Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

Did Pel know what he was doing?

She had voted to do this herself, she knew that, but she was having second thoughts now. At the time of the decision she had been panicky, desperate to do anything that would get her home; now she was thinking a bit more clearly.

Would this get her home, or would it get her killed?

And if it would get her killed, what should she be doing instead?

She glanced at Raven, but he appeared to be lost in thought, and besides, he was a liar and a thief, not to be trusted-she thought he meant well, that he was sincere in thinking that everything he did was justified by the need to defeat Shadow, but still, she couldn’t trust him.

Valadrakul was better, but he was explaining something to Pel. And those two were the only natives of Faerie left in the party-Elani and Squire Donald were dead, Stoddard and Taillefer had abandoned the group.

Raven kept talking about Shadow as if it were some ultimate evil, and Pel always thought he meant it literally, like some monster from the fairy tales, or a movie villain, but Amy didn’t think she believed in stuff like that.

There were real villains, though, lots of them, and if she couldn’t quite believe that Shadow was Evil Incarnate, she could believe that it was the local version of Adolf Hitler, or Stalin or Pol Pot or the Ayatollah Khomeini. The woman in the cottage had told Raven some of Shadow’s rules, and they’d sounded like something Hitler or Stalin might have come up with.

Well, then, what if she thought of herself as having somehow landed in Nazi Germany? What would she have done?

She’d have tried to get out, of course-across the Alps to Switzerland, like the von Trapps, or to England or somewhere.

Except there was no Switzerland or England here. Shadow had won its war and conquered the entire world.

So what then?

There was an underground, of course-Raven was proof of that. She had already seen the underground, by traveling with Raven and Valadrakul, and talking with Taillefer, and they’d made promises to get her home, and then they hadn’t been able to deliver.

Well, to hell with them, then. She wasn’t going to join the underground and become a freedom fighter if they couldn’t keep their promises. And it didn’t look as if they stood any chance of winning the war, anyway.

Undergrounds never won their wars without outside help, anyway-she was pretty sure she’d read that somewhere.

But to return to her analogy, here she was, in the Faerie equivalent of Nazi Germany, with no way to get out of the country to Switzerland or England. She was going to stay in Germany unless Hitler himself decided to send her home, so she was on her way to Berlin to ask.

Was that going to work?

Well, it might; she wasn’t the local equivalent of a Jew, so far as she could tell, or otherwise fodder for the concentration camps. If there was an equivalent to the Jews, from what Valadrakul had said she supposed it was wizards. She certainly wasn’t a wizard.

She was a foreigner, of course, and Hitler had hated foreigners, but he hadn’t just killed them out of hand.

And besides, there was no point in carrying the analogy too far.

So they were going to Berlin to ask a favor of Hitler, more or less-and if that failed, Pel wanted to try to assassinate him.

What were the odds of getting away with that?

Probably nil. She just couldn’t imagine a bunch of lost American tourists walking in and killing Hitler, which would be the equivalent.

And she couldn’t see how they could hope to destroy Shadow, whatever it was, and get away with it; despite what Pel seemed to think, this wasn’t some silly adventure story. Things like that didn’t happen in real life.

But maybe Shadow would send them home.

And what else could she do?

Well, if she were in Germany, she could just settle down somewhere, find work, or someone who would take her in, and just hope nobody reported her to the Gestapo as she got on with her life. She didn’t suppose there’d be much call for an interior decorator in a place like Faerie, but she could find something to do, she was sure. And she wouldn’t even have to learn the language-the people here spoke English.

When they came to a town, she decided, she’d do that, she’d settle down and make the best of things. Not a farm-she wanted nothing to do with rural life. But sooner or later, surely, they’d find a place with shops and some semblance of civilization, and she could stay there. The others could go on to Shadow’s fortress if they wanted, and if Shadow agreed to help they could send for her, but she didn’t want to walk in there with them.

She’d have the baby to worry about, of course, if she settled down and stayed.

Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad; she could claim to be widowed, that she’d left her home because she couldn’t manage alone with the baby coming. And just because it was Walter’s child didn’t mean it would be a monster; she could bring it up properly, and it would probably turn out fine.

And it might die, anyway.

That was a horrible thought, she told herself, but she couldn’t help it. Her situation was so awful-trapped in an alien, uncomfortable, hostile world, carrying her rapist’s child-that she thought a little morbid speculation was entirely justified.

She looked ahead, at Raven and Pel and Valadrakul, and decided she wouldn’t mention anything to them yet. They might not approve. Time enough when they found someplace she could stay, some suitable little town or village.

That woman’s cottage had been primitive, but Amy didn’t think it was too uncomfortable, really. If she could find a place no worse than that, she thought she could stand it.

She wondered if Prossie or Susan would be interested in staying with her.

* * * *

The land undulated, Prossie decided. It was a fancy word, but it fit. The countryside was an apparently-endless series of gentle-sloped ridges, and their path led them up and over each one. The westward slopes, the ones they went down, seemed longer and steeper than the eastward sides; that meant they were gradually descending these ripples, coming down from the forest, and that eventually, if they continued, they would reach either the sea or the flat plain of the coast.

It also meant, though, that most of the time they couldn’t see where they were going, but each time they topped a ridge the whole world would suddenly be spread out before them, a green expanse of small farms, groves, meadows, orchards that seemed to go on forever, arranged in the rows formed by the ridges-or rather, Prossie corrected herself, the Downs.

From each summit they could see a new valley, and then the tops of the succeeding ridges, fading away in the distance. The horizon was lost in mist from the first few ridgetops, but as the day progressed and the air warmed the mist receded and vanished. From the next two ridges everything was sharp and clear-but then the air began to grow hazy again as the temperature continued to rise. Dark clouds hovered on the western horizon, far ahead of them, but drew no nearer.

There was a pleasant sort of repetition to it all. Prossie supposed that eventually they would arrive somewhere, but she was in no particular hurry; she had been on perhaps a dozen worlds in her lifetime, and despite the high gravity this was one of the most pleasant she had yet encountered. The spaceborne habitats and bases where she had spent most of her time weren’t even in the running.

Also, the long walk gave her time to think, to meditate, to remember, and to just be.

She thought back to her childhood, remembering when she had first realized that she was a distinct individual. She knew, from reading other minds, that normal babies began to differentiate themselves from their environment when they were just a few weeks old, and had a pretty good grasp on the concept of “I” by the time they were toddlers; telepathic children, though, had a rougher time of it. Distinguishing their own thoughts from those around them, and from the network of other telepaths, was not easy.