The Reign of the Brown Magician Read online

  “Be careful,” he said as he turned to go.

  * * * *

  There were advantages, Amy decided, to having vanished in a manner sufficiently mysterious that it attracted the attention of Air Force intelligence. They hadn’t paid her bills, but at least they’d collected her mail and kept the post office from returning it all. Their patrols had scared off burglars. And they’d made sure none of the utilities were shut off.

  It was too bad they hadn’t bothered to answer her phone or explain to any of her clients what had happened. The tape on the answering machine had filled up the first week, mostly with ever-more-angry complaints from the Fosters.

  After calling to make her doctor’s appointment she had tried to phone all of her clients. Some, including the Fosters, didn’t answer; one had moved; one hung up on her. Prema Chatterji was still interested in a consultation, but the others were pretty clearly a total loss. Being called away without warning on “personal matters” for more than three months was not good business.

  And after going through the mountain of mail and matching the unpaid bills against her bank balance and the undeposited checks, she knew she was broke, or nearly so—if nothing bounced and she hadn’t missed anything and she could transfer from her savings account, she would wind up with a balance of about eighteen dollars.

  That wouldn’t even pay for groceries to replace what had gone bad. She sighed.

  “Is it bad?” Prossie asked.

  “Yeah, but it could certainly be worse,” Amy said. She looked up, out the living room window at the Air Force car parked out front.

  Those people wouldn’t let them starve, she was sure. And they were back on Earth, and alive and well.

  “It could be a lot worse,” she said.

  * * * *

  “I want agents on Earth and on Shadow’s world,” Bascombe said. “You tell me how to get them there.”

  The scientist glanced at the telepath, then shrugged. “We can get them through the warp,” he said, “but anti-gravity doesn’t work in either of those realities, so getting them down safely is…well, it’s an engineering problem. And getting them back is tougher.”

  The telepath, a man named Brian Hall, Carrie Hall’s brother, whom Bascombe had not dealt with before, said, “You want to use someone who’s already there. On Earth, our only possible contacts are Prossie Thorpe and the five we contacted before…”

  Bascombe interrupted, “I thought there were six.”

  “Yes, sir; one of them has died.”

  Bascombe nodded. “Go on,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Well, none of those contacts were very satisfactory. Carleton Miletti apparently could only transmit, not receive; though he was aware of our attempts at contact, none of our messages got through. Oram Blaisdell and Ray Aldridge…well, frankly, sir, I’m not sure either of them was entirely sane. And the other two, Angela Thompson and Gwenyth—we never got her last name—are both under-age females, which limits their usefulness.”

  “What about Shadow?”

  “We can’t read Shadow’s mind, sir; we tried, and the telepath who made the attempt died. As for other people in Shadow’s universe, we’ve never managed a solid contact; we don’t know why.”

  “What about our people who went there?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Bascombe glared at him.

  “I mean, sir,” Hall said, “I don’t know if any of them are still alive, and no attempt has been made to contact any of them. I doubt any attempt at contact will succeed, but I don’t know that.”

  “Try it,” Bascombe ordered him. “And get your sister going on contacts on Earth.” Then he turned back to the scientist. “And I want your department to figure out how we can get agents safely to Earth and Shadow. Don’t worry about getting them back yet; we can take care of that when the time comes.”

  “Yes, sir.” The scientist glanced at the telepath; the telepath carefully avoided the man’s gaze.

  “Go on,” Bascombe said. “Both of you. Get on with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter Five

  Pel wondered why he kept coming up to the top of the tower. There wasn’t anything new up here; the rain still sounded like a child’s footsteps, it hadn’t changed any. He’d heard the rain through the broken gargoyle before, seen the landscape spread out on all sides, drawn the currents of power down from the skies and guided them through the clouds. There was nothing new up here.

  But there wasn’t anything new elsewhere in the castle, either. There wasn’t anything he wanted anywhere in the entire place.

  A gust of wind blew dripping rainwater toward him; his aura turned it aside with no conscious command. Pel barely noticed; he just stared out over the marsh.

  He knew why he was up here; it was because he was bored. He was bored and miserable, and this place, out in the rain, with its vast and depressing view, was nicely suited to being bored and miserable.

  Really, it was rather amazing that he was bored and lonely and unhappy. At least in theory, he was the absolute ruler of an entire world; he was an all-powerful magician, with anything he wanted his for the taking.

  Except he didn’t want any of it.

  What he wanted was his family back. Or even, he thought, and hated himself for thinking it, just to know that they were really, permanently dead, and he could never have them back, because at least then it would be over, and he could get on to whatever came next—despair, grief, whatever, and maybe someday, if he lived long enough, building a new life for himself.

  But this not knowing, this possibility of their resurrection, was driving him crazy. He wasn’t thinking straight, hadn’t been able to keep his mind properly on anything since he had first heard Nancy was dead.

  Shadow had said she could raise the dead; she had had her fetches, and even though those weren’t much better than zombies, there was no reason to think they were the best the magical matrix could do.

  After all, Shadow had wanted servants, not companions; she hadn’t been doing anyone any favors with her resurrections.

  Pel didn’t want servants. He wanted Nancy and Rachel back. He wanted to hear real running footsteps on the battlements.

  He paused, staring out over the marsh.

  On the battlements? Did he want to stay here, if he once managed to bring his wife and daughter back from the dead?

  Probably not. It was lonely here. Controlling the matrix gave him power, it let him move and reshape matter anywhere in this world, and at least in theory it could let him see through the eyes of others, hear through their ears; it made him the unquestioned final authority; but it cut him off from everyone else at the same time. No one had even remembered that his predecessor, Shadow, was human—they’d all called her “it,” and treated her as a force of nature.

  He didn’t think he was at that extreme, but the men he had had dragged in hadn’t exactly treated him as another like themselves. He had had the power of life and death over them; when he hadn’t made a conscious effort, they hadn’t even been able to see him through the seething aura of magical energy that was the visible manifestation of the matrix.

  And when they did see him, those peasants in their homespun and leather…

  He looked down at himself, at the battered purple slacks he still wore. He remembered Raven of Stormcrack Keep, with his black velvet cloak and high boots; Valadrakul of Warricken, with his braids and knee-length vest; Elani, with her red robes.

  He didn’t belong here. He belonged back on Earth—but with his wife and daughter, and it was only in this world that anyone had the power to revive them.

  He had the power.

  All he had to do was learn how to use it.

  And that, of course…

  He stopped in mid-thought, and stared down at the causeway that connected the fortress to drier land to the east of the marsh. He wasn’t sure whether he had seen them first with his eyes or through the matrix, and now he needed a moment to convince himself that they were re
al, and not some damnable illusion the matrix had created.

  They were real—there were people approaching the fortress. Six of them—or really, four people and two fetches.

  There was only one explanation, one sort of people who would be coming here.

  Wizards!

  At last, wizards were coming!

  Now maybe he could learn this resurrection business and get on with it!

  * * * *

  The scientist cleared his throat and glanced nervously at Bascombe.

  Bascombe glared back.

  “Well, sir, it’s simple enough to get people to either of the other universes, really; the space-warp generator is completely functional. The problems arise when you require that they arrive safely and be able to get back…”

  “I don’t care if they can get back,” Bascombe interrupted. “We don’t need to worry about that. Cahn and his men got back, most of them, without any help from us.”

  “Well, in that case, it’s just a matter of landing them safely, and as I understand it, no one was seriously injured in the previous warp transitions…”

  “I don’t want them…Wait a minute.” Bascombe glowered at the man; the poor twit was almost a caricature of a scientist, probably didn’t even like to be called that, wanted to be referred to as a physicist, or an electronician, or something—as if all these arcane distinctions made any difference to anyone normal!

  But he had a point; Cahn and Carson had both arrived intact. Bascombe considered their arrivals to be unsatisfactory, but he had to stop and think for a moment to put into words, simple words a scientist could understand, exactly what had been wrong with those landings.

  “All right,” he said, “I want them to arrive quietly, without throwing away any more ships, without attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Can you do that?”

  “Well, sir,” the scientist said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t put them in space suits, with a simple anti-gravity unit to get…”

  “Anti-gravity doesn’t work there. What else have we got? Isn’t there any way to fly without using anti-gravity?”

  The scientist blinked.

  “Um,” he said.

  “Care to be a bit more explicit?” Bascombe let the sarcasm drip from his words.

  “Well, we…I mean, AG is so cheap and convenient, that we…there were experiments, but…” His voice trailed off.

  Bascombe decided the time was ripe for a suggestion, to get the man thinking positively again. “Why can’t we just make the warps come out at ground level?” he asked.

  “Oh, because…well, we were sending ships before, and the control isn’t fine enough, and solid matter…the interaction…it’s not safe.”

  “So we have to make these holes in mid-air, and let our men just fall through?”

  “Well, I—” The scientist stopped dead this time, rather than trailing off.

  “You what?”

  “Well, there’s no reason they couldn’t climb through. With ropes.”

  “Ropes?” Startled, Bascombe considered the idea.

  It seemed very obvious now, so obvious that he wondered how they had missed seeing it sooner. Maybe because it was too simple—getting to another universe involved huge machines, vast quantities of energy, super-science of all sorts; plain old rope didn’t fit the image.

  They could even have saved most of Carson’s group, if they had wanted to.

  But then, Bascombe remembered, they hadn’t particularly wanted to.

  “Ropes,” he said.

  * * * *

  “At least they didn’t cancel my credit cards,” Amy said, glancing up as she continued to pull wads of newspaper out of her new purse. “It’s a good thing I didn’t have all of them with me.”

  Prossie nodded, then looked down at herself.

  Amy had had to guess at the telepath’s sizes to some extent, since Imperial standards did not use the same systems as J.C. Penney, but the clothes seemed to fit fairly well.

  Prossie didn’t look very enthusiastic about the outfit she wore, though.

  “Is something wrong?” Amy asked, putting down the purse. She had deliberately gotten something simple and casual for her guest, since Prossie was obviously not ready to go looking for a white-collar job here on Earth, but maybe that had been a mistake.

  “It’s just so strange,” Prossie said. “I’ve worn a uniform since I was six; except on Zeta Leo III, I’ve never seen myself in any color but purple.”

  Amy shuddered at the mention of the slavers’ planet. She asked, “Even off-duty? Didn’t you ever have, you know, a furlough or something?”

  Prossie stared at her as if she were mad, then apparently caught herself and looked apologetic.

  “No, of course not,” she said. “I’m a telepath; I had to wear full uniform at all times, so that people would know I was a Special.”

  “So this makes you think of when you were a slave, back there?” Amy asked, with a wave at the blue jeans and black sweatshirt.

  Prossie hesitated, then glanced at the tattered, filthy remains of her uniform, lying in a heap on the couch.

  “I was always a slave,” she said.

  * * * *

  The first wizard through the door prostrated himself, to Pel’s surprise; the man dropped to his knees, then flung his arms up over his head and practically fell forward, until his palms were flat on the floor and his nose was at most an inch above the stone.

  The others, with only an instant’s hesitation, followed their comrade’s lead—even Taillefer, who had met Pel before, when Shadow was still alive. Pel was glad to see that Taillefer was one of the group.

  He was not glad that Taillefer’s familiar face was plastered to the floor. “Oh, get up,” Pel said testily, and inadvertently let the matrix amplify his voice into an angry roar.

  The four wizards scrambled hastily to their feet.

  Pel stared, looking them over—and doing so while well aware that they probably couldn’t see him through the glare of the matrix.

  If anyone could see through it, wizards could—but somehow, Pel didn’t think these people could.

  Physically, they didn’t look all that impressive, despite the long robes and fancy embroidery they wore. They were just people, three men and a woman, and not in the best of shape. Taillefer was fat and soft, the woman was bony and unattractive, one of the others had the red scar of an old burn marring one cheek from jaw to eyebrow.

  Through the matrix, though, Pel could see that there was a sort of patterning, a power, an inward light and structure to them that the ordinary people he had met since acquiring Shadow’s magic did not have.

  But it was very weak and faint, like a dim copy of a tiny corner of the great matrix.

  He could also see that the wizards were able to sense and touch the matrix in a way no one else had, and he remembered how Valadrakul had been so enthralled by it that he had doomed himself.

  None of these four were reacting in quite that way, though they were all certainly fascinated by the flickering tangle of interwoven magic.

  “You’re wizards?” he asked.

  “O great one,” the man who had first flung himself down said, “I am Athelstan of Meresham.” He bowed deeply and theatrically. “And you, I take it, are Shadow’s successor, Pelbrun?”

  “Brown,” Pel corrected automatically. “Pel Brown.”

  “Brown Pelbrun, then,” Athelstan agreed.

  It wasn’t worth arguing. “You’re a wizard, Athelstan? I know Taillefer, but not you others.”

  Athelstan cocked his head to the side as if puzzled.

  “Aye,” he said. “I am a wizard, after a fashion—can you not see as much?”

  Pel could see the woman and the unidentified man cringe to hear Athelstan speak so boldly; it certainly was an abrupt change from his first obeisance.

  Or had that perhaps been mockery?

  “I can see that you can touch magic,” Pel said. “But that isn’t exactly what I meant.”

  “Ah.�
� He nodded. “I’truth, O Pelbrun, neither I nor my companions can sense the true patterns, nor shape them; we draw only upon what power we find to hand. Thus, I am neither matrix wizard, nor pattern wizard, but only wizard, plain and simple. Is it this you would have us say?”

  “Not exactly,” Pel replied. “Look, I can use a matrix, obviously—I’m holding the one Shadow built, and I can use it. I have the innate ability that you don’t. But I don’t know how to use it properly, so what I’m asking is not if you have the talent of a wizard, but whether you have the knowledge of a wizard.”

  He saw Athelstan glance at the others, who exchanged furtive glances amongst themselves.

  “I know enough to fry you all, though,” Pel warned. “Don’t think I don’t.”

  “O Brown Magician,” Athelstan said, bowing again, “ne’er did I doubt it! An what would we, in any event? As you have said, such as we can touch upon a network, but cannot hold it—were you slain, or in other manner the matrix taken from you, the lot of us could hold it not for the merest instant, but instead would most probably be incinerated in its fiery dissolution. You’ve naught to fear from us.”

  “Good,” Pel said.

  “Indeed, meseems ’twould be very much in our interests to serve you honestly and well,” Athelstan continued, “for else how shall we flourish, when all the reins of power are held in your own two hands? Look you upon the pitiful estate of all known wizardry, when only we four can be found of the myriad magicians who once flourished in this realm—and this, merely that Shadow was not pleased others should wield the arts arcane. How, then, shall we not rejoice that Shadow has passed, and that a new overlord is come who, by your profession heretofore, seeks not exclusive dominion?”

  By the time Pel had interpreted this speech, and debated with himself how to respond, Athelstan had taken his pause for silent consent.

  Pel knew that Athelstan was making at least one wrong assumption; he knew that there were a few other wizards besides these four still scattered about the far corners of Faerie—but only a matrix wizard could have seen that, and it didn’t matter anyway. He let Athelstan continue.