The privies were primitive, by Amy’s standards, but functional; the beds appeared luxurious, but she found that if she stretched out her feet stuck off the end, and she had never thought of herself as unusually tall.
At least there weren’t any skulls in the bedchambers.
She wondered whether Pel was getting any sleep.
She wondered if wizards needed any.
* * * *
Pel never remembered just how the whole thing was done. Whether this was inherent in the process or the result of some spell on Shadow’s part, he had no idea. By morning, as he sat on the rough wooden stool in Shadow’s workshop, he simply knew, without being able to put any of it in words, just how one drew upon magical currents, how one manipulated and directed them, how one bound them to one another or to one’s own mind. He could sense the currents, could feel and see them; he understood what Valadrakul had seen beneath the haze of color and light, and knew how to ignore that haze himself, if he chose to. He could see the dull lumps of rock on Shadow’s crude wooden shelves as glittering foci for magical forces.
He was, in short, become a matrix wizard.
Maybe it was hypnosis, Pel thought when he realized that he didn’t know how he had become a matrix wizard. That conjured up unpleasant thoughts of lurking post-hypnotic suggestions.
“Have you…I mean…” He looked across the dim, dusty workroom at the shimmering darkness that was Shadow’s current visible incarnation, and decided against finishing the question.
Shadow guessed more or less what he had been going to say, however. The lone candle flickered as she answered, and the room darkened further; there were no windows, no skylights, no natural light in here at all-only the single candle and whatever magical glow Shadow allowed.
“Aye, I’ve placed a geas upon thee,” she said, “that thou shalt never turn my magicks against me, that thou shalt do me no harm with either thine own hand or through magic the hands of others, and that upon my request thou shalt yield up to me whatsoever I ask of thee.”
“That’s…” That wasn’t exactly what he had been going to ask, and it hardly seemed fair to have done that without his permission, but Pel decided against protesting. Shadow wasn’t much on fairness, and if she hadn’t asked a lot of questions of him while he was in her thrall, so much the better. “That’s okay,” he said.
He got the impression that Shadow was smiling, though he couldn’t see anything resembling a face. “Though ’tis wearisome betimes, Pellinore Brown,” she said, “yet I’d never wish to be other than I am, if only because none talk back o’erboldly to me.”
Then he realized how he knew she was smiling; he could feel it through the magical matrix.
The candle puffed out, but he could still sense where everything was in the little stone chamber, despite the utter darkness.
A warm golden glow flooded across him, pouring from Shadow’s face.
“Come, thou hast the foundation,” Shadow said, “and far sooner than I’d hoped; thou hast the true talent, Pellinore. Now, let us build doorways upon that foundation.”
There were other spells Pel was far more interested in learning than he was in creating doorways-the spell to raise the dead primarily, and secondarily the spells to create homunculi-but he was in no position to argue. Shadow didn’t want him to know all that; she wanted him to serve as her doorman between worlds.
She was looking at him expectantly.
He had the true talent?
He slid off the stool and stood up.
She had said he did, and he had no reason to doubt it, really, but it seemed so odd. He wasn’t anyone special; how could he have had some special talent all his life without knowing it? How could an Earthman have a talent for wizardry at all?
Maybe he’d been the hero all along, the young innocent who turns out to be the greatest wizard of all time…
But he was no innocent, and not much of a hero, even if he did have the talent. It was more likely that all Earthpeople had the talent than that he, Pel Brown, was somehow fated to have come here.
But here he was, fated or not, and Shadow was going to leave him holding her matrix, was going to teach him the spell to open portals to other worlds.
And he would have time to experiment with other spells on his own while she was away exploring the Empire.
* * * *
There were no eggs at breakfast, no coffee, no orange juice, but Amy was satisfied with ham and tea and buttered toast; she passed up the sticky little cakes, and the gooey brown lumps that might have been candied dates. She hadn’t thrown up that morning, and she wanted to keep it that way.
Prossie ate a little of everything, though, and Ted ate whatever was put in front of him as if he didn’t know or care what it was. None of them paid any attention to the wall of skulls; familiarity had bred contempt.
After the meal, the servants either went away or simply stopped moving and stood where they were; no one gave any sign of where the three were to go or what they were to do. For several minutes they simply sat, looking about the room or at each other, not speaking. Amy looked over the skulls, but they gave no clues-she would not have been very surprised, under the circumstances, if a skull had started talking, but none of them did.
The remaining servants simply stood, and Amy tried for a moment to identify the peculiar scent they produced-a faint chemical smell, vaguely reminiscent of doctor’s offices-but she couldn’t place it.
And nobody was paying any attention to them; she and Ted and Prossie were being utterly ignored.
She wondered if something had gone wrong somewhere, if Pel had died, or Shadow, and that had shut everything down-but there was no evidence of anything like that.
“Now what?” Amy asked at last.
Ted didn’t answer, or even look at her, but Prossie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you think we missed a signal or something?” Amy asked.
Prossie shook her head. “No,” she said, “I think we’re being ignored. Shadow doesn’t care about us any more, at least not for the moment. When she needs us, she’ll summon us.”
“So what should we do?” Amy glanced uneasily at a servant, at the black suede tunic he wore, his motionless hands and expressionless face.
Prossie shrugged. “Whatever we like, I suppose.” She hesitated, then added, “But if you were thinking of doing anything Shadow wouldn’t like, I wouldn’t advise it-she can hear anything, anywhere in Faerie, when she chooses, and she can see through other people’s eyes-or for that matter, anything’s eyes. She could be looking through mine, or Ted’s, or yours, right now-or the eyes of a rat under the table, or one of these servants.”
“How do you know that?” Amy asked, startled.
“From when I read her mind yesterday,” Prossie explained. “I only had a few seconds, and I was sort of desperate, so I wasn’t very selective, I just grabbed at everything I could. I picked up a lot of odd bits, so now I know something about how her magic works.” She grimaced. “Not enough to be any real use, I’m afraid; you can’t learn skills that way. I just picked up a few random memories of using that matrix thing. She’s got centuries of memories of that.”
“So she might have been spying on us the entire time, from when the ship crashed until we got here?” Amy asked. “She could have watched us through the eyes of squirrels in the trees, or something?”
Prossie nodded. “I don’t know any details, there may be limits, and I didn’t hit any memories of anything like that, but yes, she could have been spying on us. Not just through squirrels; she could have used your eyes, or mine; we’d never have known it.”
Amy shivered. “Did Raven and Valadrakul know she could do that? Or Elani?”
Prossie shrugged.
Amy looked around uneasily, and still found no clues as to what she should do; accordingly, she just sat.
* * * *