The Reign of the Brown Magician

ChapterTwenty-One

Pel sat cross-legged on the verandah of his treehouse and glared angrily up the dangling rope ladder.

A little time for paperwork and general dithering was one thing, but this was getting ridiculous. He had been hanging around here for days, waiting for the Empire to make good on its promise.

He had kept himself busy. He had constructed the elaborate four-room treehouse, growing some parts and building others, and then furnishing it to suit himself, using pieces of the dead bat-thing and I.S.S. Christopher for some of his raw materials; he had sent messages written on tree bark and shaped into gliders, rather like paper airplanes, back to the fortress, to keep Susan and the imitation Nancy appraised of his whereabouts; he had created a few monstrous little servants for himself from bits of tissue he found in the forest-tufts of fur, lost feathers, and the like.

And he’d done all that, made himself this cozy little nest, and all the time, what the hell had the Empire done?

Nothing, so far as he could see!

No one had emerged from the warp since that popinjay Curran had departed.

And nobody responded when he opened the portal to Gregory’s place and threw things in-presumably Gregory had, as ordered, turned himself in to the Imperial police.

Well, they’d had quite long enough.

Without looking, he sent an arm of the matrix back to the clearing, a hundred yards away-he’d done this often enough while working on the house that he hardly needed to think about it any shy;more.

The magic touched Christopher. Rivets flashed red and parted, as purple paint blackened and flaked away; a moment later a hull plate, about four feet by eight, popped out of the wrecked ship’s hull and floated gently upward.

Black letters etched themselves into the metal surface, spelling out Pel’s message: YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO CONTACT ME AND EXPLAIN THE DELAY.

Then the curved steel sheet sailed up through the treetops, and on through the space-warp at the top of the ladder.

* * * *

How many more were there?

Secretary Sheffield’s hands trembled as he stared at the latest list. Terra itself appeared to be complete now, as Base One had been for days; the woman who had appeared in the Emperor’s own bedroom was secure, under heavy guard. Surrenders had ceased throughout most of the inner Empire, though more of Shadow’s agents continued to trickle in elsewhere.

The count was over four hundred in all.

Four hundred, including generals, technicians, records clerks, confidential secretaries, and assorted others in sensitive positions.

And they had thought that after Operation Spotlight, with its haul of almost a hundred, there might still be as many as twenty left.

How had Shadow done it? She must have spent all her free time for seven years infiltrating her agents into the Empire! And some of these agents were people who had well-documented histories going back to childhood, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, but the telepaths were now saying that some of them weren’t even truly human. How had Shadow managed that? Had she corrupted records? Had she somehow created false memories in friends and family members? Had she substituted her imitations for the real people?

If so, how had she done it without their closest friends noticing any change?

Had she actually been working her agents into the Empire for decades, not just the seven years everyone had assumed?

And what was Pel Brown holding in reserve? Surely, he wouldn’t give up this network for next to nothing. Were these four hundred just the tip of the iceberg?

It was a nightmare.

The list was still clutched in his hand when someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he called.

The door opened, and a messenger saluted nervously.

“A message has been received, Your Excellency,” he said, “from the Brown Magician.”

Sheffield looked up, cold dread clutching his heart.

The messenger cleared his throat, and continued, “It was etched into a plate from a spaceship’s outer hull. The complete text read, ‘You have one hour to contact me and explain the delay.’ It came through the warp…” He glanced at his watch. “…twenty-three minutes ago.”

“Good God,” Sheffield said, struggling to his feet.

His legs didn’t want to support him; he leaned heavily on the table.

They had to keep Brown talking.

“Send a messenger through immediately,” he said. “Before the hour is up. The messenger is to say that an explanation will be along within another hour. Use a telepath to get that to the warp crew, if it’s fastest-do whatever it takes. Go! Get going!”

The messenger saluted, and turned away.

“Run!” Sheffield shouted after him. “Run, damn you!”

The messenger ran.

* * * *

Pel wished he had a watch.

Electronics didn’t work in Faerie, though, so his old digital watch would have been useless even if he still had it. Spring-driven watches probably worked well enough, but they didn’t appear to have been invented here-at any rate, Pel hadn’t seen any.

He hadn’t bothered to make a sundial, either.

An hourglass would be in keeping with the local technology, but he didn’t have one, and he had no idea how he could calibrate the thing if he created one.

It made it hard to tell how much of the hour had passed. It felt as if it had been an hour or more since he had sent that chunk of steel through the warp, but he couldn’t really tell for sure.

Just then he felt the kinking of the matrix as something came through the warp. He looked up, blinking against the sun, and tried to focus on the top of the ladder.

Leaves were in the way, but that was easily fixed; a brief flare in the matrix and nothing blocked his view, not even the drifting wisp of smoke that was all that remained of the branches that had obtruded.

The space suited figure was moving slowly and carefully down the ladder, and Pel didn’t want to wait; he reached a magical something up and snatched the person off the ladder, swept him spiraling down through the treetops and deposited him with a bump on Pel’s own verandah, in the very midst of the glare of the matrix.

* * * *

“Maybe you should just give him the damn bodies,” Markham suggested.

Albright turned, shocked. “Give up our only bargaining chip?”

Markham shrugged.

“Why the hell not?” he asked.

But he knew he was outvoted.

* * * *

Pel kept the first messenger on the verandah while they waited for the second.

The man was terrified. At first Pel didn’t much care; he let the fellow sit there in his space suit with the helmet off, trembling, looking around at the trees, at the twenty-foot drop to the ground, at the shifting polychrome of the matrix.

But it was probably going to be an hour before the next guy appeared, and it wasn’t the poor messenger’s fault he’d been sent. This wasn’t anyone Pel had seen before, not Curran or any of the soldiers.

“You been here before?” Pel asked at last.

“No,” the messenger said, shaking his head violently. “I haven’t even been in a suit since basic training.”

“Why’d they send you, then?”

“I was handy. I’m just a base messenger. Secretary Sheffield was in private, no telepath, so they sent me to give him your message, and he sent me back, and they suited me up and put me through. All the regulars, Lieutenant Warner and Lieutenant James and Lieutenant Butler, were in conference somewhere.”

“What about Best, or Wilkins?”

The messenger looked up into the glare, then blinked quickly and turned away. “Who?” he asked.

“Never mind.” Pel considered telling the poor bastard to suit up and go home, but just then, as he glanced thoughtfully up the ladder, he saw something glitter in the sun.

The second messenger was arriving.

Again, he reached up and plucked the suited figure off the ladder, and swept it down to the verandah.

As he lowered the newcomer to the wooden beams, Pel smiled.

It was Curran, and his absurd hat was squeezed into the helmet of his space suit, looking rather like an unborn chick inside its egg in one of those grade-school science books. Pel was tempted to shatter or dissolve the helmet to free the poor thing, but he resisted-that would have meant stranding the man here until a replacement could be sent.

Or made; Pel supposed he could make one almost as easily as he could shatter one.

Instead, he waited while Curran undogged the thing and lifted it off.

He then doffed his hat, and while still wearing his space suit he bowed dramatically, surreptitiously shaking the feathers back into shape as he did; Pel watched with amusement.

For one thing, Curran had misjudged Pel’s position within the glowing haze of the matrix, and was bowing elegantly to a tree-branch.

“All right, Curran,” Pel said, “what’s the story? Why aren’t the bodies here? I had my people turn themselves in; what’s the delay?”

“Your pardon, my lord,” Curran said. “We just need some surety, some guarantee, that in fact all your agents have surrendered.”

“Why? Do you have any evidence that some are missing?”

“No, my lord; we just need proof that you’ve held nothing back. We were, we confess, rather shaken by how high some of them had penetrated in the Imperial government, and we need to know that there are no more.”

“There are no more. I give you my word on it,” Pel said. “I ordered all of them to surrender.” He hesitated. “I suppose it’s possible a couple didn’t get the word, but if so, they’re people I’ve lost contact with myself, so they’re harmless.” He waved the possibility aside. “In any case, I’ve lived up to my side of the bargain-I’ve turned the lot of them over. Now it’s the Empire’s turn to deliver.”

“The bodies of your wife and child, you mean.”

“Right. I want them. Now.”

“My lord, if you could give us some proof that no spies remain…”

“How the hell am I supposed to prove it?” Pel shouted. “I gave you my word I ordered them all to surrender; what the hell else can I do?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what would satisfy my superiors, my lord; perhaps they don’t know themselves.”

“Well, you better go back and bloody well find out!” Pel shouted, lifting Curran into the air. “Or better yet, tell them to go fuck themselves-if those bodies aren’t here in…in two hours, I’ll make the Empire regret it!” He tried to force himself to calm down, and partially managed it. “Look, Curran,” he said, “all I’m asking is this one simple thing-two corpses that I know you people already have, stored away in a freezer somewhere on Base One. All you have to do is haul ’em through the space warp and lower them down on a rope-what’s the big deal? You don’t care about them! And I don’t care about your stupid Galactic Empire-I just want my wife and daughter back. You people have set me conditions, you’ve put me off, you’ve lied and procrastinated, and I’ve done nothing but go along with it, I’ve acted in good faith, I’ve had dozens of my servants give themselves up, and God only knows what you’re doing with them all. And what have I got to show for it?” His temper snapped again. “Nothing!” he shouted. “That’s what I’ve got to show for it! Well, to hell with you and your damn empire, Mr. Curran-I want those bodies now, within two hours, or the Empire’s going to be very sorry! You go back and you tell them that!”

Curran might have been trying to say something, but whatever it was, Pel didn’t wait to hear it; he sent Curran soaring upward on an arc of raw magical energy, toward and through the space warp.

Curran was still trying to dog down his helmet seals when he vanished.

* * * *

“It’s an empty threat,” Albright said. “It has to be. What can he possibly do to us? After all, this psionic super-science of his, his so-called ‘magic,’ can’t operate in normal space, can it?”

“Not that we know of,” Markham agreed.

“We’ve broken his spy ring, haven’t we? Four or five hundred of them-he can’t have any more.”

“Then if he hasn’t got any more, why don’t we just give him the damned corpses?” Markham demanded.

“Because we don’t know. He’s making threats-what’s he got to back them up with? We need to know.”

“It seems to me that we’re antagonizing him for no good reason,” Markham insisted. “We’re treating him as an enemy, and he isn’t one.” He paused, then corrected himself, “At least, he wasn’t one. By now, who knows?”

“Of course he’s an enemy,” Albright said. “How could he be anything else? He’s ruler of a world-of a universe! Naturally, he’ll want to expand his power, and that means taking from the Empire.”

“Does it?” Markham asked.

“If we give in to his demands,” Secretary Sheffield said, “then what’s to keep him from making further demands, indefinitely?”

Markham looked at him, startled. “Nothing,” he said, “but isn’t that just what we’re doing?”

* * * *

Pel watched as the sun sank in the west. The two hours were up, obviously; they must have been up long ago.

And there had been nothing. No one had emerged from the warp.

The messenger was asleep on the verandah; Pel walked over and stared down at him for a moment.

He looked young and innocent, asleep there on the wooden platform, with his short blond hair and clean-shaven features, his uniform hidden by the bulky space suit.

Pel kicked him in the back of the head-not particularly hard, but more than a mere prodding. The messenger’s eyes snapped open, and a hand flew up to the injured spot.

“Get your helmet on,” Pel ordered. “You’re going home, and I’ve got a message for you to take.”

The messenger scrambled to his feet, and groped for his helmet.

“It’s a very simple message,” Pel said. “It’s this: It’ll stop when I have the bodies.”

“What will?”

“You don’t need to know that. You just tell them, it’ll stop when I have the bodies, and not a moment sooner. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Good. Here you go.”

And the messenger was airborne, heading for the warp.

“Get your helmet on!” Pel shouted after him.

He slowed the ascent, and watched as the kid got his helmet in place; then the matrix flung him upward and out through the warp.

That done, the next step, Pel knew, was to attack the Empire. They’d asked for it, and they were going to get it; no more Mr. Nice Guy.

The only question was how.