Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

“That, among other things,” he said, as the State man gawked.

* * * *

Ron Wilkins ambled slowly along the causeway across Shadowmarsh, considering the fortress that towered before him and trying to decide if this was really a smart move.

He sure as hell wouldn’t have tried it if he thought Shadow was still alive and still in there.

All the reports, though, said that Shadow was dead, and the Brown Magician was in charge, and Wilkins could only figure that the Brown Magician was Pel Brown, which meant that somehow or other he and Raven and the rest had pulled it off, had defeated Shadow.

Which was pretty goddamned incredible.

Wilkins had noticed that nobody ever mentioned Raven, though, nor any of the others. He figured that this probably meant one of two things; either all the others were dead, or some were dead and some had wound up in other universes.

Like back in the Galactic Empire.

Getting back to the Empire sounded like a pretty good idea.

Oh, he might be up for desertion, or something, but nobody over there could know exactly what had happened here, not even the bloody mind-readers; the chain of command had been broken, Lieutenant Dibbs had told Wilkins and the others they could choose for themselves, and it couldn’t very well be desertion to walk out on a bunch of crazies committing group suicide, could it? Raven wasn’t an officer. Nobody in the whole bunch was except Thorpe, and she was a Special, a mutant, not in the direct chain of command at all, not authorized to give orders.

So Wilkins didn’t see that he’d broken any laws, and he didn’t think he was important enough to be framed, so going home sounded real good.

Someplace with indoor plumbing, and decent food, and clean women who didn’t scream if you so much as touched them…

Of course, if he was wrong about Brown being in charge, then he was walking right into Shadow’s lap and was probably as good as dead-but hey, if he’d wanted to live forever, he would never have signed up to be a soldier.

But he wasn’t in any hurry to be wrong. He was perfectly willing to take his time, just in case God decided to give him a sign or something.

So he was walking down the causeway toward the fortress, but walking slowly.

He had the feeling that someone was watching him, as he strolled, and every so often he glimpsed things moving in the marsh to either side. The sky was gray and overcast. Combine that with the heavy gravity, the low oxygen content of the air, and the off-color sunlight of this planet-if it really was a planet-and the whole place was about as oppressive and unpleasant as he ever cared to see. Leaving it would be a relief.

But he wasn’t going to rush into anything.

* * * *

Spaceman Second Class Thomas Sawyer, Imperial Military, paused for a moment in his work and leaned on his wooden shovel. Alison and Goody Fitzsimmons were gossiping again, exchanging the latest tales about the Brown Magician across the stableyard fence.

For a moment Sawyer once again considered trying to contact this legendary Pelbrun who had usurped Shadow’s role. It almost had to be Mr. Brown.

But that would mean going into that fortress, and Sawyer couldn’t bring himself to do that. He’d backed out at the very gate once before-and there was a good chance that Brown remembered and resented that. True, he’d apparently somehow won his battle against Shadow, but how many had died in the process? How many might have lived if there’d been another hand, such as Sawyer’s, to help?

Better not to risk it. Life here wasn’t all that bad. Rough, perhaps, but not too bad. Alison was a fine young woman, and he thought she was warming to him-that held some promise for the future, maybe more than he’d had in the Empire.

He stood, hefted the shovel, then scooped and lifted more manure into the oxcart.

* * * *

Pel sat in his throne, physical eyes closed, and concentrated on the matrix, on bending his magical perceptions in a direction outside the three rational dimensions of normal space.

He had located the reality of the Galactic Empire, and found the place (place?) where the portal had been that allowed Shadow and her hundred fetches to step through.

He didn’t want that, though; he wanted to find wherever Nancy and Rachel were.

Where their bodies were, rather.

Nancy had died aboard a spaceship, the Emerald Princess ; Rachel had reportedly died on the rebel planet, Zeta Leo III. But Pel didn’t know what had become of their remains. So far as he could recall, no one at Base One had told him, and he had been too distraught to ask.

He cursed himself for that now.

It seemed possible that both were on Zeta Leo III. Nancy’s corpse might have been jettisoned somewhere in space, though.

Or both might have been brought to Base One. That seemed like the sort of thing the Empire would do.

He didn’t know where to start; he had a whole galaxy to search. Admittedly, the galaxies of Imperial space appeared to be much smaller than those of Earth’s universe, but still, there were thousands of worlds there.

As he groped about, in great sweeping arcs through non-space, he felt odd little tugs and discontinuities, like snags in the fabric of space. At first he thought they were natural; then he thought he was doing something wrong; and then he realized that those were the places where Shadow had opened portals into the Empire.

He paused and considered.

It was interesting to see that portals left a permanent mark in what he could only think of as the shape of space itself. One might even think of it as permanent damage, and he wondered whether he might have hold of something that could destroy entire universes if misused, or even just over shy;used.

He smiled wryly. Stand aside, atom bomb-magic could wreck universes, not just a planet or two!

More importantly, as far as he was concerned, these snags were places Shadow had penetrated into the Empire, and while some of those penetrations had been botched scouting expeditions that ended in a bunch of dead monsters, hadn’t she managed to plant spies in the Imperial military?

The Empire had certainly thought so.

A portal that had been used to plant a spy would presumably come out somewhere useful. Someone could step through and ask questions, maybe learn something useful. If he could make contact with the Imperial military, get a message to General Hart at Base One, he could ask them to deliver the remains of his wife and daughter.

He had helped dispose of Shadow, after all, and after they had sent him here, to almost certain death, instead of just sending him home. They owed him one.

Of course, he couldn’t go through such a portal himself-that was what had brought Shadow to ruin. He could send someone, though.

Fetches weren’t very bright, and couldn’t talk, and could hardly blend into a crowd if there was a problem; the locals here would be hopelessly out of place in a relatively civilized space-faring universe of spaceships and aircars.

He could wait for that Imperial spy, or whatever he was, to arrive-but Pel thought it would be better if one of his own people took care of things.

“Susan!” he called.

The State Department man and the deputy from the Imperial Department of Science were chatting quietly on one corner of Amy Jewell’s patio, the Imperial’s purple space suit an odd contrast with the Earthman’s gray jacket. Major Johnston had been carefully not listening to them even before he got into the argument with the newly-arrived FBI agent-in-charge, but he did wonder just what they were saying.

The first official contact between the governments of the United States of America and the Galactic Empire was taking place just a few feet away, and here he was in a stupid jurisdictional dispute.