Free The Hero King by Rick Shelley Page A

insanity of the entire scene seemed to have a macabre undertone of danger. There was no laughter, not even a smile, not with the likelihood that World War Three had indeed broken out back home.
    “Which of the doorways is nearest?” I asked.
    “Down the back stairs here, and off to the left,” Kardeen said without hesitation.
    I stood. Everyone else stood. That’s one of the annoyances of being king. “Parthet, Aaron, can you come up with something to shield us from radiation if the passage does work?” Aaron and Parthet looked at each other. Aaron was the first to nod.
    “I’ll let the lad take care of it,” Parthet said softly. “His magic is already much stronger than mine ever was.”
    We all went down the stairs. “The rest of you stay back here,” I said, thirty feet short of the door. “No call to take more risks than we have to.” Aaron and I went on together. We looked at the silver tracing around it.
    “Let me know when you’ve got the shield up,” I said. “And if I do get the doorway open, I may jump back in one hell of a hurry. My danger sense gets quite insistent at times.”
    “I can dig it,” Aaron said. Then he shifted to a magical chant.
    The spell he wove was visible, a shimmering in the air across the doorway. There was a slightly greenish cast to anything beyond the shield—not the most attractive shade of green.
    “Go ahead,” Aaron said quietly. I could hear the tension in his words. I looked at him and he nodded.
    I reached for the silver on both sides of the doorway. The motion didn’t merely appear slow, it was slow. I was scared. I could draw on memories of enough books and movies about nuclear holocaust to be about ready to brown out at the thought that I might be opening a doorway into the middle of one. Even in a limited exchange, Louisville would certainly be a target. Fort Knox was out there south of the city, and there were other strategic targets in the area as well.
    When I touched the silver, within the green haze of Aaron’s shield, there was a scream inside my head as my danger sense overloaded—even before the cellar room in Louisville came into view.
    The room was still there . It was a mess, but it was still there. One leg had snapped on the big table in the middle of the room and spilled everything to the floor. The floor was littered with papers, books, weapons, and pieces of armor, not all of it from the table. The antique rolltop desk seemed to be intact. I guess it would take a direct hit to destroy that . The rest of the room? Well, one door had blown in, the one that led out to the rest of the basement. But there was no evidence of fire.
    The bile-green shimmering of the shield Aaron had raised started to show orange flecks that quickly multiplied and started to overshadow the green. Aesthetically, it was an improvement, but Aaron didn’t have to tell me to break the connection before the shimmering went completely orange.
    “Radiation of some kind,” Aaron said after I stepped back and the cellar room disappeared. “I had no way to guess how much there might be. There are some weak spots in the education this place gave me.”
    “A cellar under a stone house,” I said. “I would have guessed that that room would have made a decent fallout shelter.”
    “It’s still intact, except for the door,” Aaron pointed out. “That’s wood, isn’t it?” I nodded. “I can’t say what the level of radiation is. I don’t have a scale to compare it to.”
    “Back upstairs,” I said.
    When we were all seated around the table again, we were all silent for a considerable time. Parthet was the one who finally broke the silence.
    “We’ll be picking up the backlash here before long.”
    The obvious questions would have had something to do with the kind of backlash we might expect and how long it would take to start. I had something different come to mind, though.
    “Uncle Parthet, how well do you remember Vara?”
    He started to answer automatically