The Reign of the Brown Magician

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  It was, he supposed, a pretty cruel joke; these people didn’t know that the blaster wouldn’t work here. Frankly, though, he didn’t much care; he was fed up with Imperial uncooperativeness. He wanted to show he could be ruthless—and he had to do it before they saw him bring their dead companions back to life, or the effect would be ruined.

  Of course, he could threaten to fry them all magically, which would be a more honest threat, but somehow Pel suspected the blaster would be a more effective threat. These people undoubtedly believed in blasters, while they probably didn’t believe in magic.

  It was Grigsby who spoke up, which obscurely pleased Pel.

  “Don’t shoot him,” he said. “I’m the governor-general of Beckett.”

  Pel’s nasty grin turned into a pleased smile. “Governor-general? Is that what it sounds like?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Grigsby answered. “I’ve no idea what it sounds like to a barbarian such as yourself. And just who, might I ask, are you? You know who we are; who are you? Are you Shadow?”

  “No, I’m…” Pel hesitated, then gave the name he was known by here—maybe back on Earth he was Pellinore Brown, but not here. “I’m Pelbrun, the Brown Magician. And to me, ‘Governor-General’ sounds like the highest office on the…the planet? Is Beckett the name of the planet? Or is it just an island or a continent or something?”

  “Beckett is the planet,” Grigsby admitted.

  “That’s great!” Pel was absolutely delighted; this was a real stroke of luck. This first raid in his planned campaign of terror had just been intended to add to his armory; he hadn’t hoped for so valuable a hostage.

  He had figured that in any sort of open combat, soldiers from Faerie would get cut to pieces if they didn’t have any better weapons than swords and spears, and he didn’t have the patience to infiltrate an entire new network of spies and saboteurs. He did have three blasters—the one Prossie had used to kill Shadow, and two others that had belonged to Lieutenant Dibbs’ men when Shadow slaughtered them. What he needed was to get more.

  So he had sent the monster through, knowing it would die, so that soldiers would come and look at it, maybe post a guard; then the fetches were sent through, three at a time, to kill or capture the soldiers in order to get more blasters.

  The first three had gotten killed, but another threesome had been close behind, ready to snatch up the blasters the first set dropped and continue the fight, and then, after a dozen had gone through, he had sent the false Nancy to assess the situation and either sound the retreat or call for the enemy’s surrender, whichever seemed appropriate.

  And it seemed to have worked. They had more blasters.

  The fetches reappeared and lowered a purple-uniformed corpse to the floor.

  That was something to practice resurrection on, Pel thought, smiling.

  The fetches vanished back through the portal.

  “All right, Mr. Miller,” he said, “you can go—just step back through that portal, the way those two just did. Then get in your aircar and go—but I want you to take a message back to your bosses for me.”

  “What message?” Miller said warily.

  “Simple enough—you tell those fools at Base One that I’ll trade your Governor-General here, and these fine soldiers, for the bodies of my wife and daughter. I get the bodies, I let everyone go. But if I don’t get them soon, I start killing hostages. And if I run out of hostages, I’ll stage another raid—and probably not on Beckett. My men could pop up anywhere in the whole fuckin’ Galactic Empire, Mr. Miller—you tell those bastards that!”

  Miller hesitated, unsure what to say; he stared at Pel for a few seconds, glanced at Grigsby, then back at Pel.

  “Go on,” Pel said, with an impatient gesture.

  Miller stepped forward, groping for the opening—and then he was gone.

  Pel nodded with satisfaction. It would take time for Miller to get back to wherever he came from and pass the word; it would take time for the message to reach Base One, and for the brass there to decide what to do.

  They might well decide the wrong thing; the Empire had demonstrated before just how pigheaded and stupid it could be. Pel told himself that he had to be ready if the idiots said “no” again.

  And he only had nine blasters so far.

  * * * *

  “Another report,” the telepath said. “This one’s from my cousin Sharon—I mean, from Gamma Trianguli II. A party of armed men appeared from nowhere, took hostages, broke into the local constabulary’s armory, then vanished, taking the hostages with them. They left a note demanding the bodies.”

  “God,” Albright said, resting his head in his hands and staring down at the desk.

  “We should have just delivered them in the first place,” Markham said. “All the raids have been new arrivals, there haven’t been any signs that he left spies or saboteurs in place; we should have believed him and given him the damn bodies.”

  “That’s as may be,” Sheffield replied. “We didn’t, and we can’t now.”

  “Why not?” Albright asked, lifting his head. “Why the hell not?”

  “Because we can’t give in to terrorism. We mustn’t let ourselves be blackmailed, or he’ll have won, we’ll have to do whatever he demands. I have His Majesty’s backing on this—we will not give in.”

  Albright stared silently at his superior for a long moment, then glanced at Markham.

  Markham shrugged.

  “For God’s sake,” Albright said. “He wants something that’s his by right, that we should have given him long ago, and now you say that we can’t?”

  “Not while he’s attacking us. If he returns all our hostages, then maybe we can negotiate. If we choose.”

  “We did negotiate,” Markham pointed out. “He agreed to our terms, and did what he said he would, and then we changed the rules.”

  “We asked for proof, that’s all.”

  “Proof—how the hell was he supposed to prove a negative?”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter,” Sheffield insisted. “The Emperor says we don’t give him anything. We don’t even talk until he stops the attacks.”

  “And if he never stops the attacks?”

  “We’re going to make him stop the attacks.”

  “How?” Albright demanded. “We don’t have any way of locating or blocking the space-warps he’s using; they don’t produce the same radiation ours do. They don’t produce any radiation we can detect. As far as we can tell, they can pop up anywhere.”

  Sheffield shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. He turned to Celia Howe, who had sat silently throughout the debate. “What’s the latest report?”

  “We’ve been interviewing all the captured subjects, of course,” Howe replied. “It’s been assigned our highest priority. Most of them know very little about Brown, or for that matter Shadow, but they seem willing to tell us what they do know, even those immune to telepathy, though of course we can’t be sure those aren’t lying. We’ve resorted to unpleasant methods with some of them…”

  “Torture,” Albright muttered. Howe ignored him.

  “…and we’ve been collecting and collating the data as fast as we can. So far, we have not learned of any enemy personnel who have not surrendered to us—each subject has listed all agents known to him, and so far every single one is accounted for. This tends to support Brown’s claim that he gave up his entire network, however irrational such an action may appear to us—it may be that we’re dealing with a lunatic.”

  “What about these space-warps?” Sheffield asked. “Have we learned anything more about them?”

  Howe shook her head. “There are indications that the portals, as they call them, always manifested themselves in exactly the same place in the Empire, though the location of the opening on the other end might vary somewhat. However, we have been unable to establish whether this was merely a matter of convenience, or whether it’s inherent in the system.”

  Markham and Albright looked at one another. Mar
kham volunteered, “We’ve been forced to open space-warps in exactly the same spot—we can’t get them anywhere within about five hundred miles of where one previously occurred without using exactly the same place. Maybe Shadow’s method, whatever it is, has the same limitation.”

  “If we put all known warp locations under heavy guard,” Albright suggested, “perhaps we could stop any further raiding.”

  “Or perhaps,” Markham added reluctantly, “we’d just force Brown to move to someplace five hundred miles away. The Empire’s a big place; we can’t guard all of it.”

  “At the very least, we should guard every known location on Terra,” Albright said. “Are any known here on Base One?”

  Howe shook her head. “So far, we know of none on either Terra or on Base One. The Terran cell of Shadow’s network received its orders from off-world.”

  “Then how’d that woman get into the Emperor’s bedroom?” Albright asked.

  Howe frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that; it’s a top security matter.” She pointed at the telepath. “I certainly can’t say anything with him in the room. But it doesn’t appear to have involved a space-warp portal.”

  “None of this is important,” Sheffield said, cutting off the discussion. “When I said we were going to stop the attacks I wasn’t talking about some feeble blockade.”

  Markham grimaced. “Somehow, I didn’t think you meant blockading the portals. So what did you mean?”

  “I thought it was obvious,” Sheffield said.

  “So I’m stupid,” Markham replied. “Humor me.”

  “The Galactic Empire is the natural end of political evolution,” Sheffield said. “Everyone knows that. It’s our destiny to rule the entire human species, and I see no reason that should be limited to our own universe, now that we know others exist. Shadow was an unknown quantity, but Brown—we know about Brown. We don’t know everything, but enough. He’s just a man—and an amateur, at that. It’s inevitable that we’ll add his kingdom to the Empire, and these raids he’s making just mean we need to do it now.” He smiled grimly. “We’re going to counter-attack, of course. The Imperial Army is going to flatten this upstart once and for all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The abrupt twist in the matrix startled Pel out of a light doze. He sat up and looked around.

  He was in his bed, safe in Shadow’s fortress; the light of the matrix blazed gold and crimson from the bare stone walls. The false Nancy lay naked beside him, sound asleep.

  What had roused him? There wasn’t anything out of place in the bedchamber. Had he heard something?

  Not through the foot-thick walls, certainly; he reached out with the matrix and opened the door, while sensing everything that lay in the corridor beyond.

  Except there wasn’t anything in the corridor.

  He reached out farther.

  There were fetches and monsters and people going about their business, there were his dozens of hostages all secure in the dungeons and towers; all was as it should be, throughout the fortress.

  The weather above was a normal, if unpleasant, drizzle; the marsh was quiet.

  Then, finally, he noticed the kink.

  The Imperial space-warp had opened again. It had been closed for some time; in fact, he hadn’t noticed it open since he had begun his little attempts at convincing the Empire to cooperate. He had flown out to the familiar spot by his treehouse in the Low Forest of West Sunderland a few days before to see if the Empire had come to its collective senses, if the bodies had been delivered before the warp was closed, or at some time while he was asleep or distracted, and he’d found nothing but empty air and woods.

  Now it was back—but the place where the space-warp bent a strand of the matrix in an impossible direction had moved; instead of being in Sunderland it was somewhere far off in the other direction.

  And it seemed larger.

  Pel was now fully awake, and angry. What the hell was the Empire up to?

  He would just have to go and see.

  * * * *

  Captain Hamilton Puckett took a deep breath, tightened his grip on his sword, and jumped, his eyes still firmly closed. His left hand was on the hilt of his blaster—he knew all the experts said it wouldn’t work, but he couldn’t help it, he still wanted that familiar reassurance, and he’d made sure his holster was slung on the outside of his space suit.

  The glare of the warp abruptly vanished, and the red glow it made of the inside of his eyelids disappeared; he opened his eyes, and managed to catch himself just short of falling on his armored face. The drop seemed longer than it should; he hoped that was just an illusion caused by the transition to higher gravity.

  He got himself upright, released his blaster, wiped dust from the front of his helmet, and looked around.

  People were staring at him—strange people, all of them terribly tall and thin, with pale narrow faces and long black hair, wearing flowing green and white clothes. He was standing on bare dirt; in fact, his landing had stirred up a cloud of dust. Around him were crude huts made of some sort of reeds or grasses, and all in all about a dozen faces peered at him from the doorways of the huts or the spaces between them. Their expressions were odd—not fear or anger or anything he could read plainly.

  They didn’t look happy, though.

  Well, why should they? He’d just popped out of thin air in the middle of their village.

  “Damn,” he said.

  The word was oddly muffled by the helmet he wore.

  He turned and groped for the warp—the scientists had said they were going to bring it in right at ground level.

  They hadn’t; it was a good four feet off the ground. He had to back up and take his best running leap in order to get through it, and he imagined he looked like a particularly ridiculous sort of monster as he galloped through the middle of the village in his space suit, waving his sword about.

  His jump turned into an exceptionally awkward dive—he’d misjudged either the suit’s mass or the local gravity—but he did sail back through into the blinding white light of the space-warp. His landing knocked the wind out of him, and for a moment he lay motionless on the steel walkway.

  When he raised his head at last, he saw people signalling wildly to him from the observation area.

  He sighed and clambered to his feet; he’d have to go up and report.

  They probably weren’t going to like this. They’d wanted someplace near human habitation, to avoid impassable wilderness and make foraging easier, but no one had wanted to come out smack in some primitive village. And they’d wanted ground level, where they could just step through, not a four-foot drop.

  Well, it wasn’t his fault; they could shout at the scientists.

  But they’d probably want to try again, which would mean someone would have to make another leap into the unknown, and Hamilton Puckett had a pretty good idea who’d be making that leap.

  After all, he had experience now. And if he wanted to command the first assault, he needed to scout the terrain—that was the deal the brass had offered.

  And it was a deal he intended to keep.

  * * * *

  “It’s getting bad,” Miletti said. “They’re escalating, turning it into a war.”

  Major Johnston considered this for a moment, then turned to Prossie Thorpe. “Ms. Thorpe,” he said, “if you don’t want to answer I won’t press it, but you know more about this than any of the rest of us. In your opinion, is a war between Faerie and the Empire good or bad for us here on Earth?”

  “I don’t know,” Thorpe said.

  “How can any war be good?” Amy Jewell asked. She seemed uncomfortable, here in Miletti’s living room—and that was, Johnston thought, reasonable enough; after all, Miletti hadn’t invited her, and didn’t particularly want any of them here. It had been Johnston who had brought them along, in an effort to speed up the process of questioning Miletti and interpreting the data he provided.

  If Miletti had been willing to come down to t
he Pentagon, or Crystal City…

  But he wasn’t. He insisted he could provide more information if he stayed safely in his suburban home, with familiar surroundings and sixty-eight channels of cable TV, and Johnston had decided that there might be enough truth in that to make it a mistake to argue with him, or to order him anywhere.

  “If it removes them both as threats,” Johnston answered Amy’s question. “I’d consider that a good war, for us.”

  “I don’t think Pel was ever a threat to anybody,” Thorpe replied.

  “He is now,” Miletti said, looking up from his television.

  * * * *

  “Secure the village,” they said. Just what the devil did they think that meant?

  Captain Puckett only knew one way to make sure a village was secure, and he didn’t like it much. He was fairly certain that Marshal Albright knew what was involved, but Secretary Markham and Secretary Sheffield might not. Someone might get soft-hearted later, and if that happened Puckett supposed he’d take the blame for the massacre and probably spend the rest of his days on a pension somewhere like old man Blackburn, with parents warning their children away from him.

  But if he didn’t do it, he’d catch hell right now.

  He looked over his men once again. In their space suits they all looked alike, faceless gleaming automatons—but the swords they held looked weirdly out of place, throwbacks to some earlier century, as if they were knights in distorted armor rather than Imperial troopers.

  He chalked a final warning on the board—REMEMBER! FOUR-FOOT DROP, HIGH GRAVITY! Naturally, the scientists hadn’t fixed that—they claimed they couldn’t. Puckett had his own opinion on that, but knew better than to say it aloud.

  He put down the chalk and signalled the door crew. The big panel slid open, admitting the blinding glare of the space-warp, and Puckett waved his men forward.

  He wondered if any of them were yelling as they charged across the open, airless expanse and into the light.

  * * * *

  Pel had never seen this part of his new world before—but that was hardly surprising, since he had never seen most of the place.