I continued to the far entrance to the dining room, where I checked quickly and determined the place to be deserted. Good. Inside and to the right, as I recalled; there was a sliding panel which would get me into a hollow section of wall beside the library, furnished with pegs or a ladder that would take me up to a hidden entrance to the library’s balcony. It could also take me down through the spiral stair’s shaft and into the caverns below, if memory served. I hoped I never had reason to check that part out, but I was sufficiently into family tradition these days that I wanted to do a little spying, as several muttered exchanges as I’d passed the opened door led me to believe that Random was not alone in there. If knowledge really is power, then I needed all I could get my hands on, as I’d felt especially vulnerable for some time now.
Yes, the panel slid, and I was through it in a trice, sending my spirit-light on ahead. I hand-over-handed my way quickly to the top and opened the panel there slowly and quietly, feeling grateful to whoever had thought to conceal its space with a wide chair. I was able to see around the chair’s right arm with comparative safety from detection — a good view of the room’s north end.
And there was Random, drumming, and Martin, all chains and leather, was seated before him, listening. Random was doing something I’d never seen done before. He was playing with five sticks. He had one in each hand, one under each arm, and he held one in his teeth. And he was revolving them as he played, moving the one in his mouth to replace the one under his right arm, which replaced the one in his right hand, which he had switched over to his left hand, the left-hand one going up beneath his left arm, the left arm one going to his teeth, all without missing a beat. It was hypnotic. I stared until he wound out the number. His old set of traps was hardly the fusion drummer’s dreamworld of translucent plastic with tipped cymbals the size of battle shields set around the snares, a mess of tomtoms, and a couple of basses, all lit up like Coral’s circle of fire. Random’s set went back to a time before snares grew thin and nervous, basses shrank, and cymbals caught acromegaly and began to hum.
“Never saw that done before,” I heard Martin say. Random shrugged.
“Bit of horsing around,” he said. “Learned it from Freddie Moore, in the thirties, either at the Victoria or the Village Vanguard, when he was with Art Hodes and Max Kaminsky. I forget which place. It goes back to vaudeville, when they didn’t have any mikes and the lighting was bad. Had to do show-off things like that, or dress funny, he told me, to keep the audience paying attention.”
“Shame they had to cater to the crowd that way.”
“Yeah, none of you guys would dream of dressing funny or throwing your instruments around.”
There followed a silence, and there was no way I could see the expression on Martin’s face. Then, “I meant it different from that,” Martin said.
“Yeah, me, too,” Random replied. Then he tossed three of the sticks down and began to play again.
I leaned back and listened. A moment later I was startled to hear an alto sax come in. When I looked again, Martin was standing, his back still to me, and playing the thing. It must have been on the floor on the other side of his chair. There was a Richie Cole flavor to it that I rather liked, and it kind of surprised me. As much as I enjoyed it, I felt that I did not belong in this room right now, and I edged back, opened the panel, passed through, and closed it. After I’d climbed down and let myself out, I decided to cut through the dining room rather than pass the library entrance again. The music carried for some distance thereafter, and I wished, I’d learned a spell of Mandor’s for capturing sounds in precious stones, though I’m not sure how the Jewel of Judgment would have taken to containing “Wild Man Blues.”
I was planning on walking up the east corridor to the point where it intersected with the north one in the vicinity of my apartment, turning left there, and taking the stairs up to the royal suite, knocking on the door, and returning the Jewel to Vialle, whom I hoped I could get to take a rain check on explanations. And if not, I’d rather explain to her than to Random anyway. I could leave out a lot that she wouldn’t know to ask me. Of course, Random would catch up with me with questions eventually. But the later, the better.
But then I was going right past my father’s rooms. I’d brought along the key so that I could stop in later, for what I considered obvious reasons. Still, since I was already on the spot, it would be more time-effective. I unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped inside.
The silver rose was gone from the bud vase on the dresser. Odd. I took a step toward it. There came a sound of voices from the other room, too soft for me to distinguish words. I froze. He might well be in there. But you don’t just go bursting into someone’s bedroom, especially when it’s likely there’s company present — particularly when it’s your father’s room and you had to unlock an outer door to get where you were. Suddenly I was extremely self-conscious. I wanted to get out of there, fast. I unbuckled my sword belt, from which Grayswandir depended in its not-quite-perfect fit of a sheath. I did not dare bear it any farther but hung it from one of the garment pegs on the wall near the door next to a short trench coat I hadn’t noticed before. I slipped out then and locked the door as quietly as I could.
Awkward. Was he really coming and going with some regularity, somehow managing to avoid notice? Or was some sort of phenomenon of an entirely different order in progress within his quarters? I’d heard an occasional rumor that some of the older chambers had sub specie spatium doorways, if one could but figure how to activate them, providing considerable extra closet space as well as private means of entry and egress. Something else I should have asked Dworkin about. Maybe I’ve got a pocket universe under my bed. I’d never looked.
I turned and walked quickly away. As I neared the corner, I slowed. Dworkin had felt that the presence of the Jewel of Judgment on my person was the thing that had protected me from the Pattern, had it really tempted to harm me earlier. On the other hand, the Jewel, worn too long, could itself do damage to the wearer. Therefore, he had counseled me to get some rest and then pass my mind through the stone’s matrix; in effect creating a recording of a higher power of the Pattern within me along with some measure of immunity to assaults by the Pattern itself. Interesting conjecture. And that’s all it was, of course: conjecture.
When I reached the cross corridor where a left would take me to the stairway or a right back to my rooms, I hesitated. There was a sitting room diagonally across the way, to the left, across from Benedict’s seldom used rooms. I headed for it, entered, sank into a heavy chair in the corner. All I wanted to do was deal with my enemies, help my friends, get my name off any shit lists it currently occupied, locate my father, and come to some sort of terms with the sleeping ty’iga. Then I could see about the continuance of my interrupted Wanderjahr. All of which, I realized, required that I now reask myself the now near-rhetorical question, How much of my business did I want Random to know?
I thought of him in the library, playing a duet with his near-estranged son. I understood that he had once been pretty wild and footloose and nasty, that he hadn’t really wanted the job of ruling this archetypal world. But parenthood, marriage, and the Unicorn’s choice seemed to have laid a lot on him — deepening his character, I suppose, at the price of a lot of the fun things in his life. Right now he seemed to have a lot of problems with this Kashfa-Begma business, possibly having just resorted to an assassination and agreed to a less than favorable treaty to maintain the complex political forces of the Golden Circle at an even level. And who knew what might be going on elsewhere to add to his troubles? Did I really want to draw this man into something I might well be able to handle myself with his never being any the wiser, or ever even bothered, concerning it? Conversely, if I did draw him into my affairs, it seemed likely that he might well lay restrictions on me which could hamper my ability to respond to what seemed the daily exigencies of my life. It could also raise another matter which had been shunted aside years ago.
I had ne
ver sworn allegiance to Amber. Nobody had ever asked me to. After all, I was Corwin’s son, and I had come to Amber willingly and made my home here for some time before going off to the shadow Earth, where so many of the Amberites had gone to school. I returned often, and I seemed to be on good terms with everyone. I didn’t really see why the concept of dual citizenship shouldn’t apply.
I’d rather the matter did not come up at all, though. I did not like the thought of being forced to choose between Amber and the Courts. I wouldn’t do it for the Unicorn and the Serpent, the Pattern and the Logrus, and I didn’t care to do it for the royalty of either court.
All of which indicated that Vialle should not have even a sketchy edition of my story. Any version at all would require an eventual accounting. However, if the Jewel were returned without an explanation of where it had been, then no one would know to come after me on the matter, and things would still be set right. How could I lie if I were not even asked questions?
I mulled that along a little further. What I would actually be doing would be to save a tired, troubled man the burden of additional problems. There was nothing he could or should do about most of my affairs. Whatever was going on between the Pattern and the Logrus seemed mainly important as a metaphysical affair. I couldn’t see where much good or bad might come out of it on a practical level. And if I saw something coming, I could always tell Random then.
Okay. That’s one nice thing about reasoning abilities. You can use them to make yourself feel virtuous rather than, say, guilty. I stretched and cracked my knuckles.
“Ghost?” I said softly.
No response.
I reached for my Trumps, but even as I touched them, a wheel of light flashed on across the room.
“You did hear me,” I said.
“I felt your need,” came the reply.
“Whatever,” I said, drawing the Jewel’s chain up over my head and holding the stone out before me. “Do you think you could return this to its secret compartment beside the fireplace in the royal suite without anyone’s being any wiser?” I asked.
“I’m leery about touching that thing,” Ghost responded. “I don’t know what its structure might do to my structure.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll find a way to do it myself then. But the time has come to test a hypothesis. If the Pattern attacks me, try to whisk me to safety, please.”
“Very well.”
I set the Jewel on a nearby table.
After about a half minute I realized that I had braced myself against the Pattern’s death stroke. I relaxed my shoulders. I drew a deep breath. I remained intact. Could be that Dworkin was right and the Pattern would leave me alone. Also, I should be able to summon the Pattern in the Jewel now, he told me, as I do the Sign of the Logrus. There were Pattern-magics which could only be wrought via this route, though Dworkin hadn’t taken the time to instruct me in their employment. He’d suggested that a sorcerer should be able to figure the system out. I decided that this could wait. I was in no mood just now for commerce of any sort with the Pattern in any of its incarnations.
“Hey, Pattern,” I said. “Want to call it even?”
There came no reply.
“I believe it is aware of you here and what you just did,” Ghost said. “I feel its presence. Could be you’re off the hook.”
“Could be,” I responded, taking out my Trumps and sorting through them.
“Whom would you like to get in touch with?” Ghost asked.
“I’m curious about Luke,” I said. “I want to see whether he’s okay. And I’m wondering about Mandor. I assume you sent him to a safe place.”
“Oh, nothing but the best,” Ghost replied. “Same for Queen Jasra. Did you want her, too?”
“Not really. In fact, I don’t want any of them. I just wanted to see —”
Ghost winked out while I was still talking. I wasn’t at all certain that his eagerness to please was an improvement over his earlier belligerence.
I withdrew Luke’s card and went inside it.
I heard someone passing along the corridor. The footsteps went on by.
I felt Luke’s awareness, though no vision of his circumstances reached me.
“Luke, you hear me?” I inquired.
“Yep,” he answered. “You okay, Merle?”
“I’m all right,” I said. “How about yourself? That was quite a fight you —”
“I’m fine.”
“I hear your voice, but I can’t see a thing.”
“Got a blackout on the Trumps. You don’t know how to do that?”
“Never looked into the matter. Have to get you to teach me sometime. Uh, why are they blacked out anyway?”
“Somebody might get in touch and figure what I’m up to.”
“If you’re about to lead a commando raid on Amber, I’m going to be highly pissed.”
“Come on! You know I swore off? This is something entirely different.”
“Thought you were a prisoner of Dalt’s.”
“My status is unchanged.”
“Well, he damn near killed you once and he just beat the shit out of you the other day.”
“The first time he’d stumbled into an old berserker spell Sharu’d left behind for a trap; the second time was business. I’ll be okay. But right now everything I’m up to is hush-hush, and I’ve got to run. G’bye.”
Gone Luke, the presence.
The footsteps had halted, and I’d heard a knocking on a nearby door. After a time I heard a door being opened, then closed. I had not overheard any exchange of words. In that it had been nearby and that the two nearest apartments were Benedict’s and my own, I began to wonder. I was fairly certain that Benedict was not in his, and I recalled not having locked my own door when I had stepped out. Therefore…
Picking up the Jewel of Judgment, I crossed the room and stepped out into the hall. I checked Benedict’s door. Locked. I looked down the north-south hallway and walked back to the stairway and checked around in that area. There was no one in sight. I strode up to my own place then and stood listening for a time outside each of my doors. No sounds from within. The only alternatives I could think of were Gerard’s rooms, back down the side corridor, and Brand’s, which lay behind my own. I had thought of knocking out a wall — in keeping with the recent spirit of remodeling and redecorating Random had gotten into — adding Brand’s rooms to my own, for a very good-size apartment. The rumor that his were haunted, though, and the wailings I sometimes heard through the walls late at night dissuaded me.
I took a quick walk then, knocking on and finally trying both Brand’s and Gerard’s doors. No response, and both were locked. Odder and odder.
Frakir had given a quick pulse when I’d touched Brand’s door, and while I’d gone on alert for several moments, nothing untoward had approached. I was about to dismiss it as a disturbing reaction to the remnants of eldritch spells I had occasionally seen drifting about the vicinity when I noticed that the Jewel of Judgment was pulsing.
I raised the chain and stared into the gem. Yes, an image had taken form. I beheld the hallway around the corner, my two doors, and intervening artwork on the wall in plain view. The doorway to the left — the one that let upon my bedroom — seemed to be outlined in red and pulsing. Did that mean I was supposed to avoid it or rush in there? That’s the trouble with mystical advice.
I walked back and turned the corner again. This time the gem — perhaps having felt my query and decided some editing was in order — showed me approaching and opening the door it was indicating. Of course, of the two, that door was locked…
I fumbled for my key, reflecting that I could not even rush in with a drawn blade, having just disposed of Grayswandir. I did have a couple of tricky spells hung, though. Maybe one of them would save me if the going got too rough. Maybe not, too.
I turned the key and flung the door open.
“Merle!” she shrieked, and I saw that it was Coral. She stood beside my bed, where her putative sis
ter the ty’iga was reclined. She quickly moved one hand behind her back. “You, uh, surprised me.”
“Vice versa,” I replied, for which there is an equivalent in Thari. “What’s up, lady?”
“I came back to tell you that I located my father and gave him a soothing story about that Corridor of Mirrors you told me about. Is there really such a place here?”
“Yes. You won’t find it in any guides, though. It comes and goes. So, he’s mollified?”
“Uh-huh. But now he’s wondering where Nayda is.”
“This gets trickier.”
“Yes.”
She was blushing, and she did not meet my eyes readily. She seemed aware, too, that I was noting her discomfort.
“I told him that perhaps Nayda was exploring, as I’d been,” she went on, “and that I’d ask after her.”
“Mm-hm.”
I shifted my gaze to Nayda. Coral immediately moved forward and brushed against me. She placed a hand on my shoulder, drew me toward her.
“I thought you were going to sleep,” she said.
“Yes, I was. Did, too. I was running some errands just now.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Time lines,” I explained. “I economized. I’m rested.”
“Fascinating,” she said, brushing my lips with her own. “I’m glad that you’re rested.”
“Coral,” I said, embracing her briefly, “you don’t have to bullshit me. You know I was dead tired when you left. You had no reason to believe that I’d be anything but comatose if you returned this soon.”
I caught hold of her left wrist behind her back and drew her hand around to the front, raising it between us. She was surprisingly strong. And I made no effort to pry open her hand, for I could see between the fingers what it was that she held. It was one of the metal balls Mandor often used to create impromptu spells. I released her hand. She did not draw away from me, but rather, “I can explain,” she said, finally meeting my gaze and holding it.
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