The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ then said, “All right. You don’t want to talk to us. I don’t know why not. This whole bizarre case is jammed full of things I don’t know. It’s been driving me crazy for months, ever since that damned whatever-it-is fell out of nowhere into your back yard and I got assigned to make sense of it. I’ve been trying to do that without any real information, but I can’t. Now, you could give me real information, and you say you won’t—but can’t you at least say why won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

      “Because you won’t believe me. Besides, it isn’t any of your business.”

      “How do you know I won’t believe it?”

      Amy closed her eyes. It wasn’t really an unreasonable question. Johnston certainly seemed more reasonable than the soldier who had been questioning her before, who had just kept demanding she tell them where she had been for so long, and who had refused to ever accept, “I don’t know,” as an answer.

      “Because,” she said, opening her eyes and staring straight at Major Johnston’s face, “it’s all impossible, so impossible that Ted Deranian doesn’t believe it, and he was there. That’s why he’s upset, you know—he thought it was all a dream, and that he’d finally woken up, and then you people came and hauled him away, and that means either it’s real, or he’s still dreaming.” She sighed. “Now, do you expect me to believe that you’ll just accept my word for something so incredible that a man who lived through it thinks it was just a nightmare?”

      Johnston considered that for a long moment.

      “All right,” he said, “so maybe I won’t believe it. But maybe I will, and what can it hurt to try me?”

      “You won’t argue?” Amy had visions of trying to tell her story and having every point questioned, every absurdity denied, until nothing made any sense at all.

      “I don’t know,” Johnston admitted, straightening up for a moment. “Try me.”

      The man’s apparent honesty was disarming; Amy shrugged, unfolded her arms, and said, “You ask questions. I’ll answer—for now.”

      * * * *

      Shadow had known how to see through other people’s eyes, and hear through other people’s ears, Pel reminded himself. She had been able to spy on anyone, anywhere in the entire immense world she ruled. It couldn’t be that difficult.

      He closed his eyes, clenched his fists on the arms of his throne, and concentrated on the webs of magic that reached out in all directions around him.

      He could sense things out there, like tiny sparks caught in the meshes of color and darkness, things that he was fairly sure were people, and he tried to focus in on one specific twinkle, tried to see through it—and nothing happened. He didn’t connect; he didn’t see anything, through his eyes or anyone else’s.

      Shadow had known how, but Pel didn’t. He could sense the shape of the matrix, all the currents and eddies of magic that flowed through Faerie; he could tell when something disturbed those currents, and he was fairly certain he knew when the disturbance was a wizard stealing a little power, and when it was just some harmless peasant stumbling through a place where the magic ran strong. The wizards seemed to have odd little patterns of their own, sort of like fractal designs within the larger design of the matrix. Pel could see that.

      But he couldn’t see through other eyes.

      And he couldn’t match up the matrix with the outside world, either; he couldn’t make any correlation between magical streams and physical ones, couldn’t tell where the web lay on land, where on sea—or where it soared through the air or burrowed underground, or even climbed away from the planet into whatever lay beyond the sky in this strange realm. The network he had inherited from Shadow was centered on the fortress where he sat, but it extended, however tenuously, through this entire universe.

      Pel controlled all of it, through his mind and will; he knew its shape, could sense every trickle. He could tell more or less how far out in the network any movement was, and in roughly which direction—but where that was in the ordinary world he had no idea.

      He could spot the fetches he had sent out, carrying messages, but though he thought he might be able to transmit a couple of basic commands, such as a signal to return, he couldn’t really communicate with them. He could tell which direction they had gone, and could see how far they had progressed in terms of the matrix, but what that translated to in miles he could only estimate, and the farther away they got, the less reliable that estimate was.

      Where ordinary people appeared as analogous to white or golden sparks, and wizards seemed to have faint traceries woven inside those sparks, the fetches were something like smoky red embers, and were bound into the matrix itself, rather than being independently-existing structures that sometimes impinged upon the net. It seemed as if Pel ought to be able to at least see through those eyes—but he couldn’t. He didn’t know how. He couldn’t see where they were or what they were doing.

      He opened his eyes, slumped back in the elaborately-carved throne, and stared through the glimmering colors at the big open doors at the far end of the room.

      He didn’t look at the spot where Susan Nguyen’s body had lain for so long. At least he’d made a little progress on that problem—with the help of the fetches he had had the corpse settled on a spare bed, and had put a preserving spell on it as best he could. He had seen how the meats in the fortress kitchen were preserved, and he had painstakingly built up the same magical structure over poor Susan, and it seemed to be working.

      But not much else was. He was fairly certain, now, that he’d sent those fetches out on a fool’s errand. He hadn’t given them any directions; he’d just told them, “Go find wizards and bring them here.”

      But he hadn’t known what directions to give them. He didn’t even have a map. He had never seen a map of Shadow’s world. He wasn’t even sure there were maps.

      He knew the route he had taken to reach the fortress, from the Low Forest of Sunderland across the Starlinshire Downs and the coastal plain to Shadowmarsh; he had looked across the rift valley called Stormcrack and seen Stormcrack Keep, perched on the other side; but where these fit in their world, where Stormcrack lay in relation to Sunderland or Shadowmarsh, he had no idea at all. He thought he remembered Raven mentioning that Stormcrack lay in the Hither Corydians, while the mountains visible from Sunderland were the Further Corydians, but what that meant he didn’t know. He had heard other names, as well, but they were just names.

      It wasn’t fair. In all the stories the hero knew where everything was. There were always maps. Tolkien’s books had had maps all over them. Even the movies had maps sometimes.

      If Shadow had had any maps, Pel hadn’t found them yet.

      How could he find anything, or anyone, without maps, without any means of long-distance communication? And while he could sense fetches and wizards in the matrix, he didn’t know how to guide the red embers toward the white snowflakes and golden spiderwebs; how could his fetches find anyone?

      He had sent them out, a dozen of them, with orders to find wizards and bring them back—Taillefer in particular, but if they found any wizard, that would do. But how could they do that? How would they know where to go?

      He hadn’t thought this through.

      He couldn’t even send notes; most people in this world seemed to be illiterate, and those who weren’t used a different alphabet from the one he knew. He had СКАЧАТЬ