The Reign of the Brown Magician. Lawrence Watt-Evans

      She tried not to think about that.

      Major Johnston sighed. He turned a chair around, sat down, and leaned on the back.

      “No, ma’am,” he said, “you aren’t. However, if that’s what it takes to get you to cooperate, it can be arranged.”

      “On what charge?” Amy protested. “I haven’t done anything!”

      “I don’t know just what charge, ma’am,” Johnston said. “I’m not a lawyer; I work for Air Force intelligence, so I know something about the laws, but I’m not a lawyer, and in a complicated case like this…” He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he shrugged and said, “But there’s no question we could find something. You were one of sixteen people who disappeared all at once without any rational explanation, and now three of you—only three—have turned up again, one of you apparently gone at least temporarily nuts. I think we could get you booked on suspicion of something, kidnapping or assault or something. Withholding evidence, if nothing else.”

      It was Amy’s turn to sigh. At least the officer hadn’t included indecent exposure in his list. She wished Susan were there—but Susan was dead. Amy had seen her body lying on the floor of Shadow’s throne room, back in Faerie.

      Amy supposed that she could have called on the surviving members of Dutton, Powell, and Hough—Bob Hough must be back from his vacation long since—but how could she explain to them what had happened, how Susan Nguyen had died? So she had passed up the chance to call her lawyer when this Johnston had offered it.

      She had managed to stall her removal until her friend Donna had arrived, so at least someone knew where she was and more or less what was happening, but Donna wasn’t going to get her out of jail if these security people, whoever they were, did decide to arrest her.

      “Is Ted okay?” she asked. “He was pretty upset.”

      “Mr. Deranian is, indeed, upset,” Johnston admitted. “While I won’t tell you any of the details, he seems to be very unsure of his own grasp on reality. He has asked repeatedly to go home, and we may oblige him in that—we’re waiting for an opinion from a psychologist on whether it’s safe for him to be alone. We’ve tried to call his sister to look after him, but she doesn’t seem to be available.”

      “But you won’t let me go home!” Amy protested.

      “You, Ms. Jewell, are not screaming and crying and irrational.”

      Amy glared at him. Johnston glared back.

      “What about Prossie?” Amy asked.

      Major Johnston sighed again.

      “Your other companion,” he said, “tells us that her name is Registered Telepath Proserpine Thorpe, formerly of the Special Branch of the Imperial Intelligence Service. Beyond that, I’d prefer not to say at this time.” He hesitated. “Is that her name?”

      “As far as I know, it is,” Amy said.

      Johnston stared at her for a moment, 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