Then one of Shadow’s fetches charged out of the portal, sword raised, and Pel was so startled that the thing was able to take a swipe at Prossie before bursting into flame. The blade cut open one tattered sleeve and drew a line of blood before falling from shriveling, blackening fingers.
Then more fetches came bursting through, mostly one by one, occasionally in pairs or even trios, but each appearing only to flare up instantly and burn away to scattering ash. Amy crawled to the side on hands and knees, out of their path; Ted wandered clear; and Prossie backed away, blaster still in one hand, the other hand shielding her face, and watched as the swordsmen perished.
The stream of burning swordsmen seemed interminable. Since the energy that incinerated them was not his own, and needed no actual guidance but merely a point of release, Pel didn’t tire of destroying them, exactly, but the simple repetition was wearying, and the accumulated heat of their fiery extinction did become uncomfortable; by the time the last fetch perished the air of the throne room was sweltering hot, like the inside of a furnace. Amy and Ted retreated up the passage toward the rooms where they had eaten and slept, while Prossie backed out onto the landing at the top of the great staircase.
The whole process quickly took on a surreal aspect-the procession of undead charging forward to immolation, the blackened and melting swords rattling to the floor and lying there in a smoldering heap, all in the flickering, unnatural light of the windowless and underfurnished throne room, had the mindless, irrational repetitiveness of a nightmare.
If any of the fetches ever had the wit to do anything other than charge blindly after the woman who had slain his mistress, he didn’t show it-but then, Pel didn’t count them, and could not be certain, when they finally stopped appearing, that some weren’t still active on the other side of the opening.
Pel would have preferred closing the portal and stranding the fetches on the other side, for the Empire to deal with, but he could not afford the concentration to do that as long as the swordsmen kept appearing; he was unsure just how much the matrix would protect him without conscious direction.
At last, though, the stream of attackers paused, and Pel was able to think about something other than burning.
“Did you get her?” he shouted to Prossie, as he struggled to close the portal. The spell did not yield readily, did not collapse the way his portals had in practice. Something was fighting him-the geas, presumably.
“Yes, sir,” Prossie answered, sharply. Pel was startled by the “sir” until he realized that she was simply reverting to military habits.
He was relieved to hear her reply; he had assumed as much, but it was good to hear her say it. And she was quite definite, no “I think so,” or “Probably,” but a definite “Yes.”
And then something yielded and crumbled in his mind, and the portal was gone, leaving only charred sword-fragments and boot-heels and a haze of drifting ash where the fetches had been appearing. The oppressive heat lingered, and Pel could feel himself drenched in sweat, but his mind was clear and sharp-and free.
The geas was gone.
And that, he knew, meant that Shadow was dead.
* * * *
The grip of the blaster felt good in her hand. The steel cross-graining bit into her palm as she squeezed it, keeping the still-hot weapon steady despite the slick of sweat-and despite its uselessness here in Faerie. It felt good to hold it, and to know that she had killed Shadow with it.
Her hand wanted to tremble, but she wouldn’t allow it. Her long-ago training did that much for her, anyway.
She had never shot anyone before. As a rule, the Empire did not arm Specials; they weren’t there to fight. They were trained in the use of blasters, just in case, but only on the practice range, with low-power weapons. Prossie hadn’t fired a weapon in two or three years-until today. And she had never before used a full-power blast, or shot at a living target.
But now she had-and she had hit what she aimed at. She had killed Shadow.
That she had killed did not bother her, at least not yet; somewhere inside she thought that perhaps it should.
But this was Shadow. This was the Enemy. And she, Proserpine Thorpe, outlaw telepath, had killed it.
It felt very good indeed, and she was in no hurry to put the raygun down.
The swordsmen had stopped coming, finally. When she thought about it she realized that they had stopped a moment before Pel had asked her if Shadow was dead. In her excitement she had lost track, for a moment, of the sequence of events.
The portal was probably closed, then. She straightened up, out of her gunner’s crouch.
Heat was still pouring out of the throne room, while cooler air drifted up the stairs behind her; she could feel her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat. She turned and looked down the steps.
The beam of light seemed a little brighter than before, though still not up to when Shadow had controlled it; by its glow she could see the dead dragon in the hall below, lying headless on the floor. Purple ichor had puddled around it.
Imperial purple, she thought wryly.
And as if that made some mental connection, she heard her name being called.
“Carrie?” she asked.
* * * *
For a long moment Pel simply sat there, savoring the calm after the storm. The heat was gradually dissipating, the ashes were settling. The matrix hummed and glowed around him and through him, and he could feel it reaching out through all of Faerie.
Just now, he didn’t want to think about it. He knew that he would have decisions to make, important decisions, but just now he wanted to savor his victory.
That was what it was, all right-victory. He hadn’t just escaped from Shadow, from Faerie, from the Empire; this time, he had done more than escape. He had played the hero’s role after all.
He had won.
* * * *
The throne room was quiet, and the heat rolling up the passage seemed to be lessening; Amy took Ted’s hand and called, “Pel?”
No one answered-but she hadn’t called very loudly.
“You said I’d wake up,” Ted said accusingly; she jumped, startled, and turned to face him.
“Yes, I did,” she admitted.
“I’m not awake yet.” Then he laughed, not his usual nervous giggle, but a wild, hysterical laugh. “What am I doing?” he said. “I’m arguing with a dream? Because it fooled me?”
“It’s not a dream, Ted,” Amy replied.
Always before, when she had argued with Ted, or just talked to him, she had felt frustrated and helpless; she had been powerless to help him, to convince him of anything.
Now, though, as she tugged him back toward the throne room, she felt triumphant. “Come on,” she said. “We have to get you home.”
* * * *
“That’s twice now you’ve reappeared in Imperial space, and then vanished again,” Carrie sent. “We all felt it; a new adult telepath turning up anywhere in the galaxy is hard to miss. And when we tried to locate you exactly this second time, we found some of those Shadow things, but now they’re gone, too. Prossie, you said you were abandoning the family and the Empire, but you keep turning up. Who’s creating these space-warps for you, and how? Are you working for Shadow now?”
Before Prossie could answer, Carrie added, in a far more emotional tone of thought, “Prossie, what’s going on?”
“I killed Shadow,” Prossie answered proudly. She looked down at the blaster in her hand, and her mind was flooded with a tangle of emotions. She had sometimes felt something like it in others, in moments of crisis, but this was the first time she had ever experienced such powerful and complex feelings entirely on her own.
And she was really, truly on her own now. “You wouldn’t help,” she said, “you didn’t want to hear from me, but I killed Shadow.”