But she had forbidden it, and the geas was irresistible.
“’Tis well,” she said. “Be ready, now.”
And then Pel felt power pouring into him, and felt himself spilling out of his body, as Shadow’s magical matrix was transferred to him. The line between himself and the huge network abruptly blurred, and for an instant he was everywhere, all through Faerie, in the currents of magic; he felt the winds and the earth, the seas and the forests, he saw from a thousand eyes at once. An entire world was within him and around him, all at once.
With an effort, he tried to recollect himself.
Maintaining the portal, which mere hours before had seemed a major task, and mere seconds before had taken a conscious effort, was now as thoughtless and automatic as breathing.
Light and color were spilling out around him, he realized once he had managed to relocate himself as being in a specific place, in the throne room of the fortress.
And beside him, a pudgy dark-haired woman rose from her throne and announced, a trifle unsteadily, “’Tis done. Fare thee well until my return, Pellinore Brown.”
He was still trying to gather his wits and get a firm grip on reality, and said nothing as she walked, a trifle unsteadily, into the portal.
* * * *
Prossie watched the matrix transfer with interest, as far as she could; at first it didn’t seem as if Shadow were giving anything up, but merely as if Pel were developing his own shifting and colorful aura.
Pel’s aura grew brighter and brighter, however, far past the level Shadow had been maintaining herself, and Prossie had to look away.
In seconds, Pel blazed with a brilliance fully as unbearable as Shadow’s had been when first the party-eight of them, then-had entered the throne room. (Had that really only been the night before?) Prossie closed her eyes against the glare, flung an arm across her face, and turned away, pressing up to the wall.
And still the light grew brighter.
Then, finally, it stopped, though it was so intense that Prossie thought she could see the bones of her own arm silhouetted, black against red, right through the flesh and through her closed eyelids, and that was merely from the light that reached her with her back to the source, light reflected from the gray stone wall.
She heard Shadow’s voice, sounding oddly weak, say, “’Tis done. Fare thee well until my return, Pellinore Brown.” Although her ears were ringing and blood was roaring through them, she heard footsteps.
And then she heard them stop.
And then Pel’s voice roared out, loud as thunder, “Prossie? Are you all right?”
* * * *
The two men, or whatever they were, pulled Amy forward a few steps, and then released her arms, leaving her standing there in the open air of a meadow; Amy looked around warily.
Shadow’s black-clad servants were fanning out across the meadow, stamping down the tall grasses and wildflowers without so much as glancing at them; tiny insects, or at least creatures that resembled insects, whirred and buzzed about as the invaders trampled their habitat, flittering through shadow and oddly-dim sunlight.
There were insects, but there were no birds, and no trees anywhere to be seen; just grasses and flowers and stalky things like oversized weeds. In the distance she could see what appeared to be rooftops, but of an architectural style she’d never seen before.
The sky was a peculiarly purple color, and utterly cloudless above the gently-rolling hills; the sun was far up the heavens but as orange as if it were setting, and its light seemed almost thick, somehow-syrupy and rich, but not as bright as sunlight should be.
The air was fresh and cool and spicy, and she felt light on her feet; her back felt straight and strong, and she realized for the first time that it had been aching dully for days, an ache that was now fading rapidly. She took a step, and almost lost her balance.
Clearly, the gravity here was less than in Faerie, and probably less than on Earth-though it had been so long since she had been on Earth she was not absolutely sure of that. The change took some adjustment.
Ted, beside her, tumbled to the ground; quickly, he sat up again and looked about. The four servants who had brought the two of them through the portal were a few steps away, standing as if waiting for something, completely ignoring the two Earthpeople.
“Am I awake?” Ted asked. “It still looks a little funny…”
“No,” Amy told him, “it’s not Earth.” She took another tentative step. “I think the gravity’s weaker here, for one thing, and look at the color of the sky, and the sun.”
Ted looked up at the purple sky, and his face seemed to cave in.
“Oh, damn!” he said, and he started crying, heaving deep sobbing breaths.
* * * *
“I’m fine,” Prossie said, “but I can’t stand the light.”
Until that moment, Pel had not consciously realized that he was emitting light at all; the light had seemed a part of him, and he had somehow not recognized that it existed outside his own perceptions. He struggled for a moment, looking for some way to control the glow, and found it.
He wasn’t really much of a matrix wizard yet, he thought wryly, not if it took a struggle just to stop leaking so much light.
He fought down the leakage as best he could, until he thought he was seeing it entirely by magic, then asked, “How’s that?”
“Better,” Prossie said, warily opening her eyes and turning to face him. She kept a hand up, and blinked often-he supposed that despite his efforts he was still glowing, but more tolerably.
He didn’t have time to worry about it; he didn’t know what was happening on the other side of the portal, didn’t know what Shadow was up to, didn’t even know if she could see or hear what was going on, and he wanted to talk to Prossie quickly, before Shadow could do anything about it. This might be his last chance to ever talk freely to someone who understood the situation, someone who could advise him, someone who could tell him he wasn’t making a horrible mistake.
“Listen,” Pel said hurriedly, “when she sent you through there, and you said she wasn’t lying-did you mean that? Was there something else you wanted to tell me?”
Prossie blinked again. “She can’t hear us?” She hesitated, then asked, “Are you sure?”
Pel noticed the hesitation, and some little part of him wondered whether Prossie was afraid of him, now that he held Shadow’s all-powerful matrix, or whether she was just unaccustomed to not knowing, telepathically, how sure someone was.
Or whether it was something else entirely.
It didn’t matter, though. “She’s through the portal in the Galactic Empire, and I’m holding the matrix,” Pel answered. “She can’t hear us from there any more than you can read minds from here.” He thought that was the truth; he hesitated, and then in a fit of partial candor added, “But there might be homunculi listening, and they could tell her what we say-if she comes back and asks them.”
The telepath took a second to consider, then replied. “She wasn’t lying,” Prossie said, “but she could change her mind at any time-instantly. She’s selfish and short-tempered and…and whimsical. You can’t trust her, not about that, not about anything.”
Pel sighed, and wind whistled around the fortress tower above him. He was aware of it, aware that the matrix had caused that gust in sympathy to his sigh, as he might have been aware that he had blinked, or that his pulse was beating-he knew of it, but it was unimportant.
“I never really thought she could be trusted,” he said, “but what choice did I have?” He tried to keep the sound of pleading out of his voice, and could not tell if he succeeded. “She says she can raise the dead-if it’s true, she can bring back Nancy, and Rachel.”