The Hero King by Rick Shelley Page B

us has to survive, to keep anything alive anywhere.” I had to stop to suck in air. “There are a few obstacles. First off, nobody has any idea where to find the Great Earth Mother, if she really does exist.”
    “She does exist. Count on it,” Parthet said, interrupting.
    “Next, she’s already sworn to kill me, or her ghost did, just for taking the jewels. Those are a couple of rather hefty obstacles.”
    “When?” Joy asked, not at all what I thought her next word would be.
    “I don’t know. The elflord said that it would be days, more likely weeks, before he could trace the Great Earth Mother, and I can’t do anything until I know where to find her—or even if she can be found.”
    “And remember,” Parthet said, “that it will almost certainly take more of our time than it does his. A week in Fairy can be ten days or more here.”
    “Then you have time for the other first,” Joy said.
    One track.
    “Aaron, do you think that either you or Parthet could come up with a spell that would protect a horse and rider from radioactivity long enough to ride from Louisville to St. Louis and back? Joy is desperate to find out what happened to her family.”
    “Very desperate,” Joy said, intensely enough that everyone stared at her.
    “I can put together a spell for that,” Aaron decided after a moment, “but not by remote control. I’ll have to go along to keep it up. I would have to go anyway, if you intend to go,” he said, meeting my eyes. “When the elflord calls, I can bring us back here from wherever we are in the other world.”
    “Will you be able to stay there long enough to do any good?” I asked. “Won’t you just pop back here like you did before?”
    “I think not. I’ve found my place here. And I am a wizard now, not a lost little kid like I was then.”
    “I’ll get the horses and gear, sire,” Lesh said. “That’ll be three of us riding?”
    “Four,” Timon said from near the door. “I’m not a page to be left behind when things get dangerous anymore.”
    I looked at him and nodded. “Four it is,” I said.

7
The Four Horsemen
    Running off to the other world just then certainly wasn’t the most logical decision I could have made. I had a bigger load on my shoulders than going off on another crazy quest, this one to find out what had happened to my in-laws. And this looked at least as wild as the other quests I had gone on. Even if I could get from Louisville to St. Louis, it might prove almost impossible to find out anything about Joy’s family. But it did serve a purpose. Just sitting around Basil, waiting for the elflord to call-possibly for weeks, while the sky picked up extra moons and brought us closer to doomsday—would really have driven me crazy, or crazier than I already was. Worrying that Joy might slip off and try to find her way from Kentucky to Missouri alone would have been even harder to bear.
    It was just something that I had to do. I did question Aaron at length to make sure that the elflord would be able to contact us even in the other world and that Aaron would be able to pop us straight back to Basil when that call came.
    Aaron was positive. Parthet didn’t demur.
    With Lesh and Kardeen hard at work making the preparations, there was really nothing I had to do but talk with Joy. I got her to tell me about the neighborhoods where her parents and her brother lived. I had been to her parents’ place, but never to Danny’s. I asked about places they might have headed for if they had left the city. There were two places that Joy thought were possible, a state park southwest of the metropolitan area and another spot out along the Missouri River.
    Once Joy was sure that I was going to do something to find her family, she was calm. We sat in the private dining room, ate, and waited. Grabbing a couple of hours of sleep might have been smarter, especially for me, but there are times when you have to forgo things like that.
    Parthet came wandering in about