The Reign of the Brown Magician

Chapter Two

He could make the fetches obey him.

It wasn’t really much of an accomplishment for a person in Pel’s position, but it was a start.

He supposed that making living people obey him would probably be easier; he could just threaten to incinerate them, and they would obey out of fear.

Fetches, however, were already dead. To be exact, they were dead people Shadow had revived as her servants; the fortress held dozens of them.

There were hundreds of homunculi in the place, if that was the correct term for all the creatures Shadow had created from scratch, rather than just re-animated-everything from artificial insects to the dead dragon at the foot of the grand staircase, and Pel could sense that there were even bigger beasts outside the castle, such as the burrowing behemoth that had attacked Pel’s party at Stormcrack, months earlier, or gigantic bat-things like the one Valadrakul of Warricken had slain in the Low Forest of West Sunderland.

Pel had decided to start with the fetches, though; they were all human in appearance, for one thing, and he was more comfortable with that. For another, he was very concerned with the resurrection of the dead. He didn’t want Nancy and Rachel to be mere zombies, like the fetches, but he assumed that any spell that could restore his family would be somehow related to whatever Shadow had done to produce fetches.

He had found three of them simply standing in one of the corridors, lifeless and mute. At first he had stared at them, expecting them to notice him; then he had tried ordering them verbally, telling them to walk.

They had stood there, unmoving, as the shifting colors of the matrix had played across them, rich deep blue and honey-gold predominating just at that moment.

Then he had used the matrix, used his magic, and had found the little tangle of magic in the heart and spine and brain of each fetch, the magic that, he saw, controlled each one’s action. He had poked and prodded at one with immaterial fingers-and the fetch had twitched and shivered and blinked.

He had told it, “Speak,” and it had opened its mouth, but no sound came out. He had realized, with shocked disgust, that it wasn’t breathing.

“Breathe,” he had told it, and the chest expanded; air was sucked into its lungs in a hollow gasp, then expelled in a rasping wheeze.

One breath, and it stopped.

Pel shuddered.

“Never mind that,” he had said. “Will you obey me, now?”

The fetch had blinked, then nodded, and suddenly seemed alive again-somber and silent, but alive. He had, he saw, had to establish a link between its internal web and the greater web of the matrix, a link that Shadow must have once had, and must have severed at some point-probably when she first transferred the matrix to Pel.

Having established the link he controlled the fetch entirely, just as he controlled the matrix itself.

And that meant he could make the fetches obey him. He would have servants-or rather, slaves-who could run errands for him, do whatever he needed to have done.

That was a good start, he thought. It was a definite step forward on the road to using the matrix properly, and to learning to resurrect the dead.

“Go to the throne room,” he ordered. The fetch sketched a bow, then turned and marched away.

It was only a first step, though. There were things he needed to know if he was to bring Nancy and Rachel back from the dead that he couldn’t learn just from ordering fetches around, and while the matrix probably contained all the knowledge he needed, somewhere, somehow, he didn’t know how to get at it. He needed someone to talk to about his plans, someone who could teach him.

Someone to teach him magic, he thought, as he watched the fetch march down the passage toward the throne room. Pel’s lips tightened, and the aura flickered into harsh reds and smoky browns.

He wanted a wizard.

And while Shadow had been the last matrix wizard, the only wizard who regularly raised the dead, while Shadow was dead because Pel had sent Prossie Thorpe to kill her, Shadow had not been the only wizard in the world Pel and his companions had called Faerie.

Even though Shadow had roasted Valadrakul to death, and Shadow’s creatures had butchered Elani, Pel thought he knew at least one other wizard who still lived: Taillefer, that fat coward who had refused to open a portal to either Earth or the Empire. After Elani had died, Valadrakul had not known how to open portals to other worlds, so he had summoned Taillefer-and Taillefer had refused to help, for fear of drawing Shadow’s attention.

Well, Pel had learned how to open his own portals. And now he could send fetches out to… Pel smiled grimly. He could send fetches out to fetch Taillefer.

Taillefer might not know how to raise the dead, but he surely could teach Pel something.

Pel strode toward the throne room, still smiling.

* * * *

Amy hung up the phone. “Donna says she’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” she said. She smiled with relief.

Prossie didn’t smile back. “Then what?” she asked.

“Then she’ll drive us out to my place,” Amy replied. It was such a pleasure to be able to say that, to be able to take cars and telephones for granted, to know what was going on again! “I guess she can drop Ted off on the way, and then we can settle in. I don’t know if there’ll be much that’s fit to eat after all this time, but we can get into some decent clean clothes.” She frowned slightly, thinking and planning. “I don’t have my keys, but if I have to, I guess I can break a window to get in. Or maybe I should call a locksmith. I’ll have to find one who’ll take a check, I don’t have any cash. The checkbook’s gone, too, but I have extra checks at home.”

Prossie nodded, though it wasn’t a very enthusiastic gesture. Amy didn’t really notice. She was on familiar ground after months of living nightmare; she didn’t want to think about Prossie’s problems yet. There would be time for that later.

“There’s canned soup, that’ll still be good,” Amy said, talking more to herself now than to Prossie. “And I should have something that’ll fit you-you’re only an inch or so shorter than I am, right?” She sighed. “I wonder if they stopped delivering my mail? I guess if Pel’s phone still works, mine will, too, but there must be about three months’ bills waiting. And all my clients will have given up on me-I’ll have to just about start the business over again.”

She paused and glanced at her companion, but Prossie didn’t respond.

Amy continued, “I suppose that spaceship is still in the back yard-did you have anything on board? It might still be there, if nobody’s gotten in and stolen it. And I’ll need to call the doctor and make an appointment as soon as I can.” She shuddered slightly. She didn’t like to think about getting an abortion, but it had to be done-she couldn’t afford a baby, and anyway, her life was quite disrupted enough without bearing the child of a dead rapist from another universe.

And it wouldn’t hurt to have a general check-up, after all she had been through.

“Do you think they might have posted guards around the ship?” Prossie asked suddenly.

Amy blinked at her, startled. “Who?” she asked.

“Your government. The ones who arrested us.”

Amy put a hand to her mouth, then admitted, “I hadn’t thought of that.” Then she lowered the hand and managed an uncertain smile. “But even if they…no, they can’t have guards there; it’s private property, and poor Susan had a court order or something. And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

As she finished her attempt at reassurance Amy realized she could hear sirens; she turned to look out the window. For a moment she stared in disbelief; then she headed for the living room for a better view.

“How did they know?” Prossie asked as she followed Amy. “Do you think they might have telepaths, somehow?”

“No,” Amy said. “They don’t have any telepaths. They might have the place staked out, though. I didn’t think we were that obvious.” She paused, then added, “They must have tapped the phone.”

Prossie didn’t ask what that meant.

A moment later Amy and Prossie were joined by Ted, and the three of them stood at the front window watching as men in suits and uniforms emerged from the two county police cruisers that had pulled up in front of the Browns’ home, and from an official-looking car in the driveway, a sedan that had a government seal of some sort on the driver’s door.

Amy realized, annoyed, that she hadn’t had a chance to go through Nancy’s closet; she was still in her Imperial rags. She doubted these people would let her change.

And her hair was a mess-her last bleach and perm had all grown out long ago, and she hadn’t even had a chance to brush it in days.

Ted moaned softly.

* * * *

“We have a report, sir,” the lieutenant said, saluting briskly.

Bascombe put down his pen and glowered at the young man.

“A report from whom?” he demanded. “From where? About what?”

“From Registered Master Telepath Bernard Dixon, sir!” the lieutenant said, snapping sharply back to attention.

“Ah,” Bascombe said. “And exactly which of our mind-reading freaks is this Dixon?”

“Telepath Dixon is currently serving aboard I.S.S. Meteor, sir, investigating the reported reappearance of the renegade, Proserpine Thorpe.”

“Which reported reappearance?”

“Uh…the first one, sir. I think.” The lieutenant quivered uncertainly. Bascombe sighed.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“Yes, sir. According to Dixon, he has established, working in cooperation with five other telepaths, the approximate location of Thorpe’s reappearance-he reports that there is only one system it could have been in, an unnamed system with no habitable planets-the navigator aboard Meteor has the catalog number, but it was not included in the report. Dixon is unable to narrow it down any farther; no physical traces have been found, and telepathy, he says, is not sufficiently precise over interstellar distances to be more exact.”

“Did he say how he found the system at all?” Bascombe asked.

“Ah…that was not included in the report I received, sir,” the lieutenant admitted.

“Dismissed,” Bascombe said.

“Sir?” The lieutenant blinked.

“I said dismissed. Get out.”

The lieutenant almost forgot to salute again as he hurried out.

Bascombe picked up his pen and considered.

He knew how the location was determined; telepaths on a dozen planets had been asked to report which direction Prossie Thorpe had been in, and those were then adjusted by the astronomers to allow for planetary rotation and used as approximate vectors. Where the resulting lines-or rather, cones, since none were narrow enough to be lines-intersected, that was where Thorpe had been.

Meteor had been sent to explore the resulting volume of space; the charts didn’t show any inhabited systems there, but the charts could be wrong.

This time, according to Dixon, they weren’t. And he’d checked back with five other stinking mutants to see if his distance felt right.

So Thorpe hadn’t appeared on an inhabited planet, or even just a habitable one.

That meant a ship.

And that might explain why her stay there had been so brief, only about a minute-she had delivered something to a ship, and then returned to Shadow’s world.

But if she were just a courier, why would Shadow, or Raven, or whoever was behind it, use a telepath? A telepath would stand out like a beacon-Thorpe had stood out like a beacon.

Someone had wanted the Empire to know something was going on; someone had wanted to get the Empire’s attention-but who? And why?

Was it a distraction, a feint? Or was someone trying to tell them something, a message they weren’t receiving?

What about Thorpe’s other appearance? That one had been narrowed down to two possible systems, one of them, Upsilon Ceti, home to the Imperial colony of Beckett; I.S.S. Wasp was scheduled to arrive at Beckett Spaceport in a matter of hours.

If there had been a telepath on Beckett in the first place, maybe life would have been a bit simpler-but four hundred telepaths couldn’t cover three thousand Imperial planets, and Thorpe had only appeared in the Beckett area briefly. It wasn’t quite as fast as the other, about five minutes instead of one, but it was brief.

Was that a message of some kind? Why Beckett, which was a quiet little backwater?

And now Thorpe was supposed to be on Earth, the only human-inhabited planet in the Third Universe, and this time she was staying there. What did that mean?

Did it mean anything?

Or were all the telepaths lying? Had Thorpe ever really been in any of those places? Carrie Hall’s reports hadn’t started arriving yet, but he was fairly certain that when they did, they’d be useless.

Something was definitely going on, but whether the enemy was Shadow, or Raven’s band of revolutionaries, or some faction within the Empire, or the telepaths themselves, Bascombe didn’t know.

But he intended to find out.

He almost called for a telepath, but then he caught himself; he rose and stepped to the door, and called to his receptionist, “Miss Miller, have a messenger sent to Special Branch; I want orders sent to Meteor to stay where they are and search carefully for any signs of activity-ships, gravity fields, lights, whatever.”

“Yes, Mr. Bascombe.”

He nodded, and retreated back into his office.

The message would be sent by telepath, of course; there was no other way to reach Meteor except through Dixon. Sending it downstairs to Special Branch on paper, though, would mean that no telepath would be reading his mind directly.

At least, not legally.

And if telepaths were reading minds illegally, he couldn’t stop them in any case-but that way lay madness. Telepaths could be listening to any thought, at any moment.

He just hoped they weren’t.

* * * *

“Am I under arrest?” Amy demanded, folding her arms across her chest and glaring up at the man in the blue uniform who seemed to be in charge of the whole business.

They hadn’t let her change her clothes, and the gesture was as much for the sake of decency as out of annoyance. Her T-shirt was torn on both sides, and she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

She tried not to think about that.

Major Johnston sighed. He turned a chair around, sat down, and leaned on the back.

“No, ma’am,” he said, “you aren’t. However, if that’s what it takes to get you to cooperate, it can be arranged.”

“On what charge?” Amy protested. “I haven’t done anything!”

“I don’t know just what charge, ma’am,” Johnston said. “I’m not a lawyer; I work for Air Force intelligence, so I know something about the laws, but I’m not a lawyer, and in a complicated case like this…” He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he shrugged and said, “But there’s no question we could find something. You were one of sixteen people who disappeared all at once without any rational explanation, and now three of you-only three-have turned up again, one of you apparently gone at least temporarily nuts. I think we could get you booked on suspicion of something, kidnapping or assault or something. Withholding evidence, if nothing else.”

It was Amy’s turn to sigh. At least the officer hadn’t included indecent exposure in his list. She wished Susan were there-but Susan was dead. Amy had seen her body lying on the floor of Shadow’s throne room, back in Faerie.

Amy supposed that she could have called on the surviving members of Dutton, Powell, and Hough-Bob Hough must be back from his vacation long since-but how could she explain to them what had happened, how Susan Nguyen had died? So she had passed up the chance to call her lawyer when this Johnston had offered it.

She had managed to stall her removal until her friend Donna had arrived, so at least someone knew where she was and more or less what was happening, but Donna wasn’t going to get her out of jail if these security people, whoever they were, did decide to arrest her.

“Is Ted okay?” she asked. “He was pretty upset.”

“Mr. Deranian is, indeed, upset,” Johnston admitted. “While I won’t tell you any of the details, he seems to be very unsure of his own grasp on reality. He has asked repeatedly to go home, and we may oblige him in that-we’re waiting for an opinion from a psychologist on whether it’s safe for him to be alone. We’ve tried to call his sister to look after him, but she doesn’t seem to be available.”

“But you won’t let me go home!” Amy protested.

“You, Ms. Jewell, are not screaming and crying and irrational.”

Amy glared at him. Johnston glared back.

“What about Prossie?” Amy asked.

Major Johnston sighed again.

“Your other companion,” he said, “tells us that her name is Registered Telepath Proserpine Thorpe, formerly of the Special Branch of the Imperial Intelligence Service. Beyond that, I’d prefer not to say at this time.” He hesitated. “Is that her name?”

“As far as I know, it is,” Amy said.

Johnston stared at her for a moment, then said, “All right. You don’t want to talk to us. I don’t know why not. This whole bizarre case is jammed full of things I don’t know. It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since that damned whatever-it-is fell out of nowhere into your back yard and I got assigned to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to do that without any real information, but I can’t. Now, you could give me real information, and you say you won’t-but can’t you at least say why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Because you won’t believe me. Besides, it isn’t any of your business.”

“How do you know I won’t believe it?”

Amy closed her eyes. It wasn’t really an unreasonable question. Johnston certainly seemed more reasonable than the soldier who had been questioning her before, who had just kept demanding she tell them where she had been for so long, and who had refused to ever accept, “I don’t know,” as an answer.

“Because,” she said, opening her eyes and staring straight at Major Johnston’s face, “it’s all impossible, so impossible that Ted Deranian doesn’t believe it, and he was there. That’s why he’s upset, you know-he thought it was all a dream, and that he’d finally woken up, and then you people came and hauled him away, and that means either it’s real, or he’s still dreaming.” She sighed. “Now, do you expect me to believe that you’ll just accept my word for something so incredible that a man who lived through it thinks it was just a nightmare?”

Johnston considered that for a long moment.

“All right,” he said, “so maybe I won’t believe it. But maybe I will, and what can it hurt to try me?”

“You won’t argue?” Amy had visions of trying to tell her story and having every point questioned, every absurdity denied, until nothing made any sense at all.

“I don’t know,” Johnston admitted, straightening up for a moment. “Try me.”

The man’s apparent honesty was disarming; Amy shrugged, unfolded her arms, and said, “You ask questions. I’ll answer-for now.”

* * * *

Shadow had known how to see through other people’s eyes, and hear through other people’s ears, Pel reminded himself. She had been able to spy on anyone, anywhere in the entire immense world she ruled. It couldn’t be that difficult.

He closed his eyes, clenched his fists on the arms of his throne, and concentrated on the webs of magic that reached out in all directions around him.

He could sense things out there, like tiny sparks caught in the meshes of color and darkness, things that he was fairly sure were people, and he tried to focus in on one specific twinkle, tried to see through it-and nothing happened. He didn’t connect; he didn’t see anything, through his eyes or anyone else’s.

Shadow had known how, but Pel didn’t. He could sense the shape of the matrix, all the currents and eddies of magic that flowed through Faerie; he could tell when something disturbed those currents, and he was fairly certain he knew when the disturbance was a wizard stealing a little power, and when it was just some harmless peasant stumbling through a place where the magic ran strong. The wizards seemed to have odd little patterns of their own, sort of like fractal designs within the larger design of the matrix. Pel could see that.

But he couldn’t see through other eyes.

And he couldn’t match up the matrix with the outside world, either; he couldn’t make any correlation between magical streams and physical ones, couldn’t tell where the web lay on land, where on sea-or where it soared through the air or burrowed underground, or even climbed away from the planet into whatever lay beyond the sky in this strange realm. The network he had inherited from Shadow was centered on the fortress where he sat, but it extended, however tenuously, through this entire universe.

Pel controlled all of it, through his mind and will; he knew its shape, could sense every trickle. He could tell more or less how far out in the network any movement was, and in roughly which direction-but where that was in the ordinary world he had no idea.

He could spot the fetches he had sent out, carrying messages, but though he thought he might be able to transmit a couple of basic commands, such as a signal to return, he couldn’t really communicate with them. He could tell which direction they had gone, and could see how far they had progressed in terms of the matrix, but what that translated to in miles he could only estimate, and the farther away they got, the less reliable that estimate was.

Where ordinary people appeared as analogous to white or golden sparks, and wizards seemed to have faint traceries woven inside those sparks, the fetches were something like smoky red embers, and were bound into the matrix itself, rather than being independently-existing structures that sometimes impinged upon the net. It seemed as if Pel ought to be able to at least see through those eyes-but he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t see where they were or what they were doing.

He opened his eyes, slumped back in the elaborately-carved throne, and stared through the glimmering colors at the big open doors at the far end of the room.

He didn’t look at the spot where Susan Nguyen’s body had lain for so long. At least he’d made a little progress on that problem-with the help of the fetches he had had the corpse settled on a spare bed, and had put a preserving spell on it as best he could. He had seen how the meats in the fortress kitchen were preserved, and he had painstakingly built up the same magical structure over poor Susan, and it seemed to be working.

But not much else was. He was fairly certain, now, that he’d sent those fetches out on a fool’s errand. He hadn’t given them any directions; he’d just told them, “Go find wizards and bring them here.”

But he hadn’t known what directions to give them. He didn’t even have a map. He had never seen a map of Shadow’s world. He wasn’t even sure there were maps.

He knew the route he had taken to reach the fortress, from the Low Forest of Sunderland across the Starlinshire Downs and the coastal plain to Shadowmarsh; he had looked across the rift valley called Stormcrack and seen Stormcrack Keep, perched on the other side; but where these fit in their world, where Stormcrack lay in relation to Sunderland or Shadowmarsh, he had no idea at all. He thought he remembered Raven mentioning that Stormcrack lay in the Hither Corydians, while the mountains visible from Sunderland were the Further Corydians, but what that meant he didn’t know. He had heard other names, as well, but they were just names.

It wasn’t fair. In all the stories the hero knew where everything was. There were always maps. Tolkien’s books had had maps all over them. Even the movies had maps sometimes.

If Shadow had had any maps, Pel hadn’t found them yet.

How could he find anything, or anyone, without maps, without any means of long-distance communication? And while he could sense fetches and wizards in the matrix, he didn’t know how to guide the red embers toward the white snowflakes and golden spiderwebs; how could his fetches find anyone?

He had sent them out, a dozen of them, with orders to find wizards and bring them back-Taillefer in particular, but if they found any wizard, that would do. But how could they do that? How would they know where to go?

He hadn’t thought this through.

He couldn’t even send notes; most people in this world seemed to be illiterate, and those who weren’t used a different alphabet from the one he knew. He had told the fetches to summon wizards, but he had left it up to them to figure out how to deliver that summons.

They might not be able to; fetches were pretty limited.

He could go out searching on his own, he supposed-but he wasn’t sure just how to best use his magic to travel. Conjuring winds that would blow him around, the way Taillefer did, seemed dangerous and haphazard.

And he wouldn’t know where to go. It was a very big planet. The matrix seemed to stretch to infinity.

He would have to get organized about this. As Shadow’s heir and master of the matrix that controlled all the world’s magic, he was, in theory, ruler of all Faerie; he didn’t need to run his own errands, or send out all his servants. He could order other people to do it all.

And besides, he had told Amy that he intended to be a benevolent ruler here, teach these people how to lead more civilized lives; how could he carry out that promise if he stayed holed up here in his castle, with no contact with the outside world?

It was time to start playing his role properly. He would get this place organized-and that would let him fetch wizards who could teach him how to raise the dead.

And if he did some good for the natives in the process, all the better; they could certainly use some help. The towns and villages he had seen on his way to Shadowmarsh hadn’t exactly been paradise.

He remembered the gibbets in every village, the disembowelled corpses of the people who had offended Shadow-at the very least he could do away with that sort of thing.

He realized that he could start right on his own doorstep-quite literally on his doorstep, where the corpses of half a dozen Imperial soldiers still lay. He hadn’t even done anything about them.

Not that he could do very much, but at least he could have them decently buried.

And after that he could send messengers out to the surrounding villages.

He sat up straight, closed his eyes, and sent out a summons to the fetches still in the fortress, and to the handful of homunculi and other creatures over which he had established his control.