The Hero of Varay by Rick Shelley

the one that Xayber’s son had used on me, and it had been a long time since I had heard the line that an abandoned elf sword would return to kill whoever abandoned it. That was why I started carrying the first one, Dragon’s Death. Now, it seemed, I had a second to worry about.
    There was a sheet of Uncle Parthet’s three-by-five spiral notebook paper with the swords, but all it said was: “See you at Basil.”
    Louisville! I hoped that everyone there had hopped back to Varay at the first word of trouble.
    “I can’t get through on the telephone,” Joy said when I rejoined her in the living room. “I can’t even get long distance. All I get is a busy signal when I dial the one.”
    “Did you try the operator?”
    “All lines are busy, please try again later.”
    “Then we’ll just have to keep trying,” I said, giving her a quick kiss.
    Joy nodded, too vaguely, then excused herself. As soon as I heard the bathroom door close, I hurried through the dining room and hit the silver tracing on the door to the kitchen and stepped through to Mother’s house. I started shouting and running through the place, but there was no one there. When I spotted both cars in the garage, I figured that they had all scrammed back to Varay. I hoped so. I even got home to Chicago before Joy came out of the bathroom.
    She went right to the telephone again and had no luck. She hung up and tried again. And again.
    “Give it a few minutes,” I suggested. I went to her and led her back to the sofa. “It can’t help to keep dialing over and over. That may be what’s keeping the lines tied up, everybody trying over and over like that.”
    She nodded. We sat on the sofa and watched the news on the television for a time. I held Joy close to me, but she hardly seemed aware of me. I could understand that. She was scared, really scared , for maybe the first time in her life. I was scared too, but fear was no stranger to me.
    The TV networks were all staying exclusively with coverage of the terrorist attack and the reactions to it around the world—obviously. They didn’t have a lot of information from anywhere near the scene yet: some tape taken from helicopters before the Air Force chased them away, a long way from the scene of the explosion, and the first radio reports from on the ground in west Florida—not very close to the scene either. Mostly, the networks were reduced to covering press conferences and briefings in Washington and Tallahassee. No one held out even the slightest hope for any of the people who had been on the Coral Lady , but the lists of passengers and crew weren’t being made public until an effort could be made to contact all of the families. A large section of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge crossing Tampa Bay had disappeared, and the remaining sections were just so much twisted wreckage. No one had any idea how many people and vehicles might have been lost on the bridge. Afternoon traffic had been heavy, according to one traffic helicopter that managed to escape the blast and land safely after the explosion. The blast had sent the waters of Tampa Bay crashing up on shore, then sucked the water level down as water streamed in to fill the hole left in the sea by the nuclear explosion. A second tidal wave flowed ashore then, swamping boats and low-lying coastal areas, causing more as-yet-unknown casualties and damage.
    At least the early diplomatic news was less terrifying. No one seemed ready to start throwing missiles around. Everyone was talking—saying “Not me” and generally condemning terrorism in general and the attack on the Coral Lady in particular. It wasn’t just the “man on the street” who was frightened by the possibilities. This time it was more than politics that got the various heads of state in front of the cameras and microphones.
    The networks had to fill most of their time covering the reactions of people like the ones Joy and I had seen at the airport and on the elevated coming in from