I quickly withdrew to the center of the enclosure and wrapped myself fully in my cloak. If I crouched, I decided; some of the overhead pieces would fall a greater distance, striking me with more force. So I stood upright, protecting my head and neck with my arms and hands as well as with the cloak.
The creaking sounds became cracking sounds, followed by rattling, snapping, breaking. I was suddenly struck across the shoulder, but I maintained my footing.
Ringing and crunching, the edifice began to fall about me. I held my ground, though I was struck several times more.
When the sounds ceased and I looked again I saw that the roof had been removed, and I stood calf deep amid fallen branches of the hard, coral-like material. Several of the side members had splintered off at near to ground level. Others now stood at unnatural angles, and this time a few well-placed kicks brought them down.
My cloak was torn in a number of places, and Frakir coiled now about my left ankle and began to migrate to my wrist. The stuff crunched underfoot as I departed.
I shook out my cloak and brushed myself off. I traveled for perhaps half an hour then, leaving the place far behind me, before I halted and took my breakfast in a hot, bleak valley smelling faintly of sulfur.
As I was finishing, I heard a crashing noise. A horned and tusked purple thing went racing along the ridge to my right pursued by a hairless orange-skinned creature with long claws and a forked tail. Both were wailing in different keys.
I nodded. It was just one damned thing after another.
I made my way through frozen lands and burning lands, under skies both wild and placid. Then at last, hours later, I saw the low range of dark hills, and aurora streaming upward from behind them. That was it. I needed but approach and pass through and I would see my goal beyond the last and most difficult barrier of all.
I moved ahead. It would be good to finish this job and get on with more important matters. I would trump back to Amber when I was finished there, rather than retracing my steps. I could not have trumped in to my destination, though, because the place could not be represented on a card.
In that I was jogging, I first thought that the vibrations were my own. I was disabused of this notion when small pebbles began to roll aimlessly about the ground before me. Why not?
I’d been hit with just about everything else. It was as if my strange nemesis were working down through a checklist and had just now come to “Earthquake.” All right. At least there was nothing high near at hand to fall on me.
“Enjoy yourself, you son of a bitch!” I called out. “One day real soon it won’t be so funny!”
As if in response the shaking grew more violent, and I had to halt or be thrown from my feet. As I watched; the ground began to subside in places, tilt in still others. I looked about quickly, trying to decide whether to advance, retreat, or stay put. Small fissures had begun to open, and now I could hear a growling, grinding sound.
The earth dropped abruptly beneath me—perhaps six inches—and the nearest crevices widened. I turned and began sprinting back the way I had come. The ground seemed less disturbed there.
A mistake perhaps. A particularly violent tremor followed, knocking me from my feet. Before I could rise a large crack appeared within reaching distance. It continued to widen even as I watched. I sprang to my feet, leapt across it, stumbled, rose again, and beheld another opening rift—widening more rapidly than the one I had been fleeing.
I sprang once more, onto a tilting tabletop of land. The ground seemed torn everywhere now with the dark lightning strokes of rifts, heaving themselves open widely to the accompaniment of awful groans and screechings. Big sections of ground slipped from sight into abysses. My small island was already going.
I leaped again, and again, trying to make it over to what appeared to be a more stable area.
I didn’t quite manage it. I missed my footing and fell. But I managed to catch hold of the edge. I dangled a moment then and began to draw myself upward. The edge began to crumble. I clawed at it and caught a fresh hold. Then I dangled again, coughing and cursing.
I sought for footholds in the clayey wall against which I hung. It yielded somewhat beneath the thrusting of my boots and I dug in, blinking dirt from my eyes, trying for a firmer hold overhead. I could feel Frakir loosening, tightening into a small loop, one end free and flowing over my knuckles, hopefully to locate something sufficiently firm-set to serve as an anchor.
But no. My left-hand hold gave way again. I clung with my right and groped for another. Loose earth fell about me as I failed, and my right hand was beginning to slip.
Dark shadow above me, through dust and swimming eyes.
My right hand fell loose. I thrust with my legs for another try.
My right wrist was clasped as it sped upward and forward once again. A big hand with a powerful grip held me. Moments later, it was joined by another and I was drawn upward, quickly, smoothly. I was over the edge and seeking my footing in an instant. My wrist was released. I wiped my eyes.
“Luke!”
He was dressed in green, and blades must not have bothered him the way they do me, for a good-sized one hung at his right side. He seemed to be using a rolled cloak for a backpack, and he wore its clasp like a decoration upon his left breast—an elaborate thing, a golden bird of some sort.
“This way,” he said, turning, and I followed him.
He led me a course back and to the left, tangent to the route I had taken on entering the valley. The footing grew steadier as we hurried that way, mounting at last a low hill that seemed completely out of range in the disturbance. Here we paused to look back.
“Come no farther!” a great voice boomed from that direction.
“Thanks, Luke,” I panted. “I don’t know how you’re here or why but—”
He raised a hand.
“Right now I just want to know one thing,” he said, rubbing at a short beard he seemed to have grown in an amazingly brief time, and causing me to note that he was wearing the ring with the blue stone.
“Name it,” I told him.
“How come whatever it was that just spoke has your voice?” he asked.
“Uh-oh. I knew it sounded familiar.”
“Come on!” he said. “You must know. Every time you’re threatened and it warns you back it’s your voice that I hear doing it—echo-like.”
“How long have you been following me, anyhow?”
“Quite a distance.”
“Those dead creatures outside the cleft where I’d camped—”
“I took them out for you. Where are you going, and what is that thing?”
“Right now I have only suspicions as to exactly what’s going on, and it’s a long story. But the answer should lie beyond that next range of hills.”
I gestured toward the aurora.
He stared off in that direction, then nodded.
“Let’s get going,” he said.
“There is an earthquake in progress,” I observed . . .
“It seems pretty much confined to this valley,” he stated. “We can cut around it and proceed.”
“And quite possibly encounter its continuance.”
He shook his head.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that whatever it is that’s trying to bar your way exhausts itself after each effort and takes quite a while to recover sufficiently to make another attempt.”
“But the attempts are getting closer together,” I noted, “and more spectacular each time.”
“Is it because we’re getting closer to their source?” he asked.
“Possibly.”
“Then let’s hurry.”
We descended the far side of the hill, then went up and down another. The tremors, by that time, had already subsided to an occasional shuddering of the ground and shortly these, too, ceased.
We made our way into and along another valley, which for a while headed us far to the right of our goal, then curved gently back in the proper direction, toward the final range o
f barren hills, lights flickering beyond them against the low, unmoving base of a cloudlike line of white under a mauve to violet sky. No fresh perils were presented.
“Luke,” I asked after a time, “what happened on the mountain, that night in New Mexico?”
“I had to go away—fast,” he answered.
“What about Dan Martinez’s body?”
“Took it with me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like leaving evidence lying about.”
“That doesn’t really explain much.”
“I know,” he said, and he broke into a jog. I paced him.
“And you know who I am,” I continued.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Not now,” he said. “Not now.”
He increased his pace. I matched it. “And why were you following me?”
“I saved your ass, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and I’m grateful. But it still doesn’t answer the question.”
“Race you to that leaning stone,” he said, and he put on a burst of speed.
I did, too, and I caught him. Try as I could I couldn’t pass him, though. And we were breathing too hard by then to ask or answer questions.
I pushed myself, ran faster. He did, too, keeping up. The leaning stone was still a good distance off. We stayed side by side and I saved my reserve for the final sprint. It was crazy, but I’d run against him too many times. It was almost a matter of habit by now. That, and the old curiosity. Had he gotten a little faster? Had I? Or a little slower?
My arms pumped, my feet thudded. I got control of my breathing, maintained it in an appropriate rhythm. I edged a little ahead of him and he did nothing about it. The stone was suddenly a lot nearer.
We held our distance for perhaps half a minute, and then he cut loose. He was abreast of me, he was past me. Time to dig in.
I drove my legs faster. The blood thudded in my ears. I sucked air and pushed with everything I had. The distance between us began to narrow again. The leaning rock was looking bigger and bigger . . .
I caught him before we reached it, but try as I might I could not pull ahead. We raced past it side by side and collapsed together.
“Photo finish,” I gasped.
“Got to call it a tie,” he paused. “You always surprise me—right at the end.”
I groped out my water bottle and passed it to him. He took a swig and handed it back. We emptied it that way, a little at a time.
“Damn,” he said then, getting slowly to his feet. “Let’s see what’s over those hills.”
I got up and went along.
When I finally recovered my breath the first thing I said was, “You seem to know a hell of a lot more about me than I do about you.”
“I think so,” he said after a long pause, “and I wish I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“Not now,” he replied. “Later. You don’t read War and Peace on your coffee break.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Time,” he said. “There’s always either too much time or not enough. Right now there’s not enough.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Wish I could.”
The hills were nearer and the ground remained firm beneath our feet. We trudged steadily onward.
I thought of Bill’s guesswork, Random’s suspicions, and Meg Devlin’s warning. I also thought of that round of strange ammunition I’d found in Luke’s jacket.
“That thing we’re heading toward,” he said, before I could frame a fresh question of my own. “That’s your Ghostwheel, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
He laughed. Then: “So you were telling the truth back in Santa Fe when you told me it required a peculiar environment. What you didn’t say was that you’d found that environment and built the thing there.”
I nodded. “What about your plans for a company?” I asked him.
“That was just to get you to talk about it.”
“And what about Dan Martinez—the things he said?”
“I don’t know. I really didn’t know him. I still don’t know what he wanted, or why he came at us shooting.”
“Luke, what is it that you want, anyhow?”
“Right now I just want to see that damned thing,” he said. “Did building it out here in the boonies endow it with some sort of special properties?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“Like a few I didn’t even think of—unfortunately,” I answered.
“Name one.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Question and answer is a two-way game.”
“Hey, I’m the guy who just pulled you out of a hole in the ground.”
“I gather you’re also the guy who tried to kill me on a bunch of April thirtieths.”
“Not recently,” he said. “Honest.”
“You mean you really did?”
“Well . . . yeah. But I had reasons. It’s a long story and—”
“Jesus, Luke! Why? What did I ever do to you?”
“It’s not that simple,” he answered.
We reached the base of the nearest hill and he started climbing it.
“Don’t,” I called to him. “You can’t go over.”
He halted.
“Why not?”
“The atmosphere ends thirty or forty feet up.”
“You’re kidding.”
I shook my head.
“And it’s worse on the other side,” I added. “We have to find a passage through. There’s one farther to the left.”
I turned and headed in that direction. Shortly, I heard his footfalls.
“So you gave it your voice,” he said.
“So?”
“So I see what you’re up to and what’s been going on. It’s become sentient in that crazy place you built it. It went wild, and you’re heading to shut it down. It knows it and it’s got the power to do something about it—It’s your Ghostwheel that’s been trying to get you to turn back, isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Why didn’t you just trump in?”
“You can’t construct a Trump for a place that keeps changing. What do you know about Trumps, anyway?”
“Enough,” he said.
I saw the passage I was seeking up ahead.
I approached the place and I halted before I entered it.
“Luke,” I said, “I don’t know what you want or why or how you got here, and you don’t seem to care to tell me. I will tell you something for free, though. This could be very dangerous. Maybe you ought to go back to wherever you came from and let me handle it. There’s no reason to place you in jeopardy.”
“I think there is,” he said. “Besides, I might be useful.”
“How?”
He shrugged.
“Let’s get on with it, Merlin. I want to see that thing.”
“Okay. Come on.”
I led the way into the narrow place where the stone had been riven.
10
The passage was long and dark and occasionally tight, growing progressively colder as we advanced, but at length we emerged onto the wide, rocky shelf that faced the steaming pit. There was an ammonia-like odor in the air, and my feet were cold and my face flushed, as usual. I blinked hard several times, studying the latest outlines of the maze through the shifting mist. A pearl-gray pall hung over the entire area. Intermittent orange flashes penetrated the gloom.
“Uh—where is it?” Luke inquired.
I gestured straight ahead, toward the site of the latest flicker.
“Out there,” I told him.
Just then, the mists were swept away, revealing isle upon isle of dark, smooth ridges separated by black declivities. The ridges zigged and zagged their way out toward a fortresslike island, a low wall running about it, several metallic structures visible beyond.
“It’s a maze,” he remarked. “Do we travel it down in the passages or up on top of the walls?”
<
br /> I smiled as he studied it.
“It varies,” I said. “Sometimes up and sometimes down.”
“Well, which way do we go?”
“I don’t know yet. I have to study it each time. You see, it keeps changing, and there’s a trick to it.”
“A trick?”
“More than one, actually. The whole damn thing is floating on a lake of liquid hydrogen and helium. The maze moves around. It’s different each time. And then there’s a matter of the atmosphere. If you were to walk upright along the ridges you would be above it in most places. You wouldn’t last long. And the temperature ranges from horribly cold to roasting hot over a range of a few feet in elevation. You have to know when to crawl and when to climb and when to do other things—as well as which way to go.”
“How do you tell?”
“Un-uh,” I said. “I’ll take you in, but I’m not giving you the secret.”
The mists began to rise again from the depths and to collect into small clouds.
“I see now why you can’t make a Trump for it,” he began.
I continued to study the layout.
“All right,” I said then. “This way.”
“What if it attacks us while we’re in the maze?” he asked.
“You can stay behind if you want.”
“No. Are you really going to shut it down?”
“I’m not sure. Come on.”
I took several steps ahead and to the right. A faint circle of light appeared in the air before me; grew brighter. I felt Luke’s hand upon my shoulder.
“What—?” he began.
“No farther!” the voice I now recognized as my own said to me.
“I think we can work something out,” I responded. “I have several ideas and—”
“No!” it answered. “I heard what Random said.”
“I am prepared to disregard his order,” I said, “if there is a better alternative.”
“You’re trying to trick me. You want to shut me down.”
“You’re making things worse with all these power displays,” I said. “I’m coming in now and—”
The Great Book of Amber - Chronicles 1-10 Page 104
