Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

And what about Raven, or Valadrakul, or Al Singer? What about Prossie and Susan? Ted still thought it was a dream, he wasn’t worried, but what about the others? Was it courage that drove them forward? All of them were moving, all of them were approaching the door, and Amy wondered why. Weren’t any of them scared?

She had to stop in the doorway; the flickering glare was too intense to continue. The moving air brushed across her face like fingers, like wings, like blowing leaves, sometimes warm, sometimes cool, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp as wire. Shadow and color shifted too fast for her to see anything clearly.

Ted had gone through the door, and Pel, and Raven, though Amy didn’t know how they could stand to do it. Prossie and Susan and Singer were just behind her, still outside; Valadrakul was at her side.

“What is all that, anyway?” Amy asked.

“Magic,” Valadrakul said. “The raw energies of Shadow made manifest.”

“If it’s Shadow, shouldn’t it all be dark?” Amy asked. She inched forward, took her first step into the chamber beyond the door; her arm was across her face, and colors seemed to ripple and flare on all sides. Pink and orange and electric blue swept across her arm, coloring everything she saw. The air felt oddly stuffy now, as it pressed against her, and she couldn’t decide if it was warm or cold.

“It could be dark, if Shadow so chose,” Valadrakul told her. His voice sounded unsteady.

Startled, Amy glanced at the wizard.

He was trembling.

* * * *

The air of the room seemed somehow compressed, Prossie thought as she lingered in the doorway.

She didn’t like the look of the place at all; the shifting, glaring colors made her think of alarms and beacons and a dozen other sorts of warning, all going off at once, or of some sort of huge machinery going berserk. If the warp generator back at Base One had run wild, she thought it might have looked something like this.

No warp generator had ever run wild, though. Prossie knew what various other kinds of machinery would do when they failed-she had scanned through the memories of engineers any number of times, either directly or second-hand, and had seen what happened when anti-gravity drives imploded, when blasters melted down, when everything went wrong. It was a standard part of the follow-up to any disaster in the Galactic Empire to let the telepaths loose on everyone involved so as to find out what went wrong and who was responsible.

And none of those disasters had ever looked anything like this.

A warp generator malfunction probably wouldn’t either, she told herself. No warp generator had ever run amok, but Prossie had read the memories of scientists who thought they knew what it would do, and none of them had seen it being this varied and colorful.

Of course, scientists tended to think of such things in terms of numbers and schematics, not light and color.

Whatever was happening here, she didn’t like it, and didn’t understand it, and she didn’t want to face it alone.

“Carrie!” she thought, trying desperately to project, knowing as she tried that in this unnatural continuum, in Faerie, she couldn’t.

She could only hope that Carrie was listening.

* * * *

Light shows, Pel thought, it was all a light show. Like the trip sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or when the ark is opened in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” or any number of scenes in various other special-effects spectaculars.

Except that this one was different because it was all around, not confined to a screen; he wasn’t sitting in a dark theater, he was walking through the lights and colors, he thought he could actually feel them, and whether he could or not, he could certainly feel the air, and smell and taste it, and it had a weird, static-electric, closed-in feeling even though it was moving.

And the lights weren’t flashing in some ill-defined soundstage void; as his eyes adjusted he could catch glimpses of a solid room behind the glare, a colonnaded chamber with gilded decoration on white walls-he couldn’t see whether the walls were stone or plaster or what, the light was too bright.

No movie was ever so bright, so intense.

The lights moved and shifted, but there were patterns to them, and they seemed to focus on the far end of the room. He couldn’t look directly at whatever occupied that space.

Was that Shadow? If so, it seemed horribly misnamed.

It ought to be Shadow, though; they had gone through the whole stupid quest, they had fought monsters and thirst and hunger, trudged hundreds of miles, seen half their companions dead, and finally reached and entered the fortress of the enemy. In all the stories, that meant it was time to confront the Evil Power.

Was this it, then?

All that light and color- was Shadow misnamed? Was this some other being or force entirely, one that would send them home? One that could bring Nancy and Rachel back to life? One that would make this whole thing just the dream Ted still said it was?

For all Pel knew, this wasn’t Shadow, but God. The blinding light seemed more appropriate to God’s glory than to a being called Shadow.

Whatever it might be, this was definitely the pay-off, the climax of the whole horrible adventure.

Behind him, he heard Amy and Valadrakul talking, but he didn’t pay much attention. His ears were starting to ring, though he didn’t know why; the whooshings and rumblings and flappings that had accompanied the colors died away suddenly, so that besides the two voices, neither of them speaking loudly, the only sounds were the tapping of boots on marble, the shuffle of feet and rustle of clothing, and labored breathing from someone nearby-maybe Ted.

“Are you all right?” Amy asked, her voice concerned; startled out of his thoughts about Shadow, Pel turned to see who she was asking.

* * * *

Valadrakul was trembling violently; Amy could see his beard quivering, and his now-ragged embroidered vest was almost slapping the frayed knees of his purple Imperial pants.

“What is it?” she demanded, on the verge of panic. She had never seen Valadrakul visibly frightened or upset before.

“’Tis Shadow,” the wizard said, almost gasping. “’Tis the matrix. Look you, how ’tis composed-ah, so splendid! Look you, how majestical! What glory is here before us!”

“It’s a lot of bright lights,” Amy said uneasily. Perhaps the wizard wasn’t scared after all, she realized; perhaps it was something else.

“Nay, you look, but you do not see! You’ve not the eyes, you who know nothing of the arcane arts!”

“Tell us, then, what you see,” Raven said, stepping up close behind Valadrakul. His left arm shielded his eyes; his black clothing seemed to absorb the light, to be the only solid and unchanging thing in the shifting images.

“The matrix,” Valadrakul said. “The heart of Shadow-and what name is that, for this is no feeble shadow, but power incarnate! See, each light a strand of the web, woven gloriously together-why, that beam we passed on the stair, I see now how it fits!” Suddenly, the wizard was striding forward into the room, into the light and color; Amy reached out, tried to catch him as he passed, and missed.

“Look you all,” he cried as he marched, “whosoever sits at the center, upon that throne, there is the center of it all! I could no more construct a matrix such as this than a sparrow could swim, but oh, I see how it works, I see what every finest fiber must be! You, who sit there, let me try, I beg you-for but a moment, but the merest instant, give me your place!”

“Who sits where?” Amy asked, squinting, trying to see through the glare. She could see no one sitting anywhere; Ted was only a vague, dark blur, and Valadrakul, too, was fading into the brilliance.