Burb Rocking

Chapter Six: Moonshine

2012-02-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER SIX

She kisses me, draws back, smiles uncertainly. My heart is hurtling itself against my ribs, things are hazy and my legs are weak. Taking my hand, she leads me up the slope.

I am dripping wet, with hardly any memory of how I came to be that way.

Looking back at me, she tells me, “There are towels and blankets in my room. It is not far.”

“Your room?”

“You will be able to lie down and rest there.”

Though I am somewhat less than one hundred percent, I am not so out of it as to be unaware of my own condition. I know I am missing something.

“Rest? From what? What have I been doing?”

“Drowning.”

With that single word, it begins to come back to me. Her answer is an exercise in unvarnished expression. I hadn’t merely been drowning, but struggling against Time’s very own riptide. Normally a rather futile endeavor, but in this case....

To walk through the ebbing of the transient fields, mountains and isles of the clouds, to move among the spirits who dwell within the slippage of the sky, to climb the winding stairs and stroll the battlements of fairy castles on high. An old dream from our childhoods, to go where only the birds and winds can go, soon set aside as the foolish fancy it can only ever be.

Unless.

Unless one achieves the summit of Kolvir by the light of the stars to risk the wavering stair that leads from the three stone steps there up to the city tethered in the middle air, the shining silver city built of stardust, moonlight, fog, and one’s own secret yearnings, worries and regrets.

As I have done.

Why am I here again, running up this avenue past all the unseeing ones dwelling in this mirage, mirror folk borrowed from other truths of memory and prophecy, other histories of Amber, silver silhouettes blind to the reality of me, Corwin? Part of the answer lies with my grandfather. Another part of the answer is running ahead of me up the glittering pavement, fleeing my approach. There are ghosts here within this semi-substantial reflection of Amber hung beneath the stars, floating high above the roiling sea, but the one I pursue, like me, is an outlander in the city of dreams. Yellow hair, blue cloak over pale clothing, someone I recognize from another place, someone I have recently met under rather unusual circumstances...

A figure steps from the shadows of an alley to my left, pauses in the middle of the street, blocking my way. As with any ghost, I could pass through it as though it were not there. But I recognize the form and, though the portents presented here are invariably dubious, I cannot turn down a vision offered at a buy-one-get-one-free discount. For even in Tir-na Nog’th, where Time doubles back upon itself, where the energy resembles that of perpetual motion and Paradox is the default setting of the experience — even in Tir-na Nog’th there is a price paid, even if one does not immediately see the bill. This city belongs to the moon, yet even in this weird and warped image of Amber there are rules.

With a sigh, I draw Grayswandir, the portion of the Pattern with which it is carved seeming to writhe and twist within the cold grip of the moon. Extending the blade, I touch it to the hem of her garment, then wave it away. The ghost assumes the colors she would have by daylight, and takes on other real-world attributes, as well.

She pulls her wrap closer to her shoulders — the emerald hue of the material contrasting dramatically with the red tresses spilling over it while simultaneously calling attention to her eyes — shrinks from the chill evening air, glances at Grayswandir, searches my face with her critical green gaze.

“Corwin? What are you doing here? I thought we had agreed you should leave right away.”

She does not know that the Corwin whom she addresses is the product of a branch of history separate from hers, that while she and I may share many things, our memories of events do not agree. Because we, this incarnation of my sister Fiona and I, were born from different Ambers. To learn anything, however, I must play along.

“Remind me of our agreement, if you don’t mind. I have been through a lot recently.”

Pale people glance in our direction, from balconies and terraces, from the avenue where we have stopped. Fiona motions me into the alley, and I follow, keeping Grayswandir visible, involuntarily reaching for her hand and forcing myself to suppress the gesture. Here in the dreamworld leaning out over the ocean one may look upon ghosts, and when Grayswandir snares the magic of the moon one may even converse with them. But one can never touch, lest the spell be broken.

“What if someone recognized you?” she demands, her obvious frustration taking the form of a rebuke.

“Then I would depart in haste, leaving clever Fiona to concoct a viable explanation.”

She smiles, not unaware she is being flattered, but not minding either.

“Even my wiles have their limits. Now what part of what we agreed upon do you need to hear again? Your memory problems ended that day you walked the Pattern in Rebma. Or so you said.”

“No,” I correct her, adopting what I hope to be a contrite expression, “though it’s not something I like to share with everyone, my memory has never been returned to what you would call complete working order. So please pretend I’ve forgotten everything, which it now appears I have, and give it to me again.”

Her brows move toward one another as she frowns up at me.

“These are things you can ill afford to forget! Quickly then, so you can do what must be done. Amber is no place for you, and a very unsafe place for any of us. And Chaos will fall next, unless you can thwart our enemies in time.”

“So it is your opinion that I should be there rather than here?”

“My opinion, yes,” she confirms, absently tugging on a silver ear-ring wrought in the shape of a seashell, “and, more importantly, also Dworkin’s opinion. But you must have the Diamond with you. Have you lost it again? Is that why you are still here?”

“You never miss a trick, Fi. Where do you recommend I should go searching for it?”

“Where Dworkin told you to go, of course. Where you first found it.”

“Tir-na Nog’th. But where? The city in the sky is a big place.”

“The Diamond is a thing of power. It will be near the power-center, either by the Pattern or in the palace proper. Oisen may be wearing it, as he was when you first retrieved it. You will be drawn to it, wherever it is, since you are attuned to it.”

Triggered, very likely, by the irony of this Fiona having no idea we are standing in the city we are discussing, a notion occurs to me. Frivolous, but also irresistible. Caution being a thing for the stay-at-homes, the chance to experiment appeals to the troublemaker in me.

“Fiona, have you ever wondered if the reflecting power of Tir-na Nog’th might work both ways?”

“We have all wondered many things about that part of Amber. Tell me what you mean.”

“Well,” I begin, “if I were to encounter a ghost of yourself in that place, we might chat about days gone by, vendettas old and new, battles won and lost, that story about Dworkin turning a psychiatrist into a toad, how Random’s drumming might stack up against Keith Moon’s—”

“Or when Corwin tested Fiona’s patience till she was tempted to visit a pox on him?”

“Exactly!” I agree, while at the same time noting the sudden chill in the air as it occurs to me this is something of which she might actually be capable. “In Tir-na Nog’th you would be the ghost, and I the interloper in the ghost-world. But might it also work the other way? Could it be that in some Amber somewhere the same encounter plays out, where I am the ghost confounding that Amber’s Fiona with the problem of my existence?”

She looks up at the sky above me, then fixes me again with those green eyes as she makes her reply.

“If that were so, then ghosts would be seen in Amber all the time.”

“Would they, though? Tir-na Nog’th doesn’t see a lot of tourist traffic. Also, I’m thinking the ghosts of our visits to Tir-na Nog’th would only manifest in shadows of Amber, where our alter-egos are found.”

She becomes quiet, thinking her own thoughts, saying nothing. She purses her lips, begins to nod slowly.

“Hey, it’s just a crazy idea hatched by a crazy prince,” I say, changing the subject. “Just tell me one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Is there anything else you deem worth reminding me of before I go?”

“Only that haste is all. You must go. Now.” Her eyes soften with something like sympathy, or perhaps worry, as she adds, “Ferghus and Lothar are not known for their restraint. Good luck.”

She rises up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. A touching gesture, but she stumbles through me, then walks back out onto the avenue, looking both ways for me. She is again the colorless doppelgänger of my sister I happened upon only minutes ago, again an image spun from moonlight and mystery, born from need and the night. Drawing a silver card from a silver deck, she uses a Trump I cannot see whose subject I cannot guess, in mere moments reduced to motes of light that wink on, off, out. Gone.

Sheathing my sword, I shrug. The message is clear. The drama will play out at the palace, as before. A better omen than some, I suppose, and refreshingly to the point.

There being no point in delay, I begin to run.

Ghosts ride and stride across my path, engage in their silent mime-like movements and activities in nearby parks and gardens, in doorways and on walkways, marionettes tugged this way and that by whatever forces rule here. I ignore them all.

Funny how you end up in places you never foresee. Not so long ago, we had been making our way up the southern trail. A strange group, to be sure, but we had had our reasons....

Remarkable how far we had come. Almost as remarkable as the existence of shortcuts up Kolvir of which I had been unaware all my life. That was what I had been thinking.

“You said there would be horses.”

There was an unmistakable tone in Bill’s voice.

“True.”

Having paused in our ascent to turn toward Bill, the view over his shoulder was hard to miss. An invisible hand, which some call the wind, had reached from somewhere to stroke Arden’s locks, luxuriant strands gleaming with the liquid silver poured down from the big, bright, inexhaustible moon. Bound to successive mountains, the highest reaches of the forest wandered up and over, side to side, a great braid running past Amber’s shoulders, down her back. There was an exploratory quality, interspersed with passionate surges, to how the wind roved among the trees, sky and earth trysting on a scale so grand it could be missed if one wasn’t looking. But tonight a voyeur named Corwin was looking.

Nor was I alone. Seeing my look, Bill turned, too, and a few moments passed as we both stared out over the vast and — in a very valid, though somewhat mystical, sense — endless, timeless wood running for miles, north, south, and west, out to the edge of the world.

“Nice view,” Bill said.

“We like it.”

Maio and our guide, hiking up ahead, had stopped.

“What’s the hold-up?”

That was Maio. Standing not far from him, our fourth musketeer said nothing, being the quiet type.

“Bill was just informing me that the view would be much better from horseback,” I explained.

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Or a ski-lift,” Bill put in.

“You get much snow up here?” Maio asked, interested.

I remembered he’d once mentioned that he had spent some time out at Tahoe, and liked to ski.

“Not really, no.”

“But the ski-lift,” Bill went on, “That would still be a great thing.”

“Further north maybe,” Maio suggested, moving downslope toward us.

“There is a place,” I let them know, “a week’s sail up the coast.”

“They go skiing?” Bill asked. “And ride, instead of walk?”

“They do, though I’d have to say in winter they skate more than ski.”

“Like Hans Christian Andersen?” Maio guessed, halting just a few paces away.

“A lot like that, yes.”

“And easier on older, retired people?” Bill wondered.

An arrow whizzed between Bill and myself, sailing out into the gulf of night air stretching from ourselves to the treetops far below.

“Flatter, less hills, less stairs,” I said into the silence which had descended, before turning to see Bill taking to the trail again with such vigor that I doubted he had heard my comment.

A person of very short stature — our fourth, and our guide — stood about twenty paces farther up Kolvir’s slope, glowering at us and clutching his bow.

“Hey, stairs,” said Maio, pointing past our Gimli.

Beyond the small scowling figure of our newest friend (and also, obviously, expert archer) the trail, swinging northeast, climbed the stony final fifty yards remaining between where we stood and the summit.

A luminous stairway, of a white hinting of the barest blue, shifting in and out of focus as if carved from flowing water, ran away from Kolvir’s peak toward bright buildings and parks, all of the same stuff as the stair, hovering far off in the not-so-dark navy-indigo-black of the sky.

Seeming satisfied that the arrow had gotten our attention, the fourth member of our party moved quickly toward the place where the stair began. Bill was not far behind him.

“‘Up the airy mountain,’” Maio muttered under his breath, shaking his head.

“‘We daren’t tarry a moment,’” I improvised, catching his drift as I moved past him, my sense of mission returning full force. The brief respite had served its purpose, but now urgency filled me. I knew a long night lay ahead.

Behind me I heard what would be the last words of our trip to the top.

“‘For fear of impatient little bowmen...’”

Why does my mind wander so, harkening back to an arrow cutting through our time-wasting as everyone but me had nearly reached journey’s end? There can be no doubt that it has to do with where I am, with how Tir-na Nog’th evokes what lies within the subconscious and how the place itself responds to that which sleeps there.

And then there is also the well-known fact that when the body is engaged in a repetitive activity requiring little attention the mind strays, drifts as the city of day-bright moon-silvered mists drifts between the stars and the waves that catch their light, between futures that might be and pasts that never were. Activity requiring little attention. Such as running up the wide, sparkling way to the palace, the palace whose steps I have just reached.

And I stop running.

On that wide stair stands someone I have not seen for nine years or more, and our final parting was not on terms which could be described as friendly.

As with everything in the city on the other side of the looking-glass, the palace behind her — a work of art in any reality — here is something sketched in, as by a comic book artist, before the panel has been inked. The high walls, higher parapets and domes, and balconies, turrets and towers higher still, all done up in silver bright or dim, blacks faint or thick. And, in keeping with the description offered by Fiona’s double, the structure before me seems to burn brighter than anything else here where the light of the moon is concentrated to the intensity of direct sunlight.

In the world I left behind, she is an enemy, but that is not why I again draw my silvered blade. For all I know, in this place she might be my closest friend. She is here, I know, because some part of me needs her to be, and she has something to tell me. It may be something of practical value, as with Fiona, but more likely it will speak to some psychological deficit in me. Either way, in Tir-na Nog’th, as in Rome, it is best to accept where you are.

I touch Grayswandir’s tip to the stair.

Fragments of the Pattern etched into Grayswandir’s metal by the one who forged the sword here more than a millennium ago, flash in the moonlight, seem to slide and slither, subtly rearranging themselves into a new expression, as if being viewed by a new and heretofore unsuspected angle. And in that flashing, that sliding, that rearrangement, around the blade reality shifts, to fall into a new alignment.

Her hair is longer now and a shade or two darker than the brown I remember from our first meeting. The burgundy strapless number she wears, bound by a wide magenta sash at the waist, falls to her knees, and compliments her well. Pearl ear-rings, a circlet of white gold on her brow, she looks the queen she was intended to be.

“Dara, either you’ve come up in the world, or you’re going to a wedding.”

A smile. She extends her hand.

“I’m glad you came. They said you might not.”

Though I take a step toward her, I do not take her hand; we are in Tir-na Nog’th.

She raises an eyebrow.

“So. You do hate me.”

“I thought it was you who hated me. Perhaps I’m remembering it wrong, that day above the abyss.”

“We remember that day differently.”

“So forgive and forget, bygones are bygones, no more bickering and arguing over who killed who?”

“That is what I want.”

Though I should be glad, to no longer be hated for defending myself against her beloved Duke Borel, anger long suppressed flares within me, heats the words so they burn me as I speak them.

“He cost me Deirdre. Do you know that?”

“What?”

“Deirdre, my sister. Because your noble fencing master, Borel, had something to prove, he got in my way, delayed me, kept me from reaching Deirdre in time. In all my family, there was no one I loved more.”

She blinks, her dark eyes widening in surprise.

The rage, which so swiftly filled me, drains away just as quickly, and I am myself again.

“I couldn’t save her. She died. I thought you should know.”

For a moment there is something besides surprise in those eyes, as she, too, re-experiences the emotions of that day heavy with death and loss.

“Well, I — I don’t know what to say.”

“That you understand will be enough.”

She hesitates, possibly trying to put herself in my place, possibly seeking some larger and more universal understanding. Or maybe just struggling with the mixed bag of feelings she holds which has my name on it. Or something else. Whatever the cause, she looks me directly in the eye as she makes her reply.

“I do. I understand.”

“Good,” I say, becoming aware of the sensation of relief in me, that it is good indeed to hear her say that, as I say the rest, “Then I’m going to quit while I’m ahead this time.”

With that I sheathe Grayswandir and march past her. She is turning her head this way and that, bewildered, she now silver and shadow, me only a confusing memory for someone who can only be revealed by the the light of the moon.

Sorry, and not sorry. Sorry I killed Borel, since he meant something to Dara. Not sorry, since he had given me no other choice. Sorry that when I should be chasing the Diamond, I have been chasing old pain. Not sorry to have just experienced catharsis in a dream. Sorry I have come this way again, where mystery and history court each other beneath the eternal stars. Not sorry for the chance to do what must be done.

Perspective. Look at it one way, see something, another way and see something else.

Something in my mind shifts as I enter the palace, where the interior light and shadow are not like that found out in the night air here, but seem to move as I move, darkness flowing from one corner to the next as I pass. Light without source permeates the place like a plasma or noctilucent mist, drifting left, dropping, then rising, easing forward, pausing, its course like that of a twig bouncing and bobbing in the ponderous current of a rocky stream, slowing and wandering as it empties into some marsh, uncertain, questing. Avoided by me, where the shadows crouch and breathe on either side, the blackness there is absolute, suggesting holes out in space where the final and ultimate state of collapse goes on forever.

Does the unsteady trail of silver lead me, or merely anticipate impulses sloshing around within my subconscious? Did I just receive absolution from Dara, or give it?

And is that someone in a blue cloak running from right to left across my path, toward the southern wing?

And once again I am running...

When one walks — or runs — within the reflection of Amber in the sky, time is not what it is in the day-world. You have your wits about you, the use of all your faculties and whatever skills you’ve mastered over the years, yet move through time and space like one still asleep. Memories, plans, fables, wishes, pasts, futures — all one thing, found in a single volume where you can jump to any page. Or, perhaps a better analogy, the telescope through which we view our experiences has been reversed. Instead of the world going about its business, while the sleeping mind fogs up and wanders aimlessly and without regard for causality or continuity, it is Tir-na Nog’th that stumbles through jumbled time as though asleep while the mind remains as lucid as ever.

So what is the difference? You are picking your way through the litter of your life either way. I suppose the glitch comes when the piper arrives with the dawn and a missed payment means a long walk off the short pier of the sky-city into the great drowning sea. That’s the fatal problem confronting the seeker of oracular knowledge who fails to distinguish between safely dreaming in one’s own bed and taking a stroll up where the night makes moonshine.

There is a certain ignorance and arrogance which comes of having grown up around such wonders and taking them for granted, not questioning them. You could attribute it to the overconfidence and short-sightedness which are the heritage of any who are born to power and privilege which they themselves did not earn, the same reckless pride which happily assists with the downfall of all empires, dynasties and noble lineages. But I would go further and add that it is also a consequence of the provinciality with which all beings are burdened, wherever they may be on some social hierarchy.

A lot of sophistry you might see there, and I would be forced to agree. Because by the end of the day we’re all going to make mistakes.

For some time now — really, since Rebma — the real world and the dreamworld had become confused, even interchangeable. The recent business with Dworkin had taken it to a new level and left things more muddled than ever. It was a question I had asked, and thought I had answered, during the conflict between Amber and Chaos. Reality, I had concluded, is something other than solipsism, is more than the product of the mind. The Courts of Chaos had existed before Amber, and so reality was more than Amber. And more than Dworkin, even if his act of inscribing the Pattern had somehow brought Shadow into being.

Yet if one looks into Shadow, one sees one’s own mind reflected there. This is true for anyone, for everyone. Does reality somehow emerge out of the meeting of all minds? Though how can a mind react, learn and develop, without a pre-existing reality to push against? A problem in circularity and paradox. Chicken versus egg.

It was very simple. While in Trump contact with Dworkin, his dream had felt more real, more solid, and to be of greater consequence than anything I had experienced in a long while. It felt a lot more like something actually happening, certainly, than moving through the quiet and hollow dark, where the world from which we had come was more remote, more tangled, and more beyond comprehension than ever.

Steps, arches, doorways and tunnels had been cut from the living rock to link the segments of the course we followed. Downward we went, sometimes, but for the most part we climbed. We spoke very little and only as needed, which well suited the mood of our company.

In all the long centuries, I had never guessed there was a secret passage up through Kolvir to a point high on the mountain’s southwestern side.

My mistake.

Who had constructed this underground route, or why, I had no idea. But it was common knowledge that a system of caves ran beneath Kolvir, and that some had been developed as Amber’s dungeons. Beyond that, nothing general was known. The only purpose I could imagine were mining operations. Though I had never heard of mining in Amber’s mountains, it would have been a logical thing to do. Where had the stone for the palace come from, or the materials for the rest of the city? From Kolvir and her sister mountains? Why not? Who could say who had in times forgotten laid out the streets, dug the foundations, planted the gardens and trees, wrought the statues and fountains, erected the mighty walls, or lifted the towers up to where the clouds follow the winds? Not I.

And then we were there.

Light leaked around the edges of a rubble pile before us, light from the outside world. We zagged right and zigged left, and then did that again, the ground beneath our feet rising to meet the overhang of rock above till we were crouching. The overhang ended abruptly and we were outside, standing under a ledge.

“At last!”

Bill wasn’t alone in his joy at the sight of light and freedom, but he was the most vocal about it.

“Indeed,” I assented as I got clear of the ledge and straightened, taking a gander at the stars just coming out above Arden and Garnath.

It was good to taste the breeze again.

Maio was the last to join us out in the open. Our man with the blue light, who had led us through the heretofore unsuspected underground maze, was already a short distance up Kolvir’s slope, waiting.

Bill was grumbling, muttering about something in a voice too low for me to make out.

“What, Bill? Sorry, I didn’t catch that last part.”

There was a look of extreme unhappiness on his face as he turned toward me.

“My wife, Corwin. Alice. She has no idea whether I am alive or dead. She only knows that I went to meet you at the Wild Blue Restaurant. By now, she knows the building was attacked.”

For just a moment, I felt bad. It had not even occurred to me what Alice might be going through, worrying about the man who had shared the ups and downs of half a century with her.

“Bill, I — There’s been a lot going on, but...yes. Hadn’t thought of it from your viewpoint.”

“Corwin, it’s been days. She must think I died in the attack.”

Would she even survive the shock of the news? Doing the math, I estimated her age to be somewhere in the sixties. It would be a blow, surely, but...she would handle it, process it, be aged by it, but live. Still...why should she? Wasn’t there something I could do, or at least something I could say?

“I wish there was — wait! Hold on.”

“What?”

It was hitting me with a bit of a delay, my mind having been distracted by recent goings-on. It was obvious, now that I remembered. I was wearing Merlin’s cloak, and still carrying his backpack. I reached in.

“Here,” I said, taking the item I had pulled from the pack, handing it to him.

Bill knotted his bushy eyebrows, eying it skeptically.

“A cellphone? From everything you and Merlin have told me about Amber, the place is medieval. There aren’t any cellphone towers around here.”

By the time he had those words out, I had the next item in hand and was concentrating on it, opening the connection.

“What are you doing?”

No answer for Bill from me, as I focused on the Trump my son had drawn.

Maio answered for me with, “I think I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Turn on the cellphone.”

While they talked, while our guide waited and watched, my mind found its way through the Trump to a laptop, a laptop sitting in an empty hotel room in Manhattan. At the sight of that computer screen, still tracking live data from Princeton, I was suddenly glad I had paid the week in advance.

I motioned Bill closer.

“Stand beside me, and hold the cellphone in front of you as close to the Trump as you can.”

Bill complied; I could feel him standing close. Then I saw his hand holding the opened cellphone in my line-of-sight.

“Place your call,” I told him.

“Huh?”

“Place your call,” I repeated. “There are plenty of cellphone towers in Manhattan.”

The number he called was from the last call made to Merlin’s phone. It was also, I assumed, the number Bill knew best.

The phone rang, clicked as someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Alice?” Bill said. “Alice it’s me. I’m okay. I’m...I’m away right now. But I’m okay. I love you and I’m okay...”

[...to be continued...]

Copyright © 2012 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Chapter Five: Dworkin’s Dream

2011-10-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER FIVE

“You’re...dead...?”

She had taken the others to the levels above where quarters and refreshments waited, leaving me alone for a few minutes with the man who was my grandfather.

He did not look very alive.

And how, I wondered, could he still be alive? Centuries could not even describe the span of his existence. Millennia had seen him through his studies and applications of those studies, and the building, dismantling, and rebuilding which had presumably led to the establishment of the kingdom Oberon would come to rule. What sights he had seen, what events he had witnessed, what tragedies he had suffered, what ecstacies he had known, what a pageant of faces had moved into and out of his life — how much did he remember of it all? Small wonder he had seemed half crazy to the rest of us. Somehow, as the universe had transformed itself over the ages, so had he. What he had been when his journey had begun, I had no idea. But the transformation that had mattered most answered the question of how he had done it. As he had told me in our most memorable meeting, the Pattern sustained him. Whoever and whatever Dworkin had been had forever been altered when he had created — and at the same time had become — the Pattern on that day of music, blood and fire.

“What did you say?”

She came further into the room, walked over to where I stood.

“You’re...dead...?” I repeated with a touch more irony.

“And you were not yet born,” Cymnea answered, moving past me and reaching to take Dworkin’s hand for a moment before laying it atop the blanket.

“True,” I said, stepping back so she could resume her seat. “So why don’t you tell me how you are still alive?”

Accepting the chair, she pointed to the other side of the room, where a wardrobe, chair and waist-high cabinet stood.

“There is wine in the sideboard.”

“It would be a shame to waste it,” I decided, and, acting on that decision, returned minutes later with two brimming glasses and one bottle, setting the items on the bedside table.

She said, “Thank you,” and waited while I brought the other chair over to the bed.

As I sat down, Cymnea leaned toward Dworkin, pulling something from beneath his pillow. Settling back, she turned my way again, lifted her glass and touched it to mine.

“To disappointing those desiring our demise.”

“And to that state of affairs continuing for many centuries more,” I agreed, taking up my own glass.

We drank.

“Your brothers Osric and Finndo, my sons,” she began, keeping the object she had retrieved out of view in the folds of her dress, “died so you might live.”

“So you do know my name.”

She looked away, regarded Dworkin.

“I have hated you.”

Since I had nothing to say, and it seemed she did, I joined her in considering the man lying in the bed. As the room was not very well lit, and he was sequestered in its dimmest corner, almost entirely concealed by the blanket, it was nigh impossible to determine his condition. It seemed, nevertheless, that he lived. While it was possible Oberon’s former queen enjoyed sitting in the dark serenading corpses, it was more likely that she was instead his nurse. She might hate me, but all indictations suggested Dworkin, at least, was the object of her goodwill, even affection.

“Yes,” she said, watching me watch Dworkin and seeming to read my thought, “he is alive. He is not the man he once was, not the sage ready with wise counsel. Yet he lives.”

“Alive, but bedridden. What has laid him so low?”

“Who can know? Since Oberon’s death, he has not been the same. But perhaps you can find out.”

“Me?”

“No one has ever understood Dworkin, where he goes, what he does, what he wants.”

“That’s true. And I remain as mystified as anyone else. Possibly more so. The mystification of which I speak includes yourself, by the way. How you’re alive, what any of us are doing in a hidden tree house, who those little guys are who brought us here, why you are looking after Dworkin. I’ve been away from Amber for years and wouldn’t mind being brought up to date.”

Cymnea looked down at the floor.

“I have told you I hated you. Your mother stole Oberon from me. He divorced me and married Faiella, whose first act as queen was to give birth to you. Do you understand?”

She looked up.

So I said, “You were the injured party; you wanted justice, a fair outcome,” and took another sip of wine.

“My sons hated you, too. But when Oberon sent them to their deaths, that changed. We no longer hated you, Eric, or your mother. We hated Oberon.”

“Eric had been born to Faiella out of wedlock,” I said, recalling old family lore, “leaving the legitimacy of any claim he might make on the throne very much in doubt. Me, though, born to Faiella as queen...a blatant affront to your entire clan. Your feelings are understandable.”

“But they changed,” she continued. “We understood what was really happening. We were being exiled.”

It came back to me then, the ride from the summit of Kolvir down toward the Grove of the Unicorn and the Valley of Garnath. I had just fled yet another deadly encounter in Tir-na Nog’th, the artifact known as the Dreaming Diamond in hand, me already partially attuned to it, having undergone the ritual of walking it through the silvery reflection of the Pattern in the sky. Oisen, long-dead prince from before even Benedict, our oldest surviving brother, had attacked me as I had stood before my mother. Oisen and Faiella had both been ghosts, of course, actors moving on the stage of Tir-na Nog’th in a drama woven from my own fancy, from things welling up from within my subconscious. And the play had provided grist for a discussion of the deaths of Oisen, Osric and Finndo, of the end of the era defined by Cymnea’s time as Queen of Amber.

“Exile? That is not the story I have heard, not even when told by members of your family.”

“And what does my son Benedict say?”

“Nothing. He is adamant in his refusal to discuss such matters.”

That brought a sigh from her.

“He is my eldest, and was always so serious. His obsession with war I at first saw as his attempt to make sense of violence and the irrational impulses which drive us. So studious, sensitive, and compassionate, I could not understand his preoccupation with fighting and killing.”

“At first?”

“He was driven by love, and then by anger.”

“Anger? Toward whom? Oberon?”

“He was angry with his hero, Oisen.”

“If you’re trying to muddy the picture, I can only say, ‘Well done.’”

“Oisen was Oberon’s favorite. Oberon himself schooled him in war and sword-play. Dworkin taught him music and magic. Benedict idolized him and learned from him all that Oisen would teach.”

“But then something happened,” I surmised.

“Your mother happened,” she answered, elaborating. “Eric happened, and you happened. Oberon more than divorced me. He voided the marriage entirely. It was as if we had never been husband and wife, as if I had not been his queen, as if I had not borne him three sons.”

I heard the bitterness, saw it in her eyes and in the tightness around her mouth. And I guess I even felt an echo of it somewhere inside myself. The facts, after all, were the facts. Oberon had not been the most attentive father, and I doubted there was a one of us who had not felt somehow slighted by him, ignored, overlooked or passed over in some fashion. You might get used to it, but you never got to like it. No one likes being rejected, told, in effect, they don’t matter. While the universe has been telling living beings from Day One that they are of no consequence, that’s an impersonal reflex action of the cosmos. To be treated thus by a fellow being somehow hurts more. In matters of the macrocosm, we might lack significance and still keep our egos intact. But within our own microcosm? Not so much.

Marriages between nobles, however — especially among royalty — are always political arrangements. And politics is a contact sport where the referee is often paid to look the other way. So I wondered: How naïve could Cymnea really have been?

“We were never formally exiled. My family was old blood, with ties to Chaos, and had grown stronger while I was Queen. The story told in the court of Amber was that Osric and Finndo went to a hell-world to staunch a threat to Oberon’s allies. They led a force sent to reinforce troops in the field under Oisen’s command.”

“Then why wasn’t Benedict sent with them? I mean, if this was really about your family’s objections to the divorce.”

“Benedict had already been sent somewhere else by your father.”

“Then why not wait for him to come back?”

“Because if Benedict had gone with them, Osric and Finndo would have returned.”

Saying nothing, I finished my wine. She went on to explain.

“I was living with my family then, humiliated and in seclusion. But the story ran like wildfire. Benedict returned, I heard, and learned his brothers had been hurled into the jaws of certain death. He went after them. He was too late. All three were lost. All Benedict brought back was the sword you carry. He came straight to me, even before reporting to Oberon, to give me the news that Osric and Finndo were nowhere to be found.”

“What of Oisen?” I interjected. “He was a master strategist and, as you said yourself, he had instructed Benedict. He was clearly Oberon’s heir. What of him?”

“Benedict found him.”

Her delivery of that information was laden with fatalism. I knew that I was missing something, and pressed her for more detail.

“And I take it he was too late? So that Oisen perished along with your sons?”

“No,” she said solemnly, “He was just in time to kill Oisen himself.”

I watched her pour more wine into both our glasses. Her words had just struck me nearly like a physical blow. Not that I believed an offspring of Oberon would balk at killing a brother — there was a time when I would have (quite happily) granted Eric the benefit of an endless vacation in his own personal patch of six-feet-under. Caine had tried to murder me, and had actually taken Brand out of the world. Fiona had taken great pains to plant a thin blade between Brand’s ribs in a determined attempt to permanently remove him from the picture. No, it wasn’t that. Benedict was the one who reminded the rest of us to pursue ideals, to strive to adhere to some kind of a code. Then again, my own memory grimly reminded me, Benedict had slain the great-grandmother of his cherished Dara, and had then tried rather sincerely to prevent my heart from beating by sticking a sword through it. The sad fact was that the awful account of past misdeeds Cymnea was rendering might be all too true.

“That’s a rather large pile that I am not so sure I can swallow.”

She shrugged.

“I don’t care. I stopped caring about anything that day. I left Amber then, in mourning. My greatest fear was that Benedict would be the next to die. I left, and never returned. It was said I had died of grief, and so all came to believe.”

“You care about something, or you and I would not be here at Dworkin’s bedside.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “you are right. Dworkin rescued me from the storm that ran through Shadow during the war with Chaos. He had always been kind to me, kind to all of Oberon’s cast-offs, kinder than Oberon ever was. He needs me now, and so I need you. I need you to see.”

She reached into her dress and withdrew an object, the thing I presumed she had brought forth from beneath Dworkin’s pillow: a pack of cards. She placed them on the table beside the wine and the dulcimer.

“Because I can see through a Trump? So I take it you cannot. Still, there are others who can. Benedict certainly could.”

She put up a hand.

“Please, no. Only you can see as Dworkin does, for only you have done as Dworkin has done. You are the one who can find him where he is.”

Interesting. She seemed to know more of my story than I had guessed. Then again, how could this come as any surprise? She had had Dworkin at her disposal, and no one had ever known more about the disposition of all the worlds than he had. This made me curious, wanting to know more.

“Very well,” I said, taking a final sip, setting down the glass and picking up the pack of cards, making one of those split-second decisions one knows will change everything. “What have we got to lose?”

“The one on top,” she said, taking up her instrument and strumming it. “It is a self-portrait. Sit beside him, lay it on his forehead and go to where he is.”

I withdrew the top card, and it was a Trump of Dworkin.

Taking her advice, I got up and placed the card on Dworkin’s forehead, then sat down beside him, the springs creaking audibly as I gave my weight to the bed.

“You must hold his hand,” Cymnea coached, pulling the beginnings of a tune from her dulcimer.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Those are the instructions he left me. There should be music, best if a harp or lyre. But I know the dulcimer. There should be contact between the operator and the subject, between seer and seen — you may rest fingertips on his eyelids, or hold his hand. The card should touch you both. The seer must be an adept, or ideally a master.”

“A master of what?”

“Of the Line. Are you ready?”

Turning back to Dworkin, holding the card to his forehead with the thumb of my right hand while grasping his gnarled right hand in my left, I peered at the image on the card, into the image, through it. Never in my life would I have thought to employ a Trump at such close range. It was completely redundant, like speaking on the phone with someone standing right in front of you. On the face of it, totally absurd. Yet now, with Dworkin breathing so shallowly, unconscious and straddling that borderland separating life from death, it felt appropriate. So natural it seemed, that a part of my mind cast back through my memory, wondering if I’d done this before, even though I was reasonably certain I had not.

My sense of self slipped further and further away. As in meditation, or in certain dreams where we are not who we are, my identity retreated from me. Who was I really, and what, after all, is this “I” which is of such monumental importance to us all, anyway? Diffusion was what I felt, a gradual, pleasant, peaceful spreading outward. The name Corwin, which had never passed Cymnea’s lips during our conversation, was of no real consequence. What did it truly mean? I could be named anything, could be anything, and was, like anything else, part of everything.

The music was nice. A harp might indeed have been better, providing that nameless quality of being embedded in the notes and rhythms, as opposed to merely hearing them, music spinning around one like the eye of a whirlwind of sound. But the dulcimer was fine; she played it well. And she sang well, too. For, yes, she was softly singing now. I liked the song which lulled me, though I could not make out the words.

The edges of the card had disappeared along with the edges of my being, the artificiality of two dimensions at the same time yielding to a more fully realized experience of space. As Corwin went away, Dworkin came nearer. The dark eyes, the long nose, the stoop of the shoulders, the staff, the purple cloak over the orange garments covering most of his five-foot frame, the heavy white beard covering most of his face....

The wide balcony of indigo stone, its floorplan like the silhouette of a circus tent, jutted out into space, four parapets meeting at three corners beyond the walls of the narrow keep. Below swept a great and gentle plain the like of which I had never seen. Pentagonal in shape, a quilt of trapezoidal fields woven across it, alternately red and pale brown, the plain resembled an immense and peculiar chessboard. Like a chessboard, it was divided into the traditional sides: white and black, the colors of the stone of its two cities. Unlike a chessboard, though, it was crossed with lines of low hills and the five rivers that rolled down the slopes of the lone dormant volcano standing near its center. Four other keeps stood at the other corners of the plain, leaning at an outward angle, each an ethereal Pisa so tall they were lost in the clouds.

The most remarkable feature of the scene, though, was what lay beyond the plain: nothing. The five rivers roared as cataracts out over the five sides of the place into a perpetual night flecked with stars.

“Ah, peace in the valley.”

Turning toward the voice, I noticed the hooded figure in an orange robe at the corner to my left, the wind moving in waves over his garments.

“Yes, the residents seem to have retired,” I responded.

Looking up, I now saw the sun, visible through a rent in the clouds, shrinking without changing its position in the sky, as if it were rapidly retreating from where I stood or as if this tiny world were flying away from the sun at some fraction of light-speed. As the sun got smaller, of course, the night encircling the five horizons crept upward.

“After all,” I added drily, “it seems to be getting on toward evening.”

“Their war is fought,” the man said, “and both sides lost.”

I realized I knew the voice.

“Dworkin?”

He turned. Or, rather, they did. Standing in the corner to my right was another man, similarly clad in purple.

Both were Dworkin.

“Will the real Dworkin,” I requested, “please remove his cowl?”

They approached and cowls were pulled back; two Dworkins grinned at me.

“I have to keep myself company,” said the Dworkin in purple, “as I don’t get many visitors.”

“You’re the first,” added the Dworkin in orange.

“Glad I could make it,” I told them.

“And I am also glad,” the purple Dworkin agreed.

“Oh, yes,” the orange Dworkin chimed in, “we are glad you got out of the burning tower.”

“You know about that?”

They chortled, as if at some inside joke, and the Dworkin in purple said, “But you only escaped to be trapped here with me.”

“Trapped? Explains the claustrophobic feeling here. And, by the way, where are we?”

“In the maze.”

“In the labyrinth.”

I decided I no longer cared which spoke, that I would take them at their word and treat both as Dworkin.

“Looks more like a chessboard.”

“Well,” one of the Dworkins confessed, “it is a game.”

“What about the real world?”

“This is the real world.”

“Seems kind of artificial to me.”

“What’s the difference?”

In the back of my mind was the thought that this was all occurring through a Trump connection. Dworkin’s mind, his imagination, his ability to conceive of other realities, was responsible for what we were both experiencing. Nevertheless, he was right. That fact changed nothing, for the depth and completeness of his vision matched anything encountered in the waking world.

“Then if there’s no difference, why are you here rather than there? Why stay asleep, rather than waken?”

“There is one difference,” the Dworkin in purple conceded.

“Steps...crests...levels,” the other Dworkin added.

“Okay. Then what level is this?”

“A lower one, where I can recover.”

“Recover? From what?”

The floor beneath our feet trembled. I looked down and turned toward the keep, saw that orange blocks were mixed with the indigo stones, creating a bright spiral design. A door was set in the wall, and, looking up now, I saw how the exterior was scalloped, like immense waves of rock laid on their sides, end to end, growing smaller as the keep disappeared into the atmosphere, each long ascending curve encompassing several stories. A Babel-like tower, resembling something out of some Hindu or Chinese fable, soaring all the way up to Heaven itself.

“They’re coming,” a Dworkin said from behind me.

Not waiting for another cryptic comment, I walked quickly across the flagstones to the door. There was no handle, so I gave it a healthy shove. It gave not an inch. Looking for a keyhole, I saw none, but did observe a concave space the size of an egg, shiny, faceted, set within the door at eye level.

Indistinct sounds from deeper within the keep, already audible from the parapet, came louder now. Whoever was coming would no doubt be along any minute.

“Damn. Left my lock-picks at home.”

“Oberon asked you to bring the jewel,” I heard the voice of Dworkin say behind me, “Use it now to open the door.”

Inhaling deeply in an effort to draw patience into me, I examined myself. I was in my usual colors — black cloak, black trousers, gray shirt, silver belt, silver scabbard. No jewel.

Still, maybe there was something.

Drawing Grayswandir, the only talisman I possessed, I scrutinized the hilt for any surface which might conceivably align with the hollow in the door.

“Well?” Dworkin prodded.

I shrugged. What the hell, why not give it a shot?

The blade flat and pointing straight down, I pressed the hilt into the place in the door where Dworkin indicated the jewel should go. On a sudden inspiration, I visualized the Dreaming Diamond, recalled my journey through it to the Pattern on the other side, my Pattern. I had plucked it out of Tir-na Nog’th with this very blade, held the stone in my hand...

The door split in half and opened toward us.

Without waiting, both Dworkins pushed past me. Never one to run with scissors, I sheathed Grayswandir before following.

Brass. The floor, the tall tapered columns rising from that floor, the ceiling above — all of brass. Rock gardens spread to either side, beyond them sheets of glass separating the interior from trees and flowers on outdoor terraces fanning out from the walls of the keep.

The Dworkins had already passed through this open area into a corridor waiting on the other side. The ceiling was lower there. The walls, floor and ceiling of the passage were of white stone decorated with scenes of strange plants and animals wrought in gold inlay. I passed several pairs of pillars, and by the arched doorways set between them, before reaching the fork where the corridor branched to the right and the left at forty-five degree angles. A glowing tree sculpted of jade, more than three feet tall, stood atop a silver pedestal in an alcove, illuminating the intersection.

Just as I caught up to both incarnations of my grandfather, the one wearing orange veered down the branch to the right, while the other went to the left.

My future looked orange as I hastened after Dworkin. He disappeared through an opening half-way down on the left. Catching up with him there, together we moved into a triangular lobby which I took to be the core of the keep’s structure. Parallel curtains of vertical metal rods eight feet apart hung there in the center, slender obsidian slabs like oversized piano keys suspended between their side-by-side crescents, floating steps of a winding stair. The Dworkin in purple, coming from the other side, met us at the landing.

They immediately mounted the stairs.

The tromp of many feet was audible here. I looked down. The whorls of an endlessly elongated snail’s shell spiraled out of sight. In motion, in great numbers, not yet near enough to make out clearly, chanting something incomprehensible, bestial and man-like forms were swarming up the stairs from below. Their colors like the cities on the plain: white and black.

Saying “Wait!” loud enough for my grandfathers to stop and turn, I ran back the way we had come, returned to the junction. Taking up the tree in the crook of my right arm with a grunt (it was heavier than I had thought), I dropped to one knee to hug the pedestal to my chest with my left (unfortunately, just as heavy as I had thought), and stood slowly, carefully keeping balance. At something less than a jog, I made my way as fast as I could back to the stairway. The Dworkins surprised me by being right where I had left them.

Leaning a little to look down the stairwell again, one thing was clear: They were a lot closer.

So I hurled the stone tree down the stair, and then pitched the pedestal down after it.

Yeah, like bowling pins they went down. Some of them went down, anyway. And, like the opposite of pins going down, we went up, up the stairs. Also — a bonus — the chanting had stopped, to be replaced by cries of woe.

Stairs and rods thrumming and rumbling around us, we took four landings before stepping off into a long passage with glazed walls of tawny pixelated sand. Light streamed down from kidney-shaped openings in the ceiling above. A dozen wide, shallow steps waited for us at the far end.

“Dworkin, why are we running?”

The Dworkin in purple slowed till we walked abreast of one another, and took my arm. His twin hurried on ahead.

“Because you elected to become part of this dream, where the forces of Entropy pursue us, who can harm us because we are closer to the lower energies here.”

“Except none of this is real,” I countered, “and all I have to do is block the Trump contact.”

He stopped, there at the bottom of the steps. So I stopped, too.

“Go on, then,” he said, grinning up at me, “Try.”

“All right,” I said, frankly relieved to have his permission to abandon him to this nightmare.

So for a moment I tried, tried to break free of the link keeping our minds in proximity with one another. It should have been easy enough, since it was an exercise of my own will, after all, that was responsible for that link. All I had to do, in effect, was to relax my grip, and we would part.

But something peculiar at once became evident. There was no longer a part of me somewhere outside of all this that could turn the card, look away, stage a graceful exit. His dream was now as much mine as it was his own.

“See?”

Unfortunately, I had a feeling I was beginning to.

Quickly mounting the steps, we found ourselves at one end of a wide court filled with the sound of rushing water. Waterfalls screened the walls, except where they were interrupted by metal doors, and by alcoves and galleries holding objets d’art, sculpture, seating, books, fountains. Three stand-alone walls were joined together as a large flatiron-like object in the center, the two walls facing us displaying shelves full of books, scrolls and curios.

As much to allay my own fears as to reassure Dworkin, I said, “Nevertheless, our bodies remain safe in the real world.”

Keeping his eyes on mine, Dworkin shook his head.

“If one becomes lost here,” he said, tapping his forehead, “one never wakes. There is no reality without the mind.”

He led the way around to the other side of the shelves, where I saw the third side of the flatiron was a single floor-to-ceiling mirror, and also noticed a door standing open on the other side of the court. The other Dworkin had presumably passed that way.

Standing before the mirror, Dworkin turned over in his hands a scroll he had pulled from one of the shelves, studying the writing on the ribbon which bound it. He nodded, apparently satisfied, then glanced over at me.

“You must stand beside me if you wish to escape.”

I was standing off to the side at the corner of the large three-sided bookcase/mirror in order to maintain a view of the way we had just come, where any moment I expected the forces of Entropy, as Dworkin called them, to appear. The air was warmer here, rising through slots in the floor, and fluctuating yellow-green light from panels overhead moved like an aurora over the bindings of books, figurines, myself, the compressed features of Dworkin’s face.

“Yes,” Dworkin remarked absently, keeping his attention on the mirror, “they are close.”

Joining him before the mirror, I noticed something right away. Though I stood on Dworkin’s right, in the mirror my position was reversed so that — from my perspective — I was on the left, though if the reflected image of Dworkin were real I would still be on his right. Likewise, while he held the scroll in his left hand, his reflection held a scroll in what to me was the hand displayed farthest to the right in the surface of the mirror.

Watching the mirror, I reached across my body to rest my right hand on Grayswandir’s hilt, seeing the hand on the left side of the mirror reach toward the right, mimicking my movement in reverse.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall...” I said aloud.

“Magic?” Dworkin began, “You know that any sufficiently advanced technology—”

“Later, Dworkin,” I said, hearing now the shouts and the stamping of boots coming toward us, “they’re here.”

“Then look into the mirror with me,” Dworkin instructed calmly, lowering the hand that held the scroll and resting his right hand on my arm, “pay attention to the water in the reflection as I am doing, and walk with me toward what you see.”

Our reflections seemed to melt into the rippling surface of the waterfall as we took a first step. I thought I could feel its mist. The clanking of our pursuers’ armor, their angry bellows, the answering bird-like cries of their beasts, were now so near that I felt if I turned I would see them. The chanting heard earlier on the stairs, much louder now, could be made out without any trouble and it was: “The end is nigh!” We took a second step and were wetted by the water. Our third step took us through the torrent to the other side.

Beside me, Dworkin stumbled, but maintained his grip on my arm.

Turning to get a better idea of what had happened, where we were, whether any hostile entities were in the vicinity, I noticed some things. We stood on a kind of island, a moat of foaming water around us easily bridged by several paths of stepping stones, blocks of granite rising behind us in a marriage of ramps and stairs winding in and out, up and around, through a complex lattice of stone faces, water tumbling over some of them. Shifting blue light passed through the water and gaps in the honeycomb of stone above us and fell upon our island. Corridors ran out from this center, one lying on the other side of the line of stones before us. A long hall could be seen, shoebox-sized panels of pale brown wood forming walls here and there adorned with glowing symbols, the translucent ceiling carved in the pattern of tree-leaves and the source of yellow light. A shimmering surface was visible in the square of light marking the end of the hall, which I guessed to be corrugated metal or yet another indoor waterfall.

Returning my attention to the man beside me, I asked, “What are we doing here? What am I doing here? How is any of this helping you recover? How am I helping?”

Blinking, and reaching out cautiously with his left hand, extending the scroll toward me, he said, “You will need this. Take it.”

Accepting the scroll, I tried again.

“What about my question?”

He blinked, very slowly, keeping his eyes closed for a few moments, opening them, repeating the process. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, and didn’t particularly care. Though I was rather fond of Amber’s mage-in-residence, right then I wanted answers.

“We are exploring the greatest library in existence,” he said finally, staring straight ahead. “Or, rather, we are exploring my recollection of it, of a replica resurrected in a dream. But the Pattern forgets nothing, for information, like matter and energy, is conserved. This copy, therefore, in its key essentials does not meaningfully differ from the original.”

“And, as you explained once before,” I mentioned, so he would know I understood his point, “you are the Pattern. Still, I detect a flaw in there someplace. As your direct descendant, I can attest to a remarkable episode of memory loss, some of which persists even to this day. Even though, like you, I have also cast a Pattern.”

Dworkin slowly opened his eyes again, inspiring me to pass my hand before them. As I had begun to suspect, his gaze shifted not an iota.

“What you forgot, you were eventually able to recall by resorting to the Pattern,” he reminded me. “That is your answer. Parts of your mind may fail to communicate properly for periods of time, but the Pattern cleared for you the paths that had become overgrown so that you could walk them once again.”

“Okay, you have resolved the contradiction between information conservation and memory, perhaps. But you haven’t really provided any answers yet. What’s going on?”

“We are here,” Dworkin began, “because the Pattern I drew is being distorted by a competing configuration, and entropy is being accelerated. The Pattern shields me, but I must shield it and the minds that ward it. This can leave me weak and overextended. So I am here, recovering. You are here because my nurse knows you to be a Master of the Line who can help me. And you have helped me already.”

This was the second time I had been awarded that title, which had formerly been a common means for referring to Dworkin, for ages the only such master in existence. I was not entirely comfortable with it, but I chose to ignore it in order to keep chasing what I was after: knowledge.

“I’ve helped you? How?”

Dworkin gave my arm a small squeeze. The power of his grip served as a reminder of something I had learned in our previous get-together; namely, that he was much stronger than he looked.

“You brought me to this level.”

Shaking my head, I politely disagreed.

“That may be one way of putting it. Another more valid way would be: You brought me.”

He chuckled.

“That is, of course, how it has seemed to you. But before you came, I was unable to leave the parapet where you found me.”

Reflecting on our journey, I recalled my opening the locked door giving onto the interior of the keep.

“All right, granting I have been of some assistance, there’s still a fact you’re overlooking: We remain lost in this place.”

“How so?” he asked me, staring straight ahead, continuing his action of slow blinking. “We stand on the Natural History level beneath Stratigraphy Stair. You hold the scroll and the forces of Entropy have been temporarily outdistanced. We have come very far, very quickly. And now I cannot proceed without your help.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I can no longer see.”

That had been my guess, though it made little sense to me, as up to this point his eyes had obviously been working just fine.

“What has affected your vision? You led us this far.”

“The Pattern,” he answered me. “It is being distorted, as I said. Neither I nor it are as we were, and my sight comes and goes. If we get where we are going, you shall see for yourself and then make up your own mind what to do about it. But we waste time, and Entropy is gaining on us again. You must lead me up the Stair now.”

For an instant I considered pressing him further. But here’s the thing. This was Dworkin, the being least understood by anyone (excepting, perhaps, the Unicorn). No one I had ever met was more mysterious and unfathomable. No one I had ever met knew as much as he did. On top of that we were in what, by definition, was his domain: his own mind. In effect, I was Dante and he was my Virgil; I had to trust him.

So up into the honeycomb we went.

As I led him up the chaotic way, we moved through a mazy building where water was always moving somewhere, but never where we were, where the light shifted between green and blue, where sometimes we walked at the outer edge of the edifice and sometimes deep within. The slabs beside us and above, grainy and striated, were embedded with fossils of ancient and bizarre creatures, very primitive at the beginning of our climb and less so as we progressed, creating the impression that we were rising up through the buried past. An interesting effect, though it struck me as an unnecessarily tedious and difficult way to reach the floors above, especially after the shortcut we had taken through the mirror. There was no denying its beauty, however.

“I think I may be catching on,” I announced at length, as we walked a ramp along the outside of the Jenga-like structure, “and I can’t help noticing we have climbed up several stories of this keep. If I understand this right, when we get to the top, you wake up.”

“Harmonics,” he said, clutching my cloak.

Our winding way brought us back within the vertical water garden.

“Harmonics?”

“Waves and crests. Steps and levels. Music and the mind. Geometry has everything to do with everything.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I admitted, noticing the stones around us becoming less jumbled, the spaces between them growing smaller or disappearing altogether.

The stone merged as we achieved a landing whose floor was a puzzle of pink quartz. To our left, a conventional stairway curved upward, the outer wall all of glass and gleaming bands of steel. Dworkin came up beside me, moved to the rail.

“Do you see?”

Even before reaching the rail myself, I saw. The pentagonal plain was so far below that most of its features were no longer distinguishable. In the twilight, only the volcano, three of the rivers, and the white city were visible. What had been lost in detail, however, had been gained in perspective. I was gazing down at one corner of a many-sided object somewhat resembling a soccer ball the size of a large moon, for each edge of the plain formed the edge of another pentagonal surface. Clouds swirled over the faces of the Platonic solid below, some of them in sunlight, some not. The other keeps — there were a dozen or more — were clearly not keeps at all, but spindles rising from the corners of this world.

“Maybe I’m beginning to,” I replied. “If Cymnea’s dulcimer-playing, the polyhedral planetoid within your dreaming consciousness, and the Pattern all can be understood as expressions of a single system of mathematical relationships, then geometry might be the key which unlocks reality. But,” I continued, turning away from the dizzying prospect to regard Dworkin, “I’m not sure what practical good that information does either you or me. Or, for that matter, what it has to do with the price of tea in China. Pythagoras and other great minds reached similar conclusions without mastering reality.”

“That is precisely why it has practical value, Corwin,” Dworkin said, seeming to study the cosmic scene beyond the glass. “We are masters of reality. Never forget that.” Looking up at me with a clear and focused gaze, so that I knew he was able to see again, he said, “Now let us have a look at that scroll.”

Complying, I slid the ribbon off the scroll, pulled it open, and together we examined it.

There were diagrams, illustrations, notes, and marginalia on the parchment. But what caught my eye were sketches of polyhedra of all types, which clearly pertained directly to our conversation. There was also a schematic of the keep in which we now stood, and I could not resist brushing one of the illustrations with a fingertip. As I suspected, the surface was cold there. It was a Trump, as I suspected all the lifelike drawings were — and there was one of Dworkin, and one of me.

“There,” I heard Dworkin say while my eyes moved up and down the scroll as I sought to unravel its full meaning. “The way out. Do not tarry too long at the Wheel of Worlds. If I wake before you, you will never leave.”

Turning to him to ask him exactly what he was talking about, a certain level of consternation assailed me as I realized what had just happened.

Dworkin had vanished and left me stranded in his dream.

Still clutching the scroll in my left hand, I stepped out of the dim corridor into the light.

The light. Domes over the outer walls giving way to the greater and higher domes rising above the center, domes of yellow tile and beaten gold, the base of each a ring of tall windows, light streaming down from them all. The windows beneath the lower domes were colorful things, casting rainbow rectangles upon the gray-white stone of the floor and the rugs of red and blue. Towering columns rose up from that floor to uphold the arches that lifted the upper domes above those at the edges of the great hall. Galleries, on the ground floor and stories above, curved in semi-circles beyond the columns. Chandeliers hung about thirty feet above, scattering light from their lenses and prisms.

A couch of pale jade or limestone rested on an intriguing dais at the opposite end of this wide, atrium-like space. The dais held the couch as a setting would its stone, a dragon-shaped thing of crystal, great pinions resting on the floor to either side, the coils of its tail steps leading up to the high seat, the lower jaw the floor upholding the couch, the upper jaw the canopy, the rectangle of red carpet spilling from the couch to the floor like a tongue. Half-way between myself and the dais, standing alone beneath a larger, more elaborate chandelier hanging over the center of the court like some wire and crystal version of inverted Queen Anne’s Lace, was an artificial tree carved from carnelian, garnet or jasper, sporting a score of branches decked with copper leaves, as well as unlit candles and lanterns. The tree’s most notable ornament was the mechanical songbird perched atop its highest branch.

On cushions, couches, and on the floor itself lounged men and women whose hair and skin were either as black as outer space, or as white as the evening star. They were all of them tall, healthy people, all garbed as courtiers, knights and nobles. The women were without exception beautiful, their smooth faces seeming to my eye gentle and compassionate, while the men were well-built, bearded individuals all bearing the same ferocious expression conveying extreme ire and animus.

Aside from their unusual pigmentation, there were a couple of other peculiar aspects of their situation worth noting. Except where differences of hair and skin arose, the men could all have been brothers, and the women could all have been sisters. They appeared to be clones. The other thing was this: They were all asleep.

A fairy-tale.

Into that fairy-tale, from the shadows of an arcade to the right, stepped something unexplainable and as mysterious as poetry. A soft shape of light never completely still, yet never clearly observed in motion, elegant, graceful...here, then there.

She crossed between me and that tree, moving to the left. Just before she disappeared from view, she turned her head, her golden horn pointed toward me, capturing me and releasing me in a single glance.

The Unicorn.

Dreams are mysteries, and every fairy-tale a poetic puzzle. And time, I knew, was running. Yet, while Dworkin’s warning was a reminder that Time not only never goes on foot, but prefers jet-travel to the mere flapping of wings, I wanted to solve this.

Having no interest in breaking the spell, I stepped carefully over and past the bodies. A small noise caused me to look across the court, my hand on Grayswandir’s hilt. While I paused, alert for new disturbances, wary and waiting, a lady only ten feet away moved her arm, turned her head, eyes never opening, became still and silent once more.

There were no further signs of activity as I made my way over to the nearest gallery on the left. Keeping my eyes open for stirring nobility, I sought an exit. A guard sitting on the floor with his back to the doorframe and his chin on his chest, spear leaning against the doorway, forced a minor detour before I could step outside.

Minarets stood at the corners of a courtyard, where pools gleamed and fountains still played. Beyond the minarets, instead of the icy night I had expected: blue skies, wisps of cloud-mist, sunlight. Nine black doves circled the octagonal tower of pink and gray marble that rose up from within a strange series of concentric circular bronze tracks in which shiny metal spheres slowly moved. In a recessed archway above a short flight of steps at the tower’s base was set an intricately worked brass door.

Looking back the way I had come, I saw only sky above the many-domed palace behind me. The top of the keep at last.

Giving my attention back to the tower and what would have to be my final ascent, I jogged up the steps, found the door ajar, went inside.

A study on the first floor, then a workshop or laboratory, then more than one floor lined with books, then a room full of machines, spare parts, supplies, and then...bells. Bells of all sizes, large and small, every one of bronze, hung in rows from metal beams. Three floors of bells. So: a belfry. I kept going, above the bells and the metal latticework of the walls around them. There was one room still above me, and I had to see it.

A circle of glass, every wall a window, reminding me of the lantern room atop Jopin’s lighthouse, the ceiling a cunning arrangement of mirrors and lenses like what might be found inside a telescope. A round pedestal supporting a hemisphere of crystal occupied the middle of the room. A keyboard made up of wooden levers instead of the usual ivory keys stood to one side, a bed curtained by woven ropes twined about with roses on the other.

Stretched upon that bed was a young maiden in a robe of white and gold silk. The blanket upon which she lay matched the violet coverlet under which Dworkin slumbered in another world, another realm of consciousness. Long yellow tresses spilled over the scarlet pillow that supported her shoulders and her lovely head.

Though she did not resemble them, like those I had discovered in the court below, she was asleep.

Moved by something I did not understand, but something easily recognized in the context of a dream, I crossed the room, stopping at the pedestal to look down into the crystal, where wheels turned and shiny spheres spun amid a spray of colors. In the center of the system moving on the surface of a mirror, about which all the other parts seemed to slide: a cabochon of amber.

Not truly comprehending any of what I glimpsed, I nevertheless knew I beheld something of significance. But, as Dworkin had cautioned, I could not tarry.

Yet at the beautiful maiden’s bedside, I could not help pausing once more.

Blonde, voluptuous, limbs smooth and fair. I brushed the curtains to the side, leaned over her, rested my hand on the edge of the bed. There was something familiar about her, something which drew me irresistibly. Her lips were full, and I pressed mine against them, closing my eyes. My left hand strayed to her hair, the scroll rolling free. Not that I cared. It was a kiss such as I had thought I had forgotten, a kiss like the first I had ever known, so many centuries ago.

There was an immediate response. She was kissing back, softly at first, languidly, perhaps still lost in her own dream, and then with a sweetness so stirring that I imagined I heard music. Then there was the light thrilling touch of her fingertips sliding up my neck and into my hair.

There was indeed music. Mild, aimlessly wandering notes, almost inaudible, reminiscent of chimes woken by a breeze. As the kiss went on and the shivers of its pleasure ran through me, the chimes yielded by degrees to the clear and resonant interplay of bell-like tones.

The bells were ringing.

My eyes opened. Hers did, too.

Her smile held kindness in it, and perhaps some joy, as she said, “Well, well. Welcome back, Corwin.”

Copyright © 2011 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Chapter Four: Nest of Crows

2011-07-28T15:37:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER FOUR

“So you have come back to lose another game of chess?”

He said it rather loudly, and winked as he said it.

Still a short old man, bent over by Time like a tree in the wind, he still wore a gray beard that hung down to his chest and had a hide dark as the sea that had toughened it. And he didn’t even try to hide the bottle of whisky he’d been drinking.

He was also still somewhat hard of hearing, which was at least partly responsible for the unnecessarily raised voice. Again, though, there was that bottle of whisky.

We had arrived late at night. Or pretty early in the morning. Either way, it was dark. I had led the way from the quay over the rocks and up the curving stair cut into the island’s native stone, turning my head frequently to check on those following me. They had been understandably stunned by the whole thing. By the sudden and inexplicable transition from where we’d been to where we were now. By what had been happening as we had left Manhattan behind. The tower had been shaking with the force of explosions, with the force of the impact with a large, fast-moving object sent winging across the sky.

I wasn’t sure if they had witnessed what I had, if they’d felt the explosions, having already passed through the Trump. But they had heard them, possibly even felt their heat.

Before taking a single step, I had said this much to reassure them: “You are safe. You are in a place where peace and justice reign. Further, you are under my protection. As for everything that has just happened, all will be explained. Finally, any who wish to go home will be taken back in due course. Again, you are safe and all is well.

“Now follow me.”

To the man now standing before me, I said, “Beware. I have brought a couple of chess masters with me. My advice? Ask them to go easy on you, hint you’re not much used to the game and that your play may be impaired a bit due to advanced years. Lull them into a false sense of security. And then crush them.”

He laughed and said, “Come in, come in! From the look of all of you, you could stand some of my galley fare. I only hope I have enough beer, bread and gravy.”

As he waved us inside, he added with another wink, “And I believe I have some leftover lobster and chowder.”

“Then lead on, MacDuff,” I assented happily, remembering the breakfast in the Wild Blue Restaurant that I would never have, very aware of how famished I was. “We are all yours.”

So we dogged his steps up to what I judged to be the fifth floor of the Lighthouse of Cabra. It had once been a room packed with the keeper’s junk, just like the lower floors, but several years ago I’d fixed it up for him, turning it into a kind of chart room, and it hadn’t changed much.

Nor had he. His name was Jopin, one of those Amberites who had been part of Amber’s history long before I’d been born. And he had once been kind enough to shelter me — a traitor and escaped prisoner at the time — for a season. Though I’d helped out around the place, tending the light, fixing up a few of the rooms (like this one), I had never properly repaid him for his hospitality. As it was a debt whose magnitude he would probably never guess, I doubted I ever would.

The others, at Jopin’s behest, seated themselves on old barrels and crates. But I took little notice of what they did, still greatly troubled by what had propelled us from the shadow Earth to the margins of Amber, still processing the event, seeking to gain an understanding of it consistent with my understanding of other things.

I have seen politics and what has been called ‘politics by other means’ — that is, war — and all the lies and betrayals made possible by such twisted games. Obliterated towns, battlefields made from charred farmland later sown with rotting corpses, still more corpses dumped by the hundreds and even thousands into pits like so many broken bottles and bags of garbage deposited for landfill, torture chambers for liberating ‘the truth’ from death’s-head grimaces drawn taut by agony and renunciation of all hope with last drops of sweat and blood, women of defeated peoples stumbling through the ruins of their homes after systematic rape by soldiers following orders, mouths of an entire deliberately starved nation stained with the grass they ate before dying, lies printed in newspapers and history books rationalizing evil in the name of God and country, concentration camps, lynchings, people chanting slogans of hate while murdering truth and beauty in book-fed bonfires. Save for a very timely (and brief) stint in the Bastille, I had never been on the scene of something as profound with anything like the proximity I had just experienced. What it had been, and what it implied, still numbed my brain.

Jopin, meanwhile, disappeared and then reappeared with the food he had promised, bringing out a dented old cookpot, a platter and a stack of bowls. As his guests began to tentatively dig into the chowder and grub he had provided, he left and returned again with a pitcher of beer that he set aside as he poured from the bottle into cups he pulled from a cabinet. Though he’d given them a quick wipe from a cloth, I blew dust from mine before any liquid touched the glass, and noticed others doing likewise, shaking their goblets and knocking loose debris on the edge of the table where we sat. The man went months at a time without seeing a soul and was unused to company.

“First a drink,” our host had said while fetching the items we now held, and now, done pouring, he completed the sentence with, “To waking up another day and finding ourselves above ground.”

It was good whisky, smooth, and sent a wave of warmth from my throat, through my chest and into my belly. Off to my right, I heard Bill’s appreciative sigh, so apparently I was not alone in this opinion.

“Now,” Jopin announced, once everyone had quaffed at least a portion of what had been dispensed, “we have an hour before midnight comes and I must go up to check on the lantern. Do you think you can tell me before the last hour of the day passes what brings you to Amber at such a dark and dangerous time?”

Torn between my desire for my lobster sandwich and the need to answer the question, diversionary tactics struck me as in order, so I said, “That one may be a little complicated. Why don’t we start with introductions, and let each in his turn tell his piece of the story? Jopin, these are friends of mine from the shadow Earth. My friends, this is Jopin, keeper of the Lighthouse of Cabra. Feel free to introduce yourselves.”

As I bit into my sandwich, I saw Bill grin. Though he might have been onto my game, it didn’t stop him from going first. Turning to his right, he extended his hand toward our benefactor, who reached over to accept it.

“Very nice to meet you, Jopin,” Bill began. “My name is Bill Roth, and I practice law in the state of New York. Corwin and I go back many years and were meeting for breakfast this morning. Morning where we were...”

His voice trailed off, so Jopin tried to help him out.

“That place you call New York, it is part of this Earth from whence you came?”

“Yes,” Bill got out, seeming confused or distressed.

Jopin glanced up at the rafters, thoughtful, then looked down again.

“Sailed out that way twice or thrice, each time with one of Corwin’s brothers,” the keeper said, pausing to shake his head. “Big oceans, wide and deep, but too near to the old Chaos, if you ask me. Had bad luck each time I was there. Last time was under Caine’s command, a place called Lisbon. Terrible earthquake hit and we were lucky to get out with most of our cargo.”

Bill still looked troubled and, recalling his jest of a heart-attack from earlier, I leaned forward to pour myself some beer, turning my head toward him as I did.

“Bill,” I asked softly, “You okay?”

“I think I am,” he answered, “but just tell me something, will you?”

“Sure.”

“What language are we speaking?”

Jopin smiled, while I chuckled.

“A minute ago,” Bill explained, seeming relieved that we appeared unperturbed by the question and now bent on making himself better understood, “I thought I heard you say Earth, but when I thought back on it, in my memory it sounded like Terra. When you said Cabra, I heard an Irish brogue. And when Jopin spoke, I may have heard three or four languages, but I understood them all. And when I listened to myself, it was the Queen’s English I heard last year in ‘A Merchant of Venice.’”

“Thari,” I said, smiling. “You’re hearing Thari. And speaking it.”

“But how?”

“Not sure I can give you a satisfying explanation. Thari is the lingua franca of Shadow in just the way French once was in the Old World. It also shares a common feature with Latin and Sanskrit, in that it is a mother tongue. The mother tongue, actually, source of all languages. But that is only part of the answer. I believe when the Pattern is used to move beings from one shadow to another, to a certain degree it somehow adjusts the minds of the travelers to their new conditions. Honestly, though, I don’t really know.”

Bill took a moment to absorb those facts before smiling faintly and saying, “Weird, but it almost makes sense.”

“‘Almost’ is good enough in horseshoes.”

“And in something else,” Bill said, giving my grin back to me. “Or so I hear, anyway. At my age, I am no longer a qualified expert.”

“I’m not too sure about that other one, so I am sticking with horseshoes.”

“Maybe it’s my turn now,” said the man on my left. “You can call me Maio.”

“The men in black,” I said, deciding to play a card I had been holding onto and watching for a reaction, “call you Raffy Quaoar Ma’iio.”

Maio shrugged.

“They got me dead to rights. My older, windier name. People like the shorter, easier one. Hey, you’re not the only dude with more than one name. I was kind of an activist in southern California back in the day. The guys in the suits don’t like activists. Are we gonna talk about the bad mojo that went down today? Or about ancient history?”

“Ancient history works for me,” I decided. “Why don’t we start with SSFL?”

Jopin touched Maio’s empty cup and asked, “Some beer to wet your whistle first?”

Instead of giving a yes or no answer, or some nonverbal response, Maio, the musician, surprised Jopin and Bill (and even me, a little) with something else:

“Wine for the high and mighty lord
and all his wealthy kin.
Whisky for the merry merchant
staying over at the inn.
Beer for the sweating sailor
following the feckless wind.
All three served at the table
on the green at the world’s end
to all who ever loved the sea
and called Old Man Lir his friend.”

Into the momentary silence left in the wake of Maio’s impromptu a cappella number, stone-faced, the man then supplied the more condensed response of, “Beer me.”

Jopin’s eyes were still wide as he poured from the pitcher into Maio’s glass.

“Friend of Old Man Lir, are you?” Jopin asked. “You know, I believe I may have seen your people braving the open sea in big canoes using sails and outriggers. The first sailors, some say. It’s been ages since I heard that rhyme.”

“My people,” Maio said, smiling a little, “were once sailors, hundreds of centuries before I came along. My home on the world we left was a place called Kayenta, out in the ass end of nowhere. But the Tongva and the Chumash both made me their brother, two tribes who still remember crossing the great round ocean from the Dream Country now lost. They ride that ocean even today in their ti’at and tomolo’o canoes. The first sailors, as you say, who do not forget the sea is a god, who can be an enemy. Or a friend.”

“SSFL, Maio,” I prompted.

Maio nodded, sipped, then said, “The story I just was telling. Which I will tell to you now. I was living in Topanga, a hop and a skip from Malibu and Santa Monica. Always have loved water, I guess. The gods know Arizona could use a little more of it. The ocean really turned me on. Surfing, sailing, scuba. Have a real rapport with dolphins, and got pulled into the Navy Marine Mammal Program. Dolphin training. A dolphin is just as smart as a man — maybe smarter, since they know better how to have fun. That was at Point Mugu, in the beginning. I had been part of a project for coding sensitive military communications before that, so I was already someone the military felt comfortable with; they didn’t care too much if I was a hippy or not.

“But I was still a hippy. And Native American. So, many years later I pop up on their radar again. Military intelligence guys nervous I might spill something. Local government, police, FBI, unhappy I wanna help save the Place Where We Are In The Sun, Kuruvungna Springs. Holy to the Tongva, but The Man doesn’t care. On University High School grounds. We saved the springs, though. Povuu’nga? Another story. The friggin’ Place of Creation, and on top of that a burial ground. Today it is surrounded by Cal State, Long Beach. They were gonna put a strip mall over it. They have been stalled so far.

“Now we get to SSFL—”

“—For those of us who don’t know,” I interrupted, “SSFL?”

“Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Up in the hills, looking out over Simi Valley. Was a flunky there. Worked on nuclear reactors for outer space. Contaminated the hell out of the place. Don’t drink the water, my friend. Painted Cave’s petroglyphs are there, sacred to both the Chumash and the Tongva. We have to get permission to visit our own holy site. We’ve been petitioning for freer access.”

“And that’s what’s got the men in black tracking you?”

“Yeah-huh.”

“You are one very interesting fellow, Raffy Quaoar Ma’iio. I can’t say I blame them.”

I took a long drink of Jopin’s beer.

“Then it is my turn. It is simple, and it is not. Simply, we all met at one of the greatest towers standing on the shadow Earth. Bill and I were catching up for the first time in decades. Maio came to see me there, apparently to find out what was going on after a day of back-to-back strange events. My son Merlin suspected a major world event was brewing, and he was right. We barely escaped the tower as it came under violent attack. Escape came in the form of a Trump prepared by my son. The Trump was for this lighthouse, and I admit that surprises me, as I was not aware he had ever come here in the past. That, nevertheless, is the story of our coming to Amber.”

Jopin got up, clearing some of the bowls and setting them on a shelf meant for books, elbowing some books aside to do so. Then he returned, sat down, took out his pipe, filled it and lit it.

“I thought you had a lantern that needed checking,” I observed.

Jopin nodded with an, “I do, I do,” and then pointed with his pipestem at the person seated somewhat behind and off to Maio’s left. “But we have not yet heard from the young lass.”

I had almost forgotten about her. So much had happened, and there had been so much to think about. And, truthfully, I had been rather focused on consuming my meal. As Maio’s position between the young woman and myself mostly blocked her from view, she had remained almost entirely out of my thoughts.

Now she stood up.

Curvy, blonde, young, attractive, she seemed very familiar. And she smiled straight at me as she said, “A pleasure to meet you, Jopin. My name is Erin Maio, and I cover shifts as a hostess at an Irish pub in Manhattan, where musicians are encouraged to play their guitars. Or their harps.”

And then I knew her, of course.

Mine is the power of one who walks among shadows. In Amber, paradoxically, birthplace and source of that power, the power itself becomes increasingly meaningless. It becomes progressively harder — and eventually impossible — to work with the stuff of Shadow as one approaches Kolvir and the immortal city. At the same time, as one encounters the sights, sounds and smells of Amber, one also encounters others, quite often not of blood royal, who can in their own fashion play with Shadow and bend reality to their will.

Cabra’s lighthouse-keeper was such a one, in centuries past commanding vessels in Amber’s navy, then later a captain of merchant ships, navigating by strange stars through Shadow to coasts waiting under other skies. When he daydreamed at night as he fed the lantern and kept the gears turning, he surely revisited the exotic places of his past which existed nowhere near Amber, found within the nearer proximity of his own head...many perhaps no longer known to anyone in Amber besides himself.

Until only a decade or so ago, Amber time, no one had known one could walk in Shadow in the Forest of Arden. Most still did not know this; I was only aware of it because my father Oberon had given me the knowledge just before he had died. Nor is it all that easy to do, but I now know changes may be begun even this close to the city. Theoretically, therefore, I could have found a possibility that could become a probability and then a reality, our reality, in which the Butterfly (Jopin’s sailboat) would find her way through wave, wind and weather from Amber back to Cabra, though no pilot helmed her. But Jopin had wanted to bring us as far as Rebma himself, to go for a sail.

It was only a day-trip, but it still would leave Jopin rather short on sleep for his next night-watch. So I had tried to talk him out of coming along by pointing out how his political neutrality with respect to events in Amber might be lost.

“If you’re seen bringing us to shore—”

“—but I won’t be,” Jopin had returned, “as we shall be bringing the dinghy along. You will row the rest of the way to the shore, and the Butterfly will only be a distant sail.”

“There are these devices you may have heard of,” I had reminded him, “called spyglasses.”

“Corwin, Prince of Amber, has never sailed under another’s colors, never flown a false flag?”

He was insistent, so we had worked out a compromise.

She was a pretty thing, close to thirty feet of catamaran. Painted black, as befitted the old pirates who sailed her; namely, Jopin, Maio and myself. Maio’s daughter stretched herself out up by the bow, leaning back on her elbows, seeming to enjoy the wind and salty spray of the waves washing between Cabra and Faiella-bionin. Bill hung back by the stern, occasionally taking the tiller for the old keeper as he dug bottles of brew out of the ice-chest that he then brought out to Maio and myself as we tied off lines and trimmed sail for the bottle-bearing captain who best knew our course.

Jopin’s suggestion that we fit out the Butterfly, disguise her and even paint over her name for a single day’s sailing had seemed over-elaborate to me. So, just as dawn came, Jopin had extinguished the lantern and roused me from my nap. I had then gone down the steps and picked my way over to the eastern edge of the island, where I had faced the sea. And then had begun my walk around little Cabra, the mood and character of sea and sky altering as I had slowly made my way among the rocks and surf. A subtle version of shadow-walking it had been, and on my third circuit of the island, the Crow’s Nest had come into view. When she had drawn near enough to the island, I had taken the keeper’s rowboat out to the wayward vessel that had come free of her moorings somewhere in Shadow to find her way, uncrewed, to where I had called her from Cabra.

Accepting a cool bottle of ale from my old friend, I thanked him again for everything he had done and was doing.

“No need to thank me,” he said, waving his hand as though to brush any unnecessary gratitude aside, “I am doing what I want to do. It has been decades since I have sailed with any of you, and this is only a small adventure. But a little adventure now and then is a good reminder to continue getting out of bed in the morning. Or,” he added, eyes twinkling, “in the afternoon.”

His “any of you” apparently referred to my family, toward whom, as I understood it, he felt a certain ambivalence. Whatever his feelings about the family’s power-struggles, though, he seemed fond of our explorations of Shadow which had been carried out on the high seas.

“From what you hinted earlier, it sounds like we may all be getting our recommended daily allowances of adventure while in Amber. Perhaps you could shed some light now on what you meant by our coming here at a ‘dark and dangerous time’?”

Jopin glanced back at Bill, who was squinting and holding the tiller steady, then sat down beside me. Maio was nearby, keeping his balance easily as the boat lifted and dropped amidst the swells, every so often loosening or shortening a line, adjusting length and tension to suit shifts in the wind (though a gifted story-teller, Maio’s claim of kinship with the sea had not in this case been exaggerated). All was ship shape; we could be easy for a bit.

He took a pull from his own bottle and stared straight ahead, possibly at Kolvir, possibly at other things.

“Every so often, a boat will come by, bringing my supplies or bringing a pilot with questions about the local waters and about Amber. We unload the provisions and I get my news of the world if it is the first, or I give out whatever I last heard if it is the second. My news is always old news. I only know things are not good in Amber. Shortages, mysterious attacks, crimes. Prince Caine has even returned to help. Trouble in Amber, so I hear.”

“Trouble in Amber? What about the King? How has Random been handling the problem?”

Jopin turned toward me, a half-smile on his lips.

“That is what I had thought you might tell me! Last I heard, you had returned to the palace. You and your brother Julian. Princess Fiona and the King had both been away, but came back when you did. There was much gossip about it, but I would rather give my ear to a fish-story about a mermaid and a drowning sailor than heed gossip.”

“Gossip is unreliable stuff, true. Still, a truth can sometimes be hidden among a dozen lies. Do you recall any of what you heard?”

The lighthouse-keeper twisted around, shading his eyes against the sun, apparently checking on Bill. Relaxing again, he took another sip of ale.

“More gossip than you could shake a stick at, mostly about you. You are cursed, fearful types were saying, and bad tidings would follow you. Others said change in Amber is heralded by you and restless King Random would soon step down from the throne. You defeated Chaos when it assaulted Kolvir and now, talk among the soldiery had it, you wanted Random to destroy Chaos once and for all. The more romantic sorts were certain you would at last marry Queen Moire and become King of Rebma. Things like that.”

I smiled grimly.

“It seems only the first rumor was true. I see what you mean now. After hearing that, I would also prefer to hear the story about the sailor and the mermaid.”

Jopin patted me on the shoulder, smiling a kindly smile, got to his feet, and said, “A good tale, and a true one. The lucky sailor gets to live, and the mermaid also gets lucky.”

I laughed and watched him continue past me to pass Maio his ale before ambling back toward Bill to resume his duties at the tiller. Our heading bent north-northeast as we bore back out toward deeper waters, where we caught more wind. Recognizing where Jopin was taking us, I made my way forward to where Maio’s daughter reclined and sat down beside her. She regarded me through her sunglasses, one eyebrow raised.

“So the amateur guitar-player is finally going to explain everything?”

“You left out amateur harpist,” I noted, “And, as you may recall, I’m not much of a singer either. Explaining is probably my stronger suit.”

“How are you at sharing?”

Her gaze had alighted on the bottle I held, so I passed it to her and she tipped it back for a sip. The sun shone through her wavy blonde strands and the bottle as she drank, rendering both luminous and translucent, while the wind playfully tugged at her hair and blouse. It was a moment of air and light worthy of a photograph or even of something impressionistic done in paint. She turned toward me, and the moment was lost, leaving me sad that of all things beautiful only Amber seems proof against time.

“And you were about to explain?”

“Now may not be the best time for explaining,” I suggested, yet, taking the plunge anyway, went on, “but in the language of physics, since Einstein it has been known that space and time can be bent, even twisted, by matter and energy. Since Everett and Wheeler, it has been known that there may be more than one space-time, many more. And since the earliest experiments probing the wave-particle duality of light, it has been known that the observer affects the observed. Reality is not a discrete phenomenon, but participatory, non-linear, fractal and emergent. The mind helps shape the reality the mind perceives. And yesterday you directly experienced the power of the mind to focus sufficient energy to open a wormhole from one space-time to another. Though I do not fully grasp all the principles involved, I can tell you this much: My family has an inherited ability to act as conduits, conductors, for the kind of energy required to move from one world to another. And this world we are in right now is my home, Amber, the well-spring of that energy.”

“That is a pretty good explanation,” she conceded. “You could have mentioned Riemann, Bohr, Schrodinger, Thorne, Hawking, string theory, the TV show Sliders and a lot of other stuff and lost your audience. So what else are you good at?”

“I—How in the world do you know all that?”

Openly grinning, she removed the sunglasses.

“Student, NYU. Boyfriend taking physics classes who talks a lot. Dad gets Scientific American. Watch TV.”

She took another sip, then handed me back the bottle.

“Not too bitter. I don’t like bitter. But it’s not a blonde ale either. Reminds me of Old Speckled Hen.”

“How is it you’re not in some kind of shock right now? Not dazed or disoriented?”

“My father’s Raffy Maio. I grew up with UFOs and Carlos Castañeda’s books about the Yaqui sorcerer. Is that why you came up here to see me? To rescue me from shock?”

“No, I actually came up here to let you know if you peer — carefully — over the side, you may glimpse the tops of the towers of Rebma, the city beneath the sea. Jopin is taking us into those waters.”

I got up then and went back to the stern to join Jopin and Bill, passing Maio on the way.

Maio stopped chuckling long enough to say, “My daughter,” while shaking his head.

“Doesn’t look much like you.”

“Takes after her mom. Strawberry blonde when she was little, swear to God.”

We passed over Rebma. Strange lights and shadowy shapes could be seen, but nothing more. Sometimes, when conditions were right, one could actually make out avenues and buildings far below, but on this occasion it was not to be.

Jopin kept the Crow’s Nest in the area longer than was strictly necessary, scanning the waters more keenly than anyone else before sighing and heading us toward shore. Beyond the shining River Oisen and the orchards and cultivated acres of Garnath loomed the heaven-defying peaks of the mountains fencing the valley and the city of Amber from the ancient Forest of Arden and the interior of the continent. Those great sentinels which had guarded Amber for as long as any could remember grew larger, stood taller, and came nearer as our sails bore us westward.

The old sailor knew what he was about, and brought the sailboat close to shore at a point within sight of the cairn that stood there before dropping anchor. It was a bit crowded in the rowboat we put into the waves slapping against the sides of our stolen ship, but I took the oars myself and rowed till its hull scraped on the pink and sable sands. Then I jumped out, and Jopin got into the water with me. Together, we hauled the craft onto the beach, and helped our passengers disembark.

While the others stood on the beach and turned to look in wonderment about them, Cabra’s lighthouse-keeper climbed back into the little boat and I helped push him off the sand. Before I could let go of the gunwale, he leaned over for a word.

Gesturing with his eyes toward the mountains and the final mountain, upon whose eastern slopes the green and gold spires gleamed and marble arches, towers, walls and edifices glowed, streets sparkling in the midday sun, Jopin told me, “They may not want to leave.”

It was true. Amber was more than merely a kind of magnet, drawing things from shadow worlds near and far toward herself to become part of her rich, bright weave and the unerring complexity of her marvelous and impeccable design. She held a special appeal for living things, most especially people. Mysterious, endlessly enticing, fraught with innumerable questions calling for elusive answers inviting still more questions, the beauty was only the beginning of the spell cast upon those lucky enough to glimpse it. Her allure was not so difficult to understand and almost impossible to resist. Life was generous and good in the city on the mountain, and in her forest, and in her valley, and in her airs and waters. Even a unicorn would find the place fascinating, while the eyes of those there were distracted by a myriad other wondrous things.

I shrugged.

“Then something will be figured out. Maybe they can be trained as backup lighthouse-keepers. As doubtless you know, Oberon always thought you could use an extra hand out there.”

Jopin grinned and held out his hand. Relaxing my hold on the gunwale, I clasped his hand in mine.

“A great sacrifice he made,” the keeper opined. “Your father was a good king. And not all his sons are fit to be food for the fishes.”

Taking that for the compliment I knew he meant it to be, I went with, “We all have feet of clay. And when a man meets his maker each of us stands equally naked before the flame of truth. Thanks for everything, my friend, and may you keep the other flame, the one atop that old tower of yours, burning another century or more.”

“Met the maker long ago,” Jopin admitted, letting go my hand. “And you have met him, too. Have no worries on that score, Corwin. Fare thee well.”

He unshipped the oars, and I turned to make my way out of the surf up onto the beach, wondering if anything remained of the camp I had made a few years back by the edge of the wood of Garnath, where the demons of my dreams had come to let me know some nightmares will not keep to our sleep, but walk in the waking world far more freely than most of us would like.

The seagulls wheeled, dove and flapped about us, whether welcoming or protesting our trek inland it was hard to tell. If pressed, though, I would have to say their shrieks signified a protest, as our passage disrupted their activities while providing them none of the food or refuse (food again) they were accustomed to scavenging from travelers. The only nightmare they could see abroad in the land this day was the appalling lack of litter our party left behind. Their angry cries were their principal means for registering their feelings of outrage, as most of their droppings missed our rather small group.

And it might even be possible the voluble seabirds were still upset over the domestication of the once-wild Vale of Garnath. Though I rather doubted that, as the newly tamed valley was a haven for human beings, along with, of course, all their byproducts. Including the edible ones. No, these airborne residents were similar to their earthbound counterparts in at least this respect: their main objection to a major improvement to their lifestyle was that there wasn’t enough of it.

As I pondered the parallels between humans and seagulls, I couldn’t avoid the question that kept coming at me like a boxer fighting for his title: Could the birds be blamed for their ingratitude?

More than once I have wondered if Dad and I had been wrong, after all.

Oberon had sacrificed himself, surrendering his life on the Pattern in order to save it. Yet the Pattern he had given everything to preserve couldn’t really be restored. At least, not completely. That was the point Bleys had made that night when (years ago, now?) my brother and I had stayed up late in his ambassadorial residence in the Courts of Chaos. That night when Bleys had echoed Fiona’s suspicion that Oberon’s repairs to Dworkin’s original design amounted to the introduction of fresh material.

Dworkin’s manuscript, augmented by Oberon’s seamless edits, his mindful and creative connecting of older dots, had made the Pattern whole once more. But those fixes, as careful as those retouches and interpolations might be, nevertheless could only be considered corrections to a once-flawless blueprint. Meaning the Pattern we had now was and was not the one we had fought to save. Even the most faithful restoration or reproduction of a painting is unavoidably an act of translation. Dad had to have known this, of course. He had spent his entire rather long life being whatever he needed to be, most often being the active counterpart to the more passive and contemplative persona of Dworkin, and by his final act of reinscribing the Pattern had effectively become Dworkin. So he had to have known the reconstituted Pattern would be close to the original without actually being the original. Yet he had gone ahead, anyway, and done the best that could be done to repair reality, Amber and the Pattern.

But had he made a mistake? Had I made a mistake?

I had wanted and struggled for the same outcome, risked my life for it, crossed, on horseback and then on foot, the incomprehensible distance from Amber to Chaos for it, had watched my beloved Deirdre die for it.

Now, as I walked with others who had never seen the original Garnath through that altered valley, as I took in the vineyards, dirt roads, crop fields, farmhouses, gardens, and stone walls holding back quiet woods, I wondered whether what we’d done had really worked, been truly worthwhile, and, at the end of it all, had been the right thing to do.

Since Oberon had given his life so we would not have to give up the Pattern, or Amber, or all of Shadow which lay beyond and our power over it — since Oberon’s sacrifice to keep all as it was, I wondered how much might actually have been changed. Not merely in spite of his sacrifice, but because of it.

And those were my thoughts as we came upon the farmer at the place where our road crossed another before running on into the forest at the foot of the mountains. The farmer and his wagon had just come down the north branch of the other road and he had then turned his draft horse onto the dirt track we were following.

He slowed his wagon as we came within speaking distance of one another.

The driver of the wagon was a lean fellow in a simple brown tunic and blue trousers, bald as the day he had been born and wearing a straw hat to keep the sun off his hairless pate and leathery face.

“Hail, travelers,” said the farmer, bringing the wagon to a halt, tipping his hat in a friendly fashion. “What news from Rebma?”

“None,” I answered, “for we have not come from there. What, may I ask, made you think that we did?”

“You’ve no horses,” he stated drily, “and are walking west on Faiella-bionin Road, from the direction of the Stairway to Rebma. You cannot have come far. Also, by your clothes, you aren’t very likely farm folk. Still, you must hail from somewhere, if not from this valley or from Rebma.”

“Difficult to argue with your logic, so I won’t. We are far from our home of Mirata, and only as of today reached your shores. We can report the water of Mirata’s renowned well is as fresh and plentiful as ever, and instruments are still crafted and played in the City of Music. But we have heard nothing of Rebma. What news can you give us about these parts?”

His eyes moved as he ran his gaze over us a few times.

“Harbor is to the north. Just came from there myself. If you came hither from neither Rebma nor the harbor, I can only wonder as to the size of the albatross who carried you.”

Maio, standing just to my left, irrepressible as ever, spoke up then.

“‘Albatross’? Try ‘boat.’ No albatrosses. The craziest bird activity the four of us have seen is right behind you.”

The farmer turned his head to see what lay in the direction Maio was pointing.

I looked, too. So did Bill and Erin.

“Your scarecrow’s not working,” Maio added.

There was a manlike form hanging from a tree at the crossroads behind the farmer. It was covered in crows. There was something horribly wrong about the way it hung there. Which, unfortunately, I recognized.

“That’s not a scarecrow; something wicked that way hangs,” I said, turning back to the farmer to ask, “What’s the trouble around here?”

The farmer shook his horse’s reins.

“Have no idea where any of you are from,” were his parting words, “but this is my advice for wherever it is you are going.”

Pointing toward Amber as he began to drive his wagon past us, he called down, “Keep your wits about you. And keep as far away as you can from anyone on the Black List. These days, disloyalty can be contagious and” — he paused to jerk his head back toward the man dangling from the gallows tree — “fatal, as you can see. May the luck of the Unicorn protect you.”

His wagon then rattled and jounced down the road we had just walked, kicking up dust as it went. Before going on, we stayed a few moments, watching farmer, horse and wagon shrink into the distance, each of us alone with unspoken thoughts.

We passed the gallows tree at the intersection quickly. I did not look up at what hung from it, but, as I was in the lead, I have no idea if the others chose to do otherwise or not.

When we reached the open field between the harbor road and the treeline, I dropped Merlin’s purple backpack to the ground, crouched beside it and opened it up. Grayswandir’s hilt and the upper end of its scabbard still protruded from the pack, and I noticed the scarf had come loose from the hilt and haft of the blade, exposing its unique workmanship.

As I carefully wrapped the sword’s silken disguise about it again, Maio let the satchel given to him by Jopin fall into the grass and knelt beside me.

“That was more than a general warning. He didn’t buy your story.”

“Nothing he said indicated that,” I said, remaining focused on my task.

Bill came close to stand near us and, overhearing Maio, asked, “Why do you think he doubted Corwin, Mr. Maio?”

“Because he recognized him.”

I finished the job and removed an item from the pack, briefly meeting Maio’s gaze, but saying nothing.

“His cover got blown; that’s why we have stopped.”

“What cover?” Bill wondered, seeking clues in Maio’s expression, and then in mine as I stood back up.

Maio looked pointedly at Grayswandir.

“That bad-ass sword of his, silver and carved up with all those funky shapes and designs. It’s like Superman’s ‘S,’ a total trademark.”

Maio pulled his canteen out, tipped it back for a sip of water, wiped his mouth and screwed the cap back on.

“Right?”

He let the question hang there as he stood, too, absently putting the canteen away as he watched me for a response.

I took the item I held, shook it out, and pulled it over my shoulders: Merlin’s cloak.

Maio snapped his fingers, and pointed at the cloak.

“Cover.”

I took a quick look around, seeing that Erin had moved closer to the trees for a better look at where we were going. And I also saw some people in the distance on the same stretch of road the farmer had used to come down from the harbor.

While Bill thoughtfully wiped his glasses, putting them back on after a moment to do as I had just done and survey the scene, the old shaman, Raffy Maio, continued undeterred.

“You know who’s on that Black List.”

“In times of trouble and lists of suspicious persons,” I answered, adjusting the cloak, “everyone is on the list, whether his name officially appears there or not. All are guilty till proven innocent.”

Bill had been studying the harbor road to the north, but turned back toward me, frowning and sounding somewhat incredulous as he asked me, “Are you saying Amber is a police state?”

“All modern nation-states are. It is only a matter of degree.”

“So Amber is not an ideal kingdom?”

“On the contrary,” I demurred, “it is in every sense the archetypal kingdom. A king in the end is a glorified general, his position sanctioned by ritual and tradition, and all kingdoms are therefore under military rule. Kings are dictators who wear special jewelry, that’s all. Kings can be generous and just, or the opposite. As for what conditions are like in Amber these days, we will see.”

They turned their heads in a vain effort to discern the city, now hidden from us by Kolvir’s southwestern slopes. My glance flicked in that direction, too.

I had not actually expected to see Amber from this vantage, but I had not been able to avoid looking toward her as I thought of her all the same.

Erin walked back over to us while Bill decided to follow Maio’s example, refreshing himself with a drink of water, and I pulled the pack on again.

“Ideally,” I announced, since we were all together as a group once more, “this is where I say, ‘Welcome to Sherwood!’ After which, we are soon seated at a banquet, drinking wine and enjoying roast venison, surrounded by faithful friends and allies. There are reasons, however, why this cannot be.”

“One of them is people are being hung by the neck until dead?” Maio suggested.

“And forests are more picnicky than banquety?” Erin threw in.

“You neglected to submit all the forms legally changing your name to ‘Robin Hood’?” Bill tried, and then, seeing the dubious expressions on father and daughter, explained, “Corwin’s not known for obsessing over legal details.”

“True,” I admitted. “All true. I am allergic to legal wrangling and paperwork. Wilderness areas are more suited to picnics. And the ratio of allies to those who want my blood is less than favorable at this time.

“There are, however, three things I can say that may put this in a better light. One: the low fan-mail-to-hate-mail rating has been weathered in the past. Two: Jopin saw to it we are well-provisioned. Three: You are about to enter Arden, which is the forest Sherwood always wanted to grow up to be.”

They looked toward the forest — primeval, vast, a green cloak adorning the unchallenged authority of the mountains above, its surface gently rippling like the flag of Amber in a soft breeze — and then back toward me.

“There is also a fourth thing: I am still a Prince of Amber and can bring you to places of greater safety than this, if such is your wish. Or you can return along this road back to the beach, descend from the cairn there down the steps leading under the waves to Rebma in the sea, where you will be protected. So, what say you?”

The vote was unanimous, and we continued on.

Moving into the shadows of the trees, which themselves stood in the shadow of the mountains, we seemed to put more than the valley and the sea behind us, for, while it might be afternoon in Garnath, under the leafy giants over whose roots we trod the first footsteps of the evening to come had already fallen. It was as though we had set foot within a nigh-infinite cathedral erected for gods or titans, the intricately woven ceiling, wide gravity-indifferent pillars, ever-changing light stained green and gold by windows assembled from millions of living oval, crescent and diamond panes, enchanted and ageless, a sanctuary for immortals. Oak, hawthorn, lime, elm, silver birch, maple and other species rose from the black earth with a size and majesty to be envied by California’s redwoods. A city could rest comfortably among those mighty boughs, virtually invisible from the forest floor if wrought cunningly enough, and the one charged with patrolling these woods, my brother Julian, had more than once hinted this might be so. There were small forts scattered throughout, as was well known, but Julian’s personal stronghold remained a mystery to all but Julian. And Oberon. Oberon had known, of course. The story in Amber was that Julian’s refuge consisted only of his impervious armor and the saddle from which he looked down upon the royal forest from the back of his great steed Morgenstern.

As for me, Amber’s official story could quell neither my curiosity nor my imagination. I still glanced upward now and then, seeking boardwalks, stairs and structures among the highest branches.

Amber will always have her secrets.

While it is a good idea to, as a general principle, remain quiet and alert upon entering a strange forest, good ideas, general principles and common sense had little to do with how quiet our group had become. A sober silence in this instance prevailed because all conversation had ceased as awe had descended upon the three who with their own eyes were seeing for the first time the Forest of Arden.

And though the place had been my back yard for most of my life, I could no more help staring about me than the newcomers walking with me. It was only after deeply inhaling the sweet, sharp, vigorous fragrance of the place a few times myself that I noticed the others doing the same.

As I smiled and breathed and looked, I wondered how long it would be till someone asked me why we were walking northwest through the forest rather than taking the direct route up the harbor road toward Amber.

“Hey,” someone said, “why are we walking northwest through the forest rather than taking the direct route up the harbor road toward Amber?”

It was Maio.

“Because Arden is a forest of possibilities, an untamed wilderness extending beyond Amber into Shadow.”

“So we’re not going to Amber?”

“Not through Garnath. Not unless you want to go on foot.”

We were walking four abreast, more or less, and from my right I heard Bill ask, “There’s transportation out here?”

“There is.”

“Good,” Bill said, his breathing heavy and audible as we made our way along the upward slope of the road, “I’m not sure I would survive the walk.”

“Why not use your Stargate cards?”

That question was Maio’s. He had lived an interesting life, and had obviously learned to adapt quickly to new circumstances, no matter how bizarre. I liked that.

“Why not use my Trumps? We are too close to Amber, and there are some around here who are able to tell who is using those cards, and how. And, as we have already heard now from Jopin and our friend in the wagon, something is rotten in the state of Amber. So we will get the lay of the land and enter the city while attracting as little notice as possible.”

“But not on foot?” Bill checked.

“Not on foot.”

They were uniformed, and their colors were black and green.

It was only a little while later, as we walked at a slowed pace (deliberate on my part, now that I was fully aware how hard our travels were hitting Bill), when they appeared. I had just begun, in fact, to gradually shift things around me — even little details like flowers, moss and stones are not so easy to change so close to the city — in order to move our corner of Arden in the direction of a glen or paddock or hitching post, whichever would occur more readily, where we would find horses.

It had been Erin who had noticed something, gotten her father to stop, turn and look. And then we were all turning to see.

We saw a number of armed men in black and green uniforms. And from the way they picked up their pace as they rounded the last bend behind us and came into view, we knew we had caught their interest.

“Should we hide?”

That from Bill, and I shook my head.

“We have been spotted. Attempting to elude them will only make us appear more like persons of interest.”

“So what do we do?” Erin wanted to know.

“We wait.”

But the troops slowed down, causing our waiting to become drawn out. Then they halted and closed ranks.

They were under attack.

By now, it was darker than it had been when we had first made our way into Arden. The forest had dimmed considerably. Beyond the trees, the world was no doubt experiencing late afternoon and a westering sun, but the forest was in the process of welcoming twilight. So who it was exactly who was attacking was something none of us were able to make out. There were whistling sounds, however, and it seemed the soldiers were reacting to missiles of some kind.

Without exchanging a word, the four of us reached a simultaneous decision to get moving again. We began jogging.

As soon as we had lost sight of those behind us, I gestured to the others to move off the road. We pushed through underbrush and in five minutes struck a deer-path. Seeing was difficult now, but no one mentioned the lantern stowed with other gear Maio was carrying. After about fifteen minutes following the path, though, I said, “Stop,” and stayed still.

A feeling had come over me, and there were even goosebumps. The others became very still and silent; perhaps they felt it, too.

“Why do you stop now?” a rough voice asked from somewhere out in the darkness. “There is not much farther to go.”

“Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want with us?”

“Just stay on the trail and keep moving.”

I took a slow step forward, then another, my senses hyper-alert. And casually moved my hand toward the pack on my back.

“Leave that,” the voice instructed sharply. “Don’t you know you are surrounded? Just keep moving, and stay on the path.”

I lowered my hand and kept moving past trees in a forest whose darkness was rapidly becoming impenetrable. Something loomed ahead, something big. Its outline faintly visible through the contrast of its absolute blackness against the lesser darkness to either side, I determined it to be one of Arden’s oldest and largest denizens, probably an oak. The path seemed to lead straight to it.

Moving slowly so as not to bang into the tree or trip on its roots, I stepped closer and closer until it became obvious I had actually stepped inside the tree. The ground felt different beneath my feet, pitch blackness closed in about me on all sides, and the air took on a musky, resinous scent. Behind, I heard the others follow me into the enclosed space.

A soft blue glow began to occur somewhere above.

“Halt and wait,” the voice said again.

More of the blue light, from more sources. Before me, a stair curved and climbed against the wall, a closed trap-door at the base of it. Turning, I saw the wide-eyed faces of my friends behind me. And behind them were half a dozen or more figures, no more than four or five feet tall, sporting patchwork cloaks of brown and green with hoods that hid their faces, all holding bows. Long daggers hung from their leather belts. There was no longer an opening behind the little men; it appeared whatever door we had come through was now closed and we were sealed inside the tree.

“Leave your baggage on the floor. Then go up.”

Though I was looking straight at our captors, I could not determine which of them had spoken.

We complied silently, setting our belongings on the ground.

For whatever reason, I felt completely calm as I went up the narrow stair, my companions close behind.

The room above the ground floor was empty, noticeably smaller at a diameter of only fifteen feet, its ceiling ringed with holes. There was a ladder, which we used to get to the trap-door above. The wall-climbing stair resumed at the landing there, walled on both sides, so that the level it wound about was inaccessible to us. It ended at a door, which stood open. We crossed a spacious study lined with shelves full of books and scrolls, a desk and chair beneath a map or diagram, and a conventional ironwork spiral stair coiling upward in the room’s center. Panels of translucent glass or quartz were set within the walls, blue light shining through from behind them. A fireplace, cabinets, two tables, chairs, pots and pans took up space in the room waiting for us above the spiral stair. Yes, a fireplace. The room, clearly a kitchen, was decorated with fanciful depictions of mushrooms, lilies, butterflies and small peasant folk. A lamp stood on each of the tables, producing a cheery glow, like firelight, though neither emitted any smoke.

Though there were steps cut into a portion of the wall of the room we found above the kitchen, leading to levels above, I knew we had reached the end of our climb. This room was hung with tapestries offering scenes of Amber and places nowhere near the realm, one even recalling an event in the Courts of Chaos beneath that distinctive split sky. A lamp enclosing something like a wedge of luminous topaz shone from a table, beside which a woman in a mahogany chair was softly playing a dulcimer. She was facing the canopied bed on the other side.

In that bed, a violet blanket pulled up under his long beard, an old man lay in shadow, largely obscured by the curtains hanging about him. He lay very still, either in death or a deep sleep.

The woman stopped playing as we entered. Turning toward us, she set the instrument down beside the lamp, stood. She was tall, slender, and older, her brown hair lightened by strands of gray, her eyes hazel. Over her red-brown dress she wore a yellow cloak.

Open puzzlement drew her brows together as she peered in our direction. She came toward me till she stood only a foot away.

“You are not the true owner of that cloak,” she said to me, looking me up and down.

“Perhaps not technically. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, possession is nine tenths of the law.”

She frowned.

“Yet you look like him. You could be his father.”

“Before we start talking about child support, I am letting you know I will be holding out for a paternity test.”

In a surprisingly tender gesture, she reached up to touch her hand to my cheek, then brushed a lock of hair aside from my forehead, studying the features of my face the while.

“Even if it were not so,” she said quietly, “there can be no doubt you are a son of Oberon; you resemble him so strongly.”

I reached up to grasp her hand where it floated near my face, and lowered it.

“You knew him? You knew my father Oberon?”

Nodding her head, she answered, “Yes, I knew him well.”

“Then I should know you. You see, I knew him pretty well, too. Who are you? How did you know him?”

“I,” she said, drawing herself up a little straighter and taller, smiling, “am Queen Cymnea of Amber.”

My mouth opened, but all my words had fled. I began to let go of her hand, but now she held onto mine.

“Now you must tell me who you are,” she declared. “Which son of Oberon do I see before me?”

“I will answer,” I said after a moment, finding my voice again, though still unable to fully accept what she had just claimed, “but first I must know who is lying in that bed behind you.”

Smile fading but not gone, she turned her head to look over her shoulder toward the man lying there. She tugged on my hand, urging me, and I slowly followed her to the old man’s bedside.

“You should know him well enough,” she said as, together, we stared down at the bed’s occupant, “but, if you cannot, I will speak his name for you. He is the Master of the Line, last heir of the House of Barimen, twice-born beloved of the Unicorn.”

I knew, but, as my mind still needed time to understand, was unready to say anything.

She watched my face, her eyes on mine, and knew that I knew. Then she looked away, back toward the man on the bed.

“Yes,” she said, “though he is gone now, his power still hangs about him and fills this room. Here lies the one Oberon loved most.” She squeezed my hand a bit tighter, and went on. “Here lies Dworkin.”

Copyright © 2011 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Chapter Three: World’s End

2011-06-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER THREE

Only birds or airborne humans could enjoy a prospect such as I had of the meeting of the Hudson and East Rivers, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the Statue of Liberty from one hundred and seven floors above street level, the southern tip of Manhattan far below embracing the greatest harbor in the history of this world. It was a helluva view. And, never late for breakfast, I was over by a full-length window admiring it since I had shown up early. Flight on my mind, memories of the French biplane in which I’d first taken to the air a century ago returned unbidden as I beheld summer’s high, wide clear lens of blue washed in the light endlessly flowing from the bright morning sun.

The cars and people moved with a curiously unremarkable rhythm on what I have always regarded as the least remarkable day of the week — Tuesday — under a sky out of a grammar school “Dick and Jane” reading book. Manhattan was just a machine almost placidly turning its gears, and the vibe was kind of boring. The feeling of predictability, of routine, really shouldn’t have struck me as out-of-place. For something as big as New York to run smoothly year after year would only be possible if it ran as it was supposed to, if regularity were a watchword. Still, there was a quality of unreality to the whole scene.

Like me, the city seemed as if it were waiting for something.

“‘I once was lost, but never found,’” I recited under my breath, recalling the song that, for some strange reason, only I had heard on the ride over, “‘I think I’m losing what’s left of my mind to the Twentieth Century deadline.’”

The words could have been written for me. Or by me. Another century had come and gone. Actually, a box-set of ten centuries, a Millenium Special, had gone on sale. And I’d missed it, lost in a haze of forgetting. Again.

The next stanza was the one I couldn’t shake. Obscure meaning, references I neither recognized nor understood, and yet it had me. It brought Avalon back to me — not the Avalon of some years ago. The Avalon of centuries ago, when the peace was broken by betrayal, when love had shattered my heart and the silver towers both, when I had destroyed something I loved in the name of saving it, when I had taken for my emblem the silver rose.

A powerful memory, buried in the wild and remote terrain of a youthful heart since overgrown with a forest of misdeeds and cynicism. And buried deep. But for some things there is no place far enough, or deep enough. Some ghosts are restless. They found Troy, they found Babylon, they found the Terracotta Army, and, sooner or later, if anyone bothered to really look, they’d find Jimmy Hoffa. Just as I eventually found Amber. The world is a roomy old mansion, whose past clings to it like ivy and rust, shuffles through its corridors like spiderwebs walking on its drafty breath, rummages through it like the unseen shifting of objects by poltergeists. And we are no different from the world.

Upon the previous day’s departure from the police station, something electronic had beeped. We had been out on the sidewalk, making our way toward Bleeker.

Merlin had seemed as surprised as I had been as I’d fished the black handheld device out of a side pocket of his pack. I hadn’t been able to avoid thinking of a Star Trek communicator as I’d opened his Motorola cellphone.

“Hello?”

“Carl?” the familiar voice coming through the phone had asked. Not just a familiar voice, a friend’s voice, one I had recognized right away.

“Bill? Bill, gods, but it’s been a long time. Too long. Good to hear your voice again. How are you? And how are Alice and the kids?”

There had been a short laugh.

“Carl. Carl Corey. You still go by that?”

“When circumstances dictate. Today, though, and for the foreseeable future, I’m stuck being Corwin. Just don’t tell the front desk at my hotel.”

“Hotels aren’t sticklers for getting names right where I come from. Especially if you pay with cash.”

“Which,” I’d cheerfully rejoined, “by a strange coincidence, I do.”

“Just the word I would use for a Napoleon expert who drives cars into lakes, leaves priceless jewelry in compost heaps, gets hospitalized with nearly fatal stab wounds, is featured on a pack of ice-cold Tarot cards, vanishes into thin air before startled nurses, reappears over twenty years later asking how my family’s doing. Just like there’s nothing out of the ordinary about such things. That’s the word for it: strange.”

That had set me back a little.

“Over twenty years? It’s been that long?”

“Who was President last time we saw each other?”

I had cast my mind back, to what events had been transpiring in America and the world then. A troubled time, to be sure, and my recollection of that era might be off here and there, limited as it was to newspapers, television and gossip picked up while in a hospital bed and on subsequent occasions. The OPEC oil embargo, coming on the heels of Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard, had contributed to inflation and a persistent recession. The Vietnam War had only worsened the financial picture and had been over for a couple of years, a political and military disaster, leaving the Cold War in high gear. There is always another military conflict, of course, and there had been new ones in Cambodia and Angola, along with the war between Egypt and Israel. Nuclear arms control was a major issue; the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Union had been signed a few years back. The SALT agreement was the last big thing I could recall from that period of upheaval. Sonny and Cher had split up, the Eagles had made Winslow, Arizona, famous, Pink Floyd had been looking at the dark side of the moon, Stephen King had been making horror interesting again, and Spielberg had afflicted folk everywhere with a fear of swimming at the beach.

Journeys through Shadow have taught me a proper respect for libraries, and I always spend at least a little time in one if I can. When I had returned for a souvenir of my time in this Shadow, however, I had been disinclined to tarry for long. But I had gotten the impression much had transpired since.

So I had answered, “Ford. No, wait, there was a new guy from Dixie, right? Farmer?”

“Carter. There have been four presidents since then, Corwin. And a couple hung on for two terms. Remember those twin grandsons I showed you last time? One’s in trucking school and the other is doing grad work at RIT designing videogames.”

Regret had hit me in the gut, followed by the usual accompanying kidney-punch delivered by the other fist, guilt. My throat had become a little dry; I’d swallowed.

“Bill, I—”

“Have a life?”

“No,” I had said, the truth blindsiding me, smarting as it always does, “I don’t. And am having trouble remembering the last time it was when I did. That’s the sad part.”

“You know what’s better than being sad?”

“Being happy?”

“Meeting me tomorrow for breakfast. There’s a place I know down in the City. You game?”

“Bill, this whole not having a life thing—”

“It’s not really working for you? So you’ll be there?”

It was crazy. The entire universe, or multiverse, whatever you want to call it, was under threat from the Courts of Chaos, from witches, from long-lost — though probably not too sorely missed — relatives. My son had just escaped and returned to me. Amber’s foreign minister, the most well-informed link between the two ends of existence, was a prisoner in the heart of Chaos, or worse. And my nephew, heir to Amber’s throne, was missing, possibly deceased. If there had been a right time for renewing old friendships, this surely wasn’t it.

So I had said, “What time?”

He’d laughed and said, “Great. Bring that boy of yours along, too. Very smart kid. A little strange at times, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Okay, let me tell you how to get there.”

Once I had the directions, and we had settled on a time, I had said, “Before we sign off, you were calling for Merlin. Do you wish to speak to him?”

“Does he want to talk to me?” had come the reply. “I’m calling because of the message.”

“What message?”

“‘Call Carl Corey.’ Does he want to talk now, or wait till we’re together tomorrow?”

Merlin had shaken his head when I had asked him if he had wanted to talk, so Bill and I had said our good-byes and I had replaced the cellphone in the maroon backpack.

Well, tomorrow had arrived, doubtless bringing with it new things to learn. Not that anything new was really required, as yesterday had provided plenty.

When I had departed Earth what seemed like ages ago — the ‘70s — to make good my claim on Amber’s throne, there had been computers. Big, clunky machines that filled air-conditioned rooms, using for memory in their giant drives disks nearly the size of spare tires, critical files backed up on spools of tape, information often fed into them on punch-cards. A network originally put in place for the DoD — the ARPANET, sometimes called DARPANET — had allowed computers to communicate over large distances at slow speeds, using phone-lines.

Those days lay far in the past.

In my Manhattan hotel room there was a connection to the ARPANET’s much faster successor, which I had learned was now known as the Internet. For any guest’s personal portable computer. There was also a business center, where I could use a computer provided by the hotel to access the Web of computers that stretched across the entire world, linked together by the Internet. For Earth’s inhabitants, this had all become unremarkable, a normal part of life as the Millennium came and went. For me, however, it still blew my mind that the world’s libraries, newspapers, magazines, art, music and more could be browsed with ease from a hotel, a home, or an Internet café. A carry-around computer packed away like a small briefcase was all that one needed.

Merlin, though, had hardly seemed overawed by such advances as he had retrieved the triple-size card case I had first seen in the police station. Withdrawing a card, he had stared at it a moment and pulled a laptop out of thin air before turning the card away.

A laptop Trump!

My eyes had widened a bit at the sight of the designs worked into the laptop’s outer casing — Celtic spirals, runes, a sequence of numbers, equations — as I had taken in this latest item in the mystery surrounding my son. But I chose not to be distracted from the question I had waited to ask till after our cab ride and the journey up the hotel elevator.

“So,” I had wondered aloud, “Morey Lennon or Marv Dunne left Bill Roth a message?”

“Someone did,” Merlin had answered.

“Not you?”

Merlin had shaken his head as he had set the laptop on a table in my room and opened it up.

“No, they did.”

“Who?”

“The Men in Black.”

I had heard the capital letters as he had signed the computer onto the hotel’s Internet connection.

“The agents? They called Bill? I wonder why.”

“To learn more about what we know, of course.”

Not entirely sure I knew who his ‘we’ included, I had asked instead, “And what would that be, exactly?”

“This,” he had answered, indicating the computer screen.

“The...Global Consciousness Project?” I had asked, no doubt sounding somewhat skeptical as I had read the web-page over his shoulder. “What in the world is that? More to the point, what has it got to do with anything, and why would the agents care?”

“It is thirty-seven Random Event Generators in distant places, linked together by this world’s Internet. What it does is constantly flip coins in those thirty-seven places. The Men in Black care because the flipping of the coins is affected by the model of reality found in the minds of billions, and that model is not separate from the reality it mirrors, but is also a part of it. Do you understand?”

“I believe that I do,” I had decided after a moment. “All humans, according to this project, possess to some degree the same power that you and I share. The power to affect probability, and therefore reality, through the inner workings of the mind itself?”

Merlin had smiled at that.

“You have always had what may be the most flexible intellect of Oberon’s children. And you have it right. There is also a secret project using Extrasensory Global Guages, which are hardly any different from the Random Event Generators, that does almost exactly the same thing. The secret project may nevertheless be more advanced than the one at the university, and the Men in Black may have been warned by the noosphere of a major world event.”

“Noosphere?”

Merlin had nodded as he had touched the keys, bringing up a new screen, and had explained further.

“The philosophers of this Shadow understand more than most. Life woven over a world is understood by them to be a biosphere. And the complex of awareness arising from such life they understand as a noosphere. And they are close to the greater understanding.”

“And what would that be?”

“An understanding of time. The observer and the observed modify each other. This they have known. And this is so for the mind and the world where it functions. This they are only coming to know now. But do they know that events modify events?”

“Not sure I’m following you.”

“The past ordains the future, but the future has no sway over the past? Or the present?” Then he had announced, “There they are, the cumulative deviations.”

The data graphed on the screen had, to my eye, resembled nothing so much as the readings on an EEG monitor. It could have been someone’s brainwaves and had made no more sense to me than that would have.

Merlin, seeing my expression, had continued.

“The X-axis is local time, second-to-second. The vertical axis measures the cumulative deviation of variance of scores among all thirty-seven Random Event Generators. When the states of the minds of this Earth’s inhabitants are changed in large numbers by major events, there should be an increasingly positive deviation as the REGs produce results that are less and less random. If large numbers of minds begin ordering the results before powerful or world-changing events, then those minds are changing before those events happen.”

“Electronic Tarot,” I had said aloud, voicing the thought that had struck me as his words had begun making a kind of sense. “But there are two sets of data plotted here,” I had observed, taking notice of the two jagged lines, one red, one blue, traveling from left to right across the graph.

Merlin had seemed pleased.

“Tarot by machine. Why not? The book of the universe is written in mathematics. We must learn the language to read its pages. A computer program mimicking the output of thirty-seven REGs giving the greatest variance that could happen by chance grinds out the data for the blue line. The red line shows the variance in the data from the actual REGs scattered across this world.”

“The blue is consistently above zero, showing regular spikes up around the two on your cumulative deviation,” I had observed. “The red spikes around one and negative one, wandering around the horizontal axis of zero. Though I am not an expert on statistics, I would say that looks normal.”

“It is,” Merlin had agreed, pushing back his chair and getting up, leaving beside the keyboard the Trump he had used earlier, “but let us leave this screen up while I go on a Shadow-walk. If something is coming, the red will sober up and climb above the blue, and I will be able to see it with one of my Trumps for this machine.”

“You will be there in the morning, I hope,” watching as he had stopped by the door, after taking a small item out of his pack, which I had presumed to be one of the Trumps he had just mentioned. “Bill is expecting you. And I would like to hear about where you’re going...and where you’ve been. And also...”

Merlin had turned and paused with his hand on the doorknob to hear my final comment.

“What the hell you mean by a line getting sober.”

He had flashed me a grin and departed without another word. And now here I was, wearing a freshly purchased gray golf shirt under a black suit jacket, along with a pair of new black wool slacks, and realizing I had barely dressed formally enough.

The place was small and intimate, almost entirely of wood, a real thing of beauty. I paused to admire the beams running across the strips of wood that made up the ceiling. As I did, my gaze fell on a gentleman standing very close by, apparently also taking in the incredible view. He sported shoes that reflected good taste and a willingness to pay for it, and was better dressed than I was; in fact, his attire reminded me of two gentleman I had been introduced to just the day before.

He inclined his head, acknowledging me and seeming to take note of my reaction.

“You know who I am?” he asked.

“Don’t believe I have ever had the pleasure. Should I?”

He extended his hand and I shook it.

“I’m Miller. I probably look familiar to you because you met two of my colleagues yesterday.”

“Well, Agent Miller, I can assure you there has been no unlicensed fortune-telling since then. And, as you can see, I haven’t left the Island.”

Chuckling easily, he released my hand and gestured toward my table.

“Shall we sit? I only have a couple of minutes.”

We each took one of the four captain’s chairs, sitting across from one another. I chose to take the one that left me with the inspiring prospect beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Miller was smiling.

“Fantastic location, isn’t it?”

“Yes and no,” I equivocated, “On the one hand, I am reminded of nothing so much as the cozy and exclusive seating to be found in the dining section of a zeppelin. On the other hand, the most famous zeppelin today is known to us as the Hindenburg. Yet on the third hand — in the case where I hail from the Mars of H. G. Wells — files on Morey Lennon’s computer indicate the disaster befalling that most famous of zeppelins not only failed to deter the military from pursuing lighter-than-air vehicles, but may even have been engineered to move that technology out of the private sector.”

“Conspiracy and speculation, worthy of any of the more deranged residents of an asylum — or sanitarium,” Miller cheerfully rejoined. Then, leaning forward, and grinning at me as he did, “And did I mention we’ve hacked into your son’s computer and deleted files he illegally stole from the government?”

“Interesting,” I allowed. “Maybe I forgot to mention he owns more than one laptop, and that those files are safely stored on several?”

“I called him your son,” Miller reminded me, now leaning back, regarding me with cool confidence, as if he had just played the Queen of Spades or some other trump card.

“So you did,” I conceded, intrigued but untroubled, “but I still see a military-industrial complex so freaked by what we know that I keep running into agents trying and failing to scare me.”

Miller laughed, and impatiently drummed the fingertips of his right hand on the table.

“I don’t have time for these games. If either the military or intelligence community were worried about what you know, you would not be sitting with me right now worrying them about what you know.”

“True,” I agreed, “but I’m not their real problem, am I? Those files are, and the cat’s half out of the bag as it is. So why am I sitting with you right now?”

Miller became still for a moment, regarding me steadily, thoughtfully.

“You really are that guy who was at Wright-Patterson in 1949,” he said at last. “Aren’t you? That’s really something, and most of the guys I work with don’t believe it. Wow.” He said nothing for a heartbeat, just staring at me, and then resumed: “What do you know about the end of the world, Carl?”

“Pardon?”

He shook his head, at once baffled and amused.

“The year 2000. Some people thought it might be the end. Now they say it’s gonna be 2012. UFOs? Stolen files? No one cares. Disinformation is a good enough smokescreen. The end of the world is different. We care about that.”

“And I say again,” I said, feeling a little out of my depth: “Pardon?”

“The Russians were out of money,” Miller explained, “We had to launch RELIKT-2 for them. Secretly. Mark Dillon or Morey Lennon or whatever his real name is, your son, knew about it and saw the data. He is our expert on astrophysics. So now you know why you and he are still alive. See, he found evidence of another universe.”

“What?” I said, genuinely floored.

“Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation,” Miller went on. “Mark or Morey or Marv? Your son? He is...a genius.” There was respect in his voice. “In the map of the radiation left by the Big Bang he found things. There are holes, very large holes, in the map, where something outside the universe has pulled energy out of it. Clusters of galaxies are being swept toward one part of the sky, like stuff caught in a river current—”

“—or leaves in the wind?” I guessed.

Miller said nothing, just looked at me, waiting.

But I was looking at something else, a memory of a cyclone whirling luminous leaves about me, each leaf a universe. And, within one of those leaves there stood, I knew, the tree of the leaf, a Pattern spread below it, but not the Pattern that ruled the worlds I walked when I went among Shadows. A different Pattern.

“The Big Rip.”

“What?” I said again, woken from my reverie.

“The Big Rip,” Miller repeated, getting up to go, adjusting his jacket. “The end of the world, the end of everything. That’s why I came by. That’s why you keep breathing air. Ask your son about it.”

Momentarily speechless, I just looked at him. I was thinking. Whatever “men in black” were, I wasn’t so sure Miller was the same kind of animal.

“They serve a pretty good breakfast,” the agent said, handing me a menu, “Try the smoked salmon with cream cheese and bagels. Delicious, but if the cream cheese doesn’t kill you, modern life will. Be careful crossing the street.”

Not tall, which is perhaps just a more polite way of saying “short,” but maybe I can be polite on certain occasions. And the reunion with a friend, in my book, is one of those. That I had not seen this particular friend in a quarter of a century registered in more ways than one: in some additional weight on his heavy-set frame, in the gray head of hair which had also gotten thinner, in the speed with which he moved, in the look on his face and — I assumed — in the look on mine. His showed something akin to wonder, amazement at seeing me after such a long, long time. Mine showed...I was reluctant to imagine what mine showed, but I managed to meet his grin with one of my own as I stood and leaned across the table for his hand.

It was not just my hand that he shook; he was shaking his head slowly as the waiter came forward to pull his chair out from the table for him. He stopped the head-shaking to sit, turn to the waiter, thank him and accept a menu. Then he looked at me again, rubbed his chin and shook his head once more.

“I don’t even know what to call you,” he said finally.

“How about,” I suggested, “‘Hey, aren’t you that lousy son of a bitch who’s forgotten how to pick up a telephone to call an old friend’?”

“I thought I called you that yesterday. Must have slipped my mind while I was having my heart-attack.”

“Heart-attack?”

He laughed.

“Not the medical kind. The heart-attack you get when you win the lottery, or when you find out your wife’s pregnant with twins.”

That got me to relax again, which is how I learned I had tensed when I had thought for a moment he had really suffered a coronary.

“You had me there a second. I’m glad the waiter won’t have to bring the paddles along when he serves you your sausage and eggs.”

He sat there, smiling at me, silent a moment, and then said, “I’m going to call you Corwin, if that’s all right.”

“I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. Agents I have met recently are aware of a few of my aliases already, and the name Corwin won’t mean anything to them or to anyone else.”

“You’ve met the Men in Black?”

“Yesterday,” I affirmed. “And possibly again a very short time ago. You might’ve gone past one on your way into the restaurant. Only he didn’t fit the same mold as my friends from yesterday. No shades, more direct, came here alone. And had a different agenda. The Men in Black seemed very interested in determining whether Merlin and I were extraterrestrials or not. Agent Miller was after something else.”

“There were three men getting onto the elevator as I got off,” Bill said, adjusting the position of his bifocals on the bridge of his nose. “Two were on their way to the conference downstairs complaining only a quarter of the invitees had shown up. The other man was not with them, and said nothing.”

“Describe him for me.”

Bill complied, offering details he was able to recall concerning the third man, including in his account that the man “had on a really nice pair of shoes.”

“That’s him,” I confirmed, with a small snort. “Not so much in uniform, as a man dressed for another day at the office. There is a difference, and that would be the one setting him apart from the alien-chasing agents. Though he was more open with me, the Men in Black nevertheless handed me back something from the time of my accident.”

Bill chuckled and produced some papers that had been tucked in his jacket.

“That reminds me, I brought these for you,” he said, placing the papers on the table, smoothing them flat, then turning them around in order to pick them up and toss them onto my side. “The last of my investigation. Leftovers Ed Wellen found and gave to me when he was getting your house ready for sale. Oh, there is more, in some boxes in my attic. You can have them any time you want to come out and visit.”

As I began flipping through the paperwork — course descriptions, syllabi, class assignments and tests with the name ‘Carl Corey’ on them — I listened for anything more Bill might have to say.

“There was a meeting of the Carls,” Bill continued, “Carl Corey...”

And then I saw it, of course, but I said nothing so Bill could complete the sentence.

“...and Carl Sagan,” he finished.

I nodded, but remained quiet. A lover of the mystery genre, the man across from me had a problem-solving mind in that head of his, and I was curious if he had anything more to tell me.

“Sagan and two other scientists appeared as skeptics at a symposium on UFOs sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1969. The year of your accident. Sagan had come to Cornell, you see—”

“—the year before,” I chimed in. “He had been denied tenure at Harvard. So he moved to Cornell to take an endowed chair. And almost the first thing he does is debunk UFOs as evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. I was searching for my past, wondering if I might myself be an extraterrestrial...it all fits.”

I smiled.

“Mr. Holmes, thanks.”

“Alice and I agreed years ago that I must be Watson,” Bill corrected me, indicating his belly with an affectionate pat before turning to the waiter, who had just then returned to stand by our table.

As I watched this man I had known since before the births of his grandchildren, I contemplated the events and choices that had brought us together again.

Bill Roth was my closest remaining friend from the old days, when I dwelt in this shadow. Realizing that truth had made me keen not to lose him and that had been my initial reason for deciding to see him. He was also an attorney, had taken care of selling off my house for me. A pretty big favor for which I owed him. And he had helped me track down the whereabouts of the Jewel of Judgment when it had briefly resided here, before Brand had absconded with it. Also good reasons for seeing my old friend again.

There was another reason, though. He obviously had been in some way party to Merlin’s and Martin’s activities here. He was therefore important as a potential source of information. So, on this occasion at least, sentiment and expediency would together season our breakfast. As for the latest tidbit of my own history which he had just provided, I was considering that the special of the day, something I had not expected to find on the menu.

The waiter turned to me as I was musing, and I realized I had not given any real thought to what I wanted.

“Are you ready to order, sir?”

“I am. I’d like to start off with your smoked salmon, cream cheese and bagels — recommended to me by one of your regulars — along with a serving of your granola, a glass of orange juice and some of your coffee.”

“‘Start off’? Will you be ordering anything else?”

“Your prime breakfast sirloin with eggs is tempting me. Let me think about it, and I’ll let you know when the bagels and granola arrive.”

The waiter nodded, said, “We will have your orders out to you shortly,” took our menus and departed.

Bill was shaking his head again, and grinning.

“Your appetite hasn’t changed. Nothing about you has.”

“Look closer,” I advised. “War, death, taxes. Murder, mayhem, madness. See the lines around the eyes? This is no longer the quality craftsmanship of yesteryear. This is the ‘new and improved’ Corwin. Meaning you pay more, and you get less. Don’t let the first impression today deceive you. But I will go this far. I missed the hotel’s continental this morning, and I’m ready for some food.”

“At my age,” Bill said, sipping his water, “I won’t argue with your assessment of ‘new and improved.’ The preponderance of evidence supports it. Your friend Sagan was a classic. After him, there have only been your ‘pay more, get less’ models. NASA these days calls it ‘faster, better, cheaper.’ It is a different world out there.”

“Sagan was not so much a friend, as an acquaintance,” I elaborated, wanting the record to be clear. “As an open-minded skeptic interested in other worlds, he was a man I wanted to talk to — and did, on a few occasions after class. And one time when I drove out to his office at Cornell to put forward a notion for inter-world travel. But I heard ‘was’ and ‘after’ just now; the man’s still around isn’t he? He was younger than yourself.”

Bill just shook his head.

Sitting there, reminded as always that the fate of us all, ordinary or extraordinary, is to rejoin the dust beneath our feet, I said, “That is sad news. Did they ever find life on Mars? That was one of his hopes, I believe.”

“No, but they’re still looking,” Bill said, glancing past me toward the morning sky beyond the windows (I had taken Miller’s seat after he had left, wanting my guest to have the view), “I follow science more, being retired. I have the time, and the big questions interest me. Is life out there? Why is there anything at all instead of nothing? How long will the universe last?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask Merlin some of those.”

“I did ask him,” Bill admitted, putting his hand again around his glass, but not lifting it, just staring into it for a moment before looking at me again. “He didn’t know why there was something rather than nothing. He stated that the universe is full of life and even went further than that.”

“How do you go further than that?” I wondered.

“He indicated the universe is a living entity.”

“Quite a claim,” I concurred, not sure how such an assertion should be interpreted. “What did you make of it?”

“I don’t know. I know the law, and comprehend some of the science I read. But religion is too big a puzzler for me.”

A thought struck me then, concerning what Merlin might have been thinking of when he had given his answer. But it could wait till later, so I set it aside for the time being.

“Perhaps it’s more a philosophy thing, not so much a religion thing,” I offered. “Did he ever get around to that other question of yours about the lifetime of the universe?”

Bill sighed.

“Oh, yes. He said the universe might not last as long as everyone thought, but we would have to wait until the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe—”

“—The what what?”

“Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe,” Bill repeated. “They call it WMAP. Merlin said it would take years for WMAP to build a good picture. He did hold out hope, though, for a clandestine military program and a mysterious Russian satellite to give quicker results.”

“Was this the RELIKT-2 satellite?”

“Right! The Russians had run out of funds due to the Cold War—”

“—so the Pentagon quietly launched it for them,” I jumped in, suddenly catching on. “And this satellite was mapping Big Bang radiation?”

“Yes,” Bill agreed. “The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.”

I was beginning to see the light. The very, very, very old light from the Big Bang.

“Bill,” I asked, “Did Merlin ever have anything to say about something called the Big Rip?”

Bill frowned.

“Well, he is very well-informed and knows many experts. But I have never heard him say very much about it.”

Some of my disappointment must have been visible in my expression, as Bill hastened to add, “But I know what it is.”

“What is it?”

Bill cupped his hands together before him.

“If my hands are the universe,” Bill said, beginning to draw his hands apart, “then the Big Rip happens when the universe expands too fast, pulling everything within it apart till it bursts” — he moved his palms abruptly away from each other — “like a balloon inflated too quickly. That is how it has been explained to laymen like me, anyway.”

The waiter at that moment appeared with our breakfasts, which he placed before us on the table. Addressing me, he then said, “Have you decided about the prime sirloin and eggs?”

“I have, and have decided a sirloin, medium rare, and eggs over easy are an excellent idea. Could you have that brought out as soon as it’s ready?”

The waiter nodded, said, “Of course,” then gestured toward the entrance to the restaurant. “A Mr. Maio and his daughter have asked to join you. Shall I send them over?”

Having called Maio from my hotel the previous evening to let him know what had happened to me and where I would be today, I was not caught entirely off guard.

“Please do, but can you give us about three minutes first? We are about to wrap up our discussion.”

“It will take a few minutes for them to come up,” the waiter informed me. “They are waiting in the lobby on the floor below. Will that be enough time?”

“That should be fine. Thank-you.”

The waiter went his way, and when I looked at Bill again I could see he was a little confused.

“A few things, very quickly,” I explained, moving my napkin farther to the side. “Merlin asked me to bring this along, since he would not be able to join us right away.” There was a Trump lying face up where the napkin had been, which I picked up and began to stare at, concentrating. “Exactly how much has Merlin told you concerning the Tarots, the Pattern, Amber and Shadow?”

Bill blinked, glanced upward for a second before peering back at me through his bifocals.

“Your son has said that physicist Max Tegmark is correct that there is an infinite multiverse, which your people call Shadow. Amber is at the center of one loop of the lazy eight and Chaos at the center of the other loop. A Trump can open a wormhole from any place in the multiverse to any other place. The Pattern is the source of the negative energy the Trumps use to open passages through space and time.”

Merlin had apparently done as I had, and found on this Shadow Earth terms and concepts corresponding to our own understanding of reality. Recognizing this, I continued to stare at the card, and the connection slowly occurred. I was staring at the laptop back at the hotel, through the very same Trump which Merlin had used to summon the computer in the first place. Before leaving the hotel, a quick check of the latest data had revealed that, shortly before six o’clock, the red graph had topped the blue and reached two on the cumulative deviation scale. I focused on the screen.

It was now zigzagging around four.

“I can see my hotel room through the passage created by this card,” I let Bill know. “And I imagine what I am looking at is what Merlin meant when he told you the universe is alive. The noosphere, he calls it. The interface between subjective and objective reality. Monitored by the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton. I am looking at a computer in my room tracking its live data as I speak. And it’s telling me something.”

“What is it telling you?”

“That a major world event is happening. Right now.”

Even as I spoke, my mind broke into pieces, fractured along the fault-lines of time. Perhaps it was because I was viewing another place through a Trump, and somehow violating the sanctity of space and time, as Bill had just described. Whatever the cause, memories overtook me. The memory of slowly and deliberately inscribing a new Pattern on a nameless plateau overlooking a great wasteland under the sky of Chaos, the Pattern within the Jewel of Judgment and myself merged in the inexorability of the process, the feeling that I had become one with fate. Memories of dreams of the green-bearded Old Man of the Sea which had driven me from Rebma to seek answers in Tir-na Nog'th. The memory of Grayswandir falling toward me as I endured the Ordeal of the Wheel in the Arena of Doom, as I had already seen it do in a vision. The memory of myself in Valtuya, my underwater Alcatraz in the Courts of Chaos, scratching six black-and-white murals out of the black paste laid on the walls of my prison...towers. Always towers...

Maio and a blonde woman entered my field of vision, breaking the spell. Shifting my gaze back to Bill, I saw his look of concern.

The Trump connection was gone. I stared at it, focused on the card again, willing it to be real, hoping against hope, desperate. The image on the card swam before my eyes, changed, became three-dimensional. Be there, I said in my mind, be there!

And he was.

Merlin was on the other side of the room, maroon backpack in hand, though, and not right by the laptop as I had wanted him to be.

There was a pressure, moments being shoved into each other like a toppling row of dominos. Time collapsing.

“Merlin!”

There was no way to keep the growing sense of panic out of my voice.

He heard me and looked up. Maybe he even saw me on the other end of the corridor of space-time opened by the Trump, weird light like a broken sunbeam dancing over by the table where his laptop computer was busily processing the data from Princeton, charting it across the screen.

And he didn’t hestitate.

Merlin threw the backpack.

It came flying over the top of his computer, right at me. Reflexively, I stood and caught it. Unfortunately, I lost the Trump connection at the same time.

Everything happened at once.

Maio and the girl were approaching the table. Bill was getting to his feet.

And then I saw it.

It was as if Bill wasn’t standing across from me, as if the restaurant behind him and the entire one hundred and seventh floor — the entire tower, in fact — had faded away, as if I were floating above Manhattan on a magic carpet. In this vision I was not floating there alone. Something shared the sky with me.

The song that had come to me out of nowhere on the ride over from where I was staying in Murray Hill to the Wild Blue Restaurant earlier this morning returned, rang in my head. I remembered sitting in the cab, singing it softly to myself: “‘I was made of poison and blood. Condemnation is what I understood.’”

Guided not by thought, but by what people like to call ‘instinct’ — I know not what to call it other than the imperative need to act — I dug into Merlin’s pack and my hand immediately closed upon his oversized card case. Maybe that hand, shocked with the sudden dose of adrenaline racing through my bloodstream, shook a little as it slipped the case open.

Moving to stand with Maio, the girl, and Bill, I overrode their questions and yelled, “Stay close and hold on!” even as I drew the first Trump that came to hand.

The patrons and staff stared at us, perplexed, irritated. I believe a few voiced their objections to my behavior.

My mind seized on the subject of the Trump immediately. A small quay where a little sailboat bobbed in the waves, the stony place sprinkled with minor vegetation, surrounded by the moonlit sea, the gray lighthouse rising up above everything else. Against a backdrop of stars and shadows, the vision came nearer and a mild breeze touched my garments.

From their reactions, I knew the others now saw what I saw.

“If you see it, go to it! Now!”

Maio, veteran of many a vision quest, seemed the least surprised by what was happening, and moved in front of me and into the other place, taking the hand of the girl and bringing her through with him. Bill stepped before me, turned to look at me, then moved ahead also.

Then there was an explosion, and the tower shuddered.

The next line of the song seemed to echo around me as I steadied myself and almost stumbled into the place that waited.

“Video games to the tower’s fall.”

There was smoke behind me, there was disaster behind me, and in my wake, I knew, there was death.

Copyright © 2011 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Chapter Two: The Capture

2011-04-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER TWO

“Things are not as they seem.”

My son leaned back to look up at the sky, and my eyes sought after what he was seeing. Some bird, perhaps a hawk, rode a breeze undetectable to those like ourselves confined to the earth. He stared a moment at the creature gliding on the high wind before returning his gaze to me.

“Things are not as they seem,” Merlin repeated. “You understand that, don’t you?”

He turned his head to his left, studied the scene in that direction, then peered past my shoulders at whatever was going on behind me, next looking off to his right before giving me his attention once more.

“Things rarely are,” I replied, when he was looking at me again. “That’s what makes life so interesting.”

He chuckled.

“That is true, but so easy for a Prince of Amber to forget. Amber is the center, that is what those sprung from the Unicorn have been taught. A certainty they now know to be false. Yet the old assumptions continue to guide their thinking. Do you not agree?”

“I’m not sure that I do. The war, the chaos storm which swept through Shadow, and a state funeral at the other end of existence should have changed that. At least, I would hope they did.”

He held my gaze with his own for a second or two, as though something significant had been revealed, before going on to say, “Yet the House of Amber goes on pretending, doesn’t it?”

I began to protest with, “I just said—” And then caught myself. Backing up a little on the conversational terrain, I decided to do as he seemed to be hinting, to question my assumptions.

So I sat back a little, regarding him curiously.

“Pretending what exactly?”

“That Shadow isn’t real.”

And it was true. He was right. Now that I thought I had an idea what he was getting at, the point toward which he seemed to be driving. Simply, the offspring of Oberon had always understood Amber to be a thing apart, the true reality, Substance as opposed to Shadow.

And how much had that really changed?

“Then I believe I understand,” I replied slowly. “Once we believed Amber the sole reality. We have since learned the Courts represent another center, a different but equally tenable reality. Perhaps even more tenable. And so we content ourselves that now we see the whole picture, and feel no need to look any further.”

“Did you find me today?” Merlin asked, “Or did I find you? Or did something else happen?”

As he finished speaking, he looked away again.

And I looked, too, of course.

The juggler on the unicycle was circling the fountain. He had retired the water balloon act, and was weaving two wands through the air, streams of iridescent soap bubbles trailing from their tips till they vanished in the sun.

“Everything is real,” Merlin continued, “Your dreams are real.”

Not exactly the father-and-son conversation I’d expected, I admit. But he had baited the line, and I was hooked and wondering how long till the fish would be landed and thrashing in the bottom of the boat.

“You think you’ve been watching. I tell you this: You’re being watched.”

Someone was standing close by, and, turning, I saw the expressionless face of one of New York’s finest staring down at me. Two other cops, strolling up behind, moved to stand behind Merlin.

“Carl Wynne?”

That was the name I was registered under at my hotel.

“What can I do for you, officer?”

“You can come with us down to the station. We’ll have our talk there.”

“Why can’t we talk here?”

I noticed his hand drop to his belt, not so far from his holster.

“We need you to immediately cease your illegal activities and come with us,” the policeman said, delivering the next words with some extra emphasis, “Right now.”

Reaching for my things, I gathered them together, stood up.

“I’d like to know what illegal activities we’re talking about, officer. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“You deaf? I said, ‘Get moving.’ So get moving.”

They were armed, but standing within reach. I could probably take all three of them. With Merlin’s help, forget the “probably.” But Merlin was not himself today. Looking past them, I saw two cruisers at the edge of the square, lights flashing.

There was anger in me; I felt it burning in my chest and moving rapidly outward. A few years back, I would have let that wrath take me, and given these civil servants a lesson in civility, free of charge. Not as many years ago as I’d like to think. On this occasion, however, my wiser self was beside me and quietly counseling that the best way to find what this whole business was about was to go along with it for now.

Meanwhile, one of the cops, perhaps reading my first thought all too well, had taken a step toward the lead officer.

“Okay,” I assented, “you’ve got me curious. Let’s go.”

The second cop visibly relaxed a little. The third motioned Merlin to his feet and spoke for the first and only time during our happy association: “You, too.”

Merlin got calmly to his feet, and I was pleased. He had done the math and was rightly unconcerned. No ordinary cell could hold either of us, and it was even possible we might learn something.

So we went quietly, and since Washington and Liberty had finally gone on break, the couples and the children for the most part watched the unicyclist waving bubbles into being with the choreographed passes of his wands.

“So you’re his legal counsel?”

“That’s right,” I told the cop sitting across from us in the little room to which we’d been brought.

“So no phonecall for you?”

That last question had been directed toward Merlin, but I answered for him.

“You’d be advised to let him have his phonecall. It would be a shame to have our being picked up called into question on procedural grounds. Could muddy things where the legal pretext is concerned.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head with a dash of irony and a heaping cupful of mock concern, “We wouldn’t want that.”

“Well, then, what are we doing here, officer?”

“You’re waiting.”

“For what?”

“For us,” said a new voice belonging to a man just entering the room with Merlin’s backpack. Dark sunglasses, dark suit, dark hair cropped very short, tan. His colleague was similar, but a little taller, and bald.

“Thank you for your assistance, detective. We’ll take it from here.”

The cop asked, “Need anything?” as he got up to go.

The bald gentleman, entering the room behind his partner and partly obstructed from view as he passed through the door behind him, lifted up what he had in his hands so the policeman could see the coffee cups he held. The first man glanced meaningfully at the cups and smiled faintly as he said, “We’re good.”

The detective left and closed the door behind him.

The first man seated himself while the bald man set the coffees down on the table before retreating to stand in a position that left him closest to the door.

Noting the labels on the cups, I commented, “Yes, I couldn’t help noticing the Starbucks across the street as we were brought in, and thinking, ‘That’s not a coincidence.’”

The first man smiled again, more broadly this time, and said, “They’re for you.”

I took one and sipped.

Sweet, but I liked it.

“Hazelnut. How did you know?”

“We know a lot about you, Carl Wynne. Or Carl Corey. Or Cordy Fen. And about you, Morey Lennon. Or Mark Dillon. Or Marv Dunne. Among other names. And about your contacts, many highly respected scientists, writers and philosophers.”

“Not sure what you’re talking about,” I volunteered, genuinely not sure what he was talking about. “At best, I’m a military history buff. Maybe I’ve talked with a writer or historian here and there about the Napoleonic Wars. Otherwise, friend, you’re just blowing smoke.”

“Good,” the man said, “We’re friends now. Friends can tell each other stuff. Like why they spend so much time in Connecticut at the Flaumel household, often when unusual orders are placed by Amberline Enterprises. Like what’s so fascinating about the New England Air Museum outside Hartford. Like the reason for so many conversations with one of the nation’s leading time-travel researchers at UConn. Like how come one visit to the Nautilus nuclear submarine isn’t enough. Stuff like that.”

He had been looking at Merlin the entire time he had been speaking.

Merlin reached for his coffee and drank some of it.

“That’s really interesting,” I interjected — and it really was, especially the part about time-travel, “but friends also don’t let friends drive drunk. And, sadly, you gentlemen have dropped the ball on that one on several occasions. Luckily, no one got hurt and no drinks were spilled. Also, friends don’t call the cops on their friends.”

“Unless your friends are the cops.”

“You’re not cops.”

Another smile.

“Give the man a prize. I’m Agent Michaels, and this is Agent Archer. And we can be better friends to you than the police. Maybe we can even help you.”

“Help us? By dragging us down to the police station without cause?”

Michaels snorted.

“Oh, we got cause. And, yeah, we can help. We’ve had our eyes on you and your friend since the late ‘40s. Oh, that surprises you? Over fifty years of surveillance. Your friend was there in New Mexico, that day in 1949. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. And you were there three years later when the heat got turned up in Washington. You met Sarbacher at least once, also met P. R. Wallace, and in the ‘60s you were in Cambridge attending lectures.”

Bells were being rung. Some of what Michaels described echoed bits of memory not reviewed since my identity had been returned to me that day on the Pattern in Rebma. Back then, though, in the days the agent was dredging back into the light, my identity had been a mystery to me and I’d been driven. Driven to examine any angle, to follow any lead, to learn whatever the great minds of the age might have to teach. I remembered the time at Harvard of which he was speaking.

I picked up my coffee and took another sip, thinking.

“You really thought no one would notice a guy who doesn’t get any older?” the agent wondered, seeming overwhelmed by the scope of my ignorance. “This is the Information Age, Carl. This stuff gets noticed. Everybody at Wright-Patterson that day got noticed. Especially the officers. Want me to go on?”

“Let’s hear the rest,” I said.

And, as I spoke, I was recalling the day he had just harkened back to, a summer day in Ohio that a number of men had been ordered to forget. That had not been the beginning for me. I’d pondered the possibility long before then. That day, though, had made the possibility real.

“After Cambridge,” Michaels continued, “you moved to Ithaca. 1968. About a year later, you stopped by Cornell to meet your old prof just days before you tried to find out how well your car could dog-paddle. Car drowned. You didn’t.”

I remembered! It wasn’t all that clear, but about as murky as the waters in which I’d been immersed that night. I’d gone to meet a very smart man, a dreamer, even a bit of a poet. Just the kind of guy an amnesiac Prince of Amber would be expected to seek. Not all of it was intelligible to me now, but that part made sense, fit into place, and was mine again.

“Honestly,” I said, actually meaning it, “that time in my life even today remains a jumble. I was experiencing memory problems at the time, and being given the wrong treatment for them.”

“We know. You were in a sanitarium.”

“All right, so tell me. Who was it I went to see before my car failed its aquatic test drive?”

Michaels leaned back in his chair and was quiet for a moment. Then he answered.

“Carl Sagan.”

Sagan.

He had inspired a generation, at least. The sort of mind that could haunt many generations, make an entire century its home. He had firmly believed we are not alone, and had not even required extraterrestrials to sustain this belief. For he had considered dolphins to be at least as intelligent as humans.

He had also inspired me.

It was after encountering Jules Verne that I began to strongly suspect — and, in time, sincerely believed — planet Earth was not my home. Before Sagan, before Verne, I had wondered if I might have survived the demise of some lost city or sunken continent. Where might I find, then, my Shambhala? But H. G. Wells, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Teilhard de Chardin, Giordano Bruno and other far-ranging minds had suggested an alternative. The seed had been planted by Verne and the rest, but Sagan had tended it till it had emerged from the soil and come into full bloom. He had provided the philosophical scaffolding within which the notion could take solid form. Somehow, in a spaceship or on a beam of starlight, or perhaps through some process akin to quantum tunneling or via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, I had come to this world from another. The suspicion then became certainty as it had settled in my bones, where by intuition I had felt the notion to be correct. I was beyond all doubt a stranger in a strange land.

Nor, in the end, had I really been wrong about that. The method for getting from one world to another had simply been more arcane than any of those minds could have guessed.

“Sagan didn’t buy the Roswell UFO story,” I pointed out. “And, for the record, I don’t either.”

Michaels, unfazed, shrugged and responded, “Roswell was a non-event. You’re smart enough to know that. But you weren’t paying attention. I said 1949, not 1947.”

“Then what are we talking about?” I challenged, convinced this native of millennial America, this hotshot from some branch of the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI or perhaps a more obscure triplet of initials, had no real clue at all.

“About an Indian reservation in New Mexico where something over one hundred feet in diameter was found. Something previously seen cruising at 18,000 miles per hour. Fast, big — a Humpty Dumpty that took the Foreign Technology Division a very long time to put back together again.”

“I doubt I know very much about your flying omelette.”

But I did. Since leaving this Earth, it had not seemed of any lasting importance, a mystery of no real consequence in the grand scheme of things. Far greater mysteries had subsequently come into play, and that grand scheme had involved both the creation and near-destruction of everything in existence. Now, however, the old puzzle returned and tugged at my curiosity.

“You were part of the reception committee,” Michaels persisted. “You’re not going to tell me you don’t remember, are you? If you’re having trouble remembering, we’ve got plenty of questions for your cousin here.”

A chill touched me then. There are shivers that run through a person for no apparent reason. But I knew the reason for this one. It was not unlike the feeling which most people have felt at one time or another, when one believes one is alone or unobserved and then realizes otherwise and intuits there is someone watching. The mind of another was seeking mine.

While I had sweated over the preparation of a makeshift Trump for Merlin and had on several occasions concentrated on forging a link between myself and my son through that image, I had resisted the temptation of using the Trumps to communicate with anyone else. And I was sweating again as I held my mind as blank as possible, stilling my thoughts, eyes closed. My attempts to reach Merlin by that means had failed; likewise, whoever held my Trump now and struggled to find the real me behind that image would also fail. By now, back in Amber I was either presumed dead or comatose or in some other manner disabled, and it would have to stay that way for awhile longer. Word from me was well overdue, of course, but certainly not during government questioning.

This was not the usual Trump contact, however. Nothing around me registered as I drew on the hard training of the Pattern to hold my will steady and immovable.

Then it went away. My temples were throbbing and I realized my hands were gripping the edge of the table. I relaxed them slowly, opened my eyes. Michaels was looking confused, and staring at me.

“What’s up, Carl? Having an attack? Faking one? Not going to help, not going to get you out of this room without answering some questions. Doesn’t work like that. You go on and keep up the quiet routine, and we’ll do this a harder way. That what you want?”

“If you really believe I’ve been around as long as you’re saying, then try not to be too surprised if I have a spell now and then,” I said, wondering who had mustered such a formidable intensity of mental force with which to assail my mind, and then thrusting all that momentarily aside as I wondered next if I really had much of anything useful to tell this agent. “Or if I have trouble sorting through very old recollections,” I added. “Give me a moment.”

What the hell kind of timing was that, anyway? The sheer perversity of it outraged me. When between a rock and a hard place, a boulder dropped on you is just overkill. Still, I told myself, seeking the serenity with which to move on, how different was it in the end from the salesman showing up to insistently ring the doorbell while you’re upstairs in the middle of making love?

I tasted the coffee again, and tasted a memory not sampled in decades. My first impulse was to deny all. Knowledge truly is power, after all. But it can work both ways, and any responses or reactions to what I had to say might provide information I could use. And then there was the implied threat toward Merlin. He’d been silent since we’d been taken into custody. Though I’d only be delaying him being grilled by these guys, the delay would buy me time to strategize.

“You’re talking about something that occurred half a century ago,” I hedged, even as the memory returned like the bars of a nearly-forgotten tune.

Michaels leaned forward, tossed something onto the table.

“We have pictures.”

I turned the photograph toward me. Black and white, and that was me, all right. For a moment, I considered the “ancestor with a strong family resemblance” line. There I was, though, in an Air Force uniform wearing work gloves, my hand grasping the sweeping edge of a very large ellipsoidal object of gray-white metal. The entire thing was not visible, but it was suspended above the floor of a hangar, cradled by cables, covered in blankets where the cables drew against it, tarps draped over it in various other places, as well. There were two other men nearby. One had a camera out, so that the unseen photographer taking this picture was himself being photographed. A complete record of the event in that moment was being made, and I’d been part of it.

“That could be anybody who looks exactly like me, you know,” I observed.

Michaels smirked, said nothing, waited.

“Only a few people knew the whole story,” I began after a slow sigh, rubbing my chin and dusting off parts of me somewhat faded and toward the back of the shelf. “Everything was on a need-to-know basis, but information is like water: it travels. There were rumors. Somewhere near Gallup, a ‘disc’ had been recovered, on high ground near the Arizona border. The story was that Native Americans had reached it first, and had even been enlisted by the military to help locate it. So the speculation was over whether they were Zuni or Navajo, whether it was a place near the Chuska or Zuni Mountains, Tohatchi or Black Rock.

“There was also uncertainty about when, as well as where. The incident had actually happened months earlier toward the end of the previous year, perhaps even early in 1949. All we knew was that it had taken place sometime that winter. So even the exact date was up for grabs. Why had it taken months to get the material from New Mexico to Ohio? No one dared ask, and no one in the know was talking. So, again, almost everything we thought we knew was based on assumptions and guesswork. Still, given the alleged location of the site, it seemed logical that the object had been moved to Kirtland Air Force Base, especially since the Roswell story had drawn so much unwanted attention to the other end of the state and activities at White Sands.”

I stopped there and reflected. Whatever I was telling these two men I had till that moment assumed they already knew. But doubt now began to gnaw at me. Ever since the Manhattan Project, the government’s clandestine operations had been carried out under the principle of compartmentalization. The right hand often had no idea what the left was doing. Meanwhile, who was still around from that time who knew any of the story? A few, no doubt, and each would know his piece. Why ask me these questions unless someone was engaged in an effort to, as the man had just said, put Humpty Dumpty back together again? How much should I tell of what I knew or guessed?

“Of course,” I went on, downing some more of the coffee, “inquiring minds always want to know. And some of the world’s most gifted inquiring minds were housed very nearby, at Los Alamos. My own supposition was that some of the folks there and at Sandia were invited to look it over, to tackle the mystery. There were rumors of a Japanese program to build a suborbital vehicle. Could this be a test-flight gone astray? If not Japanese, then perhaps Russian? Who knew? The story of small occupants of an Asian appearance favored the former explanation. And there was always the possibility that it was the Japanese project, but had been annexed by the Russians — via Sakhalin. But, naturally, other explanations were advanced, as well.”

Michaels smiled and prodded me with two words: “Project Sign.”

I did not suppress the chuckle that elicited from me.

“We called it Project Saucer. It had recently been shut down, but it was generally believed to have given birth to twins. One twin officially existed and was known as Grudge. The other did not officially exist, but no one really believed such an important area of research would be dropped; it would be reclassified and moved out of public view. The unofficial twin we continued to refer to as Project Saucer. It was obviously going on, and the arrival of the material from New Mexico was solid proof of that. We nicknamed it ‘the wallop from Gallup.’”

“So,” Michaels said, frowning and taking back the picture, which he dramatically held up for me to see again, “though there are pictures of you in the hangar with the 1949 retrieved UFO, and documents naming you as part of the Air Technical Intelligence team that handled it, you are going to deny you were part of what you call ‘the unofficial twin’ project? Is that the story you expect us to believe?”

I laughed.

“Hey, that’s the story. Believe whatever you like. Yes, I was part of Air Technical Intelligence, and, yes, I was part of the crew that got it into the hangar that night. But, no, I was never brought into the project in any official way, and that was one of exactly two times I ever saw anything of the mystery ship.”

“Two times?”

“The reason I was at Wright-Patterson was that I was good with languages and had spent time in Belgium, France and Germany. And I knew the basics of flying. And, as I was told more than once, I was recognized as an ‘all-arounder,’ a jack of all trades, good at finding how seemingly unrelated things were connected. Later on, I was shown some writing, in some kind of code or exotic script. Since it made no sense to me, I offered a couple of guesses, but made it clear that without seeing it in context the writing was unlikely to make any sense to me. So I was brought back to the hangar. The ship was kept behind corrugated aluminum partitions. I was walked in, and still not much of it was visible. Tarps, scaffolds, plastic sheeting, machinery, men working on and around it. I was brought to a table where a schematic of the thing was displayed. Most of it had been blacked out. The engineer pointed to the portion of the schematic I was permitted to see and told me that was where the writing had been found. I gave my opinion, that it was a pictoglyph indicating an auxiliary power-supply or propulsion system. And then I was walked back out of the hangar.”

“And that was it?”

“For me, yes. NASA intrigued me, but I lacked the kind of skills they wanted and so I became a civilian for awhile. The war was over. I followed the Space Race, curious to see if any of the technology or design borrowed from secret German projects and the work at places like Wright-Patterson would show up in the space program. For whatever reason, however, this never happened. I had been convinced some magnetic, nuclear or beamed-energy form of propulsion would overtake rockets, and was disappointed. Later, the Korean Conflict flared up, and I went over.”

“Why?”

“Stalinist Russia made Germany look like a warm-up act, by my lights. But Korea was the beginning of my disillusionment. The Great Powers were playing some sort of game, and I was tired of being one of the thousands of worthless pawns. So I went to college and returned to music, an old love of mine.”

“And met Sagan. A man who dismissed UFOs as no more believable than leprechauns.”

Having met my share of leprechauns, I smiled.

“He conceded the existence of UFOs, but rejected the extraterrestrial hypothesis offered in Project Sign’s ‘estimate of the situation.’”

“What about you, Carl? Do you reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis?”

“Yes.”

“You touched a retrieved UFO.”

“I did.”

“How do you explain what you saw?”

“Operation Paperclip brought the greatest minds working on the most ambitious military programs in the history of the world into our military-industrial complex, where they were pivotal in its evolution. They had been working on their so-called disco-planes in Germany and continued their work here in the utmost secrecy. Russia doubtless indulged in a similar effort using their German scientists. The Cold War, therefore, was just a game to divert money and power to the militaries of both superpowers in the name of manufactured threats. Wars would no longer be fought for territories, but for resources. Both sides were militarily secure and therefore needed to concern themselves with economic survival. More powerful engines for economic muscle would be needed. Multinational corporations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and America securing the concession that OPEC oil would be traded only in dollars are all direct outcomes. The Cold War sham collapsed when Russia could no longer afford it. While underway, though, the magicians could never admit the rabbit had been in the hat all along.”

“So you’re saying the Air Force captured its own vehicle?”

“Giving you back your prize,” I acknowledged, inclining my head deferentially.

Michaels said nothing for a moment. He turned his head and exchanged a look with Archer, then resumed watching me, and finally spoke again.

“You want to try to explain that?”

“It’s simple. In super-secrecy, the Air Force builds German disco-planes in southern California, along with other innovative vehicles, weapons and propulsion systems. No effort is spared to maintain secrecy as they’re test-flown over remote areas to the east. In event of crash or capture, the vehicles and any pilots must appear foreign, but not Russian, since at the very highest levels of secrecy Russia’s real leaders, its kingmakers, and America’s are on the same side, staging the Cold War game for the world audience. Extemely advanced Russian technology might push Americans into an uncontrollable hysteria, with dangerous consequences at home. While the revelation that the American military has such technology would invite too many questions and too much scrutiny at a time when the military is irrevocably going ‘black.’ Unusually small, Asian-looking pilots, maybe even midgits? Why not? Coded controls employing symbols unrelated to any historical language? Of course. Fusion power-plant generating powerful electromagnetic forces to silently ‘levitate’ or swiftly whip test vehicles through the sky? The next step after rockets and nuclear fission, right? Inform the world such technology exists and let it radically alter the socio-economic structure of the emerging global civilization? Absolutely not.

“So there is an accident and a vehicle goes down. Only a very small number of people know the truth, so maintain the charade. Recover your own vehicle. Let the headquarters for Project Saucer and the Foreign Technology Division take possession. Admit nothing. Stall, prevaricate, disinform, classify. Sweep it away until a rug is found big enough for it to be put under.”

“So you,” Michaels said, sounding incredulous, “your relative, his cousin Martin, and your friend Raffy Ma’iio — none of you accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis? None of you are the extraterrestrial hypothesis?”

“May I have the backpack?”

Michaels picked it up and dropped it on the table with, “Enjoy yourself.”

There was a scabbard sticking out of it, which was the first thing I noticed, the exposed portion of the sword it held wrapped in a silk scarf. I pulled off the scarf and recognized the unmistakable silver hilt. I removed the scabbard and set it on the table. Opening the pack further, I removed the rest of its contents. A curious ring, a prismatic serpent of wire and glassy scales grasping its tail in its mouth, was discovered first. It had been resting atop the next item, a folded dark blue cloak, esoteric designs woven into its satin-like material.

And there was a Tarot deck.

I replaced the items, closed up the pack.

Michaels sat there and looked unhappy. He was almost sulking.

“You, my friend, have caught yourself students of the occult arts and the art of the con. Mark Dillon, aka Morey Lennon, my ‘cousin,’ is indeed a relation. Martin, too. Maio is just some old hippy I ran into. All as human as I am, maybe even more so. And the place I call home has always been the one true world, the real Earth.”

“You didn’t come here in a spaceship?”

Chuckling, I answered, “Never have flown in space. I grew up around my favorite form of transportation: horses.”

“The research into,” and here Michaels paused as he pulled out a sheet of paper and began scanning it, “cosmology, non-locality, quantum gravity, astrophysical anomalies and — this part makes no sense — unicorns and obscure mythological references? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Hold on just a minute,” I said, raising a hand and getting slowly to my feet. Archer visibly became more alert, but Michaels remained where he was, watching me. “I’ve been good, I’ve behaved and I’ve been interrogated—”

“—Interviewed,” Michaels corrected me.

“—Sure, interviewed. I’ve been interviewed and answered all the questions. So now I’ve got three questions for you. You ready?”

Michaels dipped his head agreeably.

“Go ahead.”

“Okay,” I said, picking up the backpack and handing it to Merlin, “When exactly did you put the truth serum in the coffees, back at the coffee shop or right here in the police station? Either way, there were security cameras present, and a lab test of my blood should reveal which chemicals were used to violate my rights. Were you at least smart enough to turn off the recording devices in this room before beginning the ‘interview’?”

Michaels shrugged.

“The answers don’t matter. You’re free to go.”

Merlin pushed back his chair, stood, shouldered the pack.

“Don’t leave Manhattan for awhile, Carl,” Michaels said, also getting up. “You haven’t answered all our questions. And there’s still your friend Raffy Quaoar Ma’iio who we haven’t talked to yet. We have questions for him about his time at SSFL. But before you go, I still owe you a free one.”

“A free one?” I asked, perplexed for a moment, edging around the table on my way out. Archer was nice enough to open the door for us. “Oh, a free one. My last question would be: What was the charge?”

Merlin was already through the door, but I turned in the doorway to catch Michaels’ response.

The dark-suited man from an unnamed government agency actually lowered his shades enough to look me in the eye.

“Class B Misdemeanor.”

“Really?” I chortled, genuinely amused. “What for?”

“Unliscensed fortune-telling.”

He made a gun with his right hand and pointed it at me.

“Don’t go far, Carl.”

“Agents,” I said, looking for and finding stage left ready and available for the inevitable exit, “see you on the flip side.”

Copyright © 2011 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Visual Guide to Other Worlds

2011-02-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

Random images that might offer a glimpse...

...Riemann sphere...

...quantum world as a slightly more than 2-D reality...

...prospect down the fractal fault-lines of a bottomless pit in a chaotic world...

...birth of a new aeon of evolving space-time whose Order defines one end of an existence bounded on the other side by Chaos, all the complex possibilities that might be lying as waves of multi-dimensional shadows in between.

“Good afternoon, Mr. President. Sorry I've been away so long...”

2010-11-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

That’s the last line of Superman II. The Man of Steel learns even the strongest metal can be broken; his heart certainly has been (and Lois’ heart, too). He fell in love, and fell from grace. Then he gave up the woman he loved for the only thing he loved more: his family...the family of humanity.

The title of this post, however, is incomplete. The full line is:

“Good afternoon, Mr. President. Sorry I’ve been away so long…I won’t let you down again.”

Those last six words, somehow so moving when spoken by Chris Reeve at the very end of Superman’s journey to understand what it means to love, to lose everything, and then to discover what the cost of redemption truly is, do not apply here.

I have been gone awhile, and may be again. And I don’t know when I will be able to resume my role as writer. My superpowers, you see, have been drained away, and I don’t know when they’ll be restored.

What happened, simply, is this: My life has been turned upside down, and so has my house. The notebooks I had created for my ‘Chronicles of Shadow’ writing project have been lost. They may be around somewhere; then again, they may not. As of this moment, however, their location remains unknown. It was a rather ambitious writing endeavor, especially for this writer, and there were indispensable notes, ideas, and ― most importantly, of course ― plot points and outlines in those notebooks.

It will be some time before I get my Fortress of Solitude back. If I ever do.

Meanwhile, folks hanging out at Shadows of Amber and any others who may or may not be out there, you’re in for a wait. The action was just about to pick up, and the beginning of the next scene sits somewhere in an errant red notebook which I hope still exists. The very next event, in fact, sends reverberations throughout Shadow all the way to the heart of Chaos itself. Old friend Bill Roth may yet have a small role to play in the history of, well, everything. It is not saying too much to reveal that a disaster of epic proportions is looming or that Corwin and Merlin have overstayed their welcome on the Shadow Earth and are bound for wild and untamed locations in Shadow and beyond.

Sequels are hard. Superman II lost its director over half-way through, causing it to arrive in theaters two years later than originally planned. By some miracle, the movie survived the loss of Richard Donner’s direction (due to his producers, the Salkinds), cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth (due to his death), and Jor-El as played by Marlon Brando (due to his oversized payscale and even larger ego). Hey, nothing’s easy.

Likewise, Zelazny originally declared The Courts of Chaos would be the final installment in The Chronicles of Amber. Yet seven years later, along comes a book long awaited by eager Amber fans: Trumps of Doom. Sequels always have their problems, and the cycle of books that followed up on Corwin’s adventure with their account of his son’s initiation into reality-crossing royal power-struggle was not entirely immune. Yet it generated much interest, getting fans excited again about new characters, places, abilities and possibilities in Zelazny’s fascinating Amber-Shadow-Chaos multiverse.

Then there are sequels beyond the sequels. Superman III and Superman IV? Best forgotten, in the opinion of many, and apparently Bryan Singer agreed when he conceived his Superman Returns as a sequel to Mario Puzo’s story, as portrayed in the first two Superman movies. If only Singer himself had paid closer attention to what had gone wrong in the third and fourth movies, his own effort might have succeeded better.

Zelazny was never able to embark upon the final five books, in which he might have woven together the stories of both Merlin and Corwin in a rebalancing of power, politics, and players in an expanded story and milieu. And Betancourt’s well-intentioned prequels have met with a reception like that which greeted the third and fourth Superman films.

And here lies 1/5 (plus a few halting chapters of the next fifth) of my own effort. Where I have presumed to pick up the story after The Courts of Chaos. (For those wondering, the answer is: Yes, I have a story device consistent with Zelazny’s multiverse ready to deploy in the third or fourth as-yet-unwritten installments that will sidestep any conflict with the Merlin cycle that would chronologically follow my material.) Leaving me in a position similar to Singer’s, attempting the Amber version of Superman Returns, which received mixed reviews, including Roger Ebert’s “glum, lackluster movie in which even the big effects sequences seem dutiful instead of exhilarating” and Mick LaSalle’s view that the plot’s culmination failed to “match the potential of the tiring 154 minute long film.”

And already there are problems cropping up in what I will here refer to as Corwin Returns. Among the very minor issues, the tags that once worked for loading the story here no longer work very well, so that now I open up February 2008 Archive, Beginning, Chapter Seven: The Lake of Sleep, and End in order to pull up Three Kings of Chaos in its entirety. Slightly less minor, I thought I had made up ‘Murtuya,’ but of course it’s a place in our world. And I’d forgotten Arkans was the duke of Kashfa in the Merlin cycle when I thought up the name ‘Arkand.’ Little stuff like that for the most part.

Regarding the next installment, its working title was, and still is, The Pages of Merlin, and real rewriting probably lies in its future. Our Earth may be where the story begins, but Shadow and points beyond are clearly where it is destined to go. Keep your eyes on Merlin when the story lurches forward again; he is, after all, ‘The Magician.’ The Tarot inspired Zelazny when he first conceived his Amber epic, and those cards guided me when I attempted to pick things up after Corwin’s journey to the Courts of Chaos. They will continue to guide me when I resume writing Corwin Returns, what I call ‘The Chronicles of Shadow.’

So what’s next? Going to have to spend time downstairs, where most of my possessions wait in a kind of limbo, and root through the cellar. But good, and sometimes very important, things are often tucked away in cellars. What was it, after all, that Corwin had to say about the all-important Pattern, center of Amber, fulcrum of existence, source of his family’s fantastic power?

It was a splendid and cryptic old family heirloom which belonged right where it was, in the cellar.

Which is, of course, also the ideal place to keep your Kryptonite.

[Summer Solstice, 2011, post-script: Original second and third chapters of Book Two have been dropped in favor of a new Chapter Two (Capture) and a new Chapter Three (World's End). Direction of the story is essentially unchanged, but the story should now be moving more directly toward where it needs to go. The hiatus is over and this year should be as much about Corwin’s renewed commitment to his mission as a renewed assault on this writing project (namely, Book Two). Meanwhile, global climate change may be here to stay, but I still say: Bring on the Summer!]

Chapter Three: The Mountaintop

2009-04-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

[Writer’s Notebook disclaimer: There are two discarded chapters in Book Two of The Chronicles of Shadow, and this is the other one. Not much to say here that didn’t get said in the note heading the former second chapter, ‘The Shore.’ Don’t know if anything can be salvaged from ‘The Mountaintop,’ but fragments below may show up later on. One section in particular should survive in some form. It isn’t easy to spend a lot of time and effort to write something and then decide it must be tossed in the recycle bin, but it happens. Any reading of the following material constitutes going through the stuff left out on the lawn for the tag sale. Recyclables can be found below.]

CHAPTER THREE

Its eyes — the first visible detail — were pale green. Curled up, its shape was difficult to discern. A small black hand, like a raccoon’s, pushed the flap farther aside. Though the digits were distinct, even human-like, the points of five retracted claws suggested feline origins. The vertical pupils dividing the eyes also suggested this. A raccoon’s cousin from another planet? No, for now followed the sleek head, swept back from a snout so narrow that the skull could pass for the sharp end of a spear or something local tribes once shaped from flint. And there was something about its black mane...

An otter with feathers?

In a sudden spring, it shot upward, leaving both pack and table behind, gliding through an opening in the ring of onlookers, disappearing behind Merlin. A moment later, it appeared again upon Merlin’s shoulders, its probing green gaze luminous with intelligence.

Yes, gliding.

Stretched between the extended limbs and narrow body like black sailcloth there had been, no, not wings exactly. But something.

“What on God’s green—”

Maio had actually jumped.

“Jinx.”

Merlin’s head was turned toward that of his companion, and he said, “Jinx,” again, but more softly as the two regarded one another. Whether the word denoted an epithet, a name, or a species, it had been spoken with affection. In response, the creature stretched its neck a little to touch its nose to Merlin’s, making a small noise as it did so.

“The two of you seem to be friends,” I observed.

Merlin reached forward, slipped fingers between the glittering black feathers, lifted something which flashed at the animal’s throat. A blue crystal with flecks of red light caught in its corners. Turning it slowly, he caused it to shift, briefly becoming a red crystal splintered with blue lines and points, then back to blue again.

“Jinx is my oldest friend.”

My son’s pet was a riddle too deep to unravel just then. So I returned to the more immediate question concerning the contents of his pack. One at a time, I withdrew the items, placed them on the table:

A folded cloak, like a quilt on one side where it was sewn with panels, gray and blue and marked with some design on the other;

An unusual dagger, shaped like a plus-sign, hilt as long as the blade, carved of green wood, like a stage prop, cut with runes on blade and hilt, completely harmless in appearance;

A slender ivory tube, marked up as though someone had played tic tac toe on it with a meat cleaver;

A wide collapseable cone, half-open, composed of telescoping segments, alternately silver and black — an optical instrument, something for eating ice cream out of?

“Okay, we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” I announced. “Right here, right now.”

They looked at me. Flora, beautiful and baffled. Maio, smiling, curious, and as caught up in the mystery as anyone there. Merlin, starting to seem like his old self again, posture erect and confident, gaze only now torn from the four things removed from his pack, a faint smile playing on his lips. Jinx, who had joined Merlin in contemplation of the table display, glancing at me before returning its attention to the mystery objects.

“Everyone,” I continued, “please have a seat.”

They sat. But I didn’t. I felt close to something important. And knew I had become a hunter again, though I did not know what it was that I hunted. And it’s harder to hunt sitting down. It’s also hard to hunt when you can’t see very well; dusk had arrived, so I walked over to the doorway, switched on the overhead chandelier. One of those adjustable affairs, so I settled for something a little stronger than firelight, deciding good atmospherics might be useful at this juncture.

Then I walked around the table, seeing the dagger, the mica-and-obsidian telescope thing, the cloak and the tube from different angles, seeing the faces of those seated there each in turn. I stopped when I reached the place opposite my sister.

“Flora, we’ll start with you.”

Her hand crept up toward her throat, an involuntary movement suggesting apprehension and surprise.

“Me? I don’t know anything.”

“We’ll see about that. For now, let’s start with those trucks parked outside. ‘Tarot Trucking’?”

The hand moved downward, the tightness around mouth and brow relaxed a little, and what she said next was uttered in a lower, calmer voice.

“Oh. You mean Random’s project. You mean Amberline Enterprises.”

“Random’s?” That took me a little by surprise. “Isn’t that Gérard’s operation?”

Flora shook her head.

“Perhaps that is what you were told, Corwin. And I suppose that is how it could seem. I guess it’s even true in a sense. May I ask where you got that idea?”

I thought back. Where had I gotten that idea? It was upon my return to Amber, that much I knew.

“I’m not sure. Things I heard from Julian, Random and Vialle. Flora looks to imports from the Shadow Earth — had that from Julian. And both Random and Vialle affirmed Gérard enjoyed, if not his old position as master of the navy and the man in charge of Amber’s port, then an expanded role where trade is concerned. Are you telling me I was misinformed?”

Flora swallowed, and it was then that I knew she was not quite as stupid as I had once thought. She understood the implications of what I was saying well enough to consider her next words carefully.

“Perhaps not fully informed, then. I don’t know how much input Gérard may have had, but it was Random’s decision. Everyone then followed their orders. Including Gérard, of course, being a loyal servant of the crown.”

“Yes, yes. Faithful Gérard, doing what is expected of him. You’re right, nothing unusual there. The King’s will is law, and all that. So this was really Random’s idea. Interesting. So now I guess I am asking why Random’s trucks are parked outside. What’s the story, Flora?”

“Bandits.”

“Say again?”

“Bandits. Pirates,” she said, and paused a moment before adding, “They prey on shipments moving from here to Calyddon.”

“Calyddon? Never heard of the place.”

“The Tecys,” Merlin said.

Flora turned toward Merlin. We all did. Except for Jinx, who, after registering everyone’s reaction, went back to keeping watch over his possessions.

Keeping watch.

That was it, of course. And doubtless correct. The animal, whatever it was, was not merely a pet. It was specially trained, which explained how it had remained quiet and unnoticed in the pack for as long as it had. And that training plainly included keeping an eye on items valuable to Merlin. Specifically, the things spread out upon the table before us. Mystery solved: Jinx was a watch-otter. Flying version.

Merlin seemed surprised by the quiet which had descended, by the impact of his words. The half-smile he had earlier flirted with came back, went away. With thumb and forefinger, he pushed at the cone, turning it first one way and then another, a safecracker searching for some combination that would unlock its secrets.

“The Tecys. Benedict’s friends. Martin’s friends.”

Now with his left hand he picked up the segmented cone, shook it, so that it telescoped open. Like a fat spyglass, an eroded sandcastle, an overturned ziggurat.

“My friends.”

The name was very familiar. My mind scrabbled after the memory, and in short order produced it: People trusted by Benedict in an unfrequented and, in keeping with Benedict’s strategic approach to things, therefore secure slice of Shadow. My brother had allowed that trust to include Martin, whom he had taken under his wing at the time, and had introduced the Tecys to Martin. Dear now-departed brother Brand had used Martin as a human sacrifice upon the Pattern — thereby precipitating the whole bloody business of the Black Road, the sporadic attacks and then open war waged by Chaos against Amber, all of which had culminated in the defeat of Chaos, the deaths of family-members and the recasting of the Pattern by our father Oberon. Martin, however, had survived the murder attempt, subsequently recuperating in the care of the safest people he knew: the Tecys.

“For an amnesiac, you are suddenly suffering from an embarrassment of remembrances,” I commented, walking around the table to stand at my son’s shoulder. “What does Calyddon have to do with the Tecys?”

Glancing up at me, Merlin answered simply, “They live there.”

I reached for his left hand, turned it over.

Gleams, glints, and glass. Crystals, lenses, facets. Concave, a hollow shell. Yeah, a crushed kaleidoscope, a geode for accordion-players, a shiny bowl.

I released his hand.

“So what is this thing, Merlin? Some kind of toy?”

His eyes went to the dagger. Maio, next to him, saw the look and picked up the useless weapon, then peered more closely at the object Merlin held, a small smile occurring on his face as some notion opened before him. With the dagger he pointed at the thing of metal and glass.

“The blade and the chalice,” Maio declared with a certain air of triumph. “Standard alchemy.”

“He’s right,” Merlin concurred. “I might show you. But not here. Many things don’t work here. This is a special shadow with special rules. That’s why great-grandpa said this was such a dangerous place.”

“I lived here for a very, very long time. Flora, too,” I pointed out. “So what’s so dangerous? What makes this shadow different from any other?”

Merlin frowned up at me, seeming puzzled.

“This is a place where the influences of Chaos and Amber nearly cancel each other out. There is no other world in Shadow that I’ve found where the powers of both are so weak. But you would know that better than anyone.”

Maio, studying the dagger’s runes, looked up, glanced at Merlin, then turned to me.

“‘Shadow’? Your name for the Otherworld? Shadow,” he repeated, tasting the word, smiling. “Yeah, I kinda like it.”

Flora spared Maio a swift side-glance, then looked at me, brows drawn together. We were breaking family protocol by discussing such things openly in front of an outsider.

“It’s okay, Flora,” I told her, “He knows.” To Maio, I said, “Better to use the plural in this case: ‘Otherworlds.’”

Whatever scent my mind had caught, I realized then that I had lost it. Maybe I had all the pieces of the puzzle with simply no clue how they might fit together? There was relief in me that Merlin had not lost all his memory, and there would be time to fish after whatever of value he still knew before our return to Amber. Most I would try to extract this evening. Meanwhile, goods moving from Earth to Amber passed through Benedict’s territory. News to me, but from a security standpoint, an excellent idea. Yet raids were being conducted on the route protected by the most formidable of all my kin. Why, and how? Was Benedict absent, confronting some greater menace elsewhere? A change in regime was either about to occur in the Courts of Chaos or had already occurred. Had Benedict been dispatched by Random, as now seemed likely, to the far end of Shadow to bear witness to the transfer of power and to prepare for what would follow? The dissolution of the Amber Accords and a renewed war on Amber. A war which, whether anyone besides Merlin, Bleys and myself knew it or not, King Zirlar had promised. Still on my undercover mission to find out what was going on in Chaos and what had befallen Merlin and Martin, I had been lying low. But it was becoming more and more apparent that the mission had failed and was over. More pointedly, I had failed. With the exception of finding my son, I had little to show for my pains. Worse, when I reported in, I would not merely be reporting on my failure. I would be admitting to my complicity in a plot against Amber, in — for all intents and purposes — treachery. I had aided the enemy by handing over three new allies to them. Along with the artifact known as the Dreaming Diamond. Earning imprisonment for myself, memory-loss for Merlin, and an unknown and unhopeful fate for Bleys. Angrily, I fought a wave of despair as the extent of my defeat descended upon me, seeking some balance between my thoughts and emotions.

Resignedly seating myself in the remaining chair, I stared across the table to see the flying otter staring back at me. Merlin was watching me, too.

“You understand how this place is different?” my son asked me.

“No,” I replied. “That is, not the way you seem to. We’re in a sanctuary, not a death-trap.”

Flora chimed in with, “I know I feel safer here than in many other places.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “More technologically advanced than most other worlds, doctors and hospitals do a better job patching you up. Phones and computers supplement our Trumps, so almost anyone in this locale can be reached quickly, easily. Cars and planes also make getting to other locations around here simpler. Hell, Random and I drove a certain Mercedes from here most of the way to Amber—”

“My brothers, the car-thieves,” Flora interrupted with a laugh.

Grinning, I finished, “And bullets tend to be faster than blades.”

Reflecting my mood, Merlin regarded me with a curious mix of amusement and amazement.

“But all those things you talk about—each one works against the higher abilities that are the birthright of a Prince of Amber. Or Chaos. You see it, don’t you? Why Uncle Random sent us here so many times? And why...”

What began as a look incorporating amusement and amazement changed then, all trace of the former going away as he let the sentence trail off.

“Yes?”

“Why you were left here to die.”

“To—? Oh, got it.”

Right between the eyes. The guy who had lost much of his memory was reminding me of something I’d momentarily forgotten. My brother Eric had left me in this shadow with just one expectation in mind: Corwin should die here. And had happily deposited a grievously wounded version of me in the middle of London in a year of the Plague.

“You’re right. It cuts both ways. What works against an enemy here also works against anyone using this place for a refuge. I can defend myself with an automatic weapon. Or be killed by one. You make a good point.”

Maio was muttering something.

“What’s that you’re saying?” I asked the old man.

“I said either all of you are brujos. Or you’re all crazy as Saturday night.”

“Why must it be an either-or question?” I asked, chuckling, “I’d say a little from Column A, a little from Column B.”

At that moment, a phone rang.

Reaching into a pocket, Merlin pulled out something that looked for all the world like a Star Trek communicator. He flipped it open and started talking into it.

“Hey, thanks for calling me back. No, I’m where you are, right here in Connecticut.... A Bose-Einstein condensate? You think that’ll work? You know I was thinking a rubidium beam, too. But using a hot plasma medium instead. Ah, there’s another call, got to go. Okay, talk to you soon.... Hello...? In Connecticut. With my Dad.... Tomorrow, I think.... I’ll put him on.”

He skidded the shiny thing across the table toward me. I lifted it to my ear.

“Hello?”

“Carl?” the familiar voice coming through the phone asked. Not just a familiar voice, a friend’s voice, one I recognized right away.

“Bill? Bill, it’s been a long time. Too long. Good to hear your voice again. How are you? And how are Alice and the kids?”

I heard a short laugh.

“Carl. Carl Corey. You still go by that?”

“When circumstances dictate. Today, though, and for the foreseeable future, I’m stuck being Corwin. Just don’t tell the front desk at my hotel.”

“Hotels aren’t sticklers for getting names right where I come from. Especially if you pay with cash.”

“Which,” I cheerfully rejoined, “by a strange coincidence, I do.”

“Just the word I would use for a Napoleon expert who drives cars into lakes, leaves priceless jewelry in compost heaps, gets hospitalized with nearly fatal stab wounds, is featured on a pack of Tarot cards, vanishes into thin air before startled nurses, reappears over twenty years later asking how my family’s doing. Just like there’s nothing out of the ordinary about such things. That’s the word for it: strange.”

That set me back a little.

“Over twenty years? It’s been that long?”

“Who was President last time we saw each other?”

I cast my mind back, to what events had been transpiring in America and the world then. A troubled time, to be sure. The OPEC oil embargo, coming on the heels of Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard, had contributed to inflation and a persistent recession. The Vietnam War had only worsened the financial picture and had just ended, a political and military disaster, leaving the Cold War in high gear. There is always another military conflict, of course, and there had been new ones in Cambodia and Angola, along with the war between Egypt and Israel. Nuclear arms control was a major issue; the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Union had just been signed. The SALT agreement was the last big thing I could recall from that period of upheaval. Sonny and Cher had split up, the Eagles had made Winslow, Arizona, famous, Pink Floyd had been looking at the dark side of the moon, Stephen King was making horror interesting again, and Spielberg had made people afraid to go into the water.

So I answered, “Ford. No, wait, there was a new guy from Dixie, right? Farmer?”

“Carter. There have been four presidents since then, Corwin, and a couple hung on for two terms. Remember those twin grandsons I showed you last time? One’s in trucking school and the other is doing grad work at RIT designing videogames.”

Regret hit me in the gut, followed by the usual accompanying kidney-punch delivered by the other fist, guilt. My throat had become a little dry; I swallowed.

“Bill, I—”

“Have a life?”

“No,” I said, the truth blindsiding me, smarting as it always does, “I don’t. And am having trouble remembering the last time it was when I did. That’s the sad part.”

“You know what’s better than being sad?”

“Being happy?”

“Meeting me tomorrow for breakfast. There’s a place I know down in the City. You game?”

“Bill, this whole not having a life thing—”

“It’s not really working for you? So you’ll be there?”

It was crazy. The entire universe, or multiverse, whatever you want to call it, was under threat from the Courts of Chaos, from witches, from long-lost — though probably not too sorely missed — relatives. Memories had been stolen from my son. Amber’s foreign minister, the most well-informed link between the two ends of existence, was a prisoner in the heart of Chaos, or worse. And my nephew, heir to Amber’s throne, was missing, possibly deceased. If there was a right time for renewing old friendships, this surely wasn’t it.

So I said, “What time?”

He laughed and said, “Great. Bring that boy of yours along, too. Very smart kid. A little strange at times, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Okay, let me give you the directions.”

Once I had the directions, and we had settled on a time, we said our good-byes. And I handed the phone back to Merlin, who ended the call.

I looked at Flora.

“Where are the drivers for those Peterbilts?”

“Caine is sending someone.”

“When?”

“In a day or two, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Because I’ve got an anti-pirate detail lined up to escort them. Which you are not to mention to Caine when you hear from him. People think I’m dead? Let’s leave it like that for a little while longer. Hey, what’s that I smell?”

Maio pointed behind me, said, “Dinner.”

Turning, I saw Anya wheeling a food-laden cart out onto the porch.

Merlin’s stuff was returned to the purple backpack to make the necessary room. Little was said during the meal, and what got said was mostly along the lines of, “Pass the salt.” Which was fine, as I chewed and thought about events down the road. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of seeing Bill the next day.

Bill Roth was my closest remaining friend from my old days, when I dwelt in this shadow. Realizing that truth made me keen not to lose him and that had been my initial reason for deciding to see him. He was also an attorney, had taken care of selling off my house for me. A pretty big favor for which I owed him. And he had helped me track down the whereabouts of the Jewel of Judgment when it had briefly resided here, before Brand had absconded with it. Also good reasons for seeing my old friend again.

There was another reason, though. He obviously had been in some way party to Merlin’s and Martin’s activities here. He was therefore important as a potential source of information. So, on this occasion at least, sentiment and expediency would go hand in hand when we had our breakfast. Whatever was left of my mission, it was back on track, and I resolved to put off my questions for Merlin till then. We had already covered a fair amount of ground in what had been an interesting day, and a long one.

When we finished up, there was a final drink, along with a round of small talk. Flora surprised me by interrupting a discussion of the Thimble Islands to mention my walking the Pattern in Rebma, which had restored my memory. She then suggested this might serve as a remedy for whatever had been done to Merlin’s mind. Indeed. Another reason to follow up tomorrow’s breakfast with a very long trip through Shadow, as far as we could go.

All the way.

Merlin expressed concern for the shipping difficulties, pushing Flora for her thoughts on conducting actual shipping, using the nearest major wharf, back in New Haven. For whatever reason, Flora frowned on the idea. Probably worried this would draw genuine pirates into the Sound and within view of her idyllic retreat. Maio paid no attention to any of the talk of either Rebma or the New Haven wharf, using every opportunity to engage Anya in conversation.

Afterward, four tired persons found beds in Flora’s mansion, since three of them would be leaving for Manhattan before dawn. Anya wrote something down on a piece of paper for Maio before she left on her drive home.

Which is why I drifted off to sleep wistful, sad, yet also oddly pleased. The old character who had so much knowledge of living on the edge of things, of music, of harps, might be a little off-the-wall (though who was I to call a kettle black?), but he had something I had lost. He had a life.

One day soon, I would too. Perhaps it was that thought which sent me off into dreams and the dark, smiling and happy. More probably though, it was just the wine.

[...to be continued...]

copyright © 2009 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB)

Chapter Two: The Shore

2009-02-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

[Writer’s Notebook disclaimer: Welcome to the online version of a work in progress, a writer’s writings as they’re written and — inevitably — rewritten. The chapter below, ‘The Shore,’ is now an ex-chapter. Magicians don’t generally like to show how they actually do their tricks, but writers sometimes do. Rewriting means, of course, that some of the original writing will be kept, the rest left out by the curb. So be prepared to see some of the abandoned chapter below reappear in its successor, the new second chapter currently titled ‘The Capture.’ And read at your own risk, for this chapter is no longer part of Corwin’s return to our world. This never happened. Might be a good idea at this point to visualize a penguin from the ‘Madagascar’ Disney movie now, waving his flippers hypnotically as he disappears into his hole in the ground, and to remember these words: ‘You didn’t see anything.’]

CHAPTER TWO

“I know you,” my son said.

Whoever had hung around past the retirement of the Tarots, whoever had missed the finality with which the harp had been laid aside — anyone left could see something personal had begun, a private affair. These were New Yorkers, naturally, blessed with a reputation for being pushy and unsympathetic, too self-centered to be nice. Somewhat true, of course, as it is for so much of humanity. Overlooked, maybe, is their willingness to give you your space in what at various times has been the most crowded place on Earth. People near us moved on and left us alone.

“Perhaps better than I know you,” I answered. “My activities may have gotten better coverage than yours. Your uncles Random and Bleys only said you’d gotten close to something. Close enough for lives to be very much at risk, including your own. The picture so far is incomplete, with two people missing from it, maybe gone forever. An artist is needed to fill the rest in.”

Someone in the park had begun playing a guitar. Cooing nearby, some pigeons anxiously flapped their wings as they hurried along the ground, frightened, but not enough to take to the air. Over the city, possibly down by the harbor, a helicopter’s blades slapped the sky. All part of the context in which the two of us were embedded, and all but ignored by us in the tension of an increasingly overstretched moment.

“Which would be you,” I prompted. “To avoid any confusion on the point, in the present conversation, you are the artist. And I am the critic. So dazzle me.”

Somewhere in some other history of Corwin, among the worlds that might have been — should have been — words tumbled forth from my son, marvelously meaningful in their import, signifigant, bearing directly on all our problems, full of the promise of solutions. Sadly, as is usually the case, the best of all possible worlds wasn't in today. And who could blame anyone for that? A gorgeous summer day, ordered up expressly for taking time off.

No, instead something else happened.

“Carl Wynne!”

That was the name I’d adopted this time around.

“Carl Wynne, I’m callin’ you out!”

There he was. Big guy, long yellow hair falling to his broad shoulders, carrying a bit of a beer belly, but otherwise in admirable shape, the beach bum who kicked sand in the face of the 98-pound weakling in the old get-in-shape ads. Boldly shirtless, sporting a gold cowboy hat studded with rhinestones, high-topped gold-bossed cowboy boots seamed with flashing diamonds (or zircon — who would know?), otherwise covered only in gold lamé underwear. He carried an old banjo over his right shoulder, and gripped the neck of a big golden guitar (comfortably perched on the afore-mentioned gut) as if it were a weapon. Which he probably thought it was.

He was pointing a finger straight at me.

The Guitar-slinger.

I stood up, and faced him.

“Are you talking to me, Slinger? Because I don’t see anyone else here. So you must be talking to me.”

The Guitar-slinger threw his head back to yell his answer.

“Oh, yeah, I’m talkin’ to you!”

Some people had started to turn our way.

So I shrugged, said, “Okay.”

“What?!”

“So talk,” I elaborated. “Say something.”

He puzzled over that answer. But only for a moment. Then he bellowed.

“Why don’t you take your cards and shuffle off!”

For some reason, that pissed me off. Maybe because it was not a bad comeback.

“Yeah, why don’t you put some clothes on?”

“It’s Summer!”

“Well, not for much longer.”

Lame, I know. Hadn’t had my Wheaties that morning, and was still waiting for my sandwich. So I tried again.

“At least put on a wife beater, you narcissistic, over-compensating Bengals reject.”

He blinked rapidly a few times, then shouted:

“You’re on my pitch!”

“Haven’t seen your name on any park benches around here,” I observed.

“You’re on my pitch!”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“This!”

He strummed the guitar.

“‘Devil went all the way to New York,
Lookin’ for a musician’s pitch to steal!’”

I turned for my guitar. Merlin surprised me by handing it to me. I passed the guitar-strap over my head, struck a chord.

“‘Devil was a Kentucky boy from the swamp,
Who had some trouble keeping it real.’”

The Guitar-slinger curled his lip in a convincing Elvis snarl.

“‘Then the Devil came upon a golden Guitar Hero from the South—’”

Grinning, I windmilled the guitar, and tossed off:

“‘And the Devil said, “Country boy, you sure got a real purty mouth!”’”

There was laughter at that, and I saw the Guitar-slinger go beet red. Then he took three long strides in my direction, and I was pretty sure he was ready to forget the musical duel so he could try his best to beat the crap out of me.

“Hey, that’s my banjo!”

It was Maio, as furious as I’d ever seen him, that crazy light in his eyes which I had only seen once before, charging through the crowd, heading straight for my rival.

The gilded cowboy took one look at his accuser, his expression one of stark surprise.

Then he turned and ran like hell.

While I stood there agape with my own version of surprise, the crowd clapped loudly. They’d figured the whole thing for a staged performance, I gradually realized. Unhooking the guitar, I passed it back to Merlin, who laid it back where it had been. To my amusement, bystanders dropped bills and change into the case. The fame was predictably fleeting, and after about a minute — no second act to the duel showing any sign of being in the works — the audience dissipated.

“Thanks,” I acknowledged belatedly, with that word including both Merlin and those kind enough to offer donations, as I sat back down. “And where were we? I think I’d asked you to impress me with your artistic talents, to fill in the blank canvas. And you were saying?”

Waiting, I contemplated the man who was my son. Merlin resembled me in certain ways, of course. Dark hair, light eyes, and (whatever may be said of his father) not a bad-looking youth. But in other ways different, as might also be expected. Slim build, which likely came from his mother, fair complexion — not much sun in the land of his birth (or, really, any at all). Yet he might be more at home here in Washington Square than I was, more a chess-player, less a swordsman. Which could be a good thing.

Today he carried a maroon pack on his back, the same we’d tracked through city streets the day before. He seemed at ease in the jeans he wore, his shirt the color of red wine. Symbolically stepping into the role of a young man in any city anywhere on the shadow Earth, he even had on a pair of sneakers. It was the sneakers that made me smile.

“I know you,” Merlin repeated, “but I don’t...remember.”

His eyes were on mine, searching for something.

“You don’t remember?” I heard myself say. “Gods, Merlin! What did they do to you?”

He glanced up at the sky, and I followed his gaze, where a large bird soared on the wind, very high up.

“Merlin...yes, my name is Merlin.”

I stared at him, wanting words, finding none. With my right hand, I reached out, gripped his shoulder, squeezed a little, as though hoping to wake him.

“There is a place where the ground moans,” he went on. “Your mind burns. Like fire...and then ashes, ashes. Thoughts go away, and don’t come back. You forget.”

“But you found me, Merlin,” I reminded him, watching my artist metaphor fall in tatters, trying to fill in the gaps myself. “How did you manage that? What do you remember?”

He was shaking his head.

“I followed the dog,” Merlin said, and drew his brows together. “Or I followed something. Through shadows and mists, until we came to this sky.”

“Which still doesn’t explain how you found me.”

“I don’t remember much about you. I remember the song about the place with the silver towers.”

“Avalon.”

“I remember Avalon. I think...I think I’ve been there.”

“You have. Your” —for a heartbeat, I hesitated— “uncle Benedict watches over the place.”

Running footsteps coming toward us. I looked. It was Maio, cutting across the square, clutching a paper bag.

“We gotta go!” was all Maio said.

Maio snatched up his harp, grabbed his other stuff. I hoisted my guitar case onto my shoulder, held out my hand to my son.

“Come.”

Merlin got to his feet. We started walking fast, to catch up to my friend.

“Maio!” I called out. “What’s the trouble?”

He whipped his head around and pointed behind me. So I turned for a look. They were pushing through the crowded park, looking for something. Or someone.

New York’s finest.

I began to move more quickly.

Maio waited for us at the edge of the square. When we got there, I took another look at what was going on. The cops had stopped some of the students, were questioning them.

“So what is this?”

“Class B misdemeanor.”

“What the hell’s a class B misdemeanor? Unfiltered smokes?”

“Unlicensed fortune-telling.”

“Oh.”

Maio was walking again. At a brisk pace. Before I followed him, I chose to take one more gander at the boys in blue.

They were looking our way.

Maio yelled, “Hey, c’mon!”

Deciding he had the right idea, we fell in behind him, merged with the other people moving along the sidewalk. Without checking to see if we were following him, Maio brandished the stained white paper bag in the air.

“Hey, c’mon!” Maio said again. “I got lunch!”

At first, the heat made the air on the highway undulate, as though the sun were shaking it out like a rug, scattering brilliance rather than dust. Because we did not leave till that afternoon, the airy rug was permitted to settle back onto the landscape when the sun tired of the chore and grew restless, hurrying west. And, in our way just as eager to cover ground, we put the departing sun at our backs as Maio hurtled us across Fairfield County in his little white sedan.

Events hadn’t progressed quite as I had envisioned, but at least they were progressing.

The idea of Maio as the man behind the wheel had seemed a good one at the time. Freeing Merlin and I to talk or sleep, so we’d be rested and up to speed by the time we got where we were going.

Then we got to Maio’s place and had a look at his car.

“Hey,” I had said right away. “I’ve just had an idea. We can rent a car. That way, we avoid putting any hard miles on your own vehicle.”

My friend had frowned and asked, “What do you wanna waste your money for? I just changed her oil this week, and she doesn’t get driven much anyways. A road trip is just what she needs.”

I noticed he’d referred to his car less as an inanimate object, and more as a pet.

“That’s not a four-cylinder model, is it?”

Merlin, who had been mostly quiet up till then, had volunteered, “Two-liter engine.”

His remark had surprised me a little. Until I’d remembered he had spent time in this Shadow before, hunting gadgets and ideas for Random.

“Two-point-two!” Maio had chimed in. “This car don’t need much power, on account of her size. I get great mileage. Get in!”

“Not sure I can fit.”

Maio’s pet was a Chevy Cavalier. Two-door.

He had scrunched his face into a skeptical expression, giving me a bemused half-smile.

“Maybe you’re not so big as you think. The bigger door makes it easier getting in and out. I’m going inside. Back in a minute.”

Merlin had walked over and pulled open the passenger door, climbing into the back. With a sigh, I had decided to follow him, taking the passenger seat in front.

In my mind, I had replayed the day so far while sitting there, smiling as I kept getting stuck on my friend chasing the Guitar-slinger out of the park. Probably because that image was more pleasant than the other, the one my imagination supplied, where memories were somehow burned out of Merlin’s mind. Something similar had been tried on me once, and I’d been fortunate enough to recover most of my lost memory. But some of it was gone forever, and I sometimes wondered what had been taken from me.

After a few minutes, the shaman of Washington Square had emerged from the small yellow house, jumped in and started up the car. And that had been when the front door had flown open, and a young woman — curvy in her lavender halter top and pink skirt, blonde, nearly as tall as I was — had come running out to the car to pass a mini-cooler through the window to our driver.

“You almost forgot!” she had said, laughing.

She had favored Merlin and I with a friendly glance, giving us a radiant smile. Then she had run back inside, and Maio had backed the car out onto the road and started us on our way.

I had looked my question at him.

“My daughter,” he had told me around his grin, and then had begun chuckling at my expression.

“Doesn’t look much like you.”

“Takes after her mom. Strawberry blonde when she was little, swear to God.”

I’d seen enough of my friend and his ways to know that anything was possible, that he might well be lying. He could really turn on the charm when so inclined, and was still quite fascinated by the fairer sex, old though he might be. In the short time I’d known him, I had already seen him squiring around two of his girlfriends.

I had shrugged. Whatever, it was none of my concern. So I had returned my attention to the course he’d begun charting out of the Bronx. And had realized one thing as he leaned on the gas, working the stick-shift like a toy: Whatever Maio drove, he’d be driving it fast.

The Cavalier carried us along the road less traveled, up the Merritt Parkway, thereby avoiding the snarl of I-95. Privately, I questioned this choice. The Merritt wasn’t built for modern congestion. And also took us out of our way, as we were aiming for the shore.

So the sun rolled west, and we rolled east. And we passed through the pretty towns.

Maio sometimes hummed, sang songs, patted the steering wheel to the beat of rhythms running through his head. He was frequently interrupted by the demands of contending with other drivers. When I glanced behind me, I saw Merlin either dozing, or staring out the window, in the quiet company of his thoughts.

It had been a long time since I’d been out this way, where New England begins. Made me wish for some smokes, but they had been left behind back at the Square during our hasty exit. It was nice to do nothing for awhile, though, just take in the scenery.

So it sort of snuck up on me until I noticed it, and then, once noticed, commanded my attention.

“Do you hear it?” I asked, after listening for several minutes, to be sure I was hearing what I was hearing.

“What?” asked Maio, looking concerned. “Is it the brakes?”

“No. Listen, listen carefully. Do you hear...music?”

“Radio’s off.”

“I know. So you don’t hear it?”

Maio cocked an ear, frowned.

“What’s it sound like?”

“Like an orchestra warming up. Lots of strings, maybe some winds. Instrumental, though possibly with some choral accompaniment. Very faint, rising and falling. Classical, if I had to guess, but it also sounds a little like Christmas music heard at a distance. When it’s coming from a different store, somehow carrying itself over the noise. You don’t hear it?”

Merlin was sitting up now, listening for it, too.

“I’m not sure,” my son answered slowly.

“There’s not enough of it to get what style it is,” I added, trying to help. “The way it seems to oscillate, it’s almost as though it were coming from something spinning, like a carousel. The notes of instruments, minus most of the structure. Romantic, or impressionistic, maybe the intro to a rock opera.”

Maio’s right eyebrow was raised. He had one eye on the sky as he drove, as though trying to look beyond it into some other dimension where music danced naked.

“The treads biting the road?” my friend tried. “Maybe a little of the brakes? ‘Cause maybe I hear something, I dunno.”

“It reaches you like a breaking wave — there’s more behind it your ear can’t quite catch,” I tried one more time, deciding to give it a last shot. “It starts to build toward something, subsides a little, comes back stronger again, while never fading out. Like a far-off flag waving in the wind.”

“Do you hear it?” Merlin asked from the back seat. “Do you hear it right now?”

They were quiet while I sat still to listen.

“Yes.”

In fact, I noticed, so long as I reserved some portion of my awareness for it, that it could still be heard under the noises of the car, the highway, our voices.

Very odd, I decided.

“Well, forget about it,” I suggested. “Probably a result of my recent re-infatuation with music. And I could doubtless use more sleep. Chalk it up to tiredness.”

Maio was giving me a sidelong look.

“What?” I asked.

“Warriors sometimes hear this music.”

“What do you mean?”

“Right before battle. Or ambush. Death comes close to the warrior, close enough for him to hear the music.”

“What music is that?”

“The song of the Otherworld, the voices of the ancestors.”

“We’re not going into battle.”

“Then it’s an ambush.”

“Or I’m just hearing things.”

Maio shrugged, kept driving.

We crossed the Sikorsky Bridge, the bird's-eye view of the Housatonic doing its best to give us the feeling we were ourselves up in one of Igor's helicopters. The connector to I-95 was right after that. Merlin dug into the cooler and split the last sandwich with me as we merged with the Interstate. The New Haven skyline loomed ahead, backed by a long ridge and traprock cliffs. Maio mentioned some deal the Quinnipiac had made with the Puritan settlers (around the time I'd arrived in London, I realized) as we raced right up against the city's southern flank. It struck me that New Haven was like an iceberg broken from the metropolitan floe we had left behind us. Then the old town was disappearing in the rearview mirror.

“Damn,” I cursed, more with mild regret than any real anger.

Maio glanced my way, asked, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just that I lost my cigarettes and could really use a smoke about now.”

Behind me there was movement. Turning, I saw Merlin holding an object out toward me. It was a pipe. With his other hand, he offered me a tobacco pouch.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the items, filling the pipe, lighting it.

After I got it going and drew on the thing a few times, I sighed happily.

“Ah, that’s much better.”

“There’s cigarettes here somewhere,” Maio informed me as I puffed. “Maybe under the seat.”

Smiling, I shook my head to let him know I was fine. And kept puffing, saying nothing for a minute or so, thinking.

Then I said, “Merlin, I see you’ve gotten some tattoos.”

Actually, I had noticed the tattoos on his forearms back when we’d shared our sandwich. But hadn’t realized how far they extended till he gave me the pipe.

They ran right out onto his palms.

“You didn’t have them before,” I continued. “When did you get them?”

The muscles around his eyes tightened as he squinted at the memory.

“We got them a couple of years ago.”

“‘We’?”

“Martin and me.”

He had answered me automatically, without troubling to search his mind. Encouraged by this, but not wanting to call attention to it just yet, I said simply, “Let me see.”

My seat was already as far back as it would go, but I reclined the back just a bit before turning to my left. He turned his hands up, leaning forward as he did, and I reached over to take hold of his right wrist.

The design was indeed curious. Starting near the inside of his elbow, a long slender branch, wound about with ivy, budding with blossoms, stretched down to his palm, where it spread out a fan of five oval leaves.

On each leaf was the picture of a place.

Releasing his right wrist, I now reached for his left, looked over the design imprinted on that arm and palm.

The same thing, only on each leaf of the left palm there was instead a face. I recognized all of them. After all, one of them was me.

“Martin’s are the same?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Your idea?”

“No, but we thought it was clever. Maybe even better than mine.”

“Whose then?”

“I...don’t know.”

“Random’s perhaps,” I suggested, overtaken by a sudden wave of affection that swept over me, causing me to delay for the barest moment my letting go his arm.

Then Maio said, “Which way?”

We were at the bottom of an exit ramp, sitting at a red light.

When I had departed Earth what seemed like ages ago — the ‘70s — to make good my claim on Amber’s throne, there had been computers. Big, clunky machines that filled air-conditioned rooms, using for memory in their giant drives disks nearly the size of spare tires, critical files backed up on spools of tape, information often fed into them on punch-cards. A network originally put in place for the DoD — the ARPANET, sometimes called DARPANET — had allowed computers to communicate over large distances at slow speeds, using phone-lines.

Those days lay far in the past.

In my Manhattan hotel room there was a connection to the ARPANET’s much faster successor, which I had learned was now known as the Internet. For any guest’s personal portable computer. There was also a business center, where I could use a computer provided by the hotel to access the Web of computers that stretched across the entire world, linked together by the Internet. For Earth’s inhabitants, this had all become unremarkable, a normal part of life as the Millennium came and went. For me, however, it still blew my mind that the world’s libraries, newspapers, magazines, art, music and more could be browsed with ease from a hotel, a home, or an Internet café. A laptop computer carried like a small briefcase was all that one needed.

In my time, there had been talk of colonies on the Moon, in orbit, even on Mars and the moons of other planets. Progress in spaceship technology had nearly ground to a halt, though. Instead, the computers which had, at least in part, been developed to handle the complex calculations required by space missions, had moved out into every corner of life, expanding their presence at the same rate they had shrunk in size.

The future had not turned out as expected. But it had sure made getting the phone number and directions a lot easier.

“Turn right,” I said, and fished out of my pocket the folded piece of paper with the directions printed on it.

Down the twisting old roads — showing their age all too well, not being in such wonderful shape. Was Connecticut having trouble funding its Department of Transportation? Maio assured me this was not so, and offered a one-word explanation: winter. Craftsman style houses, Colonials, Tudors, as well as more modern dwellings, went by as we wound our way toward the shore. Past a big awning the color of Merlin’s shirt and a wide breezy porch hung on a long brown clapboard building — “Antiques,” “Bakery,” “Pizza,” and “Market” under the awning or off the porch — the village center. The place did feel like it had been minted around the same time as New York. Still very much in evidence was the presence of the Old World in this part of the New, joined in time though separated by three-and-a-half thousand miles of ocean. We bumped along, me reciting directions, Maio sharing a couple of tidbits of history, Merlin singing softly to himself in the back seat.

The sun was rappelling down the walls of the world, generously scattering fistfuls of heavier, dimmer coppery rays, as a king would toss pennies at the feet of the commoners in the street. The sun went down, and we coasted up the driveway. And it was strange to see two eighteen-wheelers parked along one side of it. Things were somewhat cleared up by the lettering on the sides of the trailers: Tarot Trucking.

But it was still on the strange side.

Maio let out a wolf whistle. No pretty girl was in sight, but the pale blue old Victorian up ahead sure was something to stare at, with her turrets, cupolas, conical roofs, and impressive stature, proof a man’s home — or a woman’s — sometimes really is a castle.

A greensward stretched before the place, hemmed by pines to either side — for privacy more than a love of trees, I guessed. The drive split in two, wrapping about a small grassy hill crowned by a white gazebo. At the top of the loop, where a walk led up to the front door, the drive widened to surround a low circle of stone holding enough dark soil for a bed of white roses and one apple-tree.

We pulled up across from the apple-tree, next to the walk. Maio shut off the engine, and we got out, striding up the walkway toward the mansion.

I rang the bell.

A dark-haired woman opened the door and asked, “How may I help you?” in a thick accent that was Polish, or possibly Russian.

“If the lady of the house is in, you can let her know we’re here.”

“And you are?”

“Her brother Carl.”

She looked past me.

“And her nephew Merlin.”

“But who is he?” she wondered, still looking behind me.

“A friend.”

“Please come in,” she said, and we did, stepping into the oval-shaped vestibule where the chandelier divided the sunlight into pretty colors and cast them upon the cream-colored walls.

“Is she expecting you?”

“I always like to think so.”

“Please wait here.”

The woman went into another room, and I took a look around. A curving stairway to our left swept up to the next floor. The ceiling was high. Lots of windows. To our right was a large sitting room with a wide fieldstone fireplace, stiff-backed furniture, low tables, shiny bare wood floors, some Persian rugs, and a grand piano.

A moment later, the gal returned, said, “She will be right down,” gestured toward the sitting room in almost exactly the same way showroom models used to indicate Door Number Three on an old game show, and added, “You may wait in there,” before departing again.

Maio was walking in a slow circle, taking everything in. I heard him say, “Nice place,” as he peered through the arch into the room where we had been told to wait. Then he turned in my direction, squinting at me with his head tilted to one side.

“Why are we here again?”

We never got to hear my snappy comeback (something about Maio being ten minutes late for the Bertrand Russell seminar down the hall on the left).

She was descending the staircase. The short sleeveless dress matched the blue in her eyes. It was a revealing number with a plunging neckline, arousing a twinge of brotherly disapproval in me. Her orange-blonde hair wasn’t as long as I remembered, just touching her shoulders.

This time Maio’s soft whistle had nothing to do with anything old or Victorian. Though she was wearing blue.

“Corwin,” she said, smiling, stepping off the bottom stair.

Coming toward me, she opened her arms, embraced me, kissed me on the cheek. I kissed her back.

“Miss Evelyn Flaumel,” I said, stepping back from her, “May I call you Flora?”

“Is there any way I can stop you?”

“Indulge my eccentricities, and I will indulge yours.”

Then she went past me to Merlin, threw her arms about him, hugged him tightly, pinning him for almost a minute. Well past the ref’s count of three. While I was mentally giving her the victory on the metaphorical wrestling mat, I turned to admire a painting on the wall, amused by my own surprise. Selfish, vain Florimel, overcome by fondness for my son? Giving up the painting, a reproduction (or was it?) of Music in the Tuileries, I regarded them again. She was just pulling away, and, with her arms still about him, she drew him down to plant a wet kiss on his forehead.

“They’re saying you’re dead!” she announced. Then, looking from Merlin back to me again, she added, “You, too!”

“And you believed them? Hyperbole and the subject of my demise have often dined together before, and always leave without paying the check. Don’t you know by now that we princes of Amber are insured against the Grim Reaper?”

“Oh, is that so? When was the last time you told that to Eric? Or Brand? And what about Osric and Finndo?”

“They weren’t smart enough to take out policies,” I answered with a shrug. “But you are. That’s why you’ve helped me in the past. And why you’re going to help me now.”

Eyebrows lowered, shaking her head slowly to give me a scolding look, she said in a low voice, “You never change.”

“You sound disappointed, Flora. And I have changed. I’m not here for me.”

My glance flicked to Merlin, then back to Flora again.

Her expression relaxed a little, and she said, “Come with me,” leading us into the sitting room. And then through it, down a hallway, through a small parlor, down another hallway lined with doors and French windows, and out onto a screened-in porch. A table spread with a white table-cloth was waiting there, white chairs arranged about it. Toward the back, near the screen door leading outside, was a green divan, a low coffee table, a sofa, and three red upholstered chairs. Beyond the porch I saw a lawn, a line of shrubbery, then beach and after that the Sound. Waves lapped the white fifty-foot caramaran moored to the private dock. The porch — like the beach, sea and clouds beyond — was soaked in the waning glow of the departed sun.

“Please sit,” Flora said, tucking a leg beneath her as she lowered herself to the divan that was canted a bit toward the beautiful scene outside.

“By the way,” I told her, waving toward Maio as I took one of the chairs, “This is Maio, a friend of mine. He’s a musician, also part bloodhound, who helped me find Merlin.”

“Maio?” Flora asked. “Is that your first name?”

“Last,” he replied, grinning. “Now you’re gonna ask what’s my first, right?”

“Well, I...all right, what is your first name?”

“Raffy,” Maio said, his grin, if anything, widening.

Flora drew her brows together, puzzled as to the source of Maio’s amusement.

“Short for Raphael?” she guessed.

“For ‘riff-raff,’” I told her flatly.

Too late, though. Flora had been sucked in, barely sparing me a glance as she stayed focused on Maio, waiting for whatever he would say next.

“For ‘raffle,’” my friend said, laughing. “Carl never gets it right. Funny story, too. See, my dad grew up in the back end of nowhere, place called Kayenta. Ran off to Vegas soon as he was old enough—”

“Ignore him,” I instructed, catching Flora’s eye, “I don’t know how funny the story is, but it’s always a different one. The name of his family’s old village, Riofrío, in his ancestral Portugal. He rode a raft as an infant, just like Moses — ‘raft,’ ‘Raffy.’ He’s even tried telling people he was named after Iranian president Rafsanjani.”

Flora’s dark-haired employee reappeared just then, stepping out onto the porch with a crowded tray. She hesitated near the table, but Flora cleared things up with, “We will take our drinks here, Anya.” So she brought the tray over, parked the drinks on coasters she efficiently distributed one-handed upon the coffee table, rotated the tray out of the way, and asked, “Will there be anything else?”

“Dinner in one hour, please.”

Anya jerked her head once in the affirmative and then turned to go. But not before Maio had won a shy smile from her with one of his conspiratorial winks.

Merlin opened a bottle and poured four glasses of wine, then passed one to his aunt.

Not interested in standing on ceremony (neither Merlin nor Maio had their glasses ready), I reached for the glass nearest me, raised it toward Flora.

“To your health.”

“And yours.”

We both drank. Good stuff.

“Corwin,” Flora said, after taking another slow sip, “Why have you come here, now?”

“‘Corwin’?” Maio repeated.

It was the second time she had called me by my real name.

“That’s right,” I admitted, seeing no point in denying it, while also realizing I had my own “princes of Amber” remark to answer for. “I have as many names as some have stories about how they got theirs. You wouldn’t understand—it’s a shaman thing.”

Maio laughed, leaned forward, reached past the wine to pour himself a whiskey, and said, “Okay,” before tossing it down.

“Hey, don’t forget your friends,” I reminded him.

“You’re drinking wine.”

“For now.”

Mystified, he shook his head, but complied and poured a glass for each of us. He knew nothing of the stamina of Amberites, and Flora, Merlin and I weren’t even the best examples. My brothers Caine and Gérard could, individually, empty a cask of the storied Amontillado before feeling a buzz.

“I know,” I chuckled. “It’s a wonder some of us still have working livers. Sorry, Flora. You were saying?”

She’d wrinkled her nose, as though she smelled something of which she disapproved — time wasted with Maio? — and had me in the cross-hairs of that scowl.

“Everyone’s saying you’re dead. You could have gone anywhere. Why here? Why me?”

“‘Why,’ Flora? That’s the question? Lots of reasons. How about: People really are dying? And I don’t feel like joining them just yet.”

Her, “We tried your Trump,” sounded defensive.

“Really? Starting when?”

Flora frowned a moment, thinking back.

“A week ago. It was Saturday.”

“Only a week ago? I’ve been out of the game a whole lot longer than that. What prompted the sudden concern?”

She was staring at me, lines appearing on her brow, at the corners of her eyes.

“I don’t understand.”

“Who is ‘we’? Who brought up the fascinating subject of Corwin? Who said whatever it was that was said for you to want to try my Trump?”

She pouted. I’d pushed too hard.

“I don’t know why you are so upset, Corwin,” she protested, her voice higher than it had been, miffed. “You are alive. Merlin is alive. You’re both fine!”

My own temper rising, I set the wine-glass down on the table between us before answering. When I did respond, I spoke softly.

“‘Fine’? That’s how you think things are, have been? Fine? Let’s start with me, then. My own personal hell began considerably before a week ago. Months in the outside world, at least. For me, though, an eternity in a studio apartment. One-room efficiency. Big window, no doors. The ultimate in simplified plumbing: a wooden bucket in the corner. Prime location, too—the bottom of a lake.”

She blinked.

“Well, none of us knew that. I didn’t know that.”

“Hang on, there’s more. Has anyone heard from Martin?”

“He and Merlin are working on something for Random. Aren’t they?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Not anymore. Martin’s not been seen for, well, years.”

“Oh, my.”

“Then there’s Bleys. Any news on him?”

She didn’t say anything, began to slowly shake her head.

“I thought not. I’ve been avoiding the Trumps myself. Which is part of the answer to your question as to ‘why you.’ You’re closest. But I have tried the Trumps. Twice. Once for Bleys, once for Martin, for an hour each time. No answer. They’re either dead or in hiding.”

“Corwin—” she began.

“Hear me out, Flora. We’re almost at the end of my little speech. Lastly, there’s Merlin. Look at him. And tell me what you see.”

Now she set her glass down, too, getting up and slowly walking to where my son sat beside me. She held out her hand to him. He hesitantly extended his own hand in response, and she clasped it in hers.

“Merlin?” she asked quietly. “Merlin, are you all right?”

He studied her face, concentrating.

“You are Flora, my aunt,” Merlin said after a moment. “I know I have been here in your house before. But it’s faded for me, like an old dream. You fed me, too. And someone else was there.”

Flora’s mouth opened, closed. And then, instead of speaking further, she leaned closer to Merlin and hugged him. Merlin seemed puzzled by her response. He began to put his arms around her to hug her back, but she straightened then and calmly resumed her seat. She regarded me.

“He’s you.”

“As I was when I visited you that time at your old place in Westchester? Yes.”

“I am?” Merlin wondered, turning to me. “You went there, too? Beyond the river of smoke and steam, to the lake’s fiery shore?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes,” I said, understanding better this time why he searched my eyes, what he hoped to find. “Except my lake was cold, wet, and meant to permanently solve the problem known as Corwin. And, instead, my dip in it signaled my good-bye to amnesia. The key similarity between the two, however, is that both lake encounters brought us here.”

“But now that you are here,” I heard Flora say, “What will you do?”

Facing Flora again, I reached for my glass on the table. Not the wine this time. The whiskey. And threw it down the hatch. Placing the glass back on the table, I stood.

“We’re doing it right now,” I informed her.

“What we are doing?”

“Stimulating his memory.”

“How are we doing that?”

“It’s simple, Flora,” I said, walking over to the screen door to stare across the glimmering waves into the blue-gray-yellow dusk, noticing the houses anchored to small islands out in the harbor, then turning. “When I came to you years ago, being around you, talking to you, seeing your Trumps — everything — sped the recovery of memories I didn’t know I had. This time, it’s Merlin who stands in need of such triggers.”

Flora was looking toward Merlin now. He was very still, and held his wineglass before his eyes, peering into it, seeing something there that was not in the room.

“It won’t work, Corwin. With you, it was different.”

“No, it’s very much the same,” I countered, adding as I walked to the other side of Merlin’s chair, “And it’s already worked.”

“But he barely remembers me, Corwin,” Flora protested. “I cannot tell you the number of times he and Martin have stayed here, running errands for Random. Staying up late, loud music playing, strange phone-calls, professors, students from universities, C.I.A. agents, and...”

“Yes?”

“Beer bottles everywhere!”

“Can she back any of this up, Merlin?” I asked, bending down to pick up the backpack resting on the floor by his chair.

“I don’t know.”

I was already walking away from them. When I got there, I dropped Merlin’s baggage upon the white tablecloth. I untied the leather laces — no zippers anywhere, though some of the pockets were sealed with strips of gray burrs, stuff like Velcro.

“As the oft-misquoted saying goes, ‘The proof is in the purple backpack.’”

They got up, walked over and joined me at the table.

With everyone gathered round and looking on, I opened the pack up. As all of us had expected, there was stuff inside.

Some of it was alive.

copyright © 2009 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB)

Chapter One: The Hunt

2008-12-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER ONE

The lion to the left of me stared straight ahead, fascinated by something I could not see. So I angled off down the steps to the right. Turning my head, I met the blank and pitiless gaze of the lion to the other side of me. An understanding passed between us, as we two recognized the inevitability of time, flowing unheeding past us both like the river of human traffic into which I was moving.

Keeping to the right — with the current, against it, who could say? — I savored sights, smells, sounds, and even the feel of the sidewalk under my feet. Vibrations reached me through the soles of my shoes, woven somehow with the steady noise from the street, with words torn from overlapping conversations, with shouts and laughter, with colors and styles of dress, with faces of all types, with cool disdain, with smug self-satisfaction, with grim determination, with glaring rage, with careless joy.

One fashionable young lady walked by, oblivious to everyone, openly weeping. Then a thin black man, arm draped around the shoulders of a young Asian gentleman (they both looked like students) laughed loudly at what his friend said as they moved briskly past. Yet it all merged together, the sharp smells, air dense with sound, the shifts and swirls of movement — cars, people, birds, bits of paper. It was as if somewhere there was a maestro conducting this wildly spontaneous and complex concert, and everyone — me included — was a member of the orchestra, all (unable to contain ourselves) dancing as each of us played his instrument: car-horn, laugh, squealing brakes, blaring radio, slammed cab door, angry yell, barking dog on a leash, delighted shriek, throat-clearing cough.

Energy, energy, energy. It was everywhere, and it was impossible to stand apart from it. That energy got into you, even as you gave it right back. The flux swept up into it everything that wasn’t nailed down or formed of concrete.

The day was bright and hot. The summer sky above was blue. And, like every day in New York, there was magic in the air.

Today, though, just might be the day.

Which would be good, since something bad was going to happen. Soon. But before things got started, there was something I had to do first.

Another right, this one taking me out of the main flow. Not much farther, just one more right turn to go.

Big beautiful oak door. A pub allegedly built for playwrights, according to the sign. Lots of people, lots of movement, lots of noise. The only difference from outside: Here, at least, you could take a rest, sit down, absent yourself from the demanding push of the street. There was a price, of course, not that I minded paying.

There was an empty stool at a small table near the door. I took it.

Seconds later, a smiling Hispanic kid — himself barely old enough to serve alcohol, much less drink it — was asking me, “Is there anything you would like to order at this time, sir?”

“A pint of Guinness would hit the spot.”

“I’ll be right back with that.”

While I waited, I took off the guitar case I’d been carrying on my back. Lowering it, I let one end rest on the floor, the neck leaning against the wall next to me. And I gave my surroundings a closer look. Crowded and narrow, and deep. A door opening onto stairs to the second floor lay a little further up along the wall on my side of the room. Already busy, this place would be standing-room-only later in the afternoon. And louder, as it was geared toward the younger crowd.

She noticed me right away — a twenty-something blonde girl. (Me, in case you’re wondering, I can pass for mid- to late-thirties.) And came right over, putting on a bright smile along the way.

“Do you play?” she asked, glancing at the guitar.

“Opinions are divided on that point,” I answered, meeting her smile with one of my own. “Not all the reviews are in, and the kindest description of those received so far would be: mixed.”

“Cute,” she commented, leaving me uncertain whether I’d been complimented or not. “Will you play a little bit? We’ll turn down the music.”

Without waiting for a response, she moved past me to prop open the door. Then, turning, she offered a kind of half-wave, which gesture I interpretted as encouragement to begin playing. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the doorway. Studied the walk outside, looked back at me.

Well, she’d been warned. With a shrug, I reached for the case, opened it, lifted out the guitar. From my meager repertoire, I selected something I couldn’t ruin too badly. Something manageable, if scaled back a little.

“‘As I walked by the dockside one evening so fair...To view the saltwater and taste the salt air...I heard an old fisherman singing his song...’”

She listened till I was done, her head moving slightly to the guitar-rhythms.

“Nice. Play some more.”

“Well...you work here?”

She dipped her head sharply, adding, “I’m your hostess,” delivering the last word with a note of irony and another small smile.

“And you are called...?”

“Erin.”

“Erin. Many years ago, I composed a few songs. Many years ago. When it comes to performing, however...”

“‘When it comes to performing’?”

“The sounds I make may drive away more customers than they attract.”

She shrugged.

“Live entertainment brings people in. Doesn’t matter how good it is.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, but...”

“Entertainment gets free beers.”

I raised my glass then, drained the last bit of stout.

“In that case, you’ve got yourself some ‘entertainment,’ such as it is.”

She smiled again, yelled, “Luis!” And beckoned to my server. Then she went to her station, a stool behind a tiny desk with the sign “Hostess” propped up on top. A little after that, Luis returned with a fresh Guinness. I was into a mainly instrumental take on “Late November” by then (I might’ve been humming a little, but couldn’t recall the lyrics of Miss Denny’s mad and moody myth). Only two customers seemed to be paying any attention to my struggle with the guitar-strings. They smiled, tossed asides toward each other, sometimes tapped feet.

Unhappy with my sad efforts, I returned the guitar to its case, packed it away.

“I’ll pay for this one,” I told Luis, holding up my glass.

Luis looked puzzled, but not so puzzled that he questioned the ten-spot I handed him.

“Try a Harp,” said someone to my left.

A short wiry man sat on the stool next to me. Wearing jean cut-offs and a yellow shirt bearing on the front a print of a rambling building overhung with a placard proclaiming "Inn" (the back of the shirt, I knew, showed a narrow outhouse with a crescent moon window cut into the door on which hung a sign with the word "Out" sloppily painted on it — one of his jokes). An ear-ring, a teardrop of red and yellow jasper bound in gold wire, decorated his right ear. He smiled from under the drooping mustache adorning the lined brown face.

“No, thanks, pal. I’ll stick with what I’ve been drinking.”

He laughed.

“No, buddy. Keep sucking down that black brew, if you want. Was talking about this.”

With that last word, he hefted an item of green luggage up onto his lap, unbuckled it, sprung it open.

“Celtic harp. You two were made for each other.”

She was carved of pale wood, strings golden, frame wrought with intricate and indecipherable Celtic symbols.

“Pretty. Maio, I thought you knew me better. I’ve never been much for blondes. I doubt we have much of a future.”

“You need to broaden your horizons, try new things. You’re young, got your whole life in front of you.”

“So they tell me.”

“So spread your wings. Live a little. You can’t learn about life in a library, you know. Got to get out into the world, take some chances.”

“I thought that’s what I’ve been doing.”

“Nah, still playing it safe. Unless...today’s the day?”

“Today...” I began, letting the word hang out there.

“Yes?”

“Probably isn’t the day.”

A snort, a shake of the head. I was disappointing him.

“So,” I tried, aiming perhaps for a small measure of redemption, “You brought this thing all the way from where you live—”

“The Bronx. Told you that twenty times.”

“—Right, from the Bronx. To this place, just to convince me to try a new thing?”

“By thunder, I think you’ve got it.”

“And now, if I don’t try your harp here, your feelings will be hurt?”

“You will have offended me. And my family,” he announced, very serious. “I may have to kill you.”

“Really? That’s all? I think I can live with that.”

He was shaking his head.

“No, I don’t think you can. And there’s always the fate worse than death.”

“And that is?”

“No monkey-stick. No hat.”

“Give me the damn harp.”

Grinning, he passed it over.

Experimentally, I plucked a few of the strings. And laughed miserably.

Maio couldn’t tolerate even that much of my incompetence. He got up and repositioned the harp so that it sat directly on my stool.

“Embrace her like a lover, Carl. You know? C’mon, do you make love one-handed? Don’t answer that. Both hands now. A harp is like two guitars in one. You’re playing two guitars.”

“Problem,” I notified him, “I can barely play one guitar.”

“So? Now you’re playing two.”

With my fingers, I tried finding my way among the many strings. The thing sounded pretty, even as I stumbled through my pass at “Out on the Ocean.” The tune was not even recognizable. Still sounded kind of pretty, though.

“You need to be more loose.”

“Did you recognize the song?”

“‘Barbara Allen’?”

“Thank-you for making my point. There’s ‘loose.’ And then there’s ‘lose.’”

“No, no, wrong. You just need to try looser material. Know any jazz?”

I didn’t. So I tried a little of “The First Arabesque.” It was terrible.

“Debussy?”

Shocked by his guess, I looked up from the bright quivering strands. My glance swept past the doorway on the way to Maio’s aged countenance. I saw the question on his face as I thrust the harp back at him. Snatching up the guitar case, I jumped off the stool and ran out the door.

There! Disappearing into the wave of humanity pushing east toward Fifth Avenue. Wasting no time with the crowd, I went out into the street, ran past them.

At the corner, I looked left, then right.

Maio had caught up to me by then.

“Your quarry?”

Without answering, I stretched out my senses. And pushed at the boundary between worlds, that which my people call Shadow. Put a different color hat on that one, look to see a limo over where a truck should be, a crying kid clutching his mother’s hand in place of the young couple who had paused to admire something in a window. Trade the clear sky for the intrusion of a thin rib of herringbone cloud. Blur the outlines the slightest bit — this way, then that — give the Etch-a Sketch a gentle shake.

A couple of those subtle shifts showed me other versions of my target. Not precisely the same, but close enough. Nearby, in neighboring worlds, they were moving away from me on my left, not quite out of sight.

I had fiddled. Now I unfiddled. The fellow who had worn a Yankees baseball hat — only for an eyeblink — found himself securely back in Red Sox fandom and standing out in a crowd which nevertheless took almost no notice of him at all. The world was again as it had been. With no one the wiser, unless they had been standing right next to me, looking at all the little things I was looking at.

Now...North!

I started hoofing it. Who knew how much of a lead had been opened up? Three blocks later, in front of Lord & Taylor, I slowed to a walk. And again reached out.

Sirens. A firetruck and ambulance muscled their way through the cars and trucks. Enough? Too much?

“Hey,” Maio got out, as he came up next to me, panting. “Slow down for an old man! Got any respect for the elderly?”

“When I meet someone elderly, you’ll find out.”

I searched faces as some heads turned to regard the firetruck, whose driver was repeatedly sounding its horn.

Nothing. I’d overdone it.

Next to me, Maio pointed.

“Over there! Other side of the street. Half-way between 39th and 40th!”

He was right. And also lucky. A quick glance over the shoulder, that was all the object of our hunt had offered, head briefly turned — yet Maio had caught it. He had to have been looking at just the right place at just the right moment.

“Good eye.”

“Eagle scout. Also, these eyes are used to spotting feds, cops and narcs. Which is why I use both of ’em.”

The firetruck had broken through the gridlock — unavoidably one-way here as it was on almost every other street and avenue on the Island — and gone. Traffic surged in its wake, a flood of careening metal. Potentially lethal, but I was past caring as I took a step out into the roaring intersection of 39th Street and Fifth Avenue.

I felt Maio’s hand on my shoulder, an essentially symbolic attempt to hold me back. Ignored, it fell away as I leaped in front of a Mercury Cougar, threw both hands out and onto its hood, vaulted to the other side. A cab was waiting in the space into which I landed. Instead of slowing for the madman trying to get himself killed, the cabbie accelerated and swerved into the lane to his right. The car that was in his way shot forward, the driver screaming obscenities. For half a second I occupied an illusion of empty space, a delivery van bearing down on me. I took a step forward, stopped as a white pick-up followed hard behind the cab. The pick-up shifted right a little, seeming to graze a parked car, even as I felt the wind of the van at my back. The way was clear, and I ran forward.

I was running past a bank, but across the street from me (I knew without looking) was the Mid Manhattan Library. Now I looked. If the one I was chasing thought at all like me, that was a likely destination.

Just behind me, I heard Maio say, in between audible breaths and as if reading my thought, “No, not in there — other side of 40th!”

And on the west side of Fifth now — our side — there was our moving target, wearing some shade of maroon, across 40th, heading west and once more merging with the other pedestrians. The eastbound traffic was simply moving too fast for another life-threatening crossing. So we stood, waiting and watching.

“What about a cab?” Maio suggested helpfully.

A sour laugh escaped me.

“No way. At least, not until I know where we’re going.”

“What? We get in a cab and follow. It’s easy. Hey, I’ll even pay.”

“Okay,” I allowed, openly skeptical. “As soon as you can find me a cabbie willing to go west on 40th, let me know.”

That shut my companion up for the moment. Good timing, too, since the cars were all sliding to a stop. We cut across.

“So where do you think he’s going?” he asked, reminding me he couldn't be kept quiet for long.

We were on the other side now, and looking at the south wing of the New York Public Library. Full circle already today, and so far without getting anywhere. I felt like a rat on a wheel. Or in a maze.

“My guess? North, and west. The way we’ve been going all along.”

We were jogging beside each other, while I scanned ahead, right to left, seeking. As we were drawing abreast of the Radiator Building, I sighted our target again and broke into a run. People glared and shouted epithets as I shoved through the crowd, heedless of whom I jostled.

Right turn at Tesla’s Corner, as expected. Again, I moved off the walk, recklessly racing vehicles to my left on Sixth Avenue. Sad thing was, sometimes I was moving faster than they were. And the lucky thing was that no one hit me. Though I was sure some wanted to — they sure leaned on their horns like they were thinking about it — and got back on the sidewalk a little before I reached 41st.

Bryant Park on my right. And was that a flash of maroon clothing up ahead, not far from 42nd Street?

I was betting on it.

At the corner I hesitated, and Maio caught up to me again.

My mind’s eye was already taking in everything around me, imagining tiny alterations of this, that and the other, beginning to find its way among the Shadows. But the feeling was too strong, intuition and more.

Instead of moving either north or west, I turned east, toward Fifth Avenue again. And heard Maio groan behind me.

Then I was leaping down the steps, three at a time, into the subway station entrance there. Impatiently, I fished out my Metrocard, while Maio, in an unexpectedly spry move, swung up and over the turnstile. Growling an expletive, I ran after him. We raced down to the platform, where a train was just leaving.

“Which one?” Maio wondered out loud.

“The Seven. For Times Square,” I answered, without hesitation, undaunted by the fact we were being led toward the busiest subway complex in the biggest city in the world.

We got on the next train.

“Where to next?”

Again, I answered without hesitating.

“The A.”

“And then?”

“Stay on the A. Right to the end of the line.”

“How do you know?”

“Northwest, remember?”

“Sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure.”

At the Times Square station, we ran through the maze with fellow rodentia, and then — literally — took the “A” train. Hanging onto a pole, each of us shifting weight on our feet as the train rocked and rattled beneath us, as passengers moved past us, neither gaining ground nor losing any with respect to the one we imagined we hunted, we drifted through the stops along the way. Our heading: northwest.

How, you may be expected to ask, could I chance upon any one special person in a city of millions? And then track that one through the multitude in the streets?

Easy, comes the answer. Any prince of the immortal city could do it. Or princess. Being born to Amber is all that is really required. Best, of course, if born to the royal family, where the power is strongest. The power to move between worlds, the power to find one’s heart’s desire.

And lately my attention had been rather focused, as my heart knew but a single overriding desire.

Until two days ago, I had not even known if he still lived. Repeated attempts at contact had failed. My search for him out in Shadow, among the countless worlds, had come up dry. I had looked for him, but not found him.

But then he had come looking for me.

I had dreamed about him, you see.

And in those dreams he had been looking for me. Now I was going to make sure he found me.

How had he located me? By the same means through which I had learned he was moving north up Fifth Avenue, no doubt. I had played with probability, begun shifting into nearby worlds, where things were nearly identical, yet not quite. In some of those places other beings bearing a passing resemblance to the one whose blood gave him the same power that flowed in my own veins — quasi-doppelgangers, if you will — were taking a similar route. That is, most of his shadows in the nearest worlds had been heading uptown. Presumably, the same trick had brought him close enough to me that he had walked right by the pub on 35th where I had been sitting with Maio.

My Earth is not necessarily your Earth. Separated they might be by a microsecond of time, the beat of a butterfly’s wing, the thinnest sliver of a dimension, a trivial decision. I had been reading about such things in the New York Public Library that morning. Superstrings, supergravity, D-branes, p-branes, F-theory, M-theory, Freund-Rubin compactifications, Kaluza–Klein reductions, universes of 7, 9, 10, 11 or 12 dimensions. Whatever they might truly be, the master of such lore, Dworkin, had called such separations shadow veils. And so did we, his grandchildren. The ability to use a power-tool does not require full understanding of the forces and engineering which permit it to function. Mine could slice the stuff of Shadow.

On the long ride up the A line, I thought of all that had brought me here, going right back to the beginning. When my brother Eric and I had been rivals, competing in everything, whether it might be in a fencing match or in the pursuit of the same woman at a party. This had culminated in the contest for the ultimate prize: Amber’s throne. Losing the first round of that game had proven quite costly to me. Eric had left me to die of the Black Plague in London. Where I had suffered the loss of my memory, remaining on the Shadow Earth for four hundred years. While only a century and a half had passed in Amber, where time moved more slowly. Perhaps, aged more rapidly by Earth’s swift years, stripped of my identity and past, living much like other men, my life in that Shadow had changed me. The experience had surely aged me, if nothing else. And had also made Earth my home, a place special to me. Not that I could love a Shadow as much as I loved Amber, but I was fond of the place. This was known to members of my family, of course. And now one of them had followed me here.

Hunter and hunted had switched places, however. He seemed unaware that I followed him. Though perhaps that was not entirely true. Tracking me in worlds close by, he may have concluded that my course was northwest, that I would even be taking the subway. Leading to an intriguing philosophical question: If I had chosen this course because his doppelgangers had done so, and if he had chosen the same route because my Shadow selves had done the same, then who was chasing whom? Who had made the original choice? Both? Neither? And were our doubles pursuing each other in those other worlds, in some cases mine following his, in others his following mine?

These were the sorts of thoughts that passed through my head as the train sped up, slowed down, sped up, slowed down, taking us inexorably where we had to go.

Then we were there, the train slowing for West 190th.

“This ain’t the end of the line,” Maio protested, seeing me move toward the doors.

The doors opened, and I said, “Let’s go,” stepping out onto the platform.

I knew this was the right stop. Remembered it, actually, from a recurring dream.

Charging up the stairs, we reached the top quickly. Maio was gasping when we got there. The metal and glass of the passing cars gave back the blinding sun. People walked and talked, laughed and yelled. Like a herd of wild horses they suddenly seemed to me, tossing their manes in the bright air.

“Hey, hold up a minute,” I heard Maio next to me. “Still ain’t recovered from all those blocks we ran.”

“That was how long ago? An hour? And five of those were short blocks on Fifth. You’re not that old.”

“Yeah, but I smoke. Unfiltered.”

“What you smoke doesn’t come with filters. Look,” I said, automatically turning my head left, then right, taking in the scene, dazzled by the sunlight, not seeing any close relatives. Nor really expecting to. “Look,” I repeated, becoming aware of the mild rebuke in the way Maio was regarding me from beneath lowered brows. “Fort Tryon Park’s just up the street beyond Corbin Plaza. Stay on the main path till you reach the museum building. The trail ends there. Look for me, and look for him. If you find him before you find me, just stay on him, keep him in view, okay?”

Then I was running again.

Beyond the final leg of Fort Washington Avenue was the park. Maybe my favorite in Manhattan. But I had no eyes for the shimmering lawns, quiet old trees or nodding flowers. My attention was on the people walking the paths, sitting on the benches, sprawled on the grass. This was just me being thorough. As I’d already told Maio, I knew the trail ended on the other side of the people, grass, flowers and trees.

During my jog up the drive, I reflected on my new friend. That he’d shown up with a harp today hadn’t come as the surprise it might have been. When I’d first met him, he’d been playing a variety of instruments — tin whistle, fiddle, harmonica, bongos, dulcimer. That had been at the subway station by Washington Square. I’d liked his selections and style, and so had given to his cause. We’d gotten to talking, and I’d let it drop that I had once entertained pretensions of being a musician. Well, he’d offered to share his spot with me if we also shared the take. Which was more than fair, as he had been quick to point out, since he was the one who had paid for the license to perform there and had no idea if I was any good or not. This worked out well for me, too, as I needed to be out in the city, waiting for another of my dreams to come true. In particular, the dream that was coming true today.

There up ahead, from a spot where you could see the Washington Bridge run out to the Jersey shore, on a wide hilltop overlooking the northwest corner of Manhattan from its lordly perch, the closest thing to a medieval monastery a man was likely to see anywhere in North America: The Cloisters.

I slowed to a walk. The moment called for it. Things had fallen into a familiar rhythm. This was something I knew, remembered, and now my part was finally unfolding. And I was at last right where I needed to be.

Merging with the crowd, I caught whiffs of this and that — food, perfume, halitosis, clothing, soap. And sweat. Mostly me, I abruptly realized. I was drenched, trousers and shirt sticking to me. That’s what I get for running around Manhattan at the start of September. It was an aromatic herd of humans that I was part of, slowly moving up the steps.

Paid ten bucks donation, stepped into the big heavy space, walked around.

Obeying the tug of the foot traffic, I soon found myself walking past the Romanesque columns framing a flower garden. I went in among the roses and wildflowers, made it over to the shade on the other side, stepped into the arcade there.

The herb garden was just up the way. Peering across it, something besides the heat held me back. So I took a seat on a stone bench, pondered the strangeness of it all. Was I chasing a phantom? Maybe, maybe not. Then where was the path? Play the probability game? Pointless here, useless. And unnecessary. For this was the place, the time.

Cloisters they were indeed, from far-away France, from some other century.

Like me.

What was I doing here? There was an obvious place to wait. And this wasn’t it. I stood, got moving again, navigating through the parents, couples and children, checking walls and doors for useful signage. Trod the stairs and came to the place where kids were pointing, laughing, crying, teens and grown-ups digging into purses and wallets.

The Gift Shop.

Posting myself just outside the door, I watched people going in, coming out, passing me by.

“Carl, c’mon!”

Maio was standing at the corner off to my right, gesturing.

“I’m fine here.”

“He’s here. Other side of the Cuxa. Follow me!”

That was the big one, the cloister central to the whole complex. I had a notion as to where we were going, so I shook my head and pointed toward the entrance hall where the stairs were. And cut straight across it, pretty sure Maio would follow my drift.

He did, and we wove our way through the folk scattered throughout the Gothic hall on the other side. We were very close now, and the excitement had my pores tingling with chill anticipation. At the end of the hall we bore to the right.

Into the hall of the Unicorn Tapestries.

I saw him step toward the wall before him, where one of the tapestries hung, called out his name, now that he could hear it at last.

“Merlin!”

And saw Merlin, my son, vanish into thin air.

“So he is a brujo,” Maio finally said.

From the moment I had grimly turned my back on the tapestries, he had been silent. Neither of us had spoken a word as we had negotiated a path through the museum-goers and back through Fort Tryon Park. During the long ride on the subway afterward, we’d each been preoccupied with our private thoughts.

It was only when we were again part of the madding crowd ambling along the sidewalks, blinking in the sunlight, baking in the heat, gratefully accepting the shade of buildings we passed, that I had thought about where we were going.

People were lounging in this park, too. Much less grass here, more pavement. Students, people playing chess, two young ladies entertaining a large group of children and several adults with comical puppets. All in the shadow of trees, NYU, and the grand Washington Square Arch. From a spot on a concrete bench across from the fountain, almost beneath a lamp post, we had a clear view across the square of that Arch, so reminiscent of its elder cousin at the head of the Champs-Elysées.

Saying nothing, I separated the guitar from its case, began tuning it softly.

“There is more to your story today,” Maio suggested, not taking the hint, “than there was yesterday.”

“True,” I agreed, tightening a string.

“Thought we knew each other,” Maio went on, shaking his head, dramatic and sad, full of pathos.

“Hardly,” I said, plucking the tightened sting, listening to its new sound, trying to guage how close I’d gotten. “What’s a brujo?”

“Witch,” he answered simply. “Sorceror. Shaman.”

“Strong words. You lose somebody in a museum, and suddenly there’s sorcery involved.”

“You trying to piss me off? I know what I saw.”

“Yeah, a brujo,” I said, bent over the guitar, but hearing the scowl in his voice. Then I decided to look up, just to check.

Maio was glaring at me. And scowling. I hadn't anticipated the glaring.

“So what’s that, anyway? Some Portuguese slang?”

“This here’s only part Portuguese. Rest is Navajo.”

“You’re a regular citizen of the world then, aren’t you?”

“You know it. So tell me: What are you?”

“Not a citizen of the world,” I told him, and lowered my head as I resumed the guitar-tuning.

“‘Course not,” he countered, “‘Cause you’re a brujo, too.”

With a sigh of resignation, I put down the guitar.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’ve got eyes.”

“But I’ve left you in the dark?”

A nod.

“And now you want my story?”

Another nod.

I couldn’t resist a chuckle. His gaze was unblinking, and I’d swear his eyes had taken on a yellowish flavor, fierce and feral. This determined and unyielding fellow before me was a stranger. Until this moment, I had only been familiar with mellow, easy-going and fun-loving Maio. While taking in this new aspect of my friend, I got some words ready.

“Fine, okay, whatever you like. You’re right. I’m from a place nobody’s ever heard of. It’s out of the way, not part of the mix. What of it? That makes me a sorceror?”

He nodded one more time.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “And what about you? Sorcerors, right! If I believed in such things, I’d say, ‘Takes one to know one.’”

“Maybe so.”

“So what is this? I show you mine, you’ll show me yours?”

“Works for me.”

I glanced at the people sitting at the edge of the fountain. Some kids were bouncing a rubber ball back and forth between them, missing it as often as they caught it. As I watched, the girl with the pony-tail ran toward us, retrieved the ball, turned around and sent it on a ricochet back to her partner.

“She was rich and spoiled, of course,” I began, settling on what I hoped would be a believable version of the true story. “The place was called Avalon—”

“The hotel?”

“No. The town of Avalon. Out on Catalina Island. There’s a ranch there with some prize-winning Arabians. We met while riding, and again later on at the kayak rental, where we relaxed by the water with our Piña Coladas.”

“Piña Coladas? You?” Maio gave a skeptical snort.

“It was what they were serving. Anyway, to shorten the story, we have a son.”

His eyes were wide.

“Who? Not the brujo?”

“The one you and I were following? Yes, he is my son.”

“Nah, he’s too old.”

“To be my son?” I laughed. “Thank-you for that. It means I’m older than I look.”

“Show me that drawing again.”

Reaching into a pocket, I pulled out a folded piece of heavy parchment, handed it over. And watched Maio spread it out on the bench between us, smoothing down the creases with his hand.

“Looks like you,” he decided after a moment, “But I thought this was a nephew or cousin.”

“Your guess was close.”

“Few years since you’ve seen each other.”

“What makes you say that?”

With his chin, he indicated the parchment.

“Drawing. No photo. Like a police sketch or something. You gave a copy to a P.I., right? Messy divorce?”

“Not really. There was never a marriage. You got the years part right, though.”

“Whatcha gonna do when you find him?”

“Talk.”

Maio smiled.

“You got lots of catching up to do.”

“True enough. And now you’re up. You’re a brujo?”

My friend’s smile widened a little.

“I know many ways. The drum. The dance. The fast. The peyote. The smoke. There are many roads to the Otherworld. Which one is yours?”

Now it was my turn to smile. I took back the drawing, folded it up, put it away. Out of a different pocket I withdrew a new item, a rectangular case. The case was somewhat worse for the wear, singed and scorched in places. Maio watched with keen interest as I opened it and removed what was inside. Then I spread them out on the space between us.

The cards.

My half-Navajo shaman friend studied them for nearly half a minute, then looked up at me.

“Tarot?”

“It’s the only way I know.”

“Where does it take you? What do you see?”

“Possibilities. Probabilities. Hints and suggestions.”

“Truth?”

“Always, but the truth can look different to different people. We see the truth we’re prepared to see. Which would be the secret of the cards, if it had to be put into a sentence.”

He began to reach for them, but I interposed a hand.

“Touching them affects what they reveal. Likewise, their touch also affects you.”

“Two-way street, eh?”

“Think of it as Newton’s Third Law extended to the metaphysical plane. Or an expression of Bell’s Theorem.”

“Alexander Graham?”

“No, different guy. Spent time thinking about how two objects, once in contact, thereafter remain connected, no matter how separated in time and space they may become.”

“Every brujo knows that,” Maio said, underwhelmed by the information. “Amulets and spells could not work without it.”

“Are those Tarot cards?” asked a new voice.

The voice belonged to a short, stout, middle-aged woman clutching a shopping-bag.

“Yes,” I replied, wishing I had moved faster to put them away.

“Isn’t one of those―you?”

“I can see you’re an observant person. And you’re right. These were prepared by a member of my family.”

“Well, whoever-it-was is an excellent artist. Looks just like you.”

“He’d be pleased by the compliment,” I informed her, belatedly gathering up the cards.

“Can I have a reading?”

In a well-practiced move, I’d already squared the cards one-handed, opening the case with my other. Goal: make the cards quickly disappear.

Giving the woman a rueful, self-deprecating smile, I shook my head and opened my mouth to say, “No.”

Instead of “No,” however, I heard, “Thirty-five dollars.”

I have it on good authority that a shaman said this, and not me.

“Thirty-five?” the flabbergasted shopper repeated.

I looked at Maio. He was holding up the harp he’d gotten me to try earlier.

“Suggested donation. Harp accompaniment provided at no extra charge. Sets up the right vibrations, you know.”

“What?”

“Egypt,” Maio answered right away, settling the harp squarely between his knees, sweeping hands over the strings to elicit a pleasant glissando.

“Egypt?”

“Yeah, Tarot comes from Egypt. World’s oldest harps, too. Pharoahs had harps play when the Priests of On used the cards to tell the future.”

“Really? I’ve never heard that.”

“My friend Carl here knows what I’m talking about. Most of the secret tradition of the Tarot isn’t written down. Only given to seventh sons.”

She looked at me.

“Is that true?”

“Maio is Navajo, and a shaman. I’ve never known him to say anything that’s not true.”

“I’ve been having my fortune told for years. No one’s ever mentioned any of this.”

“What about the incense?” Maio demanded immediately.

“I don’t know. What does incense have to do with it?”

“Sacrifice. When a reading was done for a pharoah, a holy animal was sacrificed so the gods would breathe truth into the cards. So now it’s incense.”

“You’ve confused me.”

“Incense smoke has replaced the smoke of the animal sacrifice.”

“And that works? That deceives the gods?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m not the expert. Ask him.”

She was looking at me again.

Clearing my throat, I said, “Well, not exactly. The gods are not deceived. But holy incense can be substituted for sacrificial smoke, yes. But the scents, whatever they are, must please the Powers That Be.”

“Well, where’s your incense?”

“You’re right,” I instantly agreed. “A reading in a spirit true to the origins of the Tarot is not possible without smoke. Oh, well, sorry to have wasted your time.”

Then I watched as Maio produced an incense stick, lit it, and took up the harp.

I took a breath, then slowly let it out.

“So...do you have a question for the cards?”

The next morning, I grabbed breakfast at my hotel over in Murray Hill. Maio met me there in the lobby, where he scarfed toast, grapefruit, and a couple of cans of orange juice from the continental. He was excited after the previous day’s big haul, and couldn’t wait to get started.

The shopper who had been our first customer hadn’t coughed up the suggested thirty-five bucks. She’d given my companion a five for his harp-playing, however. And had rewarded me with a twenty — not bad for fifteen minutes of dealing out Amber’s Tarots and finding meanings in how they fell.

Several onlookers of that first reading had found irresistible the prospect of glimpsing the future through a set of cards, beautiful, unique, magical and strange. One person after another elected to sit with me at the edge of the square, placing their trust in the otherworldly Tarots and the big bearded lout — Yours Truly — who revealed their mysteries one dramatic turn at a time.

Yeah, I’d never gotten around to taking off the beard I’d had since before Mirata. Gave me a kind of Biblical look, conveniently in keeping with working alongside Maio for whatever pocket-money passing New Yorkers were willing to part with for a scrap of song. Or — now — a bit of fortune-telling.

As we’d gotten a late start the other day, the goal this time was to spend most of the day in Washington Square. And hopefully raking it in. As usual, we would spell each other, covering our staked-out turf in shifts. When together, the idea was for one of us to take the lead, with the other providing back-up and — most critically — keeping an eye on donations tossed into Maio's hat (a wide sombrero) and my guitar-case.

There were always one or two unscrupulous sorts willing to pilfer the take when the performer was distracted by the audience. This was the monkey-stick-and-hat leverage Maio had employed on me in the pub. Only rarely did he ever bring out the stick, a thing rigged with bells and colorful ribbons, waved and shaken to call attention to our activities. But the hat (which term also broadly applied to anything used to collect gratuities) was an integral part of our operation. Maio claimed that in the past he’d lost a flute, drumsticks, a banjo, over sixty dollars, and a loaf of fresh-baked bread while responding to honest spectators. A second set of eyes was good to have.

Well before noon, as I was shuffling the cards between readings, my cohort stood up abruptly, alert. He was watching someone nearby intently.

“What is it?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, flared his nostrils, sniffed the air.

“Ham and swiss. On rye. With mustard, but also...some horseradish. And a dill pickle.”

“Really? You can tell all that from just a whiff of someone's sandwich?”

He opened his eyes, looked at me and shrugged.

“Does it matter? I’ve gotta get something to eat.”

“Pick me up something, too, then. A BLT would be a nice finish to that light breakfast.”

He waited till I handed him some money. When he took the cash, he handed me the damned harp.

“You should practice, you know. Put the Tarot away for now. Be a walk-by act while I’m gone. That way, you can chow down soon’s I get back.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, not particularly liking what sounded like someone trying to give me orders. The prickly prince-of-Amber ego thing, I suppose. His argument, however, was persuasive, as all this talk of food had made me hungry. So I set the harp down beside me, going back to my shuffling.

“Only way you’ll get any better,” he commented before walking off.

As soon as he was out of sight, I put away the cards and picked up the thing. Realistically, it would take years of steady practice before I could claim to be a passable harpist. I was frankly embarrassed to try playing it with people around. Then, thinking about it just a second or two longer, I decided I didn’t care. Maio's schtick was making money from music. My cash reserves were holding up just fine, and I reminded myself I was out in the open for an entirely different reason. So I positioned the harp near the middle of my body as I had seen Maio do, lightly ran my hands over the strings. It was a pretty thing, and sounded sweet even at the touch of my unschooled fingers.

Looking around the square, I noted the guy over by the fountain, juggling small water-balloons, entertaining the kids just as much when he dropped one (for the comedy, and not by accident, or so it seemed to my eye) as when he expertly kept three in the air. There was a person completely covered in white, almost unmoving, made up like George Washington — a living statue. What looked to be a potato sack hung from his left hand, and with his right he periodically reached into it, moving quite slowly, removing fistfuls of cherry blossoms which he scattered at his feet. Earlier, I had seen him pull out a bunch of black cherries instead, offering them to passersby. Facing him a short distance away stood a woman completely covered in green make-up, a diminutive Statue of Liberty, also moving at inchworm speed, alternately distributing printed copies of the Declaration of Independence and a poem. Both stood on sturdy wooden pedestals, and I had only seen them take one break that morning. There was also a lively young man who swallowed a sword, or sometimes fire, while riding a unicycle.

I was hopelessly outclassed, but didn’t mind. That other more professional acts would draw the lion’s share of the park's visitors suited me very well. The spectators of the last reading I had given stood about uncertainly. When a couple put themselves forward, hoping to be next, I smiled and shook my head, which I then lowered for a better view of the strings.

There was a time, so long ago that I can no longer claim to even know when it was, that my grandfather Dworkin had tried to rein in the latest boy prince a little by giving him lessons in playing the harp. It had kept me from running all over the palace and the grounds, where I had demonstrated a precocious talent for annoying both family and staff. This memory came back to me now, so unexpected, so suddenly strong, that I felt my eyes sting. Other memories followed hard on its heels as I slowly moved from glittering brass wire to glittering brass wire, each humming and glowing, bright and transparent like rays of the sun. One refulgent note after another rippled around me like a timeless breeze. The shining strings held my gaze, while the sounds they made opened up forgotten vistas in my mind.

I was moved to sing. Softly they came at first, the words. And I let them come.

“After the River of the Blessed, the sea.
There we sat down, yea, we wept
when we remembered Avalon.
Our swords were shattered in our hands
and we hung our shields on th’oak tree.”

From the way a kind of quiet had begun to hover about the music, I knew someone’s ear had been caught. I played on.

“In the enchanted wood no more hang
the golden apples, said the minstrel
on his way back from Avalon.
Of the leaves which once turned there
and the city on the hill he sang:”

Someone stood close by. I could not trust myself to look up, not yet. The song would have its way with me first, and then we would see.

“‘The silver towers were fallen
into a sea of blood.
How many miles to Avalon?
None, I say, and all.
The silver towers are fallen.’”

The song was done. I set down the harp and was quiet for five heartbeats. Then I looked up and saw him there among those who had come close to hear my song. And I was not surprised.

“So you’re done chasing mythical beasts. And traded them in for a certain Prince Corwin. Good. Bleys told me you and Martin located the other realms prior to your disappearance. Then we met as prisoners right before you and Bleys were to be hurled into the abyss. Yet here you are. So have a seat. It’s time you told me a story.”

Not actually looking at me right away, but seeming focused on something far off, Merlin sat down beside me. He sat down there in the park on that bright, beautiful, sunny day. To me, he seemed a sleepwalker, a man lost in a dream. One, however, who was slowly waking. And, after awhile, he began to talk.

Copyright © 2008 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Bailout: Save Our Starbucks!

2008-07-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

Starbucks Reveals Locations Of Stores to Be Closed by Janet Adamy (Wall Street Journal)

Fannie Mae? Freddie Mac? Chrysler?

So why not Starbucks?

And why not DeLorean, for that matter? Much cooler cars than anything to come out of Chrysler! Oh well, what's done is done, and, sadly, there will not be any trips "back to the future." The Tucker Torpedo (1948's very cool innovative auto, the DeLorean of its day) is gone, too - only the fat cats get saved, that's how this game is played.

But Starbucks isn't a David bucking some collusion-ridden monopolistic industrial triumvirate (i.e., isn't a small newcomer going up against the Big Three in automaking or anything else). In the world of coffee, Starbucks is the big kid on the block. And it's about to flush 600 stores.

So, Uncle Sam, while you're busy throwing billions of taxpaid dollars/debt at mega-corporate pals of America's wealthy elite, why not open the door to a fresh face? Sure, Starbucks hasn't been around long enough to be a fixture in the corporate establishment and a part of Bush's "base" (remember his "some call you super-rich the elite, I call you my base" comment?). But a bailout would certainly help to ensure that one day it might be.

S.O.S, Sam! Save Our Starbucks!

(I'm losing my favorite, located at the center of a local outdoor mall, where the shoppers have too much money, but the people-watching and outdoor venue make it more than worthwhile to be there. Also, the staff at that store is great - but that's not really so unusual for Starbucks now, is it?)

Three Kings of Chaos

2008-07-05T12:09:00.000-07:00

So that's it. The story is now laid out in ten chapters, as had been envisioned from the beginning. Each image in the text of each title, embodied in the pix I've lifted from here and there around the Web, could be part of a set of Trumps. The summit of Kolvir, the palace grounds, the all-important library, Tir-na Nog'th, the Grove of the Unicorn, the brink of the abyss before the Courts of Chaos, the Floating City within the Courts forever rearranging itself upon the Lake of Sleep, Ygg, the infernal tower where even Brand's powers could be checked, the well at Mirata, the power center on the Shadow Earth known as Manhattan - all excellent subjects for a Master of the Line to tackle in the course of producing a deck of intriguing Trumps powered by the Pattern.

Still looking for a title for this messy fan fiction erected in the memory of Roger Zelazny. Three Kings of Chaos will have to do till something better comes along (maybe The Call of Chaos, All in for Chaos...?). Meanwhile, there may be some rewriting ahead, some punching up of the material.

If, in some fashion, you are a fan - either of Zelazny, fantasy, or stolen writing materials - then wish me well. I will probably be back. And - who knows? - maybe I'll find the fire to tackle other parts of Corwin's later years, as he steps up perhaps for the last time to rediscover his ideals, the life sleeping in his soul, and what he truly loves in this world. Even someone who has been around a thousand or more years is never too old to learn something. If you're not in the mood to wish me well, then consider wishing Corwin luck as he forges ahead, trying to learn what's truly at the bottom of the machinations cooked up in the Courts of Chaos. The mystery is a bigger knot than he realizes and will take all his resources to untie. With enough luck, some cunning and courage, and a little help from his friends, though, he just might succeed. Or get close enough for government work.

Then again, the journey of the hero, especially the aging hero, is not just about discovering all the things he can (and should) do, but sometimes is about discovering some of the things he can't (and, maybe, shouldn't) do. Not every game at the stadium ends with a victory for the home team. Put another way, the first series of Amber books ended with a victory for Amber over Chaos, but what sort of a "victory" was it really? And if Amber were to lose in some continuation of that conflict, would losing necessarily be such a bad thing?

Food for thought, perhaps.

Chronicles of Shadow ~ BOOK ONE:

Chapter One: Kolvir

Chapter Two: The South Garden

Chapter Three: The Library

Chapter Four: Tir-na Nog'th

Chapter Five: Grove of the Unicorn

Chapter Six: The Abyss

Chapter Seven: The Lake of Sleep

Chapter Eight: The Tree

Chapter Nine: The Pit

Chapter Ten: The Well

For the entire thing in just two windows:

Beginning and End

Amber-related posts:

Chronicles of Amber

Chronicles of Shadow?

Which Amberite Are You?

Chapter Ten: The Well

2008-06-09T02:34:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER TEN

In my youth, in better days long past, I’d visited these mountains and this valley with my brother Brand. I knew the Bandarnath Temple and the well, whose fame ran out from this place to the ends of the Shirai, to Keshwar where the river finally surrendered itself to the sea, to the holy city of Anrakan off in the mountains at the river’s headwaters. There was a time when kings and conquerors would not go into battle without first entering the temple to implore the favor of the Old Ones, the earliest generation of the gods of this land. The kingdoms to either side of the Shirai, however, had not gone to war in an age, and no ruler had visited the temple in centuries.

A drink from the well was supposed to confer a blessing. All I knew, though, standing there in heat that made the air flinch, was that I was thirsty. So I started up the path through the temple grove. Many things were turning in my head, so I didn’t hurry.

I was free.

But I was not where I had hoped to be. How had this happened? Perhaps, considering where I’d been held, the unpredictable forces of Chaos were responsible? There was also, I realized, the remote possibility of an Amberite performing some sort of operation on the Trumps. But it would have to be truly global, so all Trumps everywhere, even mine in my cell, were affected.

The chances of such a thing occurring at all, and occurring whilst I was testing out one of my homemade jobs, would normally be rather low. But if Chaos and Amber were now openly at war, almost anything could be happening.

Or I had simply screwed up, somehow focused on the wrong Trump. Entirely possible, given my oddball setup for getting them to work.

The temple grove behind me, I had come abreast of the terraced vegetable garden, and could see the way ahead more clearly.

There was a woman sitting by the well. I hadn’t noticed her before because her robes, like the well, were white.

Intrigued, I shifted my meanderings toward the back of my mind.

A few minutes of hiking at a renewed pace brought me within the circle of trees. Turning, I looked down toward the temple, which stood at the west end of town, overlooking a deep and sweeping valley. Clouds left soft blemishes on the green and yellow slopes below, grays which were almost blue. Probably a trick of the sudden widening of the sky there. Dust-choked roads ran through it, carrying merchants, farmers, travelers, and their carts, wagons and carriages, many following the banks of the gleaming Shirai. A view I had not seen in several hundred years, and it was good to see it again.

“A drink, traveler?”

She was seated in a chair draped in fine cloth of dark purple dye. The screen of a parasol painted with gods and heroes striving within the wheel of time stood over her. As she sat in the shade, it seemed logical the parasol offered protection from debris falling from the trees rather than an excess of sun. Either way, it was a nice decoration.

“A drink would be good, yes.”

“You have alms?”

“In days of old, a simple task performed on behalf of the temple was known to suffice. But that was all on the honor system. Back then, no one waited at the well.”

She lifted the brim of her thin silk hat — thin as gauze, so that I could see through it a little. And slowly looked me up and down. Blue eyes, red hair that made no secret of its treasure of silver, laid out in streaks found near the temples. Though she smiled, her gaze was strangely intense and searching.

“That was a very long time ago.”

Gesturing over my shoulder with my eyes and a slight turn of my head, I assented to that.

“Longer than I’d have guessed. The view’s changed.”

Her look suggested the question. So I answered it:

“The Sadar Gate no longer guards against the valley.”

She seemed to accept that.

“A long time,” she agreed. “What brought you here on that other occasion?”

“More of a ‘who.’ My brother liked to paint when he entered one of his bad spells, and this region was one of his favorite subjects.”

“You came to test its beauty against his paintings?”

“No, I came for his own protection. I was worried about him. But was glad I came. Yours is a pleasant and peaceful land.”

“You loved this brother, who perhaps no longer walks in this world?”

I realized I had spoken of Brand in the past tense.

“Sometimes. You know how brothers can be.”

“And now something else brings you here. And you wish to drink once more from the sacred well, though you have no alms.”

I glanced down at myself. My uncombed beard fell to my chest, and the hair hanging down to my shoulders was in no better shape. I was barefoot, but as the excess of my water ration had been invested in my art project, little had been left over for cleaning purposes. The truth was that I was filthy. If anything, I imagined I resembled a beggar or a prophet.

So why would a sweet old lady insist I pay for a drink of water?

I gave myself another look. The trousers were of good weave and my light jacket suggested that — once, perhaps — I might have enjoyed a better life. Did she think me some nobleman in disguise, wandering the land as one of its poor, learning how it went with the people? An old story, and a rather trite one. But not unheard-of. If such was her thought, however, wouldn’t she prefer the good opinion of someone in power?

Not necessarily. She might consider honoring temple rules and divine law to be of such great importance as to override all other considerations.

Whatever, I was here to play the beggar, and the beggar I would be.

“Is it still possible, as it was in days of old, to earn a drink with basic labor?”

“It is easier than that,” she answered, keeping her eyes on mine. “A simple kiss will do.”

“What?”

“A kiss. On the mouth,” was her matter-of-fact response.

“I —”

“Yes?”

An unusual request, though certainly fair. I’d kissed baronesses at a few of Dad’s state functions, many of them much older than the woman before me. Yet…a strange request all the same. Still, what the hell? If she wanted a kiss from a hairy old beggar, I supposed I could oblige.

Before I could make answer, she added, “You are a very handsome young man, you know.”

“Really? Because I haven’t checked, but I may have fleas.”

She laughed.

“Very well, then. Your name, a kiss, and the water is yours.”

“You need my name?”

“You come here skulking and shame-faced, then you are unworthy of the well’s blessings. What does your soul tell you? Are you brave and good? Or too proud, or perhaps ashamed, to reveal yourself to the gods of the temple, the well and the grove? Can you tell me your name?”

“Well, I’m not too sure about the ‘good.’ Or the brave part either, come to think of it.”

“But you will give me your name?”

She was watching me closely.

It was silly of me to object. Who knew of Prince Corwin of Amber in this outback of Shadow? What could be the harm? There was trade with Amber, however, through the port of Keshwar, so the possibility existed that a few of our wretched crew were known here (though it was most likely that the best of our number, Gérard, was the only prince of Amber known in these parts — he dealt with captains from Shadows far and wide). Otherwise, though, her arguments were reasonable.

“I might lie. We beggars are known for our lies.”

“You won’t. So I can expect to hear a name?”

“All right.”

She got to her feet, very slowly. And something happened.

This lady was older than I — at least older than I looked. And there was a power in her. No wonder she did not care if I came from high or low. The low-born could not do anything to her, of course, but, then, I didn’t think the high-born could either.

She held out her hand to me, as though we might embark upon a pavane. Very formal, and confident.

There was something of the air of enchantment here. I sensed it strongly now. Three times she had demanded my name, weaving the charm. And I had granted her the right to require it of me. Her power was real enough.

But she was trying to use it on a prince of Amber. I was out of her league.

Her boldness and her imminent failure both made me smile as I took her hand and bestowed a gentle kiss on her dry lips.

And, prepared as I was, she still surprised me. There was more to her than I’d guessed. A moment passed while my surprise registered, and she pressed her mouth — not so dry, after all — firmly against mine, with the sort of passion a lady might show a lover.

Just as I was about to draw back, she pulled away, her smile having much in common with cats who do terrible things to canaries.

“And now?”

There, I caught it. An accent she’d nearly lost. I could almost place it.

“After the drink, I’ll tell you.”

She inclined her head in response and moved over to the well.

“You don’t need to do that. I’ll be happy to haul up the water.”

“I will do it.”

She did, and I realized she was strong, stronger than any old lady I could recall. And perhaps not as old as I had thought. That well probably went over one hundred feet down. Yet the rope flew through her hands. In no time, the bucket rested beside the well. From within her robe, she produced a simple stone cup, filled it, and offered it to me.

I reached for it, but she shook her head.

“This is the temple’s cup. It cannot leave me.”

“And you’d like my name?”

“That, too.”

I wanted to lie to her, but I had just witnessed her feat of strength. More was surely going on than was meeting the eye. So I hedged.

“You were somewhat interested in my earlier visit here. And I freely gave up a lot of information about myself. I’m attempting to travel anonymously at this time — some bad people are after me. So how about this? Will you settle for my brother’s name instead?”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Yes.”

“His name was Brand.”

And she nodded, as if she’d known it all along. Then she stepped close and held the cup to my lips.

Greedily, I drank.

She gave me two more cupfuls of the well’s sacred water.

It had not been all that long since I’d consumed some of my water ration, but what came from that cup was cold, sweet, pure. Surpassed only, as far as I knew, by that found in the Grove of the Unicorn.

She put away the cup, took my hand in hers, began leading me back down the path.

“Where are we going?”

“You are hungry.”

Once she said it, I knew that I was. Famished, actually. For real food, not prison fare.

“The High Priestess of Bandarnath will give you a meal and help set you on your way.”

“She will?”

The woman in the white robe glanced up at me as she drew me along.

“I am the High Priestess of Bandarnath.”

And that is how, after more than five hundred years, I came again to the well at Mirata.

And she was as good as her word. She led me up to the porch on the second floor and left me sitting by a table, staring off into space. It was a moment before I really saw the gift she’d given me. Because I was still seeing the first floor temple interior through which we’d just passed.

It had been a corridor bisecting other corridors down which we’d walked. No doors, and everything speaking of unstinting opulence. Every bit of the walls and ceilings were intricately carved (of wood, I assumed), and overlaid with ivory and gold. The floor an elaborate mosaic I had not tried to unravel. Lamps and braziers burned everywhere, again causing me to wonder if the interior were truly carved of wood — if so, then the temple was an inferno which hadn’t gotten around to igniting just yet.

I’d waited till we’d left the flickering, glittering space, so as not to disturb the priestesses, acolytes, worshippers and others moving through their rituals, quietly seeking a better understanding of the wisdom of their gods. As we had ascended toward the upper deck, though, I’d asked my question.

“My memory is hardly reliable, but wasn’t this place once consecrated to the Bright God, the Lord of the Stone?”

“It still is.”

“Were there priestesses here then? I can’t recall any.”

“The temple was destroyed, the priests killed. Our order rebuilt it. We are the living female energy to the god's transcendent male energy.”

“Ah, I see.”

Which explained the upgrade from the simpler and more airy temple space I’d remembered — “This Temple Under New Management.”

The gift she’d arranged for me was a slightly altered version of the prospect across the valley I’d been afforded from the well. Then the food started coming, and I was distracted again. Vegetables, beans and grains prepared in a variety of ways, most of them spicy and hot, all of them good. That no meat touched the table didn’t surprise me too much; it was not their way, these folk who valued all life. When I’d demolished the main courses, out came the desserts of fruit, which I doggedly wiped out. All presented very prettily, I might add, but I showed none of the foodstuffs a trace of mercy. The meal tested my appetite just the same, and I lost track of the courses they served, slowing only when I realized they’d truly filled me up.

In short, they fêted me like, well, like a prince.

I was sad, though again, not surprised, when wine, beer, or any other head-spinning stuff failed to put in an appearance.

So I enjoyed the tea.

And I noticed things. Like the golden girl with the long dark hair and long dark eyes, who could not keep the look of consternation out of those eyes as she took away the party-sized bowl of noodles and vegetables which I’d emptied. And the beautiful girl with dark gleaming skin, who used both hands to carry away the wide fruit basket I’d lightened, mouthing an “Oh” as she rounded the table. And the gray-eyed elven lass who brought out the after-dinner tea — and a small pot of honey — who, seeing the astonished girl heading back to the stairs with the empty fruit basket, allowed a corner of her mouth to quirk upward.

“Plenty of diversity in this region,” I observed. “Rarely have I seen its like, save in my own land.”

“History has already happened here,” she acknowledged, setting down her cup with a jiggle, looking down at the rippling surface, watching (I supposed) the tea leaves dance. “Every way imaginable to kill and torture each other has been used here in the service of all mannner of societies, religions and governments. From one side of the continent to the other. And once the rulers and warlords had exhausted all the possibilities, they would go back to the beginning and start the whole business over again. Diversity has been a curse to us, though it was through our many peoples and their many ways that we finally found a remedy. And peace.”

“So what was the cure?”

“The Harp of Harmony. The Cup of Contentment. The Sacred Song. The Light of Love. The Dance of Duality. The Grace of the Grail. The Lyre of Lir —”

“Crap,” I said, and watched her patiently steeple her fingers, letting them rest against her lips. Her eyebrows lifted a little, inquiringly. That I suspected her to be holding back a smile made me burn a little, but I checked my natural responses right there. Because I’d belatedly remembered my manners.

“I shouldn’t have said that. Please allow me to apologize.”

“Why?” she asked, seeming surprised.

“Because they’re your beliefs.”

“And you were about to state yours,” she said. “I wish you would.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Well, why does this system of beliefs require so many aliases? If a belief system with that many names wrote me a check for my soul, I’d expect to have some trouble cashing it.”

Then she really caught fire. When it came to verbal sparring, she held her own just fine. And it quickly became obvious that she enjoyed people who disagreed with her. She let me know that not only did the continent contain every race, and a hundred or more kingdoms, but that there were also thousands, even millions, of gods. She claimed the multiplicity of religions was one of the reasons for the many names for their underlying truth.

“With that many gods hanging around,” I said, “it stands to reason there’s a fair chance of bumping into one or two on your way to the bathroom. Must happen all the time.”

Her eyes widening appreciatively, her expression very serious, she agreed, “It is sometimes necessary to ‘hold it’ all day, due to the line. And getting mirror time can be a real problem.”

“Then I won’t shave,” I announced. “And I’ll stop eating and drinking. Problem solved.”

She burst out laughing then, so that I couldn’t help a chuckle myself.

The conversation wound its way through all manner of topics — music, something this old city was known for in particular, renowned as it was for its manufacture of musical instruments, and art, astronomy and cartography — before she introduced a certain subject. And the whole time, though both of us were having fun, it was a conversation between two people without names. She seemed to enjoy calling me “Brand’s brother,” while I had little choice but to call her “High Priestess.”

“Brand’s brother, where will you go when you leave here?”

“Back whence I came, High Priestess.”

“And where is that?”

“Jail.”

“That is a very strange answer.”

“I know.”

She sighed.

“Well, perhaps I can help you. Do you require provisions of any kind?”

“I do.”

“Name them for me.”

“Art supplies and a small room in which to work.”

“That answer is stranger than the other.”

“I know.”

“I will help you, if you will do something for me in exchange.”

“And what would that be?”

“Allow me to watch. And to help you, if I can.”

“Your answer is as strange as mine, I think. But, yes, I won’t mind either a spectator or a critic, or both.”

“Then we are agreed, brother of Brand?”

“We are agreed, Priestess who is Most High.”

That got me an odd look, so I pointed to her teacup.

“I was just beginning to wonder if the acolytes were having a little fun, maybe, spiking the tea with something. No? Well, of course not. Just a joke. No offense taken, I hope? I’m still getting my art supplies?”

She kept her sense of humor, and I got my art supplies.

My studio consisted of a small shed, open on one side, roofed with cloth stretched over the two crosspieces overhead, with just enough room for me and my stuff. It was situated only a few yards away from the well, from which vantage she liked to watch the valley, the traffic going into and out of Mirata, and, of course, the approach of those who desired the blessings of the well.

When no one was around, she would watch me work. And offered small doses of praise, tempered by simple constructive suggestions. Never more than one suggestion at a time. Her advice being remarkably insightful on the whole, I found myself implementing most of her ideas, always with good results.

Also, because we were alone with each other for long stretches, she gave me her name.

“‘Claire’ is what those who know me well call me. You may call me ‘Claire.’”

“That name belongs in Mirata about as much as I do. But I already had you pegged as an expatriate from somewhere else. As for me, I’m known to some as ‘Corey.’ You can call me that, if you like.”

“What makes you want to go back to jail, Corey?”

“An attack of conscience. I don’t feel I’ve finished paying my debt to society, you see.”

Thinking I heard a chuckle, I turned my head away from my canvas (where a half-decent study of the valley was taking shape) to glimpse the expression on her face.

She was serious and serene, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

Perhaps I’d imagined the chuckle. I returned to the canvas.

“How noble of you,” she remarked. “You know, our kalsha” — the golden tree-topper that completed the temple's spire — “is not fixed very securely. The next big storm will knock it down, and beggars and thieves less honest than you will try to make off with it. You could repay some of your debt to society by better securing it to the tower.”

“How will that help society?”

“Stealing from a temple is a serious crime. You will be helping other unfortunates avoid a lot of trouble. And, as society paid for that kalsha, you will be sparing society needless additional expense.”

“You are very wise, High Priestess.”

“Another benefit,” she continued. “Sir Corey will be furthering his spiritual development, which may also be good for society.”

“Or at least not as harmful as the alternative,” I tried.

“It is as though you are reading my mind.”

That time I was able to turn quickly enough to catch her grin.

It turned out she liked to draw, paint, make things. She showed me a woodcut she’d done of the well years ago, and I was impressed. As I’d already surmised, she had obviously had another life in some other place before coming to Mirata, the City of Music. She never spoke of it, though, and I never asked. I was grateful for what she was willing to share of that other time and place — namely, her expertise in art.

So I got better. Much more quickly than I’d have done on my own, of that I was sure. Still, nowhere near quick enough. Though I was burning with impatience, with the urgency to come to Amber’s aid, I remained convinced that this was what I needed to do. The old Corwin had miscalculated in the past, and paid a terrible price, without any benefit accruing to Amber. I was not about to charge into the middle of things without being ready. And I wasn’t ready.

But I was aching with curiosity. How were things going at home? To find out, I’d only have to hellride out to the Forest of Arden, see how close I could get. Easy enough, as so many mistakes are. If the place were embroiled in full-scale war, I could very quickly find myself at the mercy of whatever was happening there. And then what? Without a set of Trumps, or some other special advantage, I could lose my freedom and much else besides.

So instead I chose to spend a few weeks in the company of an attractive older woman, whose humor and intelligence delighted me, while I practiced drawing and painting. In the mornings I rose and put myself through some basic physical exercises. Checking with the acolytes of the temple, I would inquire after any chores that I could take on. (And I did fix the kalsha — a wedge, rope, some crosspieces and a few rocks did the trick.) They trusted me enough to send me into Mirata to purchase oil for the lamps, spices they were unable to grow on the premises, ingredients for their medicines, paper, and other sundries.

A couple of times, I yielded to the temptation to take a detour off into Shadow, where various temple necessities happened to be readily available (because I willed them to be, of course), returning to the temple with the items and the unspent funds, which I suggested be put back into the till. This earned me a few strange looks. Word naturally got back to the High Priestess — Claire — who never troubled to mention it to me.

Though she did help me with my painting, my skill in drawing showed more promise. As soon as I felt ready, I attempted my first Trump, an Eiffel Tower. Didn’t work, of course.

Seeing my frustration, she asked, “What is wrong?”

“I’m trying to create a special effect, but it’s not working.”

“A special effect?”

“Yes, an image hidden within the drawing, which I’m trying to keep in the background. But there’s a problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“I need to give the hidden image added depth, greater dimensionality. Yet if I draw too much attention to that image, it threatens to overwhelm the actual subject.”

“That is a difficult problem.”

“Yes, I’m at a loss.”

“Try trees.”

So I did. I tried for a stretch of trail in Arden. It was easy to hide the Pattern in the sea of leaves. She showed me how to stagger the image, so that it was echoed in more than one place, found in more than one line.

I set the drawing down on a page in the artist's notebook/sketchpad I was developing.

And this time, when I felt for the place on the other side of the image, something was there.

Arden waited for me, and I knew how to make Trumps.

I wanted a Trump for Rebma, and Claire showed me how to use the waves. My Trump for the Eiffel Tower offered places for the Pattern in the steel beams, in the delineation of city skyline, in the shadings of the sky itself.

Each subject offered a different challenge; you had to be creative about it each time.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was easy. There were definitely a few tricks to it. For one, when it came to working the Pattern into an image, the best approach for me was a bit like automatic writing, or Ouija. It worked better if I relaxed and let things flow. Also, I found it helped if I had a representation of the Pattern to one side or the other of the space where I was working, even on both sides. Its presence at the periphery of my vision seemed to make things go better. Don't know if that was some conditioning left over from my time in my cell, the place Airu had called Valtuya. But it worked.

I couldn’t yet produce genuine Trumps, pasteboards imbued with the power of the Pattern. Mine were several times larger, and laid out on stiff sheets in my sketchpad. Not as easy to carry, or to use and then put away, as one of Dworkin's decks. None of that mattered, of course, so long as they worked.

So, slowly, carefully, I labored to produce the Trumps I thought I needed.

And then I was ready.

“I’m ready,” I told her.

“To go back to your jail?”

“That’s right. Your help has been invaluable to me. Thank you for everything.”

“Thank you for the donation you left with the temple this morning. May I ask where you came into possession of such a fortune in jewels? And how?”

“By honest means, rest assured. The temple need not worry about tainted wealth. I’m an amateur geologist; there’s a place by a waterfall I know of, off in the mountains. That’s where I went yesterday.”

A small lie. I had gone away the day before, but to a sleeping volcano in another Shadow where corundum in the rough could be chipped from exposed rock, and also could be found in the stream running down its slopes. There had even been a waterfall close by. A jeweler in Mirata had cut the stones for me, keeping a few for himself as payment.

“It is the largest gift we've received in the living memory of the temple.”

“And still less than you and the temple deserve. I’ve rarely been so well looked after, or so at peace. And the art instruction you've given has been priceless.”

“Stay one more night,” she said unexpectedly.

“Why?”

“If I have helped you,” said she, gentle yet insistent, “then stay one more night.”

I owed her too much, and so did not refuse. That night I fell asleep on my pallet as I had dozens of times. This time, though, I woke sometime after midnight, restless, and went to stand outside my hut. The moon shone bright and strong on the mountainside and made the valley glow. Tigers sometimes prowled here, so I waited. But I heard no tiger. After awhile, I went back inside.

Someone was there.

She was stretched out on the place where I slept. A daughter of the temple? A girl from the town? It wasn’t like I hadn’t had offers. Nevertheless, I had worked hard to cultivate the persona of a monk. So I was still rather surprised.

She sat up as I came closer, leaning back on her elbows. Even in the dark, I could see her smile. Slowly, she reached out toward me, and I leaned closer to her as she did. She placed a finger on my lips and sat all the way up, putting her other hand around my neck. The heady scents of flowers, herbs, and other things made a forest of her hair and a country of her skin, lighting up my senses, sparking my brain. Her face moved toward mine.

We kissed.

The touch of her lips made me think I might be dreaming.

“Corwin,” she breathed, and a part of me wondered that she knew my name. But I was already on the bed with her, and she was already drawing me closer.

I answered so softly that she might not have heard the word: “Yes.”

“Love me,” she whispered back.

Her hands were sliding beneath my clothing. Her skin was cool where it touched mine. She kissed my ear, ran fingers through my hair. Cool skin, and I had goosebumps, a thrilling skein woven wherever she touched.

And I caressed her, covered her with kisses of my own. The world went away as I held her, breathed her, tasted her.

Loved her.

When I woke the next morning, she was gone, my only company the questions she had left behind. Slowly, I dressed and got my things together. Stepping outside my hut, I took a look around.

The High Priestess had taken her place beside the well by this time as she always did. Seeing me, she looked up and smiled. With my sketchpad in one hand and pack in the other, I descended toward the well.

There was so much unspoken, and so little of it which I was prepared to say. Though I hadn't meant to let her get so close, in that moment I understood just how important to me she had become. So I simply said, “You never told me why.”

“The kiss?” she asked, her smile widening.

“We could start there.”

She turned her gaze up toward the leaves above her, then looked down toward the temple before she made her reply.

“As High Priestess, one of the roles I play is that of teacher. The kiss was both a lesson and a test. It was really no different from my helping you with your drawing. If you gained by it, then you learned something.”

“I will never be a real artist,” I confessed, while turning her words over for their full meanings, “but, thanks to you, I can see into my own mind better. And show what I see. You have been an excellent teacher.”

“I did have another student once,” she let me know, thoughtfully regarding me once more.

“Then I feel I’ve benefitted from the teaching practice he — or she — provided. I suppose you’ll always have another vocation available to you, if you should ever tire of temple life.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That part of my life is over. It was nice revisiting it again with you, but Mirata is where I belong, at its temple. And now I will share with you a secret, if you would like to hear it.”

“I’m all ears,” I said, as I folded away the sketchpad, stowing it in the backpack I’d purchased with my new funds. I had also picked up some new clothes, not to mention a pair of boots. Ready for travel. It was another day hot enough to make the air shimmy and shake. My gaze wandered westward beyond the Temple of Bandarnath. The valley below beckoned, and I was eager to be on my way.

“I enjoy meeting those who come to the well,” she began. “Different things bring people here, and some come from distant lands, very far from here. Other worlds, I hear. There is a land called Avalon, very, very far away, and very hard to find, hidden somewhere in the Western Sea. Beyond it, they say, is a place even farther off, where our boldest sailors sometimes go…”

“Amber?”

“You know it? It is not a myth?”

“No myth,” I answered, straightening and hoisting the pack onto my shoulder. “I’ve been there. The city on the Mountain that Faces the Dawn truly surpasses description. But I will try. The streets sparkle, as though embedded with chips of diamond. Much of the city is of white stone, like your well here. The towers, green and gold, soar upward like shafts of light. The palace rises up from the mountainside, a dream of pale marble born from the mind of a madman or a genius. And there are those who say he is both. A stair cut into the mountain's eastern face wends back and forth across it in a journey that takes those yet-uncounted steps on a breathless descent from the city to the sea. Mountains rear behind that jewel, the mountain of light, in a long march to the north, clothed in the most magnificent wood that has ever been, the Forest of Arden. To the south the Vale of Garnath opens, divided by the great river Oisen, which runs down swift and strong from Jones Falls. And somewhere between Garnath and the summit of the mountain called Kolvir, cradled upon a ledge on the western slopes, it is said there is a place called the Grove of the Unicorn. A nook tucked into the mountainside that is supposed to eclipse the beauty of the palace gardens, whose splendor is a fable in many worlds.”

“A madman and a genius,” she whispered, staring across the valley as I had done just moments before, but seeming not to see it as her mind wandered down old paths. “There is always one, sometimes more than one, in every land. Before your first visit to Mirata, I knew such a one. He taught me my craft as an artist, and was truly a master.”

Before my first visit? Briefly, I hung on those words, wondering if she knew what they really meant. I hadn’t noticed any funny ears on her, but perhaps she was one of those half-elven folk, many of whom could be found in these parts. Like Amberites, they were very long-lived.

I took a step toward her, knelt, extended my hand.

“Fair lady, Claire, High Priestess, I thank you, verily from the depths of my heart, for all you have done, which is more than you can know.”

She slowly put out her hand, which I took, lifting it to my lips for a kiss.

“He was called Dworkin,” she said. “Perhaps you have heard of him?”

“Even in my land, we know that name,” I answered, releasing her hand.

“You never asked me the name of my other student.”

“I think we both know what his name was,” I said, rising. “And now I must be going. Farewell.”

And I walked down the path toward the temple without looking back.

Now that I was finally on my way, there was no rush. I made my way down into the valley, walking the dusty road with others bound for the Shirai. Inside of three hours, I was on the river's banks, stripping for a swim. When I emerged, refreshed, I dried off, dressed, and found a place off the tow-path, where the last trees leaned over the water.

There I took out the sketchpad, flipped it open to the proper page, and concentrated on the image there.

It took only a few moments, and then the place was real enough to touch. So I turned the picture away, reached for the fully realized actuality.

And I was back in my cell. I returned the pad to my pack.

The thunder bucket was gone. No one was here, but someone had been, and therefore knew of my escape. I was pleased no new tenant had been forced to take up residence. Slowly, I turned to examine the wall. My engravings were untouched, which was all I really cared about.

So now I would try it again. The chaotic landscape, littered with smoke and fire, the tower crouching on the hill, the swarm of flying rocks.

There was no peculiar jolt on this occasion, no unpremeditated headlong plunge into Shadow. Ready for anything, I took the fateful step. Right away, the fumes burning my nostrils let me know I had gotten it right this time. I saw I was standing in a ruined heap of cables, struts, torn pieces of wing. Much of the crashed vehicle's red paint had been worn away. The twisted bits of metal and fiberglass were singed and scorched. The ground was hot; I was suddenly grateful I hadn’t gotten through on my first try. I’d have been barefoot.

Looking up, I could see billows of smoke, swirls of gas, jets of flame. Then, lowering my gaze, I spied the tower. There was something sinister about that place, the way it overlooked this infernal region. It loomed too close for my comfort, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to travel out to it.

But no. Half an hour of searching, first within the pile of wreckage itself, and then on the steaming ground around it, turned up what I was after. It was on the side of the broken sailplane facing away from the tower, half buried in sand, one corner visible. It was while I was scuffing up the soil around the grave of Random’s flying machine that I kicked it loose.

I had what I had come for, so I slipped it into my pocket. And took out the sketchpad again (concerned a little, I’ll confess, that a stray bit of ash or ember might alight upon it at any moment).

The drawing of the limbo I had only just left felt cold to my touch, a dramatic and exaggerated sensation given my current environs.

Time to go.

Leaving the realm of Brand’s tower behind, I let the hand holding the sketchpad fall to my side, and was once more within the cell which could no longer hold me.

This time I would depart through another door. I’d dismissed its value before as a refuge, as a base from which to rebuild ruined plans, as a strong suit in the current game. Things had changed, though, and I now knew a different game was being played. Old skills were called for and new players needed to be brought in. I had made up my mind early on during my stay in Mirata what to do if I ever found myself in Valtuya again. So no time was wasted wondering what to do now.

My mind took hold of the image on the wall, and then it took hold of me. The cell fell away as that other place and I moved toward one another. Then the engraving was gone, superceded by the reality — trumped by it, some might say. I took stock of my new surroundings.

People. In a rush on their way from a million anywheres to a thousand somewheres. I stood on a sidewalk, pedestrians pushing past, some giving me looks, others seeming unaware of me except as another obstacle. The human traffic competed with that of the cars, cabs, trucks and buses — noisy, pungent, frenetic. Exhaust fumes fell upon me, fell back, intermittently mingling with the aromas of pretzels, hot dogs, pizza. Along with the food, street sellers hocked clothes, gadgets, tchotchkes, music, magazines, postcards, brochures, books. Every door opened onto a shop, a restaurant, a bank, a hotel, even a church. The very air was charged with vitality, a transformative energy, the feeling of something on its way to becoming something else. Yet the buildings, tall and small, new and old, metal and glass, stone and concrete, modern and Gothic, effortlessly embraced centuries, surrounding all the relentless motion and change with a kind of timelessness. Witnesses, those buildings, monumental and discrete, to hundreds of years fluttering past like leaves in the late summer breeze.

The sign above the shop next to me had three words on it, and they made me smile: Bagel, Deli, Salad.

I had done it, I had gotten to Gotham.

As for Mirata, there were questions in my mind, questions needing answers. One day soon, I would have to go back, learn the truth about Claire and her connection to Dworkin and Brand, and perhaps other things. Was there something besides the scenery that had drawn Brand there in days gone by? It now seemed likely there had been. If so, I would have to find out what it was. Too much of Brand’s story remained unknown.

The mystery girl who had come to me last night was still very much on my mind. Just a chance encounter, an adventurous girl from town? Or was there something more? Perhaps Claire could provide answers here, too. Something told me she knew what had happened, might even have set it up.

Yes, I would be paying the well at Mirata another visit.

But other matters would have to come first. Bleys I would have to rescue, and I was now certain that I could do it. With Bleys at my side, we would get the lay of the land, spy on Amber, spy on the Courts, learn what was really going on.

And we would rescue Merlin. I would make sure of that.

Finally, there was the still-unsolved puzzle of my dreams. The future they had seemed to represent had entered the present. Whatever process was at work, it had moved into a new phase. And that process, as I had feared, did indeed somehow tie in to the disaster which had befallen Chaos, which now threatened Amber. The Arena of Doom had made that obvious enough.

A host of challenges and unknowns lay before me, but I was filled with confidence. I had done much, and there was much left to do. But I felt good.

I was alive, healthy, in good spirits and standing in the heart of the Big Apple. And in that moment it struck me that Sinatra had gotten it right. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

I started walking up Fifth Avenue toward the Empire State Building, whistling as I went.

END OF BOOK ONE

Copyright © 2008 Lokabrenna @ Blogger (JTB) All rights reserved

Chapter Nine: The Pit

2008-06-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

CHAPTER NINE

The fishbowl became my new home.

When consciousness returned, that’s where I was, lying on the squishy pallet where I had lain when “dead.” Each day a basket of food and drink was lowered through a cylindrical shaft down into my cell. Day-Glo fish swam beyond the encircling transparent wall.

No one came to call, to interrogate, to torture.

Solitary confinement in a place where time was almost meaningless. All the same, I marked each delivery of a meal on one of the white ribs running up the sides of the jug-shaped chamber.

When I wasn’t pondering various unworkable schemes for escape, I thought of Merlin, and of Bleys. Had they really been tossed into the abyss? Raum was more rational than Zirlar. As royals of Amber, my kin could be useful as bargaining chips. And if my ability to employ Trumps could advance the plans of Amber’s enemies, the same could be said for my son and my brother. Finally, as former agents of the crown, they held information which could be used by the other side.

I was heartened by my own continued existence. If “the bottom of the sea” euphemistically referred to my confinement in a bottle-shaped aquarium, then perhaps “hurl them into the abyss” could be taken at something other than face value. That thought was my rock and I clung to it like the drowning shipwreck victim that it almost seemed I was.

Despair came at me from several directions, but my guard was up. I lived. There would be no despair. Bleys possessed knowledge and resources beyond my own, and had survived worse situations in the past. If I lived, then my guess was that he did, too. A certain amount of denial is probably necessary in most grasps for hope, and I was well aware of the possibility that I was only kidding myself. Still, I hoped Bleys lived and chose to believe it all the same.

As for Merlin, this was his turf. Having been raised in the Courts, he obviously could access native lore beyond the ken of either Bleys or myself. His connections in this place, besides conferring hidden advantages, might also provide unlooked-for allies. In point of fact, if I were placing odds on any of the three of us living through this mess, I’d be giving myself the lowest score. Merlin’s chances were at least as good as Bleys’, and better than mine.

We were far from out of commission. This surely was check, but not yet mate. There was indeed room for hope, hope that was something other than self-deception. Room for hope, if not optimism. When Eric had me immured in the dungeons beneath Amber, I had been deprived of my eyes. Yet I had escaped and lived to tell the tale. I would escape to tell this one.

Down, but not yet out.

Still, despair was not so easily turned aside. Days went by, then weeks, then months. Eventually, I raged against Martin. This was all his fault. Somehow, he had messed up, gotten Merlin and himself in over their heads, so that Random had sent me after them. Had I not come to the Courts as a result, there would never have been talk of people inhabiting abysses or sea-bottoms.

I burned with the urge to confront him with his crimes, teach him a proper lesson. So strongly that I eyed the wall of my prison, wondered how deep underwater I was, how easily that wall could be broken. Escape, track him down, make him understand the enormity of the disaster he had precipitated, the harm he’d done his cousin Merlin, his uncle Bleys, me, and Amber herself. I believe I actually saw red, wallowing in my wrath.

Sometime later, after the anger had burned down and something like rationality returned, I forced myself to recognize the youth and inexperience of my nephew and my son. They were going to make mistakes; it was unavoidable.

So I blamed Random.

But that, too, passed. And, when I had no one left to accuse, I blamed myself.

I had not made an effort to be a part of my son’s life. Instead, I had given him the barest minimum of myself, told him the story of how I had come to his homeland, how before that I had simply come home (really not so simple), how I had come to be his father. And kept my promise to see him walk the Pattern. Then, as if fulfillment of that promise relieved me of all my duties as a parent, I had taken the first opportunity to go as far from Amber and Chaos as I could get, losing myself among the Shadows. My rationale had been my search for the Pattern I had drawn. But now I knew that quest for what it had truly been: my excuse. For, somehow, I had known all along that my Pattern was not part of the web of worlds stretched between the two known poles of existence. It lay somewhere else. Bleys and Fiona had said as much, and in the core of my being I had known they were right.

So why had I fled the home and family I’d fought so hard to save? The pain of losing Deirdre and my father? The awesome scope of Brand’s treachery? The rejection by a certain Princess of Chaos?

All of that, I decided. And more. Just as it had seemed I would take my place in a ready-made family of my own, the mother of my son had declared her hatred for me. And that son had turned out to be a being who, while resembling me on the surface, was in truth very different, almost alien, raised in a realm I still only barely comprehended.

And even if all of that had not been there, further complicating the picture, even a normal family — whatever that was — would have been complicated enough. The truth was, though I might have done a little growing up during the succession intrigues, I still had some left to do. I just hadn’t been ready. Those responsibilities had scared me, and I’d chickened out. I’d run, and now I was ashamed. And not just ashamed. Guilty. For now it was clear that others would pay for my unwillingness to face responsibilities which were mine, and mine alone.

My fault.

If I ever got out, I resolved to do things differently. If Merlin still lived, I’d find him, get to know him better, make myself available. And I’d cease avoiding Amber. Though I had sworn my loyalty to Random along with everyone else that day on the verge of the abyss, I had not rendered service as they had.

As for the rest, with so much time to think, sooner or later every connection suffered a review. Dara was the mother of my only son. Perhaps I had given up on her too easily, avoiding a serious commitment for all the reasons I was now finally willing to acknowledge. She had made it easy, by rejecting me first. The only way to know if there could be anything there would be for me to make the first move, test the waters. If those waters were still posted “No Swimming, No Fishing,” then at least I’d know that, and know I’d tried.

And Moire…what to say? She’d seemed happy enough to call the troublesome prince her consort. But had I chosen to reside with her in the city beneath the sea for her sake, or for the sake of the city itself? There I had been able to be in Amber without any of the complications of actually being in Amber. Self-imposed exile in an underwater limbo? After hundreds of years of exile, exile was what I knew best. An existence which had frustrated me, but which had also become a part of me. Frustrating, but also — not so unexpectedly — freeing.

I’d lost my passion for living. Without it, there’d be no point in escape.

I laughed bitterly. I’d chosen the beautiful prison of Rebma, willingly placed myself in the power of its lovely warden. And now where was I? Underwater again, in a funny little jail, a genie trapped in a lamp. As there was no beautiful mistress of this latest incarnation of the Stony Lonesome, and the cell was considerably smaller, on the whole it would have to be said that I had traded down. Even if the essentials had hardly changed.

And now, of course, the new conditions, having worsened somewhat, came with their own costs. Things were happening outside my collapsed existence, but what things?

The three mystery men I’d brought into the game, how mysterious were they? They were almost certainly family-members, and obviously long-lost ones. I’d seen their faces before, but I knew even less about them than I did about Osric and Finndo. These three, therefore, had to be their elders, from the time of Oisen and Isolde, if not earlier. From Amber’s earliest days then. We’d been taught they were among the deceased, but, clearly, this was not so. The witches had known this, of course, and for reasons of their own had chosen to share this information with Swayvill’s foes.

But why now?

Because Swayvill’s war on Amber had failed, that was why. He was a defeated monarch. And therefore vulnerable. Now those who had quietly plotted his downfall for millennia at last saw their chance. And had chosen to act. I marveled at their patience.

But perhaps they hadn’t been as patient as all that. It would be naïve to assume this had been their first and only attempt.

The witches themselves were obviously the key to everything. They had known more about the new Pattern than I. Not just more than I knew, more than anyone knew, more than Bleys, more than Fiona. Possibly even more than Dworkin himself.

Dworkin!

If the witches were the key to the other side’s power, Dworkin was ours. As soon as I managed to learn Merlin’s fate and, hopefully, find him alive somewhere, finding Dworkin would be my next order of business. Then I’d have to learn the story behind the witches and our three new relatives. And report any findings to Random.

The mission would still be completed. It would just end up taking a little longer than anticipated, that’s all.

Still leaving me with the problem of escape.

There were two ways out, as I saw it. One: Up through the chimney above. Two: Out through the broken wall into the waters outside. Assuming I was being held under Haylish, I would emerge in the midst of the city. From there I could make my way to the Street of the Beggars, masquerading as one (easy enough, one would hope, for a bedraggled escaped convict), learning what I could of the situation prevailing in Amber and the Courts.

What, for instance, was the cover story circulating about the disappearances of Yours Truly, the visiting prince, and Bleys, the resident ambassador? At some point, though, I’d have to make contact with Swayvill, work my way over to Thelbane, gain a private audience. From there we would have to unravel where Merlin and Bleys were being held, mount a rescue. If possible, I’d get in touch with Dworkin, secure his help. With my grandfather on board, locating the still-missing Martin should be less of a problem. Then back home to Random with solid results and, all going well, Swayvill’s opposition already dispatched.

Optimistic, me?

But there was a distinct possibility of drowning if I literally broke out. The other option, using the rope by which the food basket was lowered, wasn’t much better since whoever passed me my meals would be at the other end, able to cut or release the rope any time he chose.

The matter required yet more thinking. So I looked out through the aquarium wall, watched the fish swim by.

The old green-bearded fellow had been paying me another dream visit, shouting to be heard above a roaring wind. It had seemed I could almost make out the words.

“Lord Corwin!”

Suddenly awake, I sat up with a start and looked around. Still a lone fish in a bowl. The shifting light filtered through the waters and wall showed a round cell devoid of all but my sleeping mat and the thunder bucket against the other wall (the chamber pot that got hauled up the rope once a day).

The words had come to me in a loud whisper. A fragment of my dream?

“Lord Corwin! Are you awake?”

After a pause, I answered, “Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“Things are going swimmingly down here. So to speak.”

A girlish giggle reached my ears. So I got up, moved to the center of my chamber, tilting my head to peer up the shaft. There was, far, far up, framed against a featureless field of green light, an outline of someone’s head and shoulders.

“I’m not supposed to be here. So I have to be careful and talk softly.”

“Okay.”

“It’s great to finally talk with you.”

“Same here. I don’t get many visitors. In fact, you’re the first.”

“Aren’t you curious who I am and why I’m here?”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.”

“I’m Airu.”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance, Airu.”

“You have to escape,” she informed me.

“Now that you mention it, that’s not a bad idea. Easier said than done, however.”

“Bad things have been happening.”

“Somehow this news comes as no surprise.”

“Very bad things. King Swayvill no longer rules Chaos.”

“Who’s in charge then?”

“The lords of Chaos no longer heed Swayvill. They are calling for Zirlar to claim the Greenstone Throne.”

I’d actually been expecting something like this.

“How is Zirlar managing this coup d’état?”

“Many are unhappy with Amber’s victory. They blame Swayvill.”

“And support Zirlar?”

“He has promised victory over Amber.”

“What of Raum?”

“Zirlar’s ally.”

“He doesn’t mind sitting backstage while Zirlar takes the bows and has flowers thrown at his feet?” I wondered, a little incredulous. “Zirlar gets the glory, not to mention the power? And what does Raum get out of it?”

“Raum has said many times that he has never wanted the throne. All of Chaos knows that.”

“Really? If Swayvill knows that, though, then why doesn’t he make common cause with Raum against Zirlar? And then reward Raum with the number two spot he now holds? Doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know. But now that Swayvill’s reign is over, Chaos is mounting an attack against Amber.”

There it was.

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

They’d had months to prepare. I should have seen this coming, too. Still, I was curious how they were pulling it off.

“Without a road through Shadow?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I’ve got to escape.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“Can you help me?”

“Maybe. What will you do when you’re free?”

“Defend Amber, of course.”

“I knew that already,” she announced, her tone carrying what might have been a mild note of rebuke, annoyance at the very least. “What else will you do?”

“I don’t know. I had some ideas, but they may have just changed.”

“If I help you, you have to promise to help me.”

“Help you? How?”

“We’re prisoners, too. You have to help us get away.”

“And yet you walk free.”

“We are not free. We cannot leave this place, and none of us can walk between worlds as you do. They keep you down there because they think if they didn’t that you’d be able to leave and help Amber.”

“Well, I can’t help you unless you first help me.”

“Promise first.”

“Very well. After you help me escape, I will do what I can to help you and your friends get out of here. And, by the way, where are we?”

“Valtuya. So we have a deal?”

“We have a deal.”

“Good. Oh —!”

“What?”

The head-and-shoulder outline above vanished. A minute later, the helmed head of one of my captors appeared in its place. Another minute passed before the rope snaked down. I tied the thunder bucket to it, then tugged the rope twice. The bucket slowly rose up the shaft, carrying with it my hopes and life’s inevitable consequences.

Airu’s visit had effected a change in my thinking. I couldn’t say exactly how, but she had reinspired me, helped me to focus on the problem.

With the right tools, I could gain the shaft. With the right tools, I could pierce the walls of my prison. The problem, obviously, was tools. Maybe Airu would show up tomorrow with what I needed. Maybe a month hence. Maybe never. With an endless sentence stretching before me and no guarantees, there was no time like right now for getting started.

So what did I have?

Fortunately, I’d only been relieved of the obvious items which might aid in a possible escape attempt. Grayswandir was gone, naturally, as well as my deck of Trumps. The jewel from Tir-na Nog’th — that which had been dubbed the Dreaming Diamond — had also been confiscated.

Still, I’d been allowed my clothing and most of what I’d had on my person, minus the dangerous and/or useful things. Cloak, light jacket, shirt, belt, trousers, gloves, boots.

Most valuable, of course, was the belt, silver and steel, like my sword and other fine cutlery. And the cloak offered an ample supply of sturdy cloth.

Classically, my escape would consist of cutting the cloak into a couple of long strips to be twisted into a serviceable rope. With said rope I’d ascend the shaft to freedom.

And I did consider this. The shaft, however, looked too long, fifty, sixty feet or more in length, only about five feet wide. Even using my belt as a grapnel, I had serious doubts about hurling it straight up through the center of the shaft all the way to the top.

The floor of my cell was of stone so closely joined that no mortar was visible between the blocks. And I suspected none had been used at all, that the blocks had either been cut perfectly or formed through some natural process, like that which had created the slabs on the seafloor near Bimini. Perhaps they appeared blocks on the surface, but were merely imprinted thus on one side and in actuality a single continuous sheet of rock? However that might be, from what I could make out of the shaft’s interior, which began about fifteen feet overhead, and of the ceiling itself, a similar process had wrought the rest of this dried up well. The place might have begun long ago as some sort of lava tube within a seamount, or as some similar natural feature, but had at least been modified to the extent that a wraparound band of glass had been created where I was, down at its bottom. And it was otherwise unfurnished, with the exception of the pallet on one side and the necessity of the bucket on the other.

Could the pallet be used to gain the shaft?

No, I decided, as it was shapeless and soft, devoid of any frame or rigidity, like a water mattress or beanbag.

But perhaps structure and rigidity could be provided by employing other available resources?

Again, no. My boots and belt would not suffice for a frame ten or more feet tall.

Then perhaps my only hope for escape was the intervention of an unexpected benefactor, as when I had been held in the dungeons of Amber? And I would be forced to wait things out until fate dealt me the wild card of a Dworkin or an equally powerful ally?

But there was no time for that. And I felt, ever since the visit of the mysterious Airu, that I was on the verge of some realization which would culminate in my freedom. But what else did I have for resources?

Dworkin wasn’t coming this time. So there was only one thing to do.

Parts of the cloak were sacrificed first.

The edge of my belt buckle, sharpened against the edge of a block of stone in the floor, was my cutting tool cum burin. At first, my left boot provided the basin into which some of my water ration was poured. When I had enough water put aside, I set to soaking strips of my cloak, which were then repeatedly squeezed and wrung out.

In my impatience, it wasn’t long before I also resorted to the right boot. So if I succeeded it would be as a barefoot escapee. Whatever, I eventually had useful quantities of the black sludge I wanted.

There would be at least two versions, I decided, and more if I could manage them.

My material resources were limited, so I’d have to take it slow. As for my mental resources, these also had their limits, so, for that reason too, it would be slow going.

I began by recalling the Pattern, the necessary starting point, since without it the rest of my efforts would be for nought. First, small attempts, little petroglyphs, each scribbled on an individual block of stone. A Pattern here, a Pattern there. My first renditions were messy and crude, as I grew accustomed to my materials and refined my recollections of the glowing symbol locked away in Amber’s basement. Each time I drew a better one, I rubbed out any less worthy versions, smudging the images.

It got so that I would wake up and scratch out an image of the Pattern. The Pattern began to appear in my dreams. And, when it came right down to it, it was the image I knew best, at the center of everything. So it was not long before I could draw it without much trouble.

Then I practiced laying down a square of black and scratching a Pattern into it. As I carefully and deliberately performed one experiment after another on alternate stone blocks, the floor under my mat (where I began my work so it could be covered up and hidden from view should anyone peer down to see how I was doing) acquired a checkerboard design. What would anyone make of it if I managed to depart? Corwin had lost his wits? Or merely decided to decorate?

When I felt I had sufficiently mastered the technique, I moved to the walls. The cell was about fifteen feet wide. If I worked at eye-level, I reckoned my work would not be clearly discernible to anyone above.

Small trials at first, just as before. Only now I was more ambitious. Simple renderings of simple subjects, invariably towers. They could have been towers anywhere, in the beginning. But I got better. As with the Pattern, I began with regular drawings, then moved on to my anti-contour engravings, as I thought of them, elaborated silhouettes carved into panels of dried black goop. There were many failures, as I tried to infuse my efforts with more character and identity.

All of those sprung from the line of Oberon, of the blood of Barimen, are, after all, artists. To walk in Shadow, to imagine and visualize other places well enough for them to have the necessary richness and depth, and what might be called self-consistency, cultivates the artist within. And not just visualize — taste, smell, feel. If not born to be creative in this way, sooner or later all members of my family become so. All part and parcel of the whole Pattern-mastery gig.

Time went by, well over a month. When I finally felt I was ready, I checked my remaining supply of boot-sludge and cloak. And hoped there would be enough.

Three rectangles of black went up at three different places on the glassy wall. Each was about three feet tall, two feet wide.

Within the first rectangle I strove with a subject well known to me: the Lighthouse of Cabra. What emerged was not Michelangelo, but it at least met with my satisfaction. Then I inscribed two different towers within the other rectangles, saving the most difficult for last. As always, this took time, but when at last the work was done all three met with my approval.

Then I labored to incorporate the Pattern into the three murals, as a light overlay. I worked long and hard at this.

And failed.

With all my will, I felt for the power of the Pattern, but felt nothing. Either I was in a place where the Pattern had no power whatsoever, or my renderings were inadequate. My horrible feeling was that it was both.

For a time, I wept.

Then, the very next day, grimly, bitterly, I tried again.

Deciding my approach had been misguided, I smeared over my previous efforts and began with the Pattern this time. That was not so hard, as it had become second nature. The difficult part came when I tried again to execute the drawings. My efforts seemed doomed to failure, but I forced myself to press on.

My efforts failed.

Again, I wept.

Well, what now? I obviously could not do what Dworkin had done. What he had accomplished in minutes, I could not do, even with weeks, or months.

There was no escape.

Then I knew real despair.

Each time I woke my eyes stung with unshed tears, haunted by visions of towers and the Pattern, of Amber burning, of Merlin’s broken body lying in some ditch, of my brothers and sisters in torment and sentenced to an eternity of imprisonment. Several times, I considered suicide. The one change for the better was that the green-bearded fellow no longer troubled my sleep.

Each time that I considered suicide, I told myself there was still a chance that Airu would come.

But she didn’t come.

What had I done wrong? What secret of Dworkin’s art did I lack? Brand had known how to draw Trumps, even for people he had never met. Merlin had created Trumps, and done so without the benefit of Dworkin’s tutelage.

Sighing heavily, I got to my feet.

Though I might never discover the secret of drawing Trumps, I had all the time in the world to figure it out. Descended from the Unicorn, somewhere within me the power lay, waiting to be unlocked.

So I returned to drawing, erasing, drawing again. As I still preferred the notion of a contre-jour engraving backlit by the diffused light of my aquatic surroundings, I stuck with that. Fish swimming into a drawing as I was trying to focus on some distant place, I decided, would be distracting. That part, at least, I felt I had right.

But I also decided to broaden my range, if only a little. So I practiced other towers, too. The Eiffel Tower came readily to mind, so I gave it a go. My Empire State Building? Honestly, not my best work, even though it had been done as a regular drawing rather than as an engraving. Once more, the Lighthouse of Cabra went up, and this time I tried to incorporate the Pattern into it as I went, a method pioneered in my homage to Eiffel. I was neither surprised nor disappointed when it didn’t respond to my will.

Every so often, I put up another big Pattern on the wall, as a divider between one subject and the next. And laughed morosely as I did, imagining the report of Corwin’s descent into madness as he covered his window space with Patterns and towers — doubtless an attempt to block out the unchanging underwater seascape.

Then one day I looked up to see that my sludge was very low and my wall was covered. Six virtually identical versions of the Pattern, six towers. Cabra, Eiffel, Empire State, Thelbane…

Still unhappy with King Kong’s favorite skyscraper, I took it down, opting to try it as an engraving this time. It was unlikely there would be more drawings after this, so my tribute to New York would be my last.

The thought made me sad. When I had begun my project, I had viewed it as a time-consuming chore. Somewhere along the way, though, those very qualities which had caused it to settle on me like a burden had made it a boon. Instead of waking to wonder what I was living for, for weeks I had woken to a plan and a purpose. There were times when I had been so absorbed by my endeavors that I had forgotten where I was, when I’d briefly become, in a sense, free.

So I determined to put forth a supreme effort, and a slow one. I would make this final sketch last as long as it could be made to last.

And it did. It took about three weeks.

Then it was done, and I set aside my belt buckle.

Over the next few days I contemplated all that had led me here: exile on Earth, taking Amber, drawing my own Pattern, losing some whom I’d loved, gaining a son and then losing him. To end as a kind of shadow of Dworkin, a Dworkin wannabe, a half-crazed (only half?) artist and a failed one at that.

Finally standing there in the center of the chamber, admiring my handiwork while also despairing of it, baffled by my inability to fuse the Pattern with an image, my weary gaze faltered, unfocused, saw double images. The subjects on the wall, so poorly held by my relaxed and overstrained eyes, seemed to float over each other and merge.

It was as if a door had opened. And, indeed, one had.

The Pattern to the left of the engraving of Thelbane seemed to drift till it hovered over the tower. As it did, the Pattern almost seemed to rise up from within Thelbane, overlaid as it now was upon the Pattern that had so painstakingly been woven into the representation of the tower. At the same time, the tower acquired a sudden sense of depth. Like wearing 3-D glasses at the movie theater.

And the image continued to move toward me, for the power of the Pattern had now begun to pull the place out of the image.

I was looking through a Trump!

Inexpressible joy burst within me. Tears ran down my cheeks while at the same time I laughed.

Turning in a slow circle, I tried the trick on each of my engravings, letting eyes go out of focus till the Pattern beside a tower image lay atop the Pattern residing within the image. And each time, after a few moments and much effort, I could feel the tug of the place beyond.

I had created six Trumps!

Overwhelmed by the prospect of imminent freedom, by the shock of such a success after having despaired of any success at all, I slid my sleeping mat into the center of the room. And then sat cross-legged upon it, staring at the wall which was no longer a wall. Now that the door — make that doors — stood open, I hesitated to go through.

My future waited on the other side of one of those doors.

But which one?

There were reasons why it made sense to make use of any one of the six Trumps. And also reasons why not to. An hour went by as I reviewed the pros and cons. And the more I thought it over, the more clear my choice became.

Very well, then.

I stretched out my legs, massaged the ankles and calves a little to take out the stiffness, got to my feet. And stood before the drawing.

Smears, squiggles and shadows telling of gases, veils and trails of smoke, torn bits of gray cloud, and confusing lighting effects left everything a muddle where the horizon should be, seeming to do away with the line between land and sky. In the middle distance, squatting on a jutting shelf of rock, stood a tower, wide, tall, and dark. Like the horizon, portions of the tower were obscured by founts and spurts of smoke and flame. A race-course of dark objects, adrift in the air over the fiery and pock-marked landscape, orbited about the tower — rocks, large and small, the bigger ones smudges showing less detail due to the greater velocity with which they moved. A few random edges and angles at the bottom of the engraving hinted at the jumble of wreckage in the foreground that was needed to complete the picture. Complicated, but crude — almost abstract — to me it most closely resembled some student's random doodle on the back of a notebook.

It was my masterpiece.

I lay my will upon the image, drew upon that force which at last I thought to feel in the image, which was also part of my own being, in my very blood.

Though I’d never been there, I’d briefly seen the place through a Trump — twice, actually — and through a piece of epic story-telling provided by Random. Viewed via Trump, I’d seen the interior of the tower, only glimpsing through a window the wild and sulphurous region surrounding it. Would such piecemeal information be enough? Even as I wondered this, the lines wandering through the unseen limits of the far background blurred, almost violently, and the lines defining the tower and the hill that held it up suddenly telescoped toward me, so that the tower was lost within the effect of abrupt magnification. A peculiar lurching sensation which I could not recall experiencing with a Trump before. But that tower stood at the limits of Shadow, and I stood in a place even stranger and more remote, so the unexpected was to be expected. The coldness was there and a place hovered before me, just out of reach. Placing my trust in the system of Trumps as I always had, I barely hesitated. And took a step toward freedom, feeling the warm breath of air waiting for me before my foot even touched the ground.

The soil underfoot was dusty and hot, the wind blowing across my body a parched and dirty thing. Slowly, I raised my eyes and beheld a white four-sided tower narrowing to a needle-nose extended by a golden antenna-like spire, soaring up from a wide open-air two-story structure, looking for all the world like some alchemist’s mixed-up notion of a rocket resting on a fairy-tale launch-pad. Off to the right, the slope of a hill rose at the temple’s back. An ancient well of white stone stood on the hillside, gleaming where the rays of the sun broke through its retinue of shade-trees.

The sun. It burned fiercely in the sky that seemed to go on forever beyond the frozen white peaks of far-off mountains into an infinitely unfolding universe of ever-deepening blue.

Striding across all intervening Shadows through the doorway of a Trump, as my foot had passed over a thousand or more worlds, bringing the rest of me behind it, something unprecedented had occurred.

I had misstepped.

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