Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

“Now, you get back up that ladder and tell them!” Pel shouted.

Quickly, Warner started to set his helmet in place, then realized that the sealing buckles and latches along the side-seam weren’t closed. He dropped the helmet and began clamping them shut as quickly as he could, as the apparition he had taken for an ordinary man stared at him from a boiling cloud of violet smoke.

A moment later he was suited up and climbing. Pel watched him ascend a few feet; then he sat down on the dirt of the forest floor and sighed.

Warner glanced down, but kept moving.

Pel watched Warner clamber up into the treetops, then out into the sky beyond.

He had given them until dawn, which meant he would be spending the night here, in the woods. He looked about.

The matrix would provide light and heat without any effort at all, but shelter…well, he could make it easily enough, but wasn’t the wreck of the Christopher just over that way?

And seeing what remained of the giant bat-thing would be interesting, too.

Pel got up, dusted off the seat of his pants, and after a final glance at Warner’s distant form, he strolled off into the trees.

* * * *

“It’s all clear, I suppose?” Warner’s captain said; then he got a look at the lieutenant’s face as Warner stepped out of the airlock, his helmet already off and dangling from one hand, and the captain realized that something was wrong.

“He’s down there!” Warner said, addressing his superior and ignoring the Imperial envoy who stood, half-in and half-out of a space suit, to one side.

“Who is?” the captain asked, glancing at the array of Imperial brass up in the observation area.

“Pelbrun! The Brown Magician!” Warner answered, ignoring the glance.

“Where?” the envoy asked. “He’s supposed to be in his fortress, I…”

“He’s right there! At the foot of the ladder! He came out of a cloud and found me there!”

The captain looked up again, and caught Albright’s signal.

“Wait here,” he said.

* * * *

“The telepaths say it’s possible,” Markham told the others. “Apparently they don’t have a very good grasp of the geography there, especially now that both our contacts have returned to Imperial space, but Brown does appear to have moved out of his fortress somehow.”

“So he’s waiting for us to deliver the bodies,” Sheffield said. “He said he wanted them there, now, and he’s come to collect them.”

“And he’s given us a specific deadline this time,” Albright commented.

“Which we don’t know exactly, since your lieutenant neglected to check his watch,” Markham pointed out.

“We wouldn’t know it exactly in any case, since none of your people have ever bothered to calibrate the local cycles there,” Albright retorted. “Besides, how does this Earthman define dawn? First light? Semicircle at true horizon? Sun clear of the visible horizon?”

“Not much of a horizon in the middle of a forest,” Markham answered.

“I don’t think we want to wait for his deadline in any case,” Sheffield said. “I think we go ahead with our original plan, and send the envoy-the only difference is that he’ll be negotiating right now, instead of days from now. Does either of you gentlemen see any reason we shouldn’t proceed thus?”

Markham and Albright glanced quickly at one another, but neither spoke.

* * * *

Pel had worked his way through the mummified remnants of Shadow’s flying monster, studying the bones and skin with interest, puzzling out just why the Imperials had cut away the parts they did while leaving the rest, and was just starting a look through the wreck of I.S.S. Christopher when he heard a human voice calling.

He hesitated. It was obvious that the Imperials had used the ship and clearing as a temporary base during their ventures into Faerie, and he was curious about just how they had set it up, and how many of them had been here-and for that matter, whether anyone might still be here.

No, he could tell, magically, that no one was in the ship.

He did want to see the inside-he’d felt a twinge of nostalgia when he first saw the familiar purple paint, now somewhat marred by weather and abuse. He had only been on the ship for perhaps an hour, but it had, after all, been a fairly important hour, the one that brought him to Faerie, where he had a chance to revive his family.

But that voice was probably the Empire’s representatives, delivering the bodies, and if he had a choice between thinking about his wife and child as they were, or bringing them back from the dead, he’d be a fool to settle for memories.

Anyone who wanted to find him here could do so readily enough, since the glow of the matrix was probably visible for miles, but still, it wouldn’t hurt to let whoever it was know that he was welcome.

“Hello!” Pel called, stepping out of the hatchway. “Over here!”

Perhaps two minutes later he and the Imperial envoy came face to face on the narrow track Imperial traffic had worn between ladder and clearing; Pel stopped dead at the sight of him.

The man was wearing the most outlandish outfit Pel had encountered since leaving Earth, somewhat the worse for having been stuffed inside a space suit for the climb through the warp. The pants were black velvet with broad purple silk stripes down either side, stuffed into shiny black jackboots; the shirt was white silk with elaborate lace ruffles down the front, artfully fluffed up around a diagonal purple silk sash that combined with a purple silk cummerbund to make a bizarre imitation of a Sam Browne belt. Over this, the stranger wore a bright red cutaway jacket with gold braid on the cuffs and shoulders, and the Imperial seal on the breast-a lion and unicorn rampant against a sunburst, a seal that Pel had first seen on the door of an aircar on Psi Cassiopeia II.

Pel couldn’t tell whether the gold-and-white ruffled lace collar that flared out from the man’s neck was part of the shirt, the jacket, or neither.

The crowning glory of this comic-opera outfit was undoubtedly the hat, a curling, almost brimless, vaguely conical thing of red velvet and white and purple ostrich plumes.

That the sunlight was gone and the only illumination came from the shifting colors of the matrix made this costume all the more bizarre. Pel tried to shift the light toward white, so as to see this thing better, and belatedly thought to make sure that the matrix was transparent, so that this character could see him, as well.

Why on Earth had they sent this person to deliver the bodies, instead of just a soldier or two?

“My Lord Pelbrun?” the man asked, standing straight and snapping his heels together.

“Yeah,” Pel managed.

The apparition took off his hat and bowed, with a flourish. After a moment of frozen formal subordination, he rose, reached into an inside pocket, and pulled out a packet roughly the size of a business envelope, which he proffered to Pel. “My credentials, sir.”

Too dazed to even laugh, and feeling a twinge of dread, Pel reached out with a tendril of magic and took the packet; it felt like parchment, and was sealed with gold leaf and purple sealing wax. He pulled it open and tugged out a large sheet of paper-or more likely parchment-which he unfolded and glanced at.

It was in elaborate old-fashioned script, and Pel didn’t care to bother reading it by matrixlight, but he did notice the signature and elaborate blue seal at the bottom.

Georgius VIII Imperator et Rex.

That sounded pretty official.

“Okay,” Pel said, “the Emperor sent you. Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Ambrose Curran, my lord, and I am an accredited Imperial envoy. His Imperial Majesty has sent me to negotiate the terms under which he will yield to you the mortal remains of Nancy and Rachel Brown.”