The Reign of the Brown Magician

Chapter Twenty-Four

Pel stood in the center of the blasted clearing and looked around.

This had been a village once, but between the Imperial invasion and his own magical destruction of the invaders, there wasn’t much left-just sand and ash.

He wondered what the villagers would do now.

He was tempted to just leave and let them do it-he had his own problems. He would want to retaliate for the invasion, send a message to the Empire.

But on the other hand, it was his fault the Empire had destroyed their village, and he was their ruler and protector; he should do something to help.

With the matrix, he had the power to help.

And he was curious about who these strange people were, why and how they were linked to the matrix.

He considered what he could do.

He considered building them a new village, the way he had built his treehouse in the Low Forest-but this wasn’t a forest; there were no raw materials to work with here.

Or were there? He looked down.

There was plenty of sand and ash, and the matrix would provide all the heat he could want. What more did he need to make glass?

Half an hour later he knew what else he needed-knowledge. And maybe practice. The ugly brownish-green stuff he had produced probably qualified as glass, but it wasn’t very good glass, and his fanciful notion of raising a fairy city of glittering glass spires was obviously not going to work unless he spent a lot longer at it than he had intended.

On the other hand, he had attracted an audience; a ring of people had formed around the edge of the blasted area, all of them watching him solemnly.

These were the strange people, the ones who were linked to the matrix. There were perhaps sixty or seventy of them, men, and women, but no children that Pel could see. They were all thin, with long white faces and straight black hair worn long, wearing peculiar green and white robes.

Pel tossed aside his latest unsatisfactory lump of glass and beckoned. “Come here,” he called, using the matrix to amplify his voice. “I want to talk to you.”

A man stepped forward, and strode calmly up, to stand a few feet away. He seemed untroubled by the light of the matrix; in fact, the way he stared impassively straight ahead, Pel wondered for a moment if he might be blind.

He was taller than Pel had realized, and paler-and he had pointed ears.

It dawned on Pel that these people weren’t exactly people, and it struck him what they must be.

They were elves.

Well, why not? This was Faerie, wasn’t it? And Pel had met gnomes, and been told that they weren’t elves, that elves were something else.

Well, these were elves-weren’t they?

“You’re an elf,” Pel said.

“And you are a human,” the man replied, speaking English with an accent Pel couldn’t place, but which sounded somehow Asian.

“You’re really an elf?”

The other nodded. “And you are called Pelbrun, the Brown Magician.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“As to that, I could not say,” the elf replied.

“I never met an elf before,” Pel said.

“I never met you before.”

There was something unsatisfactory about this conversation, Pel thought. The elf’s voice was musical and pleasant enough, but shouldn’t he be saying things that were deep and meaningful?

Well, Pel’s own words hadn’t exactly been brilliant.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about the village. I’d hoped I could help rebuild it, but I don’t know how. I’m not really a very good magician yet.”

“We can rebuild it to our own liking.”

Pel looked around. He had no idea what the elf intended to rebuild with, but if he said they could…

“Don’t elves traditionally live in forests?” he asked.

“This is the place Shadow allowed us,” the elf replied.

Pel bit his lip and looked around. That explained it.

This place was a reservation. Shadow must have put the elves here to keep them out of the way, just the way whites had put Indians on various badlands back on Earth.

“Listen,” he said, “I could move you to the Low Forest of West Sunderland, if you want, above the Starlinshire Downs. Nobody lives there.”

“We would starve,” the elf replied.

Pel blinked. “You aren’t starving here, but you would there?”

The elf nodded.

It seemed to Pel that this fellow was playing the strong silent type a bit more than was entirely wise. “Why would you starve there? What do you eat?”

“The earth itself sustains us, magician; we do not eat crude matter as humans do.”

For a moment Pel stared blankly at him; then comprehension dawned. That was why these people were linked to the matrix! That was what they lived on; they consumed raw magical energy.

No wonder they wouldn’t want to live in the Low Forest.

“Oh,” Pel said.

And that, he realized, might even explain some of the old folk tales about fairy feasts, about how insubstantial fairy food was.

That also eliminated any possibility of sending elves into the Empire, for any purpose at all-they’d undoubtedly die there, just as the monsters did, or as Alella and Grummetty had.

Not that Pel had seriously been thinking about it, but the idea that they might want to avenge the destruction of their village had occurred to him.

Well, that idea was out.

“Okay, well,” Pel said, “I don’t know where else I could send you; I haven’t learned the local geography yet.”

“We are content here,” the elf answered.

Pel shrugged. “Suit yourself, then,” he said. He looked around at the circle of elves and the sandy wasteland, and decided that he’d tried, and if they weren’t going to ask for any help, he wasn’t going to give it. Let them rebuild their own damn village. “Stand back,” he said.

The elf began retreating.

Pel had never tried taking off from flat ground before-at the fortress he’d launched himself off the tower, and in the Low Forest he had jumped from a treetop, but there wasn’t any handy tower or tree to climb, and this desolate circle didn’t have anything that would block the wind. Taillefer had taken off from Castle Regisvert; Pelbrun, Pel thought, ought to be able to take off here.

And the elves could take care of themselves.

He took a deep breath and summoned the wind.

* * * *

“One hundred and eight dead or missing,” Albright said, tossing the report onto the table in front of Sheffield.

“For nothing,” he added a second later, as he settled into his chair.

“Hardly for nothing,” Sheffield said. “We know now that this Pelbrun either has some way of detecting intrusions into his universe, or that he has some form of high-speed communication that allowed the villagers to warn him. We also know that he has extremely effective weaponry using his ‘magical’ super-science. We’ve gained some important knowledge-that’s hardly nothing.”

“What good is it going to do us?” Albright argued.

“You tell me,” Sheffield replied. “Now that you know that, what would you do differently?”

“Me? Colonel Scarborough handled this.”

“Colonel Scarborough is out of the picture now; what would you do?”

Albright stared at Sheffield for a moment, thinking.

“Well, to begin with,” he said, “I’d make everything fireproof…”

* * * *

Pel made his counter-raid through the same spot Peter Gregory had used-nine fetches under the false Nancy’s direction burst through, shot everyone in sight with their blasters, collected three more blasters from the bodies, then left Pel’s prepared message, painted on a non-flammable stone slab, prominently on display.

YOU CAN’T HURT ME, it read, BUT I CAN HURT YOU. DELIVER THE BODIES.

By the time the reports reached Base One, however, Operation Brown-Out was under way. The message was ignored.

* * * *

“I think they know on both sides that it won’t work,” Miletti said. “They just aren’t ready to admit it.”

Prossie looked up at this oracular pronouncement, made not in response to any question, but out of the blue.

She glanced at the lieutenant; he looked back at her and shrugged, then turned away again.

Prossie looked at Miletti, then at the lieutenant, then back down at her book.

Miletti was behaving strangely, she thought-but what did she know of what was normal for these people?

She wished she could read his mind, to see whether the strain and isolation were getting to him, or whether it was something else-but she couldn’t.

And it wasn’t really any of her business anyway. She was supposed to be studying this planet’s history, as part of her assimilation, not worrying about Miletti’s mental health. They were keeping her here, letting her sleep in Miletti’s guest room, in case one of Miletti’s reports needed explanation, but it wasn’t really her problem any shy;more.

For her, the Empire and Faerie were the past; Earth was the future.

* * * *

Pel stared at the plateful of corned beef and cabbage.

He wasn’t really hungry-but when had he last eaten?

He didn’t know. It had occurred to him that he ought to eat, so he had had this dinner prepared and served, but he wasn’t hungry.

And he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything.

It was obvious what was happening, of course; he was drawing energy directly from the matrix, feeding off pure magic, the way the elves did.

He remembered what was supposed to happen to people who ate of fairy feasts, though-they were trapped in Faerie forever, unable to return to Earth.

That was just an old story, of course, a folk-tale for children…but he had been living a storybook existence for months now, ever since poor little Grummetty had stepped out of the basement wall. He had fought monsters, been captured by space pirates, been rescued by a Galactic Empire, defeated an evil wizard, become a wizard himself…if all that could happen in real life, if he could be sitting here in a magical stone fortress staring at a meal prepared by zombies in a room lit by his own raw magical energy, how could he possibly say that the old fairy tales were nonsense?

He picked up a forkful of meat and chewed.

His stomach protested with a sudden cramp.

He knew why, and he felt a tremor of terror at the realization. He had gone so long without food that his digestive processes were not up to handling anything this rich; he should be starting off with a thin broth, or even just water, as if he had been on the verge of starvation.

But he felt fine and healthy-other than the nausea, anyway.

Maybe he couldn’t go back to ordinary food, he thought. Maybe it was too late. Maybe it would just sit, undigested, in his gut.

Maybe he wasn’t really human any shy;more; maybe he was becoming an elf, or something else native to this other cosmos. Maybe all those stories about Shadow being an elemental force, rather than a human being, had been true, in a way. Maybe Susan’s bullets wouldn’t have killed Shadow even if they had hit her.

Maybe she could only be killed when she had become human again by leaving Faerie. And maybe he, too, was changing into something else.

But then, how could he ever go home again? How could he return to Earth once Nancy and Rachel were restored to life?

Shadow had been able to leave, to go to the Galactic Empire-but she had died there. Could she have survived even if Prossie hadn’t shot her, or would she have died the way Grummetty and Alella did?

He swallowed.

He would, he thought, just have to wait and see.

He loaded his fork again.

Then he stopped, fork halfway to his mouth.

The matrix had just twisted again. The Empire had opened a new space-warp.

He put the fork down, telling himself that he had to investigate, that doing so was more important than eating this meal.

He wished he really believed it.

Fifteen minutes later the taste of corned beef still lingered in his mouth as he leapt from the fortress tower into the waiting winds.

* * * *

Captain Puckett eyed the horizon warily as his men hauled equipment through the warp.

This time the damned thing had come out a full eight feet up, and it had taken most of an hour to locate something better than a ladder to compensate for the drop. Some clever fellow had finally located a set of folding bleachers-Puckett had no idea what such a thing was doing anywhere on Base One, but there it was, and it worked fine.

And they hadn’t come out in the middle of a village this time; instead the warp hung invisibly above a field of barley. A special squad had captured the farmer and his family-they hadn’t resisted, so no one had been killed.

The residents of the neighboring farms had either surrendered or fled.

These weren’t any pale, skinny freaks this time, just ordinary people-though they had an odd accent and an old-fashioned way of speaking. They had been terrified at the sight of the Imperial troopers in their bulky purple space suits-after the previous massacre, no one had opposed the suggestion that the troops keep their suits on, despite the inconvenience and discomfort. Helmets could be loosened to save on bottled air, or even removed, but the main suit, which was fireproof, stayed on.

Puckett was happy with that-not that his opinion mattered any shy;more. No one had openly blamed him for the disaster, but he wasn’t even nominally in command this time; he was a “special advisor” to Colonel Bender, along to provide whatever expertise he might have acquired in the course of utter defeat.

He wasn’t sure just how much of that expertise applied here. They were some six hundred miles southeast of the site of the previous landing, and the terrain was totally different. Where the other site was barren, this one was lush; instead of whitish sand, the earth was rich black loam producing a variety of crops, while any shy;place in sight that wasn’t under cultivation was either forest or rapidly returning to forest. Instead of grass huts, the natives had sturdy, well-weathered homes of stone and timber, with intricately carved lintels and shutters and generously stocked with good-quality crockery.

And of course, there was the castle.

Puckett raised his binoculars and took another look at the thing, perched perhaps five miles to the southeast, atop the highest of the surrounding hills.

Stone walls, watchtowers, overhanging parapets-that was a serious fortification there. It wouldn’t have stood half a day against blasters and aircars, but against the improvised armaments of this particular Imperial expedition…

Well, the Empire’s officers still knew how to besiege a fortress, even if they hadn’t ever actually done it.

And so far, the castle’s occupants had shown no signs of making a sortie against the invaders. The scouts had reported that faces could sometimes be glimpsed on the battlements, watching the Imperial forces as they made camp, but the heavy gates had shut within two hours of the warp’s first appearance and had remained closed ever since.

A crow cawed somewhere.

The castle was daunting, in its way, but it wasn’t what worried Puckett, not really. Anyone who needed those massive defensive walls…well, somehow Puckett didn’t think the thing that had slaughtered his men lived in a place like that.

If it had really been the Brown Magician, as Imperial Intelligence believed, then it didn’t live anywhere near here; his place, their eventual target, was supposed to be somewhere hundreds of miles to the north, according to the space-warp scientists.

At that thought, Puckett turned his glasses northward and scanned the treetops and the sky above.

And there it was.

At first he thought he’d imagined it, but then he found it again, and focused the binoculars on it, and there wasn’t any doubt.

“Colonel!” he shouted. “Colonel Bender!”

The expedition’s commander looked up from some papers a clerk was showing him.

“Sir, there it is!” Puckett shouted. “It’s coming!”

Bender turned, and by then it was visible even without the binoculars, a seething, constantly changing mass of light and color swooping toward them out of the northern sky.

Bender began shouting, but Puckett didn’t wait for his own orders; he clapped his helmet in place and began dogging it down tight.

* * * *

Pel didn’t bother reconnoitering; it was obvious that the Empire was trying again. This wasn’t a power spot, but it was near one, and a strong current of magic flowed through the earth here; Pel reached down and pulled that current upward, then turned it loose.

Fire burst up from the ground, and men screamed-but at first they simply retreated, with their faces scorched but still alive, protected by their space suits.

Pel couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t just use flame to hem them in or drive them back; since they had worn those protective suits he had to make it plain that there was no defense against the Brown Magician’s power.

He reached down to the magical flow again, and brought it up, and this time an Imperial soldier became a walking torch for an instant before collapsing into nothing. He didn’t even have time to scream before his suit held nothing but ash.

Then another went, and a third.

The suits made it slower, though; Pel had to manifest the flames inside the men’s bodies, and the lack of air made it necessary to use more magic.

Then, as he concentrated on his fourth victim, something whizzed past him, through the matrix.

Then an entire barrage tore through the air toward him, and he recognized them-arrows!

He turned them all aside easily, but it distracted him for a moment.

The Empire was getting more inventive, it seemed; Pel decided that he had best be more cautious. He twisted the light, to ensure that he would be completely invisible behind the cloud of color and shadow, and thickened the air below and before himself, forming a protective barrier.

More arrows flew up at him, and were diverted.

Something made a cracking sound, and something smaller and faster than an arrow tore past-a bullet.

He hadn’t known the Empire had guns, and for a moment he was on the verge of panic.

Then he remembered who and what he was.

He thickened his barrier once again and looped back for another pass over the Imperials-he had overshot their entire installation while they were shooting at him.

There were the bowmen, he saw-or rather, the crossbowmen. And there was someone with a muzzle-loading pistol, stuffing a wad down the barrel-was that the best the Galactic Empire could do?

That was nothing. Pel carefully targeted the pistoleer as his next incendiary victim, then began on the archers.

By the time he had incinerated a dozen men the Imperials appeared to be in full retreat, most of them running for their precious escape route, and Pel decided that he had made his point; he didn’t have to kill anyone else.

“Deliver the bodies!” he shouted, using the matrix to amplify his voice so that everyone could hear it.

Most of them probably didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, but word would reach those who did.

“I can close the warp, you know,” he called. “I’m letting you go. All I want is the bodies.”

One of the Imperials raised a megaphone-it figured that they wouldn’t even have a proper bullhorn; their technology was really pretty primitive, outside of the blasters and anti-gravity. Mostly equivalent to the early 19th century, Pel estimated-they weren’t very advanced at all, Galactic Empire or not.

“If you continue, we’ll destroy the bodies!” the man bellowed.

For a moment, Pel was shocked into silence; he flew on past the Imperials and wheeled about before replying.

“You do that,” Pel shouted back, trembling with anger, “and your fucking Empire will never know a minute’s peace as long as I live! You think I’ve given you trouble before, you’re fooling yourselves! I haven’t begun! I can make your lives hell!” He turned again. “You tell your masters that! You go home now, or you die-and you tell your masters that if they damage those bodies they’re all dead meat!”

He gestured, and fire burst up in walls around the Imperials, flames roaring twenty feet into the air, driving them back toward the space-warp.

“You tell them that!” he shrieked. “Tell them!”

* * * *

“How marvelous,” Markham muttered, reading the reports. “Now we’ve made him mad.”

“You think he’s serious?” Sheffield asked quietly.

Markham looked up in astonishment. “Of course he’s serious!”

“You think he can make good on his threat?”

“I don’t have any idea,” Markham said, “but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”

* * * *

Pel didn’t go back to Shadowmarsh after the warp collapsed into non-existence, leaving ash and debris scattered across some poor farmer’s fields. He needed to think.

His fit of temper had subsided, but he was still in no mood to see anyone else just now. The flight back to the fortress would take hours, and night was approaching, but he still didn’t want to head back yet.

Instead he sailed over the castle, waving to the tiny figures on the battlements; a few waved back, while most ran to hide. Then he let the wind blow him onward, across unfamiliar terrain; he knew that he could always find his way back, thanks to the matrix that had become a part of him.

And it didn’t matter anyway. He had the matrix with him wherever he went, anywhere in Faerie-and he didn’t have Nancy and Rachel.

He had to convince the Empire to give him the bodies.

Asking politely hadn’t worked. Making token raids hadn’t worked. Fighting off their counter-attacks hadn’t worked. What could he do that would convince them?

What could he offer them?

Conversely, what could he threaten them with?

He had an entire world he could give them-he didn’t care what happened to Faerie, so long as he got his family back and could go safely home to Earth. But how could he ensure that they would deliver the bodies? They didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust them; how could they work an exchange safely, when he couldn’t go into the Empire, and they couldn’t come here without his permission? Why should they believe that he wouldn’t just fry them all and take Faerie back once he had what he wanted?

They wouldn’t. Bribes wouldn’t work. It would have to be threats.

But what could he threaten them with? He had already threatened them with raids and sabotage and the like. What could he say that would scare them…

“Them.”

Just who were they, anyway? Who did he have to scare?

He didn’t know; he had talked to a bunch of different officers and civilian officials, but none of them had been very high in the Imperial hierarchy. Somehow, he doubted Major Southern was running things at Base One. There was that General Hart people had talked about-Pel wasn’t sure whether he had ever met him.

But they weren’t all that important, Pel was sure. They weren’t making policy.

Pel didn’t know who was making Imperial policy.

He did know who the nominal head of state was, though, and he suddenly thought of what threat he could make, even if he didn’t know who he was threatening.

Whether His Imperial Majesty George VIII was a figurehead or an actual monarch Pel didn’t know, and somehow he suspected it didn’t matter, because in neither case could the Empire’s rulers sit by and let him be assassinated.

Pel let the wind lower him gently, and landed in a forest, where magic flowed strongly in intricate patterns through the trees. Cutting wooden slabs was easy, and using his finger as a focal point it was easy to cut letters into them with his magic. The light of the matrix made the gathering gloom of evening irrelevant.

He would not settle for one. He could not risk anything going wrong, and one board might get lost, might be ignored, might land someplace too far from wherever the bodies were kept, someplace that didn’t have one of the Empire’s four hundred telepaths close at hand.

And he’d send these to places he’d hit before, and places he hadn’t-let them know that they couldn’t stop him.

He cut slab after slab, and wrote the same message into each of them.

IF THE BODIES ARE NOT DELIVERED WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF THE APPEARANCE OF THIS MESSAGE, YOUR EMPEROR WILL DIE.