Blood of Amber

Chapter 9

Power.

I remembered the day I had stood atop a rocky prominence. Fiona — dressed in lavender, belted with silver — stood in a higher place before me and somewhat to my right. She held a silver mirror in her right hand, and she looked downward through the haze to the place where the great tree towered. There was a total stillness about us, and even our own small sounds came muffled. The upper portions of the tree disappeared into a low-hanging fog bank. The light that filtered through limned it starkly against another pile of fog which hung at its back, rising to join with the one overhead. A bright, seemingly self-illuminated line was etched into the ground near the base of the tree, curving off to vanish within the fog. Far to my left, a brief arc of a similar intensity was also visible, emerging from and returning to the billowing white wall.

“What is it, Fiona?” I asked. “Why did you bring me to this place?”

“You’ve heard of it,” she replied. “I wanted you to see it.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of it. I’ve no idea what I’m looking at.

“Come,” she said, and she began to descend.

She disdained my hand, moving quickly and gracefully, and we came down from the rocks and moved nearer to the tree. There was something vaguely familiar there, but I could not place it.

“From your father,” she said at last. “He spent a long time telling you his story. Surely he did not omit this part.”

I halted as understanding presented itself, tentatively at first.

“That tree,” I said.

“Corwin planted his staff when he commenced the creation of the new Pattern,” she said. “It was fresh. It took root.”

I seemed to feel a faint vibration in the ground.

Fiona turned her back on the prospect, raised the mirror she carried and angled it so that she regarded the scene over her right shoulder.

“Yes,” she said, after several moments. Then she extended the mirror to me. “Take a look,” she told me, “as I just did.”

I accepted it, held it, adjusted it and stared.

The view in the minor was not the same as that which had presented itself to my unaided scrutiny. I was able to see beyond the tree now, through the fog, to discern most of the strange Pattern which twisted its bright way about the ground, working its passages inward to its off-center terminus, the only spot still concealed by an unmoving tower of white, within which tiny lights like stars seemed to burn.

“It doesn’t look like the Pattern back in Amber,” I said.

“No,” she answered. “Is it anything like the Logrus?”

“Not really. The Logrus actually alters itself somewhat, constantly. Still, it’s more angular, whereas this is mostly curves and bends.”

I studied it a little longer, then returned her looking glass.

“Interesting spell on the mirror,” I commented, for I had been studying this also, while I held it.

“And much more difficult than you’d think,” she responded, “for there’s more than fog in there. Watch.”

She advanced to the beginning of the Pattern, near the great tree, where she moved as if to set her foot upon the bright trail. Before it arrived, however, a small electrical discharge crackled upward and made contact with her shoe. She jerked her foot back quickly.

“It rejects me,” she said. “I can’t set foot on it. Try it.”

There was something in her gaze I did not like, but I moved forward to where she had been standing.

“Why couldn’t your mirror penetrate all the way to the center of the thing?” I asked suddenly.

“The resistance seems to go up the farther you go in. It is greatest there,” she replied. “But as to why, I do not know.”

I hesitated a moment longer. “Has anyone tried it other than yourself?”

“I brought Bleys here,” she answered. “It rejected him too.”

“And he’s the only other one who’s seen it?”

“No, I brought Random. But he declined to try. Said he didn’t care to screw around with it right then.”

“Prudent, perhaps. Was he wearing the Jewel at the time?”

“No. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“See what it does for you.”

“All right.”

I raised my right foot and lowered it slowly toward the line. About a foot above it, I stopped.

“Something seems to be holding me back,” I said.

“Strange. There is no electrical discharge for you.”

“Small blessing,” I responded, and I pushed my foot a couple of inches farther downward. Finally, I sighed. “Nope, Fi. I can’t.”

I read the disappointment in her features.

“I was hoping,” she said as I drew back, “that someone other than Corwin might be able to walk it. His son seemed the most likely choice.”

“Why is it so important that someone walk it? Just because it’s there?”

“I think it’s a menace,” she said. “It has to be explored and dealt with.”

“A menace? Why?”

“Amber and Chaos are the two poles of existence, as we understand it,” she said, “housing as they do the Pattern and the Logrus. For ages there has been something of an equilibrium between them. Now, I believe, this bastard Pattern of your father’s is undermining their balance.”

“In what fashion?”

“There have always been wavelike exchanges between Amber and Chaos. This seems to be setting up some interference.”

“It sounds more like tossing an extra ice cube into a drink,” I said. “It should settle down after a while.”

She shook her head. “Things are not settling. There have been far more Shadow-storms since this thing was created. They rend the fabric of Shadow. They affect the nature of reality itself.”

“No good,” I said. “Another event a lot more important along these lines occurred at the same time. The original Pattern in Amber was damaged and Oberon repaired it. The wave of Chaos which came out of that swept through all of Shadow. Everything was affected. But the Pattern held and things settled again. I’d be more inclined to think of all those extra Shadow-storms as being in the nature of aftershocks.”

“It’s a good argument,” she said. “But what if it’s wrong?”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Merle, there’s some kind of power here, an immense amount of power.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“It has always been our way to keep an eye on power, to try to understand it, to control it. Because one day it might become a threat. Did Corwin tell you anything, anything at all, as to exactly what this represents and how we might get a handle on it?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing beyond the fact that he made it in a hurry to replace the old one, which he’d figured Oberon might not have succeeded in repairing.”

“If only we could find him.”

“There still hasn’t been any word?”

“Droppa claims that he saw him at the Sands, back on the shadow Earth you both favor. He said he was in the company of an attractive woman, and they were both having a drink and listening to a music group. He waved and headed toward them through a crowd, and he thought that Corwin saw him. When he got to their table, though, they were gone.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“That’s not much.”

“I know. If he’s the only one who can walk this damned thing, though, and if it is a menace, we could be in big trouble one day.”

“I think you’re being an alarmist, aunty.”

“I hope you’re right, Merle. Come on, I’ll take you home.”

I studied the place once more, for details as well as feeling, because I wanted to be able to construct a Trump for it. I never told anyone that there had been no resistance as I had lowered my foot, because once you set foot into the Pattern or the Logrus there is no turning back. You either proceed to the end or are destroyed by it. And as much as I love mysteries, my break was at its end and I had to get back to class.

Power.

We were together in a wood within the Black Zone, that area of Shadow with which Chaos holds commerce. We were hunting zhind, which are horned, short, black, fierce and carnivorous. I do not much like hunting because I do not much like killing things I don’t really have to. However, it was Jurt’s idea, and since it was possibly also my last chance to work some reconciliation with my brother before I departed, I had decided to take him up on the offer. Neither of us was that great an archer, and zhind are pretty fast. So with any luck at all nothing would get dead and we’d have some chance to talk and perhaps come away on better terms at the end of the hunt.

On one occasion when we’d lost the trail and were resting, we talked for a long time about archery, court politics, Shadow and the weather. He had been much more civil to me of late, which I took for a good sign. He’d let his hair grow in such a fashion as to cover the area of his missing left ear. Ears are hard to regenerate. We did not speak of our duel, or of the argument that had led up to it. Because I would soon be out of his life, I felt perhaps he wished to close this chapter of his existence in a relatively friendly fashion, with both of us going our ways with a memory we could feel good about. I was half right, anyway.

Later, when we had halted for a cold hail lunch, he asked me, “So, what does it feel like?”

“What?” I said.

“The power,” he answered. “The Logrus power — to walk in Shadow, to work with a higher order of magic than the mundane.”

I didn’t really want to go into detail, because I knew he’d prepared himself to traverse the Logrus on three different occasions and had backed down at the last moment each time, when he’d looked into it. Perhaps the skeletons of failures that Suhuy keeps around had troubled him also. I don’t think Jurt was aware that I knew about the last two times he’d changed his mind. So I decided to downplay my accomplishment.

“Oh, you don’t really feel any different,” I said, “until you’re actually using it. Then it’s hard to describe.”

“I’m thinking of doing it soon myself,” he said. “It would be good to see something of Shadow, maybe even find a kingdom for myself somewhere. Can you give me any advice?”

I nodded. “Don’t look back,” I said. “Don’t stop to think. Just keep going.”

He laughed. “Sounds like orders to an army,” he said.

“I suppose there is a similarity.”

He laughed again. “Let’s go kill us a zhind,” he said.

That afternoon, we lost a trail in a thicket full of fallen branches. We’d heard the zhind crash through it, but it was not immediately apparent which way it had gone. I had my back to Jurt and was facing the forward edge of the place, searching for some sign, when Frakir constricted tightly about my wrist, then came loose and fell to the ground.

I bent over to retrieve her, wondering what had happened, when I heard a thank from overhead. Glancing upward, I saw an arrow protruding from the bole of the tree before me. Its height above the ground was such that had I remained standing it would have entered my back.

I turned quickly toward Jurt, not even straightening from my crouch. He was fitting another arrow to his bow.

He said, “Don’t look back. Don’t stop to think. Just keep going,” and he laughed.

I dove toward him as he raised the weapon. A better archer would probably have killed me. I think when I moved he panicked and released the arrow prematurely, though, because it caught in the side of my leather vest and I didn’t feel any pain.

I clipped him above the knees, and he dropped the bow as he fell over backward. He drew his hunting knife, rolled to the side and swung the weapon toward my throat. I caught his wrist with my left hand and was cast onto my back by the force of his momentum. I struck at his face with my right fist while holding the blade away from me. He blocked the punch and kneed me in the balls.

The point of the blade dropped to within inches of my throat as this blow collapsed a big piece of my resistance. Still aching, I was able to turn my hip to prevent another ball-buster, simultaneous with casting my right forearm beneath his wrist and cutting my hand in the process. Then I pushed with my right, pulled with my left and rolled to the left with the force of the turn. His arm was jerked free from my still-weakened grasp, and he rolled off to the side and I tried to recover — and then I heard him scream.

Coming up onto my knees, I saw that he lay upon his left side where he had come to a stop and the knife was several feet beyond him, caught in a tangle of broken branches. Both hands were raised to his face, and his cries were wordless, animal-like bleats.

I made my way over to him to see what had happened, with Frakir held ready to wrap about his throat in case it were some sort of trick he was playing.

But it was not. When I reached him I saw that a sharp limb of a fallen branch had pierced his right eye. There was blood on his cheek and the side of his nose.

“Stop jerking around!” I said. “You’ll make it worse. Let me get it out.”

“Keep your damn hands off me!” he cried.

Then, clenching his teeth and grimacing horribly, he caught hold of the limb with his right hand and drew his head back. I had to look away. He made a whimpering noise several moments later and collapsed, unconscious. I ripped off my left shirt sleeve, tore a strip from it, folded it into a pad and placed it over his damaged eye. With another strip, I tied it into place there. Frakir found her way back about my wrist, as usual.

Then I dug out the Trump that would take us home and raised him in my arms. Mom wasn’t going to like this.

Power.

It was a Saturday. Luke and I had been hang gliding all morning. Then we met Julia and Gail for lunch, and afterward we took the Starburst out and sailed all afternoon. Later, we’d hit the bar and grill at the marina where I bought the beers while we waited for steaks, because Luke had slammed my right arm flat against the tabletop when we’d wrist wrestled to see who paid for drinks.

Someone at the next table said, “If I had a million dollars, tax free, I’d…” and Julia had laughed as she listened.

“What’s funny?” I asked her.

“His wish list,” she said. “I’d want a closet full of designer dresses and some elegant jewelry to go with them. Put the closet in a really nice house, and put the house someplace where I’d be important…”

Luke smiled. “I detect a shift from money to power,” he said.

“Maybe so,” she replied. “But what’s the difference, really?”

“Money buys things,” Luke said. “Power makes things happen. If you ever have a choice, take the power.”

Gail’s usual faint smile had faded, and she wore a very serious expression.

“I don’t believe power should be an end in itself,” she said. “One has it only to use it in certain ways.”

Julia laughed. “What’s wrong with a power trip?” she asked. “It sounds like fun to me.”

“Only till you run into a greater power,” Luke said.

“Then you have to think big,” Julia answered.

“That’s not right,” Gail said. “One has duties and they come first.”

Luke was studying her now, and he nodded.

“You can keep morality out of it,” Julia said.

“No, you can’t,” Luke responded.

“I disagree,” she said.

Luke shrugged.

“She’s right,” Gail said suddenly. “I don’t see that duty and morality are the same thing.”

“Well, if you’ve got a duty,” Luke said, “something you absolutely must do — a matter of honor, say — then that becomes your morality.”

Julia looked at Luke, looked at Gail. “Does that mean we just agreed on something?” she asked.

“No,” Luke said, “I don’t think so.”

Gail took a drink. “You’re talking about a personal code that need not have anything to do with conventional morality.”

“Right,” Luke said.

“Then it’s not really morality. You’re just talking duty,” she said.

“You’re right on the duty,” Luke answered. “But it’s still morality.”

“Morality is the values of a civilization,” she said.

“There is no such thing as civilization,” Luke replied. “The word just means the art of living in cities.”

“All right, then. Of a culture,” she said.

“Cultural values are relative things,” Luke said, smiling, “and mine say I’m right.”

“Where do yours come from?” Gail asked, studying him carefully.

“Let’s keep this pure and philosophical, huh?” he said.

“Then maybe we should drop the term entirely,” Gail said, “and just stick with duty.”

“What happened to power?” Julia asked.

“It’s in there somewhere,” I said.

Suddenly Gail looked perplexed, as if our discussion were not something which had been repeated a thousand times in different forms, as if it had actually given rise to some new turn of thought.

“If they are two different things,” she said slowly, “which one is more important?

“They’re not,” Luke said. “They’re the same.”

“I don’t think so,” Julia told him. “But duties tend to be clear-cut, and it sounds as if you can choose your own morality. So if I had to have one I’d go with the morality.”

“I like things that are clear-cut,” Gail said.

Luke chugged his beer, belched lightly. “Shit!” he said. “Philosophy class isn’t till Tuesday. This is the weekend. Who gets the next round, Merle?”

I placed my left elbow on the tabletop and opened my hand.

While we pushed together, the tension building and building between us, he said through clenched teeth, “I was right, wasn’t I?”

“You were right,” I said, just before I forced his arm all the way down.

Power.

I removed my mail from the little locked box in the hallway and carried it upstairs to my apartment. There were two bills, some circulars and something thick and first class without a return address on it.

I closed the door behind me, pocketed my keys and dropped my briefcase onto a nearby chair. I had started toward the sofa when the telephone in the kitchen rang.

Tossing the mail toward the coffee table, I turned and started for the kitchen. The blast that occurred behind me might or might not have been strong enough to knock me over. I don’t know, because I dove forward of my own volition as soon as it occurred. I hit my head on the leg of the kitchen table. It dazed me somewhat, but I was otherwise undamaged. All the damage was in the other room. By the time I got to my feet the phone had stopped ringing.

I already knew there were lots of easier ways to dispose of junk mail, but I wondered for a long time afterward who it was that had been on the telephone.

I sometimes remembered the first of the series, too, the truck that had come rushing toward me. I had only caught a glimpse of the driver’s face before I’d moved — inert, he was completely expressionless, as if he were dead, hypnotized, drugged or somehow possessed. Choose any of the above, I decided, and maybe more than one.

And then there was the night of the muggers. They had attacked me without a word. When it was all over and I was heading away, I had glanced back once. I thought I’d glimpsed a shadowy figure draw back into a doorway up the street — a smart precaution, I’d say, in light of what had been going on. But of course it could have been someone connected with the attack, too. I was torn. The person was too far off to have been able to give a good description of me. If I went back and it turned out to be an innocent bystander, there would then be a witness capable of identifying me. Not that I didn’t think it was an open-and-shut case of selfdefense, but there’d be a lot of hassle. So I said the hell with it, and I walked on. Another interesting April 30.

The day of the rifle. There had been two shots as I’d hurried down the street. They’d both missed me before I’d realized what was going on, chipping brickbats from the side of the building to my left. There was no third shot, but there was a thud and a splintering sound from the building across the street. A third-floor window stood wide open.

I hurried over. It was an old apartment house and the front door was locked, but I didn’t slow down for niceties. I located the stair and mounted it. When I came to what I thought was the proper room, I decided to try the door the old-fashioned way and it worked. It was unlocked.

I stood to the side and pushed it open and saw that the place was unfurnished and empty. Unoccupied, too, it seemed. Could I have been wrong? But then I saw that the window facing the street stood wide and I saw what lay upon the floor. I entered and closed the door behind me.

A broken rifle lay in the corner. From markings on the stock I guessed that it had been swung with great force against a nearby radiator before it had been cast aside. Then I saw something else on the floor, something wet and red. Not much. Just a few drops.

I searched the place quickly. It was small. The one window in its single bedroom also stood open and I went to it. There was a fire escape beyond it, and I decided that it might be a good way for me to make my exit, too.

There were a few more drops of blood on the black metal, but that was it. No one was in sight below, or in either direction.

Power.

To kill. To preserve. Luke, Jasra, Gail. Who was responsible for what?

The more I thought of it, the more it seemed possible that there might have been a telephone call on the morning of the open gas jets, too. Could that be what had roused me to an awareness of danger? Each time I thought of these matters there seemed to be a slight shifting of emphasis. Things stood in a different light. According to Luke and the pseudo Vinta, I was not in great danger in the later episodes, but it seemed that any of those things could have taken me out. Who was I to blame? The perpetrator? Or the savior who barely saved? And who was which? I remembered how my father’s story had been complicated by that damned auto accident which played like Last Year at Marienbad — though his had seemed simple compared to everything that was coming down on me. At least he knew what he had to do most of the time. Could I be the inheritor of a family curse involving complicated plotting?

Power.

I remembered Uncle Suhuy’s final lesson. He had spent some time following my completion of the Logrus in teaching me things I could not have learned before then. There came a time when I thought I was finished. I had been confirmed in the Art and dismissed. It seemed I had covered all the basics and anything more would be mere elaboration. I began making preparations for my journey to the shadow Earth. Then one morning Suhuy sent for me. I assumed that he just wanted to say good-bye and give me a few friendly words of advice.

His hair is white, he is somewhat stooped and there are days when he carries a staff. This was one of them. He had on his yellow caftan, which I had always thought of as a working garment rather than a social one.

“Are you ready for a short trip?” he asked me.

“Actually, it’s going to be a long one,” I said. “But I’m almost ready.”

“No,” he said. “That was not the journey I meant.”

“Oh. You mean you want to go somewhere right now?”

“Come,” he said.

So I followed him, and the shadows parted before us. We moved through increasing bleakness, passing at last into places that bore no sign of life whatsoever. Dark, sterile rock lay all about us, stark in the brassy light of a dim and ancient sun. This final place was chill and dry, and when we halted and I looked about, I shivered.

I waited, to see what he had in mind. But it was a long while before he spoke. He seemed oblivious of my presence for a time, simply staring out across the bleak landscape.

Finally, “I have taught you the ways of Shadow,” he said slowly, “and the composition of spells and their working.”

I said nothing. His statement did not seem to require a reply.

“So you know something of the ways of power,” he continued. “You draw it from the Sign of Chaos, the Logrus, and you invest it in various ways.”

He glanced at me at last, and I nodded.

“I understand that those who bear the Pattern, the Sign of Order, may do similar things in ways that may or may not be similar,” he went on. “I do not know for certain, for I am not an initiate of the Pattern. I doubt the spirit could stand the strain of knowing the ways of both. But you should understand that there is another way of power, antithetical to our own.

“I understand,” I said, for he seemed to be expecting an answer.

“But you have a resource available to you,” he said, “which those of Amber do not. Watch!”

His final word did not mean that I should simply observe as he leaned his staff against the side of a boulder and raised his hands before him. It meant that I should have the Logrus before me so I could see what he was doing at that level. So I summoned my vision and watched him through it.

Now the vision that hung before him seemed a continuation of my own, stretched and twisting. I saw and felt it as he joined his hands with it and extended a pair of its jagged limbs outward across the distance to touch upon a boulder that lay downhill of us.

“Enter the Logrus now yourself,” he said, “remaining passive. Stay with me through what I am about to do. Do not, at any time, attempt to interfere.”

“I understand,” I said.

I moved my hands into my vision, shifting them about, feeling after congruity, until they became a part of it.

“Good,” he said, when I had settled them into place. “Now all you need do is observe, on all levels.”

Something pulsed along the limbs he controlled, passing down to the boulder. I was not prepared for what came after.

The image of the Logrus turned black before me, becoming a seething blot of inky turmoil. An awful feeling of disruptive power surged through me, an enormous destructive force that threatened to overwhelm me, to carry me into the blissful nothingness of ultimate disorder. A part of me seemed to desire this, while another part was screaming wordlessly for it to cease. But Suhuy maintained control of the phenomenon, and I could see how he was doing it, just as I had seen how he had brought it into being in the first place.

The boulder became one with the turmoil, joined it and was gone. There was no explosion, no implosion, only the sensation of great cold winds and cacophonous sounds. Then my uncle moved his hands slowly apart, and the lines of seething blackness followed them, flowing out in both directions from that area of chaos which had been the boulder, producing a long dark trench wherein I beheld the paradox of both nothingness and activity.

Then he stood still, arresting it at that point. Moments later, he spoke. “I could simply release it,” he stated, “letting it run wild. Or I could give it a direction and then release it.”

As he did not continue, I asked, “What would happen then? Would it simply continue until it had devastated the entire shadow?”

“No,” he replied. “There are limiting factors. The resistance of Order to Chaos would build as it extended itself. There would come a point of containment.”

“And if you remained as you are, and kept summoning more?”

“One would do a great deal of damage.”

“And if we combined our efforts?”

“More extensive damage. But that is not the lesson I had in mind. I will remain passive now while you control it.”

So I took over the Sign of the Logrus and ran the line of disruption back upon itself in a great circle, like a dark moat surrounding us.

“Banish it now,” he said, and I did.

Still, the winds and the sounds continued to rage, and I could not see beyond the dark wall which seemed to be advancing slowly upon us from all sides.

“Obviously, the limiting factor has yet to be achieved,” I observed.

He chuckled. “You’re right. Even though you stopped, you exceeded a certain critical limit, so that it is now running wild.”

“Oh,” I said. “How long till those natural limitations you mentioned dampen it?”

“Sometime after it has completely annihilated the area on which we stand,” he said.

“It is receding in all directions as well as heading this way?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. What is the critical mass?”

“I’ll have to show you. But we’d better find a new place first. This one is going away. Take my hand.”

I did, and he conducted me to another shadow. This time I summoned the Chaos and conducted the operations while he observed. This time I did not let it run wild.

When I had finished and I stood, shaken, staring into a small crater I had caused, he placed his hand on my shoulder and told me, “As you knew in theory, that is the ultimate power behind your spells. Chaos itself. To work with it directly is dangerous. But, as you have seen, it can be done. Now you know it, your training is complete.”

It was more than impressive. It was awesome. And for most situations I could visualize it was rather like using nukes for skeet shooting. Offhand, I couldn’t think of any circumstances under which I would care to employ the technique, until Victor Melman really pissed me off.

Power, in its many shapes, varieties, sizes and styles, continues to fascinate me. It has been so much a part of my life for so long that I feel very familiar with it, though I doubt that I will ever understand it fully.