and emerald touched, both started to glow.

“Not now,” Aaron said. “We have to get out of here quickly. The world is collapsing toward us.”

We ran down the stairs, through the midlevel corridor and rooms, down the last flight of stairs, and then we raced for the golden doors, slipping and sliding on the polished marble floor of the shrine.

Halfway across the huge central chamber we all skidded to a stop. A woman’s figure appeared—first a ghostly wraith, then a more substantial figure. She seemed to have been assembled from badly mismatched parts, though. Her head, neck, arms, and shoulders appeared normal—attractive face, slender neck and arms—but watermelon-sized breasts hung from her chest, covering a wasp waist that I might have been able to span with my hands, over hips and buttocks that would have had to squeeze to fit through a hula hoop. Bulky thighs supported that construction, but the legs below the knees seemed normal, about right for the head and arms. Maybe the feet were a little too big. A caricature, a gross parody.

“Who disturbs my shrine and steals my treasures?” The voice was regal, haughty, and seemed to be in stereo.

“Not yours,” I said, taking one cautious step closer to her. Obviously this was, or was supposed to represent, the Great Earth Mother. The devotional figures of her I had seen were all similarly distorted.

She studied me. “Vara, have you returned at last?” There was doubt, or maybe just wistfulness, in her voice, shattered when she shook her head and said, “No, you’re not the one. You’re just a thief. I will destroy you!”

“You’ll have to stand in line, my lady,” I said.

“She’s just a mirage,” Aaron said. “There is no substance. Hurry, to the boat.”

We went past the mirage and reached the doors without catastrophe striking. But when we got out onto the marble walk that surrounded the building we had to stop again. The men I had left with
Beathe
had come up to the shrine, and they were cowering against the outer wall. Halfway across the beach, Master Hopay lay dead, his skull crushed by a boulder that was eight feet in diameter. His arms and legs were bent at unnatural angles, also obviously broken, though those injuries could scarcely matter to him now.

That wasn’t the worst. Stones—everything from golf ball to basketball in size—were picking themselves up off the beach and smashing into our boat. There were already gaping holes in the sides of
Beathe
, and more appeared every moment. The stones hit with the velocity of artillery shells. Some went straight through, in one side and out the other. We weren’t going to sail back to Varay in
Beathe
, not without a lot of time for repairs.

And time was one thing we didn’t have.

“Look!” Lesh shouted. He was pointing at the sky.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dragons of every size and description stretching off to the horizon in every direction I could see. And they were all converging on the shrine.

“Shit!” I said. I looked around at my companions, ending with Aaron/Wellivazey. “What the hell do we do now?”

“You have the balls of the Great Earth Mother.” It was strictly the elf’s voice that I heard this time.

“What do I do with them?” I held them up, both cupped in the palm of my left hand.

“Swallow them.”

“That’s impossible!” I mean, they were each the size of a pecan, shell and all, and there was no way I could get even one of them down without choking to death.

“Swallow them!” the elf’s voice repeated, more insistently. “This is what you must do to complete your mission.”

I looked at the two jewels. “Lesh, you remember the Heimlich maneuver I taught you?”

“Aye, lord, I remember.”

“Be ready to use it on me if you have to.”

“Aye, lord.” He shifted his grip on his battle-axe.

On the beach, all of the rocks that hadn’t hurled themselves at the boat were changing shape. It was something like Claymation. The rocks grew and turned into armed soldiers, and there seemed to be as many soldiers as there were dragons in the sky. The soldiers appeared as a cross section of human history. I saw stone-axe-carrying cavemen, Roman legionnaires, knights in mail and plate, red-suited musketeers, even a couple of olive-green uniforms topped by the flat helmets our soldiers used in the First World War and at the beginning of the Second.

And they were all coming toward us.

I popped both jewels in my mouth and swallowed.

It hurt.
Oh, God, it hurt!
I could feel them sinking, and I imagine it would have felt about the same if someone had crammed a baseball bat down my throat and pushed it all the way down to my stomach. The agony was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. The world around me seemed to dim, go faint. I was on the verge of passing out but didn’t. I would have welcomed that end to my pain.

The burning went down my throat and straight on down through my gut. There was no twisting and turning of the stones following my digestive system. They
burned
straight down, like glowing embers sinking through butter.

Maniacal laughter echoed in my head. I knew that it was Wellivazey laughing, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move, couldn’t contemplate movement, and speech … I didn’t think that I would ever be able to speak again.

Fire and pain, a clear track, a straight drop, an endless agony—until the jewels came to rest. The burning and pain faded slowly. When I could finally bear to move, I had to reach down the front of my pants to check the damage. There was a very tender track down my abdomen, and an ache in my scrotum, a weight. I felt around cautiously, past the vibrating threads of pain, and counted—all the way to four. I pulled my hand out of my pants and looked at Wellivazey’s face on Aaron’s shoulders.