The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ