The Reign of the Brown Magician

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Two guards stood at the door. After an exchange of salutes and whispers, one of the guards opened the door and ushered Curran in.

  Sheffield stood at the head of a long table, presiding over the meeting; along the sides were Markham, Albright, and Howe, as Curran might have expected—but also John Bascombe, Samuel Best, Sebastian Warner, Ron Wilkins, Brian Hall, Carrie Hall, General Hart, Major Cochran, and at least a dozen others Curran didn’t immediately recognize.

  Everyone who had attended any of Curran’s briefings for this assignment appeared to be present.

  All of them glanced up as the door opened.

  “Ah, Curran,” Secretary Sheffield said. “Come in! We’ve saved you a seat.” He pointed.

  Curran took the chair indicated, between Best and Warner, and whispered to Best, “What’s happened?”

  Best leaned over and whispered back, “One of Brown’s agents threatened the Emperor. In person. In the Imperial Palace itself.”

  “He what?” Curran blinked.

  “She. We got word telepathically just after you went through the warp—even thought about calling you back, but by the time we could have suited someone else up…”

  “How’d this person…what did she…”

  “No one knows how she got in, but she was waiting in the Emperor’s private apartments when he prepared to retire, and she told him that the Brown Magician wants the bodies now.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “But what’s really frightening,” Best said, “is that she got away.”

  “How?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I take it, Mr. Curran,” Sheffield’s voice said, overriding the private exchange, “that Mr. Best has filled you in on the situation.”

  Curran looked up, startled. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “I believe you’ve just spoken with the Brown Magician—and after this latest stunt, I begin to think he deserves to be called a magician.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he say anything that might shed light on this situation?”

  Curran hesitated, swallowed, then stood up, and reported the conversation.

  He was still answering questions about the details when the telepaths began delivering the first reports of surrendering agents.

  * * * *

  “So what’s the general attitude over there?” the lieutenant asked casually.

  “Scared shitless,” Carleton Miletti replied.

  That was different; the lieutenant struggled not to show any interest, since that might break Miletti’s semi-trance. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Oh, Brown did something they didn’t think was possible, something to do with their emperor,” Miletti explained.

  “What did he do?”

  Miletti shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “Was he trying to scare them into turning over the remains?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Probably. They don’t know.”

  “Didn’t work, of course.”

  “Of course not.”

  * * * *

  Pel stretched and yawned as he stood in the open hatchway. He’d slept away most of the morning, he was sure. The sunlight spattered across the clearing was not at a particularly low angle.

  Leaves rustled overhead, and branches sighed in the breeze, but other than that all was quiet. There was no Imperial deputation waiting to deliver the bodies.

  He supposed they might be huddling at the foot of the ladder, but he doubted it. More likely they were signing receipts and filling out forms before releasing anything. Either that, or they were waiting to see how many spies they collected before they paid for them.

  After a good night’s sleep, Pel was in a far better temper than he had been; he was willing to be magnanimous and patient. The Empire had agreed to deliver the corpses, he had met their terms—it was just a matter of time.

  He hopped down from the ship and ambled toward the ladder, smiling.

  * * * *

  The first surrenders were on Delta Scorpius IV; from there, they radiated out into the Empire at slightly less than the speed a courier ship could travel.

  Word of the initial round reached Base One almost instantly; when Samuel Best had turned up on Delta Scorpius IV, Albright had made sure that the local government there had a telepath on hand at all times. He’d also had men search the area where Best said he had appeared, and had had a guard posted, but had not located any sort of space-warp. Best’s description wasn’t sufficient to pinpoint the exact spot, but at least they knew which building it was—Best said he had found himself in the office area of an old warehouse.

  When the surrenders began, Albright had sent for a report from those guards.

  There had been a small disturbance a day or so before the first surrender—objects had appeared loudly from nowhere. A civilian who had been hanging around, one of the people who worked there, had argued with the guards, slipped out of sight for a time, then returned.

  They hadn’t held him. Albright cursed them all for idiots when he heard that.

  They had checked his identity, though—his name was Peter Gregory. Albright ordered an immediate search.

  It was two days later that Gregory was found—or rather, that he turned himself in at the local constabulary, announcing that he was the ringleader of the Brown Magician’s espionage network.

  By then, however, Albright hardly cared. The surrenders had spread as far as Base One, and shock after shock was registering as one trusted person after another announced that he or she was actually one of Shadow’s spies, now working for the Brown Magician. The telepaths were constantly busy, interrogating the captured spies—or trying to; many, it turned out, were impervious to telepathy, which explained how they had survived for so long.

  No one had expected that.

  And no one had expected how many spies would turn themselves in. The official count made Peter Gregory #113, and Marshal Albright was morally certain that there were others whose capture had not yet been reported—and that there were many more yet to come.

  After all, these were just from a two-day radius around Delta Scorpius IV, and the Empire’s full expanse required thirty days to cross.

  And while no one in the Emperor’s cabinet had surrendered, nor anyone in Intelligence, nor any telepaths—that was a terrifying thought!—still, it was a shock when General Hart’s aide confessed to deliberately arranging for the inept Colonel Carson to command the expedition to Faerie, instead of the competent Captain Haggerty, to ensure the mission’s failure; when an engineer confessed to unsuccessfully attempting to sabotage the entire space-warp program; when Major Harrison acknowledged doing everything he could to ensure hostility between the Empire and Earth…

  How could there be so many infiltrators?

  Why hadn’t the telepaths long ago spotted them and reported them?

  And the most frightening question of all—if Pel Brown was giving all these agents up, what was he holding back?

  ChapterTwenty-One

  Pel sat cross-legged on the verandah of his treehouse and glared angrily up the dangling rope ladder.

  A little time for paperwork and general dithering was one thing, but this was getting ridiculous. He had been hanging around here for days, waiting for the Empire to make good on its promise.

  He had kept himself busy. He had constructed the elaborate four-room treehouse, growing some parts and building others, and then furnishing it to suit himself, using pieces of the dead bat-thing and I.S.S. Christopher for some of his raw materials; he had sent messages written on tree bark and shaped into gliders, rather like paper airplanes, back to the fortress, to keep Susan and the imitation Nancy appraised of his whereabouts; he had created a few monstrous little servants for himself from bits of tissue he found in the forest—tufts of fur, lost feathers, and the like.

  And he’d done all that, made himself this cozy little nest, and all the time, what the hell had the Empire done?

 
Nothing, so far as he could see!

  No one had emerged from the warp since that popinjay Curran had departed.

  And nobody responded when he opened the portal to Gregory’s place and threw things in—presumably Gregory had, as ordered, turned himself in to the Imperial police.

  Well, they’d had quite long enough.

  Without looking, he sent an arm of the matrix back to the clearing, a hundred yards away—he’d done this often enough while working on the house that he hardly needed to think about it any­more.

  The magic touched Christopher. Rivets flashed red and parted, as purple paint blackened and flaked away; a moment later a hull plate, about four feet by eight, popped out of the wrecked ship’s hull and floated gently upward.

  Black letters etched themselves into the metal surface, spelling out Pel’s message: YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO CONTACT ME AND EXPLAIN THE DELAY.

  Then the curved steel sheet sailed up through the treetops, and on through the space-warp at the top of the ladder.

  * * * *

  How many more were there?

  Secretary Sheffield’s hands trembled as he stared at the latest list. Terra itself appeared to be complete now, as Base One had been for days; the woman who had appeared in the Emperor’s own bedroom was secure, under heavy guard. Surrenders had ceased throughout most of the inner Empire, though more of Shadow’s agents continued to trickle in elsewhere.

  The count was over four hundred in all.

  Four hundred, including generals, technicians, records clerks, confidential secretaries, and assorted others in sensitive positions.

  And they had thought that after Operation Spotlight, with its haul of almost a hundred, there might still be as many as twenty left.

  How had Shadow done it? She must have spent all her free time for seven years infiltrating her agents into the Empire! And some of these agents were people who had well-documented histories going back to childhood, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, but the telepaths were now saying that some of them weren’t even truly human. How had Shadow managed that? Had she corrupted records? Had she somehow created false memories in friends and family members? Had she substituted her imitations for the real people?

  If so, how had she done it without their closest friends noticing any change?

  Had she actually been working her agents into the Empire for decades, not just the seven years everyone had assumed?

  And what was Pel Brown holding in reserve? Surely, he wouldn’t give up this network for next to nothing. Were these four hundred just the tip of the iceberg?

  It was a nightmare.

  The list was still clutched in his hand when someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The door opened, and a messenger saluted nervously.

  “A message has been received, Your Excellency,” he said, “from the Brown Magician.”

  Sheffield looked up, cold dread clutching his heart.

  The messenger cleared his throat, and continued, “It was etched into a plate from a spaceship’s outer hull. The complete text read, ‘You have one hour to contact me and explain the delay.’ It came through the warp…” He glanced at his watch. “…twenty-three minutes ago.”

  “Good God,” Sheffield said, struggling to his feet.

  His legs didn’t want to support him; he leaned heavily on the table.

  They had to keep Brown talking.

  “Send a messenger through immediately,” he said. “Before the hour is up. The messenger is to say that an explanation will be along within another hour. Use a telepath to get that to the warp crew, if it’s fastest—do whatever it takes. Go! Get going!”

  The messenger saluted, and turned away.

  “Run!” Sheffield shouted after him. “Run, damn you!”

  The messenger ran.

  * * * *

  Pel wished he had a watch.

  Electronics didn’t work in Faerie, though, so his old digital watch would have been useless even if he still had it. Spring-driven watches probably worked well enough, but they didn’t appear to have been invented here—at any rate, Pel hadn’t seen any.

  He hadn’t bothered to make a sundial, either.

  An hourglass would be in keeping with the local technology, but he didn’t have one, and he had no idea how he could calibrate the thing if he created one.

  It made it hard to tell how much of the hour had passed. It felt as if it had been an hour or more since he had sent that chunk of steel through the warp, but he couldn’t really tell for sure.

  Just then he felt the kinking of the matrix as something came through the warp. He looked up, blinking against the sun, and tried to focus on the top of the ladder.

  Leaves were in the way, but that was easily fixed; a brief flare in the matrix and nothing blocked his view, not even the drifting wisp of smoke that was all that remained of the branches that had obtruded.

  The space suited figure was moving slowly and carefully down the ladder, and Pel didn’t want to wait; he reached a magical something up and snatched the person off the ladder, swept him spiraling down through the treetops and deposited him with a bump on Pel’s own verandah, in the very midst of the glare of the matrix.

  * * * *

  “Maybe you should just give him the damn bodies,” Markham suggested.

  Albright turned, shocked. “Give up our only bargaining chip?”

  Markham shrugged.

  “Why the hell not?” he asked.

  But he knew he was outvoted.

  * * * *

  Pel kept the first messenger on the verandah while they waited for the second.

  The man was terrified. At first Pel didn’t much care; he let the fellow sit there in his space suit with the helmet off, trembling, looking around at the trees, at the twenty-foot drop to the ground, at the shifting polychrome of the matrix.

  But it was probably going to be an hour before the next guy appeared, and it wasn’t the poor messenger’s fault he’d been sent. This wasn’t anyone Pel had seen before, not Curran or any of the soldiers.

  “You been here before?” Pel asked at last.

  “No,” the messenger said, shaking his head violently. “I haven’t even been in a suit since basic training.”

  “Why’d they send you, then?”

  “I was handy. I’m just a base messenger. Secretary Sheffield was in private, no telepath, so they sent me to give him your message, and he sent me back, and they suited me up and put me through. All the regulars, Lieutenant Warner and Lieutenant James and Lieutenant Butler, were in conference somewhere.”

  “What about Best, or Wilkins?”

  The messenger looked up into the glare, then blinked quickly and turned away. “Who?” he asked.

  “Never mind.” Pel considered telling the poor bastard to suit up and go home, but just then, as he glanced thoughtfully up the ladder, he saw something glitter in the sun.

  The second messenger was arriving.

  Again, he reached up and plucked the suited figure off the ladder, and swept it down to the verandah.

  As he lowered the newcomer to the wooden beams, Pel smiled.

  It was Curran, and his absurd hat was squeezed into the helmet of his space suit, looking rather like an unborn chick inside its egg in one of those grade-school science books. Pel was tempted to shatter or dissolve the helmet to free the poor thing, but he resisted—that would have meant stranding the man here until a replacement could be sent.

  Or made; Pel supposed he could make one almost as easily as he could shatter one.

  Instead, he waited while Curran undogged the thing and lifted it off.

  He then doffed his hat, and while still wearing his space suit he bowed dramatically, surreptitiously shaking the feathers back into shape as he did; Pel watched with amusement.

  For one thing, Curran had misjudged Pel’s position within the glowing haze of the matrix, and was bowing elegantly to a tree-branch.

  “All right, Curran,” Pel said, “what�
�s the story? Why aren’t the bodies here? I had my people turn themselves in; what’s the delay?”

  “Your pardon, my lord,” Curran said. “We just need some surety, some guarantee, that in fact all your agents have surrendered.”

  “Why? Do you have any evidence that some are missing?”

  “No, my lord; we just need proof that you’ve held nothing back. We were, we confess, rather shaken by how high some of them had penetrated in the Imperial government, and we need to know that there are no more.”

  “There are no more. I give you my word on it,” Pel said. “I ordered all of them to surrender.” He hesitated. “I suppose it’s possible a couple didn’t get the word, but if so, they’re people I’ve lost contact with myself, so they’re harmless.” He waved the possibility aside. “In any case, I’ve lived up to my side of the bargain—I’ve turned the lot of them over. Now it’s the Empire’s turn to deliver.”

  “The bodies of your wife and child, you mean.”

  “Right. I want them. Now.”

  “My lord, if you could give us some proof that no spies remain…”

  “How the hell am I supposed to prove it?” Pel shouted. “I gave you my word I ordered them all to surrender; what the hell else can I do?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what would satisfy my superiors, my lord; perhaps they don’t know themselves.”

  “Well, you better go back and bloody well find out!” Pel shouted, lifting Curran into the air. “Or better yet, tell them to go fuck themselves—if those bodies aren’t here in…in two hours, I’ll make the Empire regret it!” He tried to force himself to calm down, and partially managed it. “Look, Curran,” he said, “all I’m asking is this one simple thing—two corpses that I know you people already have, stored away in a freezer somewhere on Base One. All you have to do is haul ’em through the space warp and lower them down on a rope—what’s the big deal? You don’t care about them! And I don’t care about your stupid Galactic Empire—I just want my wife and daughter back. You people have set me conditions, you’ve put me off, you’ve lied and procrastinated, and I’ve done nothing but go along with it, I’ve acted in good faith, I’ve had dozens of my servants give themselves up, and God only knows what you’re doing with them all. And what have I got to show for it?” His temper snapped again. “Nothing!” he shouted. “That’s what I’ve got to show for it! Well, to hell with you and your damn empire, Mr. Curran—I want those bodies now, within two hours, or the Empire’s going to be very sorry! You go back and you tell them that!”