The whiffling, the wailing, and the burbling suddenly echoed down the shaft, along with hissing, scraping, and occasional snarls. The two beasts came together and tore at each other, eyes like dying suns, claws like bayonets, forming a hellish mandala in the pale light which now reached them from below. While this produced a round of activity too near at hand for me to feel entirely at ease, it did serve to slow them to the point where I felt I need not risk an ill-suited spell and an awkward maneuver to emerge from the tunnel in one piece.
“Argh!” Luke remarked, turning suddenly within my grasp.
“I agree,” I said. “But lie still, will you? We’re about to crash—”
“—and burn,” he stated, twisting his head upward to regard the combatant monsters, then downward when he realized that we were falling, too. “What kind of trip is this?”
“A bad one,” I answered, and then it hit me: That was exactly what it was.
The opening was even larger now, and our velocity sufficient for a bearable landing. Our reaction to the spell that I called the Giant’s Slap would probably slow us to a standstill or even propel us backward. Better to collect a few bruises than become a traffic obstruction at this point.
A bad trip indeed. I was thinking of Random’s words as we passed through the opening at a crazy angle, hit dirt, and rolled.
We had come to rest within a cave, near to its mouth. Tunnels ran off to the right and the left. The cave mouth was at my back. A quick glance showed it as opening upon a bright, possibly lush, and more than a little out-of-focus valley. Luke was sprawled unmoving beside me. I got to my feet immediately and caught hold of him beneath the armpits. I began dragging him back away from the dark opening from which we had just emerged. The sounds of the monstrous conflict were very near now.
Good that Luke seemed unconscious again. His condition was bad enough for any Amberite, if my guess were correct. But for one of sorcerous ability it represented a highly dangerous wild card of a sort I’d never encountered before. I wasn’t at all certain how I should deal with it.
I dragged him toward the right-hand tunnel because it was the smaller of the two and would theoretically be a bit easier to defend. We had barely achieved its shelter when the two beasts fell through the opening, clutching and tearing at each other. They commenced rolling about the floor of the cave, claws clicking, uttering hisses and whistles as they tore at each other. They seemed to have forgotten us entirely, and I continued our retreat until we were well back in the tunnel.
I could only assume Random’s guess to be correct. After all, he was a musician and he’d played all over Shadow. Also, I couldn’t come up with anything better.
I summoned the Sign of the Logrus. When I had it clear and had meshed my hands with it, I might have used it to strike at the fighting beasts. But they were paying me no heed whatsoever, and I’d no desire to attract their attention. Also, I’d no assurance that the equivalent of being hit by a two-by-four would have much effect on them. Besides, my order was ready, and filling it took precedence.
So I reached.
It took an interminable time. There was an extremely wide area of Shadow to pass though before I found what I was looking for. Then I had to do it again. And again. There were a number of things I wanted, and none of them near.
In the meantime, the combatants showed no sign of slackening, and their claws struck sparks from the cave’s walls. They had cut each other in countless places and were now covered with dark gore. Luke had awakened during all of this, propped himself, and was staring fascinated at the colorful conflict. How long it might hold his attention I could not tell. It would be important for me to have him awake very soon now, and I was pleased that he had not started thinking of other matters yet.
I was cheering, by the way, for the Jabberwock. It was just a nasty beast and need not have been homing in on me in particular when it was distracted by the arrival of its exotic nemesis. The Fire Angel had been playing an entirely different game. There was no reason for a Fire Angel to be stalking about this far from Chaos unless it had been sent. They’re devilish hard to capture, harder to train, and dangerous to handle. So they represent a considerable expense and hazard. One does not invest in a Fire Angel lightly. Their main purpose in life is killing, and to my knowledge no one outside the Courts of Chaos has ever employed one. They’ve a vast array of senses—some of them, apparently, paranormal—and they can be used as Shadow bloodhounds. They don’t wander through Shadow on their own, that I know of. But a Shadowwalker can be tracked, and Fire Angels seem to be able to follow a very cold trail once they’ve been imprinted with the victim’s identity. Now, I had been trumped to that crazy bar, and I didn’t know they could follow a Trump jump, but several other possibilities occurred to me—including someone’s locating me, transporting the thing to my vicinity, and turning it loose to do its business. Whatever the means, though, the attempt had the mark of the Courts upon it. Hence, my quick conversion to Jabberwock fandom.
“What’s going on?” Luke asked me suddenly, and the walls of the cave faded for a moment and I heard a faint strain of music.
“It’s tricky,” I said. “Listen, it’s time for your medicine.”
I dumped out a palmful of the vitamin B12 tabs I had just brought in and uncapped the water bottle I had also summoned.
“What medicine?” he asked as I passed them to him. “Doctor’s orders,” I said. “Get you back on your feet faster.”
“Well, okay.”
He threw all of them into his mouth and downed them with a single big drink.
“Now these.”
I opened the bottle of Thorazine. They were 200 milligrams each and I didn’t know how many to give him, so I decided on three. I gave him some tryptophan, too, and some phenylalanine.
He stared at the pills. The walls faded again, the music returned. A cloud of blue smoke drifted past us. Suddenly the bar came into view, back to whatever passed for normal in that place. The upset tables had been righted, Humpty still teetered, the mural went on.
“Hey, the club!” Luke exclaimed. “We ought to head back. Looks like the party’s just getting going.”
“First, you take your medicine.”
“What’s it for?”
“You got some bad shit somewhere. This is to let you down easy.”
“I don’t feel bad. In fact, I feel real good—”
“Take it!”
“Okay! Okay!”
He tossed off the whole fistful.
The Jabberwock and the Fire Angel seemed to be fading now—and my latest exasperated gesture in the vicinity of the bartop had encountered some resistance, though the thing was not fully solid to me yet. Suddenly, then, I noticed the Cat, whose games with substantiality somehow at this point made it seem more real than anything else in the place.
“You coming or going?” it asked.
Luke began to rise. The light grew brighter, though more diffuse.
“Uh, Luke, look over there,” I said, pointing.
“Where?” he asked, turning his head.
I slugged him again.
As he collapsed, the bar began to fade. The walls of the cave phased back into focus. I heard the Cat’s voice. “Going . . . ” it said.
The noises returned full blast, only this time the dominant sound was a bagpipelike squeal. It was coming from the Jabberwock, who was pinned to the ground and being slashed at. I decided then to use the Fourth of July spell I had left over from my assault on the citadel. I raised my hands and spoke the words. I moved in front of Luke to block his view as I did so, and I looked away and squeezed my eyes shut as I said them. Even through closed eyes I could tell there followed a brilliant flash of light. I heard Luke say, “Hey!” but all other sounds ceased abruptly. When I looked again I saw that the two creatures lay as if stunned, unmoving, toward the far side of the small cave.
I grabbed hold of Luke’s hand and drew him up and over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Then I advanced quickly into
the cave, slipping only once on monster blood as I edged my way along the nearest wall, heading for the cave mouth. The creatures began to stir before I made it out, but their movements were more reflexive than directed. I paused at the opening where I beheld an enormous flower garden in full bloom. All of the flowers were at least as tall as myself, and a shifting breeze bore me an overpowering redolence.
Moments later I heard a more decisive movement at my back and I turned. The Jabberwock was drawing itself to its feet. The Fire Angel was still crouched and was making small piping noises. The Jabberwock staggered back, spreading its wings, then suddenly turned, beat the air, and fled back up the high hole in the cleft at the rear of the cave. Not a bad idea, I decided, as I hurried out into the garden.
Here the aromas were even stronger, the flowers, mostly in bloom, a fantastic canopy of colors as I rushed among them. I found myself panting after a short while, but I jogged on nevertheless. Luke was heavy, but I wanted to put as much distance as I could between ourselves and the cave. Considering how fast our pursuer could move, I wasn’t sure there was sufficient time to fool with a Trump yet.
As I hurried along I began feeling somewhat woozy, and my extremities seemed extremely distant. It occurred to me immediately that the flower smells might be a bit narcotic. Great. That was all I needed, to get caught up in a drug high while trying to bring Luke back from one. I could make out a still, slightly elevated clearing in the distance, though, and I headed for it. Hopefully, we could rest there for a bit while I regained my mental footing and decided what to do next. So far, I could detect no sounds of pursuit.
Rushing on, I could feel myself beginning to reel. My equilibrium was becoming impaired. I suddenly felt a fear of falling, almost akin to acrophobia. For it occurred to me that if I fell I might not be able to rise again, that I might succumb to a drugged sleep and be discovered and dispatched by the creature of Chaos while I dozed. Overhead, the colors of the flowers ran together, flowing and tangling like a mass of ribbons in a bright stream. I tried to control my breathing, to take in as little of the effluvia as possible. But this was difficult, as winded as I was becoming.
But I did not fall, though I collapsed beside Luke at the center of the clearing after I’d lowered him to the ground. He remained unconscious, a peaceful expression on his face. A wind swept our hillock from the direction of its far side, where nasty-looking, spiked plants of a nonflowering variety grew. Thus, I no longer smelled the seductive odors of the giant flower field, and after a time my head began to clear. On the other hand, I realized that this meant that our own scents were being borne back in the direction of the cave. Whether the Fire Angel could unmask them within the heady perfumes, I did not know, but providing it with even that much of an opportunity made me feel uncomfortable.
Years ago, as an undergraduate, I had tried some LSD. It had scared me so badly that I’d never tried another hallucinogen since. It wasn’t simply a bad trip. The stuff had affected my shadow-shifting ability. It is kind of a truism that Amberites can visit any place they can imagine, for everything is out there, somewhere, in Shadow. By combining our minds with motion we can tune for the shadow we desire. Unfortunately, I could not control what I was imagining. Also unfortunately, I was transported to those places. I panicked, and that only made it worse. I could easily have been destroyed, for I wandered through the objectified jungles of my subconscious and passed some time in places where the bad things dwell. After I came down I found my way back home, turned up whimpering on Julia’s doorstep, and was a nervous wreck for days. Later, when I told Random about it, I learned that he had had some similar experiences. He had kept it to himself at first as a possible secret weapon against the rest of the family, but later, after they’d gotten back onto decent terms with each other, he had decided to share the information in the interest of survival. He was surprised to learn then that Benedict, Gerard, Fiona, and Bleys knew all about it—though their knowledge had come from other hallucinogens and, strangely, only Fiona had ever considered its possibility as an in-family weapon. She’d shelved the notion, though, because of its unpredictability. This had been sometime back, however, and in the press of other business in recent years it had slipped his mind; it simply had not occurred to him that a new arrival such as myself should perhaps be cautioned.
Luke had told me that his attempted invasion of the Keep of the Four Words, by means of a glider-borne commando team, had been smashed. Since I had seen the broken gliders at various points within the walls during my own visit to that place, it was logical to assume that Luke had been captured. Therefore, it seemed a fairly strong assumption that the sorcerer Mask had done whatever had been done to him to bring him to this state. It would seem that this simply involved introducing a dose of a hallucinogen to his prison fare and turning him loose to wander and look at the pretty lights. Fortunately, unlike myself, his mental travelings had involved nothing more threatening than the brighter aspects of Lewis Carroll. Maybe his heart was purer than mine. But the deal was weird any way you looked at it. Mask might have killed him or kept him in prison or added him to the coat-rack collection. Instead, while what had been done was not without risk, it was something which would wear off eventually and leave him chastened but at liberty. It was more a slap on the wrist than a real piece of vengeance. This, for a member of the House which had previously held sway in the Keep and would doubtless like to do so again. Was Mask supremely confident? Or did he not really see Luke as much of a threat?
And then there is the fact that our shadow-shifting abilities and our sorcerous abilities come from similar roots—the Pattern or the Logrus. It had to be that messing with one also messed with the other. That would explain Luke’s strange ability to summon me to him as by a massive Trump sending, when in actuality there was no Trump. His drug-enhanced abilities of visualization must have been so intense that the card’s physical representation of me was unnecessary. And his skewed magical abilities would account for all of the preliminary byplay, all of the odd, reality-distorting experiences I’d had before he actually achieved contact. This meant that either of us could become very dangerous in certain drugged states. I’d have to remember that. I hoped he wouldn’t wake up mad at me for hitting him, before I could talk to him a bit. On the other hand; the tranquilizer would hopefully keep him happy while the other stuff worked at detoxing him.
I massaged a sore muscle in my left leg and rose to my feet. I caught hold of Luke beneath the armpits and dragged him about twenty paces farther along into the clearing. Then I sighed and returned to the spot where I had rested. There was not sufficient time to flee farther. And as the wailing increased in volume and the giant flowers swayed in a line heading directly toward me—glimpses of a darker form becoming visible amid the stalks—I knew that with the Jabberwock fled the Fire Angel was back on the job, and since this confrontation seemed inevitable, this clearing was as good a place to meet it as any, and better than most.
Chapter 2
I unfastened the bright thing at my belt and began to unfold it. It made a series of clicking noises as I did so. I was hoping that I was making the best choice available to me rather than, say, a bad mistake.
The creature took longer than I’d thought to pass among the flowers. This could mean it was having trouble following my trail amid its exotic surroundings. I was hoping, though, that it meant it had been sufficiently injured in its encounter with the Jabberwock that it had lost something of its strength and speed.
Whatever, the final stalks eventually swayed and were crushed. The angular creature lurched forward and halted to stare at me with unblinking eyes. Frakir panicked, and I calmed her. This was a little out of her league. I had a Fire Fountain spell left, but I didn’t even bother with it. I knew it wouldn’t stop the thing, and it might make it behave unpredictably.
“I can show you the way back to Chaos,” I shouted, “if you’re getting homesick!”
It wailed softly and advanced. So much for sentimentality.
It came on slowly, oozing fluids from a dozen wounds. I wondered if it were still capable of rushing me or if its present pace were the best it could manage. Prudence dictated I assume the worst, so I tried to stay loose and ready to match anything it attempted.
It didn’t rush, though. It just kept coming, like a small tank with appendages. I didn’t know where its vital spots were located. Fire Angel anatomy had not been high on my list of interests back home. I gave myself a crash course, however, in the way of gross observation as it approached. Unfortunately, this gave me to believe that it kept everything important well protected. Too bad.
I did not want to attack in case it was trying to sucker me into something. I was not aware of its combat tricks, and I did not care to expose myself unduly in order to learn them. Better to stay on the defense and let it make the first move, I told myself. But it just kept moving nearer and nearer. I knew that I’d be forced to do something soon, even if it were only to retreat. . . .
One of those long, folded front appendages flashed out toward me, and I spun to the side and cut. Snicker-snack! The limb lay on the ground, still moving. So I kept moving, also. One-two, one-two! Snicker-snack!
The beast toppled slowly to its left, for I had removed all of the limbs on that side of its body.
Then, overconfident, I passed too near in racing to round its head to reach the other side and repeat the performance while it was still traumatized and collapsing. Its other extensor flashed out. But I was too near and it was still toppling: Instead of catching me with its clawed extremity, it hit me with the equivalent of shin or forearm. The blow struck me across the chest and I was knocked backward.
The Chronicles of Amber Page 128
