Half an hour later he knew what else he needed-knowledge. And maybe practice. The ugly brownish-green stuff he had produced probably qualified as glass, but it wasn’t very good glass, and his fanciful notion of raising a fairy city of glittering glass spires was obviously not going to work unless he spent a lot longer at it than he had intended.
On the other hand, he had attracted an audience; a ring of people had formed around the edge of the blasted area, all of them watching him solemnly.
These were the strange people, the ones who were linked to the matrix. There were perhaps sixty or seventy of them, men, and women, but no children that Pel could see. They were all thin, with long white faces and straight black hair worn long, wearing peculiar green and white robes.
Pel tossed aside his latest unsatisfactory lump of glass and beckoned. “Come here,” he called, using the matrix to amplify his voice. “I want to talk to you.”
A man stepped forward, and strode calmly up, to stand a few feet away. He seemed untroubled by the light of the matrix; in fact, the way he stared impassively straight ahead, Pel wondered for a moment if he might be blind.
He was taller than Pel had realized, and paler-and he had pointed ears.
It dawned on Pel that these people weren’t exactly people, and it struck him what they must be.
They were elves.
Well, why not? This was Faerie, wasn’t it? And Pel had met gnomes, and been told that they weren’t elves, that elves were something else.
Well, these were elves-weren’t they?
“You’re an elf,” Pel said.
“And you are a human,” the man replied, speaking English with an accent Pel couldn’t place, but which sounded somehow Asian.
“You’re really an elf?”
The other nodded. “And you are called Pelbrun, the Brown Magician.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“As to that, I could not say,” the elf replied.
“I never met an elf before,” Pel said.
“I never met you before.”
There was something unsatisfactory about this conversation, Pel thought. The elf’s voice was musical and pleasant enough, but shouldn’t he be saying things that were deep and meaningful?
Well, Pel’s own words hadn’t exactly been brilliant.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about the village. I’d hoped I could help rebuild it, but I don’t know how. I’m not really a very good magician yet.”
“We can rebuild it to our own liking.”
Pel looked around. He had no idea what the elf intended to rebuild with, but if he said they could…
“Don’t elves traditionally live in forests?” he asked.
“This is the place Shadow allowed us,” the elf replied.
Pel bit his lip and looked around. That explained it.
This place was a reservation. Shadow must have put the elves here to keep them out of the way, just the way whites had put Indians on various badlands back on Earth.
“Listen,” he said, “I could move you to the Low Forest of West Sunderland, if you want, above the Starlinshire Downs. Nobody lives there.”
“We would starve,” the elf replied.
Pel blinked. “You aren’t starving here, but you would there?”
The elf nodded.
It seemed to Pel that this fellow was playing the strong silent type a bit more than was entirely wise. “Why would you starve there? What do you eat?”
“The earth itself sustains us, magician; we do not eat crude matter as humans do.”
For a moment Pel stared blankly at him; then comprehension dawned. That was why these people were linked to the matrix! That was what they lived on; they consumed raw magical energy.
No wonder they wouldn’t want to live in the Low Forest.
“Oh,” Pel said.
And that, he realized, might even explain some of the old folk tales about fairy feasts, about how insubstantial fairy food was.
That also eliminated any possibility of sending elves into the Empire, for any purpose at all-they’d undoubtedly die there, just as the monsters did, or as Alella and Grummetty had.
Not that Pel had seriously been thinking about it, but the idea that they might want to avenge the destruction of their village had occurred to him.
Well, that idea was out.
“Okay, well,” Pel said, “I don’t know where else I could send you; I haven’t learned the local geography yet.”
“We are content here,” the elf answered.
Pel shrugged. “Suit yourself, then,” he said. He looked around at the circle of elves and the sandy wasteland, and decided that he’d tried, and if they weren’t going to ask for any help, he wasn’t going to give it. Let them rebuild their own damn village. “Stand back,” he said.
The elf began retreating.
Pel had never tried taking off from flat ground before-at the fortress he’d launched himself off the tower, and in the Low Forest he had jumped from a treetop, but there wasn’t any handy tower or tree to climb, and this desolate circle didn’t have anything that would block the wind. Taillefer had taken off from Castle Regisvert; Pelbrun, Pel thought, ought to be able to take off here.
And the elves could take care of themselves.
He took a deep breath and summoned the wind.
* * * *
“One hundred and eight dead or missing,” Albright said, tossing the report onto the table in front of Sheffield.
“For nothing,” he added a second later, as he settled into his chair.
“Hardly for nothing,” Sheffield said. “We know now that this Pelbrun either has some way of detecting intrusions into his universe, or that he has some form of high-speed communication that allowed the villagers to warn him. We also know that he has extremely effective weaponry using his ‘magical’ super-science. We’ve gained some important knowledge-that’s hardly nothing.”
“What good is it going to do us?” Albright argued.
“You tell me,” Sheffield replied. “Now that you know that, what would you do differently?”
“Me? Colonel Scarborough handled this.”
“Colonel Scarborough is out of the picture now; what would you do?”
Albright stared at Sheffield for a moment, thinking.
“Well, to begin with,” he said, “I’d make everything fireproof…”
* * * *
Pel made his counter-raid through the same spot Peter Gregory had used-nine fetches under the false Nancy’s direction burst through, shot everyone in sight with their blasters, collected three more blasters from the bodies, then left Pel’s prepared message, painted on a non-flammable stone slab, prominently on display.
YOU CAN’T HURT ME, it read, BUT I CAN HURT YOU. DELIVER THE BODIES.
By the time the reports reached Base One, however, Operation Brown-Out was under way. The message was ignored.
* * * *
“I think they know on both sides that it won’t work,” Miletti said. “They just aren’t ready to admit it.”
Prossie looked up at this oracular pronouncement, made not in response to any question, but out of the blue.
She glanced at the lieutenant; he looked back at her and shrugged, then turned away again.
Prossie looked at Miletti, then at the lieutenant, then back down at her book.
Miletti was behaving strangely, she thought-but what did she know of what was normal for these people?
She wished she could read his mind, to see whether the strain and isolation were getting to him, or whether it was something else-but she couldn’t.
And it wasn’t really any of her business anyway. She was supposed to be studying this planet’s history, as part of her assimilation, not worrying about Miletti’s mental health. They were keeping her here, letting her sleep in Miletti’s guest room, in case one of Miletti’s reports needed explanation, but it wasn’t really her problem any shy;more.
For her, the Empire and Faerie were the past; Earth was the future.