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.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“He can’t mean it,” Sheffield said.
“Why the hell not?” Albright demanded.
“I wish we knew more about him,” Markham said. “If we knew why he wanted the corpses…maybe we should send someone to Earth, to talk to people who knew him.”
Albright snorted. “Not that easy. We cut Earth off; they’ve no reason to cooperate, and they’ve got a guard on our warp site. We’d have to open a new one, and then our men would have to find some way to cross hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain without being noticed, find the right people to talk to without alerting the local government…”
“You don’t think they’d cooperate?” Markham asked.
“Why should they?” Albright said with a shrug.
“Given time, we might manage a mission such as you describe,” Celia Howe said. “But what good would it do? We couldn’t possibly get anything useful done before that twenty-four-hour deadline.”
The telepath in the corner cleared his throat, and all four faces turned toward him.
“His Imperial Majesty informs me,” the telepath said, “that we are to return this man’s family forthwith.”
“Well, that’s it, then,” Markham sa
id, with visible relief.
“But does His Majesty understand that we cannot be sure what Brown intends…” Sheffield began.
“His Majesty understands quite enough,” the telepath said, cutting him off. “He also desires that we proffer a formal apology, and Secretary Sheffield is hereby recalled to Terra immediately.”
The others glanced at one another; they knew what this meant.
George VIII let his governments operate independently up to a point—but when his personal safety was threatened, that point had been passed.
Sheffield was ruined, at least temporarily; the Emperor would undoubtedly convene the Council and the Peerage and ask them to appoint a new government. And until they came up with one he liked he would run the Empire himself.
Whether Albright and Markham retained their posts…well, the Emperor hated doing the work of running the Empire himself. He would want a new government installed quickly. That meant as few cabinet changes as possible, and His Imperial Majesty might well instruct the legislature accordingly.
But on the other hand, Albright and Markham were involved in this interdimensional debacle, just as much as Sheffield was.
It was up to the Imperial whim.
Meanwhile, they had little choice but to obey orders as quickly and efficiently as possible. Albright stood up.
“Get me a messenger,” he said.
* * * *
The matrix twisted, and Pel almost fell. A space-warp had opened, one that was fairly close, and big enough to disturb the matrix noticeably.
It was, he quickly realized, in the same place as the second invasion.
He looked down at the forest below with something like regret; he had been enjoying his scenic tour of Faerie. The mountains ahead looked quite spectacular, and he was sure there was plenty more to be seen. He hadn’t yet come across more elves, nor any of the little people, the gnomes, as they were called, let alone their homeland of Hrumph.
Of course, Grummetty’s comments all those months ago had implied that Shadow had driven the gnomes out of Hrumph—they might have wound up on a reservation somewhere, the way the elves had.
There was so much Pel didn’t know.
For some time he had thought of Faerie as a narrow strip stretching from Shadowmarsh to the Low Forest, but now it had finally sunk in that it was an entire world.
Perhaps he and Nancy and Rachel could take a vacation here before returning to Earth, take a flying tour of the countryside. They couldn’t see all of it, of course—there was far too much, a world larger than the whole Earth—but they could roam about a bit.
For now, though, it was time to see whether the Empire had finally seen reason, or whether he would have to find a way to kill George VIII and hope that George IX, or whoever the next Emperor was, would be more sensible.
He wheeled about and headed back across the wooded hills, accelerating as he went.
Moments later he stumbled to a stop on the charred remains of a barley field, where two steel cylinders lay side by side, a sheet of paper atop one of them.
He picked up the paper and read, “With Our apologies for the delay, and hopes for cordial relations hereafter.” A blue seal adorned one corner. The signature was done with something like a rubber stamp and was slightly blurred, but still decipherable—Georgius VIII Imperator et Rex. An illegible scribble next to it was presumably the mark of the secretary who had stamped the document in accordance with Imperial instructions.
“Well, that’s more like it,” Pel said to no one, dropping the paper and turning to the cylinders.
His stomach was suddenly trembling inside him, his knees unsteady.
The cylinders were cold to the touch. Each was held closed by two complex screwed-down latches of some sort; Pel spun the flywheel of each latch on the nearer container and pried open the complicated hooks.
He felt as if he might faint, and his hands were cold, and not just from the cold metal. He was sweating. At last, at long last, he had his wife and daughter back.
Either that, or the Empire was in for unrelieved hell, if this should prove to be some other stupid delay.
He lifted the lid, not breathing, and looked inside.
For a moment he thought that it was some sort of trick, that they had substituted some ghastly thing for his wife; then he realized he was wrong.
This thing was Nancy.
She was naked, but so battered and horrific that that hardly mattered. Her skin was pale and discolored, a sickly grayish hue, and large areas were flaking or peeling, as if her skin were badly weathered paint. Her belly was a ruin of blackened, torn meat—the pirates had shot her in the gut with a blaster at point-blank range. She was half-frozen, still stiff, lying in a puddle of condensation.
One of her legs was cracked, exposing bone and flesh; Pel supposed it had happened while she was frozen.
And three fingers were gone from her right hand, but a moment later Pel spotted them, little shrivelled pink things lying by her hip.
And her face…part of the skin was gone from around her left eye, and her right cheekbone was caved in; a huge purple bruise had apparently formed before death. Her eyes were wide open and staring.
But it was Nancy.
Pel stepped back and sat down abruptly to keep from falling. He felt sick and faint.
He had never thought about what she would look like. He had thought of her looking as if she were asleep.
He should have known better. Especially after some of the things he had seen since—the disembowelled bodies hanging from gibbets in Shadow’s empire, the blackened remnants of Shadow’s enemies, the corpses he had resurrected himself, the Imperial troops he had killed himself—he should certainly have known better.
He put his head down and took deep, slow breaths, and tried not to think about her appearance.
After a minute or two he felt better—still sick, but fairly sure he wouldn’t faint or vomit.
He didn’t look at Nancy again; instead he went to the other cylinder and opened the latches.
He hesitated, however, before lifting the lid.
No one had said how Rachel had died. He knew she had died on Zeta Leo III, at the hands of the slave-owners there, but only that. Nancy had been beaten, raped, and murdered by the pirates on Emerald Princess; Rachel’s death was a mystery.
He had to be prepared for the worst.
He took a deep breath, then opened the cylinder and looked in.
It wasn’t as bad.
She was wrapped in dirty white cloth from her shoulders to her knees, and whatever might be hidden by the cloth, Pel wasn’t interested in seeing. There were no bloodstains, nothing obviously broken or missing; her eyes were closed. Although she was plainly dead, so pale and lifeless that no one would ever mistake her for a living child, she showed no signs of whatever had killed her. There were a few bruises, though, and her face was smudged with dirt. Bits of dirt clung to her hair, as well, and more dirt was smeared across the cloth…
She had been buried, Pel realized. That was why it had taken the Imperial task force so long to find her. They had found her and dug her up and brought her back to Base One after someone, probably her killer, had buried her.
Buried her without a coffin, obviously—just wrapped in an improvised shroud.
Had whoever it was been trying to do the right thing? Or had the killer just been disposing of the evidence?
It didn’t matter; all that mattered was that Pel had her back.
He reached down and touched her.
Her skin was cold and dead—very cold. Like Nancy, she had apparently been frozen, or at least refrigerated.
Pel shuddered and withdrew his hand, and the motion jarred the corpse; Rachel’s head rolled slightly to one side, and Pel saw the purple finger marks on her neck and knew how she had died.
But that was past. She was here now, in a world where magic worked, and her father, who had done nothing to save her when she was alive, would bring her back to life.
He clo
sed the lid and screwed down the latches, then did the same for the other cylinder. A moment later he was airborne, the cylinders following him northward through the sky, toward Shadowmarsh and Shadow’s fortress, where Shadow’s magic would restore them all.
* * * *
John Bascombe leaned back and smiled. The news had spread like wildfire, like the shock wave of a supernova—the Empire had yielded to the Brown Magician’s demands. The war was over, and the Empire had come out second-best. Sheffield had been recalled to Earth. A new government would be formed.
And John Bascombe, Under-Secretary for Interdimensional Affairs, was pretty sure that Sheffield would take the others down with him—Markham and Albright and Hart and all the rest of them.
But not him. Not John Bascombe. Because he’d been cut out of everything, shunted off to the side; none of what had happened was his fault.
Or at least, none of it could be pinned on him, and that was what counted.
And with Markham and the rest surely doomed, that would mean opportunities for advancement. He might not be the new Secretary of Science, but he thought he ought to be able to move up a notch or two. Perhaps General Under-Secretary of Science? Imperial Advisor on Science?
He was musing pleasantly on the various possibilities when the door of his office burst open and two men stepped in, blasters drawn.
They wore the purple and gold of the Imperial Guard. Bascombe sat up suddenly and stared.
“John Bascombe?” one of them asked.
“Uh,” Bascombe said.
“John Bascombe, you are under arrest, by order of His Imperial Majesty, George VIII.”
“Uh,” Bascombe said again, staring.
How could he be under arrest? And it wasn’t just Sheffield or the others taking a last-minute revenge—the Imperial Guard didn’t take orders from anyone but the Emperor and their own officers.
They didn’t ordinarily leave Terra at all—the Emperor must have sent them here especially. It must be a full-scale purge, Bascombe realized.
But he hadn’t done anything wrong! Oh, he had intrigued a little, hidden a few little mishaps, but he hadn’t done anything wrong, he hadn’t been one of Sheffield’s people…
The Reign of the Brown Magician Page 28
