Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

Pel didn’t want to wait, sitting around the way he had at Base One, with nothing to do but remember his dead wife and daughter, sinking in morose helplessness. He needed to do something. He had set a goal of getting home to Earth, and that was what he intended to do.

Besides, what did he have to lose? Nancy and Rachel were dead; if he got himself killed, as well, so what?

“Then you insist on going on?” Raven asked.

“That’s right,” Pel said.

“If this Shadow’s so tough with its magic,” Wilkins asked, looking around at the scattered bones, “why hasn’t it spotted us and sent a bunch of its monsters after us?”

“It probably hasn’t noticed us yet,” Pel muttered unhappily, as he trudged on down the highway. He looked straight ahead, at the tree-lined highway, trying not to see the bones below or the clouds overhead.

“Well, why the hell not?” Wilkins demanded, stopping in his tracks. “It noticed these people!” He kicked at a skull fragment.

“We don’t know that,” Pel insisted, pausing reluctantly. “Maybe it was wild animals or bandits that killed them.”

“Bandits?” Wilkins picked up a thigh bone. “Something sucked the marrow out of this, Brown-what kind of bandits would do that?”

“Animals, then,” Pel said. “Come on, let’s keep moving; I don’t like it here. Whatever did this, it might come back.”

“I never heard of any animal that would do anything like this,” Sawyer said, joining the discussion.

“’Twas most likely Shadow’s beasts,” Raven said, leaning his bandaged left hand against a tree by the roadside. “This looks very much in their fashion.”

“Which is what I said in the first place,” Wilkins pointed out. “So why hasn’t Shadow sent the beasts after us?”

“It did, back at the ship,” Amy said, not very confidently.

“But not since then,” Wilkins argued.

Amy shrugged; she was obviously struggling to hold down her lunch. Her bouts of nausea had become far less frequent over the last few days, but she still had trouble when they came across something unpleasant.

Human bones scattered across the highway were definitely unpleasant. Pel had no idea how old these were, or how long they had actually been there, but he didn’t think they had been brought there from somewhere else; it looked as if a small group of people had been killed and torn to pieces right there on the spot.

“Maybe they did something to attract attention,” Pel suggested. “Used magic, maybe.”

“Brown, we’ve been using magic,” Wilkins shouted. “Back at the ruin that twit Taillefer was bloody flying, and why didn’t that attract Shadow?”

“I don’t know,” Pel said. “Maybe we were just lucky that time.” He frowned.

“We’ve been using magic over and over again, Brown,” Wilkins insisted. “Our tame wizard here’s lit us a fire with his fingers every night.”

“We’d no need, had we funds to pay an inn, or had Shadow not done away with all laws of hospitality,” Valadrakul pointed out. “But as it is, we’ve no tinderbox, no other way to make fire. Would you eat your food raw, and sleep unwarmed?”

“It’s better than getting ripped apart, like whoever these people were,” Marks snapped.

“But we haven’t been,” Wilkins said. “And I want to know why.”

Raven said, “Perhaps the Goddess protects us.”

“Shit,” Wilkins replied.

Pel didn’t say anything more; he just turned and marched onward.

For five days now they had been off the Starlinshire Downs and onto flat country that Raven assured them was a coastal plain; they had marched on across Shadow’s countryside, passing through towns and villages without stopping, since they had no more coins to spend. No one spoke to them; children, and sometimes adults, ran and hid at the sight of strangers. Even those who spotted them stealing food never called out or protested; they turned away, or simply watched, without intervening.

Most of the towns had had gibbets in the square, and most of those gibbets had been in use, with corpses of varying age. Some had been fresh, as if the travelers had only just missed the execution; others had been little more than bone and blackened skin. Most were men; some were women; and in one village four children had dangled there, naked and eviscerated-three girls and a boy, none older than twelve.

Pel no longer argued that Shadow might just be the victim of hostile propaganda.

The travelers had grown quieter, gloomier, and more nervous with each new atrocity, and the weather had not helped any; the bright sunlight and greenery of Castle Regisvert were only a memory, and they had been walking beneath a heavy overcast since shortly after that first town, where they had wasted Susan’s handful of coins at the inn.

Pel almost wished it would rain and get it over with, but it didn’t; the clouds hung oppressive and unmoving overhead, growing steadily thicker and darker, but never releasing so much as a drop of rain. Wind rustled ominously in the leaves, but at ground level the air was still and thick and heavy, and smelled of mold.

Pel waited for a moment longer, but Wilkins seemed to have said his piece.

“Come on,” Pel said. He started walking. Raven straightened up and joined him; the others followed.

“You know what it is,” Wilkins said. “We’re walking into a trap, that’s what it is. Shadow wants us to come to its fortress and save it the trouble of hunting us down. If we turned back, we’d probably have the monsters after us in a minute.”

Pel turned to argue, and saw Susan and Prossie staring at Wilkins intently as they walked; they obviously thought the soldier was onto something.

“That’s ridiculous,” Pel said.

“Why?” Wilkins demanded belligerently. “What’s ridiculous about it?”

Pel’s mouth opened, then closed.

What was ridiculous about it? It made far more sense than Pel wanted to admit.

And what would he do if it were true? To turn back would be to invite attack. True or false, he had to continue.

He turned forward again and kept walking.

* * * *

Prossie glanced up from the half-eaten chicken leg she held and noticed that Wilkins was, for the moment, alone; he was sitting to one side, leaning against the base of a rather unhealthy-looking tree and gnawing on a chunk of poultry, while most of the others were clustered close around the fire.

She rose to a half-crouch and took a quick few steps over to the tree, staying low, as if there were enemies out there watching, ready to shoot-and for all she knew, there were.

She wished she could still read minds; the freedom of mental silence, of being out of the Empire’s net, was still new and strange and wonderful, but it was also horribly frustrating to not know what anyone was thinking, to not know if there were people out there she couldn’t see. She was unaccustomed to knowing less than the people around her.

It wasn’t really frightening any more, but it was frustrating.

And lonely.

“Spaceman Wilkins,” she whispered, as she squatted beside him.

He looked up. “Yeah, Thorpe?”

“May I talk to you?” She didn’t look him in the eye; non-telepaths never liked it when telepaths looked directly at them-as if the eyes had something to do with mind-reading.

Wilkins put down his chicken and wiped greasy fingers on his already-filthy uniform trousers. “You need to talk, Telepath?” he asked belligerently. “About what?”

“Yes, I need to talk,” Prossie said, annoyed. “I can’t read your mind here.”

“That’s what you said, anyway,” Wilkins acknowledged, his tone a little less hostile. “So what do you want?” He glanced at the neckline of her uniform, and she realized that squatting as she had might not have been clever. “If it’s what I think,” Wilkins said, leering, “I don’t know-there’s not much privacy, and I never screwed a mutant freak before. You noisy? Mind if the others watch?”