The Great Book of Amber - Chronicles 1-10

by Roger Zelazny

  “Hell! I don’t want conversation or atmosphere. I just want some nice fresh fish. Where would you go for the best?”

  “Well, it’s a long walk. But if you go all the way down to the docks, at the back of the cove, it’s a little to the west. . . . But maybe you shouldn’t. It’s kind of late, and that isn’t the best neighborhood after dark.”

  “Is that by any chance Death Alley?”

  “They do sometimes call it that, sir, as bodies are occasionally found there of a morning. Maybe you’d better go to the Net, seeing as you’re alone.”

  “Gerard took me through that area once, during the day. I think I could find my way around it, all right. What’s the name of the place?”

  “Uh, Bloody Bill’s.”

  “Thanks. I’ll say hi to Bill for you.”

  He shook his head. “Can’t. It was renamed after the manner of his demise. His cousin Andy runs it now.”

  “Oh. What was it called before?”

  “Bloody Sam’s,” he said.

  Well, what the hell. I bade him a good night and set out walking. I took the path to the short stairway down the slope, which led to the walkway through a garden and over to a side gate, where another guard let me out. It was a cool night with the breezed smells of autumn burning down the world about me. I drew it into my lungs and sighed it out again as I headed for the Main Concourse, the distant, almost-forgotten, slow clopping sounds of hoofs on cobbles coming to me like something out of dream or memory. The night was moonless but filled with stars, and the concourse below banked by globes of phosphorescent liquid set atop high poles, long-tailed mountain moths darting about them.

  When I reached the avenue I strolled. A few closed carriages rolled by as I passed along the way. An old man walking a tiny green dragon on a chain leash touched his hat to me as I passed and said, “Good evening.” He had seen the direction from which I had come, though I was sure he did not recognize me. My face is not that well-known about town. My spirits loosened a bit after a time, and I felt a spring come into my step.

  Random had not been as angry as I’d thought he might. Since Ghostwheel had not been stirring up any trouble, he had not charged me to go after it immediately and try again for a shutdown. He had merely told me to think about it and come up with the best course of action we might pursue. And Flora had been in touch earlier and told him who Luke was—a thing that seemed to have eased his mind somehow, knowing the identity of the enemy. Though I’d asked, he would not tell me what plans he might have formulated for dealing with him. He did allude to the recent dispatch of an agent to Kashfa, though, to obtain certain unspecified information. The thing that seemed to trouble him the most, actually, was the possibility that the outlaw Dalt was still to be numbered among the living.

  “Something about that man . . . ” Random began.

  “What?” I’d asked.

  “For one thing, I saw Benedict run him through. That generally tends to terminate a person’s career.”

  “Tough son of a bitch,” I said. “Or damn lucky. Or both.”

  “If he is the same man, he’s the son of the Desacratrix. You’ve heard of her?”

  “Deela,” I said. “Wasn’t that her name? Some sort of religious fanatic? Militant?”

  Random nodded. “She caused a lot of trouble out around the periphery of the Golden Circle—mostly near Begma. You ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Begma’s the nearest point on the circle to Kashfa, which is what makes your story particularly interesting. She’d raided a lot in Begma and they couldn’t handle her by themselves. They finally reminded us of the protection alliance we have with almost all the Circle kingdoms—and Dad decided to go in personally and teach her a lesson. She’d burned one Unicorn shrine too many. He took a small force, defeated her troops, took her prisoner and hanged a bunch of her men. She escaped, though, and a couple of years later when she was all but forgotten she came back with a fresh force and started the same crap all over. Begma screamed again, but Dad was busy. He sent Bleys in with a larger force. There were several inconclusive engagements—they were raiders, not a regular army—but Bleys finally cornered them and wiped them out. She died that day, leading her troops.”

  “And Dalt’s her son?”

  “That’s the story, and it makes some sense, because he did everything he could to harass us for a long time. He was after revenge, pure and simple, for his mother’s death. Finally, he put together a fairly impressive fighting force and tried to raid Amber. Got a lot farther than you’d think, right up to Kolvir. But Benedict was waiting, his pet regiment at his back. Benedict cut them to pieces, and it sure looked as if he’d wounded Dalt mortally. A few of his men were able to carry him off the field, so we never saw the body. But hell! Who cared?”

  “And you think he could be the same guy who was Luke’s friend when he was a kid—and later?”

  “Well, the age is about right and he seems to hail from that same general area. I suppose it’s possible.”

  I mused as I strolled. Jasra hadn’t really liked the guy, according to the hermit. So what was his part in things now? Too many unknowns, I decided. It would take knowledge rather than reasoning to answer that one. So let it ride and go enjoy dinner. . . .

  I continued on down the concourse. Near to its farther end I heard laughter and saw where some hardy drinkers still occupied a few tables at a sidewalk cafe. One of them was Droppa, but he didn’t spot me and I passed on. I did not feel like being amused. I turned onto Weavers Street, which would take me over to where West Vine wound its way up from the harbor district. A tall masked lady in a silver cloak hurried by and into a waiting carriage. She glanced back once and smiled beneath her domino. I was certain that I didn’t know her, and I found myself wishing I did. It was a pretty smile. Then a gust of wind brought me the smoke-smell of someone’s fireplace and rattled a few dead leaves as it went by. I wondered where my father was.

  Down along the street then and left on West Vine . . . Narrower here than the concourse, but still wide; a greater distance between lights, but still sufficiently illuminated for night travelers. A pair of horsemen clopped slowly by, singing a song I did not recognize. Something large and dark passed overhead a bit later, to settle upon a roof across the street. A few scratching noises came from that direction, then silence. I followed a curve to the right, then another to the left, entering what I knew to be a long series of switchbacks. My way grew gradually steeper. A harbor breeze came up at some point a little later, bearing me my first salt sea smells of the evening. A short while afterward—two turns, I believe—and I had a view of the sea itself, far below; bobbing lights on a sparkling, swelling slickness over black, pent by the curving line of bright dots, Harbor Road. To the east the sky was powdered slightly. A hint of horizon appeared at the edge of the world. I thought I caught a glimpse of the distant light of Cabra minutes later, then lost it again with another turning of the way.

  A puddle of light like spilled milk pulsed on the street to my right, outlining a ghostly gridwork of cobbles at its farthest downhill reach; the stippled pole above it might advertise some spectral barbershop; the cracked globe at its top still showed a faint phosphorescence, skull-on-a-stick style, reminding me of a game we used to play as kids back in the Courts. A few lighted footprints proceeded downhill away from it, faint, fainter, gone. I passed on, and across the distance I heard the cries of sea birds. Autumn’s smells were submerged in ocean’s. The powdered light beyond my left shoulder rose higher about the water, drifted forward across the wrinkled face of the deep. Soon. . . .

  My appetite grew as I walked. Ahead, I beheld another dark-cloaked stroller on the other side of the street, a slight glowing at the edges of the boots. I thought of the fish I would soon be eating and hurried, breasting the figure and passing. A cat in a doorway paused at licking her asshole to watch me go by, hind leg held vertical the while. Another horseman passed, this one headed up the hill. I heard the fringes of an argume
nt between a man and a woman from upstairs in one of the darkened buildings. Another turning and the shoulder of the moon came into sight like some magnificent beast surfacing, shrugging droplets from bright bathic grottoes. . . .

  Ten minutes later I had reached the port district and found my way over to Harbor Road, its lack of all but occasional globes supplemented by window spillage, a number of buckets of burning pitch and the glow of the now-risen moon. The smells of salt and sea-wrack were more intense here, the road more cluttered with trash, the passersby more colorfully garbed and noisier than any on the concourse, unless you counted Droppa. I made my way to the rear of the cove, where the sounds of the sea came to me more strongly: the rushing, building advances of waves, then their crashing and splashing out beyond the breakwater; the gentler falls and slopping withdrawals nearer at hand; the creaking of ships, the rattling of chains, the bumping of some smaller vessel at pier or moor post. I wondered where the Starburst, my old sailboat, might be now.

  I followed the curve of the road over to the western shore of the harbor. A pair of rats chased a black cat across my path as I wandered briefly, checking several side streets for the one I sought. The smells of barf as well as solid and liquid human waste mingled with other odors here, and I heard the cries, crashes and thuds of a struggle from somewhere nearby, leading me to believe that I was in the proper neighborhood. From somewhere distant a buoy bell rattled; from somewhere nearby I heard an almost bored-sounding string of curses preceding a pair of sailors who rounded the nearest corner to my right, reeling, staggered on past me, grinning, and broke into song moments later, receding. I advanced and checked the sign on that corner. SEABREEZE LANE, it read.

  That was it, the stretch commonly called Death Alley. I turned there. It was just a street like any other. I didn’t see any corpses or even collapsed drunks for the first fifty paces, though a man in a doorway tried to sell me a dagger and a mustachioed stock character offered to fix me up with something young and tight. I declined both, and learned from the latter that I wasn’t all that far from Bloody Bill’s. I walked on. My occasional glances showed me three dark-cloaked figures far to the rear which, I supposed, could be following me; I had seen them back on Harbor Road too. Also, they might not. In that I was not feeling particularly paranoid, I reflected that they could be anybody going anywhere and decided to ignore them. Nothing happened. They kept to themselves, and when I finally located Bloody Bill’s and entered they passed on by, crossing the street and going into a small bistro a little farther down along the way.

  I turned and regarded Bill’s. The bar was to my right, tables to my left, suspicious-looking stains on the floor. A board on the wall suggested I give my order at the bar and say where I was sitting. The day’s catch was chalked beneath this.

  So I went over and waited, collecting glances, until a heavy-set man with gray and amazingly shaggy brows came over and asked what I wanted. I told him the blue sea scut and pointed at an empty table to the rear. He nodded and shouted my order back through a hole in the wall, then asked me whether I wanted a bottle of Bayle’s Piss to go with it. I did, he got it for me, and a glass, uncorked it and passed it over. I paid up there, headed back to the table I had chosen and seated myself with my back to the wall.

  Oil flames flickered through dirty chimneys in brackets all about the place. Three men—two young, one middle-aged—played cards at the corner table in the front and passed a bottle. An older man sat alone at the table to my left, eating. He had a nasty-looking scar running both above and below his left eye, and there was a long wicked blade about six inches out of its scabbard resting on the chair to his right. He, too, had his back to the wall. Men with musical instruments rested at another table: between numbers, I guessed. I poured some of the yellow wine into my glass and took a sip: a distinctive taste I remembered from across the years. It was okay for quaffing. Baron Bayle owned a number of vineyards about thirty miles to the east. He was the official vintner to the Court, and his red wines were generally excellent. He was less successful with the whites, though, and often wound up dumping a lot of second-rate stuff onto the local market. It bore his emblem and a picture of a dog—he liked dogs—so it was sometimes called Dog Piss and sometimes Bayle’s Piss, depending on who you talked to. Dog lovers sometimes take offense at the former appellation.

  About the time my food arrived I noticed that two young men near the front of the bar were glancing in my direction more than occasionally, exchanging a few indistinguishable words and laughing and smiling a lot. I ignored them and turned my attention to my meal. A little later the scarred man at the next table said softly, without leaning or looking toward me, his lips barely moving, “Free advice. I think those two guys at the bar noticed you’re not wearing a blade, and they’ve marked you for trouble.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Well. . . . I was not overly concerned about my ability to deal with them, but given a choice I’d rather avoid the occasion entirely. If all that it required was a visible blade, that was easily remedied.

  A moment’s meditation and the Logrus danced before me. Shortly thereafter, I was reaching through it in search of the proper weapon—neither too long nor too heavy, properly balanced, with a comfortable grip—with a wide dark belt and scabbard. It took me close to three minutes, partly because I was so fussy about it, I suppose—but hell, if prudence required one, I wanted comfort—and partly because it is harder reaching through Shadow in the vicinity of Amber than it is almost anywhere else.

  When it came into my hands I sighed and mopped my brow. Then I brought it up slowly from beneath the table, belt and all, drew it about half a foot from its scabbard, to follow a good example, and placed it on the seat to my right. The two guys at the bar caught the performance and I grinned back at them. They had a quick consultation, and this time they weren’t laughing. I poured myself a fresh glass of wine and drank it off at a single draught. Then I returned to my fish, about which Jordy had been right. The food here was very good.

  “Neat trick, that,” the man at the next table said. “I don’t suppose it’s an easy one to learn?”

  “Nope.”

  “It figures. Most good things aren’t, or everybody’d do ’em. They may still go after you, though, seeing as you’re alone. Depends on how much they drink and how reckless they get. You worried?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so. But they’ll hit someone tonight.”

  “How can you tell?”

  He looked at me for the first time and grinned a nasty grin. “They’re generic, like wind-up toys. See you around.”

  He tossed a coin onto the table, stood, buckled on his sword belt, picked up a dark, feathered hat and headed for the door.

  “Take care.” I nodded.

  “Night.” As he passed out of the place the two guys began whispering again, this time glancing after him rather than at me. Some decision reached, they rose and departed quickly. For a moment I was tempted to follow, but something restrained me. A little later, I heard the sounds of a scuffle from up the street. Not too long after that, a figure appeared in the doorway, hovered a moment, then fell forward. It was one of the two drinkers. His throat had been cut.

  Andy shook his head and dispatched his waiter to inform the local constabulary. Then he took hold of the body by the heels and dragged it outside, so as not to impede the flow of customers.

  Later, when I was ordering another fish, I asked Andy about the occurrence. He smiled grimly.

  “It is not good to mess with an emissary of the Crown,” he said. “They tend to pick them tough.”

  “That guy who was sitting next to me works for Random?”

  He studied my face, then nodded. “Old John worked for Oberon, too. Whenever he passes through he eats here.”

  “I wonder what sort of mission he was on?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? But he paid me in Kashfan currency, and I know he ain’t from Kashfa.”

  As I worked on my second pla
tter I pondered that one. Whatever it was that Random had wanted from Kashfa was probably on its way to the castle right now, unless of course it was unavailable. It would almost have to concern Luke and Jasra. I wondered what it was, and of what benefit it might be.

  I sat there for a long while after that, thinking, and the place was a lot less noisy than it had been for most of an hour, even when the musicians began a fresh set. Had it been John the guys had been watching all along, with both of us misinterpreting their gazes as directed toward me? Or had they simply decided to go after the first person who left alone? I realized from these reflections that I was beginning to think like an Amberite again—seeking plots everywhere—and I hadn’t been back all that long.

  Something in the atmosphere, I guessed. Probably it was a good thing that my mind was moving along these lines once more, since I was involved in so much already and it seemed an investment in self-preservation.

  I finished my glass of wine and left the bottle on the table with a few drinks still in it. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t be fogging my senses any further, all things considered. I rose and buckled on my sword belt.

  As I passed the bar Andy nodded. “If you run into anyone from the palace,” he said softly, “you might mention that I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

  “You knew them?”

  “Yeah. Sailors. Their ship came in a couple of days ago. They’ve been in trouble here before. Blow their pay fast, then look for some more the quick way.”

  “Do you think they might be professionals at—removing people?”

  “Because of John’s being what he is, you mean? No. They got caught once too often, mainly for being stupid. Sooner or later they were bound to run into someone who knew what he was doing and end up this way. I don’t know anyone who’d hire them for something serious.”

  “Oh, he got the other one too?”

  “Yep. Up the street a way. So you might mention that they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”