Free The Hero King by Rick Shelley

sighed. “Yes, my weapons.” I was still Hero of Varay, and the Hero must always be armed in public. Well, with the collapse apparently on again, it was a good idea anyway.
    Even with the delays, we stepped through to Castle Basil less than twenty minutes after I discovered that the doorways back to the other world didn’t work. It was barely an hour since I had left Aaron and Parthet in the workroom they now shared.
    The guard who spotted us just after we arrived at Basil snapped to attention and Lesh commandeered him to go after Baron Kardeen. Joy and I went straight up to the private dining room across from the king’s bedroom. I sent Jaffa and Rodi to stir somebody in the kitchen—one of the cooks was always on call—to make coffee and something to snack on and get them hauled upstairs. The boys knew their way around Castle Basil. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they knew back passageways that I hadn’t found yet.
    “Where do you want me?” Joy asked when we got to the dining room and got some light in the room. Timon lit a torch from one out in the hall and stuck it in a wall bracket. Then he lit the other wall torches in the room from that one.
    “Right at my side, where you belong,” I told Joy. I shifted one of the chairs around next to the royal “throne.” Physical labor. It made me feel good to do things that my people would scarcely permit if any of them were close enough to get in the way. I barely beat Timon to it, though.
    Baron Kardeen arrived almost as I got the chair in position.
    “How bad is it, Majesty?” Kardeen asked.
    “The doorways back to my world don’t work. At least, none of them from Cayenne do. I haven’t tried the ones here in Basil yet. My guess is that nuclear war has broken out back there. If the doorways are all shot, I’m not even sure how we could find out.” The idea of being stranded permanently in the buffer zone was almost as frightening as the idea of nuclear war back home—the war that everyone said could no longer happen because of the decline of Communism.
    “There are ways,” Kardeen said. “Parthet will know.”
    Almost on cue, Parthet and Aaron came in. Mother was just a minute behind them. I told the others what little I knew and what I suspected. Nuclear war wasn’t gibberish to either Parthet or Kardeen. They knew enough about my world to follow the talk without any trouble at all. And Aaron … well, he had more reason than most to know what nuclear weapons could do.
    “It seems that the first thing to do is to check all of the doorways leading to the lesser world,” Parthet said. It was the first time I had heard him call my world “the lesser.”
    “The doors in the cellar in Louisville might have survived even holocaust,” Mother said. “Unless the magic can be disrupted by EMP, like electronics.”
    “Electromagnetic pulse?” Parthet said, rubbing his chin. “It’s a distinct possibility. Carl once offered a guess that our magic might be a function of an electromagnetic force, something at the extreme short end of the spectrum. I suppose that might do it. Of course, even if there is disruption, it might be temporary. Who really knows enough about things like EMP? It’s all theory, like nuclear winter.”
    That’s right, we sat around in the middle of the night, in a medieval castle, discussing the ramifications of nuclear war—an ancient wizard, a new young wizard, and all the rest of us. And down in the crypt, we had the headless body of a dead elf warrior. We were in a kingdom that couldn’t exist by any rule of logic. Magic forces assailed us from every side and dragons the size of ocean liners sometimes flew overhead and dropped two-ton loads of crap. Our pages and two kitchen workers hauled in wooden platters of food, a pewter pot of terrible coffee, a small keg of beer, and the “tools” to handle it all.
    Joy and I were both trained in computer science and there wasn’t a computer in the kingdom. At the moment, the