Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Reign of the Brown Magician

Markham looked at him, startled. “Nothing,” he said, “but isn’t that just what we’re doing?”

* * * *

Pel watched as the sun sank in the west. The two hours were up, obviously; they must have been up long ago.

And there had been nothing. No one had emerged from the warp.

The messenger was asleep on the verandah; Pel walked over and stared down at him for a moment.

He looked young and innocent, asleep there on the wooden platform, with his short blond hair and clean-shaven features, his uniform hidden by the bulky space suit.

Pel kicked him in the back of the head-not particularly hard, but more than a mere prodding. The messenger’s eyes snapped open, and a hand flew up to the injured spot.

“Get your helmet on,” Pel ordered. “You’re going home, and I’ve got a message for you to take.”

The messenger scrambled to his feet, and groped for his helmet.

“It’s a very simple message,” Pel said. “It’s this: It’ll stop when I have the bodies.”

“What will?”

“You don’t need to know that. You just tell them, it’ll stop when I have the bodies, and not a moment sooner. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Here you go.”

And the messenger was airborne, heading for the warp.

“Get your helmet on!” Pel shouted after him.

He slowed the ascent, and watched as the kid got his helmet in place; then the matrix flung him upward and out through the warp.

That done, the next step, Pel knew, was to attack the Empire. They’d asked for it, and they were going to get it; no more Mr. Nice Guy.

The only question was how.

He didn’t like it, but returning to Shadow’s fortress was the fastest way to acquire an army. There weren’t any people in the Low Forest; there weren’t even a lot of animals to work with. He’d grown himself a few furry little servants, but they were hardly suitable for what he had in mind.

He had an entire world to draw on, of course, but the fortress still seemed like the place to start.

The stone halls were cold and gloomy, and Pel wondered why it had taken him so long to get the hell out of this damn tomb, into the wide green world-the sunlight might be the wrong color, the air strange, and the gravity harsh, but it was better than these dank corridors. He certainly didn’t want to stay back here any longer than necessary.

He wished there were some sort of rapid transit possible between the fortress and the vicinity of the space-warp; his wind-riding took between three and four hours by his best estimate. The sort of lifting and tossing he’d been doing with Curran and that poor twit of an Imperial messenger was severely limited in range-he couldn’t use the pure magic of the matrix to move things much beyond what he could see, and he had trouble moving himself at all; the winds were faster and safer.

Even a phone line would be helpful, or a telepathic link like the ones in the Empire, but he didn’t have one. He was fairly sure that magic could be used to communicate over long distances-he’d seen Valadrakul summon Taillefer from afar, and everyone seemed to think that Shadow had spied on people all over the world-but Pel didn’t know how it had been done. Once or twice he had thought he was on the verge of using Shadow’s trick of seeing through other people’s eyes, but he had never quite managed it, and had no idea what he was doing wrong.

He could, he supposed, round up the wizards again, and ask them-in fact, it might be a good idea. Not that he liked them much, or thought he could trust them.

That could wait, though; first he needed to assemble his attack force.

He swept into the throne room, the matrix flaring up more brightly than it ever had in the wilds of Sunderland, and sent out the magical summons- every living thing in the fortress was to come to him.

They came-fetches, homunculi, simulacra, monsters, peasants, dogs, cats, everything. The monsters ranged from little buglike flying things the size of his finger up to a creature resembling a rhinoceros that struggled mightily to mount the steps from the entry, and from the sluglike marsh monsters with their simple tubular bodies to a thing that looked like a hundred-pound cross between a spider and an octopus, with additions-it had stalked eyes, tentacles, jointed legs, rudimentary wings, and mandibles like giant pliers.

The dragon, alas, was long dead, its head blown off by Pel’s own magic and the remains incinerated. The gigantic bat-things were far too large to ever enter any building, and the great burrowers were not nearby-but that didn’t matter, because Pel didn’t think he could create a portal anything that size could fit through.

Within moments the throne room was jammed full, and more were still arriving. The humanoids had clustered closest around the throne, arms or hands flung up to shield eyes from the glare; there was the false Nancy, and the real Susan, and any number of fetches and peasants.

Pel thought for a moment, then began giving orders.

* * * *

Shelton Grigsby had always had mixed feelings about his post as governor-general of Beckett. Beckett was a pleasant enough place to live-the gravity was light, the air sweet, the sunlight rich, if a trifle unpleasantly reddish, and the locals were friendly and peaceful. The local flora was plentiful and only rarely toxic, the local fauna generally harmless. Of the three thousand worlds in the Empire, this was definitely one of the mildest environments.

The planet was, however, something of a backwater, well out of the political mainstream, and he sometimes regretted giving up the opportunities for advancement he’d have had if he’d held a post back on Terra or one of the other innermost worlds. A governor-general out here could expect to serve until retirement or death; a peerage, or promotion to the Imperial Council or the Emperor’s cabinet, was unlikely in the extreme.

He had always consoled himself with the thought that he’d probably live longer without the stress and strain of political intrigue, that he’d given up his ambitions but found peace. He’d certainly never expected any trouble on Beckett, with its placid population of a hundred million or so, spread over four small continents and a score of moderately large cities.

He should have known better, he thought.

But he had certainly never expected any trouble out of Blessingbury. The town was a resort in the foothills of the Darlington Mountains, small but reasonably modern, and well supplied with all the essentials and a good many luxuries-a place for the moderately-well-off to spend their annual vacations hiking, riding, or swimming.

Now, though, Blessingbury seemed to be attracting trouble, rather than tourists.

First there were those mysterious corpses, with their swords, that had been shipped off to Base One and got the Empire to station a squad of soldiers and even a telepath in town.

Now, he had a report of monsters.

He glanced out the window of the limousine; they had bypassed the town itself and headed for the meadows to the northeast, where the corpses had been found and where the monster had been reported.

From up here everything looked ordinary enough.

The car was descending; the chauffeur had his orders, and was following them.

A moment later, Grigsby stepped out and clapped his hat on his head-this was official business, and he had to look the part.

A lieutenant in full uniform stepped up to greet him; Grigsby snapped off a salute, then turned toward the meadow.

It wasn’t hard to find the monster; the thing was lying dead, half a dozen soldiers standing in a ring around it.

It was black and hideous, with fangs and tentacles, and Grigsby had no doubt what it was-he’d read all those briefing papers, like a good little official.