Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

“Fool,” a voice said, a voice none of them had heard before, rich and loud, but not particularly deep. “The matrix does my will, not thine, thou pitiful semblance of a wizard. It centers not upon this seat, but upon me!”

The words came from somewhere further in the room, deeper in the blaze of light, beyond Ted and Valadrakul, but Amy still couldn’t see anything of the speaker.

“Oh, but let me share it,” Valadrakul pleaded. “I could learn so much …”

“Too much, perchance,” the voice said. “Begone, wizardling; another step, and perish.”

“Oh…” Valadrakul began. He stepped forward, hands outstretched, reaching for the glory he saw before him.

And then he burned; the initial golden flash was scarcely noticeable amid the lights, but Amy had been watching Valadrakul, staring at him, and the flames were plain enough.

After the flames the blast struck the wizard, and flung him backward, directly toward Amy; she let out a noise, a choking, gasping noise that might have been a scream had she been able to breathe more deeply before it came out.

An instant later a flash of pure white, pale and almost lost in the polychrome glory of Shadow’s presence, burst from the flying remains of Valadrakul-Amy remembered the flash when Elani had died, when her magicks had shattered, and knew that Valadrakul, too, was dead.

The body skidded to a halt by her feet, and Amy looked down through flickering colors at the blackened remains of the mage Valadrakul of Warricken.

His vest was reduced to a few scorched threads; the Imperial uniform had held up somewhat better, and was still mostly intact, but every bit of it was charred black, not a trace of purple remaining. A few beard hairs were still sizzling, and the stench of burning hair made Amy gag even before the blackened ruin of the wizard’s face registered on her consciousness.

Something white showed through at one spot, and when Amy realized she couldn’t tell if it was exposed bone or exposed eyeball she turned away and decided against bothering to keep down whatever wanted to come up. Her life was turning into a horror; vomiting seemed a perfectly appropriate reaction.

Very little did come up, though; a thin spatter of yellowish fluid, nothing more.

* * * *

They were all dead, Pel decided as he looked at Valadrakul’s smoking remains. The wizard had been blasted just as effectively, and a good deal more quickly, than the Nazis in “Raiders.”

Which meant that while this was plainly Shadow, and not a merciful God, this Shadow, to all intents and purposes, was as powerful here as God.

The smell of burned meat reached Pel’s nostrils, and he came to the conclusion that this wasn’t an adventure story he was trapped in, it was a horror novel, a Stephen King nightmare.

He should be screaming. He should be fleeing in terror-but there wasn’t anywhere to go, and after everything that had already happened, after the long walk and the disembowelled corpses hanging in every town and the deaths of Nancy and Rachel, Pel didn’t have the emotional reserves to scream or yell or be shocked by Valadrakul’s death.

Something in him was already dead, he thought.

And in a few moments, if Shadow’s whim ran that way, all of him would be dead, body and soul.

They were all dead.

There was nothing more to lose. He turned back to face Shadow, if that was what sat before them in that polychrome glare, and asked, “What did you do that for?”

For a moment, everything was almost silent, save for odd unidentified rustlings, like those that they had heard when the doors first opened, and a faint popping and hissing that Pel realized with a dull, belated shock was the sound of Valadrakul’s corpse cooling. The quiet was so total that it seemed as if the surviving humans were holding their breath, and Pel supposed that some of them were.

The shifting labyrinth of light and color seemed to slow and dim slightly.

“Durst thou address me thus, then?” Shadow’s voice asked; Pel thought he heard a note of amusement.

“Why not?” Pel replied. He supposed that monsters weren’t used to questions like that, but he didn’t care. He was too far gone to really be frightened. “You’ve got us; we’re all dead anyway.”

“Think’st so?” The amusement was definite now, and the voice was higher than Pel had realized.

Pel didn’t bother to answer, and Shadow continued, “I’truth, some among you might yet live to see daylight more.”

“Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?” Pel said. “Any whim that strikes you, there isn’t anything we can do about it, is there?”

“Nay,” Raven shouted suddenly, lurching forward, his still-bandaged fingers raised in a defiant gesture. It occurred to Pel, apropos of nothing, that they ought to be healed by now. “’Tis the duty of all free men, of all who love the Goddess, to resist this thing!” Raven called. “Friend Pel, yield not your soul to it!”

For an instant, Pel thought that they had finally arrived at the climax of the story, that it was an adventure with a happy ending after all, that Raven, the storybook hero, had found some secret weakness, some way to resist Shadow’s power. He would draw a magic sword and cut through Shadow’s spells, or fling some prepared spell of his own.

Then he realized that that wasn’t it at all; this was no simple fantasy. This was more horror. Raven had no secret weapon; he had simply cracked under the strain and done something stupid, not something heroic. He had done something stupid, and he would die for it. If there was any hero here, it wasn’t Raven after all.

And Pel didn’t really think there was any hero. Not after Valadrakul’s death. This was real life, and in real life last-minute rescues didn’t always come, sometimes innocents died horribly, sometimes the good guys were slaughtered. Just like a horror story. Real life didn’t need to be fair, or just, or satisfying; where was the justice in a plane wreck or an earthquake?

Innocents and good guys died meaningless deaths all the time.

He didn’t really know anything about Raven’s past, didn’t know if Raven was an innocent or a good guy, in any sense of the terms, but right now it looked as if Raven was about to die a horrible and meaningless death.

He was. Pel turned as Raven’s velvets flared up, in a blaze of fire and spark; black smoke billowed upward around the man’s burning black hair into the golden shafts above, spilling into the light like ink into clear sparkling water. The swarthy skin reddened, then blackened, then disappeared.

There was no shock-wave like the one that had flung Valadrakul’s corpse at Amy’s feet, and although the self-proclaimed rightful lord of Stormcrack Keep had time to give a brief, anguished cry before the flames consumed him, there was no recognizable corpse, but merely a flurry of black ash.

“I’d worry not of souls, little man,” Shadow told the smoking, drifting remains and the shocked survivors. “I deal not in souls; the flesh of this world is enough to concern me.”

Pel stared for a moment; he heard Singer make a strangled noise somewhere nearby. He knew he should be shocked, horrified, something, but he wasn’t. It occurred to him that Raven had been the last of their native companions; everyone who still stood before Shadow came from either Earth or the Galactic Empire.

He doubted that would make any difference if they ran afoul of one of Shadow’s whims.

* * * *

One by one, Al Singer thought, it’s picking us off one by one and there isn’t anything we can do about it.

This was not what he’d joined the military for. This wasn’t anything he’d ever imagined.

And he couldn’t even fight back. Oh, he still had his blaster, but it wouldn’t work here except for whacking someone over the head, or maybe cracking nuts.