In the Empire of Shadow

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Slowly, Susan lowered the pistol. Then she shrugged, and said to Amy, “I told you it wouldn’t work.” She turned away.

  And Raven let out his breath.

  He had not realized, until that moment, that he had bated it.

  Nor had he realized, until the danger was past, that he had thought Susan would shoot. Yet it was with surprise and wonder that he saw her put the weapon away, and saw Taillefer standing unharmed.

  Had it been he himself who held the weapon, and who held Susan’s position, Raven knew that Taillefer would now be dead.

  Which would, as Taillefer had said, be a disaster.

  This bore some thought.

  * * * *

  “Maybe you should have wounded him,” Pel suggested quietly, leaning on one elbow. The stone pavement of Castle Regisvert was cold beneath him. “If you’d put a bullet in his leg, say, maybe he’d have believed you, not called your bluff.”

  Susan, lying nearby, raised her head and shook it no; Pel could just barely see the movement in the darkness. “Too risky,” she said. “What if he bled to death, or the wound got infected? No, it was all bluff, and we lost.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We go to sleep, Mr. Brown. It’s late, it’s been a long day. You heard Raven and Wilkins and Taillefer. We’ll talk it all out tomorrow, by daylight.”

  “But how do we get back to Earth?” Pel heard his own voice rising in pitch; he realized that he must sound almost hysterical.

  That was reasonable; he was almost hysterical. He had to get home. He had to get out of this fairy-tale world, this pulp fantasy story he had found himself in, back to the sane and normal world of lawn mowers and income taxes and marketing consultation, back to the world of Nancy and Rachel. He couldn’t stay in Faerie; he simply couldn’t take it.

  And his only way back was Taillefer, and Taillefer was refusing to cooperate.

  How could he go to sleep?

  “How do we get back?” he repeated, a bit more quietly.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Brown,” Susan said. “I don’t know, and no one here knows. You’re tired, we’re all tired, we’re distraught—get some sleep. It’ll help.”

  “But what…”

  “Maybe Taillefer will be braver by daylight; had you thought of that? People are like that sometimes—everybody is, whether they admit it or not. It’s easier to take risks by daylight. Go to sleep, Mr. Brown.”

  Pel hesitated, then rolled over, and tried to sleep.

  It was easier than he had expected.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amy sat up, stretched, then immediately leaned over and threw up—or tried to; her stomach held nothing she could bring up.

  Susan awoke at the sound; Amy saw the attorney’s eyes, closed a moment before, open and watching her. Pel, on Susan’s other side, stirred.

  Taillefer, already up and about, turned and looked at her with interest.

  “What ails you, woman?” he asked.

  “I dunno,” Amy muttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Have you a fever, then?”

  Amy shrugged; Susan, who had felt Amy’s wrist and forehead the night before, answered, “No fever I could find.”

  “Is’t bad food, perchance? What had you to eat, of late?”

  “Garbage,” Amy muttered.

  “The same as the rest of us,” Susan replied.

  Taillefer considered that. “Well, betimes a poison may strike one and pass another by, yet…how long has this troubled you?”

  “A few days,” Amy said, wiping her hand on a clump of grass.

  “Has it…your pardon for my coarseness; has it troubled your bowels?”

  Amy shook her head. “Not really. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Feel you weak and weary, perchance? An so, did that come ere the vomiting?”

  “I’ve felt rotten for weeks,” Amy agreed. “But it’s just this place—I need to go home!”

  Taillefer shook his head. “I think that’s not the cause, mistress.”

  Amy glared up at him. “Oh? Is this something people get here? You recognize it?”

  Taillefer smiled crookedly. “An I read the signs aright, mistress,” he said, “’tis something that women must surely ‘get’ in every land, be it here in the True World, or in the Galactic Empire, or on your Earth. Are you wed?”

  For a moment, Amy didn’t understand what Taillefer meant; the sudden question seemed to come from nowhere, to be completely irrelevant.

  Then she saw the connection. The anger drained from her stare, to be replaced with shock.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  * * * *

  Pel returned from the bushes still blinking sleepily as he buttoned his pants; he wished the Galactic Empire had developed the zippered fly, but they apparently hadn’t. He looked up to see that Amy was crying, and Susan was comforting her—again.

  Pel frowned slightly. Whatever was bothering Amy, she didn’t seem to be taking it well. It didn’t seem to be getting much worse—or any better.

  He had heard her asking Susan whether she thought it could be the same thing that killed Grummetty and Alella, that her system was somehow incompatible with this entire universe; he didn’t see how that could be it, since no one else was affected, and he certainly hoped it wasn’t that.

  Well, whatever it was, there wasn’t anything he could do about it except help her get back to Earth. The sooner the whole group sat down together and figured out how to do that, the better.

  Amy and Susan were sitting against the east wall of the great hall, in the shade; Ted was still asleep nearby. Taillefer and Valadrakul were talking quietly over toward the northeast corner. Raven and Singer and Prossie were doing something together in the sunlit center of the hall, shadows stretching far out to the west—Pel hoped they were getting breakfast. Wilkins and Marks and Sawyer were moving about over at the south end, where thorn bushes had grown up through the broken floor.

  Stoddard was nowhere in sight; Pel guessed he was out gathering firewood. The morning air was chilly and damp, fragrant with mosses and weeds, and he still had no shirt; a fire would be welcome.

  But there was no need to wait for that; if everyone but Ted was awake, it was time to start discussion.

  “So what are we doing?” Pel demanded loudly, of no one in particular.

  “Getting breakfast, I hope,” Wilkins replied. “We’ve been trying to catch something here—might be a woodchuck, if you have those here.”

  The two wizards looked up from their colloquy. “Perchance I might lend a hand,” Valadrakul said.

  * * * *

  The animal was a badger, not a woodchuck, and managed to claw Singer’s arm before being clubbed into unconsciousness by the butts of four blasters and a chunk of wood; it was finished off by Wilkins, who cut its throat with his pocket knife.

  Pel watched the operation with morbid interest, but did not help beyond lending moral support; he was not yet accustomed to killing his own food. It seemed like a very messy business—not that he saw much of an alternative here.

  He did help build the fire, though.

  The meat was edible, at least some of it—Raven cut out the portions he said were fit to eat, and left the rest. Even when properly cooked, however, it wasn’t very pleasant eating, and the relatively good parts did not go very far when divided a dozen ways. The smells of blood and dew-wet badger fur lingered, which didn’t help Pel’s appetite any.

  For the rest of the meal Taillefer had a pouch of hard biscuits he shared out, while Sawyer and Marks brought water from a nearby spring.

  As they ate, Pel kept looking for Stoddard’s return, but there was no sign of the man; when he suggested that a share be set aside for him, Raven simply shook his head.

  Amy ate her share quietly, without complaint, and kept it down—she seemed more interested in the biscuits than the meat, however.

  The entire party was gathered around the cooking fire in a circle, more or less; the three women were seated tog
ether on one side, between Ted Deranian and Albert Singer, while the other men were arranged in no particular order. Pel found himself between Sawyer and Valadrakul; Raven was seated on Sawyer’s other side, Taillefer just beyond Valadrakul.

  When everyone had eaten, and had brushed crumbs from their hands and clothes, and Valadrakul had collected the offal and gnawed bones in a heap on the dead animal’s hide for later burial in sacrifice to the Goddess the Faerie folk worshipped, Pel asked loudly, “Should we get down to business now, or should we wait for Stoddard?”

  Raven glared silently at him; Valadrakul looked up from the badger skin to say quietly, “Messire Brown, speak you no more of Raven’s man. Stoddard left in the night, whither we know not, without leave nor notice. We can but assume that he has left Raven’s service, as did so many others, and that we’ll not see him more.”

  Startled, Pel turned to Raven for confirmation; the nobleman nodded, once.

  It had never occurred to Pel, despite Stoddard’s complaints, that Stoddard would really desert.

  “Oh,” he said. Then he recovered himself. “Well, then, let’s get on with it!”

  “On with what?” Wilkins demanded.

  “On with deciding what to do next, of course,” Pel said. “Taillefer says he won’t open the space-warp for us, and we don’t seem to be able to force him—so how do we get home?”

  “Maybe we don’t,” Wilkins growled.

  “And you’ll all be made welcome by those of us who yet resist Shadow’s foul dominion,” Raven said. “Live you among us, and join our fight!”

  “I say we go back to the ship,” Marks said. “Maybe they’ve sent a rescue party. Or maybe the lieutenant’s got some plans of his own.”

  “We can check that easily enough,” Susan said. She leaned forward to speak past Amy, to Prossie. “Did they send a rescue party?”

  * * * *

  Prossie had been sitting quietly, not listening, not thinking, but just being; it was something she had never really done until very recently. All her life, back in the Empire, no matter where she was sent, no matter where she lived, she had had to either listen, or to actively shut out the constant background noise of other minds; she had never, ever been able to sit and to do absolutely nothing, to neither think nor heed the world around her. The Empire did not allow telepaths that sort of isolation; telepaths were watched and guarded, always kept aboard crowded ships or in crowded military installations or in crowded cities. Telepaths, even should one somehow find herself far away from all ordinary minds, were always in contact with the far-flung network of their clan, always open to the common chitchat of their sibs and cousins; even their dreams were shared, built up of the gossip passing back and forth around them and the images that drifted through a shared unconscious.

  In Prossie’s brief stay on Earth she had been too frightened by the strangeness of mental silence, too lonely, too worried about what would become of her, to really appreciate the virtues of solitude. A jail cell on an alien world, she thought, was hardly the best place for a young woman to look into herself.

  And at first, here in Faerie, she had been too busy worrying about survival, too concerned with the politics of Base One, too involved with events—and she had had Carrie, sending to her, listening to her, keeping her in touch.

  But since she had cut herself loose, told Carrie to break off, she had begun to drift inward, to look down into the depths of her own mind, depths that she had never really acknowledged to exist until now.

  She knew, of course, that minds all exist on multiple levels, sometimes in parallel and contradictory consciousness—she had seen for herself that people could believe things at the same time they saw them for nonsense, and never notice the discrepancy; she had seen that the same person could feel love, hate, and indifference, all at once, toward something. She had known that there were layers of memory and emotion, piled up upon each other ever since infancy, though she had always been forbidden to dig down into all that accumulated experience.

  But she had never, before this, thought that there must be such layers in her own mind. She had never, before this, tried to explore those layers.

  But during the walk across the Starlinshire Downs, the wait for Taillefer at the Castle Regisvert, she had begun to wonder. She found herself thinking of things, almost at random, that she had not thought of in months, or years—and for the first time in her life, she couldn’t attribute it to leakage from the thoughts of those around her.

  These odd bits of thought, and of memory, must be coming from her.

  And when she reached that realization, she began to deliberately look for them, to search her own memories, her own feelings—as she had been forbidden to, back in the Empire, where the government wanted all their telepaths to be nothing more than communication devices, with no thoughts or desires of their own.

  She had never thought of that as something bad before. She had been trained to think that the Empire had been merciful and kind in not simply killing all the telepaths, as a danger to the state—or simply allowing hostile mobs to kill them. Everyone she knew had told her that, had believed that, and it was almost impossible for her to disagree when she could see that belief in the minds around her. That the Empire had done so because they found telepaths useful she had always known and accepted; that was the price of survival.

  But it wasn’t fair. She had been denied all her own thoughts.

  And, she discovered as she slept on the cold stone floor of Regisvert, her own dreams, as well. Her dreams that night were fragmentary and uneasy; her mind was not accustomed to constructing its own, without outside influence.

  When she awoke she tried to remember those dreams, and could not; she sat there, groping to recover images, as the soldiers trapped and butchered the badger. She ate silently, letting her own memories drift up from wherever they had been buried, enjoying the sensation of not thinking, not listening, but just being herself.

  And then she realized everyone was staring at her, that someone had asked her a question.

  Susan repeated, “Did Base One send a rescue party?”

  Prossie blinked, and said, “I don’t know.” Recovering quickly, she added, “I’ve been out of touch; should I see if I can make contact and ask?”

  She saw some of the others glancing uneasily at one another; she saw Wilkins making a familiar, hated gesture to Marks, the clawed finger-wiggling sign used to tease telepaths, the sign that meant “freak” or “monster.”

  “If you could,” Susan said.

  “I’ll try,” Prossie said. She sat up straighter and closed her eyes—which was just for show, not necessary, but it seemed to be called for in this instance.

  She didn’t say anything to Wilkins, didn’t acknowledge his gesture, but inside she hated him with an intensity she had never before allowed herself, a hate that was hot and crawling in her skull, a hate that was the cumulative effect of a thousand memories collected throughout her lifetime, from infancy right up to now, of being loathed just for what she was, regardless of what she did, or who she was.

  Maybe she wouldn’t try at all; why should she help Wilkins and his like? How would anyone know?

  But it had been Susan who asked, not Wilkins. Prossie wondered why anyone cared, why they thought of it just now—she hadn’t been listening to the conversation at all, she realized.

  But whether she tried or not made little difference, really; it was up to Carrie, and as she sat, mind open and receptive, she realized that Carrie wasn’t listening, wasn’t sending, wasn’t there at all as far as Prossie could tell. No one else made contact, either.

  She opened her eyes and started to speak, then caught herself.

  Why were they asking about rescues?

  The only possible reason was that they were hoping to go back to the ship and be rescued themselves.

  There were monsters back there. Shadow would have taken an interest in the ship by now. To go back there would be insanely dangerous. And even if by some miracle the Em
pire really had sent a rescue party, which they had certainly had no intention of doing when she was last in contact with Carrie, Prossie did not want to go back and be rescued.

  “No rescue,” she said. “They’ve decided not to risk it. We’re on our own.”

  It was a lie—but who cared? These people would never know unless they returned to the Empire, and Prossie would never go back there, never go back to the hatred and oppression, the rules and limits, the constant barrage of thought.

  Right now, though, she thought she had better pay closer attention to what was being said.

  * * * *

  “I just want to go home,” Amy said.

  “Me, too,” Pel said.

  “I want to wake up,” Ted said. “I’m tired of this.”

  “Same thing,” Pel told him.

  “I’m not real interested in staying around here, either,” Wilkins said. “The question is, what we can do about it?”

  “If nobody’s rescued the lieutenant,” Sawyer asked Prossie, “what has happened to those guys?”

  “I don’t know,” Prossie said. “I don’t have any way to find out; they’re cut off, no communications.” She looked Sawyer in the eye.

  Sawyer frowned, obviously unhappy with the answer—or with Prossie’s behavior.

  “I’d send you all home,” Raven said, “if ’twas in my power. Alas, ’tis not. Think you, then, on what you’d have in the stead of that—would you join me in the fight ’gainst Shadow? Though in truth I’d rather the weapons of Earth, yet would willing hands be welcome e’en without.”

  “You won’t reconsider?” Pel asked Taillefer.

  The wizard shook his head. “Nay,” he said. “To open a portal would be to die at Shadow’s hand, and I’ve no wish to die.”

  Pel looked at him, then back at Raven, then around at the others, at Ted and Amy and Susan, Ted with his bandaged head, Amy leaning weakly against Susan, who stood clutching her big black purse. The wizard Taillefer, the only one here who could get them out of this storybook world and back home to Earth and sanity, but too afraid of Shadow to try; Raven, who wanted guns to fight Shadow; Ted, who thought he was dreaming; poor sick Amy; Susan, with the revolver in her purse…