Knight of Shadows tcoa-9

by Roger Joseph Zelazny

  “Julia studied with a variety of teachers after you two broke up,” she began. “Once I hit upon my plan, it was a simple matter to cause them to do or say things which would disillusion or discourage her and set her to looking for someone else. It was not long before she came to Victor, who was already under our tutelage. I ordered him to sweeten her stay and to skip many of the usual preliminaries and to proceed to teaching her about an initiation I had chosen for her —”

  “That being?” I interrupted. “There are an awful lot of initiations around, with a variety of specialized ends.”

  She smiled and nodded, breaking a roll and buttering it.

  “I led her myself through a version of my own — the Way of the Broken Pattern.”

  “Sounds like something dangerous from the Amber end of Shadow.”

  “I can’t fault your geography,” she said. “But it is not all that dangerous if you know what you’re doing.”

  “It is my understanding,” I said, “that those Shadow worlds which contain shadows of the Pattern can only hold imperfect versions and that this always represents a hazard.”

  “It is a hazard only if one does not know how to deal with it.”

  “And you had Julia walk this — Broken Pattern?”

  “My knowledge of what you refer to as walking the Pattern is restricted to what my late husband and Rinaldo have told me of it. I believe that you follow the lines from a definite external beginning to an interior point where the power comes to you?”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged.

  “In the Way of the Broken Pattern,” she explained, “you enter through the imperfection and make your way to the center.”

  “How can you follow the lines if they are broken or imperfect? The real Pattern would destroy you if you departed the design.”

  “You don’t follow the lines. You follow the interstices,” she said.

  “And when you emerge… wherever?” I asked.

  “You bear the image of the Broken Pattern within you.”

  “And how do you conjure with this?”

  “Through the imperfection. You summon the image, and it is like a dark well from which you draw power.”

  “And how do you travel among shadows?”

  “Much as you do — as I understand it,” she said. “But the break is always with you.”

  “The break? I don’t understand.”

  “The flaw in the Pattern. It follows you through Shadow. It is always there beside you as you travel, sometimes as a hair-fine crack, sometimes a great chasm. It shifts about; it may appear suddenly, anywhere — a lapse in reality. This is the hazard for those of the Broken Way. To fall into it is the final death.”

  “It must lie within all of your spells then also, like a booby trap.”

  “All occupations have their hazards,” she said. “Avoiding them is a part of the art.”

  “And this is the initiation through which you took Julia?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Victor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand what you are saying,” I replied, “but you must realize that the broken Patterns are drawing their power from the real one.”

  “Of course. What of it? The image is almost as good as the real thing, if you’re careful.”

  “For the record, how many useful images are there?”

  “Useful?”

  “They must degenerate from shadow to shadow. Where do you draw the line and say, ‘Beyond this broken image I will not risk breaking my neck’?”

  “I see what you mean. You can work with perhaps the first nine. I’ve never gone farther out. The first three are best. The circle of the next three is still manageable. The next three are a lot riskier.”

  “A bigger chasm for each?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why are you giving me all this esoteric information?”

  “You’re a higher-level initiate, so it doesn’t matter. Also, there is nothing you could do to affect the setup. And finally, you need to know this to appreciate the rest of the story.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Mandor tapped the table, and small crystal cups of lemon sherbet appeared before us. We took the hint and cleared our plates before resuming the conversation. Outside, the shadows of clouds slid across the mountain slopes. A faint music drifted into the room from somewhere far back along the corridor. Clinking and scraping noises, sounding like distant pick-and-shovel work, came to us from somewhere outside — most likely at the Keep.

  “So you initiated Julia,” I prompted.

  “Yes,” Jasra said.

  “What happened then?”

  “She learned to summon the image of the Broken Pattern and use it for magical sight and the hanging of spells. She learned to draw raw power through the break in it. She learned to find her way through Shadow —”

  “While minding the chasm?” I suggested.

  “Just so, and she had a definite knack for it. She’d a flair for everything, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m amazed that a mortal can traverse even a broken image of the Pattern and live.”

  “Only a few of them do,” Jasra said. “The others step on a line or die mysteriously in the broken area. Ten percent make it, maybe. That isn’t bad. Keeps it somewhat exclusive. Of them, only a few can learn the proper mantic skills to amount to anything as an adept.”

  “And you say that she was actually better than Victor, once she knew what she was about?”

  “Yes. I didn’t appreciate just how good until it was too late.”

  I felt her gaze upon me, as if she were checking for a reaction. I glanced up from my food and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Yes,” she went on, apparently satisfied. “You didn’t know that was Julia you were stabbing back at the Fount, did you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I’d been puzzled by Mask all along. I couldn’t figure any motive for whatever was going on. The flowers were an especially odd touch, and I never really understood whether it was you or Mask behind the bit with the blue stones.”

  She laughed.

  “The blue stones, and the cave they come from, are something of a family secret. The material is a kind of magical insulator, but two pieces — once together — maintain a link, by which a sensitive person can hold one and track the other —”

  “Through Shadow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if the person doing the tracking otherwise has no special abilities along these lines?”

  “Even so,” she said. “It’s similar to following a shadow shifter while she’s shifting. Anyone can do it if she’s quick enough, sensitive enough. This just extends the practice a little further. It’s following the shifter’s trail rather than the shifter herself.”

  “Herself, herself… You trying to tell me it’s been pulled on you?”

  “That’s right.”

  I looked up in time to see her blush.

  “Julia?” I said.

  “You begin to understand.”

  “No,” I said. “Well, maybe a little. She was more talented than you’d anticipated. You already told me that. I get the impression she suckered you on something. But I’m not sure where or how.”

  “I brought her here,” Jasra said, “to pick up some equipment I wanted to take along to the first circle of shadows near Amber. She did have a look at my workroom in the Keep at that time. And perhaps I was overly communicative then. But how was I to know she was making mental notes and probably formulating a plan? I’d felt her too cowed to entertain such thoughts. I must admit she was a pretty good actress.”

  “I read Victor’s diary,” I said. “I take it you were masked or hooded and possibly using some sort of voice-distorting spell the whole time?”

  “Yes, but rather than awe Julia into submission, I think I roused her cupidity for things magical. I believe she picked up one of my tragoliths — the blue stones — at that time. The rest is history.”

  “Not for me.”
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br />   A bowl of totally unfamiliar but delicious-smelling vegetables appeared, steaming, before me.

  “Think about it.”

  “You took her to the Broken Pattern and conducted her initiation…” I began.

  “Yes.”

  “The first chance she had,” I continued, “she used the… tragolith to return to the Keep and learn some of your other secrets.”

  Jasra applauded softly, sampled the veggies, quickly ate more. Mandor smiled.

  “Beyond that I draw a blank,” I admitted.

  “Be a good boy and eat your vegetables,” she said.

  I obeyed.

  “Basing my conclusions concerning this remarkable tale solely upon my experience of human nature,” Mandor suddenly observed, “I would say that she wished to test her talons as well as her wings. I’d guess she went back and challenged her former master — this Victor Melman — and fought a sorcerous duel with him.”

  I heard Jasra’s intake of breath.

  “Is that truly only a guess?” she asked.

  “Truly,” he answered, swirling his wine in his goblet. “And I would guess further that you had once done something similar with your own teacher.”

  “What devil told you that?” she asked.

  “It is only a guess that Sharu was your teacher — and perhaps more than that,” he said. “But it would explain both your acquisition of this place and your ability to catch its former lord off guard. He might even have had a stray moment before his defeat for a wishful curse that the same fate attend you one day. And even if not, these things do sometimes have a way of running full circle with people in our trade.”

  She chuckled.

  “The devil called Reason, then,” she said, a note of admiration in her voice. “Yet you summon him by intuition, which makes it an art.”

  “It is good to know he still comes when I call. I take it Julia was surprised, however, by Victor’s ability to thwart her.”

  “True. She did not anticipate that we tend to wrap apprentices in a layer or two of protection.”

  “Yet her own defenses obviously proved adequate — at least.”

  “True. Though that, of course, was tantamount to defeat. For she knew that I would learn of her rebellion and come soon to discipline her.”

  “Oh,” I observed:

  “Yes,” she stated. “That is why she faked her death, which I must admit had me completely fooled for a long while.”

  I recalled the day I had visited Julia’s apartment, found the body, been attacked by the beast. The corpse’s face had been partly destroyed, the remaining features gory. But the lady had been the right size, and general resemblances had jibed. And she had been in the right place. And then I had become the object of the lurking doglike creature’s attention, which had distracted me more than a little from the minutiae of identity. By the time my struggle for my life was concluded, to the accompaniment of approaching sirens, I was more interested in flight than in further investigation. Thereafter, whenever I had returned in memory to that scene, it was Julia dead whom I beheld.

  “Incredible,” I said. “Then whose body was it that I found?”

  “I’ve no idea,” she replied. “It could have been one of her own shadow selves or some stranger off the street. Or a corpse stolen from the morgue. I’ve no way of knowing.”

  “It was wearing one of your blue stones.”

  “Yes. And its mate was on the collar of the beast you slew — and she opened the way for it to come through.”

  “Why? And why all that business with the Dweller on the Threshold as well?”

  “Red herring of the first water. Victor thought I’d killed her, and I thought he had. He assumed I’d opened a way from the Keep and sent the heating beast after her. I guessed he’d done it, and I was irritated he’d hidden his rapid development from me. Such things seldom bode well.”

  I nodded.

  “You breed those creatures around here?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “and I show them, too, in several adjacent shadows. I’ve a number who’ve taken blue ribbons.”

  “I’ll stick with pit bulls,” I said. “They’re a lot cuter and better behaved. So, she left a body and a hidden corridor to this place, and you thought Victor had done her in and was setting things up for a raid on your sanctum sanctorum.”

  “More or less.”

  “And he thought she’d become sufficiently dangerous to you — as with the corridor — that you’d killed her?”

  “I don’t really know that he ever found the corridor. It was fairly well hidden, as you learned. Either way, neither of us was aware of what she’d really done.”

  “That being?”

  “She’d also planted a piece of tragolith on me. Later, after the initiation, she used its mate to track me through Shadow to Begma.”

  “Begma? What the hell were you doing there?”

  “Nothing important,” she said. “I mention it only to show her subtlety. She did not approach me at that time. I know of it, in fact, only because she told me of it later. She trailed me then from the perimeter of the Golden Circle back here to the Citadel. The rest you know.

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  “She had designs on this place. When she surprised me, I was surprised indeed. It was how I became a coatrack.”

  “And she took over here, donning a goalie mask for public relations purposes. She dwelled here for a time, building her powers, increasing her skills, hanging umbrellas on you —”

  Jasra growled softly, and I remembered that her bite was worse. I hastened into a fresh area of speculation. “I still don’t understand why she spied on me on occasion and sometimes threw flowers.”

  “Men are exasperating,” Jasra said, raising her wineglass and draining it. “You’ve managed to understand everything but her motive.”

  “She was on a power trip,” I said. “What’s to understand past that? I even recall a long discussion we once had concerning power.”

  I heard Mandor chuckle. When I glanced at him, he looked away, shaking his head.

  “Obviously,” Jasra said, “she still cared about you. Most likely, a great deal. She was playing games with you. She wanted to rouse your curiosity. She wanted you to come after her, to find her, and she probably wanted to try her power against your own. She wanted to show you that she was worthy of all those things you’d denied her when you denied her your confidence.”

  “So you know about that, too.”

  “There were times when she spoke freely to me.”

  “So she cared for me so well that she sent men with tragoliths to track me to Amber and try to slay me. They almost succeeded, too.”

  Jasra looked away, coughed. Mandor immediately rose, circled the table, and refilled her goblet, interposing himself between us. At that time, while she was wholly blocked from my sight, I heard her say softly, “Well, not exactly. The assassins were… mine. Rinaldo wasn’t around to warn you, as I’d guessed he was doing, and I thought I’d have one more shot at you.”

  “Oh,” I observed. “Any more wandering around out there?”

  “They were the last,” she said.

  “That’s a comfort.”

  “I’m not apologizing. I’m just explaining, to clear our differences. Are you willing to cancel this account, too? I’ve got to know.”

  “I already said I was willing to call things even. It still goes. Where does Jurt come into all this? I don’t understand how they got together and what they are to each other.”

  Mandor added a touch of wine to my own glass before returning to his seat. Jasra met my eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She had no allies when we fought. It had to have happened while I was rigid.”

  “Have you any idea where she and Jurt might have fled?”

  “No.”

  I glanced at Mandor, and he shook his head.

  “Neither have I,” he said. “However, a peculiar thought has occurred to me.”

 
; “Yes?”

  “Besides the fact that he has negotiated the Logrus and come into his powers, is it necessary for me to point out that Jurt — apart from his scars and missing pieces bears you a strong resemblance?”

  “Jurt? Me? You’ve got to be kidding!”

  He glanced at Jasra.

  “He is right,” she said. “It’s obvious that the two of you are related.”

  I put down my fork and shook my head.

  “Preposterous,” I said, more in self-defense than as a matter of certainty. “I never noticed.”

  Mandor shrugged, very slightly.

  “You want a lecture on the psychology of denial?” Jasra asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I want a little while in which to let this sink in.”

  “Time for another course anyway,” Mandor announced, and he gestured widely and it was delivered.

  “Will you be in trouble with your relatives for having released me?” Jasra asked after a while.

  “By the time they realize you’re gone, I hope to have a good story ready,” I answered.

  “In other words, you will be,” she said.

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t like to be obligated to anyone,” she said, “and you’ve done more for me than I have for you in this. If I come upon a means of turning their wrath away from you, I’ll employ it.”

  “What could you possibly have in mind?”

  “Let it go at that. Sometimes it’s better not to know too much.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this at all.”

  “An excellent reason for changing the subject,” she said. “How great an enemy has Jurt become?”

  “To me?” I asked. “Or are you wondering whether he’ll be returning here for second helpings?”

  “Both, when you put it that way.”

  “I believe he’ll kill me if he can,” I said, glancing at Mandor, who nodded.

  “I fear that is so,” he stated.

  “As for whether he’ll be back here for more of whatever it is that he got,” I continued, “you’re the best judge. How close did he seem to be to possessing the full powers one might gain from that ritual at the Fountain?”