Copyright Information

Copyright © 1996 by Lawrence Watt-Evans. This edition copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Watt-Evans. All rights reserved.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

www.wildsidebooks.com

Dedication

For Julie—

of course.

Chapter One

Her car was gone. Amy Jewell had looked out the front door and seen that the curb was empty, and had stepped back inside and closed the door.

Her car was gone.

That had come as a shock at first, but it shouldn’t have. After all, she had left it out front months ago.

It was hard to realize that it had really been months, that it hadn’t all been a dream, that they hadn’t somehow returned to the moment they had left.

But it had been real, and it had been months ago that she had parked her car out front of Pel and Nancy Brown’s house in the expectation of being safely back home and in bed by midnight. She and her lawyer had come here to find out why there was a non-functional spaceship in her back yard; she hadn’t planned on anything more than an evening of explanations.

She certainly hadn’t planned on spending months going through hell in two other universes.

But then, just to see if the stories she had been told were true, she and the others had stepped through a magical portal in the basement wall into a universe she called Faerie, where Shadow ruled—and after that she had been caught up, unable to return, until now.

She had fled from Shadow’s monsters into the third universe, dominated by the Galactic Empire, where she had been captured by pirates and sold into slavery; she had spent weeks as a slave before the Empire had rescued from her master, Walter, and his helper Beth.

At least she’d survived—Nancy Brown was killed by the pirates, Nancy’s daughter Rachel by her master. Walter had killed a slave once, but he didn’t kill Amy.

She was pregnant by that son of a bitch, though. Not that she intended to stay that way. The Empire had hanged Walter and Beth both, and she intended to abort Walter’s child, and be rid of it, as well. She’d never managed to have any children when she was married, not even before she had found out what a bastard Stan really was and divorced him, and she wasn’t about to start now with Walter’s kid.

After the rescue she had spent boring weeks at Base One, the home of the Imperial Fleet, and then she had been sent back into Faerie as part of a raiding party that was meant to assassinate Shadow.

She hadn’t intended to really attempt anything that stupid; she’d intended to use the Faerie magic to go home the minute the Empire’s troops weren’t watching her. But then Elani, the wizard who knew the portal spell, had been killed, and she and the others had been stranded again.

So they’d gone on with the plan to assassinate Shadow, knowing it was suicidal.

And it was suicidal—most of the party had either died or deserted.

But the most amazing thing in the whole adventure was that they had actually managed it, eventually—Pel Brown and Prossie Thorpe had killed Shadow. Proserpine Thorpe, Registered Master Telepath, who had rebelled against the Galactic Empire and was now a refugee here on Earth with Amy, had shot a powerless Shadow dead.

And Pellinore Brown, a marketing consultant from Germantown, Maryland, had set it up, and now controlled all the power, the magical matrix, that Shadow had held.

And he had sent Amy, and Prossie, and his lawyer Ted Deranian, safely back through the portal in the Browns’ basement, and here they were, but Pel hadn’t been able to do anything about all the time that had passed while they were going through hell in those other realities.

So of course the car was gone, after so long.

Amy did wonder what had happened to it, though; had it been towed, or stolen, or repossessed, or what?

She realized then that she didn’t have her keys, so she couldn’t have started it anyway. She didn’t have her driver’s license, or any money, or anything else—her purse, if it still existed at all, was back on Zeta Leo III, where she’d been Walter’s household slave, in that other universe where the Galactic Empire ruled all those hundreds of planets.

Ted’s car was gone from out front as well.

Pel’s and Nancy’s were in the garage; Amy checked, and found them both sitting there, somewhat dusty but apparently intact.

That didn’t help much, though; even if she hadn’t been bothered by the idea of stealing one of them, she didn’t know where any keys were. She supposed one set was still in Nancy’s stolen purse—and that was probably on Zeta Leo III, like her own. As for any other set, well, who knew where Pel kept his keys?

She wondered if Ted might know—or if not, whether he might know how to hot-wire an ignition.

Ted, however, was firmly settled in the family room, in front of the TV, watching CNN Headline News, trying to catch up on what he’d missed, and to convince himself…

Well, to convince himself of something, but Amy wasn’t sure just what. That he’d imagined the whole adventure? That it was all real? That whatever had happened, everything was normal now? For all she knew, he was checking to see whether this was really Earth, and not some twisted alternate version.

Whatever he was doing, he had ignored her ever since he found out that the TV worked, that the power and TV cable hadn’t yet been cut off for non-payment.

Prossie seemed to be wavering between the two of them; she was fascinated by the TV, but she also seemed to consider Amy her lifeline, and whenever Amy stayed out of sight of the family room for more than a few minutes Prossie came looking for her, calling her name quietly into the silent depths of the Browns’ house.

It was hardly surprising that Prossie felt out of place—certainly no more surprising than the car’s absence. After all, this wasn’t Prossie’s native world.

Amy paused in the hallway as Prossie caught up; for a moment both women hesitated, but neither spoke, and at last Amy led the way.

She wasn’t really going anywhere in particular, just looking around; she didn’t want to settle down the way Ted had, she wanted to keep moving, to get on home to her own house up in Goshen, but her car was gone and she didn’t have any money or identification or credit cards, and she was wearing only the filthy, tattered remains of Imperial military-issue pants and T-shirt. She couldn’t catch a bus or call a cab.

She might be able to find something she could wear in Pel and Nancy’s closet—she and Nancy hadn’t been the same size at all, Nancy had been smaller, but there would surely be something, one of Pel’s shirts maybe. She didn’t like taking things without permission, but this was an emergency, and she’d only be borrowing it until she could get home.

And besides, it wasn’t as if Nancy would ever need her clothes again.

But Amy still didn’t have money for a bus or cab.

If the phone still worked she could call a friend for a ride, but she needed to think things through first. Who would she call? What would she say? What had happened all those weeks she was gone? Was the wreck of I.S.S. (for “Imperial Space Ship”) Ruthless still lying in her back yard?

She wished that thing had never fallen out of the sky onto her land; that had been what got her involved in all this in the first place. The Empire had been trying to establish contact with Washington, and had suddenly discovered, when Ruthless popped out of a space-warp over Amy’s back yard, that their anti-gravity drive didn’t work in Earth’s universe.

And no one had believed it was real, so the crew had been thrown in jail down in Rockville, and Ted had bailed them out because Pel had been contacted by people from Faerie who wanted to talk to the Imperials, and then they’d all stepped through the portal in Pel’s basement for a quick look, just to see if it was real…

Well, they were back now, and Amy wanted to go home, but what about Ted, and Prossie? What would become of them, if Amy left? Prossie had nowhere to go, and Ted seemed so out of touch with reality that Amy wasn’t at all sure he could take care of himself.

There were hundreds of questions, and she needed to think, and she thought best when she was moving, when she was looking at things, so she rambled through the Browns’ empty house, looking around and trying to think, while Prossie followed along, saying nothing.

Amy thought Prossie probably had at least as many questions of her own, and it was really very thoughtful of her to not ask them yet.

She looked in the master bedroom, but did not explore the closets or dressers—she wasn’t ready for that yet. Going through the Browns’ clothes would be a little too intimate.

She would get to it, but first she just wanted to look.

Roaming from room to room with another woman tagging after her seemed so very familiar and comfortable that she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry; it was just like looking over a prospective client’s home with the client a step behind. And the Browns could certainly have used an interior decorator—or maybe just a good cleaning crew. The house was a mess.

It wasn’t just the dust and general air of abandonment, either. Things were out of place, drawers left open, books stacked in front of empty shelves. Amy couldn’t be certain, but she thought the house had been searched. She didn’t remember any such disarray when she had been here before; true, that had only been for a few hours, months ago, and she hadn’t seen most of the house, but she was fairly certain things were different.

The house hadn’t been burgled; the TV and stereo and other valuables were all still there.

Someone, she guessed, must have reported the Browns missing. The police had probably gone through the place, looking for clues—and maybe not just the police, if someone had made the connection to the crashed spaceship. The FAA and the Air Force had been interested in it.

She smiled wryly at the thought as she stood in the door of poor little Rachel’s bedroom. Somehow, she doubted the police or the Air Force would ever have figured out that everyone in the house had magically walked through a solid concrete wall in the basement and emerged in another universe, caught up in the conflict between the Galactic Empire and an all-powerful wizard named Shadow.

The smile vanished as she stepped into the bedroom and looked about.

Toys were strewn across the floor; a floppy green-and-red plush alligator lay on the bed, gaping foolishly at her.

Poor little Rachel Brown, six years old, had been sold into slavery and then murdered. There wasn’t anything funny about that.

Rachel’s mother had been raped and killed by pirates—not storybook pirates with eye patches and peg legs, but serious, workmanlike pirates with guns and a spaceship. Rachel’s father had survived, but he was back there in Shadow’s place, mourning them both, with some crazy idea he could bring them back from the dead.

Six Earthpeople had walked through that basement wall, and only two had come back—Pel was still in Faerie, and Nancy and Rachel and Susan, Amy’s lawyer Susan Nguyen, who she had dragged along, were all dead.

And the Faerie folk who had created the portal were all dead—Raven of Stormcrack Keep, and the wizards Valadrakul and Elani, and Squire Donald…

No, not quite all, she corrected herself; Stoddard might not be dead—he’d deserted, and might be safe somewhere in Faerie. He was gone, though, and the others were dead. So were at least a dozen of the Imperials who had been involved.

There wasn’t anything funny about any of it.

“I want to go home,” Amy said suddenly. “Did you see a phone anywhere?”

Prossie blinked at her.

“What’s a phone?” she asked.

* * * *

“Proserpine Thorpe is definitely on Earth now,” the telepath said, standing at attention and staring straight ahead.

Under-Secretary of Science for Interdimensional Affairs John Bascombe leaned back in his desk chair and looked up at Carrie Hall’s face.

Thorpe was the rogue telepath, the one who had gone into Shadow’s universe with that barbarian Raven, and the Earthpeople, and that idiot Colonel Carson who’d got himself killed. She was the one who had started refusing orders, or making up her own—crimes that would have gotten her, or any other telepath, hanged or shot within hours, anywhere in the Empire. The Empire couldn’t tolerate disobedience in the mind-reading mutants.

She was also Carrie Hall’s cousin—all the telepaths, all four hundred and sixteen of them, were a single extended family, scattered across the Empire.

But Thorpe had been in Shadow’s universe. Bascombe himself, along with General Hart, had sent her there after she and most of the crew of Ruthless had managed to get home to Base One.

Earth wasn’t in Shadow’s universe.

There were times Bascombe regretted that he had wangled himself this job. It had looked like an easy road to advancement, and it definitely had promise, but he kept stumbling across all these complications.

“Earth,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Carrie answered, her gaze fixed on the wall behind him.

“You’re absolutely sure she’s on Earth, Hall? Not on some backwater like her last appearance, or some obscure part of the Shadow reality we haven’t seen before, or some other planet in Earth’s universe? Or on Terra? I’m told that Earth and Terra are very similar.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure. She’s on Earth.”

“Do you have any idea what she’s doing there?”

Carrie hesitated.

“No, sir,” she said.

“You can’t read her mind?”

Carrie hesitated even longer this time.

“Sir, it’s…it’s difficult, when she’s on Earth,” Carrie explained, “especially since she isn’t just ignoring me, she’s actively trying to shut me out, and even without the use of her own telepathic abilities she knows how to make it difficult for me.”

“So you haven’t been able to read anything, telepath?” The doubt was plain in Bascombe’s tone.

“Just…just glimpses, sir. It’s hard to describe.”

“Try.”

“I really wouldn’t know where to begin, sir. There’s a memory of a gunfight in a meadow somewhere, and something about blinding colored lights, and thoughts of death, and the image of a machine showing colored moving pictures, like a miniature movie.”

“You can’t do any better than that?”

She didn’t answer, but he could see the unhappiness on her face.

Bascombe took his time watching that unhappiness before he said, “This renegade, I am told by you telepaths, has popped into real space twice in the past sixty hours. You tell me that these two appearances were over a hundred light-years apart, even though there’s no sign of a spaceship involved. At considerable expense we’ve sent expeditions to both supposed locations, each one with a telepath along. And now you come in here and tell me that she’s on Earth. Do you expect us to send another expedition there? Do I need to remind you what happened to Ruthless?”

“No, sir.” Carrie’s face was blank again.

“Then what do you expect, Telepath?”

“Nothing, sir,” Carrie said. “I just thought it was my duty to inform you.”

Bascombe nodded.

“It was. You did. Now get the hell out of here—and I want you to write up a report on everything you can read from Proserpine Thorpe’s mind, and keep on writing it from now until I tell you to stop, and send a copy of the new material to me once a day.”

“Yes, sir.” Carrie turned and fled.

When she was gone, Bascombe stared at the door.

For decades the Imperial government had relied on those damned mind-reading mutants for much of their intelligence-gathering and long-distance communication. Thorpe wasn’t the first one to go bad, and she probably wouldn’t be the last, but each time anything like this happened, Bascombe worried; someday they might all go bad.

And this time it was all mixed up with the two known alternate universes, with the thing called Shadow that had been sending its spies and monsters into the Empire for the past seven years, and with the party of troublemakers Bascombe and his political rival General Hart had sent to their deaths. And now there was this thing about near-instantaneous travel across deep space.

At least, the telepaths said Thorpe had somehow crossed all those light-years in a day or so, without a ship.

If that was true, if hopping between universes could provide near-instantaneous interstellar travel, that could mean that space-warp technology, Bascombe’s own little bailiwick in the Department of Science, might be even more important than he had thought.

And if it wasn’t true, it could mean that the telepaths had already gone bad.

* * * *

Near the end of the row of gargoyles that drained the rooftop was one with a broken jaw. Its granite chin was gone, and the rusted end of an iron pipe protruded below the stumps of fangs, a jagged hole in the pipe’s underside spilling water in uneven splatters onto the stone of the tower’s battlement.

The steady rush of water from the others, pouring out over the side, did not bother Pel Brown at all, but the pattering from the broken pipe sounded like a child’s running feet, and that sound tormented him. It was as if Rachel’s ghost were running endlessly across the parapet.

He wanted to reach out and grab her, pull her back to safety, away from the edge—but she wasn’t there.

Rachel would have adored this place, he thought, with its spires and its gargoyles, its spiral staircases and its secret passages. That she had not lived to see it was still unbearable, despite the weeks that had passed since he was told of her death.

He stood under the overhanging eaves, watching the rain, watching the streams of water pouring out into space, watching the one stream that scattered and fell short, watching the repeating pattern of splashes on the stone.

He had, for the moment, suppressed the visible portion of the aura of magic that surrounded him; to outward appearances he was only a man, but he could still feel the matrix he held, the power that flowed around and through him.

He could stop the sound, of course; any time he wanted to, he could stop it. He could blast the gargoyle into powder, if he chose. He thought that with a little more effort he could repair it, gathering dust from the air around it and healing the carved stone.

He did neither; instead, he drew the power to him, reached out into the web, into the power matrix, and found the lines that led up into the clouds overhead. He shifted them, working by feel in a way he had no words to explain.

The rain stopped, as if someone had shut off a faucet. Almost immediately after the last drops plopped onto the tile roof the steady flow from the other gargoyles slowed, and the spattering fall from the broken pipe changed its rhythm, becoming less even.

And that was worse.

It didn’t sound like his daughter anymore; it didn’t sound like anything. It was as if he had erased the last trace of her. The sky was still grey overhead, the water was still dripping from the eaves, the battlement was still glazed with rain, but no invisible child’s footsteps pattered on the stone.

Instead, damp air swirled and whispered across the stone, driven not by wind, but by the magical currents of the matrix.

He pulled the power to him, grabbing at it, hauling it in; magic seethed in his mind and his fingers, and the distinction between himself and the matrix he held became vague and uncertain. A red sheen blurred his vision for a second, and then was swept aside in a shower of crimson sparks that danced wildly across the stonework.

He was glowing again; his control of his appearance had slipped, and a halo of shifting colors flickered around him.

He ignored it, looking upward.

The clouds hung above him, low and dark, and he sent a broad band of scarlet fire snaking upward, lighting them to the color of blood.

The unnatural glow suffused the landscape; the green forests on the distant hills turned black, the gray marshlands that encircled the fortress were tinged with a rusty life, and the castle itself took on a color that had never been seen in nature, not in this world, nor on Pel’s native Earth.

It looked like something out of a horror movie, Pel thought, that eerie sky and the thick clouds and the gargoyles, hovering above him.

That seemed perfectly appropriate. He felt as if he’d fallen into a story months ago, and been unable to climb back out. Sometimes it was science fiction, as in the Galactic Empire, with their spaceships and blasters; sometimes it was an epic fantasy, as when Shadow had made him into a wizard and he had turned on her and destroyed her. Why shouldn’t it be a horror story now?

He released the knot of power he had gathered—not in a spell, as he had thought he would, but in a simple release, flowing back into its natural patterns—or at any rate, into a form as natural as the patterns could be while still bound together in the world-spanning matrix that Shadow had created for herself and passed on to Pel.

The rain began falling anew, and Pel turned away.

He had no reason to be up here, really. He had been exploring the fortress for lack of anything better to do—or rather, because he was not sure he knew what he wanted to do.

He knew what he wanted to have—he wanted his wife and child back. And he knew that he held a power that could allegedly raise the dead.

But he didn’t know what he had to do to make it work. He didn’t know how to find out.

Hadn’t someone said that knowledge was power? Well, Pel thought, the converse didn’t seem to be true. He had all the power he could want, but it hadn’t gotten him much in the way of knowledge.

He stepped into the tower, closed the door behind him, and started down the stair. The way was dark and narrow, the slit windows covered by dusty shutters, and Pel had no lantern or torch, but he didn’t need one—he carried the mobile focus of all this world’s magic with him wherever he went, and its glow brilliantly illuminated the surrounding stone walls.

He didn’t need to see at all, though; the matrix also let him sense the shape of the world around him in some more direct way he did not understand.

It was amazing how quickly he had become accustomed to carrying this thing about wherever he went, he thought as he tramped down the steps. Shadow had used something like hypnosis on him, he knew—something that used magic, rather than the simple psychological stunts and suggestions of Earthly hypnotists. She had wanted him to learn quickly, not for his own good, but so that he could serve her purposes that much sooner. So he accepted calmly that his senses were altered and enhanced, that he was bound to a network of mystical force as if it were a part of his body, that he could draw on that seemingly-infinite source of energy and therefore no longer grew tired, no matter what he did.

It was mad, really; he was living out an insane power fantasy. Shadow had used this matrix to rule her entire world, and had intended to conquer others, as well; surely, Pel thought, no individual could handle such physical power. It had to be some sort of dream or delusion—a story, not real.

If it was all real, then how could he accept it so calmly?

He paused, and looked about at the shifting glare of colors that shone across rough gray stone.

Was it real?

Of course it was. Poor Ted Deranian had thought he was dreaming, and it had gotten him beaten and abused; Pel wasn’t going to make that mistake. This was all real.

But how did he know he hadn’t dreamed Ted? And Amy and Prossie, and all the others. None of them were here now to tell him if he was mad or dreaming. He had sent the three of them, Amy and Ted and Prossie, safely back to Earth, and the rest were dead or missing.

He shook his head, and magical currents twisted and writhed around him.

He wasn’t dreaming. It was all real. It was as real as anything had ever been; he reached out and touched the nearest wall, felt the cool, hard stone under his fingertips.

It was real.

It was real, and he controlled all the magic in this world of magic, and it didn’t seem strange at all. It seemed perfectly natural.

He wondered if that was a good thing.

* * * *

The technician sat up abruptly at the sound of the beep. He blinked at the panel, and his eyes widened as he saw the code number indicating which phone was in use. He reached for his own phone.

“Get me Major Johnston,” he said. “We have an outgoing call on the Brown phone.”

Chapter Two

He could make the fetches obey him.

It wasn’t really much of an accomplishment for a person in Pel’s position, but it was a start.

He supposed that making living people obey him would probably be easier; he could just threaten to incinerate them, and they would obey out of fear.

Fetches, however, were already dead. To be exact, they were dead people Shadow had revived as her servants; the fortress held dozens of them.

There were hundreds of homunculi in the place, if that was the correct term for all the creatures Shadow had created from scratch, rather than just re-animated—everything from artificial insects to the dead dragon at the foot of the grand staircase, and Pel could sense that there were even bigger beasts outside the castle, such as the burrowing behemoth that had attacked Pel’s party at Stormcrack, months earlier, or gigantic bat-things like the one Valadrakul of Warricken had slain in the Low Forest of West Sunderland.

Pel had decided to start with the fetches, though; they were all human in appearance, for one thing, and he was more comfortable with that. For another, he was very concerned with the resurrection of the dead. He didn’t want Nancy and Rachel to be mere zombies, like the fetches, but he assumed that any spell that could restore his family would be somehow related to whatever Shadow had done to produce fetches.

He had found three of them simply standing in one of the corridors, lifeless and mute. At first he had stared at them, expecting them to notice him; then he had tried ordering them verbally, telling them to walk.

They had stood there, unmoving, as the shifting colors of the matrix had played across them, rich deep blue and honey-gold predominating just at that moment.

Then he had used the matrix, used his magic, and had found the little tangle of magic in the heart and spine and brain of each fetch, the magic that, he saw, controlled each one’s action. He had poked and prodded at one with immaterial fingers—and the fetch had twitched and shivered and blinked.

He had told it, “Speak,” and it had opened its mouth, but no sound came out. He had realized, with shocked disgust, that it wasn’t breathing.

“Breathe,” he had told it, and the chest expanded; air was sucked into its lungs in a hollow gasp, then expelled in a rasping wheeze.

One breath, and it stopped.

Pel shuddered.

“Never mind that,” he had said. “Will you obey me, now?”

The fetch had blinked, then nodded, and suddenly seemed alive again—somber and silent, but alive. He had, he saw, had to establish a link between its internal web and the greater web of the matrix, a link that Shadow must have once had, and must have severed at some point—probably when she first transferred the matrix to Pel.

Having established the link he controlled the fetch entirely, just as he controlled the matrix itself.

And that meant he could make the fetches obey him. He would have servants—or rather, slaves—who could run errands for him, do whatever he needed to have done.

That was a good start, he thought. It was a definite step forward on the road to using the matrix properly, and to learning to resurrect the dead.

“Go to the throne room,” he ordered. The fetch sketched a bow, then turned and marched away.

It was only a first step, though. There were things he needed to know if he was to bring Nancy and Rachel back from the dead that he couldn’t learn just from ordering fetches around, and while the matrix probably contained all the knowledge he needed, somewhere, somehow, he didn’t know how to get at it. He needed someone to talk to about his plans, someone who could teach him.

Someone to teach him magic, he thought, as he watched the fetch march down the passage toward the throne room. Pel’s lips tightened, and the aura flickered into harsh reds and smoky browns.

He wanted a wizard.

And while Shadow had been the last matrix wizard, the only wizard who regularly raised the dead, while Shadow was dead because Pel had sent Prossie Thorpe to kill her, Shadow had not been the only wizard in the world Pel and his companions had called Faerie.

Even though Shadow had roasted Valadrakul to death, and Shadow’s creatures had butchered Elani, Pel thought he knew at least one other wizard who still lived: Taillefer, that fat coward who had refused to open a portal to either Earth or the Empire. After Elani had died, Valadrakul had not known how to open portals to other worlds, so he had summoned Taillefer—and Taillefer had refused to help, for fear of drawing Shadow’s attention.

Well, Pel had learned how to open his own portals. And now he could send fetches out to… Pel smiled grimly. He could send fetches out to fetch Taillefer.

Taillefer might not know how to raise the dead, but he surely could teach Pel something.

Pel strode toward the throne room, still smiling.

* * * *

Amy hung up the phone. “Donna says she’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” she said. She smiled with relief.

Prossie didn’t smile back. “Then what?” she asked.

“Then she’ll drive us out to my place,” Amy replied. It was such a pleasure to be able to say that, to be able to take cars and telephones for granted, to know what was going on again! “I guess she can drop Ted off on the way, and then we can settle in. I don’t know if there’ll be much that’s fit to eat after all this time, but we can get into some decent clean clothes.” She frowned slightly, thinking and planning. “I don’t have my keys, but if I have to, I guess I can break a window to get in. Or maybe I should call a locksmith. I’ll have to find one who’ll take a check, I don’t have any cash. The checkbook’s gone, too, but I have extra checks at home.”

Prossie nodded, though it wasn’t a very enthusiastic gesture. Amy didn’t really notice. She was on familiar ground after months of living nightmare; she didn’t want to think about Prossie’s problems yet. There would be time for that later.

“There’s canned soup, that’ll still be good,” Amy said, talking more to herself now than to Prossie. “And I should have something that’ll fit you—you’re only an inch or so shorter than I am, right?” She sighed. “I wonder if they stopped delivering my mail? I guess if Pel’s phone still works, mine will, too, but there must be about three months’ bills waiting. And all my clients will have given up on me—I’ll have to just about start the business over again.”

She paused and glanced at her companion, but Prossie didn’t respond.

Amy continued, “I suppose that spaceship is still in the back yard—did you have anything on board? It might still be there, if nobody’s gotten in and stolen it. And I’ll need to call the doctor and make an appointment as soon as I can.” She shuddered slightly. She didn’t like to think about getting an abortion, but it had to be done—she couldn’t afford a baby, and anyway, her life was quite disrupted enough without bearing the child of a dead rapist from another universe.

And it wouldn’t hurt to have a general check-up, after all she had been through.

“Do you think they might have posted guards around the ship?” Prossie asked suddenly.

Amy blinked at her, startled. “Who?” she asked.

“Your government. The ones who arrested us.”

Amy put a hand to her mouth, then admitted, “I hadn’t thought of that.” Then she lowered the hand and managed an uncertain smile. “But even if they…no, they can’t have guards there; it’s private property, and poor Susan had a court order or something. And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

As she finished her attempt at reassurance Amy realized she could hear sirens; she turned to look out the window. For a moment she stared in disbelief; then she headed for the living room for a better view.

“How did they know?” Prossie asked as she followed Amy. “Do you think they might have telepaths, somehow?”

“No,” Amy said. “They don’t have any telepaths. They might have the place staked out, though. I didn’t think we were that obvious.” She paused, then added, “They must have tapped the phone.”

Prossie didn’t ask what that meant.

A moment later Amy and Prossie were joined by Ted, and the three of them stood at the front window watching as men in suits and uniforms emerged from the two county police cruisers that had pulled up in front of the Browns’ home, and from an official-looking car in the driveway, a sedan that had a government seal of some sort on the driver’s door.

Amy realized, annoyed, that she hadn’t had a chance to go through Nancy’s closet; she was still in her Imperial rags. She doubted these people would let her change.

And her hair was a mess—her last bleach and perm had all grown out long ago, and she hadn’t even had a chance to brush it in days.

Ted moaned softly.

* * * *

“We have a report, sir,” the lieutenant said, saluting briskly.

Bascombe put down his pen and glowered at the young man.

“A report from whom?” he demanded. “From where? About what?”

“From Registered Master Telepath Bernard Dixon, sir!” the lieutenant said, snapping sharply back to attention.

“Ah,” Bascombe said. “And exactly which of our mind-reading freaks is this Dixon?”

“Telepath Dixon is currently serving aboard I.S.S. Meteor, sir, investigating the reported reappearance of the renegade, Proserpine Thorpe.”

“Which reported reappearance?”

“Uh…the first one, sir. I think.” The lieutenant quivered uncertainly. Bascombe sighed.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“Yes, sir. According to Dixon, he has established, working in cooperation with five other telepaths, the approximate location of Thorpe’s reappearance—he reports that there is only one system it could have been in, an unnamed system with no habitable planets—the navigator aboard Meteor has the catalog number, but it was not included in the report. Dixon is unable to narrow it down any farther; no physical traces have been found, and telepathy, he says, is not sufficiently precise over interstellar distances to be more exact.”

“Did he say how he found the system at all?” Bascombe asked.

“Ah…that was not included in the report I received, sir,” the lieutenant admitted.

“Dismissed,” Bascombe said.

“Sir?” The lieutenant blinked.

“I said dismissed. Get out.”

The lieutenant almost forgot to salute again as he hurried out.

Bascombe picked up his pen and considered.

He knew how the location was determined; telepaths on a dozen planets had been asked to report which direction Prossie Thorpe had been in, and those were then adjusted by the astronomers to allow for planetary rotation and used as approximate vectors. Where the resulting lines—or rather, cones, since none were narrow enough to be lines—intersected, that was where Thorpe had been.

Meteor had been sent to explore the resulting volume of space; the charts didn’t show any inhabited systems there, but the charts could be wrong.

This time, according to Dixon, they weren’t. And he’d checked back with five other stinking mutants to see if his distance felt right.

So Thorpe hadn’t appeared on an inhabited planet, or even just a habitable one.

That meant a ship.

And that might explain why her stay there had been so brief, only about a minute—she had delivered something to a ship, and then returned to Shadow’s world.

But if she were just a courier, why would Shadow, or Raven, or whoever was behind it, use a telepath? A telepath would stand out like a beacon—Thorpe had stood out like a beacon.

Someone had wanted the Empire to know something was going on; someone had wanted to get the Empire’s attention—but who? And why?

Was it a distraction, a feint? Or was someone trying to tell them something, a message they weren’t receiving?

What about Thorpe’s other appearance? That one had been narrowed down to two possible systems, one of them, Upsilon Ceti, home to the Imperial colony of Beckett; I.S.S. Wasp was scheduled to arrive at Beckett Spaceport in a matter of hours.

If there had been a telepath on Beckett in the first place, maybe life would have been a bit simpler—but four hundred telepaths couldn’t cover three thousand Imperial planets, and Thorpe had only appeared in the Beckett area briefly. It wasn’t quite as fast as the other, about five minutes instead of one, but it was brief.

Was that a message of some kind? Why Beckett, which was a quiet little backwater?

And now Thorpe was supposed to be on Earth, the only human-inhabited planet in the Third Universe, and this time she was staying there. What did that mean?

Did it mean anything?

Or were all the telepaths lying? Had Thorpe ever really been in any of those places? Carrie Hall’s reports hadn’t started arriving yet, but he was fairly certain that when they did, they’d be useless.

Something was definitely going on, but whether the enemy was Shadow, or Raven’s band of revolutionaries, or some faction within the Empire, or the telepaths themselves, Bascombe didn’t know.

But he intended to find out.

He almost called for a telepath, but then he caught himself; he rose and stepped to the door, and called to his receptionist, “Miss Miller, have a messenger sent to Special Branch; I want orders sent to Meteor to stay where they are and search carefully for any signs of activity—ships, gravity fields, lights, whatever.”

“Yes, Mr. Bascombe.”

He nodded, and retreated back into his office.

The message would be sent by telepath, of course; there was no other way to reach Meteor except through Dixon. Sending it downstairs to Special Branch on paper, though, would mean that no telepath would be reading his mind directly.

At least, not legally.

And if telepaths were reading minds illegally, he couldn’t stop them in any case—but that way lay madness. Telepaths could be listening to any thought, at any moment.

He just hoped they weren’t.

* * * *

“Am I under arrest?” Amy demanded, folding her arms across her chest and glaring up at the man in the blue uniform who seemed to be in charge of the whole business.

They hadn’t let her change her clothes, and the gesture was as much for the sake of decency as out of annoyance. Her T-shirt was torn on both sides, and she wasn’t wearing anything under it.

She tried not to think about that.

Major Johnston sighed. He turned a chair around, sat down, and leaned on the back.

“No, ma’am,” he said, “you aren’t. However, if that’s what it takes to get you to cooperate, it can be arranged.”

“On what charge?” Amy protested. “I haven’t done anything!”

“I don’t know just what charge, ma’am,” Johnston said. “I’m not a lawyer; I work for Air Force intelligence, so I know something about the laws, but I’m not a lawyer, and in a complicated case like this…” He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he shrugged and said, “But there’s no question we could find something. You were one of sixteen people who disappeared all at once without any rational explanation, and now three of you—only three—have turned up again, one of you apparently gone at least temporarily nuts. I think we could get you booked on suspicion of something, kidnapping or assault or something. Withholding evidence, if nothing else.”

It was Amy’s turn to sigh. At least the officer hadn’t included indecent exposure in his list. She wished Susan were there—but Susan was dead. Amy had seen her body lying on the floor of Shadow’s throne room, back in Faerie.

Amy supposed that she could have called on the surviving members of Dutton, Powell, and Hough—Bob Hough must be back from his vacation long since—but how could she explain to them what had happened, how Susan Nguyen had died? So she had passed up the chance to call her lawyer when this Johnston had offered it.

She had managed to stall her removal until her friend Donna had arrived, so at least someone knew where she was and more or less what was happening, but Donna wasn’t going to get her out of jail if these security people, whoever they were, did decide to arrest her.

“Is Ted okay?” she asked. “He was pretty upset.”

“Mr. Deranian is, indeed, upset,” Johnston admitted. “While I won’t tell you any of the details, he seems to be very unsure of his own grasp on reality. He has asked repeatedly to go home, and we may oblige him in that—we’re waiting for an opinion from a psychologist on whether it’s safe for him to be alone. We’ve tried to call his sister to look after him, but she doesn’t seem to be available.”

“But you won’t let me go home!” Amy protested.

“You, Ms. Jewell, are not screaming and crying and irrational.”

Amy glared at him. Johnston glared back.

“What about Prossie?” Amy asked.

Major Johnston sighed again.

“Your other companion,” he said, “tells us that her name is Registered Telepath Proserpine Thorpe, formerly of the Special Branch of the Imperial Intelligence Service. Beyond that, I’d prefer not to say at this time.” He hesitated. “Is that her name?”

“As far as I know, it is,” Amy said.

Johnston stared at her for a moment, then said, “All right. You don’t want to talk to us. I don’t know why not. This whole bizarre case is jammed full of things I don’t know. It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since that damned whatever-it-is fell out of nowhere into your back yard and I got assigned to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to do that without any real information, but I can’t. Now, you could give me real information, and you say you won’t—but can’t you at least say why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“Because you won’t believe me. Besides, it isn’t any of your business.”

“How do you know I won’t believe it?”

Amy closed her eyes. It wasn’t really an unreasonable question. Johnston certainly seemed more reasonable than the soldier who had been questioning her before, who had just kept demanding she tell them where she had been for so long, and who had refused to ever accept, “I don’t know,” as an answer.

“Because,” she said, opening her eyes and staring straight at Major Johnston’s face, “it’s all impossible, so impossible that Ted Deranian doesn’t believe it, and he was there. That’s why he’s upset, you know—he thought it was all a dream, and that he’d finally woken up, and then you people came and hauled him away, and that means either it’s real, or he’s still dreaming.” She sighed. “Now, do you expect me to believe that you’ll just accept my word for something so incredible that a man who lived through it thinks it was just a nightmare?”

Johnston considered that for a long moment.

“All right,” he said, “so maybe I won’t believe it. But maybe I will, and what can it hurt to try me?”

“You won’t argue?” Amy had visions of trying to tell her story and having every point questioned, every absurdity denied, until nothing made any sense at all.

“I don’t know,” Johnston admitted, straightening up for a moment. “Try me.”

The man’s apparent honesty was disarming; Amy shrugged, unfolded her arms, and said, “You ask questions. I’ll answer—for now.”

* * * *

Shadow had known how to see through other people’s eyes, and hear through other people’s ears, Pel reminded himself. She had been able to spy on anyone, anywhere in the entire immense world she ruled. It couldn’t be that difficult.

He closed his eyes, clenched his fists on the arms of his throne, and concentrated on the webs of magic that reached out in all directions around him.

He could sense things out there, like tiny sparks caught in the meshes of color and darkness, things that he was fairly sure were people, and he tried to focus in on one specific twinkle, tried to see through it—and nothing happened. He didn’t connect; he didn’t see anything, through his eyes or anyone else’s.

Shadow had known how, but Pel didn’t. He could sense the shape of the matrix, all the currents and eddies of magic that flowed through Faerie; he could tell when something disturbed those currents, and he was fairly certain he knew when the disturbance was a wizard stealing a little power, and when it was just some harmless peasant stumbling through a place where the magic ran strong. The wizards seemed to have odd little patterns of their own, sort of like fractal designs within the larger design of the matrix. Pel could see that.

But he couldn’t see through other eyes.

And he couldn’t match up the matrix with the outside world, either; he couldn’t make any correlation between magical streams and physical ones, couldn’t tell where the web lay on land, where on sea—or where it soared through the air or burrowed underground, or even climbed away from the planet into whatever lay beyond the sky in this strange realm. The network he had inherited from Shadow was centered on the fortress where he sat, but it extended, however tenuously, through this entire universe.

Pel controlled all of it, through his mind and will; he knew its shape, could sense every trickle. He could tell more or less how far out in the network any movement was, and in roughly which direction—but where that was in the ordinary world he had no idea.

He could spot the fetches he had sent out, carrying messages, but though he thought he might be able to transmit a couple of basic commands, such as a signal to return, he couldn’t really communicate with them. He could tell which direction they had gone, and could see how far they had progressed in terms of the matrix, but what that translated to in miles he could only estimate, and the farther away they got, the less reliable that estimate was.

Where ordinary people appeared as analogous to white or golden sparks, and wizards seemed to have faint traceries woven inside those sparks, the fetches were something like smoky red embers, and were bound into the matrix itself, rather than being independently-existing structures that sometimes impinged upon the net. It seemed as if Pel ought to be able to at least see through those eyes—but he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t see where they were or what they were doing.

He opened his eyes, slumped back in the elaborately-carved throne, and stared through the glimmering colors at the big open doors at the far end of the room.

He didn’t look at the spot where Susan Nguyen’s body had lain for so long. At least he’d made a little progress on that problem—with the help of the fetches he had had the corpse settled on a spare bed, and had put a preserving spell on it as best he could. He had seen how the meats in the fortress kitchen were preserved, and he had painstakingly built up the same magical structure over poor Susan, and it seemed to be working.

But not much else was. He was fairly certain, now, that he’d sent those fetches out on a fool’s errand. He hadn’t given them any directions; he’d just told them, “Go find wizards and bring them here.”

But he hadn’t known what directions to give them. He didn’t even have a map. He had never seen a map of Shadow’s world. He wasn’t even sure there were maps.

He knew the route he had taken to reach the fortress, from the Low Forest of Sunderland across the Starlinshire Downs and the coastal plain to Shadowmarsh; he had looked across the rift valley called Stormcrack and seen Stormcrack Keep, perched on the other side; but where these fit in their world, where Stormcrack lay in relation to Sunderland or Shadowmarsh, he had no idea at all. He thought he remembered Raven mentioning that Stormcrack lay in the Hither Corydians, while the mountains visible from Sunderland were the Further Corydians, but what that meant he didn’t know. He had heard other names, as well, but they were just names.

It wasn’t fair. In all the stories the hero knew where everything was. There were always maps. Tolkien’s books had had maps all over them. Even the movies had maps sometimes.

If Shadow had had any maps, Pel hadn’t found them yet.

How could he find anything, or anyone, without maps, without any means of long-distance communication? And while he could sense fetches and wizards in the matrix, he didn’t know how to guide the red embers toward the white snowflakes and golden spiderwebs; how could his fetches find anyone?

He had sent them out, a dozen of them, with orders to find wizards and bring them back—Taillefer in particular, but if they found any wizard, that would do. But how could they do that? How would they know where to go?

He hadn’t thought this through.

He couldn’t even send notes; most people in this world seemed to be illiterate, and those who weren’t used a different alphabet from the one he knew. He had told the fetches to summon wizards, but he had left it up to them to figure out how to deliver that summons.

They might not be able to; fetches were pretty limited.

He could go out searching on his own, he supposed—but he wasn’t sure just how to best use his magic to travel. Conjuring winds that would blow him around, the way Taillefer did, seemed dangerous and haphazard.

And he wouldn’t know where to go. It was a very big planet. The matrix seemed to stretch to infinity.

He would have to get organized about this. As Shadow’s heir and master of the matrix that controlled all the world’s magic, he was, in theory, ruler of all Faerie; he didn’t need to run his own errands, or send out all his servants. He could order other people to do it all.

And besides, he had told Amy that he intended to be a benevolent ruler here, teach these people how to lead more civilized lives; how could he carry out that promise if he stayed holed up here in his castle, with no contact with the outside world?

It was time to start playing his role properly. He would get this place organized—and that would let him fetch wizards who could teach him how to raise the dead.

And if he did some good for the natives in the process, all the better; they could certainly use some help. The towns and villages he had seen on his way to Shadowmarsh hadn’t exactly been paradise.

He remembered the gibbets in every village, the disembowelled corpses of the people who had offended Shadow—at the very least he could do away with that sort of thing.

He realized that he could start right on his own doorstep—quite literally on his doorstep, where the corpses of half a dozen Imperial soldiers still lay. He hadn’t even done anything about them.

Not that he could do very much, but at least he could have them decently buried.

And after that he could send messengers out to the surrounding villages.

He sat up straight, closed his eyes, and sent out a summons to the fetches still in the fortress, and to the handful of homunculi and other creatures over which he had established his control.

Chapter Three

“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” Amy said wearily. “It’s over, it’s done, and I just want to go home and forget about it.”

“What about the spaceship in your back yard?” Major Johnston asked.

Amy sighed.

She had to admit that Johnston had done his best to make it easy on her; he hadn’t nagged, hadn’t argued, hadn’t pushed when she said she didn’t know something—but on the other hand, he had this annoying habit of finding questions she didn’t want to think about.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What about it?”

“Are you going to just leave it there?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Assuming you have a choice.”

“I haven’t decided. Do you want it?”

Johnston hesitated, then admitted, “We haven’t decided, either. We might; please let us know before you do anything drastic with it.”

“Sure,” Amy said. “May I go now?”

“Um…” The major hesitated. “Not quite yet, I’m afraid.”

* * * *

“We’ve got the report from Beckett, sir,” the lieutenant said.

Bascombe leaned back. “Let’s have it, then,” he said.

“The formal statement is still being written up, sir, but the gist of it is that several unidentified corpses were found in a field outside Blessingbury that could easily have been the place Thorpe appeared. All but one of the corpses were adult males, in some sort of black livery, carrying swords; the one female wore a gray robe and carried no weapon. All had been killed by blaster fire, but no blasters were found; a more careful search is ongoing.”

Bascombe blinked and straightened up.

“Swords?” he said.

“Yes, sir. That’s what the telepath said, anyway.”

“The bodies—were they human?”

The lieutenant hesitated. “Well, yes, sir, so far as I know,” he said. “The report calls them dark-haired Nordic males, which would certainly seem to imply human. I don’t think any autopsies have been done yet, though.”

“Dark-haired Nordic?”

“Yes, sir, Nordic is the standard term for any pure-blooded white, you know, it’s not just the true…”

“Shut up.”

Bascombe knew Imperial racial classifications as well as anyone; what he didn’t know was why any Imperial citizen, except a few holders of ceremonial titles back on Terra, would be carrying a sword.

Shadow’s creatures might well use swords, but most of them didn’t seem to be genuine human beings. Even the humanoids often had black skin—not the brown of a Negro, but actual black.

On the other hand, the people of Earth were authentic human beings, so far as Bascombe knew. Of the four who had stayed at Base One for several weeks, three had been white, one Azeatic; Bascombe had never seen a Negro Earthman, but that didn’t mean much, since that foursome was hardly a fair sample.

Did Earthpeople still use swords? Earlier reports had indicated that they carried projectile weapons, not blades—gunpowder-and-bullet firearms. Perhaps this group had been even more primitive, though, or had been uncertain their guns would work in Imperial space. Swords always worked. And they never needed reloading.

Still, swords seemed more appropriate to Shadow’s world. Shadow itself relied on its super-scientific “magic,” but its slaves didn’t seem to, and in fact much of the “magic” didn’t seem to operate in normal space.

Or maybe these had been members of Raven’s resistance movement. Bascombe didn’t think much of Raven of Stormcrack Keep—the man was obsessive and abysmally ignorant, determined to fight Shadow’s science with…

With swords.

This was all getting very complicated—Shadow, Earth, and Raven were all possibilities.

If the telepaths hadn’t made it all up.

“Lieutenant,” Bascombe said, “I want one of these corpses brought here to Base One, as fast as possible. Make sure the sword comes with it, and someone who saw everything as it was first found—not a telepath.”

“Yes, sir.” The messenger turned to go.

“And,” Bascombe added loudly, “send the telepath Carrie Hall up here.”

* * * *

Major Reginald Johnston sat at his desk, staring at the fancy silver pen he’d gotten as an award two years before, rolling it between his fingers as he tried to think it all through logically.

Sherlock Holmes always said that when you had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained, however unlikely, had to be the truth—but how did you know what was really impossible?

Which was impossible, and which merely incredibly unlikely?

The three of them were all reasonably consistent in their stories. Details varied, of course, but not to the point of finding any actual contradictions. Deranian insisted that the whole thing was a dream or hallucination, and would only talk about it with a psychologist, and only on those terms; Jewell didn’t claim to understand any of it, only to be reporting what she thought she had experienced; but Thorpe, if that was really her name, was the tough one, as she claimed to actually be from one of these other universes.

And that should have been easy to disprove, but it wasn’t.

So either it was all true, and the United States had blown a chance to make peaceful contact with aliens not just from another planet, but from another universe entirely, or else the whole thing was the most elaborate and inexplicable hoax Johnston had ever heard of.

It didn’t make sense as a hoax—but a Galactic Empire in another universe? Wizards and castles in a third?

If it was a hoax, how did the hoaxers get that spaceship there? Why hadn’t anything leaked in the months since it crashed? Who was Proserpine Thorpe? Where did she and the others come from? Where did they go?

What did Sherlock Holmes say to do after you had eliminated the impossible, and found there was nothing left?

For months, ever since that impossible spaceship had fallen out of nowhere and the case had been dumped in his lap, Johnston had been looking for an explanation. He had thought that when he found some of the missing people he would have that explanation.

He supposed he did have an explanation now—but he didn’t like it, and he didn’t want to believe it.

All the same, he had to cover the bases. If it is true, he asked himself, tapping his fancy silver pen on the worn spot on the blotter, if it is true, what do I do about it?

A Galactic Empire. An all-powerful wizard.

Hell, it was simple enough, really; the first thing any commander does is collect information, scout out the territory. Even when the territory was in another universe, that rule still held.

And you pass the information up the chain of command, keep headquarters informed—but how in hell could he tell anyone about this one? If he didn’t really believe it, how could he convince anyone higher up?

And that brought him to the first rule, not of military strategy, but of political strategy: CYA.

He would file the appropriate reports, full of qualifiers and ambiguity, and other than that he wouldn’t say a damn thing to anyone until he could provide proof. He would investigate the hell out of everything, have the Brown house searched right down to the foundations, have Jewell and Deranian and Thorpe watched every minute, send someone to check out whether there was any research being done on…on what? Other dimensions?

The Golden Fleece Award people on that senator’s staff might know—research like that would be right up their alley.

He put down the pen and reached for the intercom.

* * * *

Pel looked over the motley crew he had gathered before his throne. Colored light flickered across black clothing, black leather, glossy black fur—Shadow’s color scheme had been pretty limited. Maybe she saw enough colors from the matrix, Pel thought.

He counted nine fetches—kitchen help, mostly, but since Pel could draw all the energy he needed from the matrix, he didn’t need to eat, so why should he maintain a kitchen?

There were four hairless, black-skinned homunculi, human in appearance except for their color; three of them, two male and one female, were naked. Pel had no idea what purpose they had served, why Shadow had created them, but he had found them and been able to make them obey him.

There were about a dozen other creatures, but most of them Pel had no name for; Shadow had apparently been fond of experimenting, and had often been generous with claws, teeth, scales, and tentacles. Two could reasonably be called hounds, and one resembled a panther, but the others weren’t so easily classified.

Hundreds of other creatures lived in the fortress—if they were really alive—and there were literally thousands more in the surrounding marsh and the forests beyond, but Pel hadn’t yet managed to gain control of all those.

He didn’t see much use for the sluglike marsh-monsters, in any case. The dragon might have been nice, but he had killed that—which reminded him, he should incinerate the remains before they began to stink.

Most of the rest of Shadow’s creatures he just hadn’t gotten to yet.

So he had about two dozen obedient servants, of various shapes, none of them particularly appealing.

“All right,” he said, “I want all of you to go out of this place, and go out to the villages, and bring back people. Alive. Don’t hurt them. I want to talk to them. Understand?”

Roughly a score of heads nodded.

Pel hesitated.

“No children,” he added. He didn’t want to terrorize any kids. “Adults only. For that matter, make it men only.” This was a primitive and sexist world he was in; he didn’t want to worry about the sexual politics of the situation. He looked at some of the non-humanoid creatures, and asked, “Can you tell men from women?”

The bobbing movements, hissings, and grunts looked and sounded like agreement.

“Good. Okay, then go.” He sat back on the throne as his audience turned away.

He didn’t know how to send them after anyone in particular, but he figured that out of any random group of men they might bring in there would be someone he could make use of, as a messenger at the very least, maybe as a deputy or more.

And he had to send several of the things because he didn’t know whether he could trust any one of them to do the job, or how people would react. If he only sent one, as a trial, it might get killed by some panicky peasant, or it might fall in a bog somewhere—he wasn’t sure how bright most of these creatures were.

Besides, he wouldn’t mind having enough of a sample of the population to be at least slightly representative. You didn’t test a new product on just one potential buyer; he wanted to have a few people brought in.

They might even find poor Tom Sawyer, if he was still alive out there somewhere.

Pel blinked.

“Wait,” he called.

The pack of monsters paused in the doorway of the throne room; two of the homunculi turned back to face him, but the fetches and most of the rest simply stopped where they were.

Spaceman Sawyer was still out there somewhere, either alive or dead, and Pel had completely forgotten about him until just now.

How could he have been so thoughtless?

He had been busy, he had had other problems to worry about, but it was still unforgivable. He had left an Imperial soldier wandering around in Faerie, trapped out there, when he, Pel, could have sent him home to the Galactic Empire in a matter of minutes.

And not just Sawyer, who had turned back at the fortress gate; there was Ron Wilkins, as well, who had deserted the party days before, somewhere in the villages this side of Starlinshire. And there might be other survivors of the Imperial landing party, as well—most had stayed at the ship with Lieutenant Dibbs, and while most of that group had later turned up dead, Pel knew at least a couple were still unaccounted-for.

He could send any of them who were still alive back to their home universe.

And if they hadn’t disguised themselves, they’d be easy to spot. They had all been wearing those silly Buck Rogers uniforms the Galactic Empire used.

“Purple,” he told his waiting servants. “You find any men wearing purple, you bring them to me. Whatever men you can find, bring them here, but especially if they’re wearing purple!”

* * * *

They had even given her her car back; Amy knew she shouldn’t complain. They’d provided some sandwiches—soggy and stale, but genuine Earth food, without any of the strange off tastes of the Empire or Faerie. They’d just been doing their jobs, and that Major Johnston had really been very reasonable, given how incredible the whole thing sounded.

But still, she was furious.

They were going to be watching her house every minute, they admitted it. They were tapping her phone. She wasn’t to leave the state overnight.

She ought to have a lawyer; this couldn’t be constitutional, watching her like this. But Susan was dead.

Should she call Bob Hough?

She looked right as she came to an intersection, and had to lean forward to see past Prossie; that reminded her of the telepath’s presence.

Poor Prossie would need help settling in, and having Bob Hough around wouldn’t help any with that. Amy needed to see the doctor, and Bob Hough wouldn’t help with that, either—in fact, from some remarks he had made during the divorce hearings, Amy didn’t think Bob would approve of her getting an abortion, even if he believed her about the father being a rapist and murderer, which he probably wouldn’t.

The damn government people would see her going to the doctor, would probably find out all about it—she hadn’t mentioned her pregnancy to Major Johnston, since it wasn’t anyone’s business but her own.

She didn’t want the government to know about it. What if they decided that the baby was some sort of valuable specimen, living proof that Earthpeople and Imperials could interbreed? Maryland might have legal guarantees of a woman’s right to an abortion, but she was pretty sure the feds could find a way around that if they wanted to.

She frowned as she drove on through the intersection. She was making it sound like some trashy late-night movie, thinking about “aliens” breeding with human women—with her. This wasn’t science fiction, and she wasn’t some silly heroine in a tight skirt and heels who was no use for anything but screaming, and Walter wasn’t an alien, he was just a bastard—a dead bastard. She didn’t want his kid, and she wasn’t going to carry it.

If anyone tried to interfere with that, then she’d call a lawyer.

* * * *

It was raining again, and Pel was back on the battlement, looking out over the marsh. Wind whistled around the stone of the tower and sprayed water across the wall, and water pattered unevenly from the broken gargoyle.

He didn’t let the sound bother him this time, at least not consciously; after all, he was doing everything he could to bring Rachel back. His messengers had gone out into the world of Faerie, and until they returned, what else should he be doing? The dragon was reduced to ash, Lieutenant Dibbs and the other dead Imperials were buried, and Susan’s corpse was as well-preserved as he could manage.

All he could do was wait.

He could feel the matrix surging and flowing around him, all that power at his disposal—but he didn’t know what to do with it.

Waiting was always hard, especially waiting alone. If he had someone to talk to, he thought, it might not be so bad.

For a moment he considered opening a portal to Earth and sending a messenger to find Amy Jewell and bring her here. She knew his situation, she had been through it all with him; he could talk to her.

So had Ted Deranian, of course, but he had cracked under the strain. And Prossie Thorpe, but she wasn’t from Earth, they didn’t have a common background. It would have to be Amy or no one, he thought.

It was foolish, though; Amy was probably getting on with her own life, trying to get her decorating business back on track, catching up on everything she had missed while they were all trapped in the Empire and in Faerie. She wouldn’t appreciate being dragged away.

Besides, it would take time to find another fetch or homunculus and break it to obedience, time for it to find its way to Amy once it was on Earth, time to bring her back—by then his messengers would probably be returning.

There were still plenty of non-human creatures around the fortress—hellbeasts, Raven had called most of them—but those wouldn’t do; they couldn’t live in non-magical universes. The ones Shadow had sent into the Galactic Empire had all died within hours, according to everything Pel had seen and heard. Earth’s space was different from Imperial space, but Pel didn’t think it was anymore magical.

Fetches and homunculi were sufficiently human to function in the Empire, and presumably on Earth, but he had used up every cooperative surviving fetch and homunculus he could readily find, sending them all out as messengers.

About a hundred fetches had died—or rather, been destroyed; fetches were already dead—in the fight with Shadow. That had left the place somewhat understaffed.

He sensed through the matrix that there were still creatures he had not seen deep in the subterranean depths of the fortress, and some of them were probably homunculi—but it just wasn’t worth the trouble of going down there and finding them and enchanting them into obedience, and then sending them to Earth, where they wouldn’t know how to drive or use the phone and they’d probably just get run over trying to cross a street.

Besides, what good would it really do to talk to Amy? What did she know about Nancy or Rachel, about losing loved ones? It wasn’t as if the two of them had been friends before all this started; they hadn’t even known each other.

And really, Pel and Amy hadn’t hit it off all that well while they were traveling together, either. Pel remembered Amy weeping with exhaustion, Amy vomiting by the side of the road, Amy shouting hysterically…

He didn’t need company that badly.

He would wait.

* * * *

Under-Secretary Bascombe looked down at the black-garbed corpse, then over at the sword next to it, and finally up at the soldier accompanying it.

“You were there when they found them?” Bascombe asked.

“Yessir.”

“It looked just like this?”

“Ah, well…not exactly.” The soldier hesitated; Bascombe favored him with an inquisitive glare.

“Well, what I mean is, it was fresher; we didn’t have anywhere good to put it on ice on the ship here, sir.”

“Oh, of course.” He looked down again. “But it was dressed like this? Had the blaster wound in the chest? And the sword?”

“Yessir.”

Bascombe nodded. He turned to the doctor beside him. “How long’s he been dead?”

“Well, Mr. Secretary, that’s hard to say…” The doctor fumbled with the buttons of his white lab coat.

“Try,” Bascombe said tartly.

The doctor sighed. “Well, sir,” he said, “there are conflicting signs. Some of the evidence of overall decay indicates a death within the past three days, while tissue desiccation would seem to indicate a much earlier demise. Seems to me that despite what the sergeant here says, someone’s made partially-successful attempts to preserve this fellow’s remains. Either that, or he was not at all well for some time before his death.”

That figured, Bascombe thought; the entire thing was confusing, so why should even so simple a detail as time of death be any different?

The corpse did prove a few things, though.

First off, it was real—something mysterious had happened where the telepaths reported it, it wasn’t all a fabrication. Everything the telepaths had reported that could be readily checked on had been checked on, and it was all true.

If there was some sort of conspiracy or rebellion under way among the telepaths, it was undetectably subtle—and since there was no obvious way the telepaths could have obtained these mysterious corpses, the plotters must also have hitherto unseen, unknown resources.

Second, the corpse was dressed in the manner of some of the people who took part in previous incursions made by Shadow, and armed with a sword; there was nothing to connect it in any way with Earth. No one had ever found any evidence that Earth had inter-dimensional capabilities; the Empire’s own crash program had taken five years to produce the space-warp generator once they knew it was theoretically possible to travel between universes, and Earth, which had no anti-gravity, no blasters, and little semblance of the Empire’s applied science, had supposedly known of the Empire’s existence for no more than a few months.

If Earth was involved, then the Earthpeople had hitherto unseen, unknown resources, and were being undetectably subtle.

In other words, if either the telepaths or the Earthpeople were behind this, the Empire was outmatched—but all the evidence pointed to Shadow.

Shadow was definitely up to something.

The question was, up to what?

Chapter Four

One man had died of fright.

Pel hadn’t expected anything like that; for a few moments guilt closed his throat, and he blinked away tears.

He should have expected it—the poor sucker had been abducted without warning, captured by a pair of zombies and dragged off to the fortress of a world-conquering evil power, a power well known for hanging and disembowelling its enemies.

Nobody out there knew that Shadow was dead, that her replacement was one of the good guys—or at least, tried to be one of the good guys.

Not that he was very good at it, he thought as he wiped his eyes and tried to swallow. The storybook heroes never made such stupid mistakes, never accidentally killed innocent bystanders.

Maybe, when he had learned how to resurrect the dead, he could bring this poor fellow back, too.

“Take him to the kitchen,” he told two of the fetches when he could speak.

The other involuntary guests all shuddered, glancing at one another and at the corpse as the fetches carried it away.

Pel silently cursed himself, and his eyes teared up again, this time more with frustration than grief. “That’s where it’s easiest to preserve him until I can revive him,” he explained.

It would take some effort to always remember that these people were accustomed to assuming the worst. Under Shadow, assuming the worst was the only way to avoid disaster.

He looked the survivors over.

There were eight, so far, and more on the way—that was really a pretty promising result. None of them were wizards or Imperials; most of them were scruffy and dirty and looked like peasants, but still, this was a good start.

He looked them over, standing or crouching at the eastern end of the throne room, faces averted or eyes shielded against the glare of the matrix and blinking anyway. They obviously had no idea what was going on.

He had debated waiting for the last few, but he had already kept the first arrivals in suspense for over an hour while this group collected, and the others wouldn’t reach the fortress for some time yet; it was time to begin.

“I assume you think that I’m Shadow,” he said, and without meaning to he let the matrix amplify his voice, so that it boomed and echoed; one man clapped his hands over his ears, and others flinched, but they all turned to listen.

“I’m not,” Pel continued. “Shadow is dead. But before she died, she turned her power over to me.”

He paused, unsure what to say next; he hadn’t gotten that far in preparing a speech. He’d assumed he could just wing it, make it up as he went along—he’d done that often enough in presentations—but he’d been disconcerted by the one who died, thrown off his pace, and now he was struggling to remember what he’d planned to say. He had figured that he would tell these people that the hangings and other executions were to stop, that they were free now—but how did he get to that from the announcement that Shadow was dead?

And if they were free, how could he order them to stop hanging people, or bring him wizards, or do anything else?

And somehow he had pictured himself speaking to a group of well-dressed, dignified village elders, rather than a bunch of terrified farmers who were cowering against the wall in confusion, too scared to speak.

“Shadow is dead,” he repeated.

One of the men blinked, and ventured a whispered, “Shadow is dead; long live Shadow.”

His neighbors turned to stare at him, then quickly looked back at the blaze of color and light that was all they could see before them.

When Pel, too startled to react immediately, said nothing, about half of the men mumbled, “Shadow is dead, long live Shadow.”

Pel slammed a fist onto the arm of his throne, and outside, unheard, magically-driven winds whipped around the fortress walls; Pel could sense them through the matrix. Within the throne room his glow shifted toward reds and blues and shadows, away from the lighter and warmer colors. This was so slow and frustrating! These people didn’t understand, and he didn’t know how to explain it to them.

“No, no,” he said. “Shadow is dead; there is no more Shadow. I am not Shadow!” He fought down the light and color, so that the men could see him. “I’m just a man, a man who has Shadow’s magic.”

The peasants peered at him through the lessened glare, then glanced at one another, and after a moment one of them called unsteadily, “Who are you, then?”

“My name is Pel Brown.”

Feet shuffled and voices muttered. No one spoke.

Pel realized that his name wasn’t much of an answer.

“I came here from another world,” he said. “Shadow wanted me to help her with something, but she lied to me, and…and I killed her.”

It was surprisingly hard to admit that, and for a moment he wondered whether a trace remained of the geas Shadow had placed on him, the magical compulsion not to harm her.

But it was probably, he knew, just guilt. He didn’t like to admit to being a murderer, even if it was justified homicide, even if he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself. He’d seen Shadow kill his friends for no reason, so even though he couldn’t harm her himself, he had set up a situation where Prossie Thorpe would kill her.

He’d conspired to commit murder, and why shouldn’t he feel guilty about it? Maybe the heroes in books and movies never had any qualms about the villains they killed, but he wasn’t any hero, despite what had happened to him, and even if Shadow had been a murderer many times over and a truly evil person, he wasn’t happy about her death.

And this man who had died of terror didn’t help any; that wasn’t justified, it was just carelessness. He hadn’t meant it to happen, but it was still his fault.

The peasants muttered among themselves. If he bothered, he could extend his senses through the matrix and hear every word they said, find out if they were blaming him for their companion’s death—but why bother? He let them mutter.

He hoped someone would step forward and speak up, ask questions, turn this into a proper conversation—but no one did. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised; this world’s culture seemed pretty authoritarian, not much given to discussion.

So it would have to be a speech.

“I have all Shadow’s power,” he said, “but not her knowledge, and not her…her ambition. I’m not going to hurt any of you. I have no desire to rule your world; in fact, I want you to be free, and happy.”

One man managed to work up an almost-hopeful expression at that, but that was countered by looks of dread on other faces; Pel supposed that to most of them, any talk of change sounded threatening.

He would just have to work past that.

And he knew where to begin; he remembered his horrific walk to the fortress.

“When I came here,” he said, “I came down the road from the Low Forest in Sunderland, and I passed through several of your towns and villages, and in most of them there were dead bodies hanging. Who were they all?”

The peasants looked at one another. No one wanted to be the spokesman, obviously. Pel sighed. “You,” he said, pointing, “on the end, in the green. Step forward.”

The man hesitated, then stepped forward, placing each foot carefully; it looked as if he was having trouble breathing.

“Who were all those people who got hanged?”

“I…I know not, my lord…your Majesty. In…in my own village, the last to be hanged was a man named Norbert…”

The colors surged up, flickering orange, as Pel momentarily lost control of his emotions, his guilt and grief turning abruptly to anger as frustration got the better of him.

“Not their names, idiot!” he shouted, and the walls echoed back a dull, angry roar. “I mean, what were they hanged for?”

The men cowered back against the wall; one moved for the door, but Pel twisted at a strand of his web and the doors slammed shut.

Someone moaned, and Pel forced himself to calm down; he didn’t want any more deaths. He didn’t even want anyone to faint.

But he did want answers.

“Why were they hanged?” Pel demanded. “You, why was this Norbert hanged?”

The man in green glanced back at his companions, found no help there, and after a false start and a throat-clearing, managed to say, “’Twas said he had failed to show the village elders the respect due their station.”

Pel glared, though he doubted anyone could see his expression through the magical haze. He had expected something like that, but it was still infuriating. Death for the most trivial wrongs—that had been Shadow’s style. No wonder the men were scared. “He didn’t kill anybody?”

The man blinked, and made the chopping motion that Pel had learned was the local equivalent of shaking one’s head.

“He didn’t even steal anything?”

Another chop.

All those people, horribly dead for nothing, and it had been deliberate, not accidental like the one the fetches were taking to the kitchen; Pel felt sick. “All right, listen, all of you,” he announced. “From now on, you only hang murderers. Only murderers. You understand? You can…you can beat thieves, or flog them, or throw them in jail, or whatever seems appropriate, but you can’t kill them. Is that clear?”

Heads bobbed. That gesture was the same here—just another of those annoying situations where things were only partly different, just familiar enough to be confusing.

“And you don’t disembowel anyone, is that clear? Not unless a murderer chops people up with an axe or something, then maybe you can gut him, but nobody else.”

“The Elders…” someone began.

“To hell with the elders!” Pel shouted. “You go tell them to stop hanging people, or they’ll answer to me! If they don’t believe you, you send ’em here! And look, hey, you can take fetches back with you to prove you were here. I don’t want anyone else killed! Shadow’s dead, and you don’t do that stuff anymore!” He was standing in front of the throne now, pointing and yelling; magic swirled and blazed around him, actual flame flaring briefly from the air behind him as his anger sucked energy from the matrix.

The eight men all pressed flat against the wall, hands over their ears, driven back by sheer volume.

Seeing them there, Pel’s anger suddenly passed, and he flopped back into his chair.

“And you can clean up your villages, too,” he said in his normal tones. “Maybe pave the streets. Put in sewers—some of those places stank. There’s no reason you can’t live decently, can’t have indoor plumbing and all the rest of it.”

No one answered, though a few risked uncovering their ears.

“You don’t know about all that stuff,” he said, with a gesture of dismissal. “It can wait. We’ll get to it.”

“Ah…your Majesty,” the man in green said, head down, “if one could be permitted to speak…”

Pel slumped back in the throne.

“Oh, go ahead and speak,” he said. “Stand up straight and tell me all about it.”

“Majesty, we…I am but a poor cobbler,” the man said. “I know naught of governance or law, and would only go about my business. Wherefore, then, am I brought hither? Why speak to me of roads and hangings and the rest? Would it not be better to call upon the councils of the wise, the elders and those who have a say in such matters? Or perchance, to send forth your own ministers, an you are displeased with our lords?”

“You don’t have a say?” Pel asked.

“Nay, surely not,” the cobbler said. “I’m neither prince nor councilor.”

“You’re a person, aren’t you?”

The cobbler blinked. “Aye, but…”

“Well, then you have a say,” Pel proclaimed. “Everybody has a say. It’s time you people got rid of your lords and ladies and learned some democracy.” Blue streaked through the matrix for a moment. “Listen, all of you,” Pel said. “From now on, I want things to be run democratically around here. I want you to elect your leaders, not just let them happen. Vote for ’em.”

“Majesty, I understand this not a whit.”

“I mean I want you to choose your own leaders by getting everyone to vote—each person says who he wants, and whoever gets the most votes wins.”

The men stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“It’s simple,” Pel insisted. “Look, suppose the eight of you were somewhere together and needed a leader. Each of you would say who you wanted to be the leader, and whoever got five or more votes would win.”

“But…’tis all very well, but how to know who shall vote?” the cobbler asked.

“Everybody votes!” Pel said, waving his hands to include all the world.

“Let everyone have a say?” one of the other men protested. “The fools, the children, women? People bearing grudges?”

The others murmured agreement, and Pel stared at them just as uncomprehendingly as they had stared at him a moment before.

It was at that point that Pel realized he didn’t care. If they didn’t want to be democratic, what business was it of his? If they didn’t want to build sewers, why should he care? He didn’t have to live in their stinking villages.

He didn’t really care whether they cleaned up their villages, he discovered. He had told them to stop hanging and disembowelling anyone who argued with the village elders, and they had agreed, and that was the really important change. Death mattered. Death was important. The rest of it, elections and building sewers and aqueducts and so on, that could wait, or they could figure it out for themselves.

He had had an idea, when he sent the others back to Earth but chose to stay here, that he might play the great leader, that he might show the people of this world the way to a more modern, more civilized lifestyle, but if they weren’t interested, it wasn’t his problem.

“Suit yourselves,” he said, his hands dropping.

His problem was getting his wife and daughter back.

“All right,” he said, “forget all that. But no more hangings, no more eviscerations, no torture—none of that stuff. Be good to each other. Shadow’s dead. You tell everyone she’s dead, and that Pel Brown is running things now.” He hoped that that name would reach Wilkins and Sawyer and other Imperials who were still alive, and they could come and find him and he could send them home. “No hangings, and the name’s Pel Brown. You understand?”

Heads nodded.

“And there’s something else. Something important.”

He could see them tense, he could, through the matrix, hear them drawing quick breaths and holding them; he could sense muscles tightening, pupils dilating.

“I want wizards,” he said. “I want every wizard you can find, I want every wizard there is. Send word out through all the world—every wizard must come to me, here in my fortress.” He stood up and pointed nowhere in particular, to emphasize his words. “All the wizards. Especially Taillefer. They come here, or they’re in deep shit. I can find them if I have to, and they know it.” This last wasn’t as certainly true as he made it sound; he was sure that he could locate anyone who dared to use magic, since all magic was linked into a single network and he controlled that network, and he thought he could tell someone experienced in wizardry by the patterning in their own tiny bit of matrix, but he did not yet really know how to interpret the data, how to convert a sensation in the matrix into a place in the real world.

But that didn’t matter.

The important thing was what they believed.

He thought for a moment about telling them to find Imperials, too, but then he dismissed the idea. They didn’t seem all that bright, and he wanted to keep it as simple as he possibly could. The creatures he had sent out to fetch this bunch hadn’t come across anyone wearing purple; probably Sawyer and Wilkins were hundreds of miles away.

“You find wizards. You tell your village elders, you tell everybody. Any wizard doesn’t come here might as well cut his own throat and be done with it, you understand?”

They were cowering back against the wall, and Pel realized that intangible clouds of dark gray were rolling around the throne room, interspersed with gouts of flame and vivid flashes of crimson—the matrix was picking up his insistence and interpreting it. His guests, or captives, or whatever they were, were probably scared half to death.

He dropped his pointing finger and calmed the roiling currents of magic.

“You get the idea,” he said. “No more hangings, and find wizards, and send them here. Now, get out of here, go home, tell everyone.” He made the twist in the web of power that would link him to the fetches, and ordered them, “You go with these men, you make sure people believe them about the hangings and the wizards. Take a week, that should do it, then come back here.” He waved in dismissal. “Get out of here, all of you.”

He slumped back into the throne and watched as the eight men fled, the fetches trudging stolidly after them.

He hoped none of them tripped and fell down the stairs on the way out.

* * * *

Johnston peered warily down the basement stairs.

Except for being unusually dusty, which came from being shut up and neglected all summer, the place looked perfectly ordinary. It was hard to believe that the doorway to another universe had appeared in this house.

Well, maybe it hadn’t—but the house didn’t look much like part of an incredibly-elaborate hoax, either.

Carefully, he trudged down the steps. Behind him came a heavily-loaded Air Force lieutenant, struggling to maneuver two cases of equipment safely.

“You’ll want to change those lightbulbs,” Johnston said, pointing. “The Jewell woman says they’re burnt out.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant agreed, looking up.

“That’s the wall, right there, according to the description both the women gave,” Johnston said, indicating the bare concrete. “Poke at it if you like, do anything you want that won’t damage it—take pictures, measure it, whatever.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Set the radio up first.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don’t really expect anything to happen, you understand—but if it does, it could be anything, anytime.”

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant set the cases on the basement floor.

“Any questions?”

The lieutenant looked around, then shrugged. “No, sir.”

Johnston nodded. “Your relief will be here at 1800.”

“Yes, sir.”

Johnston hesitated, then crossed to the blank wall. He stared at the gray blocks, reached up and tapped one.

Just concrete. His hand didn’t vanish into a chilly medieval forest, nor a bare white desert, nor any of the other places Jewell and Thorpe had described and Deranian had babbled about.

“Be careful,” he said as he turned to go.

* * * *

There were advantages, Amy decided, to having vanished in a manner sufficiently mysterious that it attracted the attention of Air Force intelligence. They hadn’t paid her bills, but at least they’d collected her mail and kept the post office from returning it all. Their patrols had scared off burglars. And they’d made sure none of the utilities were shut off.

It was too bad they hadn’t bothered to answer her phone or explain to any of her clients what had happened. The tape on the answering machine had filled up the first week, mostly with ever-more-angry complaints from the Fosters.

After calling to make her doctor’s appointment she had tried to phone all of her clients. Some, including the Fosters, didn’t answer; one had moved; one hung up on her. Prema Chatterji was still interested in a consultation, but the others were pretty clearly a total loss. Being called away without warning on “personal matters” for more than three months was not good business.

And after going through the mountain of mail and matching the unpaid bills against her bank balance and the undeposited checks, she knew she was broke, or nearly so—if nothing bounced and she hadn’t missed anything and she could transfer from her savings account, she would wind up with a balance of about eighteen dollars.

That wouldn’t even pay for groceries to replace what had gone bad. She sighed.

“Is it bad?” Prossie asked.

“Yeah, but it could certainly be worse,” Amy said. She looked up, out the living room window at the Air Force car parked out front.

Those people wouldn’t let them starve, she was sure. And they were back on Earth, and alive and well.

“It could be a lot worse,” she said.

* * * *

“I want agents on Earth and on Shadow’s world,” Bascombe said. “You tell me how to get them there.”

The scientist glanced at the telepath, then shrugged. “We can get them through the warp,” he said, “but anti-gravity doesn’t work in either of those realities, so getting them down safely is…well, it’s an engineering problem. And getting them back is tougher.”

The telepath, a man named Brian Hall, Carrie Hall’s brother, whom Bascombe had not dealt with before, said, “You want to use someone who’s already there. On Earth, our only possible contacts are Prossie Thorpe and the five we contacted before…”

Bascombe interrupted, “I thought there were six.”

“Yes, sir; one of them has died.”

Bascombe nodded. “Go on,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Well, none of those contacts were very satisfactory. Carleton Miletti apparently could only transmit, not receive; though he was aware of our attempts at contact, none of our messages got through. Oram Blaisdell and Ray Aldridge…well, frankly, sir, I’m not sure either of them was entirely sane. And the other two, Angela Thompson and Gwenyth—we never got her last name—are both under-age females, which limits their usefulness.”

“What about Shadow?”

“We can’t read Shadow’s mind, sir; we tried, and the telepath who made the attempt died. As for other people in Shadow’s universe, we’ve never managed a solid contact; we don’t know why.”

“What about our people who went there?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Bascombe glared at him.

“I mean, sir,” Hall said, “I don’t know if any of them are still alive, and no attempt has been made to contact any of them. I doubt any attempt at contact will succeed, but I don’t know that.”

“Try it,” Bascombe ordered him. “And get your sister going on contacts on Earth.” Then he turned back to the scientist. “And I want your department to figure out how we can get agents safely to Earth and Shadow. Don’t worry about getting them back yet; we can take care of that when the time comes.”

“Yes, sir.” The scientist glanced at the telepath; the telepath carefully avoided the man’s gaze.

“Go on,” Bascombe said. “Both of you. Get on with it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter Five

Pel wondered why he kept coming up to the top of the tower. There wasn’t anything new up here; the rain still sounded like a child’s footsteps, it hadn’t changed any. He’d heard the rain through the broken gargoyle before, seen the landscape spread out on all sides, drawn the currents of power down from the skies and guided them through the clouds. There was nothing new up here.

But there wasn’t anything new elsewhere in the castle, either. There wasn’t anything he wanted anywhere in the entire place.

A gust of wind blew dripping rainwater toward him; his aura turned it aside with no conscious command. Pel barely noticed; he just stared out over the marsh.

He knew why he was up here; it was because he was bored. He was bored and miserable, and this place, out in the rain, with its vast and depressing view, was nicely suited to being bored and miserable.

Really, it was rather amazing that he was bored and lonely and unhappy. At least in theory, he was the absolute ruler of an entire world; he was an all-powerful magician, with anything he wanted his for the taking.

Except he didn’t want any of it.

What he wanted was his family back. Or even, he thought, and hated himself for thinking it, just to know that they were really, permanently dead, and he could never have them back, because at least then it would be over, and he could get on to whatever came next—despair, grief, whatever, and maybe someday, if he lived long enough, building a new life for himself.

But this not knowing, this possibility of their resurrection, was driving him crazy. He wasn’t thinking straight, hadn’t been able to keep his mind properly on anything since he had first heard Nancy was dead.

Shadow had said she could raise the dead; she had had her fetches, and even though those weren’t much better than zombies, there was no reason to think they were the best the magical matrix could do.

After all, Shadow had wanted servants, not companions; she hadn’t been doing anyone any favors with her resurrections.

Pel didn’t want servants. He wanted Nancy and Rachel back. He wanted to hear real running footsteps on the battlements.

He paused, staring out over the marsh.

On the battlements? Did he want to stay here, if he once managed to bring his wife and daughter back from the dead?

Probably not. It was lonely here. Controlling the matrix gave him power, it let him move and reshape matter anywhere in this world, and at least in theory it could let him see through the eyes of others, hear through their ears; it made him the unquestioned final authority; but it cut him off from everyone else at the same time. No one had even remembered that his predecessor, Shadow, was human—they’d all called her “it,” and treated her as a force of nature.

He didn’t think he was at that extreme, but the men he had had dragged in hadn’t exactly treated him as another like themselves. He had had the power of life and death over them; when he hadn’t made a conscious effort, they hadn’t even been able to see him through the seething aura of magical energy that was the visible manifestation of the matrix.

And when they did see him, those peasants in their homespun and leather…

He looked down at himself, at the battered purple slacks he still wore. He remembered Raven of Stormcrack Keep, with his black velvet cloak and high boots; Valadrakul of Warricken, with his braids and knee-length vest; Elani, with her red robes.

He didn’t belong here. He belonged back on Earth—but with his wife and daughter, and it was only in this world that anyone had the power to revive them.

He had the power.

All he had to do was learn how to use it.

And that, of course…

He stopped in mid-thought, and stared down at the causeway that connected the fortress to drier land to the east of the marsh. He wasn’t sure whether he had seen them first with his eyes or through the matrix, and now he needed a moment to convince himself that they were real, and not some damnable illusion the matrix had created.

They were real—there were people approaching the fortress. Six of them—or really, four people and two fetches.

There was only one explanation, one sort of people who would be coming here.

Wizards!

At last, wizards were coming!

Now maybe he could learn this resurrection business and get on with it!

* * * *

The scientist cleared his throat and glanced nervously at Bascombe.

Bascombe glared back.

“Well, sir, it’s simple enough to get people to either of the other universes, really; the space-warp generator is completely functional. The problems arise when you require that they arrive safely and be able to get back…”

“I don’t care if they can get back,” Bascombe interrupted. “We don’t need to worry about that. Cahn and his men got back, most of them, without any help from us.”

“Well, in that case, it’s just a matter of landing them safely, and as I understand it, no one was seriously injured in the previous warp transitions…”

“I don’t want them…Wait a minute.” Bascombe glowered at the man; the poor twit was almost a caricature of a scientist, probably didn’t even like to be called that, wanted to be referred to as a physicist, or an electronician, or something—as if all these arcane distinctions made any difference to anyone normal!

But he had a point; Cahn and Carson had both arrived intact. Bascombe considered their arrivals to be unsatisfactory, but he had to stop and think for a moment to put into words, simple words a scientist could understand, exactly what had been wrong with those landings.

“All right,” he said, “I want them to arrive quietly, without throwing away any more ships, without attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Can you do that?”

“Well, sir,” the scientist said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t put them in space suits, with a simple anti-gravity unit to get…”

“Anti-gravity doesn’t work there. What else have we got? Isn’t there any way to fly without using anti-gravity?”

The scientist blinked.

“Um,” he said.

“Care to be a bit more explicit?” Bascombe let the sarcasm drip from his words.

“Well, we…I mean, AG is so cheap and convenient, that we…there were experiments, but…” His voice trailed off.

Bascombe decided the time was ripe for a suggestion, to get the man thinking positively again. “Why can’t we just make the warps come out at ground level?” he asked.

“Oh, because…well, we were sending ships before, and the control isn’t fine enough, and solid matter…the interaction…it’s not safe.”

“So we have to make these holes in mid-air, and let our men just fall through?”

“Well, I—” The scientist stopped dead this time, rather than trailing off.

“You what?”

“Well, there’s no reason they couldn’t climb through. With ropes.”

“Ropes?” Startled, Bascombe considered the idea.

It seemed very obvious now, so obvious that he wondered how they had missed seeing it sooner. Maybe because it was too simple—getting to another universe involved huge machines, vast quantities of energy, super-science of all sorts; plain old rope didn’t fit the image.

They could even have saved most of Carson’s group, if they had wanted to.

But then, Bascombe remembered, they hadn’t particularly wanted to.

“Ropes,” he said.

* * * *

“At least they didn’t cancel my credit cards,” Amy said, glancing up as she continued to pull wads of newspaper out of her new purse. “It’s a good thing I didn’t have all of them with me.”

Prossie nodded, then looked down at herself.

Amy had had to guess at the telepath’s sizes to some extent, since Imperial standards did not use the same systems as J.C. Penney, but the clothes seemed to fit fairly well.

Prossie didn’t look very enthusiastic about the outfit she wore, though.

“Is something wrong?” Amy asked, putting down the purse. She had deliberately gotten something simple and casual for her guest, since Prossie was obviously not ready to go looking for a white-collar job here on Earth, but maybe that had been a mistake.

“It’s just so strange,” Prossie said. “I’ve worn a uniform since I was six; except on Zeta Leo III, I’ve never seen myself in any color but purple.”

Amy shuddered at the mention of the slavers’ planet. She asked, “Even off-duty? Didn’t you ever have, you know, a furlough or something?”

Prossie stared at her as if she were mad, then apparently caught herself and looked apologetic.

“No, of course not,” she said. “I’m a telepath; I had to wear full uniform at all times, so that people would know I was a Special.”

“So this makes you think of when you were a slave, back there?” Amy asked, with a wave at the blue jeans and black sweatshirt.

Prossie hesitated, then glanced at the tattered, filthy remains of her uniform, lying in a heap on the couch.

“I was always a slave,” she said.

* * * *

The first wizard through the door prostrated himself, to Pel’s surprise; the man dropped to his knees, then flung his arms up over his head and practically fell forward, until his palms were flat on the floor and his nose was at most an inch above the stone.

The others, with only an instant’s hesitation, followed their comrade’s lead—even Taillefer, who had met Pel before, when Shadow was still alive. Pel was glad to see that Taillefer was one of the group.

He was not glad that Taillefer’s familiar face was plastered to the floor. “Oh, get up,” Pel said testily, and inadvertently let the matrix amplify his voice into an angry roar.

The four wizards scrambled hastily to their feet.

Pel stared, looking them over—and doing so while well aware that they probably couldn’t see him through the glare of the matrix.

If anyone could see through it, wizards could—but somehow, Pel didn’t think these people could.

Physically, they didn’t look all that impressive, despite the long robes and fancy embroidery they wore. They were just people, three men and a woman, and not in the best of shape. Taillefer was fat and soft, the woman was bony and unattractive, one of the others had the red scar of an old burn marring one cheek from jaw to eyebrow.

Through the matrix, though, Pel could see that there was a sort of patterning, a power, an inward light and structure to them that the ordinary people he had met since acquiring Shadow’s magic did not have.

But it was very weak and faint, like a dim copy of a tiny corner of the great matrix.

He could also see that the wizards were able to sense and touch the matrix in a way no one else had, and he remembered how Valadrakul had been so enthralled by it that he had doomed himself.

None of these four were reacting in quite that way, though they were all certainly fascinated by the flickering tangle of interwoven magic.

“You’re wizards?” he asked.

“O great one,” the man who had first flung himself down said, “I am Athelstan of Meresham.” He bowed deeply and theatrically. “And you, I take it, are Shadow’s successor, Pelbrun?”

“Brown,” Pel corrected automatically. “Pel Brown.”

“Brown Pelbrun, then,” Athelstan agreed.

It wasn’t worth arguing. “You’re a wizard, Athelstan? I know Taillefer, but not you others.”

Athelstan cocked his head to the side as if puzzled.

“Aye,” he said. “I am a wizard, after a fashion—can you not see as much?”

Pel could see the woman and the unidentified man cringe to hear Athelstan speak so boldly; it certainly was an abrupt change from his first obeisance.

Or had that perhaps been mockery?

“I can see that you can touch magic,” Pel said. “But that isn’t exactly what I meant.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “I’truth, O Pelbrun, neither I nor my companions can sense the true patterns, nor shape them; we draw only upon what power we find to hand. Thus, I am neither matrix wizard, nor pattern wizard, but only wizard, plain and simple. Is it this you would have us say?”

“Not exactly,” Pel replied. “Look, I can use a matrix, obviously—I’m holding the one Shadow built, and I can use it. I have the innate ability that you don’t. But I don’t know how to use it properly, so what I’m asking is not if you have the talent of a wizard, but whether you have the knowledge of a wizard.”

He saw Athelstan glance at the others, who exchanged furtive glances amongst themselves.

“I know enough to fry you all, though,” Pel warned. “Don’t think I don’t.”

“O Brown Magician,” Athelstan said, bowing again, “ne’er did I doubt it! An what would we, in any event? As you have said, such as we can touch upon a network, but cannot hold it—were you slain, or in other manner the matrix taken from you, the lot of us could hold it not for the merest instant, but instead would most probably be incinerated in its fiery dissolution. You’ve naught to fear from us.”

“Good,” Pel said.

“Indeed, meseems ’twould be very much in our interests to serve you honestly and well,” Athelstan continued, “for else how shall we flourish, when all the reins of power are held in your own two hands? Look you upon the pitiful estate of all known wizardry, when only we four can be found of the myriad magicians who once flourished in this realm—and this, merely that Shadow was not pleased others should wield the arts arcane. How, then, shall we not rejoice that Shadow has passed, and that a new overlord is come who, by your profession heretofore, seeks not exclusive dominion?”

By the time Pel had interpreted this speech, and debated with himself how to respond, Athelstan had taken his pause for silent consent.

Pel knew that Athelstan was making at least one wrong assumption; he knew that there were a few other wizards besides these four still scattered about the far corners of Faerie—but only a matrix wizard could have seen that, and it didn’t matter anyway. He let Athelstan continue.

“What learning we might have we place gladly at your disposal, O Brown Magician,” the wizard said. “What would you have of us?”

There it was, the question Pel had been waiting for. He took a deep breath.

“I want to learn to raise the dead,” he said.

* * * *

“I want to be useful,” Prossie said. “I feel as if I should be doing more, not just sitting here in your house, eating your food and wearing your clothes.”

Amy hesitated. “You can’t drive a car, though,” she said. “You don’t have any marketable skills, or any educational record, or anything. I don’t know what sort of work you could get. I mean, if I were still in business, I could maybe hire you myself for awhile, but right now…I mean, I’m going to be job-hunting myself.”

“There must be something,” Prossie said desperately; she was on her feet, standing by the living room couch, as if, Amy thought, she couldn’t bear to stay seated.

“I’m sure there is,” Amy agreed, getting up herself. “Maybe working at McDonald’s, if nothing else. We’ll want to get you a GED, maybe sign you up at Montgomery College or somewhere—maybe those Air Force people could help…” She glanced out the front window at that, at the car that waited out on the gravel shoulder of Goshen Road.

It would be nice to get some use out of all this mess, she thought. “Maybe you could sell souvenirs…” she began, as she turned to look out through the kitchen, through the glass panel in the back door, at the spaceship that lay in her back yard.

She stopped in mid-sentence and stared; her mouth fell open.

Prossie asked, “What is it?” She hurried to the kitchen door and looked.

Not realizing at first that Amy was looking out the back, it took her a moment to see what was wrong; she wasted several seconds scanning the kitchen itself, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At last, though, her gaze reached the window.

“Oh, my…” she began.

“Someone better tell the Air Force men,” Amy said. She turned and ran for the front door to do just that, leaving Prossie staring wide-eyed out the back, staring at the men in purple space suits climbing down a rope-ladder that seemed to hang from empty sky.

Chapter Six

Samuel Best sometimes wondered whether his name had helped him in his career in Imperial Intelligence. Nobody would admit such a thing, of course, but sometimes he wondered whether, on some level, people expected more of him because of his name, and chose him for tough assignments because he was, after all, the Best.

Not that he necessarily believed he actually was the best; to think such a thing could lead to overconfidence, and that could easily be fatal.

He did try to be good at his work, though, and in this case that had resulted in delays that had irritated the hell out of that officious twit, John Bascombe, Under-Secretary for Interdimensional Affairs.

Best didn’t much care. Bascombe might be an up-and-coming politician, he might be able to ruin Best’s life—but screwing up a field assignment could get a man killed. Better to annoy one’s superiors and live than to do as one’s told and die.

It had just seemed to be common sense to insist on speaking to anyone in the Empire who had actually been in this Shadow place, and it wasn’t his fault if the surviving crewmen of I.S.S. Ruthless had been reassigned and scattered.

It was too bad no one from Colonel Carson’s squad had made it back alive, but they hadn’t; there were only the six men from Ruthless.

Not that they had been able to tell him much, in any case; they had only been there for about twenty minutes, and in an area hundreds of miles from his intended point of arrival.

Still, it was useful to know about the heavier gravity, the lower-than-optimum oxygen content of the atmosphere, the blue-shifted sunlight, the pseudoterrestrial ecology, the appearance of a feudal social structure—and the clothing. Best had no desire to be obvious; he wasn’t about to go in in uniform.

The squad sent to the other universe, the place called Earth, could make their own decisions; he and his boys were going in in the closest approximation of local costume they could manage.

This meant that the Earth squad went first, of course—Bascombe hadn’t been willing to wait.

That was fine with Best; he wasn’t eager to be the first to try this trick of climbing through a space-warp on a rope ladder. And the fact that the Empire only had one space-warp generator operational at the moment—though he knew that more were under construction, a fact he was not supposed to know—meant that he and his three underlings couldn’t go anywhere until the Earth squad was through, and the generator shut down, recalibrated, and re-started.

It seemed to be working, though; having finally approved the preparations, he stood behind Bascombe and to the side, hand shading his eyes, and watched through the thick tinted glass as the four space suited figures vanished into the blinding white glare of the space-warp field.

A fifth figure, also suited, emerged from the glare and waved to the control room.

“They’re through,” one of the engineers said.

“Good,” Bascombe said. “Then get this thing shut down and open the warp to Shadow’s universe.”

“But, sir,” someone protested, “If you do that, you’ll cut off the men on Earth—the ladder will be sheared off, and we won’t be able to retrieve them.”

“Roll the damn ladder up,” Bascombe said, “and then use it to get Best, here, and his crew, to Shadow’s world. Then you can reopen the warp to Earth. We’ll do four-hour shifts hanging that ladder in each universe.”

“Give them another hour, sir,” Best said. “It’ll take me that long to get my men ready.”

Bascombe turned to glare at him, looked down at the phony peasant garb Best wore, then shrugged.

“Forty minutes,” he said. “I want you and your men in the staging area, suited and ready to go, in forty minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” Best said. He saluted, and stood at attention as Bascombe left the room.

“What an idiot,” an engineer muttered when the door had swung shut.

Best didn’t bother to reply aloud, but his own opinion was the same.

* * * *

“It didn’t work,” Pel said, glaring at the dead dog. It had stopped twitching.

“Well, O Great One,” Athelstan said, “did we not say that we knew not the way of it?”

“You said you thought you could, if you had enough power,” Pel countered.

“Nay, rather, said we that we thought we might, had we the power,” Athelstan corrected him. “’Twould seem we were mistaken. Ne’er did we promise.”

For a moment, Pel just stared at the dog. Then he sighed. “I know you didn’t promise,” he said. “So you can’t do it, you don’t know how—but doesn’t anyone know? Shadow knew, right?”

“Yes, it does…that is, rather, it did.” Athelstan stared at the dog as well.

After a moment’s silence, the wizard bestirred himself and said, “Hark, then, Master—we know the theory of old, as we told you, handed down from master to apprentice since the earliest years of Shadow’s use of fetches. Our knowledge thereof must, we see, be deficient in some wise. Perchance, though, were we to study an ensample of the practice of necromantic art, understanding might be gained thereby.”

Pel turned and looked at the wizard.

“What?” he said.

Athelstan blinked, then said, speaking slowly and clearly, “O Great One, had we the chance to study, and to test, perhaps to destruction, one that had in fact been resurrected from death, might we then gain the understanding we lack?”

Pel stared at him.

“Your fetches, Lord,” Athelstan explained, gesturing at the pair that stood guard by the door.

Pel blinked, then glanced at his unmoving servants, then back at Athelstan.

Something twinged, twitched, tickled at him somehow. He paused.

Something felt odd, and slightly wrong, and he wasn’t sure what it was or where it was or even whether it was internal or external. Something was disturbed, somehow.

It might have been somewhere out in the matrix, in the web of magical currents that covered this entire world—or it might have been in his head.

Could it have been a twinge of guilt at the idea of destroying a fetch?

After all, he supposed the fetches had been alive once, free people with their own souls and their own interests and their own rights—but they weren’t now; he could see that through the matrix, could see how their magical energies differed from those of real live human beings. Shadow hadn’t brought them back that far; she had left them mindless zombies. They were already dead, really; why should he feel guilty about dissecting one, or whatever Athelstan had in mind? He had already killed about a hundred of them himself, one way or another, and didn’t feel guilty about it. Letting the wizards kill one more was no problem, not really.

If that was what he had felt, then his subconscious was being silly and unreasonable.

If he’d felt something else, something out there in the network somewhere, it could wait. Bringing back his family took priority over anything else.

“Sure,” he said. “Go to it.”

* * * *

Major Johnston took a final look around the yard, his gaze lingering on the silly-looking purple spaceship. “You’re sure no one could be hiding in that thing?” he called.

“Sure as we can be, sir,” a lieutenant replied.

Johnston nodded, glanced up at where the rope ladder had disappeared into thin air, then headed back around the side of the house, toward the waiting cars.

There were four of them, lined up by the roadside; he hesitated for an instant, then marched up to the last one in line, an Air Force-blue sedan.

Amy Jewell looked up at him through the closed window. She showed no sign of rolling it down, so he spoke loudly.

“I’m sorry about this, Ms. Jewell,” he said. “I’m going to see if we can get you listed as a civilian consultant, and get you some compensation for your time—you and Ms. Thorpe both. We’ll provide alternate accommodations for you, if you’d rather not stay here for now. And I’m afraid we may want to buy your house, if these people are going to keep coming.”

Amy shrugged, then nodded. “Thanks,” she called, her voice barely audible through the glass.

He patted the side of the car, then straightened up.

More cars were arriving, bringing more men—Air Police, so far; Johnston hoped they’d be enough.

After all, next time the Galactic Empire might send an attack force, rather than scouts or diplomats. If he had had his way, he’d have had a fully-armed squad of Marines here, ready for anything—but he was Air Force, and didn’t have the authority to call in the jarheads. A request like that would have to work its way up through channels. He’d started the paperwork, but it would take time.

APs he could do now.

He no longer doubted the existence of the Galactic Empire; he had arrived just in time to see the rope ladder vanish into thin air. He wished he’d been able to reach the place in less than forty minutes; maybe he could have sent someone back up.

But that might not have been safe. The Imperials had arrived in space suits, after all—genuine Buck Rogers space suits, bulky purple things with fishbowl helmets, straight out of “Destination Moon.” Maybe they’d needed them at the top of the ladder.

They weren’t saying, though.

He glanced at the two civilian cop cars that had been the first things he’d been able to get to the site. Each one had two men in back, space suits and equipment removed, but still in their silly-looking Imperial uniforms.

He marched over to the closer one and peered in the open window. “Care to tell me anything?” he asked.

“Lieutenant James Austin, Imperial Service, H-657-R-233-B-708,” the purple-uniformed man said, staring straight ahead without so much as glancing at Johnston.

Johnston sighed. He slapped the car roof.

“Take ’em away,” he said.

* * * *

Prossie sat motionless in the back of the groundcar, wishing she could know what the people around her were thinking. Sometimes her mental silence was a blessing, sometimes a curse; right now it was horrible.

The Empire had sent more men—not an envoy this time, no telepaths, but a scouting team, probably, from their actions, Imperial Intelligence.

She wasn’t as frightened of the Smarts as most of the people she had known; over the years she had read the minds of several of the dreaded Intelligence agents, and while they generally weren’t nice people, they were just people, not the fearsome, emotionless supermen they were reputed to be. She had even worked directly for Intelligence once or twice herself; all the telepaths, the entire Special Branch, were nominally under the joint jurisdiction of Intelligence and the Imperial Messenger Service, always available if the Smarts needed them.

But still, any time Intelligence was involved, matters were serious. The situation was serious now.

Especially since she didn’t know why they were here.

Especially since one possibility was that they had been sent after her.

She knew that the Empire would take a rogue telepath very seriously indeed. If they knew she was here, if they knew she had really, genuinely gone rogue…

Otherwise it seemed like quite a coincidence, an Imperial team arriving directly behind the very house she was staying in.

She knew that it wasn’t really as much of a coincidence as it first appeared; she had read from the minds of Imperial scientists that something about the shape of space itself made it easier to open a space-warp in the same place every time. If the Empire was going to open a warp to Earth anywhere, this would be the natural place; she was here herself because this was where the warp had come out before.

Still, even if it wasn’t a coincidence, why were they here? What did they want? She knew, beyond question, that when she had left Base One with Colonel Carson and Raven and the rest, no one at Base One had had any plans for further contact with Earth, with the possible exception of sending Pel and Amy and the rest home someday. John Bascombe had written Earth off as worthless; General Hart had considered it irrelevant.

Why had they changed their minds?

There was one way she might be able to find out; Carrie had tried to contact her several times. Carrie would know what was going on; she wouldn’t be able to help it. Maybe Prossie could coax an explanation out of her.

And maybe not. She and Carrie hadn’t exactly parted as friends. Prossie had betrayed her family, betrayed all the telepaths in the Empire, by lying to Imperial officers, disobeying orders, and in general breaking any rule she found inconvenient once she was outside Imperial space and cut off from the mental network she had grown up in.

That she had done so because she could now see that she had been oppressed and abused all her life would not matter much to Carrie or the others; they were still there, under the Empire’s thumb, subject to summary execution for the slightest infraction of the telepathy laws. Prossie’s rebellion could conceivably endanger them all.

And maybe that was why Carrie hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t lifted a finger or transmitted a thought when Prossie had been utterly at Shadow’s mercy and convinced she was about to die.

Prossie was the one who had broken contact, who had been unspeakably rude, who had been refusing to communicate; maybe Carrie would listen, maybe they could make up. They were cousins, bound together by blood and background—surely a little internecine squabble could be patched up.

But Carrie would have to try again before they could talk. Telepathy was impossible in Earth’s universe. Prossie couldn’t send unless Carrie was listening, couldn’t receive unless Carrie was sending.

Carrie or someone, anyway. There were four hundred and fourteen other telepaths in the Empire, at last count.

And until one of them tried to reach her, Prossie couldn’t talk to any of them.

All she could do was to sit in the groundcar, in the thick silence of her own isolated mind, and wonder whether the Empire wanted her, or wanted Earth.

And whether it really made any difference.

* * * *

Best brushed aside leaves and peered down at the ground below.

For the most part the earth was thick with dead leaves and moss—nobody lived here, that was obvious.

In one direction, though, the view was different. There was a clearing ahead, and a very strange clearing indeed. It appeared to have been created or enlarged by breaking limbs off trees, where any normal clearing would simply be a place where no trees grew. Most of the clearing was covered by a black mound of something Best couldn’t identify; here and there things showed through the black, some of them bones, some of them unidentifiable. At one side, at the very edge of what he could see, something large and purple protruded from beneath the mound, something that Best thought might be I.S.S. Christopher.

Most of it was hidden by trees, so he couldn’t be sure; he’d have a better look when he reached the surface.

All around the black mound were signs that people had been there—but not that any were there now.

The area looked entirely deserted, in fact.

That was exactly what Best wanted; smiling but still wary he climbed down the rope ladder into the forest.

* * * *

Athelstan and the woman, Boudicca, were just finishing their dissection when that odd kink in the matrix suddenly vanished.

It hadn’t been guilt. Pel had been forcing himself not to think about it, but when it disappeared so abruptly its absence drew his attention. Nothing internal could have done that; he knew it must have been a twist in the currents of magic, not in his subconscious.

That was reassuring.

So it had been caused by something out there in the world somewhere—presumably a wizard, because what else could affect the magical flow? And from the size of the disturbance, big enough to cause him a real twinge, the wizard must be a fairly powerful one.

Another wizard…Athelstan and Taillefer and Mahadharma hadn’t thought there were any others left alive. Boudicca, more conservative, had refused to venture an opinion. Pel had known there were other people out there who could touch magic, but had thought they might all be just beginners or dabblers.

Anyone who could make himself—or herself—felt through the matrix like that wasn’t just playing around with fire-lighting spells. If this current batch didn’t work out at least there might be another chance.

“See you,” Athelstan said, pointing to the fetch’s heart, “how ’tis with this?”

At first Pel thought Athelstan was addressing Boudicca, but then he realized that both wizards were looking in his direction—not quite at his face, because of the haze of magic around him, but in his direction.

“What?” he asked, leaning forward and trying not to be sickened by the sight of the fetch’s opened chest.

At first he saw nothing but gore, but then he adjusted his vision, shielding his gaze with a layer of magic—not because it had occurred to him that that would help, but just to put something between himself and the exposed organs.

And when he did, he saw the fetch not as a human body, but as a magical structure, and he could see what Athelstan meant: the pattern that kept the heart beating, and that was not at all what they had tried to use on that dog.

“Oh,” he said. He studied it for a moment, then said, “I could do that.”

“So,” Boudicca said, sitting back on her heels. “Thus it is.”

“I could do that,” Pel repeated.

It was simple, really. Not obvious, but simple.

And judging by what he saw in the fetch, it was stable, self-sustaining. It could be done in anything that had the right general structure to it, it didn’t have to be a human heart.

Were the homunculi and the rest done the same way?

If so, no wonder Shadow had made so many of them. It would be easy.

Pel tugged at the magic flowing through and around the chamber, and the fetch’s chest closed, healing almost instantly.

Athelstan fell back, startled, in a most graceless and unwizardly fashion. Boudicca merely blinked.

That pattern in its heart kept it alive, Pel could see that, and the network that ran through the rest of its body, like a miniature of the matrix itself, let it move and function.

But there was a break in the pattern, a discontinuity, where living creatures continued down into fractal complexity, but the fetch’s energies simply flattened out and looped back upon themselves; Pel wondered if Athelstan had seen it.

Excited by this discovery, without thinking what it might do, Pel reached out and repaired the flaw.

The fetch sat up. It opened its eyes and looked about.

Then it started screaming.

Chapter Seven

“I know, I know,” Johnston said wearily, “name, rank, and serial number.” He waved at the prisoners and sat down. He sighed heavily.

“You know,” he said, “we aren’t at war with the Empire. Right now we aren’t at war with anybody, and we’d like to keep it that way. I think I might know a few things you boys don’t, things that your superiors would be interested in—but I’m not going to just hand them over if you people insist on acting like prisoners of war. So far, you’re just trespassers and illegal aliens…” His mouth twitched a little at that phrase, and he had to stop for a few seconds to keep from laughing.

The four of them sat silently as he recovered. The leader, Lieutenant Austin, was glowering at him; one of the others was looking sheepish, a third was staring at his own knees, and the fourth was studying the ceiling.

“You trespassed on Ms. Jewell’s land,” Johnston said, “and you’re in the country without the proper papers, but you aren’t felons, you aren’t charged with espionage, you aren’t considered hostile or prisoners of war. You’re maybe subject to a fine and deportation, and that’s about it. Now, I’ll offer you a deal—you tell us why you’re here, and we’ll take you back and see if we can send you home. If the opening’s still there we can send you through by helicopter, maybe, even if the ladder’s gone. You keep quiet, and I’ll keep you locked up and incommunicado for as long as I possibly can. It’s that simple. If your people want to talk, we can talk—not me, I’m Air Force, but we can get the State Department in on it. If you don’t want to talk, you stay the hell out of our space. Simple enough?”

The sheepish-looking one shifted his feet.

“We’ll give back the suits before you go, too,” Johnston added. “No tricks.”

The one who had been watching the ceiling tiles threw his superior a glance, but Austin wasn’t buying.

It was obvious who needed convincing here.

“Lieutenant Austin,” Johnston said, “I’m not asking for much.”

“Too much,” Austin said.

Johnston sat back and stared at Austin for a moment; the Imperial looked back unflinchingly.

“So what the hell do you want us to do with you?” Johnston shouted suddenly. “You want to rot here?”

Austin shrugged. “You’re holding Imperial personnel against their will,” he said.

“You’re not in Imperial space, you…” Johnston bit his words off short; it wouldn’t help any to call Austin an idiot.

He obviously was an idiot, but it wouldn’t help to tell him that.

“Okay, look,” he said. “Maybe you think the Empire’s going to come in here, blasters blazing, to rescue you—but did they go after the crew of the Ruthless? Did they go after the squad that went with Lord Raven? I know about all that. I know your blasters don’t work here, your ships can’t fly here—this is our turf. They couldn’t save you even if they wanted to, and I’ll bet they don’t want to.”

Austin was unmoved, but the other three were all visibly nervous now.

“Here’s what we’re going to do, then,” Johnston said. “We’re going to send one of you…let’s see…Hitchcock. We’ll send Spaceman Hitchcock back through the space-warp, and let him talk to whoever’s in charge over there, and tell them that we want to talk, we want answers, and that none of you are going anywhere until we get them.”

Hitchcock looked up from his folded hands.

“I know we didn’t talk when the Ruthless came through, because we didn’t know it was for real,” Johnston said. “Well, now we know. We want to talk. You just tell ’em that, Hitchcock.”

“Yessir,” Hitchcock said, smiling nervously.

Austin threw him a look that should have been fatal, and Hitchcock wilted into silence, but Johnston leaned back and smiled.

* * * *

The formerly-dead man—Pel could no longer think of him as a fetch—crouched with his head on Boudicca’s chest, shivering silently. He hadn’t been eager to answer questions, and Pel hadn’t pressed the issue—the man appeared to be unnerved by the memories of spending several years as Shadow’s undead servant. Waking up suddenly, with all those memories, had sent him into a screaming fit.

The fit seemed to be past, but Pel still didn’t think he wanted to know just what the man was remembering.

The revived dog, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy with her situation; she sat panting cheerfully as Pel petted her.

“’Twould seem, O Brown Magician,” Athelstan said, “that you now have the knowledge that you sought.”

“Yeah,” Pel said, scratching the dog behind her ears, relishing the familiar doggy feel of the coarse hair and loose skin. She was a pleasant dog, a mutt, mostly hound—she looked something like a coonhound, only smaller.

He felt pretty pleased with himself just now, and he wanted to bask in it for a moment. He’d fixed the fetch, turned it back into a man. He’d brought a dead dog back to life. He thought he had a good understanding of resurrection, and he could use Susan Nguyen as a final trial, bring her back from the dead to sure it would work on Earthpeople. Everything was going well.

He didn’t expect it to last, he was sure something would go horribly wrong at any minute now, but he wanted to enjoy the feeling of accomplishment while he could.

“Are we then free to go?” Athelstan asked.

Pel frowned as he considered the question.

“I’m afraid not just yet,” he said at last. “Not till Susan…not till I know this works every time. And besides, I don’t have the…the bodies…” His throat tightened. The pleasant afterglow vanished as he imagined Nancy and little Rachel lying dead. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and asked, “But I can make bodies, can’t I? Raven said that Shadow could make duplicates of people—do I need a hair or something from the person, to work with?” He thought of the science fiction stories about cloning people from a single cell, and he thought that it ought to be possible to do something like that with magic.

“Simulacra? Alas, O Great One, I know nothing…”

Pel’s brows lowered, and thunder rumbled somewhere—not outside the fortress, but in the hallway outside the throne room doors.

Athelstan blanched.

“Perhaps, with some experimentation…” he said.

* * * *

“I’m out of this one,” General Hart said, shaking his head. “Once you called in Intelligence, I knew enough to get out of the way. It’s all yours, Bascombe.”

Bascombe, seated comfortably behind his own desk, stared up at the general. “And I suppose you’ll deny approving Raven’s expedition? We happen to have the paperwork on that one, with your signature all over it.”

“Oh, I’ll admit to that one, all right,” Hart said, leaning back against the gray-painted steel wall. “I did that one through the proper channels, you approved it, everything by the book. I sent Major Southern back to Terra with a full report. And that was just a dozen troopers, two officers, a telepath, and a bunch of foreigners—I didn’t send any Intelligence agents, Colonel Carson’s no loss, and the telepath was authorized higher up. It’s not going to look real pretty on my record, but it’s not serious.”

“Are you suggesting that my follow-up actions are a serious mistake?” Bascombe demanded.

“If they aren’t,” Hart said, straightening up again, “then why do you want me involved? I can see spreading the blame, but since when would you want to share the credit?”

“I’m just trying to be fair,” Bascombe said.

“Oh, of course. You didn’t bother to consult me until you heard that the Imperial Marshal and the Secretary of Science were on their way here, but then you suddenly wanted to be absolutely sure I didn’t mind. What a coincidence.” He put his hands on Bascombe’s desk and leaned forward until his face was a foot or so from Bascombe’s. “Not a chance, Bascombe. If there’s credit to be had here, you can have it. I’ve had enough of you. This one’s all yours, and I hope you choke on it.”

* * * *

Best thought he was making good time as he led his little squad through the forest; he just wished he knew where he was going.

Begley, his number two man, had claimed some expertise in woodlore and had reported finding a track that someone had followed away from that huge pile of rotting flesh that covered the wreck of I.S.S. Christopher. Best hoped he was right, and that they were following the right people.

The track became obvious after a point, and now Best was leading the way, with Begley, Poole, and Morcambe following close behind. Morcambe was carrying his knife ready in his hand; the others left theirs sheathed.

Best wished he had thought to bring a bow and arrows—but that assumed one could have been found at Base One, which was doubtful.

This silent forest, with its filtered, scattered sunlight and its thick, rich smells, was getting on his nerves. There could be enemies behind any tree. The Ruthless survivors had described monsters that came charging out of the woods at them, that burrowed up out of the ground; the thing that had dropped on I.S.S. Christopher looked as if it had had wings, before the scavengers and bacteria had started in on, and that implied that it flew. Monsters could come at them from any direction, from above or below, at any time.

And he didn’t want to face monsters with just a knife. A bow and arrow would have been only slightly better. He wished blasters worked here, and he wondered just what sort of weird place this was that they didn’t.

He wanted to get out of the woods, onto open ground. He wanted to find a native to talk to.

The daylight seemed brighter ahead—was that a clearing? Were the trees thinning?

He beckoned to the others, muttered, “Come on,” and picked up the pace.

* * * *

“I guess we won’t need the chopper,” Johnston said, staring at the rope ladder that hung from empty air, swaying in the breeze, its bottom rung bumping gently against the side of the spaceship that covered half of Amy Jewell’s back yard. He turned to one side for a moment and said, “There you go, Mr. Hitchcock—your way home. You get up there and tell them that we’re ready to talk, and that they don’t get their other men back until we do.”

Hitchcock nodded, smiling happily as he stepped forward. He already had his space suit on. “Will do, Major,” he said. He lifted his bubble helmet into place and began securing the seal.

“Major Johnston,” someone called.

Johnston turned to locate the speaker.

“Got a call for you.” The voice came from the back door of the house, where a lieutenant was leaning out, the receiver of Ms. Jewell’s phone in one hand.

Johnston blinked, then frowned. “This better be important,” he said.

“It’s Thorpe,” the lieutenant replied.

Hitchcock had his helmet in place; he gave Johnston a questioning look, and the major waved him on toward the ladder.

“I still say we should’ve suited up some of our own men and sent them along,” someone muttered.

Johnston shook his head as he started toward the house. “Too dangerous,” he said as he walked. “Could be construed as hostile. Trespassing. Invading. We don’t know how rough they play.” He took the receiver from the lieutenant. “Ms. Thorpe?” he said. “Johnston here.” He turned to watch as Hitchcock started up the ladder.

“Sir,” Prossie Thorpe’s voice said unsteadily, “I tried to talk to Carrie—to Registered Telepath Carolyn Hall. She contacted me.”

“Go on,” Johnston said. Hitchcock was moving quickly, but it was a long climb, a good hundred feet at least, probably more.

“She…she questioned me, but I…”

The Imperial telepath’s tone penetrated Johnston’s focus on Hitchcock’s ascent. He looked down at the kitchen floor, at the toes of his shoes, and concentrated on the voice in his ear.

“Take your time, Thorpe,” he said.

* * * *

Prossie drew a deep breath and tried to compose herself.

It shouldn’t hurt this much, she told herself. She had already known she was a rogue, an outlaw; she had already known that Carrie was turned against her.

Still, she hadn’t felt it until she had taken up direct mental contact with Carrie again.

Then she had felt it, all right—that tense loathing and anger, not just from Carrie, but through her from the entire network of telepaths, the entire extended family.

In fact, most of it came from the four hundred, not from Carrie—but then, Prossie knew that Carrie hardly had any real existence apart from the network. All her life she’d lived in the family’s web of thought and feeling, just the way Prossie had before Ruthless came through the warp.

And much of what the family felt they picked up from the normals around them, the non-telepaths. Carrie was working with John Bascombe and General Hart and people who hated and feared telepaths; it was easy for her to direct that fear and hatred at her traitor cousin.

Still, it was a shock to feel it.

And it was a shock to learn why it was so intense.

Bascombe had sent those men to Earth after her.

Carrie hadn’t meant to let that slip, but she had. She hadn’t meant to tell Prossie anything.

And Prossie hadn’t meant to tell Carrie as much as she had, either, but any time telepaths communicated directly there would be leakage, there would be things that slipped out. A telepath couldn’t completely hide anything without breaking contact.

Hell, even when there was no conscious contact, things tended to leak through; telepathy wasn’t limited to conscious thought. Anything one telepath knew, they all did, on some level—though they might not all remember it.

Prossie swallowed and gripped the phone, the strange Earthly gadget that was almost like a mechanical telepath, that could transmit voices for hundreds of miles.

“Major Johnston,” she said, “I found out what those men were sent after.”

“Yes?”

“They think…they suspect that you and your people have joined forces with Shadow, that you’re plotting together against the Empire, and that I came here as Shadow’s liaison. They came to capture or kill me, and to see whether such an alliance actually exists. I told Carrie that it doesn’t, and that Shadow is dead, and she should know I wasn’t lying, but I can’t be sure.”

For a moment Prossie heard nothing, and she wondered whether the phone had broken, or whether some part of its mysterious mechanical workings needed extra time to transmit this particular message, but then Johnston asked, “Can you relay to her for us?”

Prossie shook her head before she remembered that Johnston couldn’t see her.

“No,” she said. “She and I…we can’t communicate anymore.”

“Damn. You’re sure?”

Prossie took a deep breath. “Yes, sir.”

“Is there anyone else she can communicate with, then? Did they send any telepaths with that bunch we have locked up? And please, don’t tell me it’s Hitchcock, because he’s two-thirds of the way up the ladder out here.”

“No, sir. Not Hitchcock or any of the others, so far as I know—none of them are telepaths, and I don’t think any of them can receive.” Prossie blinked. “But there are some possibilities, sir—you know, we sort of made contact with some of your own people before Ruthless came through. There were six…no, five of them, because one died.”

She didn’t really listen to what Johnston said to her next, because she knew what it was going to be. She closed her eyes and concentrated, remembering.

“Their names…there are three men and a woman, and a little girl. The men are named Oram Blaisdell, and Carleton Miletti, and Ray Aldridge, and the woman is Gwenyth, I don’t know her last name, and the little girl’s name is Angela Thompson, I talked to her sometimes. I think Carrie’s brother Brian was the last one assigned to contact them…”

* * * *

Pel stared at the object in dismay as he wiped blood and bits of fat and skin from his hands. A thick, soapy smell filled the room.

The thing on the table was made of human flesh, or a reasonable approximation. It had the shape of a woman. He thought he could force it to live, if he wanted to.

But it wasn’t Nancy.

He had thought he remembered her every feature, every inch, every detail, but the thing he had created, had grown and gathered and shaped into a semblance of humanity, was not Nancy. The face was wrong. The proportions were wrong.

“I was never a sculptor,” he said, flinging down his washrag in disgust.

Behind him stood two fetches and three others; two of the others, the two wizards, stirred at his words.

“Your pardon, O Great One,” Athelstan said, looking quickly from Pel to the inanimate body and back, “but I see no flaw in this homunculus. Surely, it…”

“It’s not Nancy,” Pel shouted at him, wheeling to face the wizard. The air crackled with anger, and red light blazed from the walls; Boudicca backed away a step.

“Nay, ’tis not,” Athelstan admitted hurriedly, “nor did I say it might be. Yet you’ve created here a woman—is that not a fair start? To make so fine a semblance as you desire, one needs must have better to work from…”

“I don’t want a semblance,” Pel barked. “I want Nancy. And Rachel. My wife and daughter.”

“And surely, with patience, you’ll have them,” Athelstan said. He gestured at the woman who stood stolidly to the side. “Have you not brought this one back from the dead? Can any doubt that you have the power to wreak whatever you will?”

Pel turned and looked at Susan. She gazed calmly back, and he relaxed slightly. He had brought her back without any problem.

But he hadn’t had to create a body for her.

“Doesn’t look much like Nancy, does it?” he asked her.

Susan looked at the lifeless homunculus. “It’s a good try,” she said slowly, “but it isn’t quite right, no.”

Pel turned to Athelstan again. “If we had some of Nancy’s hair, would that help?”

“Oh, most assuredly! By the Law of Contagion we derive the Law of Parts, and see thereby that the part can be made equal to the whole—from a single hair, in time, we can surely recreate all the pattern of your wife’s flesh.”

“Do you know how to do it?”

Athelstan hesitated, then glanced at Boudicca.

“I do,” the female wizard said.

“Good,” Pel said. He looked at Susan, then away.

If he sent Susan back to Earth, why would she return? It was, perhaps, cruel to keep her here, but so far she hadn’t asked him to send her home, and it was so good to see her alive again, to have the company of a fellow Earthman.

Maybe she wasn’t sure the magic that had revived her would hold back on Earth—and for that matter, Pel wasn’t entirely certain, either, but Shadow’s fetches had lived in the Galactic Empire, and Prossie had said simulacra had lived there; why not a revenant on Earth, then? Susan had left Earth alive, and would return alive, and what difference did it make what had happened in between?

But he wanted her here.

He would open a portal to Earth, and send someone to bring him back Nancy’s hairbrush, and Rachel’s, and the bedroom and bathroom wastebaskets, and anything else that might have hairs or fingernail clippings in it.

But he wouldn’t send Susan.

“You,” he said, pointing at a fetch. “I have an errand for you.”

* * * *

The lieutenant looked up, startled, at the sound of a footstep. He closed his book.

A man was walking across the basement, a pale man dressed in strange black clothes, paying no attention to the lieutenant or anything else. The man was marching directly toward the stairs.

“Hey,” the lieutenant said, dropping Destroyer novel #82 and getting to his feet. “Hey! Hold it, you!”

The man in black paid him no attention whatsoever. He began marching up the stairs, his tread heavy on the wooden steps.

The lieutenant hesitated; should he call in, or stop this guy?

If he took the time to call, the man might get away.

He drew his sidearm. “Stop right there!” he shouted.

The man kept on up the stairs.

The lieutenant cursed; he couldn’t shoot in cold blood, not just for ignoring him. The man might be deaf. He shoved the pistol back in its holster and ran after the stranger.

He caught him at the top of the stairs, threw an arm around his neck and pulled him back.

The stranger didn’t exactly struggle, but he did try to keep walking for a moment. When he realized it wasn’t working he stopped.

He let the lieutenant carry him back down to the basement, and did not resist as his arm was twisted up behind his back and held with one hand while the lieutenant used the other to work the radio.

The lieutenant had no idea why the silent stranger was being so cooperative, and he hurried to get his message through while the cooperation lasted.

He didn’t know that the fetch had been ordered to bring certain items, and no one had told him to hurry.

* * * *

“Aldridge and Blaisdell are easy,” Johnston told the FBI man, pointing at the list. “Blaisdell’s in Tennessee—you people gave us a report on him, which is why we decided to turn the job over to you. That, and we hope you can be less conspicuous about picking them up.”

“We’ll try,” the FBI man said dryly.

Johnston ignored the sarcasm. “Aldridge is in Oakland; he’s in the papers. Miletti is supposed to be local, but we don’t know which jurisdiction, Virginia or Maryland or the District, and we haven’t located him yet. Thompson is trickier—we think she might be in Texas, but that might just be something she was pretending. Thorpe can maybe give you more on the little girl…”

The intercom buzzed.

“Damn.” Johnston pushed a button. “What is it?” he demanded. He was tempted to add, “This better be good,” but he didn’t. His people all knew that.

“Sir, there’s been an incident at the Brown house…” his secretary began.

“Damn,” Johnston repeated, releasing the button. He got to his feet and grabbed for his jacket.

“If you can keep up,” he told the FBI man on his way to the door, “you can come along.”