No one disturbed Joy and me when morning came. Sunrise was a couple of hours gone when I finally woke. Strangely, I felt more rested and relaxed than I had in a long time even though I was still several days short on sleep. Lying in bed when I woke, I remained motionless for long, luxurious minutes experiencing an unusual tranquil glow, a warm floating sensation. At first, my thoughts were limited to a passive awareness of my body and how good I felt. My perceptions broadened only very slowly. I became conscious of Joy at my side and I turned my head so I could see her-and I saw her as I never had before.
Joy. Emotions coursed madly through me, racing, overlying each other, blending in new ways, an exhilarating kaleidoscope-not just the intense passion she usually aroused, something more powerful and complex. She was still asleep. Her face seemed totally relaxed. There were scarcely visible freckles across her nose, tiny lines at the corners of her eyes. She breathed quietly through barely parted, full lips. Her hair was draped across one cheek in a riot of shadings of blond and light brown over lightly tanned skin. Thin neck, soft shoulders. I felt a love that I really didn't understand, love that I had never completely recognized before, and something more, a deep empathy, a sense of being part of a greater whole.
It was a perfect moment.
I reached out slowly to touch her cheek, to brush the hair away from the corner of her mouth, and she opened her eyes before I touched her. She smiled and made a contented sigh. Her cheek was warm, her hair as soft as ever.
We kissed.
"I love you," I whispered, and Joy echoed it.
I propped myself up on one elbow and peeled the blanket and sheet off of us. Joy lay motionless while I stared at her and tried to memorize every soft contour of her body. I looked, and then I leaned over and kissed each nipple. When I laid my hand on her stomach, Joy seemed to catch fire. She pulled me over on top of her and we shared a long, deep kiss-tender and passionate by turns, and then we shifted into more urgent foreplay. Everything seemed to be deliciously protracted, as if time had slowed to stretch the moment for us. There was no frenzied abandon to our lovemaking that morning. Each instant expanded to let us savor it fully-sex as symphony, the way it is in dreams but rarely in life. We reached a blinding orgasm together, but I didn't lose my erection, and as soon as the waves of the first climax ebbed, we started moving toward a second, rolling over on our sides together. For a time, it felt almost as if we were melting together, becoming one person. I slid my arms around Joy and held her. And our second climax was as wild as the first.
After that, we both needed time to get our breathing and heart rates back in order, time to come down from the dizzying heights. Our bodies remained tangled together while I slowly deflated. The deep blush faded from Joy's face and the pale skin of her breasts. I stroked her cheek and told her again that I loved her. I may have dropped a tear or two into the pillows when I realized how totally I was committed to her… and how likely it was to come to an end, all too soon. I had to go off and be a Hero again, and if I survived the first quest, then I would have to go into the den of my most powerful enemy to return the body of his son, the son I had killed. I didn't look forward to another confrontation with the Elflord of Xayber, especially not where his power was greatest.
To keep my thoughts from wandering farther in that direction and spoiling the morning, I had to get out of bed. I went into the bathroom and started to fill the huge oval tub that had been carved from a block of granite and polished until it sparkled. The sun had been out long enough to give us hot water for a bath.
Joy was still in bed, lying spread-eagled like a pose for a men's magazine-and lovely enough to grace the best of them. I picked her up and carried her into the bathroom. While we waited for the tub to fill, we made love again. We started standing up, me holding her, her legs wrapped around my hips, and ended with me sitting on the side of the tub, still holding her, moving her against me until everything went all dark and light and crazy for us again. Somehow, I managed to get us turned around and lowered into the tub without disengaging or falling. We sat in body-temperature water and washed each other slowly, lovingly, not separating until we had to.
The morning was half gone before we dressed.
"I'll probably be leaving on this job tomorrow morning," I told Joy when I couldn't postpone it any longer. "And I'll probably be busy getting ready for the trip most of this afternoon."
Joy nodded. "I figured that it had to be that soon." She hesitated, then said, "It's going to be very dangerous, isn't it?" The form was a question, but the tone wasn't.
It was my turn to nod. I might not have volunteered that information, but I wouldn't lie to her about it. "I have to locate a couple of relics that might not exist, from unknown places that no one has ever been to, and figure out how to use them to keep everything from continuing to unravel." Piling impossibility on impossibility-but it still sounded mundane and simple when I put it into words like that.
"You won't go alone, will you?" This time it was a real question.
"I doubt it. I'm the crown prince or whatever here. I'm supposed to have a proper retinue at times like this. Lesh, Harkane, and Timon will all go with me, maybe even Uncle Parthet. He can come up with useful bits of magic now and then." I didn't plan to mention the elf's head that we would need for a guide.
"How long will you be gone?"
"I don't have any idea yet. Actually, this may turn into three separate trips, one right after the other. Depends. The first place is somewhere in the Titan Mountains to the south, the second is an island somewhere out in the Mist-the Sea of Fairy-north of Varay, and the third is the stronghold of the Elflord of Xayber in Fairy. I may be able to sneak back here between trips. Maybe."
"Do you really have to go?" That was the ultimate question, I guess. The answer was unavoidable, though.
"I have to go. It's the only hope of straightening everything out again, the only chance to get life back to normal, here and back in our world." After three years, I still made the distinction. Joy had only had a couple of days to see the differences.
"But why you?" she asked, passing by any question about grandiose delusions, Messiah complexes, or any of the other things most people might be tempted to ask.
I snorted, maybe added a bitter laugh. "Because I'm Gil Tyner, Prince and Hero of Varay. It would have been my father's job if it had happened before he was killed. Now it's my job."
"And we can't just go back to Chicago and forget it all, let them find another Hero?"
"No, we can't." I was quiet for a moment before I continued. "I didn't really choose this Hero job. My parents trained me for it without telling me what it was all about. Then, when my father died, I had the job dropped on me before I really had any understanding of what was going on. Still, I can't just walk away. It's a matter of family, if nothing else." I put an arm around her, and we walked to the window. It was a bright, warm day, right at the start of August. The grass and trees were green, the grain fields turning color, nearly ready to harvest. In southern Varay, the wheat comes in at the end of July or early August.
"You'll do okay here while I'm gone. You'll have the rest of the staff to take care of things, treat you like royalty. You can always pop through to Basil for company. My mother will be there. Kardeen too. And you'll have your folks here this time next week."
"And they're going to expect you here," she said. "How am I going to explain the fact that you're off gallivanting so soon after our wedding?"
I just looked at her for a moment while I fought back the urge to bust out laughing. "Don't you think you'll have enough to explain to them?" I asked. "They won't even notice that I'm gone."
Then we both started laughing.
"I guess I'll manage," Joy said when we got it under control. "I'll be waiting when you get back."
There wasn't much more we could say just then. We went downstairs to put in an appearance. I had to talk to Lesh and the others, tell them what we had to face and give them the option of staying put. No one took it. I was certain that no one would. Joy went to the kitchen to get us something to eat-and to avoid listening to the shop talk, I guess. We had missed breakfast and it was still a little early for lunch, but there were always sandwich fixings and whatnot to tide people over at Cayenne, like most places in the buffer zone.
Joy brought back a plate with huge ham sandwiches and the Varayan answer to potato chips and french fries-half-inch-thick slices of potato fried so that they were crunchy on the outside and soft inside.
"The choice of drinks seems to be beer, wine, or coffee," Joy said.
"That's usually the choice, unless I pick up a case of Pepsi and bring it over."
"Maybe I'll go get some this afternoon while you're busy."
The idea of her going off alone like that made me nervous, but I finally nodded. "You'll probably find it easier to go through Louisville," I said. I reminded her which doorways to take, told her where my mother kept the spare keys to her van. We had to go back upstairs to get a set of house keys for her. I also gave her one of my bank cards and the code number to use it and told her how to find the bank machine and then the supermarket. "It's in a big shopping center. If you think of anything else we need, go ahead and get it."
"In that case, I could use someone to help carry things."
I thought about it for a second. "Lesh and Harkane will both be busy, but go ahead and take Timon. He's been there a few times and he knows enough English to get by."
"What do you mean? He speaks perfect English. Everyone here does."
I laughed. "You mean you haven't noticed?" I asked.
"Noticed what?"
"Watch people's lips when they talk. The only people in Varay who speak English fluently are you, me, my mother, and Uncle Parthet. Lesh is pretty good at it, but he slips into Varayan quite frequently. Harkane's almost as good as Lesh, and he tries harder. The rest of the people here speak no English at all, except for Timon."
Joy got a bewildered look on her face.
"You ever see a foreign movie dubbed in English?" I asked. "Seen the way words and lip movements don't match?" She nodded. "It's like that here." I switched into Varayan for the last sentence and Joy's eyes got wider.
"And everybody sees me like that?" she asked.
"Except for the people who speak English well enough to avoid having the translation magic kick in. Part of the magic of this place lets everyone hear his own language, no matter what language a speaker uses. You get used to it in time."
"I think I'd rather learn to speak Varayan."
"You can't, not here. The translation magic makes it impossible for anyone to learn a foreign language in the buffer zone. I had to take my lessons back in our world, and that's where I taught Lesh, Harkane, and Timon what they know of English. Well, Harkane knew some English before. He was my father's last squire."
For a time, I knew that Joy would be staring at people's lips whenever they spoke. I went through that too.
"Ah, you'll find that Timon's English is pretty sports-oriented," I said. "I've taken him to see all the Chicago teams in action. But he can get by around food too." Timon loved football and hockey most of all, hard contact sports. Soccer and basketball were lower on his list, and baseball still confused him a little. His proposed remedy for a called third strike was for the batter to take off the umpire's head with his dandy warclub. I could see the temptation of that myself.
"Just remember," I said, getting more serious. "Keep an ear on the news and don't waste time there. If I get the mess straightened out here, maybe we won't have to worry so much about what might happen in the other world, but I haven't started yet."
I waited around to see Joy and Timon off through the doorway. Timon had changed to blue jeans and a Chicago Bears jersey, number 50, Mike Singletary's number. Timon liked Singletary's approach to the game. "He looks like he's ready to bite their heads off," Timon said one Monday night while we were watching the Bears play on television. The networks always liked to show a close-up of Singletary looking out over the line.
After Joy and Timon left, Lesh and I went to Castle Basil to get going on our work.
"Since we'll probably be going to the mountains first, we're going to need a lot of rope, as much as you can lay your hands on," I told Lesh as we walked from the doorway toward Basil's great hall. "A couple of grappling hooks if you can find them." I had done a little climbing with Dad-we had sampled a little of almost everything, it seems-but not a lot. I tried to describe pitons and some of the other climbing gear I thought we might be able to fake. I didn't know of anywhere in either Chicago or Louisville where I could just walk in and buy climbing equipment off the shelf, and I was positive that we wouldn't have time to do any traveling or to wait for the items to be delivered by mail order. If the place we had to reach in the Titan Mountains was really at the very limit to which people could climb, we were going to have to leave our horses behind at some point and finish on foot, which also meant that there was a limit to how much gear we would be able to take along.
"Don't worry, I'll get it all fixed up," Lesh said, and I knew he would. Within his own limits, Lesh was as efficient as Baron Kardeen.
We parted at the entrance to the great hall. Lesh went off toward the courtyard and I went into the hall. This trip, I was properly accoutered for public display, blades hanging off of me like icicles from a Christmas tree. As usual, there were a few people lounging around the great hall, and others who were working. But neither Parthet nor Kardeen was in evidence, so I went on to Parthet's workroom.
Parthet wasn't there either, but Aaron was sitting at the wizard's desk, reading. It was Aaron, no doubt of that, since he was the only black in the seven kingdoms, but he looked so different that he was almost unrecognizable. It wasn't until he stood up that I realized why.
"You look like you've grown six inches since yesterday," I said.
"Yes, sir, all of that." He grinned very briefly, but it was a happy grin, not self-conscious. His voice was different too, with an adolescent harshness to it. To all appearances he had put on five or six years of age overnight.
"Has Parthet been conjuring over you?" I asked-sharply, I suppose.
"No, sir. He was surprised too this morning."
"You're taking it pretty good."
"Ain't that much fun being a little kid." It was just another adventure to him, no worries about the impossibility of all the things that had happened to him. In a way, I envied him.
"Where's Parthet?"
"Upstairs, sleeping, I think. He was up all night."
"I know. What are you reading?" I gestured at the scroll he had been going through.
"It's about some dude named Vara. You know about him?"
"I know. When Parthet gets some free time, ask him to take you downstairs to show you where Vara is buried."
"He was for real?"
"He was for real, but I don't know how much of that stuff he really did," I said, pointing at the scroll again. "Things get exaggerated over the years."
I went out and climbed the tower stairs to Parthet's other room. He was sleeping. I could hear his snoring even through the six-inch-thick wooden door. I opened the door and hit him with a screeching whistle. Parthet woke immediately and popped up to a sitting position.
"Is that any way to treat an old man?" he demanded.
"What happened to Aaron?" I asked.
"Not my doing. His parents died, his grandmother died, he suddenly appeared in Varay-twice. Why should the fact that he's growing up overnight be any different than the rest?"
"Let's just say that I'm suspicious of wizards who want apprentices."
"If you'll think back, I didn't want an apprentice, but I recognized the signs when he showed up here." Parthet cleared his throat, coughed a couple of times, and got out of bed. He had slept in his clothes.
"What time is it?" he asked.
"After noon."
"It worries me in a way," Parthet said, his voice lower, almost somber. "The fact that he's growing up so quickly may mean that he will be needed before he could grow up naturally. I'm old, but I had planned on getting a lot older."
"Maybe it's just part of the general weirdness, like two full moons in the sky at the same time, or the dragon eggs."
"Perhaps." Parthet shrugged. "Anyhow, the lad's a positive genius. I worried that he might not be able to understand some of the texts he'll have to master to become a wizard. The translation magic can't reduce complex formulas into language so simple that someone who doesn't have the vocabulary can understand. I mean, how would you explain calculus to someone who had no concept of numbers? But the lad reads. He comprehends. He asks more intelligent questions than you do sometimes."
"Okay, he's smart. Have you come up with any way we can do this other thing without the elf?"
"No." Just the single word, without any futile protest against what I was going to have to do. But Parthet had undoubtedly stayed at his work all night making absolutely certain that there was no other way. And then he had slept because there was nothing else he could do about it. The way I had slept after I finally made my decision to meet the elf's terms.
"Have you figured out what I've got to do with the family jewels once I've got them?"
This time he shook his head. "Possession alone may be enough, though I doubt that. Possession may impart the knowledge, the instinct to use them. Or the elf may have some idea. If nothing else, I may be able to conjure up the answer once you bring them back here."
"I'll do the talking to the elf," I reminded him. "You've decided that you're not going along on this caper?"
"I could never climb the Titans. It's all I can do to climb the stairs here in the castle. I keep wishing that I had used some of that last sea-silver you collected to connect the different floors here, like an elevator."
"Next time," I said with a smile. "I'll try to pick some up on my way back from Xayber."
"You do that. You going to talk to Xayber's son now?"
"Not yet. I've got to talk to Kardeen and do a couple of other things first. Maybe an hour or two."
"He'll wait," Parthet said.
"I know."
I left Parthet and headed for the chamberlain's office. I told Kardeen what I thought we would need and that I had started Lesh off at collecting the gear.
"There have been a few climbers here," Kardeen said. "Some of our young soldiers like the challenge of trying something that's supposed to be impossible. Not all of them make it back, but most give up before it's too late." He gave me an apologetic look with that.
"So?" I asked, managing a smile. "That just means that most of the young soldiers are smarter than I am. And they had the choice. But I've done a little climbing. I won't be a total novice when we get to the difficult bits."
"I'm tempted to join you myself on this one," Kardeen said, grinning self-consciously. "I did some climbing along the nearer heights of the Titans when I was young. Before I got married and inherited this job." Kardeen rarely talked about his past or his family unless I asked a direct question. That was his sense of place, I guess, something that I came up against almost every day in Varay. I had been in Varay nearly six months before I learned that the young clerk who was always in Kardeen's outer office was his son, Maldeen.
"I'd welcome you in a minute, you know that, but I think you've got more important work here. If I manage to complete this first trek, I'm going to need a boat stocked for a voyage and people willing to dare sailing out of sight on land into the Mist."
"And that's not the easiest task," Kardeen said. "But I think we can manage. Finding a vessel safe enough for long-distance work is harder than finding the men to sail it."
"Then it might keep you busy for a day or two?" More than once I had joked with Kardeen about the way he seemed to get everything done immediately.
"At least." He smiled. "What are your immediate plans?"
"I have to do the deal with our elf first, but unless he comes up with new demands, we'll probably leave tomorrow morning. As soon as I know where we have to enter the Titans, we'll use a doorway to the nearest point and ride from there." I told him that it would be just me, my three people, and the elf's head.
"You'll probably need at least two extra horses to carry supplies and equipment," Kardeen said.
"Lesh is probably in the mews choosing them now."
When I left the baron's office, I headed for the crypt again. My last visit there had been cut off when I found the workmen fixing a place for my great-grandfather. I still wanted a few minutes down there to think, and talk. Sure, the conversations were one-sided, but talking a problem out there sometimes helped me get a better perspective.
I walked slowly down the steps, thinking about Parthet's idea of installing magic doorways as elevators. The idea felt better all the time.
This time, there were no sounds of workmen to distract me on the way down. And they had cleaned up their mess in the burial chamber. But there was a stranger there now, or most of him. I had never asked what had been done with the elf's body. Somehow, it had ended up in the burial crypt, which probably wouldn't have gone over very well with the permanent residents. The body was laid out on a simple stretcher, on the floor. It didn't look as if anything had been done to the body, but it didn't seem any worse for the time it had lain around without its head. There was no puddle of blood, no odor of decay.
"There goes the neighborhood," I said loudly. I had to make some kind of joke. A body lying out in the open is different from a room full of headstones.
"At least you're not likely to be hotheaded down here, even if you had your head with you," I said, looking down at the body. The crypt was deep inside the rock on which Castle Basil stands. It was cool in the room no matter how hot or cold it was outside, like being in a cave. I think they say it's always fifty-eight degrees in caves back home-Mammoth or Carlsbad, or any other cave system. You get underground and you have a constant temperature. The torches burning in the crypt and on the stairs couldn't warm it up all that much.
Deep in the heart of a rock bigger than the Great Pyramid, in a room used for the same purpose, to bury kings and heroes, I walked away from the elf's body and over to the end of Dad's burial niche.
"Have you met your new roomie?" I asked, laying my hand on the capstone. "He came to Varay to kill me and I killed him instead. He's dead, but he's still trying to get me. And I don't have any choice. I have to walk right into his trap."
Dad didn't answer. I doubt that I could have handled the situation if he had. After meeting the Congregation of Heroes in that room once, I'm spooked easily by ghosts.
"I don't know if you're somehow aware of all the crazy things going on here," I said. "Maybe you are. There's so much that's improbable about this place, maybe you are aware of it all. And maybe you're watching what I do. The dead elf is the son of the Elflord of Xayber. He thinks that he has me trapped and trussed up ready to send to his father. If I make it that far, though, maybe I can come up with a few surprises. I hope so."
I was silent for a moment, listening, not so much for an answer as for any sound of someone coming down the stairs. I would hate to get caught making a soliloquy in the catacombs. That kind of thing could start rumors.
"It all starts tomorrow, I expect. It looks like we have to go to the ends of this world on this one-both ends, up the unscalable mountains and out across the uncrossable sea. How can an angry elflord hope to compete with that?
"Oh, by the way, Joy and I got married. I know you haven't met her, but I'm sure you'd like her. She's here in Varay with me now. Someday, if we get that kind of someday, I'll bring her down, but not yet, not when I'm getting ready to leave on a crazy mission like this one."
I stood there for another few minutes, then climbed back to the livelier levels of the castle. Lesh was waiting at the top of the stairs. I guess he knew my habits better than I thought.
"Are we all set?" I asked.
"It's coming good," he said. "We got people working on everything. I'll have to check it out later, but it's good for now."
"Well, if everything's cracking nicely here, what would you say to a tall mug or two down at the Bald Rock?"
Lesh grinned. "It is a right hot day."
We took the magic doorway down to the Bald Rock in the town of Basil. I hadn't been back to the inn since the night I was attacked-not all that long before. The landlord remembered that too. He came right over, full of noisy apologies and exaggerated bows. He was mortified, he was distressed, he hadn't been able to sleep or eat right since it happened, worrying about me… and on and on. But he also claimed to be "right proud" of the way I had handled the outlander. I tried to reassure Old Baldy that I didn't hold any of it against him, but he insisted that the drinks were on him that afternoon. I didn't argue. After all, Lesh and I didn't have time for more than one or two beers apiece.
"This is going to be a rough one, Lesh," I said when we started our second, after I had stopped the innkeeper from having his boys set up a full keg for us.
"Gots to be better than dragon eggs for breakfast," Lesh said.
"You may not think so before it's over."
"Be that as it will. Do we have time for another?" He finished his mug in a long draft.
"Best not. We've still got work to do. We get really going here, we may never get back up there. And after all, there's plenty of beer up on the rock."
"Aye, there is," Lesh agreed.
We walked up the rock to the castle. That was one way to get a little exercise and sweat out some of the beer. The Rock. One of the old legends I kept hearing said that the stone that Castle Basil was built on was the hub around which all three realms rotated, the center of the universe. I wouldn't be surprised if the people of the other six kingdoms in the buffer zone had the same sort of legends about their own local landmarks. But Basil's rock was some sort of anomaly, a huge block of homogeneous stone just out in the middle of nowhere, geologically. It wasn't part of any mountain chain, fault zone, or anything else. According to Kardeen, there wasn't any stone like it in any of the mountains of the buffer zone. It was unique.
Two beers wasn't nearly enough preparation for the confrontation with our guide. I got Parthet and Kardeen to witness the deal after I cautioned them again to let me do all the negotiating.
"You want to get home and I want to get the balls of the Great Earth Mother so I can stop all the strange happenings," I said when Parthet pulled the head out of the alcohol.
"You know my terms. I'll tell you where they are if you will take me home to my father-all of me."
I shook my head. "Telling isn't enough. You'll have to go along to identify them. Once I get them back here, I'll make sure that you get back to your father."
"You personally must take me home."
"I'll take you back under truce with your father."
"You take me back or there's no deal."
"I'll discuss the details directly with him. We have talked before. But without your help, I can't start and you have absolutely no hope of ever getting home. We'll bury you with the dragon eggs."
"If you don't get the jewels, it won't matter what you do with me."
"Perhaps." I was careful to avoid showing any reaction to his first admission that he had a stake in the success of my mission. "Or perhaps we can get the information elsewhere. The Elfking himself might be interested, or one of the other elflords."
"Go ahead. Try."
It had been an empty bluff, and the elf had called it.
"I'll get you home to your father," I said.
"Bring my body up here."
Parthet was against it, but I nodded and Kardeen went to get men to haul the body up from the crypt. The elf remained silent until his body was carried into the room.
"Stand me up there." The soldiers lifted the body onto its feet and it stood without further support from them.
"Set my head back on my shoulders."
"I think not," I said. "Not now. Once we get back with the jewels of the Great Earth Mother."
"You'll take me home to my father? You, yourself?"
"I will."
"Then let's shake hands on our bargain."
I nodded and the elf's right arm came up, hand extended. I stepped closer, shook hands with the headless body, and felt the cold crawl up my arm. The pact was made.