The Reign of the Brown Magician

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  He marched on ahead, seemingly unwearied by the long flight, up the stairs and across the landing into the throne room. The matrix glow lingered sufficiently for the others, rather more worn, to make their way up the steps at their own pace.

  Amy’s legs ached by the time she stepped into the throne room, arm raised to fend off the glare.

  “Pel?” she called, as she advanced cautiously into the light. “Could you turn it down?”

  “Sure.”

  And the glow was gone—or rather, reduced to insignificance, to just enough to light the throne room pleasantly. Amy could see Pel’s face.

  His hair was fairly long and hung in greying tangles around his head; his beard was shaggy and uneven as well. Both appeared to have been cut at least once since she had last seen him—but it hadn’t been very recently. He had obviously not concerned himself with his appearance lately.

  Well, the telepaths had said he appeared to be depressed, and that would fit. She moved cautiously nearer.

  Best and Wilkins stepped to the doorway, but waited there as Amy walked warily into the room to talk to Pel.

  They’d done their job; they’d gotten her to Pel safely. The rest was up to her. This was what the Empire was paying her a small fortune in gold for; this was what she had agreed to when she had coaxed from the Imperials a promise to commute Prossie’s treason sentence from death to exile.

  Amy looked around the room, trying to collect her thoughts.

  She didn’t remember that hole in the ceiling. She didn’t remember the litter along the sides of the room, or the thin layer of ash that she scuffed through as she approached Pel’s throne. She didn’t remember the damp, faintly musty odor.

  It reminded her of a pre-teenager’s bedroom—the sort of kid who never cleaned up, and screamed if his parents dared move a single candy wrapper.

  “So, how’s it going?” she asked.

  Pel shrugged. “Hard to say; how’ve you been doing? I guess the Empire sent you to talk to me about something?”

  “I’m fine, thanks—the Air Force people have been very nice about everything. And yes, they tell me that the Emperor himself suggested I come talk to you.”

  “Really? Wow.” Pel sprawled comfortably in his throne; Amy looked around for somewhere she might sit, but found nothing.

  After all, this was a ruler’s throne room, she realized; she wasn’t supposed to sit in the presence of royalty, or wizardry, or whatever Pel was.

  “So here you are,” Pel said, “and it’s good to see a familiar face, and I hope we can talk awhile before I send you home again, but what was it the Emperor wanted you to say?”

  Amy hesitated; she hardly knew where to begin. This wasn’t going the way she had pictured it.

  “Come on, let’s get the business out of the way,” Pel urged.

  “He thinks you’re upset about something,” Amy said. “Or his advisors do, or the telepaths, or someone; I never talked to the Emperor, of course, just a bunch of officers and bureaucrats, but they seemed nicer than the ones we dealt with before.”

  “Maybe you’re just more used to them now.”

  “Maybe,” Amy agreed. “Or maybe I’m not so scared. They weren’t trying to send me off to fight Shadow, after all, they just wanted me to talk to you.”

  “I’m as powerful as Shadow was,” Pel remarked. “Or pretty nearly, anyway. I can’t do a lot of the stuff she did, but I can do plenty.”

  “So I’ve heard.” She hesitated, then asked, “Are you upset about something?”

  Pel looked away, at a door in a side wall that had stood slightly ajar; now it slammed shut, though no one had touched it.

  He looked back at Amy.

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said.

  Amy glanced back at Best and Wilkins, who stepped back discreetly.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Pel swallowed, and looked entirely human for a moment.

  “It’s Nancy,” he said.

  “Nancy’s dead?” Amy asked.

  She wasn’t sure just what had happened to Nancy. She knew that the Empire had delivered her corpse to Pel, she knew that Shadow had claimed to be able to raise the dead, and Pel claimed to have all Shadow’s power, but had Pel really brought Nancy back to life?

  “Yeah,” Pel said, and Amy could hear the pain in his voice, “she’s dead. She’s up and walking, but she’s still dead, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Pel slammed a fist into the back of his chair, and plumes of golden flame flared momentarily into existence on all sides, then vanished.

  “Of course I’m sure, damn it!”

  Amy took a step back, but then Pel burst into tears.

  “Oh, God, Amy,” he said, “of course I’m sure!”

  * * * *

  It didn’t really matter what she said, Pel thought; it was just good to have someone he could talk to, someone he could explain it all to, someone from Earth, someone real, someone who would understand.

  He hadn’t known Amy back on Earth, he had only met her at that first gathering in his house, when Raven of Stormcrack Keep and his little band of resistance fighters had led Captain Cahn and his crew, and Amy and her lawyer, and Pel and his wife and daughter and their lawyer, into Faerie.

  For five minutes, Raven had said. Just to see. Just so they would know it was real.

  How long had it been? Pel had lost track of time; here in the windowless depths of Shadow’s fortress, where he didn’t need to eat or sleep, he had let days slip by uncounted. The seasons were different here, the year longer than Earth’s—it was autumn here, wasn’t it? Back in Maryland winter had probably come and gone.

  Five minutes, Raven had said.

  And he and Amy and the others had been trapped into this adventure, this long storybook adventure that should have ended with Shadow’s destruction and Pel’s ascension, when everyone was supposed to live happily ever after.

  Or with Nancy and Rachel’s resurrection, when Pel had regained what he had lost, and once again, should have lived happily ever after.

  Happily?

  He wept openly, he sat on the floor with Amy’s arms around him and cried miserably.

  Best and Wilkins retreated to the stairs, embarrassed, and Pel had started to shut the doors, until Amy had reminded him that if he did that, the two Imperials would be in the dark.

  So he had left the doors open, and he didn’t care if they heard him crying. He was the goddamned Brown Magician, he could reduce them to ash with a thought, and he would cry if he wanted.

  His wife and daughter were dead to him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  * * * *

  Amy held Pel and let him cry; she had to keep her eyes closed, and even so they stung with the glare of the matrix, because Pel’s control of its brilliance had slipped with his loss of control of his emotions, but she didn’t turn away or let him go. She held him and let him cry.

  At last he stopped, and fought the matrix down, and she opened her eyes to find him looking up at her, his own eyes red and weary.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You look awful.”

  “So do you,” she said, repressing a sudden urge to giggle. It was all so ridiculous, him lying there in her arms as if he were her lover, but with his hair and beard going every which way and his silly black robe like some comic-book wizard’s cloak making him look like an ancient lunatic.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Pel sat up, and Amy released him.

  “So what are you going to do?” Amy asked.

  “About what?”

  “Well, I meant about Nancy, but as long as you’re asking, what about the Empire? I mean, they sent me here to ask if you’d send home their hostages, and promise not to attack them again, and all that. Normalize relations, I guess you’d say.”

  Pel shook his head. “I don’t want to normalize relations. I want to be left alone. As long as they do that, I won’t bother anyone. And
they can have the hostages back; I don’t even remember where I put them. They’re somewhere in the fortress dungeons, I guess; I’ll let them go, and they can go back to the space-warp with Best and Wilkins.”

  “You won’t open a portal for them?”

  “No.” Pel shifted around to face Amy properly. “No, I’m not going to do that. I wouldn’t know where to send them; I don’t know where any of the openings into the Empire come out.” Amy doubted that that was true, but she didn’t want to argue it. “And besides,” Pel continued, “it’s too much contact with the Empire; every time I’ve dealt with them it’s been trouble. Let them take care of their own.”

  Amy shrugged. “I guess that’ll have to do, then.”

  “It ought to.”

  “I think it will.”

  For a moment the two of them sat silently; then Amy looked around, before the silence became awkward, and remarked, “It’s gotten a bit dusty in here; you’ve been letting the housekeeping go, I guess.”

  Pel looked up at the hole in the ceiling. “I always was a bit of a slob,” he said.

  Amy hesitated, then asked, “So what are you going to do about Nancy?”

  Pel shrugged. “What can I do? She’s my wife—my responsibility. I was the one who brought her here and brought her back to life. I have to stay with her and try to go on loving her.” He sighed heavily. “I suggested that she go back to Earth without me, but she didn’t want to. She didn’t really mind, but…and besides, after what happened to Grummetty and Alella, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.”

  “So why don’t you go back to Earth?”

  “Leave her?” Pel looked at Amy, startled.

  “You said she was dead, Pel; if she’s dead, let her go.”

  “But she’s alive, really, she’s just different.”

  “If she’s not the woman you married, let her go; if Rachel’s not your daughter any­more, let Nancy have her.”

  Pel turned away. “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Pel,” Amy said, “have I ever talked to you about my ex-husband, Stan?”

  Pel didn’t answer, and Amy continued, “One day I saw that he wasn’t the man I’d thought I’d married, that I didn’t know him and didn’t love him, and I divorced him—and it was the smartest thing I could have done. Staying in a bad relationship isn’t a good thing to do.”

  “This is different,” Pel said.

  “Yeah, I suppose it is—but is it that different?”

  Pel got up and began brushing dust and ash from his black magician’s robe.

  “I can’t go back to Earth,” he said, not looking at Amy. “I’m the Brown Magician, the ruler here. I control all the magic. If I leave, the matrix will come apart and all the magic will run wild.”

  “If you’re happy here,” Amy said, “then stay.”

  “It’s not…I mean, I’m needed. Without me there’d be chaos.”

  “So you’re running everything, the way Shadow did?”

  “Not the way Shadow did,” Pel replied. “No hangings—I’ve outlawed the death penalty for anything short of murder. And no eviscerations even for that. And I don’t keep a close watch on everything the way she tried to do; I never learned how she did all that stuff.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I…well, I stopped the Empire from invading.”

  “They said you raided them first, and your men killed innocent people.”

  “Well, they’d lied to me! They cheated me!” The matrix flared up redly for a moment, and Amy decided not to argue with that.

  Instead, she said, “So you attacked them?”

  “Just some little raids.”

  “And they counter-attacked, but you stopped them?”

  He nodded. “That was easy. I just let some of the magic turn to flame, and burned them up, drove them back into the space-warps.”

  “Same as Shadow would have done.”

  Pel nodded again, not looking at her.

  He had closed himself off again, Amy thought; that moment of emotional release, when he had wept in her arms, was past.

  The matrix was flickering in and out of visibility around him, like spreading multicolored flames; a swirl of fine black ash rose up for a second in a gust of magical wind.

  Amy wondered where that ash had come from. What had Pel burned here?

  Had he burned people?

  He had admitted burning those Imperial soldiers. He had committed murder, had taken human lives—and he didn’t seem to think it was important.

  She took a step back, suddenly frightened.

  “Pel, I think I’d like to go home now,” she said.

  He turned to face her.

  “I’ve said what the Empire wanted me to say,” she said, “and I’ve given you my opinion about what you should do about Nancy and Rachel, and that’s all I came to do. So could you send me home?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Give me a minute.”

  * * * *

  Just before she stepped into the portal, Amy turned to face him for a final word.

  “Be careful, Pel,” she said. “The way you killed those soldiers, and everything, the way you’ve let yourself go—be careful you don’t turn out like Shadow.”

  And then she was gone, back to Earth, to the basement of his own house, in Germantown, Maryland.

  Angrily, he dropped the portal, let it collapse into nothingness as the matrix resumed its proper shape.

  He wasn’t like Shadow. He was a caring, considerate person. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  He’d killed those soldiers, but they weren’t real, they were just Imperials…

  And why weren’t they real?

  And he’d killed Shadow herself, of course, or at least set her up, and he’d destroyed all those fetches, but they weren’t really alive, were they?

  He’d killed a lot of Shadow’s monsters, by sending them into the Empire to die, but they weren’t people.

  He had an excuse for everything—but he had an awful lot to excuse, didn’t he?

  Why hadn’t he just gone back to Earth in the first place? Everyone would have been better off.

  He tried to tell himself that no, the people of Faerie wouldn’t have been better off, they wouldn’t have had him there to protect them—but how much protection had he actually provided? Would the Empire have attacked the elves, or those farms, if Pel hadn’t goaded them into it?

  And most of the time he had just shut himself up here in this fortress, brooding over his own concerns, driving himself to distraction with his problems and ignoring everyone else.

  He didn’t know a thing about Faerie, really. Had he ever talked to the people here? Did he know what they wanted?

  He shook his head.

  He really didn’t. He’d made a half-hearted attempt, back at the beginning, to be the good ruler, but instead of listening to what his people wanted he had told them what he wanted, an end to executions and an attempt at democracy.

  That was hardly anything to be proud of.

  He wasn’t doing anyone any good here—least of all himself, trapping himself here, surrounded by his own failures and by a world that he couldn’t help seeing as somehow unreal, no matter how solid the stone walls might be.

  The door at the side of the throne room opened, and Susan Nguyen—or at least, the thing that used her body and shared her memories—looked in.

  “Go get Nancy and Rachel,” Pel barked. “Both Nancys.”

  If he was going to do something irrevocable, if he was going to leave her, he had to let her know.

  If she asked him to stay, or asked him to take her with him, he would do it, he knew that.

  But if she didn’t, if she said she didn’t care, what would he do?

  Amy was right, he had to be free of Nancy, Nancy was dead and holding onto her wouldn’t help. And the longer he stayed here in this fortress, in this world, the more like Shadow he became.

  Maybe it was somethi
ng in the matrix; maybe it was something in human nature. He didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. Having that power always there, straining to be free, waiting to be used, was changing him for the worse.

  He had to leave Faerie. He didn’t know how to release the matrix completely any other way.

  And he couldn’t pass it on; there was no one in Faerie who had the talent. Shadow had said so; that was why she had chosen him in the first place. The talent for matrix wizardry had been bred out of the inhabitants of Faerie, and among the Imperials she had only found it in the telepaths; only among Earthpeople was it reasonably common. And the only Earthpeople still here in Faerie were revenants or simulacra, who could never hold magic.

  So he would release it, and the matrix would come apart, and wild magic would be loose in the world—and would that really be so bad?

  Shadow had said it would, but Shadow could have been wrong, could have lied.

  Pel couldn’t see how it could be so bad. It would be wild and free, and Shadow would have seen that as bad, but was it really?

  And no new matrix wizards would arise, to gather the power together again—the talent had been bred out. The magic would stay free.

  Pel almost wished he could be here to see it.

  But he couldn’t; he had to go.

  Back home to Earth, to Maryland…

  To Maryland?

  Well, to Earth, certainly; he had no desire to live in the Galactic Empire, under the absolute rule of His Imperial Majesty George VIII.

  But Maryland?

  Back there where his business was ruined, and there were probably a hundred lawsuits and legal complications to deal with because of his sudden disappearance?

  Back to that house full of memories of Nancy and Rachel?

  Why?

  “You wanted us?” Nancy’s voice called from the door.

  “No,” Pel said. “I mean, yes. Come here, all of you.” He sat up in his throne and watched as the three women and the girl approached.

  “If I were to leave,” he asked, watching the passive faces, “permanently, would you prefer to come with me, or stay here?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Susan said.

  “Whichever you like,” the simulacrum said.

  “I don’t really care,” the Nancy revenant said.