The Reign of the Brown Magician

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  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 tha
t 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.

  Chapter Three

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Amy said wearily. “It’s over, it’s done, and I just want to go home and forget about it.”

  “What about the spaceship in your back yard?” Major Johnston asked.

  Amy sighed.

  She had to admit that Johnston had done his best to make it easy on her; he hadn’t nagged, hadn’t argued, hadn’t pushed when she said she didn’t know something—but on the other hand, he had this annoying habit of finding questions she didn’t want to think about.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What about it?”

  “Are you going to just leave it there?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Assuming you have a choice.”

  “I haven’t decided. Do you want it?”

  Johnston hesitated, then admitted, “We haven’t decided, either. We might; please let us know before you do anything drastic with it.”

  “Sure,” Amy said. “May I go now?”

  “Um…” The major hesitated. “Not quite yet, I’m afraid.”

  * * * *

  “We’ve got t
he report from Beckett, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  Bascombe leaned back. “Let’s have it, then,” he said.

  “The formal statement is still being written up, sir, but the gist of it is that several unidentified corpses were found in a field outside Blessingbury that could easily have been the place Thorpe appeared. All but one of the corpses were adult males, in some sort of black livery, carrying swords; the one female wore a gray robe and carried no weapon. All had been killed by blaster fire, but no blasters were found; a more careful search is ongoing.”

  Bascombe blinked and straightened up.

  “Swords?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. That’s what the telepath said, anyway.”

  “The bodies—were they human?”

  The lieutenant hesitated. “Well, yes, sir, so far as I know,” he said. “The report calls them dark-haired Nordic males, which would certainly seem to imply human. I don’t think any autopsies have been done yet, though.”

  “Dark-haired Nordic?”

  “Yes, sir, Nordic is the standard term for any pure-blooded white, you know, it’s not just the true…”

  “Shut up.”

  Bascombe knew Imperial racial classifications as well as anyone; what he didn’t know was why any Imperial citizen, except a few holders of ceremonial titles back on Terra, would be carrying a sword.

  Shadow’s creatures might well use swords, but most of them didn’t seem to be genuine human beings. Even the humanoids often had black skin—not the brown of a Negro, but actual black.

  On the other hand, the people of Earth were authentic human beings, so far as Bascombe knew. Of the four who had stayed at Base One for several weeks, three had been white, one Azeatic; Bascombe had never seen a Negro Earthman, but that didn’t mean much, since that foursome was hardly a fair sample.

  Did Earthpeople still use swords? Earlier reports had indicated that they carried projectile weapons, not blades—gunpowder-and-bullet firearms. Perhaps this group had been even more primitive, though, or had been uncertain their guns would work in Imperial space. Swords always worked. And they never needed reloading.