by Rick Shelley
“Things were different here in the days when Vara was still King of Varay. The distinctions among the three realms were … different from what they are now. Fairy was more advanced than the buffer zone, and we were more advanced than the lesser world. The pyramids had yet to be imagined. It was possible to move back and forth quite freely from one realm to another—not that many people had much cause to travel far. There was the occasional lordling who wanted primitives to impress. I guess that at one time or another, there were plenty of those—men and women of Fairy who liked the idea of being worshiped as gods and goddesses in one area of Earth or another.”
He fell silent again. I waited a bit and then asked the next important question. “How did Vara die?”
“We never knew exactly. It happened in Battle Forest. He didn’t come back from a hunt. The few soldiers he had taken with him were found first. Vara was found nearly three miles away. A patrol from Coriander found him.”
“What kind of condition was the body in?” I asked.
“Mutilated. He …” Parthet stopped and looked up suddenly, and his thoughts were clearly reflected on his face. He realized what I was talking about, and put together the legends that had grown during the millennia of his forgetfulness. “He had been …” Parthet shook his head and needed a moment to get his thoughts organized again.
“He never talked about anything before Varay. He never told us about our family’s past. Back then, it wasn’t even something we would have thought to ask. We had Varay. It was our heritage. It was enough.”
“So you’re half brother to all of creation?” I asked, speaking very softly so I wouldn’t disrupt the mood.
Parthet’s gaze seemed to stretch out toward infinity. “I have to get back to my workroom,” he said. “There may be some …” He got up and left, almost as if he were floating out of the room.
After Parthet left, the rest of us did one of those numbers where everybody just looks around at everybody else.
“What was that all about?” Mother asked finally. “I’ve never seen Parthet act like that—so strange.”
“I had to shock him back to our roots,” I said. “It may be the only way to find an answer.”
“You’ve given up on the elflord?” Aaron asked.
“Not necessarily, but I like the idea of having alternatives, and if Parthet can really keep his thoughts together on this, he may be a better source than Xayber could be at his most willing.”
“I never suspected,” Kardeen said slowly, and the shock of that realization, rather than the revelation that caused it, seemed to get to the chamberlain. He looked toward the door. “I knew he was old, but I didn’t know he was that old.”
“I don’t think Parthet remembered it himself,” I said. “You’ve heard him talk about how history changes. He had been affected by those changes like everything else. I shocked him back to an earlier release, back to the roots. I hope. Aaron, give him a little time alone, then keep a close watch on him. Anything could happen now.”
Aaron nodded.
I closed my eyes for a moment. I wasn’t working from any set plan. I was just jumping from one thought to another, trying to catch up.
“I’m still going to have to talk to the elflord,” I said.
“When?” Aaron asked.
“It had better be soon,” I said without much hesitation. “We don’t know how much time we have, so we need to pursue all our options at the same time.”
“In the morning?” Aaron suggested.
I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe we shouldn’t even wait that long. Mother, will you stay with Parthet until Aaron and I get done?”
She nodded abruptly, started to say something, then changed her mind.
“It had to be, Mother,” I said, assuming that she was about to question what I had done to Parthet. “Right now, there’s too much at stake to worry about what might happen to any of us as individuals.”
Mother got up and left.
“Joy, you’d better go with Baron Kardeen. Or try to get some sleep. We still have my old bedroom here. I’ll come get you after I talk to the elflord.”
“You don’t think I could actually sleep, do you? Gil, we have to find out what happened. My family is back there.”
I turned toward her, took her hands in mine. “I know, dear. I’ll do everything I can.”
There were tears on her cheeks that I hadn’t noticed before. Her family. Caught up in everything else, I hadn’t even thought about them. I couldn’t. I had a lot more to worry about, as heartless as that might have sounded to Joy. I didn’t say that, though, and Joy didn’t press. Not then.
Kardeen escorted her out.
“Do you need to do anything special before we try to contact the elflord?” I asked Aaron when we were alone in the room. Timon, Lesh, and the pages were out in the hall, close but not in the way.
“I don’t think so. I just need a few minutes to make some preparations. Are you sure it’s wise to call in the middle of the night?”
“I’m not sure it’s wise to call him anytime, but night or day won’t make any difference to the elflord. It may not even be night where he’s at.”
“Xayber is straight north of here, isn’t it?”
“Near enough, but day and night don’t necessarily coincide between here and Fairy. A week inside Fairy can be ten days out here, or two weeks, or even longer.”
“That’s what Parthet was talking about?”
“Part of it.”
I got up and paced, over by the windows, while Aaron worked up his preliminary magics. While I couldn’t follow any of the mumbo-jumbo he chanted, I had a rough idea of what he was doing. He knew that the Elflord could be dangerous, even long-distance, so he was building what defenses he could around us before he made any connection to Xayber. I had been through a couple of psychic confrontations with the elflord, and I was all in favor of getting any extra protection I could before chatting with him this time.
Calling the Elflord of Xayber was a little more complicated than picking up the telephone and dialing a number. I knew that Parthet had communicated with the Elfking something like this, back when I was trying to distract Xayber long enough to let us deal with the Etevar of Dorthin, but I hadn’t been around to observe the process. I was off on the isthmus looking for sea-silver to line new magic doors and getting myself in more than enough trouble on my own. And the Elflord of Xayber had found my “number” while I was raising a little hell among his subjects. When it worked, this magic long-distance communication was a lot more comprehensive than the telephone. It really brought you close enough to “reach out and touch someone”—in my limited experience, usually to the dismay of one or the other of the parties.
“You do know that there are certain hazards to this, don’t you?” I asked when Aaron paused in his preparations.
“I know about the time Parthet got caught with his spells down, and how you rescued him,” Aaron said. “I know that the elflord controls a more powerful magic than I do, than you and me combined.” He looked at me. “Even with the ruby and emerald contributing.”
“Are they?”
“I can feel the magic,” Aaron said. “If all this jive is right, they helped create the whole ballpark. Makes Adam and Eve sound like kid stuff.” He circled the table, mumbling another chant. When he finished that one, he stopped at my end of the table.
“You’re a regular riot of magic now, you know? I can feel the static complicating what I’m trying to do.”
“Parthet told me that everything here has its own kind of magic about it,” I said.
“No different anywhere,” Aaron said. “But you’re something else.”
I nodded and tried to divert my mind from worrying by listing all of my contributions to the static—the magic of the Hero of Varay, the magic of the king, the magic of each of the elf swords (hung across my back in an “X marks the spot” arrangement, so I couldn’t even sit back comfortably), and the magic of the balls of the Great Ear
th Mother. Each packed a potent sui generis magic. Maybe I had picked up a little extra zap from the elf and the dragons I had killed along the way—something like the primitive belief that you could get some of the lion’s power by eating the heart of a lion you had killed. Only in the buffer zone, that sort of thing seemed to be fact rather than superstition.
“The static won’t get in the way of your precautions, will it?” I asked.
“Give the elflord something extra to think about. Almost ready now. You know what you’re going to say to the man—or whatever he is?”
“I didn’t write a speech, but I’ve got some idea what I need to say.” Only mildly sarcastic. “There going to be any trouble holding this long enough to say it all?”
“From what I’ve heard, the only worry is can we hang up when we want to.”
“I’m ready whenever you are,” I said. I sat back down in my place at the head of the table.
Aaron sat in the chair to my right, along the side of the table, and started chanting again, a different line, louder than before, more insistent. Judging by what I could feel and see, it was a stronger, or at least a more active, magic than his preparatory spells. My skin tingled, itched. The hair on my arms stood on end. The lights seemed to fade and flare alternately. The entire room seemed to pulse.
And suddenly, the Elflord of Xayber was seated at the far end of the table, staring at me, drumming his fingers—audibly—against the tabletop.
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” he said. The voice was intimately familiar, recalled in every nuance from our earlier “meetings.” There was a hint of condescension in his voice now, as there had been before, and a hint that he hadn’t really expected me to make contact. I sat quietly and stared at him for a moment. I couldn’t distinguish this magic from reality. To all intents and purposes, the elflord was actually there in the room with me … and he had brought along his own chair. Ma Bell should work so good.
“Are you ready to fulfill your vow?” Xayber asked. He looked much as I remembered him from our psychic duel years before—tall, even sitting he seemed to dwarf me; thin, with coal-black hair and a face that was so pale that it was really white, bone white.
“I have many vows to keep,” I told him. “Right now, there is one that is more time-critical than returning your son’s remains. Are you aware that the whole fabric of creation is disintegrating? That we seem to be running down to complete destruction?”
The elflord glanced toward Aaron at the side of the table, then said, “I have noted a few disturbances.”
“It’s more than that. You’d better hear the whole story.” And I gave it to him, as complete as I could, the dragons in chicken eggs, the Coral Lady and Aaron, the two full moons. I covered his son’s interpretation, the basics of our trips to the shrines of the Great Earth Mother, and the apparent outbreak of nuclear war in my world. Xayber asked a few questions, but even the elflord seemed to have a passing acquaintance with the vocabulary of the nuclear age—either that or the translation magic put it in terms he could relate to.
“There are now three moons in the sky,” he said after I finished my recital. “Seven is the critical number.”
“Then time is even shorter than I thought,” I said. “And before I can bring your son home to you, I have to try to stop this spiral into chaos. If we go down to general destruction, it wipes us all out.”
The elflord looked toward the ceiling. His image seemed to flicker out for just an instant before he looked at me again. He shook his head.
“It is already too late to save this universe,” he said.
6
Death Dawn
“No!”
The negative was ripped out of my throat without thought, but thought didn’t alter my rejection of Xayber’s verdict. The elflord stared at me. I saw pity on his face, and that added anger to the other emotions I was feeling.
“There are some things that wishing cannot change,” he said.
I paused, took a deep breath, and set my jaw. “Perhaps, but you must be wrong about this.”
“Doubtful,” he said.
“There must be something we can do. I have the balls of the Great Earth Mother!” After all the hell I had gone through to. retrieve them and the utter agony of … assimilating them, I couldn’t bear to contemplate the possibility that it might have been in vain.
“This world, this universe, must pass,” Xayber said. He seemed to flicker out and in again. Then he shrugged. “Perhaps it is best. The old must pass before the new may come.” Fatalism. “Will you bring my son home before the end?”
“I won’t give up.”
Too much was flooding through my mind. I tried to focus on the elflord, but the thought of total eradication, the End of Everything, was overloading my circuits. I thought only of what I would lose in the total disaster. How can anyone really comprehend the greater disaster? I thought of the unborn child who would never be born. I thought of losing Joy, of losing Varay after the world I grew up in had already suffered nuclear catastrophe. There was no way that my mind could accept Xayber’s sentence of futility. Hey, I thought. This is a fantasy world. Never-Never Land. It can’t end like this. I got so wrapped up in all the internal byplay that I didn’t hear what Xayber said next.
“What was that?” I asked when I realized that I had missed something.
“I said that the old world must pass, but that if you are a true heir of Vara, you may—may—be able to see that some portion of this world is recreated in the next. You carry the seed.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“The seed. The seed. Are you dense? You must do what Vara did. The seed and the egg.”
The seed? I stared at him for a moment. Perhaps the old euphemism was what threw me. “You mean I have to find the Great Earth Mother and knock her up?”
“If you are truly the heir of Vara, you have the seed of the new world in you,” he said, nodding.
“The Great Earth Mother is already looking to kill me for taking the family jewels in the first place. And I don’t think my magic is strong enough to let me take her against her will.” Not to mention my own revulsion at the idea of forcing anyone.
“If you want to have any hope of preserving anything of this world, if you want to ensure that there is a next one, you must create it with her. There is no other way.”
Long pause.
“There don’t seem to be a lot of alternatives,” I said, shaking my head at the images running through my mind. “Granting that it means that I have to try, where do I find her and how do I make my approach?”
Another long pause.
“Difficult questions,” the elflord said. “It will take time to find the answers.”
I hope you’re not going to pull a Deep Thought on me, I thought.
“How much time?” I asked. “That commodity seems to be in particularly short supply.”
“There will be a price,” Xayber said. “The return of my son.”
“If there is time, and if I have your guarantee that you won’t do anything to hinder my attempt to find the Great Earth Mother.”
“Agreed. Anything I might do would be less than you will experience in your frustration to save what can’t be saved.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I won’t do anything to hinder you. You have my word on that. You could even return my son now. Bring him to this room and I can take him home with me.”
I kept my voice level and my face straight. “I think that might be premature,” I said. “When you have the answers I need.”
“As you will.”
“For what it may be worth, we could never have come this far without the help of your son, even after he was dead.”
“I know.”
I thought you might.
There was a loud noise from the corridor, something—or someone—falling against the door. I turned, distracted, and started to reach for a sword instinctively. The elflord also looked toward the door. Aaron was fa
cing it. The door swung open and Annick hopped over Lesh. He grabbed for her ankles but missed.
“I knew there was an elf near,” Annick said, not quite in a shout. A long dagger flashed through the air—through the head of the image of the elflord—and clattered off the wall behind him.
“You, the hellhound.” Xayber hadn’t even blinked at the dagger she threw at him, a calmness I could never have maintained, even if I knew that it was just an image of me being threatened.
“Me. Tell my father that I’ll get to him yet. I’ll take off his head the way he”—she pointed at me—”took the head off of that other crud.”
Lesh levered himself to his feet and lurched toward Annick. She started to jump sideways, but Aaron pointed a finger at her. She went rigid and fell. Lesh broke the fall but couldn’t stop her from going down.
The elflord looked at me. “I will contact you when I have the answers you seek.”
“How long?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It will take time. The Great Earth Mother is always elusive.”
“Hours? Days?” I wanted some idea.
“Days, at least, more likely weeks.” The elflord glanced at Aaron again, then back to me. “I will find you then.”
And then he was gone.
Tableau vivant. I’m sitting on the almost-throne at the head of the table. Aaron is to my right, standing about a third of the way down the table. Lesh is on one knee, his left arm still supporting Annick’s head, just off the floor. She is sprawled, still held by Aaron’s restraining magic.
I don’t suppose that the scene held motionless more than a couple of seconds, but it seemed much longer. That kind of frozen moment always seems impossible, a device, unless it’s actually happening to you. I had one of those moments when I heard about the Challenger disaster. Dad said he experienced the same thing when he heard that President Kennedy had been killed, a frozen moment with everything about it impressed indelibly in the mind.
