She looked in both directions and also glanced behind us and upward.
“More people headed down,” she remarked.
I looked back up and saw three figures near the top of the stairway, but they were standing still, as if they’d only come down a short distance to try the view. None of them wore Llewella’s colors. . . .
“Fellow sightseers,” I said.
She watched them a moment longer, then looked away. “Aren’t there caves along here somewhere?” she asked.
I nodded to my right.
“That way,” I answered. “There’s a whole series. People get lost in them periodically. Some are pretty colorful. Others just wander through darkness. A few are simply shallow openings.”
“I’d like to see them,” she said.
“Sure, easily done. Let’s go.”
I began walking. The people on the stair had not moved. They still appeared to be looking out to sea. I doubted they were smugglers. It doesn’t seem like a daytime occupation for a place where anyone might wander by. Still, I was pleased that my faculty for suspicion was growing. It seemed appropriate in light of recent events. The object of my greatest suspicion, of course, was walking beside me, turning driftwood with the toe of her boot, scuffing bright pebbles, laughing—but there was nothing I was ready to do about it at the moment. Soon. . . .
She took my arm suddenly.
“Thanks for bringing me,” she said. “I’m enjoying this.”
“Oh, I am, too. Glad we came. You’re welcome.”
This made me feel slightly guilty, but if my guess were wrong no harm would be done.
“I think I would enjoy living in Amber,” she remarked as we went along.
“Me, too,” I replied. “I’ve never really done it for any great length of time.”
“Oh?”
“I guess I didn’t really explain how long I’d spent on the shadow Earth where I went to school, where I had that job I was telling you about. . . . ” I began, and suddenly I was pouring out more autobiography to her—a thing I don’t usually do. I wasn’t certain why I was telling it at first, and then I realized that I just wanted someone to talk to. Even if my strange suspicion was correct, it didn’t matter. A friendly-seeming listener made me feel better than I had in a long while. And before I realized it, I was telling her about my father—how this man I barely knew had rushed through a massive story of his struggles, his dilemmas, his decisions, as if he were trying to justify himself to me, as if that were the only opportunity he might have to do it, and how I had listened, wondering what he was editing, what he had forgotten, what he might be glossing over or dressing up, what his feelings were toward me. . . .
“Those are some of the caves,” I told her, as they interrupted my now embarrassing indulgence in memory. She started to say something about my monologue, but I simply continued; “I’ve only seen them once.”
She caught my mood and simply said “I’d like to go inside one.”
I nodded. They seemed a good place for what I had in mind.
I chose the third one. Its mouth was larger than the first two, and I could see back into it for a good distance. “Let’s try that one. It looks well lighted,” I explained. We walked into a shadow-hung chill. The damp sand followed us for a while, thinning only slowly to be replaced by a gritty stone floor. The roof dipped and rose several times. A turn to the left joined us with the passage of another opening, for looking back along it I could see more light. The other direction led more deeply into the mountain. We could still feel the echoing pulse of the sea from where we stood.
“These caves could lead back really far,” she observed.
“They do,” I replied. “They twist and cross and wind. I wouldn’t want to go too far without a map and a light. They’ve never been fully charted, that I know of.”
She looked about, studying areas of blackness within the darkness where side tunnels debouched into our own.
“How far back do you think they go?” she inquired.
“I just don’t know.”
“Under the palace?”
“Probably,” I said, remembering the series of side tunnels I’d passed on my way to the Pattern. “It seems possible they cut into the big caves below it somewhere.”
“What’s it like down there?” .
“Under the palace? Just dark and big. Ancient. . . . ”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Whatever for?”
“The Pattern’s down there. It must be pretty colorful.”
“Oh, it is—all bright and swirly. Rather intimidating, though.”
“How can you say that when you’ve walked it?”
“Walking it and liking it are two different things.”“
“I’d just thought that if it were in you to walk it, you’d feel some affinity, some deep resonant kinship with it.”
I laughed, and the sounds echoed about us.
“Oh, while I was walking it I knew it was in me to do it,” I said. “I didn’t feel it beforehand, though. I was just scared then. And I never liked it.”
“Strange.”
“Not really. It’s like the sea or the night sky. It’s big and it’s powerful and it’s beautiful and it’s there. It’s a natural force and you make of it what you will.”
She looked back along the passageway leading inward.
“I’d like to see it,” she said.
“I wouldn’t try to find my way to it from here,” I told her. “Why do you want to see it, anyhow?”
“Just to see how I’d respond to something like that.”
“You’re strange,” I said.
“Will you take me when we go back? Will you show it to me?”
This was not going at all the way I’d thought it would. If she were what I thought, I didn’t understand the request. I was half tempted to take her to it, to find out what she had in mind. However, I was operating under a system of priorities, and I’d a feeling she represented one concerning which I’d made myself a promise and, some elaborate preparations.
“Perhaps,” I mumbled.
“Please. I’d really like to see it.”
She seemed sincere. But my guess felt near-perfect.
Sufficient time had passed for that strange body-shifting spirit, which had dogged my trail in many forms, to have located a new host and then to have zeroed in on me again and be insinuating itself into my good graces once more. Coral was perfect for the role, her arrival appropriately timed, her concern for my physical welfare manifest, her reflexes fast. I’d have liked to keep her around for questioning, but I knew that she would simply lie to me in the absence of proof or an emergency situation. And I did not trust her. So I reviewed the spell I had prepared and hung on my way home from Arbor House, a spell I had designed to expel a possessing entity from its host. I hesitated a moment, though. My feelings toward her were ambivalent. Even if she were the entity, I might be willing to put up with her if I just knew her motive.
So, “What is it that you want?” I asked.
“Just to see it. Honestly,” she answered.
“No, I mean that if you are what I think you really are, I’m asking the big question: Why?”
Frakir began to pulse upon my wrist.
Coral was silent for the space of an audible deep breath, then, “How could you tell?”
“You betrayed yourself in small ways discernible only to one who has recently become paranoid,” I responded.
“Magic,” she said. “Is that it?”
“It’s about to be,” I replied. “I could almost miss you, but I can’t trust you.”
I spoke the guide words to the spell, letting them draw my hands smoothly through the appropriate gestures. There followed two horrible shrieks, and then a third.
But they weren’t hers. They came from around the corner in the passageway we had recently quitted.
“What—?” she began.
“—the hell!” I finished; and I rushed past her and rounded the co
rner, drawing my blade as I went.
Backlighted by the distant cavemouth I beheld three figures on the floor of the cave. Two of them were sprawled and unmoving. The third was seated and bent forward, cursing. I advanced slowly, the point of my weapon directed toward the seated one. His shadowy head turned in my direction, and he climbed to his feet, still bent forward. He clutched his left hand with his right, and he backed away until he came into contact with the wall.
He halted there, muttering something I could not quite hear. I continued my cautious advance, all of my senses alert. I could hear Coral moving at my back, then I glimpsed her accompanying me on my left when the passage widened. She had drawn her dagger, and she held it low and near to her hip. No time now to speculate as to what my spell might have done to her.
I halted as I came to the first of the two fallen forms. I prodded it with the toe of my boot, ready to strike instantly should it spring into an attack. Nothing. It felt limp, lifeless. I used my foot to turn it over, and the head rolled back in the direction of the cavemouth. In the light that then fell upon it I beheld a half-decayed human face. My nose had already been informing me that this state was no mere illusion. I advanced upon the other one and turned him, also. He, too, bore the appearance of a decomposing corpse. While the first one clutched a dagger in his right hand, the second was weaponless. Then I noted another dagger—on the floor, near the live man’s feet. I raised my eyes to him. This made no sense whatsoever. I’d have judged the two figures upon the floor to have been dead for several days, at least, and I had no idea as to what the standing man had been up to.
“Uh. . . . Mind telling me what’s going on?” I inquired.
“Damn you, Merlin!” he snarled, and I recognized the voice.
I moved in a slow arc, stepping over the fallen ones. Coral stayed near to my side, moving in a similar fashion. He turned his head to follow our progress, and when the light finally fell upon his face, I saw that Jurt was glaring at me out of his one good eye—a patch covered the other—and I saw, too, that about half of his hair was missing, the exposed scalp covered with welts or scars, his half-regrown ear-stub plainly visible. From this side I could also see that a bandana suitable for covering most of this damage had slipped down around his neck. Blood was dripping from his left hand, and I suddenly realized that his little finger was missing.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“One of the zombies hit my hand with his dagger as he fell,” he said, “when you expelled the spirits that animated them.”
My spell—to evict a possessing spirit. . . . They had been within range of it. . . .
“Coral,” I asked, “are you all right?”
“Yes,” she replied. “But I don’t understand. . . . ”
“Later,” I told her.
I did not ask him about his head, as I recalled my struggle with the one-eyed werewolf in the wood to the east of Amber—the beast whose head I had forced into the campfire. I had suspected for some time that it had been Jurt in a shape-shifted form, even before Mandor had offered sufficient information to confirm it.
“Jurt,” I began, “I have been the occasion of many of your ills, but you must realize that you brought them on yourself. If you would not attack me, I would have no need to defend myself—”
There came a clicking, grinding sound. It took me several seconds to realize that it was a gnashing of teeth. “My adoption by your father meant nothing to me,” I said, “beyond the fact that he honored me by it. I was not even aware until recently that it had occurred.”
“You lie!” he hissed. “You tricked him some way, to get ahead of us in the succession.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “We’re all so far down on the list that it doesn’t matter.”
“Not for the Crown, you fool! For the House! Our father isn’t all that well!”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I’d never even thought of it that way. And Mandor’s ahead of all of us, anyhow.”
“And now you’re second.”
“Not by choice. Come on! I’ll never see the title. You know that!”
He drew himself upright, and when he moved I became aware of a faint prismatic nimbus that had been clinging to his outline.
“That isn’t the real reason,” I continued. “You’ve never liked me, but you’re not after me because of the succession. You’re hiding something now. It’s got to be something else, for all this activity on your part. By the way, you did send the Fire Angel, didn’t you?”
“It found you that fast?” he said. “I wasn’t even sure I could count on that. I guess it was worth the price after all. But. . . . What happened?”
“It’s dead.”
“You’re very lucky. Too lucky,” he replied.
“What is it that you want, Jurt? I’d like to settle this once and for all.”
“Me, too,” he answered. “You betrayed someone I love, and only your death will set things right.”
“Who are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
He grinned suddenly.
“You will,” he said. “In the last moments of your life I’ll let you know why.”
“I may have a long wait, then,” I answered. “You don’t seem to be very good at this sort of thing. Why not just tell me now and save us both a lot of trouble?”
He laughed, and the prism effect increased, and it occurred to me in that instant what it was.
“Sooner than you think,” he said, “for shortly I will be more powerful than anything you ever met.”
“But no less clumsy,” I suggested, both to him and to whomever held his Trump, watching me through it, ready to snatch him away in an instant. . . .
“That is you, Mask, isn’t it?” I said. “Take him back. You don’t have to send him again either and watch him screw up. I’ll promote you on my list of priorities and come calling soon, if you’ll just give me an assurance that it’s really you.”
Jurt opened his mouth and said something, but I couldn’t hear it because he faded fast and his words went away with him. Something flew toward me as this occurred; there was no need to parry it, but I couldn’t stop the reflex.
Along with two moldering corpses and Jurt’s little finger, a dozen or so roses lay scattered on the floor at my feet, there at the rainbow’s end.
5
As we walked along the beach in the direction of the harbor, Coral finally spoke.
“Does that sort of thing happen around here very often?”
“You should come by on a bad day,” I said.
“If you don’t mind telling me, I’d like to hear what it was all about.”
“I guess I owe you an explanation,” I agreed, “because I wronged you back there, whether you know it or not.”
“You’re serious.”
“Yep,”
“Go on. I’m really curious.”
“It’s a long story. . . . ” I began again.
She looked ahead to the harbor, then up to Kolvir’s heights.
“ . . . A long walk, too,” she said.
“ . . . And you’re a daughter of the prime minister of a country with which we have somewhat touchy relations at the moment.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the things that are happening may represent kind of sensitive information.”
She put her hand on my shoulder and halted. She stared into my eyes.
“I can keep a secret,” she told me. “After all, you know mine.”
I congratulated myself on having finally learned my relatives’ trick of controlling facial expression even when puzzled as all hell. She had said something back in the cave when I had addressed her as if she were the entity, something that sounded as if she believed I had discovered a secret concerning her.
So I gave her a wry smile and nodded.
“Just so,” I said.
“You’re not planning on ravaging our country or anything like that, are you?” she asked.
> “To my knowledge, no. And I don’t think it likely either.”
“Well, then. You can only speak from your knowledge, can’t you?”
“True,” I agreed.
“So let’s hear the story.”
“All right.”
As we walked along the strand and I spoke, to the accompaniment of the waves’ deep notes, I could not help but remember again my father’s long narrative. Was it a family trait, I wondered, to go autobiographical at a time of troubles if the right listener turned up? For I realized I was elaborating my telling beyond the bounds of necessity. And why should she be the right listener, anyhow?
When we reached the port district, I realized I was hungry, anyway, and I still had a lot of telling to do. In that it was still daylight and doubtless considerably safer than when I’d made my nighttime visit, I found my way over to Harbor Road—which was even dirtier in strong light—and, having learned that Coral was hungry, too, I took us on around to the rear of the cove, pausing for a few minutes to watch a many-masted vessel with golden sails round the sea wall and head in. Then we followed the curving way to the western shore, and I was able to locate Seabreeze Lane without any trouble. It was still early enough that we passed a few sober sailors. At one point a heavy, black-bearded man with an interesting scar on his right cheek began to approach us, but a smaller man caught up with him first and whispered something in his ear. They both turned away.
“Hey,” I said. “What did he want?”
“Nothin’,” the smaller man said. “He don’t want nothin’.” He studied me for a moment and nodded. Then, “I saw you here the other night,” he added.
“Oh,” I said, as they continued to the next corner, turned it, and were gone.
“What was that all about?” Coral said.
“I didn’t get to that part of the story yet.”
But I remembered it vividly when we passed the place where it had occurred. No signs of that conflict remained.
I almost passed what had been Bloody Bill’s, though, because a new sign hung above the door. It read “Bloody Andy’s,” in fresh green letters. The place was just the same inside, however, except for the man behind the counter, who was taller and thinner than the shaggy, cragfaced individual who had served me last time. His name, I learned, was Jak, and he was Andy’s brother. He sold us a bottle of Bayle’s Piss and put in our order for two fish dinners through the hole in the wall. My former table was vacant and we took it. I laid my sword belt on the chair to my right, with the blade partly drawn, as I had been taught etiquette required here.
The Great Book of Amber - Chronicles 1-10 Page 134
