Prossie nodded. “She can bring corpses back to life,” she agreed. “After a fashion, anyway. That’s where a lot of those servants came from, I think-I didn’t get the memories very clearly.”
“The servants?” Light flickered across the walls in the magical equivalent of a blink.
“The ones in black, like the ones she took through the space-warp with her,” Prossie explained.
“Fetches,” Pel said. “She calls them fetches. I heard her call them that.”
“That’s right,” Prossie agreed. “Fetched back from the dead-it’s not quite what the word means in the Empire, but that’s what she means by it.”
“Then she can bring back Nancy and Rachel!” A surge of long-suppressed hope and joy welled up, and for a moment white light flooded the throne room, forcing Prossie to turn away.
The telepath blinked, trying to clear her vision, and for an instant, inadvertently, Pel thought he looked out through her eyes.
“I know you want them back, Mr. Brown,” Prossie said, “but I…” She stopped.
“But what?” Pel demanded, the hope turning to ash within him.
“But wouldn’t she need the bodies?” Prossie asked. “I mean, to bring back your wife and daughter.”
Pel sat motionless for a moment, and sickly reds and violets flickered along the ceiling. “I don’t know,” he said, finding himself involuntarily looking at Susan’s body again. “Would she?”
He hadn’t thought about that. Maybe he should have asked Shadow about it, tried to make her promise to revive Nancy and Rachel.
But maybe she couldn’t, without the bodies. And what if the bodies had to be fresh? Rachel and Nancy had been dead for some time now; he had spent weeks at Base One and on the long journey from I.S.S. Christopher.
He didn’t want to think about it any more, didn’t want to kill his hope completely, and he changed the subject. After all, there were other things that needed to be discussed.
“Listen,” he said, “I can’t harm her; she put a spell on me, and maybe I could break it if I knew how, now that she’s there and I’ve got this matrix of hers, but I don’t know how. I can’t harm her, and I can’t ask anyone else to. But I won’t stop anyone else who tries.”
Prossie blinked at him, not understanding, her hand shielding her eyes against the glare.
“Are you still in touch with Base One?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Prossie admitted. “Not right at the moment. And even if I were, it would take time for them to find her and reach her…”
“And she’d see them coming. She’d kill Ted, and maybe Amy, and she’d come back here and probably kill me,” Pel agreed. “I couldn’t defend myself; the spell wouldn’t let me. I have to give back the matrix when she wants it, I can’t close the portal and trap her there.”
“If she were killed, she couldn’t bring anyone back from the dead,” Prossie pointed out. “She couldn’t send anyone home.”
“I could send people home,” Pel said. “That much I learned.” He paused, as a thought burst through his mind, a thought that he now saw as so obvious that he could not understand why he hadn’t thought of it before.
He had learned how to open a portal; maybe he could learn more.
No one had taught Shadow to raise the dead, had they? She had managed it on her own, by virtue of the incredible accumulation of magical power she had amassed.
It might have taken her awhile, though; she’d had centuries in which to experiment. And he didn’t really know anything about the magic he now controlled.
But there were other wizards out there. They could help. And if Shadow were dead…
He couldn’t harm her, of course.
But he didn’t need to stop anyone else from harming her, if someone could figure out how.
And as far as raising the dead went, he certainly had enough corpses around to practice on; even if Raven and Singer were beyond recovery, Susan and Valadrakul remained, and there were the bodies hanging over the fortress gate.
A sudden urgency swept over him as pieces fell into place. He didn’t just want to talk to the telepath; he wanted her to do something.
He wished she were still able to read his mind; how could he lead her to the conclusion he wanted?
He would have to try.
“Prossie,” he said, “I can’t leave here, I have to hold this portal open-go down to the gate, will you? I’m going to cut down the men hanging there.”
Prossie blinked at him. “What?” she asked.
“Just…just go down and look at them. Hurry!”
He wanted to explain further, but he couldn’t. The geas stopped him.
It was too much like asking someone to harm Shadow.
* * * *
The woman called Shadow appeared from the air; Amy saw the arrival from the corner of her eye.
There was no glare of light, no shifting colors, no darknesses or other peculiarities. Shadow was just an overweight middle-aged woman, standing in a meadow and staring about open-mouthed; there was no trace of magic to her-or to anything else here, beyond the everyday magicks of nature, sun and sky and flowers and grass.
“’Tis real!” Shadow said, and her voice seemed weak and thin without her magic amplifying it.
Amy turned, and started to take a step toward Shadow, but then stopped herself.
Here Shadow was, without her magic, and Amy wanted to kill her, she wanted to beat that ugly head against a rock until it broke, to pay her back for Susan and the rest-but she stopped herself.
Because Shadow still had her guards; the four who had brought Amy and Ted through the portal were stepping up beside her, standing at attention, obviously waiting for orders. Their hands were mere inches from the hilts of their swords.
Amy had not lived through so much just to get herself run through by some semi-human creature’s sword.
“Yes, it’s real,” Amy said. “Now what?”
* * * *
Puzzled and wary, Prossie emerged from the throne room onto the landing at the top of the stairs. She didn’t understand what was going on, whether Pel was cooperating with Shadow or pursuing some scheme of his own.
It would be so simple, back home, to dip quickly into his mind, maybe not see the details but at least sense which way he was going-but here it was impossible.
Did she want to cooperate with him? What was going to happen to her, if Pel was cooperating with Shadow? Where would she go?
Return to the Empire meant death; living here, under Shadow, meant constant fear and probably death as well. And would Shadow allow her to go to Earth with Amy and Ted?
Would Shadow ever allow Amy and Ted to return to Earth at all?
Prossie paused atop the stairs and glanced down.
The black dragon was still down there, looking up at her from below, but then, abruptly, its head burst into flame; for a moment Prossie thought her eyes were playing tricks, or it was an illusion of some sort.
Then the creature bellowed, spitting fire; it crumpled, toppling to one side, and fell, twitching once and then lying still, obviously dead.
“I can’t really control them yet,” Pel’s voice, unnaturally loud, called from behind her. “Run!”
Whatever his plans, Pel was determined, she realized, and while it might have been cowardly, she didn’t dare defy him, not when she could be incinerated as easily as the dragon, or as Raven and Singer before it. Prossie dashed down the steps, but slowed as she neared the dead beast.
The beam of light above the corridor was dim and flickering unsteadily; Prossie glanced uneasily up at it as she picked her way carefully past the dead dragon.
Sunlight was pouring in through the open doors, and the eldritch glare of Shadow’s matrix shone down from the top of the stairs, so there was plenty of light even should the beam vanish completely; it wasn’t darkness Prossie was afraid of, but the uncertainty.