The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      “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.

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