The creatures along the ledges weren’t moving; that was some comfort, anyway.
She heard several distant, muffled thumps from somewhere ahead, and she stopped in her tracks.
“Hurry!” Pel called from above, his voice weirdly distorted.
Baffled and frightened and annoyed, Prossie hurried, running down the long, long passage and out into the sunlight, where the six bodies lay.
They stank. Maybe they had before, and the height had kept the odor away, but now the stench was overwhelming, and Prossie shied away involuntarily.
And they didn’t look very pleasant, either; they had fallen heavily into loops of their own entrails. Decaying blood and damaged flesh were heaped across the threshold, only partially wrapped in ruined purple uniforms.
Why had Pel wanted her to see this?
Was this some sadistic quirk, forcing her to look at her dead comrades? Was he going mad?
Bloated hands, dead faces, staring eyes; torn cloth, scuffed black boots, black leather belts.
Prossie wished desperately that she could read Pel’s thoughts, and find out what she was supposed to see.
Lieutenant Dibbs’ mouth gaped open mere inches from another man’s bowel, and Prossie had to swallow hard; she looked away, down Dibbs’ body, but that was no better, with his slit-open belly, the severed ends of the waistband of his Sam Browne belt dangling into the cavity within, the empty holster at his side…
Empty holster.
They weren’t all empty.
And Pel was holding the portal open. He couldn’t go through it himself, he couldn’t harm Shadow-but Prossie could.
Suddenly, she had no doubt at all of Pel’s intentions, and she found herself smiling even as she struggled to hold down her breakfast. She scrabbled eagerly at Spaceman Shelby’s holster.
* * * *
“Oh, ’tis wondrous strange!” Shadow exclaimed, oblivious to Amy; the wizard smiled broadly, taking it all in.
Annoyed, the Earthwoman glanced at Ted; he was ignoring her, too, as he stared at the flowers.
And the men in black weren’t paying any attention, either. Most of them had formed a hundred-yard ring, while half a dozen hovered warily near Shadow, hands on sword-hilts.
For her part, Shadow was lifting her feet and marveling at the feel of the lighter gravity, staring at the color of the sky, and trying to look every direction at once as she wandered slowly in the general direction of those distant buildings.
“And ’twill be mine,” Shadow sang, “all mine!”
Amy snorted.
The ring of men was moving with Shadow, and Amy was, reluctantly, moving as well.
Ted didn’t notice, didn’t move, until the ring touched him, and two of the swordsmen snatched him up by the arms and dragged him along.
A few feet away, as Amy watched, a swordsman vanished into the portal-presumably by accident, since the opening was invisible. The swordsman had been keeping his station in the moving circle when it reached the portal, and had stepped through.
Amy waited for him to reappear-surely, once on the other side, he would simply turn around and step through again.
He didn’t.
Amy blinked; what was happening back there in Shadow’s fortress? Why hadn’t the swordsman reappeared?
“Hey,” she said.
No one paid any attention.
“Hey, look!” she shouted.
* * * *
Prossie dashed into the throne room, blaster in hand, just as a fetch stepped from the portal; Pel saw her raise the weapon and point it at the black-garbed slave, but of course it didn’t do anything.
Rayguns didn’t work here; magic did.
He let one little tendril of arcane force free, just as he had with the dragon, and the fetch burst into flame-as Raven had, as Singer had.
He wanted to shout encouragement to Prossie, but he couldn’t, the geas wouldn’t let him. He didn’t need to stop her, Shadow hadn’t worried enough about her safety to appoint Pel as her guardian, but the spell prevented him from doing anything to urge the telepath on.
She didn’t need encouragement; she ran through the hot, drifting ash and through the portal without slowing.
* * * *
Amy stared as a figure burst from the portal, a figure in a slashed and dirty purple uniform, a figure with a gun in her hand.
The gun fired with an electric crackle and a muffled thud, and a swordsman fell, headless and twitching, as blood sprayed around him; Shadow spun, astonished.
Prossie fired again as Shadow opened her mouth to speak, and Shadow’s shoulder exploded into bloody scraps. Whatever Shadow had planned to say was lost as she screamed and tottered, but for another long second the wizard remained upright. Amy glimpsed her face, and saw nothing but surprise; she had obviously not suspected that anything like this could happen.
Shadow had been ready to confront the Galactic Empire with spies and swordsmen, and had not realized how vulnerable that made her. In an instant, Amy understood what that meant. Despite all the reports her agents had brought her, Shadow had never seen a blaster, nor any other weapon produced by high technology-or Imperial science-except Susan’s pitiful little pistol. She hadn’t really comprehended how powerful they were. She hadn’t known what she was getting into, hadn’t realized how vulnerable she was in this universe where magic didn’t work.
She hadn’t understood that here, the Empire held a scientific matrix just as powerful as her own magical one.
Prossie fired a third time, and Shadow’s chest burst into rags; she toppled forward, and landed face-down in a patch of strange red flowers, her blood staining their leaves and stems almost as bright as their blossoms.
A hundred blades flashed in the alien sun as the black-clad men drew their blades and prepared to defend-or avenge-their mistress.
“Run for the portal!” Prossie cried, as her weapon blasted the belly out of the nearest swordsman.
Amy hesitated at the idea of running toward that thing Prossie was firing, but then she obeyed; she stumbled once, forgetting the lower gravity, but she quickly recovered.
She didn’t know how it had happened, but she knew an opportunity when she saw it. Pel must have arranged it somehow, despite all Shadow’s plans. He had sent Prossie to save them.
And he was waiting for them, back in Faerie.
She hoped that Pel had some way of sending them back to Earth, but even if he didn’t, they certainly couldn’t stay here.
“Ted!” she called. He looked up. “Through the portal!”
He didn’t move, and she was almost there; Prossie was picking off swordsmen one by one, starting with those nearest her, but there were an awful lot of them, and some were coming around behind her.
“Ted, I swear, just get through the portal and you’ll wake up!”
Ted hesitated, then stumbled toward the faint waver in the air, but Amy didn’t wait for him; she dove past Prossie and through, and landed on freshly-skinned knees on the stone floor of Shadow’s throne room.
Or rather, she corrected herself, of Pel’s throne room.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Pel wished he could see what was happening beyond the portal, but despite his incredible power he couldn’t manage that. A way might exist, for all he knew, but if so, he hadn’t discovered it; the portal itself seemed to block whatever he had done to sense where it would go before he had created it, and the trick of seeing through other eyes, even if he had known how to use it, couldn’t work in Imperial space, any more than any other magic could.
He saw Amy fall out onto the throne room floor, though; he saw Ted stagger out a moment later, and then Prossie backed from nowhere into the room, still trying to fire her blaster. She was squeezing the firing stud so hard he could hear the clicking over Amy’s panting and Ted’s shuffling and all the other little noises of their disorganized return.