“I wish I could have seen something of Amber,” he said at length, “under less restricted circumstances.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged,” I replied. “I’d like to show you around. I know a great restaurant in Death Alley.”
“That wouldn’t be Bloody Eddies, would it?”
“It would, though the name gets changed periodically.”
“I’ve heard of it, and long been curious.”
“We’ll do that one day.”
“Excellent.”
He clapped his hands and bowls of fruit appeared. I freshened my coffee and swirled a Kadota fig in a bowl of whipped cream.
“I’ll be dining with my mother later,” I remarked.
“Yes. I overheard.”
“Have you seen much of her recently? How’s she been?”
“As she said, rather reclusive,” he replied.
“Do you think she’s up to something?”
“Probably,” he said. “I can’t recall a time when she hasn’t been.”
“Any idea what?”
“Why should I guess when she’ll probably tell you outright?”
“You really think she will?”
“You have an advantage over everyone else, in being her son.”
“Also a drawback, for the same reason.”
“Still, she’s more likely to tell you things than she would anyone else.”
“Except, perhaps, Jurt.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She always liked him better.”
“Funny, I’ve heard him say the same thing about you.”
“You see him often?”
“Often? No.”
“When was the last time?”
“About two cycles ago.”
“Where is he?”
“Here, in the Courts.”
“At Sawall?” I had visions of him joining us for lunch. I wouldn’t put something like that past Dara either.
“One of its byways, I think. He’s rather reticent concerning his comings and goings — and stayings.”
There being something like eight byway residences to Sawall that I knew of, it would be difficult to run him down through byways that could lead well into Shadow. Not that I’d any desire to, at the moment.
“What brings him home?” I asked.
“The same thing as yourself, the funeral,” he said, “and all that goes with it.”
All that goes with it, indeed! If there were a genuine plot to put me on the throne, I could never forget that willing or unwilling, successful or unsuccessful — Jurt would be a step or two behind me all the way.
“I may have to kill him,” I said. “I don’t want to. But he’s not giving me a whole lot of choice. Sooner or later, he’s going to force us into a position where it has to be one or the other.”
“Why do you tell me this?”
“So you’ll know how I feel about it, and so that you might use whatever influence you may still have to persuade him to find a different hobby.”
He shook his head.
“Jurt moved beyond my influence a long time ago,” he said. “Dara’s about the only one he’ll listen to — though I suspect he’s still afraid of Suhuy. You might speak to her concerning this matter, soon.”
“It’s the one thing neither of us can discuss with her — the other.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just the way it is. She always misunderstands.”
“I’m certain she’s not going to want her sons killing each other.”
“Of course not, but I don’t know how to put the matter to her.”
“I suggest you make an effort to find a way. In the meantime, I would contrive not to be alone with Jurt should your paths cross. And if it were me, in the presence of witnesses, I would make certain that the first blow was not mine.”
“Well taken, Mandor,” I said.
We sat for a time in silence. Then, “You will think about my proposal,” he said.
“As I understand it,” I replied.
He frowned.
“If you have any questions…”
“No. I’ll be thinking.”
He rose. I got to my feet, also. With a gesture, he cleared the table. Then he turned away and I followed him out of the gazebo and across its yard to the trail.
We emerged after a stroll in his external study cum receiving room. He squeezed my shoulder as we headed for the exit.
“I’ll see you at the funeral then,” he remarked.
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks for the breakfast.”
“By the way, how well do you like that lady, Coral?” he asked.
“Oh, pretty well,” I said. “She’s quite — nice. Why?”
He shrugged.
“Just curious. I was concerned about her, having been present at the time of her misadventure, and I wondered how much she meant to you.”
“Enough that it bothers me a lot,” I said.
“I see. Well, give her my good wishes if you should talk to her.”
“Thanks, I will.”
“We’ll talk again later.”
“Yes.”
I strode into the way, making no haste. I still had considerable time before I was due by the Ways of Sawall.
I paused when I came to a gibbet-shaped tree. A moment’s reflection and I turned left, following an ascending trail among dark rocks. Near its top, I walked directly into a mossy boulder, emerging from a sandbank into a light rain. I ran across the field before me, till I came to the fairy circle beneath the ancient tree. I stepped to its middle, made up a couplet with my name for the rhyme, and sank into the ground. When I was halted and the moment’s darkness went away, I found myself beside a damp stone wall, looking downhill across a prospect of headstones and monuments. The sky was fully overcast and a cool breeze wandered by. It felt to be one of the ends of a day, but whether morning or twilight lay near, I could not tell. The place looked exactly as I remembered it — cracked mausoleums hung with ivy, falling stone fences, wandering paths beneath high, dark trees. I moved down familiar trails.
As a child, this had been a favored playground of mine, for a time. I met here almost daily, for dozens of cycles, with a little shadow girl named Rhanda. Kicking through boneheaps, brushing by damp shrubbery, I came at length to the damaged mausoleum where we had played house. Pushing aside the sagging gate, I entered.
Nothing had changed, and I found myself chuckling. The cracked cups and saucers, tarnished utensils, were still stacked in the corner, heavy with dust, stained with seepage. I brushed off the catafalque we’d used as a table, seated myself upon it. One day Rhanda had simply stopped coming, and after a time I had, too. I’d often wondered what sari of woman she had become. I’d left her a note in our hiding place, beneath a loose floor stone, I recalled. I wondered whether she’d ever found it.
I raised the stone. My filthy envelope still lay there, unsealed. I took it out, shook it off, slid out my folded sheet.
I unfolded it, read my faded childish scrawl: What happened Rhanda? I waited and you didn’t come. Beneath it, in a far neater hand, was written: I can’t come anymore because my folks say you are a demon or a vampire. I’m sorry because you are the nicest demon or vampire I know. I’d never thought of that possibility. Amazing, the ways one can be misunderstood.
I sat there for a time, remembering growing up. I’d taught Rhanda the bonedance game in here. I snapped my fingers then, and our old ensorcelled heap of them across the way made a sound like stirring leaves. My juvenile spell was still in place; the bones rolled forward, arranged themselves into a pair of manikins, began their small, awkward dance. They circled each other, barely holding their shapes, pieces flaking away, cobwebs trailing; loose ones — spares — began to bounce about them. They made tiny clicking sounds as they touched. I moved them faster.
A shadow crossed the doorway, and I heard a chuckle. “I’ll be damned! All you need’s a tin roof. So this is how they spend their time in Chaos.”
“Could say I was selling cemetery lots,” he observed. “You interested in one?”
He had on a red shirt and brown khakis tucked into his brown suede boots. A tan cloak hung about his shoulders. He was grinning.
“Why aren’t you off ruling?”
His smile went away, to be replaced by a moment of puzzlement, returned almost instantly.
“Oh, felt I needed a break. What about you? There’s a funeral soon, isn’t there?”
I nodded.
“Later on,” I said. “I’m just taking a break myself. How’d you get here, anyway?”
“Followed my nose,” he said. “Needed some intelligent conversation.”
“Be serious. Nobody knew I was coming here. I didn’t even know it till the last minute. I —”
I groped about in my pockets.
“You didn’t plant another of those blue stones on me, did you?”
“No; nothing that simple,” he replied. “I seem to have some sort of message for you.”
I got to my feet, approached him, studying his face.
“Are you okay, Luke?”
“Sure. As okay as I ever am, that is.”
“It’s no mean stunt, finding your way this near to the Courts. Especially if you’ve never been here before. How’d you manage it?”
“Well, the Courts and I go back a long ways, old buddy. You might say it’s in my blood.”
He moved aside from the doorway and I stepped outside. Almost automatically, we began walking.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I told him.
“Well, my dad spent some time here, back in his plotting days,” he said. “It’s where he met my mother.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It never came up. We never talked family, remember?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and no one I asked seemed to know where Jasra came from. Still, the Courts… She’s a long way from home.”
“Actually, she was recruited from a nearby shadow,” he explained, “like this one.”
“Recruited?”
“Yes, she worked as a servant for a number of years — I think she was fairly young when she started at the Ways of Helgram.”
“Helgram? That’s my mother’s House!”
“Right. She was a maid-companion to the lady Dara. That’s where she learned the Arts.”
“Jasra got her instruction in sorcery from my mother? And she met Brand at Helgram? That would make it seem Helgram had something to do with Brand’s plot, the Black Road, the war —”
“— and the Lady Dara going looking for your father? I guess so.”
“Because she wanted to be a Pattern initiate as well as one of the Logrus?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I wasn’t present.”
We moved down a gravelly trail, turned at a huge cluster of dark shrubbery, passing through a forest of stone and over a bridge that crossed a slow black stream that reflected high branches and sky, monochrome. A few leaves rustled in a stray breeze.
“How come you never mentioned any of this later?” I asked.
“I intended to, but it never seemed urgent,” he said, “whereas a lot of other things did.”
“True,” I said. “The pace did seem to keep picking up each time our trails crossed. But now… Are you saying it’s urgent now, that I suddenly need to know this?”
“Oh, not exactly.” He halted. He reached out and leaned upon a headstone. His hand began to grip it, growing white about the knuckles, across the back. The stone at his fingertips was ground to powder, fell snowlike to the earth. “Not exactly,” he repeated. “That part was my idea, just because I wanted you to know. Maybe it’ll do you some good, maybe it won’t. Information is like that. You never know.” With a crunching, cracking sound, the top of the headstone suddenly gave way. Luke hardly seemed to notice this, and his hand kept on squeezing. Small pieces fell from the larger one he now held.
“So you came all this way to tell me that?”
“No,” he answered, as we turned and began walking back the way we had come. “I was sent to tell you something else, and it’s been pretty hard holding off. But I figured if I talked about this first, it couldn’t let me go, would keep feeding me till I got around to the message.”
There came a huge crunch, and the stone he held turned to gravel, falling to mix with that on the trail. “Let me see your hand.”
He brushed it off and held it out. A tiny flame flickered near the base of his index finger. He ran his thumb over it and it went out. I increased my pace, and he matched it.
“Luke, you know what you are?”
“Something in me seems to, but I don’t, man. I just feel — I’m not right. I’d probably better tell you what I feel I should pretty quick now.”
“No. Hold off,” I said, hurrying even more.
Something dark passed overhead, too quick for me to make out its shape, vanishing among the trees. We were buffeted by a sudden gust of wind.
“You know what’s going on, Merle?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said, “and I want you to do exactly what I tell you, no matter how weird it might seem. Okay?”
“Sure thing. If I can’t trust a Lord of Chaos, who can I trust, eh?”
We hurried past the clump of shrubs. My mausoleum was just up ahead.
“You know, there really is something I feel obliged to tell you right now, though,” he said.
“Hold it. Please.”
“It is important, though.”
I ran on ahead of him. He began running, too, to keep up.
“It’s about your being here at the Courts, just now.”
I extended my hands, used them to brake myself when I came up against the wall of the stone building. I swung myself through the doorway and inside. Three big steps, and I was kneeling in the corner, snatching up an old cup, using the corner of my cloak to wipe it out.
“Merle, what the hell are you doing?” Luke asked, entering behind me.
“Just a minute and I’ll show you,” I told him, drawing my dagger.
Placing the cup upon the stone where I had been seated earlier, I held my hand above it and used the dagger to cut my wrist.
Instead of blood, flame came forth from the incision.
“No! Damn it!” I cried.
And I reached into the spikard, located the proper line, and found the flowing channel of a cooling spell that I laid upon the wound. Immediately, the flames died and it was blood that flowed from me. However, as it fell into the cup it began to smoke. Cursing, I extended the spell to control its liquidity there, also.
“Yeah, it’s weird, Merle. I’ll give you that,” Luke observed.
I laid the dagger aside and used my right hand to squeeze my arm above the wound. The blood flowed faster. The spikard throbbed. I glanced at Luke. There was a look of strain upon his face. I pumped my fist. The cup was more than half-full.
“You said you trust me,” I stated.
“Afraid so,” he answered.
Three-quarters…
“You’ve got to drink this, Luke,” I said. “I mean it.”
“Somehow, I suspected you were leading up to this,” he said, “and, really, it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. I’ve a feeling I need a lot of help just now.”
He reached out and took the cup, raised it to his lips. I pressed the palm of my hand against the wound. Outside, the winds were gusting regularly.
“When you’ve finished, put it back,” I said. “You’re going to need more.”
I could hear the sounds of his swallowing.
“Better than a slug of Jameson,” he said then.
“Don’t know why.” He replaced the cup on the stone.
“A little salty, though,” he added.
I removed my hand from the incision, held the wrist above it
again, pumped my fist.
“Hey, man. You’re losing a lot of blood there. I feel okay now. Was just a little dizzy, that’s all. I don’t need any more.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Believe me. I gave a lot more than this in a blood drive once and ran in a meet the next day. It’s okay.”
The wind rose to a gale, moaning past us now.
“Mind telling me what’s going on?” he asked.
“Luke, you’re a Pattern ghost,” I told him.
“What do you mean?”
“The Pattern can duplicate anybody who ever walked it. You’ve got all the signs. I know them.”
“Hey, I feel real. I didn’t even do the Pattern in Amber. I did it in Tir-na Nog’th.”
“Apparently, it controls the two images as well, since they’re true copies. Do you remember your coronation in Kashfa?”
“Coronation? Hell no! You mean I made it to the throne?”
“Yep. Rinaldo the First.”
“God damn! Bet Mom’s happy.”
“I’m sure.”
“This is kind of awkward then, there being two of me. You seem familiar with the phenomenon. How does the Pattern handle it?”
“You guys tend not to last very long. It seems the closer you are to the Pattern itself the stronger you are, too. It must have taken a lot of juice to project you this far. Here, drink this.”
“Sure.”
He tossed off a half cupful and handed the cup back.
“So what’s with the precious bodily fluids?” he asked.
“The blood of Amber seems to have a sustaining effect on Pattern ghosts.”
“You mean I’m some kind of vampire?”
“I suppose you could put it that way, in a sort of technical sense.”
“I’m not sure I like that — especially such a specialized one.”
“It does seem to have certain drawbacks. But one thing at a time. Let’s get you stabilized before we start looking for angles.”
“All right. You’ve got a captive audience.”
There came a rattle, as of a rolled stone, from outside, followed by a small clanking noise.
Luke turned his head.
“I don’t think that’s just the wind,” he stated.
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