He couldn’t do it. At least, not from this height.
Maybe, if he lowered himself gradually…
He looked ahead, trying to judge distances, and spotted something strange, ahead and to the left. Something was sticking up out of the forest.
He had glimpsed it before, from a distance, and had taken it for an odd branch, or a dead trunk, but now he saw he had badly misjudged its size and distance.
He turned and steered for it.
It rose straight up out of the forest, straighter than anything that could naturally be there, taller and thinner than anything natural, and swaying slightly in the wind. Pel couldn’t see the top. He could see above where it stopped, but somehow he couldn’t see the exact point at which it ended; there was a blind spot.
And the matrix was kinked out of shape there, he realized.
This was the space-warp. This is what he had intended to be aiming for all along, but he’d gotten so involved in the mechanics of flying, and the view of the landscape, that he had lost track of it.
Well, there it was.
He hadn’t really expected anything visible, but there it was.
He hadn’t bothered to ask Best or his companions how they got through the warp, but now he saw. That thing was a ladder, a rope ladder that reached from a space-warp about five hundred feet up to down in the forest somewhere. It was swinging in gentle curves, swaying back and forth in a shallow sine wave.
That would be an uncomfortably long climb and a dizzy, seasick one, but obviously the Imperial spies had managed it.
And Pel could, too. He wasn’t about to go up through the warp-he’d lose control of the matrix if he left Faerie for even a second-but he could grab the ladder and climb down to the ground.
That, at least, was the theory; steering himself through the air at perhaps forty miles an hour and boarding a stationary rope ladder turned out to be much more difficult than he had expected. Instead he smacked into it and then slid on past before he could grab hold, sending the ladder into violent, twisting oscillations and drawing a nasty rope-burn across his right cheek.
He made a wide loop, rubbing his injured face and muttering obscenities, then came back for another pass, dropping so much speed that he began losing altitude rapidly.
He hit the ladder hard, and barely managed to clamp his hands onto a rung about three steps lower than he intended. His arms jarred with the impact, and he wondered if he had injured his shoulder, but he kept his grip.
* * * *
Sebastian Warner stared up at the glowing, seething thing that hung in the sky above him.
It had struck the ladder and then passed on through, and Warner had seen the ladder still there and thought he was safe, but then it had looped around and hit the ladder again, and this time it stayed there.
It looked as if the ladder was being consumed by some sort of eldritch energy cloud. Since no severed end came tumbling to the ground, Warner assumed that it was not actually being consumed, but he was still cut off from the space-warp. He wasn’t about to try climbing through that.
In fact, he was hurrying to get off the ladder and away, behind a tree, where the thing might not spot him-assuming it could see.
Once there, he turned and watched for a moment. If he hadn’t still been suited up, he’d have drawn his blaster and found out once and for all whether the things really didn’t work here.
And he’d wished for something interesting to happen. He should have known better. This was something interesting, all right, and it looked like very bad news indeed.
Of course, it could get worse-and as he watched, it did get worse.
The thing started moving downward along the ladder.
* * * *
Pel’s shoulder ached, and his back felt oddly scraped and raw from the now-vanished wind pressure, and the thick, damp, hot air above the forest made his skin itch and his head hurt, but at least he’d finally gotten both hands and both feet onto the ladder.
He began descending, carefully. The ladder swayed more than he would have liked, so he moved slowly.
As he neared the treetops he noticed the light and color of the matrix flitting across the leaves, and decided he didn’t like that. It might attract unwanted attention, and besides, it made it harder for him to see whatever there might be to see around here. Shadow had apparently been able to use the matrix to enhance her senses as a regular, permanent thing, but Pel’s mastery of it wasn’t anywhere near that complete; it took an effort of will to sense anything through the matrix unless whatever he was sensing was somehow part of the matrix.
The space-warp was a part of the matrix, in a way; any attempt to use magic was, as well. Fetches and homunculi and the rest of Shadow’s servants and creatures qualified, as well, and showed up without any special effort on his part.
Trees, however, didn’t.
That was mildly interesting, actually; Pel had always thought of trees as rather magical things. Certainly they were magical in most of the fantasy stories he’d read.
Maybe some were magical, but the Low Forest wasn’t, or at least the matrix didn’t register anything special there, and the energy currents were weak. And Pel’s eyes were having some trouble seeing through the magical haze.
He suppressed it, forcing the magical radiation out of the visible spectrum, and then continued climbing.
* * * *
The instant it had started downward, Warner had taken off his space helmet and begun opening his suit. He had dragged out his blaster, pointed it, and pressed the trigger.
They were right; nothing happened. It didn’t so much as buzz.
He shoved it back in the holster, and was debating whether to turn and run when the cloud-thing vanished, revealing a rather battered-looking man climbing slowly downward.
Was that the notorious Brown Magician, perhaps? Or one of his representatives?
He didn’t look like much of a threat.
Warner backed off a few paces and found himself a hiding place in the underbrush; then he waited to see what the new arrival was up to.
* * * *
Pel was about ten feet up when he spotted the man in the space suit. He smiled, and dropped to the ground, skipping the last few rungs. “Hey, you!” he called, the matrix amplifying his voice.
The man froze.
“Come on out where I can see you!” Pel beckoned.
The man hesitated, then stepped out of the concealing foliage. He had a bubble helmet under one arm, and his free hand was on the butt of a blaster that protruded through an open seam in his vacuum armor.
“The raygun won’t work here,” Pel told him. “You can try it if you want.”
The man’s hand dropped away from the useless weapon.
“I’m Pel Brown,” Pel said. “I run this place. Who’re you?”
“Lieutenant Sebastian Warner, Imperial Fleet,” the stranger replied.
“Good!” Pel said, smiling. This was just what he had hoped-and, from the instant he first saw Warner, expected; nobody but the Galactic Empire would have sent someone here in a purple space suit. “You’re holding down the fort for your people, I take it?”
Warner blinked. “I’m sorry, I…”
“I mean, they left you in charge here? Or is there a whole installation in the next clearing? Maybe you’re using the Christopher as your headquarters. If you’re not in charge, can you take me to whoever is?”
“It’s just…listen, whoever you are, I don’t have to answer any questions!”
Pel abruptly dropped the suppression, and the matrix flared up around them both in red and orange swirls. “No,” he said, “you don’t have to answer any questions-but you might want to. My name’s Pel Brown, as I said, but I’m better known here as Pelbrun, the Brown Magician.”