The Reign of the Brown Magician

Chapter Twenty-Three

The abrupt twist in the matrix startled Pel out of a light doze. He sat up and looked around.

He was in his bed, safe in Shadow’s fortress; the light of the matrix blazed gold and crimson from the bare stone walls. The false Nancy lay naked beside him, sound asleep.

What had roused him? There wasn’t anything out of place in the bedchamber. Had he heard something?

Not through the foot-thick walls, certainly; he reached out with the matrix and opened the door, while sensing everything that lay in the corridor beyond.

Except there wasn’t anything in the corridor.

He reached out farther.

There were fetches and monsters and people going about their business, there were his dozens of hostages all secure in the dungeons and towers; all was as it should be, throughout the fortress.

The weather above was a normal, if unpleasant, drizzle; the marsh was quiet.

Then, finally, he noticed the kink.

The Imperial space-warp had opened again. It had been closed for some time; in fact, he hadn’t noticed it open since he had begun his little attempts at convincing the Empire to cooperate. He had flown out to the familiar spot by his treehouse in the Low Forest of West Sunderland a few days before to see if the Empire had come to its collective senses, if the bodies had been delivered before the warp was closed, or at some time while he was asleep or distracted, and he’d found nothing but empty air and woods.

Now it was back-but the place where the space-warp bent a strand of the matrix in an impossible direction had moved; instead of being in Sunderland it was somewhere far off in the other direction.

And it seemed larger.

Pel was now fully awake, and angry. What the hell was the Empire up to?

He would just have to go and see.

* * * *

Captain Hamilton Puckett took a deep breath, tightened his grip on his sword, and jumped, his eyes still firmly closed. His left hand was on the hilt of his blaster-he knew all the experts said it wouldn’t work, but he couldn’t help it, he still wanted that familiar reassurance, and he’d made sure his holster was slung on the outside of his space suit.

The glare of the warp abruptly vanished, and the red glow it made of the inside of his eyelids disappeared; he opened his eyes, and managed to catch himself just short of falling on his armored face. The drop seemed longer than it should; he hoped that was just an illusion caused by the transition to higher gravity.

He got himself upright, released his blaster, wiped dust from the front of his helmet, and looked around.

People were staring at him-strange people, all of them terribly tall and thin, with pale narrow faces and long black hair, wearing flowing green and white clothes. He was standing on bare dirt; in fact, his landing had stirred up a cloud of dust. Around him were crude huts made of some sort of reeds or grasses, and all in all about a dozen faces peered at him from the doorways of the huts or the spaces between them. Their expressions were odd-not fear or anger or anything he could read plainly.

They didn’t look happy, though.

Well, why should they? He’d just popped out of thin air in the middle of their village.

“Damn,” he said.

The word was oddly muffled by the helmet he wore.

He turned and groped for the warp-the scientists had said they were going to bring it in right at ground level.

They hadn’t; it was a good four feet off the ground. He had to back up and take his best running leap in order to get through it, and he imagined he looked like a particularly ridiculous sort of monster as he galloped through the middle of the village in his space suit, waving his sword about.

His jump turned into an exceptionally awkward dive-he’d misjudged either the suit’s mass or the local gravity-but he did sail back through into the blinding white light of the space-warp. His landing knocked the wind out of him, and for a moment he lay motionless on the steel walkway.

When he raised his head at last, he saw people signalling wildly to him from the observation area.

He sighed and clambered to his feet; he’d have to go up and report.

They probably weren’t going to like this. They’d wanted someplace near human habitation, to avoid impassable wilderness and make foraging easier, but no one had wanted to come out smack in some primitive village. And they’d wanted ground level, where they could just step through, not a four-foot drop.

Well, it wasn’t his fault; they could shout at the scientists.

But they’d probably want to try again, which would mean someone would have to make another leap into the unknown, and Hamilton Puckett had a pretty good idea who’d be making that leap.

After all, he had experience now. And if he wanted to command the first assault, he needed to scout the terrain-that was the deal the brass had offered.

And it was a deal he intended to keep.

* * * *

“It’s getting bad,” Miletti said. “They’re escalating, turning it into a war.”

Major Johnston considered this for a moment, then turned to Prossie Thorpe. “Ms. Thorpe,” he said, “if you don’t want to answer I won’t press it, but you know more about this than any of the rest of us. In your opinion, is a war between Faerie and the Empire good or bad for us here on Earth?”

“I don’t know,” Thorpe said.

“How can any war be good?” Amy Jewell asked. She seemed uncomfortable, here in Miletti’s living room-and that was, Johnston thought, reasonable enough; after all, Miletti hadn’t invited her, and didn’t particularly want any of them here. It had been Johnston who had brought them along, in an effort to speed up the process of questioning Miletti and interpreting the data he provided.

If Miletti had been willing to come down to the Pentagon, or Crystal City…

But he wasn’t. He insisted he could provide more information if he stayed safely in his suburban home, with familiar surroundings and sixty-eight channels of cable TV, and Johnston had decided that there might be enough truth in that to make it a mistake to argue with him, or to order him anywhere.

“If it removes them both as threats,” Johnston answered Amy’s question. “I’d consider that a good war, for us.”

“I don’t think Pel was ever a threat to anybody,” Thorpe replied.

“He is now,” Miletti said, looking up from his television.

* * * *

“Secure the village,” they said. Just what the devil did they think that meant?

Captain Puckett only knew one way to make sure a village was secure, and he didn’t like it much. He was fairly certain that Marshal Albright knew what was involved, but Secretary Markham and Secretary Sheffield might not. Someone might get soft-hearted later, and if that happened Puckett supposed he’d take the blame for the massacre and probably spend the rest of his days on a pension somewhere like old man Blackburn, with parents warning their children away from him.

But if he didn’t do it, he’d catch hell right now.

He looked over his men once again. In their space suits they all looked alike, faceless gleaming automatons-but the swords they held looked weirdly out of place, throwbacks to some earlier century, as if they were knights in distorted armor rather than Imperial troopers.

He chalked a final warning on the board-REMEMBER! FOUR-FOOT DROP, HIGH GRAVITY! Naturally, the scientists hadn’t fixed that-they claimed they couldn’t. Puckett had his own opinion on that, but knew better than to say it aloud.

He put down the chalk and signalled the door crew. The big panel slid open, admitting the blinding glare of the space-warp, and Puckett waved his men forward.

He wondered if any of them were yelling as they charged across the open, airless expanse and into the light.

* * * *

Pel had never seen this part of his new world before-but that was hardly surprising, since he had never seen most of the place.

He estimated that he had covered at least two hundred miles so far, probably more, and the twist in the matrix was still far ahead of him, somewhere to the southwest. The terrain below was not as lush as the Starlinshire Downs, by any means-there were occasional open areas that looked like little more than bare sand, while trees were few and far between.

Far off to his right, almost on the horizon, he could make out a distant ocean, glittering in the afternoon sun. Behind and to his left were green hills. Ahead, he saw mostly flat scrubland.

There weren’t any roads or villages along this stretch; there had been, closer in toward Shadowmarsh, but he had passed them all.

What the hell was the Empire doing, opening a warp out here?

And using it, too; he’d sensed people coming through the warp for some time.

And there were people around the warp before the Empire’s people started arriving. Had the Empire found local allies? Maybe some part of the resistance movement that Raven and Valadrakul had belonged to still survived, and wanted to see Shadow’s matrix destroyed, rather than passed on.

Well, once he had his family back, Pel wouldn’t have any great objection to that. If the matrix exploded and wild magic wrecked what little civilization Faerie possessed, it wasn’t his problem.

He glimpsed something moving in the air ahead, and almost fell off the wind he was riding before he recognized it as just distant smoke.

It seemed like rather a lot of smoke, though.

He reached out through the matrix.

Shadow had had some way to see far-off places magically, through the eyes of the people or animals there, but Pel had never managed it, and he still couldn’t contrive to get a look at whatever was happening there-it didn’t help any that he was whipping through the air several hundred feet up at about fifty miles an hour.

Sometimes, when he used the matrix, he felt as if he were one of those poor fools with a big fancy computer loaded with expensive software that he only used for balancing his checkbook because he didn’t know how to access anything else. Shadow had only taught him to open interdimensional portals; she hadn’t intended to turn the matrix over to him permanently. He had picked up a few other things from the other wizards, and there were a few things that simply feeling the matrix made obvious, and then on top of that, every so often he would stumble across something else the matrix could do-such as fly-but he still had the tantalizing feeling that there were a thousand other wonderful things just out of reach.

And some way of seeing what was making that smoke was probably-almost certainly!-one of them.

He could sense the shape of the matrix. He could sense people, usually. But he couldn’t see anything, or hear anything.

The matrix was bent out of shape by the intruding space-warp, and Pel could tell that this warp was bigger than the old one in Sunderland-but why? That one had been big enough to fit a spaceship; what more would they need?

And there were people there. There were a lot of people there. Two different kinds…

That was strange; he hadn’t usually been able to tell people apart through the matrix before, and certainly not at so great a distance. Fetches felt different from natural people; so, much more subtly, did simulacra, and wizards. But other than that, people were people; he hadn’t noticed any difference between natives, Earthpeople, or Imperials.

So why did some of the people ahead feel different?

And they seemed brighter somehow, as if they held more of that trace of magic that people had, as if they were more nearly linked to the matrix.

The new space-warp had come through at the center of a magical power spot, he noticed; did that have anything to do with it? Had these people absorbed some of the world’s magic by living there?

More and more Imperials were arriving, or at least more and more people were coming through the warp, and he assumed they were Imperials. The others, the strange-feeling ones, were scattering in all directions, moving away from the warp.

What the hell was going on? There were dozens of Imperials there, a whole army of…

An army.

There was an entire Imperial army coming through the warp.

An invasion!

The Empire was invading!

They were actually invading Faerie!

How could they be so stupid?

And that explained the smoke…or did it? Blasters didn’t work here, and the Empire had no conventional firearms, so far as he knew; what weapons would they be using that might start fires?

Angry and worried, he gathered more of the energy of the matrix into the wind that carried him.

* * * *

These funny-looking natives were deucedly hard to kill. Puckett’s troops were not particularly skilled swordsmen, and their space suits had gotten in the way at first, but all the same, Puckett thought they ought to have been able to handle a bunch of mostly unarmed wogs, regardless of what sort of wogs they were.

Maybe half a dozen of the natives had turned up with ornately carved spears, but the others had had only bare hands. Slaughtering the lot of them should have been easy.

But they dodged. And they hid. And they ran, without ever seeming to hurry, and those abnormally long legs of those could really cover territory.

None of them had said a word, none had shouted or screamed, even when Puckett’s swordsmen surrounded them and hacked them to pieces. It wasn’t natural.

And there must have been a hundred or more in the village originally, but Puckett could only confirm four killed-and he’d lost five of his own men to those spears.

Now, though, the natives had been driven away, their huts burned, and the village was, he could say with some confidence, secured.

And it hadn’t been a slaughter at all, really. That was almost a relief. Puckett didn’t need to worry about being another Major Blackburn.

Of course, with so many wogs still out there, they’d need to be constantly on guard for counter-attacks, snipers, and the like, since they hadn’t killed the villagers; that wasn’t in accordance with doctrine. Colonel Scarborough and the rest of the brass might not like it.

Well, Puckett thought as he scanned the situation from his position at one end of the wide steel steps leading up to the warp, the Colonel and the others could just stuff it-it wasn’t Puckett’s fault that the natives had fled and faded away, or that his men had to arrive in those bulky, awkward suits that were never meant for use on a planetary surface, or that they had to use archaic, unfamiliar weapons.

At least matches worked here. And dropping the steps through at the very first had made transit through the warp easy enough.

The first supply dumps were arriving now, and the men were clearing away the last burning wreckage of the crude native huts; they would have some tents and probably a few more substantial shelters up well before sunset. Swordsmen were patrolling the perimeter, ready to fend off any wog counter-attack. Order and organization were arising out of chaos.

If this campaign was going to last long, though, Puckett hoped the brass would see about getting some different armament. These swords they’d been issued were a bit flimsy-they were just ceremonial swords that had been sharpened, not serious fighting blades, since that was all that was available in quantity on short notice. Some of the men were using their standard-issue knives, instead, and it wasn’t just because the knives were more familiar.

And some sort of missile weapons-bows, crossbows, powder firearms, something like that-would help considerably. Even some decent spears or pikes would be useful.

“Captain!” someone shouted.

Puckett turned, and saw men pointing skyward. He shaded his eyes and looked up to the northeast.

“Damn,” he muttered.

The brass had assured him that aircars didn’t work here, any more than blasters did-and of course, any number of his men had tested blasters; he had, himself. Blasters didn’t work, so the assumption had been that aircars didn’t either.

But something did, because that wasn’t any bird or bat or airfish or pterosaur approaching. For that matter, it wasn’t any sort of aircar Puckett had ever seen before, either. Puckett didn’t know what it was-it blazed almost as brightly as the afternoon sun, but in a thousand changing colors. Tendrils of light and smoke trailed out in all directions, shifting constantly.

Was it a weapon?

The glare dimmed momentarily, and Puckett thought he glimpsed something at the thing’s center-something that looked like a man.

Not a man in an aircar or any other sort of machine, just a man, flying unsupported through the air like a leaf in the wind, in the middle of that great insubstantial thing.

And flying fast, too.

Puckett wished more than ever for a squad of crossbowmen.

Or rocketeers; would rockets work here? He couldn’t see how they wouldn’t, but he wasn’t a scientist. When he sent his next report he’d suggest bringing rockets. Why hadn’t anyone thought of that sooner?

But right now he didn’t have rockets, or anything else that could shoot that thing down.

“Maintain your positions,” he called. “It may be a diversion-keep alert!”

He hoped it wasn’t a serious attack-after all, there was only the one man in there. Maybe someone was coming to parley.

But how would the enemy have known they were there? Had the displaced villagers gotten word back that fast? Base One had said the enemy’s central fortress was over three hundred miles up the coast; did the enemy have telepaths, or some equivalent?

Maybe this thing was from a local garrison somewhere.

The flying thing was coming closer; it was crossing the perimeter. Puckett cursed under his breath; he supposed no one at Base One had even thought about air cover.

But after all, it was just one man in there.

* * * *

The ground looked as if it had measles-purple measles. The whole area was speckled with the purple spots of Imperial uniforms. Pel stared down at them in annoyed amazement.

The Empire could organize an entire invasion, but they couldn’t turn over two bodies.

The invaders were interestingly arranged, Pel thought; almost in a target. The thickest concentration was right in the center, where he knew the warp was, where dozens of uniformed men were hauling boxes and beams about; then there was a broad ring where they were relatively scarce. Outside that was a ring of men, and then another clear area, only a few advance scouts moving quickly at angles through the scrub.

The warp made a perfect bull’s eye.

He passed directly over it, and saw faces turned upward, watching him-but no one was shooting at him.

They probably didn’t have anything that could shoot at him.

Now, what had this place been before the Imperials arrived? Where were those strange people he had sensed? What had made all the smoke he had seen?

The smoke he could partially explain, at any rate-there were heaps of ash still smoldering. But what had they been originally?

And the people were mostly still alive, but not in the circle the Imperials had established as their beachhead-he could sense them on all sides, a few hundred yards away, as inexplicable as ever.

That was reassuring-at least the Imperials hadn’t butchered them all.

He looked at the piles of ash, at how they were arranged, and suddenly Pel realized what they were.

They were houses. This had been a village of those strange people, and the Imperials had come in and burned it all.

They had just marched in and burned people’s homes.

What right did they have?

Those people weren’t Imperial citizens. They weren’t rebel slavers, like the ones on Zeta Leo III. They were Faerie folk, going about their own business.

They were Shadow’s subjects, not the Empire’s-except Shadow was dead.

So they were Pel’s subjects.

And they’d been attacked because Pel had attacked the Empire. Not because they’d done anything, but because Pel had attacked the Empire to try to get his family back.

Damn the Empire!

Magic flowed thick and strong here; the matrix hummed through Pel almost as strongly as back in his fortress, and he could sense half a dozen currents of natural energy intersecting just where that Imperial space-warp had come out.

It couldn’t be a coincidence, but how could the Empire have known?

It had to be something in the nature of interdimensional travel, Pel thought. The warp over the Low Forest hadn’t been near any power spots, but the Empire had been aiming that one for a particular place; this new one had probably been allowed to come out wherever it was easy.

Maybe that had some connection with why it was impossible to open two portals near one another.

Whatever the reason, the result was that Pel had all the power he could ask for here, enough to dispose of the Imperial intrusion if he wanted to.

He wondered whether the power spot had any connection with the strange people, then upbraided himself. Of course it did! They were more attuned to magic, he could sense that-not as much as the wizards were, their auras or whatever they were weren’t patterned and formed like regular wizards’, but these people definitely had something magical about them. They must have sited their village here deliberately, to take advantage of it.

Were they all some sort of low-level wizards, then? That was something to investigate.

Right now, though, what they all were was refugees, and the Empire was occupying their village, and it was Pel’s job, as their ruler and protector, to do something about it.

While he had observed and thought through this much, he had passed completely over the Imperial perimeter; now he wheeled back for another pass.

He had to do something about the invasion-but what?

The simplest thing would be to just unleash some of that magic and flash-fry the Imperials, as Shadow had flash-fried Raven and the others in her fortress, but Pel hesitated. That seemed unnecessarily ruthless.

He could twist the warp into nonexistence, he thought-he wasn’t certain, but he thought that it would be possible. That would cut off these soldiers, several hundred of them by the look of it, with nowhere to go, nothing to do but make trouble…not a good idea.

He wanted the Empire to hand over the bodies. He wanted them to see that they didn’t stand a chance. Cutting off the warp and leaving their men alive wouldn’t do that. Simply obliterating the expeditionary force would be more effective-but not quite right, either.

He wanted survivors who would tell the Empire what had happened.

He turned again, this time moving himself toward the rim of the Imperial circle, and began to bend the matrix into the shape he wanted.

* * * *

“What the devil is it?” Lieutenant Miles asked.

“Haven’t the faintest notion,” Puckett replied. The glowing thing had passed directly over the camp, swooped back across, then veered off to one side; now it seemed to be circling their perimeter.

But it wasn’t doing anything, so far as Puckett could see; it flew along at a steady altitude, a few hundred feet up, with all those patterns of light and color and shadow spraying every which way, but doing nothing.

And then something flashed, and someone screamed; Puckett drew his blaster without thinking, swore, and flung it aside, reaching for his sword instead.

Another flash, more screams, and wild shouting, but Puckett still couldn’t see what was happening.

Another flash, and another, and another, moving along below the flying thing, in a great sweeping curve just beyond the Imperial perimeter.

And there were men running, falling back from the perimeter, some retreating in good order, others screaming and running, as the flashes blended into a solid ring of fire.

“What’s happening?” Puckett snapped.

A sergeant saluted from the foot of the steps. “Sir, explosions all along the perimeter! We’re losing men, burned alive-can’t see what’s causing it, there’re no bombs falling, just bang, and some poor fellow goes up in flames.”

“Damn,” Puckett said. “All right, fall back-everyone fall back. Noncombatants to suit up and get back through the warp immediately; combat troops to stand ready. Miles, sergeant, spread the word!”

Puckett watched as his men gathered inward, contracting toward the warp. The flames had closed the circle now, and were beginning to spiral inward-that flying thing was fast.

Another supply team stepped out of the warp just then, their load slung from poles on their shoulders, and stood, staring in astonishment at the surrounding chaos. Puckett grabbed them, turned them around, and shoved them back toward the warp.

“Get back through there!” he shouted. Then he grabbed a man who was about to put on his space helmet, and told him, “Pass the word-no more traffic outbound! Tell them on the other side-we’re doing at least a partial withdrawal! Understand?”

“Yes, sir!” the soldier barked, saluting. Puckett noticed that he wore an engineer’s insignia-that was good; engineers could follow orders.

“Good! Now get that helmet on and get back there!” He slapped the engineer on the back and turned his attention back to the ring of fire.

This looked very bad. Somehow, he didn’t think a partial withdrawal was going to be enough.

* * * *

Pel watched as the last survivors vanished through the warp mere inches ahead of the magical flames, still trying to pull on space suits and helmets; he wondered whether they’d make it to safety across the airless expanse between the warp and the rest of Base One.

Plenty of their comrades hadn’t even made it that far, of course; the broad burned-over expanse outside the contracting circle of flame was covered with drifting black dust, much of which had been Imperial troops.

And their equipment, of course, as well as some of the native plants and a few structures left from the native village.

Now, everything was gone except the warp itself and the steps leading up to it, there in the heart of the flame.

The steel steps melted and sagged, and Pel reached out for the warp itself, and twisted hard, pouring magical force into it, trying to straighten the shape of space itself.

It resisted for several seconds, then gave, and the warp was gone. He had done it; he had closed it.

He wondered what effect that would have on their machinery, back on Base One.

He hoped it wasn’t damaged; then they wouldn’t be able to deliver the bodies until it was repaired.