Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

And it shouldn’t be necessary, anyway-he should have the bodies as soon as the Empire could take care of the paperwork, and then he’d be able to take them anywhere, back to the fortress or anywhere he wanted.

The Low Forest was a dark green line on the horizon before him, and the overgrown ruin ahead and to the left, where the power flowed strongly just beneath the ground, was surely the ruins of Castle Regisvert. Pel adjusted his course, and blew onward.

* * * *

Spaceman Thomas Sawyer looked up from the pigpen and saw the glowing, seething mass of color and light tear across the sky to the south, moving eastward. The flickering lit the mud and the hogs in quick flashes of color, like a fireworks display.

“What the hell is that?” he asked no one in particular.

It had to be magic, of course. They didn’t have fireworks here in Faerie, did they?

It had to be magic. So even if Shadow was really dead, there was still magic running loose, and it didn’t look like just the stuff people like Taillefer and Valadrakul did.

Sawyer had no intention of getting involved in anything like that. It looked like he’d be staying down on the farm for awhile yet.

* * * *

Lieutenant Sebastian Warner checked the seals on his space suit one final time, then cycled the airlock. He waited patiently while the pressure decreased, and when the signal light came on he undogged the outer door and stepped out into the vacuum of space.

Huge machinery surrounded him, but he closed his eyes and ignored it as he proceeded carefully toward the space-warp, moving hand-over-hand along the rope ladder. Even with his eyes tightly shut the glare was painfully bright, forcing him to work entirely by feel.

This wasn’t his first trip through, though; he was an old hand now, and could find his way easily. He had already made almost two dozen quick trips to see how things stood on the other side, and whether anyone interesting was in the area around the base of the ladder.

This time the job description was slightly different-he was supposed to prepare the site for an Imperial envoy, whatever that meant. As far as he was concerned, it was more of the same, and just as dull as ever.

He’d missed the assignment when Spaceman Wilkins was picked up; dull as that was, it had been about the most exciting job anyone had had here since Warner was given his current duty. James and Butler had got that one, had met Wilkins and brought him up the ladder; Warner had never encountered anyone on the other side.

Warner had hopes of spotting something interesting eventually. Even just one of the primitives finding the ladder while out hunting would do.

If nothing else, it would give Warner a chance to see whether the stories were true, and blasters really didn’t work on the other side; he hadn’t wanted to test the theory without a valid reason, in case one of those damned spying mutants reported it.

He’d spent the first twenty years of his life without ever being on the same planet as a telepath, but lately it seemed as if he couldn’t get away from the bloody freaks.

He was through the warp; he could tell because the gravity had shifted, the ladder now led down instead of forward, and because the intense glare of the warp had faded. Without thinking, he had gotten his feet securely onto a rung.

He opened his eyes on bright, cool sunlight and saw the green roof of the forest spread out below him, and began climbing down toward it.

He was just passing the highest branches when a bright flicker of movement attracted his attention. He turned his head, expecting to see a wild bird or other flying creature of some kind, hoping it wasn’t even the most distant cousin of that dead giant bat-thing that lay in the clearing below.

Instead he saw, miles away but approaching rapidly, a thing like a cloud of polychrome light.

He froze, clinging to the ladder, and stared. He’d wished for something interesting, but this was a little more than he’d had in mind.

And it was coming closer fast, at least as fast as an aircar at cruising speed.

He shouldn’t stay here, exposed, he realized. He should either climb back up and give the alarm, or he should get down to the ground, take shelter, and watch, maybe wait until it had passed and then get the hell back to Base One.

He had no idea what the thing was-some weird natural phenomenon peculiar to this strange world? Some sort of creature? A weapon, sent by the so-called Brown Magician, or maybe Shadow? They said Shadow was dead; he wasn’t convinced. Maybe Shadow and the Magician were still fighting this out, and the thing coming toward him was involved in that.

Whatever it was, he had to move.

He looked up, at those long yards of ladder exposed in the open air, then down at the shelter of the trees, and he began descending as rapidly and silently as he could.

Pel frowned as he looked down at the trees beneath. He remembered, a little belatedly, how Taillefer had landed at Regisvert, tumbling out of the sky onto half a dozen waiting helpers.

Pel didn’t have any helpers. And tumbling down through the forest canopy looked scratchy.

On the other hand, he had access to more power than Taillefer could ever imagine.

But Taillefer was more experienced and skilled at using his power, and this particular area was one where there were no strong natural currents of magic, so that the matrix was relatively weak.

Relatively weak, but still vastly stronger than anything Taillefer could do. And even here, Valadrakul had been able to blast Shadow’s creatures.

The power to do any sort of landing he wanted was unquestionably there, but Pel had to admit that he didn’t really know how to land, other than to simply let himself fall. And here in the forest, that might mean breaking a leg or putting his eye out on a broken branch.

He supposed he could use the matrix to protect himself from damage; Shadow had certainly taken her personal invulnerability for granted, and with good reason. It might well be that the matrix would protect him even if he did nothing consciously at all.

His instincts rebelled at the idea, though. Letting himself drop into the trees…

He couldn’t do it. At least, not from this height.

Maybe, if he lowered himself gradually…

He looked ahead, trying to judge distances, and spotted something strange, ahead and to the left. Something was sticking up out of the forest.

He had glimpsed it before, from a distance, and had taken it for an odd branch, or a dead trunk, but now he saw he had badly misjudged its size and distance.

He turned and steered for it.

It rose straight up out of the forest, straighter than anything that could naturally be there, taller and thinner than anything natural, and swaying slightly in the wind. Pel couldn’t see the top. He could see above where it stopped, but somehow he couldn’t see the exact point at which it ended; there was a blind spot.

And the matrix was kinked out of shape there, he realized.

This was the space-warp. This is what he had intended to be aiming for all along, but he’d gotten so involved in the mechanics of flying, and the view of the landscape, that he had lost track of it.

Well, there it was.

He hadn’t really expected anything visible, but there it was.

He hadn’t bothered to ask Best or his companions how they got through the warp, but now he saw. That thing was a ladder, a rope ladder that reached from a space-warp about five hundred feet up to down in the forest somewhere. It was swinging in gentle curves, swaying back and forth in a shallow sine wave.

That would be an uncomfortably long climb and a dizzy, seasick one, but obviously the Imperial spies had managed it.