The Reign of the Brown Magician Page 2

  He could stop the sound, of course; any time he wanted to, he could stop it. He could blast the gargoyle into powder, if he chose. He thought that with a little more effort he could repair it, gathering dust from the air around it and healing the carved stone.

  He did neither; instead, he drew the power to him, reached out into the web, into the power matrix, and found the lines that led up into the clouds overhead. He shifted them, working by feel in a way he had no words to explain.

  The rain stopped, as if someone had shut off a faucet. Almost immediately after the last drops plopped onto the tile roof the steady flow from the other gargoyles slowed, and the spattering fall from the broken pipe changed its rhythm, becoming less even.

  And that was worse.

  It didn’t sound like his daughter any­more; it didn’t sound like anything. It was as if he had erased the last trace of her. The sky was still grey overhead, the water was still dripping from the eaves, the battlement was still glazed with rain, but no invisible child’s footsteps pattered on the stone.

  Instead, damp air swirled and whispered across the stone, driven not by wind, but by the magical currents of the matrix.

  He pulled the power to him, grabbing at it, hauling it in; magic seethed in his mind and his fingers, and the distinction between himself and the matrix he held became vague and uncertain. A red sheen blurred his vision for a second, and then was swept aside in a shower of crimson sparks that danced wildly across the stonework.

  He was glowing again; his control of his appearance had slipped, and a halo of shifting colors flickered around him.

  He ignored it, looking upward.

  The clouds hung above him, low and dark, and he sent a broad band of scarlet fire snaking upward, lighting them to the color of blood.

  The unnatural glow suffused the landscape; the green forests on the distant hills turned black, the gray marshlands that encircled the fortress were tinged with a rusty life, and the castle itself took on a color that had never been seen in nature, not in this world, nor on Pel’s native Earth.

  It looked like something out of a horror movie, Pel thought, that eerie sky and the thick clouds and the gargoyles, hovering above him.

  That seemed perfectly appropriate. He felt as if he’d fallen into a story months ago, and been unable to climb back out. Sometimes it was science fiction, as in the Galactic Empire, with their spaceships and blasters; sometimes it was an epic fantasy, as when Shadow had made him into a wizard and he had turned on her and destroyed her. Why shouldn’t it be a horror story now?

  He released the knot of power he had gathered—not in a spell, as he had thought he would, but in a simple release, flowing back into its natural patterns—or at any rate, into a form as natural as the patterns could be while still bound together in the world-spanning matrix that Shadow had created for herself and passed on to Pel.

  The rain began falling anew, and Pel turned away.

  He had no reason to be up here, really. He had been exploring the fortress for lack of anything better to do—or rather, because he was not sure he knew what he wanted to do.

  He knew what he wanted to have—he wanted his wife and child back. And he knew that he held a power that could allegedly raise the dead.

  But he didn’t know what he had to do to make it work. He didn’t know how to find out.

  Hadn’t someone said that knowledge was power? Well, Pel thought, the converse didn’t seem to be true. He had all the power he could want, but it hadn’t gotten him much in the way of knowledge.

  He stepped into the tower, closed the door behind him, and started down the stair. The way was dark and narrow, the slit windows covered by dusty shutters, and Pel had no lantern or torch, but he didn’t need one—he carried the mobile focus of all this world’s magic with him wherever he went, and its glow brilliantly illuminated the surrounding stone walls.

  He didn’t need to see at all, though; the matrix also let him sense the shape of the world around him in some more direct way he did not understand.

  It was amazing how quickly he had become accustomed to carrying this thing about wherever he went, he thought as he tramped down the steps. Shadow had used something like hypnosis on him, he knew—something that used magic, rather than the simple psychological stunts and suggestions of Earthly hypnotists. She had wanted him to learn quickly, not for his own good, but so that he could serve her purposes that much sooner. So he accepted calmly that his senses were altered and enhanced, that he was bound to a network of mystical force as if it were a part of his body, that he could draw on that seemingly-infinite source of energy and therefore no longer grew tired, no matter what he did.

  It was mad, really; he was living out an insane power fantasy. Shadow had used this matrix to rule her entire world, and had intended to conquer others, as well; surely, Pel thought, no individual could handle such physical power. It had to be some sort of dream or delusion—a story, not real.

  If it was all real, then how could he accept it so calmly?

  He paused, and looked about at the shifting glare of colors that shone across rough gray stone.

  Was it real?

  Of course it was. Poor Ted Deranian had thought he was dreaming, and it had gotten him beaten and abused; Pel wasn’t going to make that mistake. This was all real.

  But how did he know he hadn’t dreamed Ted? And Amy and Prossie, and all the others. None of them were here now to tell him if he was mad or dreaming. He had sent the three of them, Amy and Ted and Prossie, safely back to Earth, and the rest were dead or missing.

  He shook his head, and magical currents twisted and writhed around him.

  He wasn’t dreaming. It was all real. It was as real as anything had ever been; he reached out and touched the nearest wall, felt the cool, hard stone under his fingertips.

  It was real.

  It was real, and he controlled all the magic in this world of magic, and it didn’t seem strange at all. It seemed perfectly natural.

  He wondered if that was a good thing.

  * * * *

  The technician sat up abruptly at the sound of the beep. He blinked at the panel, and his eyes widened as he saw the code number indicating which phone was in use. He reached for his own phone.

  “Get me Major Johnston,” he said. “We have an outgoing call on the Brown phone.”

  Chapter Two

  He could make the fetches obey him.

  It wasn’t really much of an accomplishment for a person in Pel’s position, but it was a start.

  He supposed that making living people obey him would probably be easier; he could just threaten to incinerate them, and they would obey out of fear.

  Fetches, however, were already dead. To be exact, they were dead people Shadow had revived as her servants; the fortress held dozens of them.

  There were hundreds of homunculi in the place, if that was the correct term for all the creatures Shadow had created from scratch, rather than just re-animated—everything from artificial insects to the dead dragon at the foot of the grand staircase, and Pel could sense that there were even bigger beasts outside the castle, such as the burrowing behemoth that had attacked Pel’s party at Stormcrack, months earlier, or gigantic bat-things like the one Valadrakul of Warricken had slain in the Low Forest of West Sunderland.

  Pel had decided to start with the fetches, though; they were all human in appearance, for one thing, and he was more comfortable with that. For another, he was very concerned with the resurrection of the dead. He didn’t want Nancy and Rachel to be mere zombies, like the fetches, but he assumed that any spell that could restore his family would be somehow related to whatever Shadow had done to produce fetches.

  He had found three of them simply standing in one of the corridors, lifeless and mute. At first he had stared at them, expecting them to notice him; then he had tried ordering them verbally, telling them to walk.

  They had stood there, unmoving, as the shifting colors of the matrix had played across them, rich deep blu
e and honey-gold predominating just at that moment.

  Then he had used the matrix, used his magic, and had found the little tangle of magic in the heart and spine and brain of each fetch, the magic that, he saw, controlled each one’s action. He had poked and prodded at one with immaterial fingers—and the fetch had twitched and shivered and blinked.

  He had told it, “Speak,” and it had opened its mouth, but no sound came out. He had realized, with shocked disgust, that it wasn’t breathing.

  “Breathe,” he had told it, and the chest expanded; air was sucked into its lungs in a hollow gasp, then expelled in a rasping wheeze.

  One breath, and it stopped.

  Pel shuddered.

  “Never mind that,” he had said. “Will you obey me, now?”

  The fetch had blinked, then nodded, and suddenly seemed alive again—somber and silent, but alive. He had, he saw, had to establish a link between its internal web and the greater web of the matrix, a link that Shadow must have once had, and must have severed at some point—probably when she first transferred the matrix to Pel.

  Having established the link he controlled the fetch entirely, just as he controlled the matrix itself.

  And that meant he could make the fetches obey him. He would have servants—or rather, slaves—who could run errands for him, do whatever he needed to have done.

  That was a good start, he thought. It was a definite step forward on the road to using the matrix properly, and to learning to resurrect the dead.

  “Go to the throne room,” he ordered. The fetch sketched a bow, then turned and marched away.

  It was only a first step, though. There were things he needed to know if he was to bring Nancy and Rachel back from the dead that he couldn’t learn just from ordering fetches around, and while the matrix probably contained all the knowledge he needed, somewhere, somehow, he didn’t know how to get at it. He needed someone to talk to about his plans, someone who could teach him.

  Someone to teach him magic, he thought, as he watched the fetch march down the passage toward the throne room. Pel’s lips tightened, and the aura flickered into harsh reds and smoky browns.

  He wanted a wizard.

  And while Shadow had been the last matrix wizard, the only wizard who regularly raised the dead, while Shadow was dead because Pel had sent Prossie Thorpe to kill her, Shadow had not been the only wizard in the world Pel and his companions had called Faerie.

  Even though Shadow had roasted Valadrakul to death, and Shadow’s creatures had butchered Elani, Pel thought he knew at least one other wizard who still lived: Taillefer, that fat coward who had refused to open a portal to either Earth or the Empire. After Elani had died, Valadrakul had not known how to open portals to other worlds, so he had summoned Taillefer—and Taillefer had refused to help, for fear of drawing Shadow’s attention.

  Well, Pel had learned how to open his own portals. And now he could send fetches out to… Pel smiled grimly. He could send fetches out to fetch Taillefer.

  Taillefer might not know how to raise the dead, but he surely could teach Pel something.

  Pel strode toward the throne room, still smiling.

  * * * *

  Amy hung up the phone. “Donna says she’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” she said. She smiled with relief.

  Prossie didn’t smile back. “Then what?” she asked.

  “Then she’ll drive us out to my place,” Amy replied. It was such a pleasure to be able to say that, to be able to take cars and telephones for granted, to know what was going on again! “I guess she can drop Ted off on the way, and then we can settle in. I don’t know if there’ll be much that’s fit to eat after all this time, but we can get into some decent clean clothes.” She frowned slightly, thinking and planning. “I don’t have my keys, but if I have to, I guess I can break a window to get in. Or maybe I should call a locksmith. I’ll have to find one who’ll take a check, I don’t have any cash. The checkbook’s gone, too, but I have extra checks at home.”

  Prossie nodded, though it wasn’t a very enthusiastic gesture. Amy didn’t really notice. She was on familiar ground after months of living nightmare; she didn’t want to think about Prossie’s problems yet. There would be time for that later.

  “There’s canned soup, that’ll still be good,” Amy said, talking more to herself now than to Prossie. “And I should have something that’ll fit you—you’re only an inch or so shorter than I am, right?” She sighed. “I wonder if they stopped delivering my mail? I guess if Pel’s phone still works, mine will, too, but there must be about three months’ bills waiting. And all my clients will have given up on me—I’ll have to just about start the business over again.”

  She paused and glanced at her companion, but Prossie didn’t respond.

  Amy continued, “I suppose that spaceship is still in the back yard—did you have anything on board? It might still be there, if nobody’s gotten in and stolen it. And I’ll need to call the doctor and make an appointment as soon as I can.” She shuddered slightly. She didn’t like to think about getting an abortion, but it had to be done—she couldn’t afford a baby, and anyway, her life was quite disrupted enough without bearing the child of a dead rapist from another universe.

  And it wouldn’t hurt to have a general check-up, after all she had been through.

  “Do you think they might have posted guards around the ship?” Prossie asked suddenly.

  Amy blinked at her, startled. “Who?” she asked.

  “Your government. The ones who arrested us.”

  Amy put a hand to her mouth, then admitted, “I hadn’t thought of that.” Then she lowered the hand and managed an uncertain smile. “But even if they…no, they can’t have guards there; it’s private property, and poor Susan had a court order or something. And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  As she finished her attempt at reassurance Amy realized she could hear sirens; she turned to look out the window. For a moment she stared in disbelief; then she headed for the living room for a better view.

  “How did they know?” Prossie asked as she followed Amy. “Do you think they might have telepaths, somehow?”

  “No,” Amy said. “They don’t have any telepaths. They might have the place staked out, though. I didn’t think we were that obvious.” She paused, then added, “They must have tapped the phone.”

  Prossie didn’t ask what that meant.

  A moment later Amy and Prossie were joined by Ted, and the three of them stood at the front window watching as men in suits and uniforms emerged from the two county police cruisers that had pulled up in front of the Browns’ home, and from an official-looking car in the driveway, a sedan that had a government seal of some sort on the driver’s door.

  Amy realized, annoyed, that she hadn’t had a chance to go through Nancy’s closet; she was still in her Imperial rags. She doubted these people would let her change.

  And her hair was a mess—her last bleach and perm had all grown out long ago, and she hadn’t even had a chance to brush it in days.

  Ted moaned softly.

  * * * *

  “We have a report, sir,” the lieutenant said, saluting briskly.

  Bascombe put down his pen and glowered at the young man.

  “A report from whom?” he demanded. “From where? About what?”

  “From Registered Master Telepath Bernard Dixon, sir!” the lieutenant said, snapping sharply back to attention.

  “Ah,” Bascombe said. “And exactly which of our mind-reading freaks is this Dixon?”

  “Telepath Dixon is currently serving aboard I.S.S. Meteor, sir, investigating the reported reappearance of the renegade, Proserpine Thorpe.”

  “Which reported reappearance?”

  “Uh…the first one, sir. I think.” The lieutenant quivered uncertainly. Bascombe sighed.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. According to Dixon, he has established, working in cooperation with five other telepaths, the approximate location of
Thorpe’s reappearance—he reports that there is only one system it could have been in, an unnamed system with no habitable planets—the navigator aboard Meteor has the catalog number, but it was not included in the report. Dixon is unable to narrow it down any farther; no physical traces have been found, and telepathy, he says, is not sufficiently precise over interstellar distances to be more exact.”

  “Did he say how he found the system at all?” Bascombe asked.

  “Ah…that was not included in the report I received, sir,” the lieutenant admitted.

  “Dismissed,” Bascombe said.

  “Sir?” The lieutenant blinked.

  “I said dismissed. Get out.”

  The lieutenant almost forgot to salute again as he hurried out.

  Bascombe picked up his pen and considered.

  He knew how the location was determined; telepaths on a dozen planets had been asked to report which direction Prossie Thorpe had been in, and those were then adjusted by the astronomers to allow for planetary rotation and used as approximate vectors. Where the resulting lines—or rather, cones, since none were narrow enough to be lines—intersected, that was where Thorpe had been.

  Meteor had been sent to explore the resulting volume of space; the charts didn’t show any inhabited systems there, but the charts could be wrong.

  This time, according to Dixon, they weren’t. And he’d checked back with five other stinking mutants to see if his distance felt right.

  So Thorpe hadn’t appeared on an inhabited planet, or even just a habitable one.

  That meant a ship.

  And that might explain why her stay there had been so brief, only about a minute—she had delivered something to a ship, and then returned to Shadow’s world.

  But if she were just a courier, why would Shadow, or Raven, or whoever was behind it, use a telepath? A telepath would stand out like a beacon—Thorpe had stood out like a beacon.

  Someone had wanted the Empire to know something was going on; someone had wanted to get the Empire’s attention—but who? And why?