He reached down to the magical flow again, and brought it up, and this time an Imperial soldier became a walking torch for an instant before collapsing into nothing. He didn’t even have time to scream before his suit held nothing but ash.
Then another went, and a third.
The suits made it slower, though; Pel had to manifest the flames inside the men’s bodies, and the lack of air made it necessary to use more magic.
Then, as he concentrated on his fourth victim, something whizzed past him, through the matrix.
Then an entire barrage tore through the air toward him, and he recognized them-arrows!
He turned them all aside easily, but it distracted him for a moment.
The Empire was getting more inventive, it seemed; Pel decided that he had best be more cautious. He twisted the light, to ensure that he would be completely invisible behind the cloud of color and shadow, and thickened the air below and before himself, forming a protective barrier.
More arrows flew up at him, and were diverted.
Something made a cracking sound, and something smaller and faster than an arrow tore past-a bullet.
He hadn’t known the Empire had guns, and for a moment he was on the verge of panic.
Then he remembered who and what he was.
He thickened his barrier once again and looped back for another pass over the Imperials-he had overshot their entire installation while they were shooting at him.
There were the bowmen, he saw-or rather, the crossbowmen. And there was someone with a muzzle-loading pistol, stuffing a wad down the barrel-was that the best the Galactic Empire could do?
That was nothing. Pel carefully targeted the pistoleer as his next incendiary victim, then began on the archers.
By the time he had incinerated a dozen men the Imperials appeared to be in full retreat, most of them running for their precious escape route, and Pel decided that he had made his point; he didn’t have to kill anyone else.
“Deliver the bodies!” he shouted, using the matrix to amplify his voice so that everyone could hear it.
Most of them probably didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, but word would reach those who did.
“I can close the warp, you know,” he called. “I’m letting you go. All I want is the bodies.”
One of the Imperials raised a megaphone-it figured that they wouldn’t even have a proper bullhorn; their technology was really pretty primitive, outside of the blasters and anti-gravity. Mostly equivalent to the early 19th century, Pel estimated-they weren’t very advanced at all, Galactic Empire or not.
“If you continue, we’ll destroy the bodies!” the man bellowed.
For a moment, Pel was shocked into silence; he flew on past the Imperials and wheeled about before replying.
“You do that,” Pel shouted back, trembling with anger, “and your fucking Empire will never know a minute’s peace as long as I live! You think I’ve given you trouble before, you’re fooling yourselves! I haven’t begun! I can make your lives hell!” He turned again. “You tell your masters that! You go home now, or you die-and you tell your masters that if they damage those bodies they’re all dead meat!”
He gestured, and fire burst up in walls around the Imperials, flames roaring twenty feet into the air, driving them back toward the space-warp.
“You tell them that!” he shrieked. “Tell them!”
* * * *
“How marvelous,” Markham muttered, reading the reports. “Now we’ve made him mad.”
“You think he’s serious?” Sheffield asked quietly.
Markham looked up in astonishment. “Of course he’s serious!”
“You think he can make good on his threat?”
“I don’t have any idea,” Markham said, “but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”
* * * *
Pel didn’t go back to Shadowmarsh after the warp collapsed into non-existence, leaving ash and debris scattered across some poor farmer’s fields. He needed to think.
His fit of temper had subsided, but he was still in no mood to see anyone else just now. The flight back to the fortress would take hours, and night was approaching, but he still didn’t want to head back yet.
Instead he sailed over the castle, waving to the tiny figures on the battlements; a few waved back, while most ran to hide. Then he let the wind blow him onward, across unfamiliar terrain; he knew that he could always find his way back, thanks to the matrix that had become a part of him.
And it didn’t matter anyway. He had the matrix with him wherever he went, anywhere in Faerie-and he didn’t have Nancy and Rachel.
He had to convince the Empire to give him the bodies.
Asking politely hadn’t worked. Making token raids hadn’t worked. Fighting off their counter-attacks hadn’t worked. What could he do that would convince them?
What could he offer them?
Conversely, what could he threaten them with?
He had an entire world he could give them-he didn’t care what happened to Faerie, so long as he got his family back and could go safely home to Earth. But how could he ensure that they would deliver the bodies? They didn’t trust him, and he didn’t trust them; how could they work an exchange safely, when he couldn’t go into the Empire, and they couldn’t come here without his permission? Why should they believe that he wouldn’t just fry them all and take Faerie back once he had what he wanted?
They wouldn’t. Bribes wouldn’t work. It would have to be threats.
But what could he threaten them with? He had already threatened them with raids and sabotage and the like. What could he say that would scare them…
“Them.”
Just who were they, anyway? Who did he have to scare?
He didn’t know; he had talked to a bunch of different officers and civilian officials, but none of them had been very high in the Imperial hierarchy. Somehow, he doubted Major Southern was running things at Base One. There was that General Hart people had talked about-Pel wasn’t sure whether he had ever met him.
But they weren’t all that important, Pel was sure. They weren’t making policy.
Pel didn’t know who was making Imperial policy.
He did know who the nominal head of state was, though, and he suddenly thought of what threat he could make, even if he didn’t know who he was threatening.
Whether His Imperial Majesty George VIII was a figurehead or an actual monarch Pel didn’t know, and somehow he suspected it didn’t matter, because in neither case could the Empire’s rulers sit by and let him be assassinated.
Pel let the wind lower him gently, and landed in a forest, where magic flowed strongly in intricate patterns through the trees. Cutting wooden slabs was easy, and using his finger as a focal point it was easy to cut letters into them with his magic. The light of the matrix made the gathering gloom of evening irrelevant.
He would not settle for one. He could not risk anything going wrong, and one board might get lost, might be ignored, might land someplace too far from wherever the bodies were kept, someplace that didn’t have one of the Empire’s four hundred telepaths close at hand.
And he’d send these to places he’d hit before, and places he hadn’t-let them know that they couldn’t stop him.
He cut slab after slab, and wrote the same message into each of them.
IF THE BODIES ARE NOT DELIVERED WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS OF THE APPEARANCE OF THIS MESSAGE, YOUR EMPEROR WILL DIE.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“He can’t mean it,” Sheffield said.
“Why the hell not?” Albright demanded.
“I wish we knew more about him,” Markham said. “If we knew why he wanted the corpses…maybe we should send someone to Earth, to talk to people who knew him.”
Albright snorted. “Not that easy. We cut Earth off; they’ve no reason to cooperate, and they’ve got a guard on our warp site. We’d have to open a new one, and then our men would have to find some way to cross hundreds of miles of unfamiliar terrain without being noticed, find the right people to talk to without alerting the local government…”