The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ