In the Empire of Shadow

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Hanged, with his face congested with blood, his tongue swollen and protruding, body limp and lifeless, no longer a human being but just a thing.

  Amy shuddered.

  That dead thing back on Zeta whatever-it-was had fathered a child on her, too, which only made it worse. What kind of a human being was it who did things like that?

  And Beth, who’d been hanged as well, even though she was a slave, the same as Amy had been—the Empire never knew that, had taken Amy’s word for it when she said Beth was guilty, too. Plain quiet Beth, who’d helped Walter abuse Amy, and who had mostly stayed out of Walter’s way the rest of the time. What kind of woman had she been, to help her master, her captor, against another victim?

  But then, Amy knew she had heard of such things before. Patty Hearst had helped the SLA, hadn’t she? Amy remembered the name for it, for hostages coming to help their captors—the Stockholm syndrome. It happened all the time.

  And it wasn’t new. The Sabine women had sided with the Romans against their own brothers and fathers, hadn’t they? Why should Beth have been any different? Why side with a loser?

  Because it was right, Amy answered herself. Because siding with the abuser was wrong, it was evil, it just encouraged more abuse.

  Would she ever have helped Walter with someone new? She had resisted—why couldn’t Beth?

  But of course, Beth had been there for years, not just weeks. Maybe she had fought at first; maybe she had resisted just as much as Amy had, until it finally sank in that resistance did no good. No Imperial troops came to rescue Beth, the way they had saved Amy. Beth had seen Sheila die for fighting back.

  What did it matter, anyway, Amy asked herself. Walter and Beth were both dead, and nothing could bring them back. If Beth hadn’t deserved hanging, it was a little late to worry about it. Beth had given up, and had died for it, and that was too damn bad, but why was Amy worrying about it? So there were three dead men hanging in the town square—nothing could bring them back, either, and what business was it of hers, anyway? She didn’t know anything about it.

  She did know that she wouldn’t be staying in this town, though. She wouldn’t stay in a place where those corpses could be left out there. Why hadn’t they been cut down and decently buried?

  They were meant as a warning, of course, and as far as Amy was concerned, they’d worked—they’d warned her away from this place, once and for all. Anyone who could stay here would be accepting things like that, would be as bad as Beth.

  And, Amy reluctantly realized, the same was probably true of anywhere Shadow ruled. She couldn’t just settle down, not here, not anywhere.

  But walking into Shadow’s fortress was suicide, and wasn’t that wrong, too?

  There was no way out. There was no right thing to do. She was trapped.

  She sipped more ale. She wanted to cry, but fought back the urge—not here, not now, not in this town.

  Later she intended to cry, but not now.

  * * * *

  “What do you suppose they did?” Pel asked, nodding toward the window as he picked at a splinter in the tabletop.

  Raven shrugged. “Doubtless they irked Shadow somewise,” he said. “As you’d do, by troubling it in its fortress.”

  “You don’t think we should do that, do you?” Pel asked unhappily.

  “Nay, I do not,” Raven said.

  “But what else can we do?” Pel asked. “It’s our only way home, the only way we can get you your guns, the only chance we have. There are only eleven of us; we can’t fight all Shadow’s monsters and magic by ourselves.”

  “Yet that’s just what you attempt, is’t not?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Pel insisted. “We aren’t trying to fight them, we’re trying to get past them, to destroy Shadow itself. Like Frodo and the Ring. Or like assassinating Hitler to end World War II.”

  Raven shrugged. “These names mean naught to me.”

  “Frodo’s from a famous story about a war against an evil magician—a lot like Shadow, from your description.”

  “But a mere story?”

  Reluctantly, Pel nodded. “But Hitler was real,” he said.

  “And was this Hitler assassinated, as you propose?”

  “No,” Pel admitted.

  Raven said nothing, but his expression was plain for Pel to read. Raven clearly thought both Pel’s examples were silly.

  And Pel had to admit that he had a point; this was real life, not Tolkien’s Middle Earth—but then, this wasn’t Earth at all, and the only experiences Pel had ever had with other worlds had been in books and movies, and in all of those, a few brave and determined people could destroy the all-powerful enemy and save the world.

  In the real world, nobody had ever assassinated Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon, but how hard had anyone tried? And if he remembered his history right, someone had assassinated Caligula, and who knew how many other tyrants had been destroyed before they had reached Hitler’s level?

  Besides, what else was Pel supposed to do?

  “Well, what alternative are you offering us?” he demanded. “Just how do you propose to defeat Shadow and send us home?”

  “In truth,” Raven said, “I know not. I would have us find shelter, that we might take what time we need in gathering our forces, that we might await whatever opportunity the Goddess might send—for surely, She will not allow Shadow to rule forever, in despite of Her.”

  “I don’t believe in your Goddess,” Pel answered. “We have a saying in my world that God helps those who help themselves; those who simply have faith and wait usually wait forever, if you ask me. And if someone does save them, it’s other people who weren’t waiting, not God—or your Goddess, either.”

  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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “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 ther
e, 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?”

  “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 b
ack 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.”