The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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, and while the matrix probably contained all the knowledge he needed, somewhere, somehow, he didn’t know how to get at it. He needed someone to talk to about his plans, someone who could teach him.

      Someone to teach him magic, he thought, as he watched the fetch march down the passage toward the throne room. Pel’s lips tightened, and the aura flickered into harsh reds and smoky browns.

      He wanted a wizard.

      And while Shadow had been the last matrix wizard, the only wizard who regularly raised the dead, while Shadow was dead because Pel had sent Prossie Thorpe to kill her, Shadow had not been the only wizard in the world Pel and his companions had called Faerie.

      Even though Shadow had roasted Valadrakul to death, and Shadow’s creatures had butchered Elani, Pel thought he knew at least one other wizard who still lived: Taillefer, that fat coward who had refused to open a portal to either Earth or the Empire. After Elani had died, Valadrakul had not known how to open portals to other worlds, so he had summoned Taillefer—and Taillefer had refused to help, for fear of drawing Shadow’s attention.

      Well, Pel had learned how to open his own portals. And now he could send fetches out to… Pel smiled grimly. He could send fetches out to fetch Taillefer.

      Taillefer might not know how to raise the dead, but he surely could teach Pel something.

      Pel strode toward the throne room, still smiling.

      * * * *

      Amy hung up the phone. “Donna says she’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” she said. She smiled with relief.

      Prossie didn’t smile back. “Then what?” she asked.

      “Then she’ll drive us out to my place,” Amy replied. It was such a pleasure to be able to say that, to be able to take cars and telephones for granted, to know what was going on again! “I guess she can drop Ted off on the way, and then we can settle in. I don’t know if there’ll be much that’s fit to eat after all this time, but we can get into some decent clean clothes.” She frowned slightly, thinking and planning. “I don’t have my keys, but if I have to, I guess I can break a window to get in. Or maybe I should call a locksmith. I’ll have to find one who’ll take a check, I don’t have any cash. The checkbook’s gone, too, but I have extra checks at home.”

      Prossie nodded, though it wasn’t a very enthusiastic gesture. Amy didn’t really notice. She was on familiar ground after months of living nightmare; she didn’t want to think about Prossie’s problems yet. There would be time for that later.

      “There’s canned soup, that’ll still be good,” Amy said, talking more to herself now than to Prossie. “And I should have something that’ll fit you—you’re only an inch or so shorter than I am, right?” She sighed. “I wonder if they stopped delivering my mail? I guess if Pel’s phone still works, mine will, too, but there must be about three months’ bills waiting. And all my clients will have given up on me—I’ll have to just about start the business over again.”

      She paused and glanced at her companion, but Prossie didn’t respond.

      Amy continued, “I suppose that spaceship is still in the back yard—did you have anything on board? It might still be there, if nobody’s gotten in and stolen it. And I’ll need to call the doctor and make an appointment as soon