By the time we got back to my mother's house, the story was already breaking. The telephones and CB radios must have been busy. Most of the Louisville television and radio stations had crews on the way, and two TV stations with news helicopters were already on the scene. There were live shots of the dead dragon on TV when I switched the set in the living room on. There was no chance that anyone would be able to suppress this story-assuming that any military or governmental types might have tried out of conditioned reflex. The carcass appeared on the evening news of all three networks as well. I had the distinct feeling that Tessie would be much more than a nine-day wonder. Before the late news came on, dragon sightings had been reported in every state but Hawaii… and there had been two "sea serpent" sightings there.
"You think any of those are for real?" Joy asked.
"No. they would be swarming all over us by now if there were more." Maybe that was just my pessimism.
I switched over to CNN. The Air Force had finally admitted that a fighter plane had been missing for two weeks, lost while attempting to intercept a Tessie radar return over the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. A small coastal freighter was missing without a trace in the Adriatic. There had been no storms or reports of trouble from the ship before its disappearance. No wreckage had been found. An attempt to hijack a SAC B-l bomber had been foiled by Air Police and the FBI. The Soviet Union was making "almost an accusation" that American forces had either sunk or sabotaged a new frigate in the Indian Ocean near Diego Garcia. Despite the improved relations of the last few years, the rhetoric was fairly heated. Radio and television signals had been mysteriously jammed, off and on, for nearly two hours throughout Iberia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange had suspended trading for three days after the Nissei Index doubled in five days. Duluth, Minnesota, had recorded its first significant September summer snowfall-nine inches and counting. A few hundred miles away, Milwaukee and Chicago were breaking record high temperatures, not just for September, for any month.
I would have liked to listen to more news, maybe even spend the night in civilization, but I had to get back to Varay. I got Joy, the others, and all of our loot through to Cayenne, stopped to talk to Lesh for a few minutes, then went right over to Basil while Joy organized a late supper at Cayenne.
Supper was just ending at Basil, but there was still food on the table, so I grabbed a snack, then went looking for Kardeen. He was in his office, still working.
"Sorry I'm late," I told him. "I keep attracting dragons." I pulled the ruby out from under my shirt. I hadn't taken the jewel off since I got it. Varay isn't big on safe deposit boxes. "They seem to be drawn by this. Even in the other world." I told him about Tessie.
Kardeen nodded, and gestured me into a chair without saying anything. He looked overworked and tired. He was always overworked, but he usually kept it off his face.
"I'm going to need Parthet along on the boat or we'll never get to the other shrine," I said when I finished talking about Tessie. "He has a spell to hide people from dragons. He used it when we rode to Thyme that first time. If the spell will work around this ruby."
Kardeen sent a runner for Parthet and Xayber's son, then filled in the time by telling me about our boat and the strange things that had been happening around Varay the last few weeks. A lot of little things had been reported. It sounded vaguely like the weird reports back home. In one case, they merged quite clearly. Fishermen had reported seeing a gray steel ship drifting without power in the Mist.
"Russian, most likely," I told Kardeen. "They're missing a frigate back home." I started to list the other ways the worlds were bleeding into each other but stopped, chilled by a sudden realization.
"That ship may have nuclear weapons aboard." The chill came from wondering what the Elflord of Xayber might do if he got his hands on weapons like that and found a way to make them work in Fairy or in the buffer zone.
"It's all coming apart at the seams, isn't it?" I asked.
Parthet arrived just then, carrying the elf head-still in its birdcage-and Aaron was following close behind. Aaron was as large and mature-looking as Joy had said. Kardeen repeated my question for Parthet.
The wizard nodded. "We're running out of time, even sooner than I feared. I have yet to convince myself that we have enough time left for you to complete your work and get back here."
"Have you figured out what we have to do with the jewels when we have both of them?" I asked.
Parthet shook his head. I turned the question on the elf, and he said that he wasn't positive of the precise steps either. There was nothing in the collective memory he could tap and nothing in the written records Parthet had available.
"The answer is there to be found, though," the elf said before I could accuse him of being less than honest with us. "I would not have agreed to any of this without that certainty."
"We're going to need you on the boat with us, Uncle," I told Parthet. "We need you to shield us from the dragons this rock draws."
"Not me," Parthet said. "Aaron will have to go. I couldn't sustain that magic long enough to help. I think Aaron can. You have no idea how quickly he's grown into the craft. And it will be his initiation test, the journey into the Mist and back."
I stared up at Aaron. He hadn't said anything but hello so far, standing back out of the way. His hair was clipped short now, and he had traces of beard stubble on his chin and cheeks. He seemed assured of himself and his place in the scheme of things. But I remembered the frightened eight-year-old he had been less than two months before. In some peculiar way, I could even see the boy as a ghostly overlay on the man.
"What do you think, Aaron?" I asked.
"I know the magic," he said. "I can't say how long I can hold it until I try." His voice was deep but soft, his words precise, unhurried. I had the impression that he considered each word individually, but without losing time at it.
"He knows virtually every spell I can recall," Parthet said, speaking just as softly, but without the sense of deliberation. "And he knows many more I had forgotten. He has pored through all of my old books and his memory is-so far as I can determine-exact."
"This is what I was born to do," Aaron said.
There is something about that kind of utter certainty that always scares me.
"Has Parthet told you the price?" I asked.
Aaron shrugged. He knew what I was talking about. "I will be my own children. The little boy in me is not completely lost. He never will be."
It was going to take an effort to avoid thinking of Aaron as that little kid who kept popping into Varay from Joliet, even though his maturation seemed to be mental and emotional as well as physical. But I stood and stuck out my hand. Aaron was four inches taller than me and his hand dwarfed mine. We shook.
"I'll say 'Welcome aboard' now, even though I haven't seen our boat yet," I told him.
"I might have been better off marrying a traveling salesman," Joy said the next morning when I was dressing. "They're home more often."
I kissed her. "It's not always like this, dear. When things are going well, I can be idle for months on end."
"Do things ever go well here?" I guess the question was inevitable.
"I'll show you when we get this flap nailed down," I said. I didn't add all of the qualifications. Joy would worry enough without them.
There was a dragon circling over Cayenne at dawn, but the beast the other night had done no harm and my people were getting used to feeling privileged to "serve" the Hero of Varay. I guess they considered the honor guard overhead part of the price.
We stepped through to Basil-Lesh, Harkane, Timon, Jaffa and Rodi, Joy, and me. It was breakfast time, naturally, but Joy and I left our companions to start eating while we made a quick trip upstairs. Mother was with the king. Pregel was either asleep or comatose. Mother said that there wasn't much difference between the two for him anymore. Sometimes he was almost alert. Sometimes days would pass without his opening his eyes. He had aged visibly. He seemed to be only a half step short of mummification.
"He can't last much longer," Mother said. "I've seen the records. It's how his father died, though at nearly twice the age."
"No, not yet. I can't stay here to take his place. I have to go after this other jewel. It's the only hope for any of us." I spoke much louder than I needed to for Mother to hear. I wanted Pregel to hear as well, if he could, and Mother had to know that was what I was doing.
"I know," she said. She met my eyes without adding anything else. I couldn't read the emotion in her eyes. The loss of understanding that came when I discovered the world that had been hidden from me had made us strangers. Nothing had changed.
I turned and left.
We ate a hearty breakfast downstairs, knowing we were going back out into the wild. Baron Kardeen assured me that our boat would carry more than enough food for the four of us and for our crew, food for nearly two months-though much of it would seem monotonous, salted meat and hardtack. I hoped that our sailors were good fishermen.
A crowd of us went from Basil to Castle Arrowroot on the shore of the Mist. Parthet and Joy were there to open the way back to Basil for the others. Even Kardeen came to see us off, and he rarely left Basil.
Kardeen had given me a description of our boat the night before, but I had never seen it. The Varayan designers made it easy on themselves by designing half a vessel and using two of them together. The boat was fifty feet long, eighteen wide in the middle, and it had a single mast precisely in the center. The ends of the boat were identical, pointed something like the ends of a Viking dragon ship but without the carvings and fancy paint. A steering oar could be attached at either end. The sides were lapstraked, like clapboard siding on a house. There were five shallow extensions below the waterline in place of a single keel or keelboard. There were benches along both sides for the rowers, an open-ended cabin through the middle of the boat, and six separate storage bins that were not quite holds. The mast carried a single sail, and the spar could be rotated all the way around the mast. You never had to worry about turning the boat around if you wanted to head in the opposite direction. Just move the steering oar to the other end, turn the rowers around on their benches, and swivel the spar and you were ready to go.
But the sight of the boat stirred my danger sense. Not that I could avoid getting aboard and setting sail, but my danger sense was making sure that I knew I was doing something foolish.
We walked over to the boat-the name Beathe was painted on the side of the cabin-from the castle, taking along much of the off-duty portion of Arrowroot's garrison and a few dozen townspeople as spectators. The only sea traffic that normally put out from Arrowroot was the fishing fleet, and they never sailed out of sight of land. Apparently, everyone knew we were going farther out.
Walking on the pier, my first impression was that there was very little boat showing above the waterline, and there were still five of us to climb aboard, weighted down with weapons and armor.
"You sure we're not overloading this thing?" I whispered to Baron Kardeen.
"Not at all." He smiled. "It may not look like much, but this is the most seaworthy class of boat sailing the Mist or the other seas. And you'll be lightening the load daily as you eat and drink."
"In other words, the longer it is before we run into heavy seas the safer we'll be."
"This ship will take a lot, loaded down or not," Kardeen said.
Beathe's master was a grizzled fisherman named Hopay-young and grizzled. He was thin but his arms were muscled like a comic book hero's. He rattled off the names of his eight rowers, but there was no way I could remember them all from one exposure. I've always had trouble with names.
I said my farewells to Parthet, Kardeen, and Joy, taking quite a lot of time with Joy. Parthet had some last-minute instructions for Aaron. Aaron and I were the last to board Beathe. There was no "all ashore that's going ashore" because only the people who were sailing went aboard.
"Whenever you're ready, Master Hopay," I said, and he started shouting orders. The boat was pushed away from the dock, oars went down, and we moved out into the Mist.
Our departure was a protracted event. The breeze was against us, so we had to rely on our rowers. We could see people waiting back on shore. Joy and Parthet moved off to the side of the crowd. I waved a couple of times, and stared at Joy until I could no longer see her clearly. I waved again, just in case she could still make me out, then turned my attention to my command.
"Which way do we go?" I asked Xayber's son. His cage was tied on top of the cabin so we couldn't lose him overboard.
"West-northwest," he said.
"We'll have the wind in our faces most of the time," Hopay warned.
"That is the way we must go," the elf said.
"It isn't a matter of choice, Master Hopay," I said. "West-northwest it is. The elf is our navigator."
"Ain't but the least part of an elf," Hopay said, squinting at him. If he was worried about Xayber's son, he took care not to show it.
"Face me toward the bow and dangle the jewel in front of me," the elf said. I did as he asked and held the ruby out until he said, "Enough. Yes, this is the right way, but we have forever to sail."
"Aaron, you're keeping a lookout for dragon?"
"Since we left the castle," he said. "You know, I've never been on a boat of any kind before." He paused, then looked straight into my eyes. "My parents debated taking me with them on the Coral Lady, but it was to be a business cruise and they thought I was too young, that I wouldn't have any fun with them busy all the time. 'Next time,' they told me."
I nodded. "I've got some idea how rough it can be. I lost my father suddenly." I glanced away, then looked at him again.
Aaron was more a wonder than the talking head of a dead elf or dragons that could slurp down a string of cars like a strand of spaghetti. Even granting the visual impossibility that he could age fifteen years in a matter of days, it would be logical to expect emotional or educational lag, but Aaron showed neither. It was as if the magic that aged him also crammed a full education into his head and gave him the equivalent experience in living. I couldn't help thinking of the cliche about orphans being forced to grow up overnight. Aaron had done that in absolutely literal fashion. And he had absorbed "years" of apprenticeship as a wizard at the same time. Magic? Well, maybe that is the closest word, but it isn't close enough.
"There's something about me you should know," Aaron said a few minutes later. We had moved all the way to the bow of Beathe, where the sides rose to meet the nose. "You remember how I suddenly popped up in Varay?" I nodded. "Well, I can control it now, to some extent."
I needed a moment to consider that. "What extent?" I asked, amazed at how calm I sounded.
"I can use all of the doorways with the silver tracing-without rings or any of your 'family' magic. I can go to any portal from any other once I can picture the scene there. From any to any," he emphasized, "not just through the paired doorways. Only Parthet and Baron Kardeen know that."
"I appreciate your trust," I said, marveling at the power. That was something Parthet had never even hinted was possible. I was sure he couldn't do it.
"You are Hero of Varay, and you will be king if we make it back from this voyage," Aaron said. "If I am to be your wizard, you have a right to know what you can expect from me."
I nodded slowly. I had to keep reevaluating my understanding of Aaron, a constant upgrading. I told him just what we had encountered in getting the first jewel of the Great Earth Mother, in detail. I finished off, "I don't know exactly what we'll meet this time. The defenses might not be identical, but they will be at least as thorough."
"Without a doubt," Aaron said.
"And no matter what problems we meet getting to the shrine, our most critical problem is time. We could win through up here, get the second jewel, and still have the worlds fall apart on us because there isn't time to get back to Varay and do anything with them."
Aaron appeared to go blank then, for maybe thirty seconds. His eyes remained open, he didn't fall over or anything, but there just didn't seem to be anybody home.
"Check with Wellivazey," he said when he finally came back from wherever his mind had gone. "Make sure that the boat is on precisely the right heading for this island we're looking for."
"Wellivazey?"
"Him." Aaron pointed at the elf's head.
"How did you know his name?" I asked. That was a secret Parthet had found too deep for him to come close to learning it. An elf's most closely guarded secret is his true name, for fear that an enemy might use it to conjure spells against him.
"I don't know how," Aaron said. "I simply knew it when you brought him back the other day. I looked at him and knew his name."
"How about his father's name?"
"I've never met his father."
"Does he know that you know his name?" I nodded slightly toward the head.
"I didn't speak it in his presence."
"That's good, I think. It might be best if he doesn't know that he has lost that secret. I'll check on our course."
I didn't know how to use it yet, but the name was a weapon if we needed it. In Fairy, to know the true name of your enemy was to hold the ultimate weapon over him. I went back to Wellivazey and asked about the course. He went through the same procedure as before, staring through the ruby and chanting, and then he confirmed that we were aimed directly at the island shrine-though it was still an unknown but considerable distance away.
I passed the news to Aaron. He nodded, stared up into the sky behind the boat, and started chanting softly. I couldn't understand any of it, of course. The translation magic of the buffer zone doesn't extend to magic spells. Aaron kept chanting, gradually building in volume, but it was fifteen minutes before I noticed any result.
The wind had been in our faces since we left the dock at Arrowroot, but that died off and a new breeze started coming from behind. At first the two winds met and swirled around each other. Then the breeze from behind offset and finally overpowered the headwind. Master Hopay got the oars in and the sail raised. Beathe picked up a little speed, then more. The bow seemed to rise a little as we sped across the Sea of Fairy.
"Is this too much?" Aaron asked when he quit chanting and noticed me again.
I asked Master Hopay, and Hopay said that we were fine now but that if the wind got much stronger Beathe would be hard to handle and we might be in trouble then.
"It will get no stronger," Aaron promised.
An hour later I could see no sign of the coast on the southern horizon, even when I climbed up on top of the cabin and stood on tiptoe, holding the mast for support. There wasn't a trace of land to be seen.
Life aboard Beathe was far from comfortable. Fourteen people were crowded into an area that would have seemed inadequate for seven. The "beds" were merely shelves under the deck, narrow spaces that opened off of the cabin under the rower's benches, like bookshelves, slots no larger than the burial niches in the crypt below Castle Basil. The difference was that these slots were open on the side, not sealed at the head. But the similarity was enough to disturb my sleep and spoil my dreams. There were only eight beds in the cabin at that. Two more people could sleep on the long benches, and anyone else had to make do with a stretch of passageway down the center. Meals were eaten in shifts, and when we were under sail, at least three of the nine seamen (including the master, who took a regular watch) were always on duty, one at the steering oar and two to tend the sail and act as lookouts. The toilet was over the side, and using it could get comic and dangerous at the same time.
The wind remained constant in direction and force and didn't require Aaron's continuous attention. We only spotted one dragon, very late the first afternoon, and it remained far to the south, almost at the limit of vision. Aaron put up a hazy, shimmering shield like the one Parthet had demonstrated in Precarra almost three and a half years before.
Master Hopay was reluctant to continue under sail after dark, and he remained nervous when I told him that we had to. He had no experience at sailing at night. It just wasn't done. Mariners in the buffer zone put in to shore every evening. Sailing out of sight of land was bad enough. Sailing after dark out of sight of land was inconceivable, according to Hopay. He wanted to furl the sail and drag a sea anchor through the hours of darkness. I conferred with Aaron and Wellivazey, more for form than because the decision needed a conference, then overruled Master Hopay.
"There are no obstacles in front of us and we can't afford to waste time," I said. If I had been anyone but the Hero of Varay, Hopay would have refused, or at least carried the argument on longer. But he gave in. He grumbled a lot, though, the first night and every night we continued to sail.
Every night. When we started, we had no idea how long the voyage might be. Even after Aaron came up with his wind I had no expectation of a quick passage. Neither Aaron nor the elf could tell how far away the shrine was. After a week at sea, the elf said that the pull of the left jewel of the Great Earth Mother was stronger than before, but still too distant to gauge.
At least we hadn't run into any serious challenges yet.
"They didn't come for us until we were close before," Xayber's son reminded me. "The forest trolls don't count. You brought that peril on yourself."
That made me think about Annick. I wondered what kind of torture she was inflicting on herself now, why she had been out in the wilds of Varay hunting trolls, where she was now, where she might pop up next. That last view I had of her, standing off an arrow's flight away from me, she had looked more sad than angry.
We went through the dowsing routine with the ruby three or four times a day. I dangled the jewel by its chain in front of the elf's head and he confirmed that we were still aimed in the right direction. Aaron started looking into the ruby after the elf each time, but said that he couldn't tell anything from it. Each time, Aaron qualified that with "yet."
The second week ended.
"No mortal's e'er been out so far from land," Master Hopay said. "Leastwise, none's e'er come home from so far out."
That was old news.
Lesh, Harkane, and I had taken to standing watches of our own, in case the danger appeared right aboard our boat. Our sailors were nervous and unhappy. But Baron Kardeen had apparently chosen them wisely. Every man grumbled and talked of his fear and his wish to turn about and go home, but no one went beyond talk.
On the eighteenth day, the sea developed a chop, a surface roughness we had not seen before, and Aaron's wind had competition that took his full attention for several hours. That night, for the first time, Aaron called off his wind and we took in the sail and dragged a sea anchor to keep us from drifting too far.
"I need the break," Aaron told me as the sail came down. "In the morning, I'll build the wind again-if we still need it. I think we're getting close though."
Maybe he needed the break, but he certainly didn't use the time to sleep. Aaron spent most of that night in the bow of Beathe, staring out at the sea in front of us.
And on the morning of the nineteenth day, the Mist finally lived up to its name. Dawn brought the densest fog I had ever seen, worse even than the one that had enveloped Castle Arrowroot to give the elflord's soldiers cover to retreat three years back.
"We're very close now," the elf said. He didn't even need the jewel to judge that. Over to the side, out of the elf's sight, Aaron nodded his agreement.
Aaron tried to raise his wind again but failed, so it was back to the oars. Our rowers hadn't worked much through the voyage, so they were able to put a lot into the task for this push. Lesh and Harkane took turns on the benches too, which let everyone take an occasional break and kept us moving at a decent clip.
"I can't budge this fog," Aaron confessed after perhaps two hours of effort. "I can't even grasp it." I wasn't sure what that meant. The two of us were standing at the ship's bow again, trying to see through the fog in front. "It's not a natural fog."
"I know." The fog had set off my danger alarm. For the first time in two weeks I was wearing both of my elf swords and my lucky Cubs cap, ready for anything and certain that "anything" was close. My bow and quiver were handy, and the others had their weapons where they could reach them in a hurry.
"Someone is reaching out to us," Aaron said a little later. "I can feel her mind probing."
"Her?" I asked. Aaron nodded.
"Then it must be the Great Earth Mother herself," I said. It didn't make me feel any better. Something tugged at my mind then, and I turned to look at the elf perched at the forward end of the cabin. His face had turned ash gray in the fog. His eyes bulged out so far that it looked as though they might actually pop out of his skull. And now, he seemed to be choking-without a throat to be constricted.
"Are you okay?" I asked, moving to him. The question was so ludicrous that I must have blushed bright red. Wellivazey's eyes rolled up in his head. A strangled sound escaped from purple lips.
"Aaron, can you help him?" I asked. We had to have the elf to identify the other jewel: someone of the blood of Fairy, pure and true.
Aaron started chanting. After a couple of minutes, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a fierce grimace. His eyes narrowed as he squinted, staring at the elf, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. Some color came back into the elf's face, gradually, but his eyes remained closed. He remained silent. Aaron started to sweat, and the temperature couldn't have been more than fifty on the deck of Beathe.
At the stern of the boat, Hopay shouted, "We have to turn back, lord!"
"No!" I yelled back. "Don't waver an inch from our course."
"We have to turn back!" Hopay repeated, panicked.
Timon grabbed his bow, notched an arrow, and aimed it straight at Hopay's heart.
"The Hero of Varay said we must go on," Timon said. Most of the rowers stopped rowing, waiting to see what would happen.
"Put your bow down, Timon," I said. I walked to the stern. Hopay's eyes were wide with terror.
"Master Hopay, we must go forward. There is no alternative. We have to reach the shrine, and it is still in front of us." I tried to sound reasonable-encouraging, not threatening-but Hopay had to feel the tacit threat. I stared until he nodded.
"Aye, lord, we'll go on as you say."
"And when we reach the island," I said, dropping my voice almost to a whisper, "you remember that there is no way you can survive to get home without us, without the wizard, the elf, and me. You know that as surely as you know your own name."
He resisted even longer before he nodded this time. "Aye, lord, I know it. And maybe not e'en then."
I knew what he meant. I continued to stare at him. I didn't like the idea that my danger sense, or perhaps just my innate suspicious nature, forced on me. I didn't like to think of the possibility that Master Hopay and his crew might abandon us when we went ashore to get the other jewel. I couldn't let that happen.
"Gil! Quickly!" Aaron shouted.
I turned. He gestured and I hurried back to the bow.
"He's recovering, for now. I'm afraid it's only temporary, but it's the best I can do. The strain… He's held on to the spark inside far too long already. My magic won't hold him long. A matter of hours, no more, and if that other power grabs him again…" He shook his head.
I looked at the elf. He opened his eyes.
"I heard," Wellivazey said, "and I could tell even without his words." His voice was thick and weak, barely understandable. "You'll remember your vow, Hero." It was no question.
"I'll remember if you hold on long enough to fulfill your part of the bargain," I said.
"Get me to the shrine." His eyes closed again, just as the bow of the ship emerged from the fog.
The demarcation was as clear as it had been with the fog that shrouded Arrowroot while Wellivazey's father pulled his troops away from the siege there. As we emerged, I could see the shrine of the Great Earth Mother dead ahead-a huge white building that looked to be the identical twin of the shrine in the Titan Mountains. But this temple was surrounded by white sand and gray rocks. The island was low, scarcely more than a sandbar, and not a hell of a lot larger than the shrine. It looked like no more than fifty yards from shore to shrine at the widest spots.
There were no troops waiting to bar us from shore, no outer maze for us to penetrate, but the shrine was not without its defenders. As Beathe cleared the fog, a scaly green sea serpent showed itself. The beast surfaced quickly. It was wrapped completely around the island, and its head reared up over tys tail.
Our boat could have sailed straight into its mouth with the sail up and full of wind.