In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Twenty-Five

Pel wished he could see what was happening beyond the portal, but despite his incredible power he couldn’t manage that. A way might exist, for all he knew, but if so, he hadn’t discovered it; the portal itself seemed to block whatever he had done to sense where it would go before he had created it, and the trick of seeing through other eyes, even if he had known how to use it, couldn’t work in Imperial space, any more than any other magic could.

He saw Amy fall out onto the throne room floor, though; he saw Ted stagger out a moment later, and then Prossie backed from nowhere into the room, still trying to fire her blaster. She was squeezing the firing stud so hard he could hear the clicking over Amy’s panting and Ted’s shuffling and all the other little noises of their disorganized return.

Then one of Shadow’s fetches charged out of the portal, sword raised, and Pel was so startled that the thing was able to take a swipe at Prossie before bursting into flame. The blade cut open one tattered sleeve and drew a line of blood before falling from shriveling, blackening fingers.

Then more fetches came bursting through, mostly one by one, occasionally in pairs or even trios, but each appearing only to flare up instantly and burn away to scattering ash. Amy crawled to the side on hands and knees, out of their path; Ted wandered clear; and Prossie backed away, blaster still in one hand, the other hand shielding her face, and watched as the swordsmen perished.

The stream of burning swordsmen seemed interminable. Since the energy that incinerated them was not his own, and needed no actual guidance but merely a point of release, Pel didn’t tire of destroying them, exactly, but the simple repetition was wearying, and the accumulated heat of their fiery extinction did become uncomfortable; by the time the last fetch perished the air of the throne room was sweltering hot, like the inside of a furnace. Amy and Ted retreated up the passage toward the rooms where they had eaten and slept, while Prossie backed out onto the landing at the top of the great staircase.

The whole process quickly took on a surreal aspect-the procession of undead charging forward to immolation, the blackened and melting swords rattling to the floor and lying there in a smoldering heap, all in the flickering, unnatural light of the windowless and underfurnished throne room, had the mindless, irrational repetitiveness of a nightmare.

If any of the fetches ever had the wit to do anything other than charge blindly after the woman who had slain his mistress, he didn’t show it-but then, Pel didn’t count them, and could not be certain, when they finally stopped appearing, that some weren’t still active on the other side of the opening.

Pel would have preferred closing the portal and stranding the fetches on the other side, for the Empire to deal with, but he could not afford the concentration to do that as long as the swordsmen kept appearing; he was unsure just how much the matrix would protect him without conscious direction.

At last, though, the stream of attackers paused, and Pel was able to think about something other than burning.

“Did you get her?” he shouted to Prossie, as he struggled to close the portal. The spell did not yield readily, did not collapse the way his portals had in practice. Something was fighting him-the geas, presumably.

“Yes, sir,” Prossie answered, sharply. Pel was startled by the “sir” until he realized that she was simply reverting to military habits.

He was relieved to hear her reply; he had assumed as much, but it was good to hear her say it. And she was quite definite, no “I think so,” or “Probably,” but a definite “Yes.”

And then something yielded and crumbled in his mind, and the portal was gone, leaving only charred sword-fragments and boot-heels and a haze of drifting ash where the fetches had been appearing. The oppressive heat lingered, and Pel could feel himself drenched in sweat, but his mind was clear and sharp-and free.

The geas was gone.

And that, he knew, meant that Shadow was dead.

* * * *

The grip of the blaster felt good in her hand. The steel cross-graining bit into her palm as she squeezed it, keeping the still-hot weapon steady despite the slick of sweat-and despite its uselessness here in Faerie. It felt good to hold it, and to know that she had killed Shadow with it.

Her hand wanted to tremble, but she wouldn’t allow it. Her long-ago training did that much for her, anyway.

She had never shot anyone before. As a rule, the Empire did not arm Specials; they weren’t there to fight. They were trained in the use of blasters, just in case, but only on the practice range, with low-power weapons. Prossie hadn’t fired a weapon in two or three years-until today. And she had never before used a full-power blast, or shot at a living target.

But now she had-and she had hit what she aimed at. She had killed Shadow.

That she had killed did not bother her, at least not yet; somewhere inside she thought that perhaps it should.

But this was Shadow. This was the Enemy. And she, Proserpine Thorpe, outlaw telepath, had killed it.

It felt very good indeed, and she was in no hurry to put the raygun down.

The swordsmen had stopped coming, finally. When she thought about it she realized that they had stopped a moment before Pel had asked her if Shadow was dead. In her excitement she had lost track, for a moment, of the sequence of events.

The portal was probably closed, then. She straightened up, out of her gunner’s crouch.

Heat was still pouring out of the throne room, while cooler air drifted up the stairs behind her; she could feel her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat. She turned and looked down the steps.

The beam of light seemed a little brighter than before, though still not up to when Shadow had controlled it; by its glow she could see the dead dragon in the hall below, lying headless on the floor. Purple ichor had puddled around it.

Imperial purple, she thought wryly.

And as if that made some mental connection, she heard her name being called.

“Carrie?” she asked.

* * * *

For a long moment Pel simply sat there, savoring the calm after the storm. The heat was gradually dissipating, the ashes were settling. The matrix hummed and glowed around him and through him, and he could feel it reaching out through all of Faerie.

Just now, he didn’t want to think about it. He knew that he would have decisions to make, important decisions, but just now he wanted to savor his victory.

That was what it was, all right-victory. He hadn’t just escaped from Shadow, from Faerie, from the Empire; this time, he had done more than escape. He had played the hero’s role after all.

He had won.

* * * *

The throne room was quiet, and the heat rolling up the passage seemed to be lessening; Amy took Ted’s hand and called, “Pel?”

No one answered-but she hadn’t called very loudly.

“You said I’d wake up,” Ted said accusingly; she jumped, startled, and turned to face him.

“Yes, I did,” she admitted.

“I’m not awake yet.” Then he laughed, not his usual nervous giggle, but a wild, hysterical laugh. “What am I doing?” he said. “I’m arguing with a dream? Because it fooled me?”

“It’s not a dream, Ted,” Amy replied.

Always before, when she had argued with Ted, or just talked to him, she had felt frustrated and helpless; she had been powerless to help him, to convince him of anything.

Now, though, as she tugged him back toward the throne room, she felt triumphant. “Come on,” she said. “We have to get you home.”

* * * *

“That’s twice now you’ve reappeared in Imperial space, and then vanished again,” Carrie sent. “We all felt it; a new adult telepath turning up anywhere in the galaxy is hard to miss. And when we tried to locate you exactly this second time, we found some of those Shadow things, but now they’re gone, too. Prossie, you said you were abandoning the family and the Empire, but you keep turning up. Who’s creating these space-warps for you, and how? Are you working for Shadow now?”

Before Prossie could answer, Carrie added, in a far more emotional tone of thought, “Prossie, what’s going on?”

“I killed Shadow,” Prossie answered proudly. She looked down at the blaster in her hand, and her mind was flooded with a tangle of emotions. She had sometimes felt something like it in others, in moments of crisis, but this was the first time she had ever experienced such powerful and complex feelings entirely on her own.

And she was really, truly on her own now. “You wouldn’t help,” she said, “you didn’t want to hear from me, but I killed Shadow.”

“What?” Prossie could feel Carrie’s astonishment clearly. “But…did you really? You’re serious? How? You’ll have to…Prossie, can you get back to the Empire, then? They’ll want…”

Prossie’s grip tightened on the blaster, and she cut Carrie off.

“Fuck the Empire,” she said. “And fuck you, Carrie Hall.”

* * * *

The throne room was ablaze with color and shadow, and stank of smoke; blackened debris was scattered across a wide area.

And Amy noticed that Susan’s corpse was still lying against a wall, untouched by recent events.

The shape on the throne was a mass of light, too bright to look at; for a moment Amy could not believe that it was poor Pellinore Brown. It had to be Shadow; the whole thing must have been a trick of some kind.

Then it spoke, and the voice was Pel’s.

“I might as well send you all home, I guess,” he said. “If I can, anyway.”

* * * *

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your own universe?” Pel asked again, for the third time in ten minutes.

Prossie shook her head. “Earth,” she said.

It wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the right one, she was sure.

If she returned to her own universe she would be a criminal, a hunted fugitive, with no way to hide from her hunters-who would be her own family. They were all slaves to the Empire, all bound up in the web of deception and self-deception, shared delusions and identity. They would track her down, steal from her mind everything she knew about Faerie and Shadow and Pel and Earth and all the rest, and then turn her over to the Empire to be hanged.

And if by some miracle they didn’t hunt her down, if they sided with her, or even just let her slip away somehow, then they would be as guilty as she-they would all be risking their lives. The Empire would not hesitate to wipe the filthy mutants out.

She might have disowned them all, cut herself off, rejected them all-but she couldn’t ask that of them.

And besides, she had grown accustomed to the oddly-liberating mental silence of the other realities, and to being her own person; she didn’t think she could fit back in the Empire, didn’t think she could go back to being a communications device instead of a person.

As for Faerie-even with Shadow gone, even with the entire world’s magic in Pel’s hands, it wasn’t for her. The heavy gravity was wearing, the watery light was unpleasant, the sanitation was abysmal, the whole place was depressingly primitive and harsh.

And although she hated to admit it, she didn’t trust Pel any more; she didn’t trust anyone who held that much power. She was not at all certain whether Pel entirely controlled the matrix, or whether the matrix partially controlled Pel, and she also wondered if some part of Shadow might still linger in that great tapestry of magic. Shadow’s original body was dead, yes-but how much of her had been bound up in the matrix?

Not the Empire, not Faerie-that left Earth, which she had only glimpsed, directly and through the Earthpeople’s minds back at Base One-Earth, with its amazing alien machines, its complex history, diverse society, and strange, rich culture-television and movies, cars and airplanes, books, music, so much to explore! The Galactic Empire had been working toward uniformity for a century, trying with mixed success to impose its single central culture on thousands of worlds; Earth, with its fragmented politics and sophisticated communications, seemed to be going to the other extreme, jamming a million different societies together on a single big planet.

Earth looked like far more fun-frightening and alien, but fun.

“Definitely, Earth,” she repeated.

The shifting colors swirled for a moment, and Prossie thought that swirl might have been Pel’s magical equivalent of a shrug.

“It’s your life,” Pel said.

* * * *

Finding Earth was tricky, much more difficult than finding the Empire had been; Pel was not surprised that the Empire’s telepaths and science had found it before Shadow’s magic.

He would have preferred opening another portal to the Empire first, for Prossie’s use-that he could have done in just a few minutes-but she insisted she didn’t want to go home, she wanted to go to Earth.

Which meant only creating a single portal, but it also meant that he had to find Earth.

And finding the right part of Earth was tricky, as well. Nobody had cared where on a particular planet Shadow arrived, so long as it was a reasonably pleasant neighborhood and not too far from civilization, but Pel did not think Amy and Ted would appreciate being dumped in the Australian outback-let alone on Mars.

But then, at last, Pel found a place that the portal wanted to go, and he realized with a start that he had found his own basement, and the lingering traces of Elani’s portal.

His own basement.

He hesitated, momentarily reconsidering his decision to stay.

Then he began the process of prying the portal open.

* * * *

Ted vanished, and Amy took a step toward the portal. Then she paused. “You’re sure?” she asked, staring at the throne, trying to see Pel through the glare.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“But…”

“No, I’m sure, Amy,” Pel said. “It’s a chance to play God. To make everything better for all the people here. I mean, remember what it was like out there, under Shadow’s rule! Those gibbets, the dirt, the squalor-I can do a lot of good. Just teaching these people some basic stuff like indoor plumbing, I’ll accomplish more than I would in a hundred years as a marketing consultant.”

Amy glanced at Prossie, waiting her turn a few feet away, then back at Pel. She knew perfectly well that that wasn’t the sort of “playing God” that Pel was really interested in. Oh, he might do it, and it might be a good thing, but it wasn’t why he wanted to stay in Faerie.

He wanted to learn to raise the dead, so he could bring back his wife and poor little Rachel. Amy knew that.

But it was his business, not hers.

Poor Susan’s body was still lying against the wall; in all the excitement no one had had time yet to do anything for her, or for those dead Imperials out front. Maybe Pel would raise Susan from the dead, too. Maybe he would bring Lieutenant Dibbs and his men back to life, and send them all home.

It seemed vaguely blasphemous and somehow dangerous, but Amy told herself she was being silly. She’d never been devout, and any ideas about it being dangerous came more from horror movies than from logic.

It wasn’t her problem.

Her biggest problem was an unwanted baby, and she needed to get back to Earth to get rid of it safely. And just getting back to a normal life-which she could hardly do in Faerie.

She didn’t want to play God; she just wanted to go home.

So why was she still here, arguing?

“Besides, Amy,” Pel said, “if I leave without turning the matrix over to someone, it’ll come apart, and wild magic will run amok-the sort of magic that cooked all those people, Raven and the fetches and the others.”

“It will?” she asked, startled. “I thought that it sounded like things were pretty good before the matrix wizards got out of hand.” She wondered whether Pel was just making excuses, trying to convince himself.

She wondered, also, if he had any idea what he was talking about. Did he really know any of this stuff? If he’d learned it from Shadow, had she told the truth?

“Well, yeah,” Pel said, “but that was before the magic all got collected. It would disperse out to harmlessness eventually, I think, but if I just turn it loose now it’ll be like an explosion.”

“Are you sure?” Amy asked.

“No,” Pel admitted. “Look, Amy, you go on; I can always open the gate up again and go home. But I can’t ever come back-once I leave, the portal closes and the matrix comes apart. So I want to do whatever I can here first.”

Amy glanced at Susan’s corpse and shrugged; it wasn’t really any of her business if Pel stayed, and maybe he would do some good. She stepped through the portal, and as the throne room’s eerie colors vanished she saw Prossie coming close on her heels.

She emerged into the dim light of a single bare bulb-if there had been others, as she vaguely remembered there were, they must have burned out. She stepped quickly to one side, so that Prossie would not walk into her.

Pel’s basement was hot and musty; the house had probably been closed up all summer, Amy realized. Ted was sitting on the stairs.

“Hello,” he said, as Prossie appeared.

Amy glanced at Prossie, and then, reassured that she was safely through the portal, turned and blinked at Ted. Her eyes needed time to adjust to the dimness after the blinding glare of the matrix.

“Are you okay, Ted?” she asked, concerned. “I thought you’d be on your way home by now.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Am I awake? Why am I in someone’s basement, if I’m awake? This is supposed to be Earth, isn’t it?”

“It’s Earth, Ted, and you’re awake,” Prossie said gently. “You’ve been awake all along.”

He shook his head. “No, no; that’s crazy.”

“Well, crazy or not,” Amy told him, “you’re in Pel’s basement, on Earth, and you’re safe. Open the door, and let’s go home.”

Ted shook his head, and Amy saw terror on his face. All through their adventures he had smiled, or simply looked blank, but now that they were safely home he was obviously seriously frightened.

“I don’t know what’s out there,” Ted said slowly. “I don’t know who you two really are, if this is real and the dream’s over. If I’m here, and not home in bed, it can’t have been an ordinary dream-so maybe I’m not awake yet after all. Maybe if I go through that door I’ll be back in that castle, or the spaceship, or something. There could be monsters, or slave-drivers, or anything.”

“Open the door and see, Ted,” Amy said, annoyed with his weakness. She marched across the basement and up the dusty steps, while Prossie trailed uncertainly after her.

For an instant, as her hand closed on the knob and Ted stared fearfully up at her, Amy thought that he might somehow be right, that anything could lie beyond that door-or beyond any door.

But then she swung it wide and saw only the Browns’ hallway, dusty and muggy, and she knew it was over.

* * * *

Pel sat on his throne, staring at the portal, for several minutes after Ted and Amy and Prossie had vanished.

None of them reappeared; they were presumably safely back on Earth, but for all he could see they might just as well be dead, or imprisoned. He considered holding the portal open for a moment longer, just in case, but then decided that was silly.

He let his link to Earth collapse into nothingness, glanced back at Susan’s body, and got to his feet.

Susan would have to wait; he wanted to practice on someone or something else first. Susan was a friend; he didn’t want to bring her back until he could do the job right.

And after he had brought Susan back to life, he would find Nancy and Rachel. Somehow, somewhere, some way, he would find them.