The Hero of Varay (32 page)

“Tessie?” Joy asked.

“It figures,” I said. “They call the Loch Ness monster Nessie, so Tennessee’s dragon becomes Tessie.” It was too transparent to be anything else.

“But they’re treating it like a joke,” Joy complained.

“What do you think they’re going to do? They have to either laugh at it or think they’re in the middle of a Japanese monster movie. It could be worse. After the
Coral Lady
, they could be shooting at clouds.” I looked in all three rearview mirrors, then craned my head out the window. “I guess we should be on the alert, though.”

“You think this dragon will come after you like the others?” Harkane asked.

“I’d almost bet on it,” I replied. Time for a sigh.

“I’ll get your weapons ready, lord,” Harkane said. They were probably all at the bottom of the pile in the back of the van, beneath everything we’d bought in Nashville.

“Tessie comes anywhere near Fort Knox, the Army is likely to blow him away,” I said. “I think that’s still restricted airspace, what with the gold depository and all.”

“Can we drive through the base?” Joy asked. “Wouldn’t it be simpler if they took care of the dragon and you didn’t have to?”

I couldn’t deny it. “If we get that far. But we’ll have to hide the weapons again and hope they don’t stop us for a random check. The Army gets touchy about armed visitors.”

I hadn’t been to Fort Knox in years. We used to drive out to look at the bullion depository every year or two, go through the George S. Patton Museum, and look at soldiers. Mostly, somebody in the family got the idea to go out there every time
Goldfinger
was on television. I knew that we had to get off the interstate quite a bit south to go through the base and depository area, but I had never gone in from that side, so Joy had to check the map to find out that we needed to turn off on US 31W at Elizabethtown.

Tessie didn’t cooperate, though. We were just south of the exit for Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace when Timon spotted the dragon coming up from the southeast, a little off to the right and behind us. We weren’t going to outrun Tessie. I was already doing sixty and it was overtaking us easily.

“I have your sword and gun, lord,” Harkane yelled right in my ear.

“Rest area coming up,” Joy said. She was watching the signs.

“It’s either the rest area or we fight out here on the road,” I said. I floored the gas pedal and the van shuddered a little at the sudden acceleration. “Make sure that there’s a shell in the chamber and that the safety is off,” I told Harkane. I had taught him the basics of handling firearms, enough to get the weapon ready for me. I hadn’t known that the rifle was in the car until Harkane mentioned it. That must have been his idea.

“There’s the exit,” Joy said.

I kept my foot on the gas until the last possible instant, then braked hard and pulled onto the ramp. There weren’t many vehicles in the rest area—a couple of tractor-trailer rigs, one camper, and two cars. We went past all of them to the far end of the lot. I turned the wheel hard and stood on the brake, and we skidded to a stop.

I swung my door open and Harkane handed me the rifle, another .458 magnum like the one I had at Cayenne. The van was between me and the other vehicles. At the moment, there were no other people out in the open. I hoped that any witnesses would be too busy watching, or running from, the dragon to notice when I started shooting. I figured that the odds were pretty good.

“There’s a box of shells in the glove compartment,” Harkane said. Joy got the box out and open. I didn’t know if I would have time to empty the magazine, let alone reload, but …

But there was no more time to plan. The dragon was on a steep glide, its wings tucked back, aiming straight for me. There wasn’t going to be any hovering and circling for this joker. Of course, this dragon had been out of the buffer zone since before the rest of the nonsense started.

I wrapped the leather sling around my left arm and steadied the barrel on the roof of the van. The only thing missing was a telescopic sight, and that was hardly essential. I lined up on the dragon’s left eye and worked to keep the pupil lined up in the notch of the sights while I waited.

I waited until the dragon was within a hundred yards before I started shooting—
after
I heard the first scream in the parking lot. I squeezed off all five shots, as fast as I could aim and shoot accurately.

I hit the dragon, every time. It jerked to the side, flipped over, then righted itself and came down hard, but not hard enough. It was still alive. It got up on all four legs and started toward me again. I moved out from behind the van, and Timon passed me Dragon’s Death while Harkane reloaded the rifle. Harkane had never fired a weapon that powerful, and I hoped he wouldn’t pick this time to start. He’d be as like to hit me as the dragon, even though the reptile was twice the size of the riverboat
Belle of Louisville
.

I moved out toward the dragon, but slowly, content to let it do most of the traveling. There were sirens blowing in the distance, coming our way, so someone had called the cops. A lot of good a state trooper was going to do, even if he had a shotgun or one of those briefcase submachine guns. Anyway, the sirens sounded too far off to reach the rest area in time to do anything but pick up the pieces.

The dragon stumbled and went down on its front knees—or whatever the proper terminology is for a dragon. It got up, and fell again. Its head slammed against the pavement, hard enough to crack it—the pavement, not the head. Lower teeth pierced its upper lip. Black blood oozed out.

“Give me the rifle,” I called. Harkane was there in a second. I returned the sword and took the rifle. I went to within six feet of Tessie’s snout and put five more rounds through the eye. Before long, I was going to be the Dirty Harry of the dragon-slaying business.

“Okay, let’s get out of here before the cops arrive,” I said, hurrying back to the van.

We got inside and I started the engine. “Bury the rifle and sword back there,” I said as I put the transmission in drive and goosed the gas pedal.

“You’re just going to leave that thing lying there?” Joy asked.

“Damn right. This isn’t the time to get messed up in red tape.”

“But what are they going to think?”

“Maybe they’ll think that dragons are for real,” I said. I didn’t really care. “Check the map. Find us a back road into Louisville.”

17
The Mist

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.