The Reign of the Brown Magician

Chapter One

Her car was gone. Amy Jewell had looked out the front door and seen that the curb was empty, and had stepped back inside and closed the door.

Her car was gone.

That had come as a shock at first, but it shouldn’t have. After all, she had left it out front months ago.

It was hard to realize that it had really been months, that it hadn’t all been a dream, that they hadn’t somehow returned to the moment they had left.

But it had been real, and it had been months ago that she had parked her car out front of Pel and Nancy Brown’s house in the expectation of being safely back home and in bed by midnight. She and her lawyer had come here to find out why there was a non-functional spaceship in her back yard; she hadn’t planned on anything more than an evening of explanations.

She certainly hadn’t planned on spending months going through hell in two other universes.

But then, just to see if the stories she had been told were true, she and the others had stepped through a magical portal in the basement wall into a universe she called Faerie, where Shadow ruled-and after that she had been caught up, unable to return, until now.

She had fled from Shadow’s monsters into the third universe, dominated by the Galactic Empire, where she had been captured by pirates and sold into slavery; she had spent weeks as a slave before the Empire had rescued from her master, Walter, and his helper Beth.

At least she’d survived-Nancy Brown was killed by the pirates, Nancy’s daughter Rachel by her master. Walter had killed a slave once, but he didn’t kill Amy.

She was pregnant by that son of a bitch, though. Not that she intended to stay that way. The Empire had hanged Walter and Beth both, and she intended to abort Walter’s child, and be rid of it, as well. She’d never managed to have any children when she was married, not even before she had found out what a bastard Stan really was and divorced him, and she wasn’t about to start now with Walter’s kid.

After the rescue she had spent boring weeks at Base One, the home of the Imperial Fleet, and then she had been sent back into Faerie as part of a raiding party that was meant to assassinate Shadow.

She hadn’t intended to really attempt anything that stupid; she’d intended to use the Faerie magic to go home the minute the Empire’s troops weren’t watching her. But then Elani, the wizard who knew the portal spell, had been killed, and she and the others had been stranded again.

So they’d gone on with the plan to assassinate Shadow, knowing it was suicidal.

And it was suicidal-most of the party had either died or deserted.

But the most amazing thing in the whole adventure was that they had actually managed it, eventually-Pel Brown and Prossie Thorpe had killed Shadow. Proserpine Thorpe, Registered Master Telepath, who had rebelled against the Galactic Empire and was now a refugee here on Earth with Amy, had shot a powerless Shadow dead.

And Pellinore Brown, a marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland, had set it up, and now controlled all the power, the magical matrix, that Shadow had held.

And he had sent Amy, and Prossie, and his lawyer Ted Deranian, safely back through the portal in the Browns’ basement, and here they were, but Pel hadn’t been able to do anything about all the time that had passed while they were going through hell in those other realities.

So of course the car was gone, after so long.

Amy did wonder what had happened to it, though; had it been towed, or stolen, or repossessed, or what?

She realized then that she didn’t have her keys, so she couldn’t have started it anyway. She didn’t have her driver’s license, or any money, or anything else-her purse, if it still existed at all, was back on Zeta Leo III, where she’d been Walter’s household slave, in that other universe where the Galactic Empire ruled all those hundreds of planets.

Ted’s car was gone from out front as well.

Pel’s and Nancy’s were in the garage; Amy checked, and found them both sitting there, somewhat dusty but apparently intact.

That didn’t help much, though; even if she hadn’t been bothered by the idea of stealing one of them, she didn’t know where any keys were. She supposed one set was still in Nancy’s stolen purse-and that was probably on Zeta Leo III, like her own. As for any other set, well, who knew where Pel kept his keys?

She wondered if Ted might know-or if not, whether he might know how to hot-wire an ignition.

Ted, however, was firmly settled in the family room, in front of the TV, watching CNN Headline News, trying to catch up on what he’d missed, and to convince himself…

Well, to convince himself of something, but Amy wasn’t sure just what. That he’d imagined the whole adventure? That it was all real? That whatever had happened, everything was normal now? For all she knew, he was checking to see whether this was really Earth, and not some twisted alternate version.

Whatever he was doing, he had ignored her ever since he found out that the TV worked, that the power and TV cable hadn’t yet been cut off for non-payment.

Prossie seemed to be wavering between the two of them; she was fascinated by the TV, but she also seemed to consider Amy her lifeline, and whenever Amy stayed out of sight of the family room for more than a few minutes Prossie came looking for her, calling her name quietly into the silent depths of the Browns’ house.

It was hardly surprising that Prossie felt out of place-certainly no more surprising than the car’s absence. After all, this wasn’t Prossie’s native world.

Amy paused in the hallway as Prossie caught up; for a moment both women hesitated, but neither spoke, and at last Amy led the way.

She wasn’t really going anywhere in particular, just looking around; she didn’t want to settle down the way Ted had, she wanted to keep moving, to get on home to her own house up in Goshen, but her car was gone and she didn’t have any money or identification or credit cards, and she was wearing only the filthy, tattered remains of Imperial military-issue pants and T-shirt. She couldn’t catch a bus or call a cab.

She might be able to find something she could wear in Pel and Nancy’s closet-she and Nancy hadn’t been the same size at all, Nancy had been smaller, but there would surely be something, one of Pel’s shirts maybe. She didn’t like taking things without permission, but this was an emergency, and she’d only be borrowing it until she could get home.

And besides, it wasn’t as if Nancy would ever need her clothes again.

But Amy still didn’t have money for a bus or cab.

If the phone still worked she could call a friend for a ride, but she needed to think things through first. Who would she call? What would she say? What had happened all those weeks she was gone? Was the wreck of I.S.S. (for “Imperial Space Ship”) Ruthless still lying in her back yard?

She wished that thing had never fallen out of the sky onto her land; that had been what got her involved in all this in the first place. The Empire had been trying to establish contact with Washington, and had suddenly discovered, when Ruthless popped out of a space-warp over Amy’s back yard, that their anti-gravity drive didn’t work in Earth’s universe.

And no one had believed it was real, so the crew had been thrown in jail down in Rockville, and Ted had bailed them out because Pel had been contacted by people from Faerie who wanted to talk to the Imperials, and then they’d all stepped through the portal in Pel’s basement for a quick look, just to see if it was real…

Well, they were back now, and Amy wanted to go home, but what about Ted, and Prossie? What would become of them, if Amy left? Prossie had nowhere to go, and Ted seemed so out of touch with reality that Amy wasn’t at all sure he could take care of himself.

There were hundreds of questions, and she needed to think, and she thought best when she was moving, when she was looking at things, so she rambled through the Browns’ empty house, looking around and trying to think, while Prossie followed along, saying nothing.

Amy thought Prossie probably had at least as many questions of her own, and it was really very thoughtful of her to not ask them yet.

She looked in the master bedroom, but did not explore the closets or dressers-she wasn’t ready for that yet. Going through the Browns’ clothes would be a little too intimate.

She would get to it, but first she just wanted to look.

Roaming from room to room with another woman tagging after her seemed so very familiar and comfortable that she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry; it was just like looking over a prospective client’s home with the client a step behind. And the Browns could certainly have used an interior decorator-or maybe just a good cleaning crew. The house was a mess.

It wasn’t just the dust and general air of abandonment, either. Things were out of place, drawers left open, books stacked in front of empty shelves. Amy couldn’t be certain, but she thought the house had been searched. She didn’t remember any such disarray when she had been here before; true, that had only been for a few hours, months ago, and she hadn’t seen most of the house, but she was fairly certain things were different.

The house hadn’t been burgled; the TV and stereo and other valuables were all still there.

Someone, she guessed, must have reported the Browns missing. The police had probably gone through the place, looking for clues-and maybe not just the police, if someone had made the connection to the crashed spaceship. The FAA and the Air Force had been interested in it.

She smiled wryly at the thought as she stood in the door of poor little Rachel’s bedroom. Somehow, she doubted the police or the Air Force would ever have figured out that everyone in the house had magically walked through a solid concrete wall in the basement and emerged in another universe, caught up in the conflict between the Galactic Empire and an all-powerful wizard named Shadow.

The smile vanished as she stepped into the bedroom and looked about.

Toys were strewn across the floor; a floppy green-and-red plush alligator lay on the bed, gaping foolishly at her.

Poor little Rachel Brown, six years old, had been sold into slavery and then murdered. There wasn’t anything funny about that.

Rachel’s mother had been raped and killed by pirates-not storybook pirates with eye patches and peg legs, but serious, workmanlike pirates with guns and a spaceship. Rachel’s father had survived, but he was back there in Shadow’s place, mourning them both, with some crazy idea he could bring them back from the dead.

Six Earthpeople had walked through that basement wall, and only two had come back-Pel was still in Faerie, and Nancy and Rachel and Susan, Amy’s lawyer Susan Nguyen, who she had dragged along, were all dead.

And the Faerie folk who had created the portal were all dead-Raven of Stormcrack Keep, and the wizards Valadrakul and Elani, and Squire Donald…

No, not quite all, she corrected herself; Stoddard might not be dead-he’d deserted, and might be safe somewhere in Faerie. He was gone, though, and the others were dead. So were at least a dozen of the Imperials who had been involved.

There wasn’t anything funny about any of it.

“I want to go home,” Amy said suddenly. “Did you see a phone anywhere?”

Prossie blinked at her.

“What’s a phone?” she asked.

* * * *

“Proserpine Thorpe is definitely on Earth now,” the telepath said, standing at attention and staring straight ahead.

Under-Secretary of Science for Interdimensional Affairs John Bascombe leaned back in his desk chair and looked up at Carrie Hall’s face.

Thorpe was the rogue telepath, the one who had gone into Shadow’s universe with that barbarian Raven, and the Earthpeople, and that idiot Colonel Carson who’d got himself killed. She was the one who had started refusing orders, or making up her own-crimes that would have gotten her, or any other telepath, hanged or shot within hours, anywhere in the Empire. The Empire couldn’t tolerate disobedience in the mind-reading mutants.

She was also Carrie Hall’s cousin-all the telepaths, all four hundred and sixteen of them, were a single extended family, scattered across the Empire.

But Thorpe had been in Shadow’s universe. Bascombe himself, along with General Hart, had sent her there after she and most of the crew of Ruthless had managed to get home to Base One.

Earth wasn’t in Shadow’s universe.

There were times Bascombe regretted that he had wangled himself this job. It had looked like an easy road to advancement, and it definitely had promise, but he kept stumbling across all these complications.

“Earth,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Carrie answered, her gaze fixed on the wall behind him.

“You’re absolutely sure she’s on Earth, Hall? Not on some backwater like her last appearance, or some obscure part of the Shadow reality we haven’t seen before, or some other planet in Earth’s universe? Or on Terra? I’m told that Earth and Terra are very similar.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure. She’s on Earth.”

“Do you have any idea what she’s doing there?”

Carrie hesitated.

“No, sir,” she said.

“You can’t read her mind?”

Carrie hesitated even longer this time.

“Sir, it’s…it’s difficult, when she’s on Earth,” Carrie explained, “especially since she isn’t just ignoring me, she’s actively trying to shut me out, and even without the use of her own telepathic abilities she knows how to make it difficult for me.”

“So you haven’t been able to read anything, telepath?” The doubt was plain in Bascombe’s tone.

“Just…just glimpses, sir. It’s hard to describe.”

“Try.”

“I really wouldn’t know where to begin, sir. There’s a memory of a gunfight in a meadow somewhere, and something about blinding colored lights, and thoughts of death, and the image of a machine showing colored moving pictures, like a miniature movie.”

“You can’t do any better than that?”

She didn’t answer, but he could see the unhappiness on her face.

Bascombe took his time watching that unhappiness before he said, “This renegade, I am told by you telepaths, has popped into real space twice in the past sixty hours. You tell me that these two appearances were over a hundred light-years apart, even though there’s no sign of a spaceship involved. At considerable expense we’ve sent expeditions to both supposed locations, each one with a telepath along. And now you come in here and tell me that she’s on Earth. Do you expect us to send another expedition there? Do I need to remind you what happened to Ruthless?”

“No, sir.” Carrie’s face was blank again.

“Then what do you expect, Telepath?”

“Nothing, sir,” Carrie said. “I just thought it was my duty to inform you.”

Bascombe nodded.

“It was. You did. Now get the hell out of here-and I want you to write up a report on everything you can read from Proserpine Thorpe’s mind, and keep on writing it from now until I tell you to stop, and send a copy of the new material to me once a day.”

“Yes, sir.” Carrie turned and fled.

When she was gone, Bascombe stared at the door.

For decades the Imperial government had relied on those damned mind-reading mutants for much of their intelligence-gathering and long-distance communication. Thorpe wasn’t the first one to go bad, and she probably wouldn’t be the last, but each time anything like this happened, Bascombe worried; someday they might all go bad.

And this time it was all mixed up with the two known alternate universes, with the thing called Shadow that had been sending its spies and monsters into the Empire for the past seven years, and with the party of troublemakers Bascombe and his political rival General Hart had sent to their deaths. And now there was this thing about near-instantaneous travel across deep space.

At least, the telepaths said Thorpe had somehow crossed all those light-years in a day or so, without a ship.

If that was true, if hopping between universes could provide near-instantaneous interstellar travel, that could mean that space-warp technology, Bascombe’s own little bailiwick in the Department of Science, might be even more important than he had thought.

And if it wasn’t true, it could mean that the telepaths had already gone bad.

* * * *

Near the end of the row of gargoyles that drained the rooftop was one with a broken jaw. Its granite chin was gone, and the rusted end of an iron pipe protruded below the stumps of fangs, a jagged hole in the pipe’s underside spilling water in uneven splatters onto the stone of the tower’s battlement.

The steady rush of water from the others, pouring out over the side, did not bother Pel Brown at all, but the pattering from the broken pipe sounded like a child’s running feet, and that sound tormented him. It was as if Rachel’s ghost were running endlessly across the parapet.

He wanted to reach out and grab her, pull her back to safety, away from the edge-but she wasn’t there.

Rachel would have adored this place, he thought, with its spires and its gargoyles, its spiral staircases and its secret passages. That she had not lived to see it was still unbearable, despite the weeks that had passed since he was told of her death.

He stood under the overhanging eaves, watching the rain, watching the streams of water pouring out into space, watching the one stream that scattered and fell short, watching the repeating pattern of splashes on the stone.

He had, for the moment, suppressed the visible portion of the aura of magic that surrounded him; to outward appearances he was only a man, but he could still feel the matrix he held, the power that flowed around and through him.

He could stop the sound, of course; any time he wanted to, he could stop it. He could blast the gargoyle into powder, if he chose. He thought that with a little more effort he could repair it, gathering dust from the air around it and healing the carved stone.

He did neither; instead, he drew the power to him, reached out into the web, into the power matrix, and found the lines that led up into the clouds overhead. He shifted them, working by feel in a way he had no words to explain.

The rain stopped, as if someone had shut off a faucet. Almost immediately after the last drops plopped onto the tile roof the steady flow from the other gargoyles slowed, and the spattering fall from the broken pipe changed its rhythm, becoming less even.

And that was worse.

It didn’t sound like his daughter any shy;more; it didn’t sound like anything. It was as if he had erased the last trace of her. The sky was still grey overhead, the water was still dripping from the eaves, the battlement was still glazed with rain, but no invisible child’s footsteps pattered on the stone.

Instead, damp air swirled and whispered across the stone, driven not by wind, but by the magical currents of the matrix.

He pulled the power to him, grabbing at it, hauling it in; magic seethed in his mind and his fingers, and the distinction between himself and the matrix he held became vague and uncertain. A red sheen blurred his vision for a second, and then was swept aside in a shower of crimson sparks that danced wildly across the stonework.

He was glowing again; his control of his appearance had slipped, and a halo of shifting colors flickered around him.

He ignored it, looking upward.

The clouds hung above him, low and dark, and he sent a broad band of scarlet fire snaking upward, lighting them to the color of blood.

The unnatural glow suffused the landscape; the green forests on the distant hills turned black, the gray marshlands that encircled the fortress were tinged with a rusty life, and the castle itself took on a color that had never been seen in nature, not in this world, nor on Pel’s native Earth.

It looked like something out of a horror movie, Pel thought, that eerie sky and the thick clouds and the gargoyles, hovering above him.

That seemed perfectly appropriate. He felt as if he’d fallen into a story months ago, and been unable to climb back out. Sometimes it was science fiction, as in the Galactic Empire, with their spaceships and blasters; sometimes it was an epic fantasy, as when Shadow had made him into a wizard and he had turned on her and destroyed her. Why shouldn’t it be a horror story now?

He released the knot of power he had gathered-not in a spell, as he had thought he would, but in a simple release, flowing back into its natural patterns-or at any rate, into a form as natural as the patterns could be while still bound together in the world-spanning matrix that Shadow had created for herself and passed on to Pel.

The rain began falling anew, and Pel turned away.

He had no reason to be up here, really. He had been exploring the fortress for lack of anything better to do-or rather, because he was not sure he knew what he wanted to do.

He knew what he wanted to have-he wanted his wife and child back. And he knew that he held a power that could allegedly raise the dead.

But he didn’t know what he had to do to make it work. He didn’t know how to find out.

Hadn’t someone said that knowledge was power? Well, Pel thought, the converse didn’t seem to be true. He had all the power he could want, but it hadn’t gotten him much in the way of knowledge.

He stepped into the tower, closed the door behind him, and started down the stair. The way was dark and narrow, the slit windows covered by dusty shutters, and Pel had no lantern or torch, but he didn’t need one-he carried the mobile focus of all this world’s magic with him wherever he went, and its glow brilliantly illuminated the surrounding stone walls.

He didn’t need to see at all, though; the matrix also let him sense the shape of the world around him in some more direct way he did not understand.

It was amazing how quickly he had become accustomed to carrying this thing about wherever he went, he thought as he tramped down the steps. Shadow had used something like hypnosis on him, he knew-something that used magic, rather than the simple psychological stunts and suggestions of Earthly hypnotists. She had wanted him to learn quickly, not for his own good, but so that he could serve her purposes that much sooner. So he accepted calmly that his senses were altered and enhanced, that he was bound to a network of mystical force as if it were a part of his body, that he could draw on that seemingly-infinite source of energy and therefore no longer grew tired, no matter what he did.

It was mad, really; he was living out an insane power fantasy. Shadow had used this matrix to rule her entire world, and had intended to conquer others, as well; surely, Pel thought, no individual could handle such physical power. It had to be some sort of dream or delusion-a story, not real.

If it was all real, then how could he accept it so calmly?

He paused, and looked about at the shifting glare of colors that shone across rough gray stone.

Was it real?

Of course it was. Poor Ted Deranian had thought he was dreaming, and it had gotten him beaten and abused; Pel wasn’t going to make that mistake. This was all real.

But how did he know he hadn’t dreamed Ted? And Amy and Prossie, and all the others. None of them were here now to tell him if he was mad or dreaming. He had sent the three of them, Amy and Ted and Prossie, safely back to Earth, and the rest were dead or missing.

He shook his head, and magical currents twisted and writhed around him.

He wasn’t dreaming. It was all real. It was as real as anything had ever been; he reached out and touched the nearest wall, felt the cool, hard stone under his fingertips.

It was real.

It was real, and he controlled all the magic in this world of magic, and it didn’t seem strange at all. It seemed perfectly natural.

He wondered if that was a good thing.

* * * *

The technician sat up abruptly at the sound of the beep. He blinked at the panel, and his eyes widened as he saw the code number indicating which phone was in use. He reached for his own phone.

“Get me Major Johnston,” he said. “We have an outgoing call on the Brown phone.”