Curran might have been trying to say something, but whatever it was, Pel didn’t wait to hear it; he sent Curran soaring upward on an arc of raw magical energy, toward and through the space warp.
Curran was still trying to dog down his helmet seals when he vanished.
* * * *
“It’s an empty threat,” Albright said. “It has to be. What can he possibly do to us? After all, this psionic super-science of his, his so-called ‘magic,’ can’t operate in normal space, can it?”
“Not that we know of,” Markham agreed.
“We’ve broken his spy ring, haven’t we? Four or five hundred of them—he can’t have any more.”
“Then if he hasn’t got any more, why don’t we just give him the damned corpses?” Markham demanded.
“Because we don’t know. He’s making threats—what’s he got to back them up with? We need to know.”
“It seems to me that we’re antagonizing him for no good reason,” Markham insisted. “We’re treating him as an enemy, and he isn’t one.” He paused, then corrected himself, “At least, he wasn’t one. By now, who knows?”
“Of course he’s an enemy,” Albright said. “How could he be anything else? He’s ruler of a world—of a universe! Naturally, he’ll want to expand his power, and that means taking from the Empire.”
“Does it?” Markham asked.
“If we give in to his demands,” Secretary Sheffield said, “then what’s to keep him from making further demands, indefinitely?”
Markham looked at him, startled. “Nothing,” he said, “but isn’t that just what we’re doing?”
* * * *
Pel watched as the sun sank in the west. The two hours were up, obviously; they must have been up long ago.
And there had been nothing. No one had emerged from the warp.
The messenger was asleep on the verandah; Pel walked over and stared down at him for a moment.
He looked young and innocent, asleep there on the wooden platform, with his short blond hair and clean-shaven features, his uniform hidden by the bulky space suit.
Pel kicked him in the back of the head—not particularly hard, but more than a mere prodding. The messenger’s eyes snapped open, and a hand flew up to the injured spot.
“Get your helmet on,” Pel ordered. “You’re going home, and I’ve got a message for you to take.”
The messenger scrambled to his feet, and groped for his helmet.
“It’s a very simple message,” Pel said. “It’s this: It’ll stop when I have the bodies.”
“What will?”
“You don’t need to know that. You just tell them, it’ll stop when I have the bodies, and not a moment sooner. Got that?”
“Yessir.”
“Good. Here you go.”
And the messenger was airborne, heading for the warp.
“Get your helmet on!” Pel shouted after him.
He slowed the ascent, and watched as the kid got his helmet in place; then the matrix flung him upward and out through the warp.
That done, the next step, Pel knew, was to attack the Empire. They’d asked for it, and they were going to get it; no more Mr. Nice Guy.
The only question was how.
ChapterTwenty-Two
He didn’t like it, but returning to Shadow’s fortress was the fastest way to acquire an army. There weren’t any people in the Low Forest; there weren’t even a lot of animals to work with. He’d grown himself a few furry little servants, but they were hardly suitable for what he had in mind.
He had an entire world to draw on, of course, but the fortress still seemed like the place to start.
The stone halls were cold and gloomy, and Pel wondered why it had taken him so long to get the hell out of this damn tomb, into the wide green world—the sunlight might be the wrong color, the air strange, and the gravity harsh, but it was better than these dank corridors. He certainly didn’t want to stay back here any longer than necessary.
He wished there were some sort of rapid transit possible between the fortress and the vicinity of the space-warp; his wind-riding took between three and four hours by his best estimate. The sort of lifting and tossing he’d been doing with Curran and that poor twit of an Imperial messenger was severely limited in range—he couldn’t use the pure magic of the matrix to move things much beyond what he could see, and he had trouble moving himself at all; the winds were faster and safer.
Even a phone line would be helpful, or a telepathic link like the ones in the Empire, but he didn’t have one. He was fairly sure that magic could be used to communicate over long distances—he’d seen Valadrakul summon Taillefer from afar, and everyone seemed to think that Shadow had spied on people all over the world—but Pel didn’t know how it had been done. Once or twice he had thought he was on the verge of using Shadow’s trick of seeing through other people’s eyes, but he had never quite managed it, and had no idea what he was doing wrong.
He could, he supposed, round up the wizards again, and ask them—in fact, it might be a good idea. Not that he liked them much, or thought he could trust them.
That could wait, though; first he needed to assemble his attack force.
He swept into the throne room, the matrix flaring up more brightly than it ever had in the wilds of Sunderland, and sent out the magical summons—every living thing in the fortress was to come to him.
They came—fetches, homunculi, simulacra, monsters, peasants, dogs, cats, everything. The monsters ranged from little buglike flying things the size of his finger up to a creature resembling a rhinoceros that struggled mightily to mount the steps from the entry, and from the sluglike marsh monsters with their simple tubular bodies to a thing that looked like a hundred-pound cross between a spider and an octopus, with additions—it had stalked eyes, tentacles, jointed legs, rudimentary wings, and mandibles like giant pliers.
The dragon, alas, was long dead, its head blown off by Pel’s own magic and the remains incinerated. The gigantic bat-things were far too large to ever enter any building, and the great burrowers were not nearby—but that didn’t matter, because Pel didn’t think he could create a portal anything that size could fit through.
Within moments the throne room was jammed full, and more were still arriving. The humanoids had clustered closest around the throne, arms or hands flung up to shield eyes from the glare; there was the false Nancy, and the real Susan, and any number of fetches and peasants.
Pel thought for a moment, then began giving orders.
* * * *
Shelton Grigsby had always had mixed feelings about his post as governor-general of Beckett. Beckett was a pleasant enough place to live—the gravity was light, the air sweet, the sunlight rich, if a trifle unpleasantly reddish, and the locals were friendly and peaceful. The local flora was plentiful and only rarely toxic, the local fauna generally harmless. Of the three thousand worlds in the Empire, this was definitely one of the mildest environments.
The planet was, however, something of a backwater, well out of the political mainstream, and he sometimes regretted giving up the opportunities for advancement he’d have had if he’d held a post back on Terra or one of the other innermost worlds. A governor-general out here could expect to serve until retirement or death; a peerage, or promotion to the Imperial Council or the Emperor’s cabinet, was unlikely in the extreme.
He had always consoled himself with the thought that he’d probably live longer without the stress and strain of political intrigue, that he’d given up his ambitions but found peace. He’d certainly never expected any trouble on Beckett, with its placid population of a hundred million or so, spread over four small continents and a score of moderately large cities.
He should have known better, he thought.
But he had certainly never expected any trouble out of Blessingbury. The town was a resort in the foothills of the Darlington Mountains, small but reasonably modern, and well supplied with all the essentials and a good many luxuries—a place for the moderate
ly-well-off to spend their annual vacations hiking, riding, or swimming.
Now, though, Blessingbury seemed to be attracting trouble, rather than tourists.
First there were those mysterious corpses, with their swords, that had been shipped off to Base One and got the Empire to station a squad of soldiers and even a telepath in town.
Now, he had a report of monsters.
He glanced out the window of the limousine; they had bypassed the town itself and headed for the meadows to the northeast, where the corpses had been found and where the monster had been reported.
From up here everything looked ordinary enough.
The car was descending; the chauffeur had his orders, and was following them.
A moment later, Grigsby stepped out and clapped his hat on his head—this was official business, and he had to look the part.
A lieutenant in full uniform stepped up to greet him; Grigsby snapped off a salute, then turned toward the meadow.
It wasn’t hard to find the monster; the thing was lying dead, half a dozen soldiers standing in a ring around it.
It was black and hideous, with fangs and tentacles, and Grigsby had no doubt what it was—he’d read all those briefing papers, like a good little official.
It was a Shadow-beast.
But wasn’t Shadow supposed to be dead?
“What killed it?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” the lieutenant replied. “It was still alive and moving when it was first spotted, but it apparently keeled over shortly after, and by the time anyone dared get close it was definitely dead.”
“Where’d it come from?”
The lieutenant shrugged. “Who knows? There was a trail in the grass, but it appeared out of nowhere a few feet back.”
Grigsby turned to look at the place the soldier indicated—and at that moment, three pale, black-garbed men stepped out of thin air in that exact spot, rayguns ready in their hands.
One of the soldiers reached for his blaster, and an invader blew his head off before the weapon cleared its holster.
Even to the governor’s untrained eye, though, the attacker’s hand seemed unsteady, his aim poor; only the very short range allowed him to hit his target.
“Down!” the lieutenant shouted, tugging at Grigsby’s arm, and Grigsby dropped, stunned by what he had just seen.
That first shot was followed by more; Grigsby heard the electric crackle of blaster discharge and the dull explosions of superheated tissue where the bolts struck, but didn’t see any of what was happening as he dropped and huddled in the tall grass, the lieutenant’s arm flung protectively across his shoulders.
Then, cautiously, he looked up from behind the carcass of the dead monster.
The grass surrounded them in broken disarray; to one side was the slick black hide of the Shadow-beast. Overhead was the familiar purple sky of Beckett, but the blue-white discharges of blasters discolored it in streaks and flashes.
He couldn’t see, from here, who was firing at what.
“What’s going on?” he shouted.
The lieutenant lifted up on one elbow.
“There are more of them,” he said, “but I don’t see…”
Another blaster crackled, and the lieutenant dove again. He groped at his belt for his own weapon. “Stay down, Your Excellency,” he said. Then he was up on his knees, crouching behind the dead Shadow-beast, using it for shelter as he snapped off three quick shots.
Then blue-white electric fire tore through the air and the lieutenant dropped his blaster and fell, clutching at the bloody ruin of his left ear.
“Drop your weapons!” someone shouted—a woman’s voice. “If you don’t shoot at us, we won’t hurt you!”
Grigsby looked at the wounded lieutenant, at the blaster flashes, and shouted, “Cease fire!” He tugged at the lieutenant’s sleeve and told him, “Order them! Cease fire!”
The lieutenant winced, hesitated, then called, “Cease fire!”
The louder discharges stopped almost immediately; the enemy, whoever it was, took two more shots before they, too, stopped firing.
Cautiously, Grigsby pushed himself up on all fours, then rose to a kneeling position and peered over the dead monster’s back.
There were eight or nine of the strangers now—eight or nine still standing, at any rate, and others lying on the ground, dead or wounded. Most of them were men wearing odd, primitive clothing—the same sort of clothing, Grigsby realized, as those mysterious corpses that had appeared in this same meadow some weeks back.
Behind the others, though, was a woman—a woman wearing a heavy black jacket but little or nothing else; her legs were completely bare.
What the hell was a half-naked woman doing on a battlefield?
Of the six soldiers who had surrounded the dead monster, three lay unmoving, two of them visibly missing pieces and obviously dead, the third perhaps only wounded; another sat clutching a blackened arm that hung limp; and the other two, who had taken shelter behind the monster, appeared unhurt.
A stray bolt had hit Grigsby’s official aircar, and a corner of the roof was now torn, blackened, twisted metal instead of sleek purple lacquer. The chauffeur, Ben Miller, had dived out the other side and now crouched behind the vehicle.
At least, Grigsby thought, Miller hadn’t simply flown off and left the others to die.
On the other hand, if he had flown off, and hadn’t been shot down, he might have summoned aid.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Grigsby shouted.
And where the devil did they come from, he wondered silently. He had seen the first three appear as if out of nowhere, and these others had presumably arrived during the fighting, but there were no tracks, there had been no sound to indicate their arrival.
“If you’ll step this way, we’ll explain everything,” the woman answered, gesturing. Grigsby noticed for the first time that her hands were empty. In fact, he realized, most of the attackers appeared to be unarmed; he only counted three blasters.
Maybe ceasing fire had been a mistake; if those were the same three blasters that the first arrivals had had, they couldn’t have very much charge left.
It was too late now, though; he would play along for the moment.
“You, the driver,” the woman called, “and you in the fancy suit—you two go first, the wounded go last.”
Grigsby had serious misgivings about this, but he reluctantly emerged from what little shelter he had and stepped up to where the woman indicated.
“Here?” he said.
“One more step,” she replied.
He obligingly took one more step…
And Beckett vanished.
* * * *
“So what’s the total?” Pel asked, looking up from the unconscious lieutenant.
“We now have nine blasters,” Susan replied. “However, two of them appear to be low on charge. Eight fetches were destroyed. Nancy and the other fetches are unhurt.”
“Fetches are no great loss,” Pel said. “Was anyone on their side hurt?”
“Three men dead,” the false Nancy reported. “Six captured.”
“I can count the captured for myself.” Pel, still on his knees, looked around.
There were four soldiers, counting the lieutenant; he had already repaired an injured arm on one before attending to the lieutenant’s ruined ear. There was a dignified elderly man in a fancy suit—nothing as elaborate as that man Curran’s rig, but this fellow was obviously someone important. And the last man wore a black-and-maroon uniform that Pel had never seen before.
“Someone go get the dead ones,” Pel said. He picked two of the fetches and pointed them out by surrounding them in a golden glow. “You and you—bring the three dead men.” He glanced at the Nancy simulacrum. “Were they all soldiers?”
“Yes.”
“Just the ones in purple uniforms, then—don’t bother with the ones in black.”
The fetches disappeared into the portal.
Pel stood up, str
etched his back, and crossed to his throne. He settled in, got himself comfortable, then largely suppressed the visible manifestations of the matrix, allowing the Imperials to see him.
“All right,” he said, “who are you all?” He pointed at the man in the fancy suit. “You first.”
“My name is Shelton Grigsby,” that gentleman said. “I’m a representative of His Imperial Majesty’s government on Beckett.”
“What sort of a representative?” Pel asked, curious.
Grigsby didn’t answer. Pel shrugged, and pointed to the man in the black uniform. “What about you?”
The man glanced at Grigsby, then said, “I’m Gov…I’m Mr. Grigsby’s driver.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ben Miller.”
“You’re a chauffeur?”
Miller nodded.
“You drive aircars?”
Miller nodded again.
“Good!” Pel said. “That’s perfect. You tell me what kind of a representative your Mr. Grigsby is, then, and I’ll let you go home.”
Miller glanced at his superior, who said nothing, whose expression gave nothing away. The soldiers shifted about uneasily; the lieutenant, no longer under Pel’s sleep spell, stirred uneasily.
“Okay, don’t tell me,” Pel said with a shrug. “I’d think, after seeing me grow that man a new ear and put the other’s arm back together, you’d have a bit more appreciation of me than that, but what the hell. Susan, get a blaster.”
Susan took a raygun from a nearby fetch.
“Now, unless someone tells me just who this Mr. Grigsby is, what his job is, and what an Imperial representative is doing on your little backwater planet,” Pel said, “I’m going to tell this woman to put that blaster to Mr. Miller’s ear and pull the trigger.” He grinned broadly as he spoke.
The Reign of the Brown Magician Page 24
