Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

“That’s not what I want,” Prossie said, refusing to rise to his bait; she guessed that he wanted an angry response. “I just want to talk to you about something you said earlier.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to a mutant,” he replied, a challenge clear in his voice.

Prossie stared at him for a moment, wishing she could see whether he was joking, just what mix of fright and anger and hate and resentment and lust he was feeling. His expression was a peculiar one, not quite smiling, a little tense-she had never been good at reading expressions, since she had never had to be. She had always just read the thoughts behind the face.

She couldn’t do that now, though, and she finally decided to get directly to the point.

“Do you really think we’re walking into a trap?” she asked.

He glanced past her at the others, then back at her, and asked, “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to die,” she answered bluntly.

“Everybody dies,” he said, looking down and picking up his piece of chicken. Whatever emotional game he had been playing with her seemed to be over. “The only questions are when and how.”

She smiled bitterly. “True enough, Spaceman, but if I get a choice, I vote for much later, and of natural causes.”

“So you don’t get a choice,” he said, taking a bite of chicken, still not looking at her.

She actually thought for a moment of snatching the food from his mouth, but the remnants of her lifelong conditioning held; she didn’t touch him, but she didn’t leave, either.

He chewed and swallowed, took another bite, chewed and swallowed, then looked up and found her still there, staring at him. He stared back for a moment, then tossed the rest of the chicken aside.

“What do you want, Thorpe?” he asked. “Who are you spying for now?”

“I’m not spying for anyone,” Prossie said. “I’m just trying to stay alive.”

“And what if I don’t believe that? You’ve always been a spy; maybe you say you can’t read my mind now, but that doesn’t mean you’ve stopped spying. You can still talk to Base One, right? You can still report on whether I’ve been a good little boy, still loyal to His Imperial Majesty? Well, maybe I don’t want to give you anything to tell them. Maybe I don’t know who you’re working for back there, whether you’re a good little soldier or some politician’s flunky, and I just don’t want to get tangled up in anything.”

“I’m not spying for anyone,” Prossie insisted. “I can still talk to my cousin, yes, but I haven’t heard from her for two days now, and I don’t tell her everything, and she’s loyal to our family and the Emperor, nobody else. If you think we’re working for General Hart or Under-Secretary Bascombe, we’re not. And I’m just asking for me, nobody else.”

“So what do you want from me?” Wilkins asked.

“I just want to know why you think we’re walking into a trap, and whether you know of a way out.”

“I think it’s pretty obvious why I think it’s a trap,” he said. “If this Shadow is as all-powerful as these people say it is, wouldn’t it have to know we’re here? I mean, even if it doesn’t know anything from its magic, or whatever it is, we’ve been passing through town after town, in broad daylight, and if it’s got anything better than messengers on foot, there’s been plenty of time for a message to reach it. Valadrakul got a message to that flying nitwit somehow, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen smoke used for signalling, so I figure Shadow knows we’re here-but it hasn’t come after us.”

“Maybe it doesn’t care,” Prossie suggested.

Wilkins shook his head. “You think it’s that kind of a thing? Then what were all those people hanged for? What spread those bones around the highway back there? If those were all murderers, the whole region would have been depopulated by now. If they’re thieves, you’d think they’d have learned-Raven said this has been Shadow’s turf for a couple of centuries now. About the only thing I can think of that people just can’t learn to do, even if it gets them killed, is to keep their damn mouths shut-so I think Shadow’s the kind of boss who takes loose talk seriously, and doesn’t stand for any kind of loose ends. It wouldn’t allow a bunch of foreigners to stroll across the countryside any old way they want-not unless it was watching them somehow, and they were doing just what it wanted.”

Prossie nodded. She had learned the word “paranoid” from the Earthpeople, and it seemed to fit what Wilkins described; it also matched her own perceptions of Shadow.

“So maybe it’s not exactly a trap,” Wilkins said. “Maybe it’s not going to kill us; maybe if we turn back we’ll just find a bunch of cops who’ll take us in for questioning, instead of those black animal things. Maybe when we get there it’ll offer us all a chance to join its side, maybe go back to the Empire as traitors, saboteurs-I don’t know. I do know that either it’s tracking us, and knows perfectly well where we are, or else Raven and the wizard have been lying to us and we don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on here.”

“Makes sense,” Prossie admitted.

Wilkins studied her, then asked, “So, Thorpe, you can still call Base One, right? You can tell them whether to send reinforcements, or try to pick us up?”

“I can ask Carrie to pass on a message,” Prossie agreed, “but that’s it. They’ll probably ignore it.”

“That’s about the only way we’re going to get out of this, though-if they send in someone else. If you tell them that it’s a trap, won’t they listen to you?”

Prossie hesitated.

“Listen, Wilkins,” she said. “There’s something I didn’t tell anyone-I don’t know if you know all the rules we telepaths have, some people do and some don’t, but we have rules about what we tell who of what we read, and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the hell with that.”

“What?” He eyed her warily.

“We were set up. I don’t know the details, I didn’t get it all, but Bascombe deliberately screwed up this whole expedition just to get rid of those people.” She waved a hand at the others, sure that Wilkins would understand that she meant the Earthpeople and Faerie folk. “He was listening to Shadow’s spies back there at Base One when he picked Carson for command. And when things started going wrong, he and General Hart decided that they want us all dead, so there won’t be any evidence that they screwed up. That’s why I’ve been so sure we weren’t getting rescued.”

Wilkins blinked. “Why didn’t you tell the lieutenant, back at the ship?”

“You think he’d have believed me? A mutant, telling him he can’t trust his own superiors? Lieutenant Dibbs, we’re talking about.”

“So why are you telling me, then?” Wilkins asked. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because you figured out that we’re being set up again-that Shadow’s watching us. So maybe I think you’re smarter than the lieutenant. And maybe if you know a bit more, you can figure out how we can get out of this.”

For a moment the two stared silently at each other; then Wilkins said, “Yeah, I can see what you mean.” He glanced over at the others. “Problem is, there are a couple of things we don’t know here.”

“What?”

“What Shadow wants with us,” Wilkins said, “and which of us it wants.”

* * * *

“’I wish the damn clouds would either break up or rain’,” Sawyer said angrily to Pel. “You had to say that.”

Pel glared back at him; it wasn’t worth trying to talk over the constant patter of the rain, or the splashing as they slogged through the mud. His stolen shirt, taken from a farmer’s hut two days before, clung damply to his back and dripped down his wrists; he almost regretted its acquisition.