In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Fourteen

Amy sat up, stretched, then immediately leaned over and threw up-or tried to; her stomach held nothing she could bring up.

Susan awoke at the sound; Amy saw the attorney’s eyes, closed a moment before, open and watching her. Pel, on Susan’s other side, stirred.

Taillefer, already up and about, turned and looked at her with interest.

“What ails you, woman?” he asked.

“I dunno,” Amy muttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Have you a fever, then?”

Amy shrugged; Susan, who had felt Amy’s wrist and forehead the night before, answered, “No fever I could find.”

“Is’t bad food, perchance? What had you to eat, of late?”

“Garbage,” Amy muttered.

“The same as the rest of us,” Susan replied.

Taillefer considered that. “Well, betimes a poison may strike one and pass another by, yet…how long has this troubled you?”

“A few days,” Amy said, wiping her hand on a clump of grass.

“Has it…your pardon for my coarseness; has it troubled your bowels?”

Amy shook her head. “Not really. Not yet, anyway.”

“Feel you weak and weary, perchance? An so, did that come ere the vomiting?”

“I’ve felt rotten for weeks,” Amy agreed. “But it’s just this place-I need to go home!”

Taillefer shook his head. “I think that’s not the cause, mistress.”

Amy glared up at him. “Oh? Is this something people get here? You recognize it?”

Taillefer smiled crookedly. “An I read the signs aright, mistress,” he said, “’tis something that women must surely ‘get’ in every land, be it here in the True World, or in the Galactic Empire, or on your Earth. Are you wed?”

For a moment, Amy didn’t understand what Taillefer meant; the sudden question seemed to come from nowhere, to be completely irrelevant.

Then she saw the connection. The anger drained from her stare, to be replaced with shock.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

* * * *

Pel returned from the bushes still blinking sleepily as he buttoned his pants; he wished the Galactic Empire had developed the zippered fly, but they apparently hadn’t. He looked up to see that Amy was crying, and Susan was comforting her-again.

Pel frowned slightly. Whatever was bothering Amy, she didn’t seem to be taking it well. It didn’t seem to be getting much worse-or any better.

He had heard her asking Susan whether she thought it could be the same thing that killed Grummetty and Alella, that her system was somehow incompatible with this entire universe; he didn’t see how that could be it, since no one else was affected, and he certainly hoped it wasn’t that.

Well, whatever it was, there wasn’t anything he could do about it except help her get back to Earth. The sooner the whole group sat down together and figured out how to do that, the better.

Amy and Susan were sitting against the east wall of the great hall, in the shade; Ted was still asleep nearby. Taillefer and Valadrakul were talking quietly over toward the northeast corner. Raven and Singer and Prossie were doing something together in the sunlit center of the hall, shadows stretching far out to the west-Pel hoped they were getting breakfast. Wilkins and Marks and Sawyer were moving about over at the south end, where thorn bushes had grown up through the broken floor.

Stoddard was nowhere in sight; Pel guessed he was out gathering firewood. The morning air was chilly and damp, fragrant with mosses and weeds, and he still had no shirt; a fire would be welcome.

But there was no need to wait for that; if everyone but Ted was awake, it was time to start discussion.

“So what are we doing?” Pel demanded loudly, of no one in particular.

“Getting breakfast, I hope,” Wilkins replied. “We’ve been trying to catch something here-might be a woodchuck, if you have those here.”

The two wizards looked up from their colloquy. “Perchance I might lend a hand,” Valadrakul said.

* * * *

The animal was a badger, not a woodchuck, and managed to claw Singer’s arm before being clubbed into unconsciousness by the butts of four blasters and a chunk of wood; it was finished off by Wilkins, who cut its throat with his pocket knife.

Pel watched the operation with morbid interest, but did not help beyond lending moral support; he was not yet accustomed to killing his own food. It seemed like a very messy business-not that he saw much of an alternative here.

He did help build the fire, though.

The meat was edible, at least some of it-Raven cut out the portions he said were fit to eat, and left the rest. Even when properly cooked, however, it wasn’t very pleasant eating, and the relatively good parts did not go very far when divided a dozen ways. The smells of blood and dew-wet badger fur lingered, which didn’t help Pel’s appetite any.

For the rest of the meal Taillefer had a pouch of hard biscuits he shared out, while Sawyer and Marks brought water from a nearby spring.

As they ate, Pel kept looking for Stoddard’s return, but there was no sign of the man; when he suggested that a share be set aside for him, Raven simply shook his head.

Amy ate her share quietly, without complaint, and kept it down-she seemed more interested in the biscuits than the meat, however.

The entire party was gathered around the cooking fire in a circle, more or less; the three women were seated together on one side, between Ted Deranian and Albert Singer, while the other men were arranged in no particular order. Pel found himself between Sawyer and Valadrakul; Raven was seated on Sawyer’s other side, Taillefer just beyond Valadrakul.

When everyone had eaten, and had brushed crumbs from their hands and clothes, and Valadrakul had collected the offal and gnawed bones in a heap on the dead animal’s hide for later burial in sacrifice to the Goddess the Faerie folk worshipped, Pel asked loudly, “Should we get down to business now, or should we wait for Stoddard?”

Raven glared silently at him; Valadrakul looked up from the badger skin to say quietly, “Messire Brown, speak you no more of Raven’s man. Stoddard left in the night, whither we know not, without leave nor notice. We can but assume that he has left Raven’s service, as did so many others, and that we’ll not see him more.”

Startled, Pel turned to Raven for confirmation; the nobleman nodded, once.

It had never occurred to Pel, despite Stoddard’s complaints, that Stoddard would really desert.

“Oh,” he said. Then he recovered himself. “Well, then, let’s get on with it!”

“On with what?” Wilkins demanded.

“On with deciding what to do next, of course,” Pel said. “Taillefer says he won’t open the space-warp for us, and we don’t seem to be able to force him-so how do we get home?”

“Maybe we don’t,” Wilkins growled.

“And you’ll all be made welcome by those of us who yet resist Shadow’s foul dominion,” Raven said. “Live you among us, and join our fight!”

“I say we go back to the ship,” Marks said. “Maybe they’ve sent a rescue party. Or maybe the lieutenant’s got some plans of his own.”

“We can check that easily enough,” Susan said. She leaned forward to speak past Amy, to Prossie. “Did they send a rescue party?”

* * * *

Prossie had been sitting quietly, not listening, not thinking, but just being; it was something she had never really done until very recently. All her life, back in the Empire, no matter where she was sent, no matter where she lived, she had had to either listen, or to actively shut out the constant background noise of other minds; she had never, ever been able to sit and to do absolutely nothing, to neither think nor heed the world around her. The Empire did not allow telepaths that sort of isolation; telepaths were watched and guarded, always kept aboard crowded ships or in crowded military installations or in crowded cities. Telepaths, even should one somehow find herself far away from all ordinary minds, were always in contact with the far-flung network of their clan, always open to the common chitchat of their sibs and cousins; even their dreams were shared, built up of the gossip passing back and forth around them and the images that drifted through a shared unconscious.

In Prossie’s brief stay on Earth she had been too frightened by the strangeness of mental silence, too lonely, too worried about what would become of her, to really appreciate the virtues of solitude. A jail cell on an alien world, she thought, was hardly the best place for a young woman to look into herself.

And at first, here in Faerie, she had been too busy worrying about survival, too concerned with the politics of Base One, too involved with events-and she had had Carrie, sending to her, listening to her, keeping her in touch.

But since she had cut herself loose, told Carrie to break off, she had begun to drift inward, to look down into the depths of her own mind, depths that she had never really acknowledged to exist until now.

She knew, of course, that minds all exist on multiple levels, sometimes in parallel and contradictory consciousness-she had seen for herself that people could believe things at the same time they saw them for nonsense, and never notice the discrepancy; she had seen that the same person could feel love, hate, and indifference, all at once, toward something. She had known that there were layers of memory and emotion, piled up upon each other ever since infancy, though she had always been forbidden to dig down into all that accumulated experience.

But she had never, before this, thought that there must be such layers in her own mind. She had never, before this, tried to explore those layers.

But during the walk across the Starlinshire Downs, the wait for Taillefer at the Castle Regisvert, she had begun to wonder. She found herself thinking of things, almost at random, that she had not thought of in months, or years-and for the first time in her life, she couldn’t attribute it to leakage from the thoughts of those around her.

These odd bits of thought, and of memory, must be coming from her.

And when she reached that realization, she began to deliberately look for them, to search her own memories, her own feelings-as she had been forbidden to, back in the Empire, where the government wanted all their telepaths to be nothing more than communication devices, with no thoughts or desires of their own.

She had never thought of that as something bad before. She had been trained to think that the Empire had been merciful and kind in not simply killing all the telepaths, as a danger to the state-or simply allowing hostile mobs to kill them. Everyone she knew had told her that, had believed that, and it was almost impossible for her to disagree when she could see that belief in the minds around her. That the Empire had done so because they found telepaths useful she had always known and accepted; that was the price of survival.

But it wasn’t fair. She had been denied all her own thoughts.

And, she discovered as she slept on the cold stone floor of Regisvert, her own dreams, as well. Her dreams that night were fragmentary and uneasy; her mind was not accustomed to constructing its own, without outside influence.

When she awoke she tried to remember those dreams, and could not; she sat there, groping to recover images, as the soldiers trapped and butchered the badger. She ate silently, letting her own memories drift up from wherever they had been buried, enjoying the sensation of not thinking, not listening, but just being herself.

And then she realized everyone was staring at her, that someone had asked her a question.

Susan repeated, “Did Base One send a rescue party?”

Prossie blinked, and said, “I don’t know.” Recovering quickly, she added, “I’ve been out of touch; should I see if I can make contact and ask?”

She saw some of the others glancing uneasily at one another; she saw Wilkins making a familiar, hated gesture to Marks, the clawed finger-wiggling sign used to tease telepaths, the sign that meant “freak” or “monster.”

“If you could,” Susan said.

“I’ll try,” Prossie said. She sat up straighter and closed her eyes-which was just for show, not necessary, but it seemed to be called for in this instance.

She didn’t say anything to Wilkins, didn’t acknowledge his gesture, but inside she hated him with an intensity she had never before allowed herself, a hate that was hot and crawling in her skull, a hate that was the cumulative effect of a thousand memories collected throughout her lifetime, from infancy right up to now, of being loathed just for what she was, regardless of what she did, or who she was.

Maybe she wouldn’t try at all; why should she help Wilkins and his like? How would anyone know?

But it had been Susan who asked, not Wilkins. Prossie wondered why anyone cared, why they thought of it just now-she hadn’t been listening to the conversation at all, she realized.

But whether she tried or not made little difference, really; it was up to Carrie, and as she sat, mind open and receptive, she realized that Carrie wasn’t listening, wasn’t sending, wasn’t there at all as far as Prossie could tell. No one else made contact, either.

She opened her eyes and started to speak, then caught herself.

Why were they asking about rescues?

The only possible reason was that they were hoping to go back to the ship and be rescued themselves.

There were monsters back there. Shadow would have taken an interest in the ship by now. To go back there would be insanely dangerous. And even if by some miracle the Empire really had sent a rescue party, which they had certainly had no intention of doing when she was last in contact with Carrie, Prossie did not want to go back and be rescued.

“No rescue,” she said. “They’ve decided not to risk it. We’re on our own.”

It was a lie-but who cared? These people would never know unless they returned to the Empire, and Prossie would never go back there, never go back to the hatred and oppression, the rules and limits, the constant barrage of thought.

Right now, though, she thought she had better pay closer attention to what was being said.

* * * *

“I just want to go home,” Amy said.

“Me, too,” Pel said.

“I want to wake up,” Ted said. “I’m tired of this.”

“Same thing,” Pel told him.

“I’m not real interested in staying around here, either,” Wilkins said. “The question is, what we can do about it?”

“If nobody’s rescued the lieutenant,” Sawyer asked Prossie, “what has happened to those guys?”

“I don’t know,” Prossie said. “I don’t have any way to find out; they’re cut off, no communications.” She looked Sawyer in the eye.

Sawyer frowned, obviously unhappy with the answer-or with Prossie’s behavior.

“I’d send you all home,” Raven said, “if ’twas in my power. Alas, ’tis not. Think you, then, on what you’d have in the stead of that-would you join me in the fight ’gainst Shadow? Though in truth I’d rather the weapons of Earth, yet would willing hands be welcome e’en without.”

“You won’t reconsider?” Pel asked Taillefer.

The wizard shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “To open a portal would be to die at Shadow’s hand, and I’ve no wish to die.”

Pel looked at him, then back at Raven, then around at the others, at Ted and Amy and Susan, Ted with his bandaged head, Amy leaning weakly against Susan, who stood clutching her big black purse. The wizard Taillefer, the only one here who could get them out of this storybook world and back home to Earth and sanity, but too afraid of Shadow to try; Raven, who wanted guns to fight Shadow; Ted, who thought he was dreaming; poor sick Amy; Susan, with the revolver in her purse…

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place for Pel, as he stared first at Susan’s purse, then at Taillefer and Valadrakul.

Wizards.

Or rather, he corrected himself, “Wizards,” the movie by Ralph Bakshi.

While he had been thinking of all this as something out of a story ever since Grummetty first stepped from the basement wall, ever since he first heard Raven speak, up until now he hadn’t settled on just one story. He had thought of Tolkien and “Twilight Zone” and a dozen others, but none of those had shown him a way out, back to real life.

“Wizards” was another matter.

Of course, this wasn’t just a story, this was real life, but still…

And there was something else. Taillefer was the only one here who knew the portal spell, but there was someone else who knew it even better, someone who just might not be quite the villain it was painted.

Of course, convincing anyone else to try that would be difficult. The gun was easier.

“Listen,” he said, turning back to Taillefer, “if Shadow were dead, you could send us home, right?”

“Aye, surely,” Taillefer said, mystified. “Were Shadow dead ’twould be as a new dawn, and all would be different indeed; I’d have no fear of its creatures, if any even survived. More, methinks the death of Shadow would wreak great change upon the flow of magic through all the world, and all who study the arcane arts would find new strengths to draw on, were Shadow’s web sundered. A portal would be but the least of spells, surely, and gladly would I perform it.”

“Friend Pel,” Raven said, “an Shadow were dead… welladay, ’twould be glorious beyond measure; ’tis the end I’ve sought all my life. But how to achieve this miracle? Shadow’s life has spanned centuries; it draws unnatural vitality from its nets of power, that it ages not. How then, think you to end this? A blade is as naught; no spell can touch Shadow; no mere mortal can hope to outlive it.”

“All right, Shadow can’t be killed by anything from this land, but what about a weapon from another world?” He pointed at Susan.

Raven followed Pel’s pointing finger, and Pel knew from his expression that he had understood Pel’s plan immediately.

So did most of the others.

“Would it work?” Susan asked. “I mean, it’s just a bullet, this isn’t any sort of big magic.”

“It might,” Pel said.

“And how would you administer this ‘bullet,’ Messire Pel?” Taillefer asked. “Need you enter Shadow’s fortress? I’d not risk a farthing ’gainst all the gold in Goringham for your chances, then.”

“We’d need to get pretty close, yeah,” Pel admitted.

“’Tis not to be done, then,” Taillefer said, with clear finality.

“No?” Pel demanded, challengingly. “How do you know? You ever tried it?”

“I yet live, do I not?” Taillefer retorted. “No, I’ve not made the trial.”

“Then how do you know?” Pel repeated. “I say it’s worth a try-at least, for some of us.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “In fact,” he said, “I think it might be time for some of us to go see Shadow even without the gun. After all, if you won’t send us home, maybe it will!”

Raven stared at Pel, mouth open in dumbfoundment; Taillefer stared for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“Oh, foolish man,” he said, when he could speak again, “think you that Shadow will do your bidding, an you walk up to the fortress and ask ever so politely? ‘Oh, please, destroyer of kingdoms, ravager of nations, master of all the world, send me home, though I’ve nothing to pay, and no reason to give that you’ll not better to strike me dead this instant.’ Is that what you’d say, brown one?”

“Something like…no,” Pel said. He put his hands to his hips and glared at the wizard. “No, not like that. Listen, you may be a sworn enemy of Shadow, but we aren’t.” He waved an arm to take in both Earthpeople and Imperials. “All we know about it is what we’ve heard from you, and from your friends. How do we know Shadow’s any worse than you are? And who says we have nothing to offer it?”

“You speak treason,” Raven said quietly, his hand falling to where his sword-hilt should have been.

“You’re calling me a traitor?”

“Aye…” Raven began.

“Traitor to what?” Pel demanded, cutting the aristocrat off short. “I’m a citizen of the United States of America, I’m not one of your underlings, Lord Raven! And even if I were-where’s Stoddard this morning? For that matter, where’s Donald a’ Benton, or Elani, or Grummetty, or any of the others? Isn’t Shadow the government around here? Seems to me that you’re the fugitive from the law, and anyone who follows you and doesn’t have the sense to give up like Stoddard did is just buying an early death. Where’s my wife, Lord Raven? Where’s my daughter? They’re dead, from following you…”

“They’re slain by Shadow, Pel Brown,” Raven countered. “Would you join your wife’s murderer, then?”

“Who says it was Shadow?” Pel shouted. “You do, and your buddies in the Galactic Empire! I don’t know who killed her-hell, I don’t even know she’s really dead, I just have your word on it, yours and the Empire’s-I never got to see them! I didn’t see the bodies!” He had stepped forward, as had Raven; the two of them stood with their noses an inch or two apart, shouting in each other’s faces.

“Pel,” Susan said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

Pel fell silent, but stayed face to face with Raven, glaring down at the shorter man, for a long moment. At last, though, he backed away.

“I don’t care what you say, Raven,” Pel announced. “Or any of the rest of you, for that matter. Prossie says the Empire’s abandoned us, and Taillefer won’t send me home; well, the only other person-or thing-that can send me home is Shadow, so I’m going to go see Shadow, and if I can’t make a deal with it, I’ll do my damnedest to kill it, and if I do that, my price is Taillefer’s portal spell. So I’m going looking for Shadow. Now, who’s coming with me?”

He looked around at the faces, at expressions of confusion, dismay, and even fear.

“You’re mad,” Taillefer announced loudly.

“I’ll come,” Susan said quietly. “At least for now. You may want the pistol, after all.”

“Makes no difference to me,” Ted said with a shrug. “I’ll come.”

“Whaddaya think?” Wilkins asked, turning toward Marks and Sawyer.

“I’ll go along for now,” Singer said.

“I’m in,” Marks said.

Sawyer hesitated. “Whatever you guys decide,” he said.

“Then we go,” Wilkins concluded.

* * * *

Amy listened to Pel and Raven argue, listened to the soldiers make their decision. When Susan said she would go with Pel, Amy felt as if something had fallen out from beneath her insides somewhere-how could Susan say that without even a glance at Amy, to see what she thought? Susan was betraying her.

No, she wasn’t, Amy corrected herself; Susan was looking after herself. She wasn’t really a friend, after all-they’d been acting like friends for weeks, but that was because they were the only two American women around; they didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Susan wasn’t really her friend, Susan was her attorney; she had to remember that.

And Susan was right, anyway; they had to go to Shadow. If Taillefer was right, if Amy was really carrying Walter’s child-she thought she must be, she realized now that she hadn’t had her period since early in her captivity on Zeta Leo III, and a baby would have to be Walter’s, she hadn’t been with another man in almost a year-then she had to get home, back to a civilized world, where she could abort it, or put it up for adoption, or do something. She didn’t want her dead rapist’s child. And she didn’t want to go through pregnancy and labor and childbirth in this stupid primitive world, this place out of some horrible old fairy tale where for all she knew leeches were the latest thing in medical care.

And she wasn’t a young woman, she had no business having a first child at her age-she was used to being childless, she liked it, she didn’t want a child.

And if she did, she wouldn’t want it to be by that sadistic bastard Walter.

She had to go to Shadow with Pel, even if it meant risking death, because just staying in this world meant risking death. She could catch a plague, she could die of something in the water, she could bleed to death.

She had to get home, by any means possible.

“I’ll come,” she said.

* * * *

Prossie had begun to drift away into her own thoughts again, but when she heard all the different voices speaking up, saying whether they would accompany Pel Brown, she listened, she thought back to what she had heard without paying attention.

Going to confront Shadow-that was insane! She had seen and heard memories, back at Base One, from Raven and Valadrakul and Elani and Stoddard; even allowing for added coloration, she knew from those memories that Shadow was cruel and ruthless, willing to commit atrocities to further its ends or remove those who opposed it.

But they were all going along-Susan and Amy and Bill Marks and all of them. If she didn’t agree, she would be left behind, with Raven and the wizards, the only foreigner among them.

That would be awful.

And maybe she could convince the others to turn back. Maybe they would come to their senses.

“I’ll go,” she said.

If she hadn’t been trained since childhood not to venture her own opinions, she would have added, But I don’t like it.

* * * *

Raven watched with annoyance as voice after voice spoke up, hand after hand raised, agreeing to accompany Pel Brown on his mad errand.

He didn’t really have any great need for this oddly-assorted group, but he was reluctant to let them go heedlessly and needlessly to their deaths without some further attempt to save them, perhaps to win some benefit from all this disastrous series of events.

And of course, the lot of them might come to their senses when they learned just what they had taken upon themselves. When they saw Shadow’s fortress, and realized that none could penetrate it to confront Shadow itself, the survivors might well be valuable additions to the forces of resistance.

They might also, in their madness, learn something useful of Shadow’s defenses-surely not enough to allow them to enter Shadow’s keep, but something that could be turned to use someday, by those wiser and mightier than themselves.

“All of you are fools,” he said, “and I feel I must accompany you as far as I dare, that I might do what I can to save you from your folly.

* * * *

Taillefer watched with mounting astonishment as one after another in the party announced his or her intention of bearding Shadow in its lair, of marching in wide-eyed innocence to certain destruction.

When even Raven and a reluctant Valadrakul agreed to go along, at least for some part of the way, Taillefer flung his hands up.

“May the Goddess preserve me!” he shouted. “You have, every one of you, lost your senses! I’d call on the Goddess to save you all, if I thought it possible even for Her! And as ’tis not, I’ll take my leave of you all, lest this madness be catching! Go, then, and die, and I’ll pray for your souls!” He spread his arms and spoke the Word of Power he had prepared, and the wind rose, filling his cloak.

He felt the air pressing him upward, felt the currents of power beneath this place, power that led to Shadow, he knew, but power that he could turn to his own ends, at least for now. He drew upon it to conjure the wind that roared about him.

He grew lighter and lighter, until at last the air, and the magical power behind it, lifted him off his feet.

A moment later the others watched as the wizard literally blew away, up into the sky, bound for his distant home.