Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

“I wonder if maybe Taillefer could teach the portal spell to someone?” Pel asked. “Someone who could use it, and step through with us?”

Amy stared at him, angrier than ever. “Now you think of that?” she shouted.

“Don’t forget about Ted,” Susan said quietly, pointing. Pel’s lawyer was a hundred feet away, marching on toward the fortress.

“Valadrakul,” Pel said, “could Taillefer teach someone to work the spell, without using it himself? Without Shadow noticing?”

The wizard considered the question, but before he could reply, Singer said, “I don’t think it matters.”

The others turned to him.

“Why not?” Pel demanded.

“Remember Bill Marks,” Singer said. He pointed, back along the highway, and the others turned to look.

On the road behind them were half a dozen of the stovepipe-shaped monsters, sprawled across the highway; as they watched, another slithered up from the marsh.

“I don’t think those are going to let us kick them aside,” Singer said.

“Wilkins was right all along,” Prossie said. “It’s a trap; Shadow wants us to come to it, and if we don’t we’ll all wind up like Marks.”

For a moment, they all stared at the creatures; then Pel shrugged and said, “Well, if we don’t have a choice, we might as well get going.”

He turned and marched ahead, following Ted.

Amy stared at the monsters.

“Come on,” Prossie said, touching her arm.

Reluctantly, Amy turned.

“We might as well get it over with,” she agreed.

* * * *

Just as Pel had expected, the fortress was larger and farther away than it had looked; they had first spotted it in the morning, but dusk was falling by the time they finally approached the gates. He was soaked with sweat; so were most of the others. The day was not actually all that hot, but the humidity and the high gravity made it an exhausting march.

Raven had judged their entire journey to be around two hundred miles, once everyone had agreed on what a mile was, and Pel now appreciated just how much that was. Two hundred miles was about the distance from Washington to Philadelphia, about four hours by car, nothing much-but it was a damnably long way to walk, through forests and over ridges and across the plain and then through this soggy, unpleasant marshland.

And Pel would much rather have arrived at Philadelphia than at Shadow’s fortress; he amused himself for part of this final leg of the journey by trying to remember the exact phrasing of the appropriate W.C. Fields quote, and although he had no way to check it, he finally settled on, “Frankly, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.”

They weren’t in Philadelphia, though, they were approaching the fortress.

In a way, that didn’t seem quite right; they hadn’t had enough adventures along the way. They hadn’t really had any adventures since leaving Castle Regisvert; petty theft wasn’t much of an adventure. Wilkins’ disappearance hadn’t been very dramatic; Marks’ death hardly qualified. The whole two-hundred-mile walk had been pretty dull.

In the stories, the journeys were never so boring-or was that just because the authors left out the dull parts?

No, any epic quest was supposed to have real challenges along the way-goblins and monsters, not just rain and irate villagers. And the adventurers were supposed to defeat the menaces through wit and strength and other traditional virtues, not by just trudging onward, day after day.

They hadn’t even seen the monster that had killed Marks. And while Valadrakul had defeated the giant bat-thing with a spell, that was a long time ago, and far away, and hardly seemed to count.

But this wasn’t a story, this was real life, and Pel supposed that if anyone ever wrote it all down, the long dull walk would be relegated to a line or two of scene-shifting.

In any cases, challenges met and menaces defeated or not, they had reached Shadow’s fortress.

The marsh came right up to the towering stone walls, but the highway led directly into an open gate. The entire thing was built on a gigantic scale; the outer wall was at least as long as a city block, and Pel judged it to rise ten stories or so-a hundred feet high. The towers were not visible from directly below the walls, but he had seen from the highway that they were clearly at least three or four times as high. Pel hadn’t thought simple masonry, with no steel frame, could support so high a tower-but then, it probably didn’t; Shadow’s magic probably held the thing together.

Just like all those Hollywood movies, he supposed; if by some miracle they did play out the traditional heroic adventure and managed to kill Shadow, that whole immense tower would probably fall in and crush them all.

That never happened in the stories-the heroes always got out in time, though the villains might get crushed. Pel didn’t care to trust to that sort of thing in real life.

They had no choice, though; a glance back showed him that the highway behind them was sprinkled with those crawling giant-slug-with-teeth monsters. And although Singer had said those weren’t what had killed Marks, something had killed him-Raven and Singer and Susan all agreed on that. They couldn’t turn back; they had to go on in and finish up the story, even if it meant dying.

And maybe dying wouldn’t be that bad. If there was an afterlife, maybe he’d see Nancy and Rachel again; if Ted’s theory was right, he’d be back on Earth. Maybe Marks was back in the Galactic Empire even now, back with his family, if he had any.

Pel was suddenly bothered that he had no idea whether Marks had had any family. Wilkins would have known, but Wilkins was gone, too-maybe dead, maybe not.

Marks was definitely dead. Elani was dead. Carson was dead. Nancy and Rachel were dead. If Pel died, he would at any rate be in good company.

And whatever death might mean, at least if Pel died he would be out of Shadow’s power and out of Raven’s world, this whole ghastly thing would be over for him.

And he might or might not die. If they were in a story, and one of them was the hero-Raven seemed like the traditional candidate-then that one could expect to win through alive somehow, but the rest of them could die; sidekicks and spear-carriers were always expendable.

And it was always possible that they were just one of the earlier expeditions doomed to fail, so that some later hero might avenge them. Or perhaps the men would be slain and the women imprisoned, for later rescue.

Or maybe it wasn’t a story at all, maybe real life didn’t work that way. It certainly hadn’t worked out well for somebody, he saw; there were more dead bodies, like those in the towns and villages, hanging by their necks from the parapet above the open gate.

Pel had thought he’d gotten used to gibbets and scaffolds and bones and corpses, so at first he didn’t really pay much attention when he realized that there were people hanging there; he just tried not to look. The fading light made that easier; so did his sore feet, as they kept his attention elsewhere.

After all, this was Shadow’s headquarters; why would it be any different from the rest of Shadow’s realm?

Then he heard Sawyer say, “Oh, shit.”

He turned, and saw the Imperial soldier staring up at the dangling corpses. Without meaning to, without thinking about it, Pel looked up at them, too.

He swallowed hard.

He had thought he’d gotten used to gibbets and scaffolds and bones and corpses, but this was different.

This time he knew them.

There were six men hanging there, each with his belly sliced open and grayish loops of his intestines torn out and draped across his legs and feet-Shadow apparently wasn’t interested in originality in its executions. Six men, and Pel recognized them all. Second from the left was Lieutenant Dibbs; Pel couldn’t put definite names to the others, but all wore the remains of the purple uniform of the Galactic Empire, and all their faces, twisted and discolored as they were, were familiar. Of the six, useless blasters still hung on the belts of three. One even wore his helmet.