“Gryll,” I said, naming an old family servant from the Courts.
“Aye, Lord,” it replied. “The same as taught you the bonedance game.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Business before pleasure, Lord. I’ve followed the black thread a long and horrid way to come calling.”
“The threads didn’t reach this far,” I said, “without an awful lot of push. Maybe even not then. Do they now?”
“It’s easier now,” he replied.
“How so?”
“His Majesty Swayvill, King of Chaos, sleeps this night with the ancestors of darkness. I was sent to fetch you back for the ceremonies.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Yeah. Well, okay. Sure. Just let me get my stuff together. How’d it happen, anyhow?”
I pulled on my boots, donned the rest of my garments, buckled on my blade.
“I am not privy to any details. Of course, it is common knowledge that his health was poor.”
“I want to leave a note,” I said.
He nodded.
“A brief one, I trust.”
“Yes.”
I scrawled on a piece of parchment from the writing table, Coral, Called away on family business. I’ll be in touch, and I laid it beside her hand.
“All right,” I said. “How do we do this?”
“I will bear you upon my back, Prince Merlin, as I did long ago.”
I nodded as a flood of childhood memories returned to me. Gryll was immensely strong, as are most demons. But I recalled our games, at Pit’s-edge and out over the darkness, in burial chambers, caves, still-smoking battlefields, ruined temples, chambers of dead sorcerers, private hells. I always seemed to have more fun playing with demons than with my mother’s relatives by blood or marriage. I even based my main Chaos form upon one of their kind.
He absorbed a chair from the room’s corner for extra mass, changing shape to accommodate my adult size. As I climbed upon his elongated torso, catching a firm hold, he exclaimed, “Ah, Merlin! What magics do you bear these days?”
“I’ve their control, but not full knowledge of their essence,” I answered. “They’re a very recent acquisition. What is it that you feel?”
“Heat, cold, strange music,” he replied. “From all directions. You have changed.”
“Everyone changes,” I said as he moved toward the window. “That’s life.”
A dark thread lay upon the wide sill. He reached out and touched it as he launched himself.
There came a great rushing of wind as we fell downward, moved forward, rose. Towers flashed past, wavering. The stars were bright, a quarter moon just risen, illuminating the bellies of a low line of clouds. We soared, the castle and the town dwindling in an eyeblink. The stars danced, became streaks of light. A band of sheer, rippling blackness spread about us, widening. The Black Road, I suddenly thought. It is like a temporary version of the Black Road, in the sky. I glanced back. It was not there. It was as if it were somehow reeling in as we rode. Or was it reeling us in?
The countryside passed beneath us like a film played at triple speed. Forest, hill, and mountain peak fled by. Our black way was a great ribbon heaving before us, patches of light and dark like daytime cloud shadows sliding past. And then the tempo increased, staccato. I noted of a sudden that there was no longer any wind. Abruptly, the moon was high overhead, and a crooked mountain range snaked beneath us. The stillness had a dream-like quality to it, and in an instant the moon had fallen lower. A line of light cracked the world to my right and stars began to go out. There was no feeling of exertion in Gryll’s body as we plunged along that black way; and the moon vanished and light grew buttery yellow along a line of clouds, acquiring a pink cast even as I watched.
“The power of Chaos rises,” I remarked.
“The energy of disorder,” he replied.
“There is more to this than you’ve told me,” I said.
“I am but a servant,” Gryll responded, “and not privy to the councils of the mighty.”
The world continued to brighten, and for as far ahead as I could see our black ribbon rippled. We were passing high over mountainous terrain. And clouds blew apart and new ones formed at a rapid rate. We had obviously begun our passage through Shadow. After a time, the mountains wore down and rolling plains slid by. Suddenly the sun was in the middle of the sky. We seemed to be passing just above our black way, Gryll’s toes barely grazing it as we moved. At times his wings hardly fluttered before me, at other times they thrummed like those of a hummingbird, into invisibility.
The sun grew cherry-red far to my left. A pink desert spread beneath us. . . .
Then it was dark again and the stars turned like a great wheel.
Then we were low, barely passing above the tops of the trees. . . .
We burst into the air over a busy downtown street, lights on poles and the fronts of vehicles, neon in windows. The warm, stuffy, dusty, gassy smell of city rose up about us. A few pedestrians glanced upward, barely seeming to note our passage.
Even as we flashed across a river, cresting the house tops of suburbia, the prospect wavered and we passed over a primordial landscape of rock, lava, avalanche, and shuddering ground, two active volcanoes—one near, one far—spewing smoke against a blue-green sky.
“This, I take it, is a shortcut?” I said.
“It is the shortest cut,” Gryll replied.
We entered a long night, and at some point it seemed that our way took us beneath deep waters, bright sea creatures hovering and darting both near at hand and in the middle distance. Dry and uncrushed, the black way protected us.
“It is as major an upheaval as the death of Oberon,” Gryll volunteered. “Its effects are rippling across Shadow.”
“But Oberon’s death coincided with the re-creation of the Pattern,” I said. “There was more to it than the death of a monarch of one of the extremes.”
“True,” Gryll replied, “but now is a time of imbalance among the forces. This adds to it. It will be even more severe.”
We plunged into an opening in a dark mass of stone. Lines of light streaked past us. Irregularities were limned in a pale blue. Later—how long, I do not know—we were in a purple sky, with no transition that I can recall from the dark sea bottom. A single star gleamed far ahead. We sped toward it.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the Pattern has grown stronger than the Logrus,” he replied.
“How did that happen?”
“Prince Corwin drew a second Pattern at the time of the confrontation between the Courts and Amber.”
“Yes, he told me about it. I’ve even seen it. He feared Oberon might not be able to repair the original.”
“But he did, and so now there are two.”
“Yes?”
“Your father’s Pattern is also an artifact of order. It served to tip the ancient balance in the favor of Amber.”
“How is it you are aware of this, Gryll, when no one back in Amber seems to know it or saw fit to tell me?”
“Your brother Prince Mandor and the Princess Fiona suspected this and sought evidence. They presented their findings to your uncle, Lord Suhuy. He made several journeys into Shadow and became persuaded that this is the case. He was preparing his findings for presentation to the king when Swayvill suffered his final illness. I know these things because it was Suhuy who sent me for you, and he charged me to tell them to you.”
“I just assumed it was my mother who’d sent for me.”
“Suhuy was certain she would—which is why he wanted to reach you first. What I have told you concerning your father’s Pattern is not yet common knowledge.”
“What am I supposed to do about it?”
“He did not entrust me with that information.”
The star grew brighter. The sky was filled with splashes of orange and pink. Shortly, lines of green light joined them, and they swirled like streamers about us.
We raced on, and the c
onfigurations came to dominate the sky fully, like a psychedelic parasol rotating slowly. The landscape became a total blur. I felt as if a part of me dozed, though I am certain I did not lose consciousness. Time seemed to be playing games with my metabolism. I grew enormously hungry and my eyes ached.
The star brightened. Gryll’s wings took on a prismatic shimmer. We seemed to be moving at an incredible pace now.
Our strand curved upward at its outer edges. The process continued as we advanced until it seemed we were moving in a trough. Then they met overhead, and it was as if we sped down a gun barrel, aimed at the blue-white star.
“Anything else you’re supposed to tell me?”
“Not so far as I know.”
I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her behind in Brand’s apartment. Why had I done that? I—my mind felt cloudy, the memory dream-like.
This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory. Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the clouding effect of glamour. I had walked into a spell back in Brand’s apartment. I’d no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I’d activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more general, enlivened by the disaster—possibly even an unintentional side effect of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.
For that matter, I doubted any generality about the business. It was just too right to have been a booby-trap Brand had left lying about. It had confounded a trained sorcerer, me. Perhaps it was only my present distancing from the vicinity of its occurrence that had helped to clear my mind. As I reviewed my actions from the time of exposure I could see that I had been moving in something of a haze since then. And the more I reviewed the more I felt the spell to have been specifically tailored to enfold me. Not understanding it, I could not consider myself free of it with this knowledge either.
Whatever it was, it had caused me to abandon Frakir without thinking twice about it, and it had caused me to feel—well—strange. I could not tell exactly how it might have influenced, might still be influencing, my thoughts and my feelings, the usual problem when one is caught up inside a spell. But I didn’t see how it could possibly have been the late Brand himself who had set the thing up against such an unpredictable occurrence as my having rooms next to his old ones years after his death, from which I would be prompted to enter his quarters in the disastrous aftermath of an improbable confrontation between the Logrus and the Pattern in an upper hall of Amber Castle. No, it seemed that someone else had to be behind it. Jurt? Julia? It didn’t seem too likely that they’d be able to operate undetected in the heart of Amber Castle. Who then? And could it have had anything to do with that episode in the Hall of Mirrors? I drew blanks. Were I back there now I might be able to come up with a spell of my own to ferret out the one responsible. But I wasn’t, and any investigation at that end of things would have to wait.
The light ahead flashed more brightly now, winking from heavenly blue to baleful red.
“Gryll,” I said. “Do you detect a spell upon me?”
“Aye, m’lord,” he replied.
“Why didn’t you mention it?”
“I thought it one of your own—for defense, perhaps.”
“Can you lift it? I’m at a disadvantage, here on the inside.”
“’Tis too tangled in your person. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?”
“Only that it’s there, m’lord. Does seem rather heavy about the head, though.”
“Could be coloring my thoughts a certain way, then?”
“Aye, a pale blue.”
“I wasn’t referring to your manner of perceiving it. Only to the possibility that it could be influencing my thinking.”
His wings flashed blue, then red. Our tunnel expanded suddenly and the sky grew bright with the crazy colors of Chaos. The star we followed now took on the proportions of a small light—magically enhanced, of course—within a high tower of a sepulchral castle, all gray and olive, atop a mountain the bottom and middle of which had been removed The island of stone floated above a petrified forest. The trees burned with opal fires—orange, purple, green.
“I’d imagine it could be disentangled,” Gryll observed. “But its unraveling be a bafflement to this poor demon.”
I grunted. I watched the streaking scenery for a few moments. Then, “Speaking of demons . . . ” I said.
“Yes?”
“What can you tell me about the sort known as a ty’iga?” I asked.
“They dwell far out beyond the Rim,” he replied, “and may be the closest of all creatures to the primal Chaos. I do not believe they even possess true bodies of the material sort. They have little to do with other demons, let alone anyone else.”
“Ever know any of them—uh—personally?”
“I have encountered a few—now and then,” he replied.
We rose higher. The castle had been doing the same. A fall of meteors burned its way, brightly, silently, behind it.
“They can inhabit a human body, take it over.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“I know of one who has done this thing, several times. But an unusual problem has come up. It apparently took control of one on the human’s deathbed. The passing of the human seemed to lock the ty’iga in place. It cannot vacate the body now. Do you know of any way it might escape?”
Gryll chuckled.
“Jump off a cliff, I suppose. Or fall on a sword.”
“But what if it’s tied to its host so closely now that this doesn’t free it?”
He chuckled again.
“That’s the breaks of the game, in the body-stealing business.”
“I owe this one something,” I said. “I’d like to help her—it.”
He was silent for a time, then replied, “An older, wiser ty’iga might know something about these matters. And you know where they are.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry I can’t be more help. They’re an old breed, ty’iga.”
And now we bore down upon that tower. Our roadway under the shifting kaleidoscope that was the sky dwindled before us to but the tiniest of streaks. Gryll beat his way toward the light in the window and I peered past him.
I glanced downward. The prospect was dizzying. From some distant place a growling sound came up, as if portions of the earth itself were moving slowly against each other—a common enough occurrence in this vicinity. The winds beat at my garments. A strand of tangerine clouds beaded the sky to my left. I could make out detail work in the castle walls. I caught sight of a figure within the room of the light.
Then we were very near, and then through the window and inside. A large, stooped, gray and red demonic form, horned and half-scaled, regarded me with elliptically pupiled yellow eyes. Its fangs were bared in a smile.
“Uncle!” I cried as I dismounted. “Greetings!”
Gryll stretched and shook himself as Suhuy rushed forward and embraced me—carefully.
“Merlin,” he said at last, “welcome home. I regret the occasion but rejoice in your presence. Gryll has told you . . . ?”
“Of the passing of His Highness? Yes. I’m sorry.”
He released me and stepped back a pace.
“It is not as if it were unanticipated,” he said. “Just the opposite. Too much so, in fact. Yet there is no proper time for such an event.”
“True,” I replied, massaging a certain stiffness out of my left shoulder and groping in my hip pocket after a comb. “And he had been ailing for so long that I had grown used to it,” I said. “It was almost as if he’d come to terms with the weakness.”
Suhuy nodded. Then, “Are you going to transform?” he asked.
“It’s been a rough day,” I told him. “I’d as soon save my energy, unless there’s some demand of prot
ocol.”
“None at all, just now,” he replied. “Have you eaten?”
“Not recently.”
“Come then,” he said. “Let’s find you some nourishment.”
He turned and walked toward the far wall. I followed him. There were no doors in the room, and he had to know all the local Shadow stress points, the Courts being opposite to Amber in this regard. While it’s awfully hard to pass through Shadow in Amber, the shadows are like frayed curtains in the Courts—often, you can look right through into another reality without even trying. And, sometimes, something in the other reality may be looking at you. Care must be taken, too, not to step through into a place where you will find yourself in the middle of the air, underwater, or in the path of a raging torrent. The Courts were never big on tourism.
Fortunately, the stuff of Shadow is so docile at this end of reality that it can be easily manipulated by a shadowmaster—who can stitch together their fabrics to create a way. Shadowmasters are technicians of locally potent skill, whose ability derives from the Logrus, though they need not be initiates. Very few are, although all initiates are automatically members of the Shadowmaster Guild. They’re like plumbers or electricians about the Courts, and their skills vary as much as their counterparts on the Shadow Earth—a combination of aptitude and experience. While I’m a guild member I’d much rather follow someone who knows the ways than feel them out for myself. I suppose I should say more about this matter. Maybe I will sometime.
When we reached the wall, of course, it wasn’t there. It just sort of grew misty and faded away, and we passed through the space where it had been—or, rather, a different analogous space—and we were passing down a green stairway. Well, it wasn’t exactly a stairway. It was a series of unconnected green discs, descending in spiral fashion, proper riser and tread distance apart, sort of floating there in the night air. They passed about the exterior of the castle, finally stopping before a blank wall. Before we reached that wall we passed through several moments of bright daylight, a brief flurry of blue snow, and the apse of something like a cathedral without an altar, skeletons occupying pews at either hand. When we finally came to the wall we passed through it, emerging in a large kitchen. Suhuy led me to the larder and indicated I should help myself. I found some cold meat and bread and made myself a sandwich, washing it down with tepid beer. He nibbled at a piece of bread himself and sipped at a flagon of the same brew. A bird appeared overhead in full flight, cawing raucously, vanishing again before it had passed the entire length of the room.
The Chronicles of Amber Page 169
