The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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      “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.

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