* * * *
Pel stared at the plateful of corned beef and cabbage.
He wasn’t really hungry-but when had he last eaten?
He didn’t know. It had occurred to him that he ought to eat, so he had had this dinner prepared and served, but he wasn’t hungry.
And he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten anything.
It was obvious what was happening, of course; he was drawing energy directly from the matrix, feeding off pure magic, the way the elves did.
He remembered what was supposed to happen to people who ate of fairy feasts, though-they were trapped in Faerie forever, unable to return to Earth.
That was just an old story, of course, a folk-tale for children…but he had been living a storybook existence for months now, ever since poor little Grummetty had stepped out of the basement wall. He had fought monsters, been captured by space pirates, been rescued by a Galactic Empire, defeated an evil wizard, become a wizard himself…if all that could happen in real life, if he could be sitting here in a magical stone fortress staring at a meal prepared by zombies in a room lit by his own raw magical energy, how could he possibly say that the old fairy tales were nonsense?
He picked up a forkful of meat and chewed.
His stomach protested with a sudden cramp.
He knew why, and he felt a tremor of terror at the realization. He had gone so long without food that his digestive processes were not up to handling anything this rich; he should be starting off with a thin broth, or even just water, as if he had been on the verge of starvation.
But he felt fine and healthy-other than the nausea, anyway.
Maybe he couldn’t go back to ordinary food, he thought. Maybe it was too late. Maybe it would just sit, undigested, in his gut.
Maybe he wasn’t really human any shy;more; maybe he was becoming an elf, or something else native to this other cosmos. Maybe all those stories about Shadow being an elemental force, rather than a human being, had been true, in a way. Maybe Susan’s bullets wouldn’t have killed Shadow even if they had hit her.
Maybe she could only be killed when she had become human again by leaving Faerie. And maybe he, too, was changing into something else.
But then, how could he ever go home again? How could he return to Earth once Nancy and Rachel were restored to life?
Shadow had been able to leave, to go to the Galactic Empire-but she had died there. Could she have survived even if Prossie hadn’t shot her, or would she have died the way Grummetty and Alella did?
He swallowed.
He would, he thought, just have to wait and see.
He loaded his fork again.
Then he stopped, fork halfway to his mouth.
The matrix had just twisted again. The Empire had opened a new space-warp.
He put the fork down, telling himself that he had to investigate, that doing so was more important than eating this meal.
He wished he really believed it.
Fifteen minutes later the taste of corned beef still lingered in his mouth as he leapt from the fortress tower into the waiting winds.
* * * *
Captain Puckett eyed the horizon warily as his men hauled equipment through the warp.
This time the damned thing had come out a full eight feet up, and it had taken most of an hour to locate something better than a ladder to compensate for the drop. Some clever fellow had finally located a set of folding bleachers-Puckett had no idea what such a thing was doing anywhere on Base One, but there it was, and it worked fine.
And they hadn’t come out in the middle of a village this time; instead the warp hung invisibly above a field of barley. A special squad had captured the farmer and his family-they hadn’t resisted, so no one had been killed.
The residents of the neighboring farms had either surrendered or fled.
These weren’t any pale, skinny freaks this time, just ordinary people-though they had an odd accent and an old-fashioned way of speaking. They had been terrified at the sight of the Imperial troopers in their bulky purple space suits-after the previous massacre, no one had opposed the suggestion that the troops keep their suits on, despite the inconvenience and discomfort. Helmets could be loosened to save on bottled air, or even removed, but the main suit, which was fireproof, stayed on.
Puckett was happy with that-not that his opinion mattered any shy;more. No one had openly blamed him for the disaster, but he wasn’t even nominally in command this time; he was a “special advisor” to Colonel Bender, along to provide whatever expertise he might have acquired in the course of utter defeat.
He wasn’t sure just how much of that expertise applied here. They were some six hundred miles southeast of the site of the previous landing, and the terrain was totally different. Where the other site was barren, this one was lush; instead of whitish sand, the earth was rich black loam producing a variety of crops, while any shy;place in sight that wasn’t under cultivation was either forest or rapidly returning to forest. Instead of grass huts, the natives had sturdy, well-weathered homes of stone and timber, with intricately carved lintels and shutters and generously stocked with good-quality crockery.
And of course, there was the castle.
Puckett raised his binoculars and took another look at the thing, perched perhaps five miles to the southeast, atop the highest of the surrounding hills.
Stone walls, watchtowers, overhanging parapets-that was a serious fortification there. It wouldn’t have stood half a day against blasters and aircars, but against the improvised armaments of this particular Imperial expedition…
Well, the Empire’s officers still knew how to besiege a fortress, even if they hadn’t ever actually done it.
And so far, the castle’s occupants had shown no signs of making a sortie against the invaders. The scouts had reported that faces could sometimes be glimpsed on the battlements, watching the Imperial forces as they made camp, but the heavy gates had shut within two hours of the warp’s first appearance and had remained closed ever since.
A crow cawed somewhere.
The castle was daunting, in its way, but it wasn’t what worried Puckett, not really. Anyone who needed those massive defensive walls…well, somehow Puckett didn’t think the thing that had slaughtered his men lived in a place like that.
If it had really been the Brown Magician, as Imperial Intelligence believed, then it didn’t live anywhere near here; his place, their eventual target, was supposed to be somewhere hundreds of miles to the north, according to the space-warp scientists.
At that thought, Puckett turned his glasses northward and scanned the treetops and the sky above.
And there it was.
At first he thought he’d imagined it, but then he found it again, and focused the binoculars on it, and there wasn’t any doubt.
“Colonel!” he shouted. “Colonel Bender!”
The expedition’s commander looked up from some papers a clerk was showing him.
“Sir, there it is!” Puckett shouted. “It’s coming!”
Bender turned, and by then it was visible even without the binoculars, a seething, constantly changing mass of light and color swooping toward them out of the northern sky.
Bender began shouting, but Puckett didn’t wait for his own orders; he clapped his helmet in place and began dogging it down tight.
* * * *
Pel didn’t bother reconnoitering; it was obvious that the Empire was trying again. This wasn’t a power spot, but it was near one, and a strong current of magic flowed through the earth here; Pel reached down and pulled that current upward, then turned it loose.
Fire burst up from the ground, and men screamed-but at first they simply retreated, with their faces scorched but still alive, protected by their space suits.
Pel couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t just use flame to hem them in or drive them back; since they had worn those protective suits he had to make it plain that there was no defense against the Brown Magician’s power.