Above him was that single line of gargoyles, and a heavy, leaden overcast.
Around him seethed the light and shadow of the matrix.
He was standing on a stone fifty, maybe sixty stories up, unsheltered by anything but his magic.
Nothing built without steel had any right to be this high, he thought. It must have used magic. Why hadn’t it fallen down when Shadow died?
Because the matrix still held, of course. And he held it.
He reached out, down into the fortress; he couldn’t sense any specific place where magic held the stone, but surely there were some.
The wind subsided slightly as his attention was distracted, and he shifted a foot to keep his balance.
The merlon was carved, the corners somewhat rounded, in what appeared to be a representation of leaves. It wasn’t very well executed, and as he glanced at it through a purple swirl of magical energy Pel thought the result resembled a tooth more than anything else. The lines of the carving provided a bit of traction, but as Pel looked past the stone and past the haze of color at the drop below him he wished the corners were still solid and square.
What was he doing, standing here on top of a tower and deliberately summoning a wind that would blow him off?
This was insane. People couldn’t fly.
Not on Earth, anyway, but this wasn’t Earth. He’d seen Taillefer do it, and he had Shadow’s entire matrix, where Taillefer had had only the leavings of it. Taillefer hadn’t lived in a constant shifting mass of magic the way Pel did.
He wasn’t going to jump. He wasn’t going to step off. If he could conjure up a wind strong enough to blow him off, then he’d believe he could make one strong enough to carry him.
He felt the matrix, felt it moving the air, and he drew more power to that movement, summoned strength from earth and sky, and the wind hit him like a wall, sweeping him off the battlements, bearing him up and away into empty space.
* * * *
“So how do we get a message to him?” Secretary Sheffield asked.
“Send a messenger through the space-warp. It’s about a ten-day hike from there to the fortress,” Albright replied.
“There isn’t anything faster?”
Albright shook his head. “We can’t seem to relocate the warp to anywhere within five hundred miles or so of a previously-used location, so we can’t get it any closer to the fortress. Brown apparently has some way of contacting his network of spies, so he may well know our decision within a day or two, but we don’t have any way of knowing that. We haven’t been able to break the ring, or infiltrate, or even identify any members with certainty. We know Felton, and of course we know who Felton’s contact was, but that was a woman named Fielding, and she committed suicide before we could capture and interrogate her. We’re checking on her friends and associates, but so far we haven’t found anything particularly suspicious.”
“Felton didn’t know any other names?”
“Not for certain. The telepaths are still digging.”
“So our only way of contacting Brown is through our own space-warps, and the only one we currently have is ten days march from Brown’s fortress-but can’t we get some sort of vehicle through there?”
Albright shook his head. “Anti-gravity doesn’t work in…well, we call it Faerie. The telepaths picked up that name for it somewhere, and it seems to fit. Anyway, anti-gravity won’t work-ships and aircars just fall to the ground and sit there.”
“What about wheeled vehicles? Or is there a water route?”
Albright hesitated. “We don’t have any wheeled vehicles,” he pointed out. “And I suspect the roads aren’t good enough. The warp comes out in a forest, and the pathway out is just that, a path. As for a water route, again, our entry point is in the middle of a forest, with no navigable rivers in the areas we’ve seen.” He glanced at Best, who was seated at one corner of the table, trying hard to be unobtrusive.
“No rivers,” Best confirmed. “And there aren’t any roads in the forest.”
“What about opening a new warp over the sea somewhere?” Sheffield suggested. “It would have to be farther away, but it might be faster all the same. Is this fortress accessible by sea?”
Albright rubbed his noes thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said. “You understand, sir, I haven’t seen it myself, and we haven’t done any photoreconnaissance. I understand it’s in the middle of a marsh, but I don’t know any more than that-whether a small boat could get across the marsh is an excellent question.” He turned to Best again. “You were there,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Best admitted.
“You think a boat could reach this fortress?”
“I don’t know much about boats,” Best said, “but no, I don’t think so. It’s a pretty nasty marsh, and I didn’t see where it connected to anything better. Besides, how would you power a boat? If you’re rowing, that’s no better than walking, is it?”
Sheffield acknowledged that with a nod.
“All right, then,” he said, “we’ll send an envoy to this forest and let him walk from there, and one of the demands will be to find a better way for future communications.”
Demands?
This was the first mention Best had heard of demands. He tried to imagine what the Empire might be demanding of the Brown Magician.
And he tried to imagine how Brown would react to any such demands.
He didn’t like what he came up with.
* * * *
Riding the wind was a very strange sensation, something like swimming in a very strong current. And of course, he could steer the current by manipulating the matrix.
And the matrix added to the strangeness, because he could feel that he was simultaneously riding and pulling it. It didn’t want to have its center dragged away from the fortress.
Pel began to understand why Shadow had sat waiting in her fortress, rather than coming out to collect her visitors; it was uncomfortable being out here. He was stretching his web, forcing the patterns to shift and distort.
He rebelled at any thought of going back, though. He could operate out here, and he would-he wouldn’t be held prisoner by his own power!
Besides, he could sense that the matrix would restructure itself with time; the patterns would slide and shift until they settled into new positions, and the discomfort would pass. It wasn’t so much that he was restricted to one spot as that the matrix resisted moving about.
Of course, it would work best and be most comfortable in one of the natural places of power-Shadowmarsh was one, probably the strongest, but Castle Regisvert would work, too, or any number of other places.
He looked down.
He was not at airplane altitudes-he’d started at about five hundred feet, and hadn’t risen much above that. He didn’t see any need to go higher. From this height he could follow the road without difficulty, from the causeway across the marsh back past the berry fields and plains to the villages, one after another, strung out across the ridges and valleys of the Starlinshire Downs.
The roads branched, the towns held forks and crossroads, but Pel simply remembered that he and his party had traveled almost due west; he kept his bearings and headed eastward.
From this altitude, low as it was, he could see far more of the countryside than he had from the ground. Farms and villages stretched off in all directions; castles were scattered about, but all of them looked abandoned, and most were outright ruins-Shadow had not been kind to the conquered nobility.
Some castles, of course, had belonged to wizards; to the unassisted eye those were built in more or less random locations and were all no more than ruins-some, in fact, more nearly resembled craters than castles. Through the matrix, however, Pel could see that these locations weren’t random at all, but carefully sited on the natural magical currents of earth and sky, currents that were now all diverted into the matrix itself, leaving shadowy ghosts of themselves in an odd sort of double image.