Sign of Chaos

Chapter 1

I felt vaguely uneasy, though I couldn’t say why. It did not seem all that unusual to be drinking with a White Rabbit, a short guy who resembled Bertrand Russell, a grinning Cat, and my old friend Luke Raynard, who was singing Irish ballads while a peculiar landscape shifted from mural to reality at his back. Well, I was impressed by the huge blue Caterpillar smoking the hookah atop the giant mushroom because I know how hard it is to keep a water pipe lit. Still, that wasn’t it. It was a convivial scene, and Luke was known to keep pretty strange company on occasion. So why should I feel uneasy?

The beer was good and there was even a free lunch. The demons tormenting the red-haired woman tied to the stake had been so shiny they’d hurt to look at. Gone now, but the whole thing had, been beautiful. Everything was beautiful. When Luke sang of Galway Bay it had been so sparkling and lovely that I’d wanted to dive in and lose myself there. Sad, too.

Something to do with the feeling… Yes. Funny thought. When Luke sang a sad song I felt melancholy. When it was a happy one I was greatly cheered. There seemed an unusual amount of empathy in the air. No matter, I guess. The light show was superb…

I sipped my drink and watched Humpty teeter, there at the end of the bar. For a moment I tried to remember when I’d come into this place, but that cylinder wasn’t hitting. It would come to me, eventually. Nice party…

I watched and listened and tasted and felt, and it was all great. Anything that caught my attention was fascinating. Was there something I’d wanted to ask Luke? It seemed there was, but he was busy singing and I couldn’t think of it now, anyway.

What had I been doing before I’d come into this place? Trying to recall just didn’t seem worth the effort either. Not when everything was so interesting right here and now.

It seemed that it might have been something important, though. Could that be why I felt uneasy? Might it be there was business I had left unfinished and should be getting back to?

I turned to ask the Cat but he was fading again, still seeming vastly amused. It occurred to me then that I, too, could do that. Fade, I mean; and go someplace else. Was that how I had come here and how I might depart? Possibly. I put down my drink and rubbed my eyes and my temples. Things seemed to be swimming inside my head, too.

I suddenly recalled a picture of me. On a giant card. A Trump. Yes. That was how I’d gotten here. Through the card…

A hand fell upon my shoulder and I turned. It belonged to Luke, who grinned at me as he edged up to the bar for a refill.

“Great party, huh?” he said.

“Yeah, great. How’d you find this place?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I forget. Who cares?”

He turned away, a brief blizzard of crystals swirling between us. The Caterpillar exhaled a purple cloud. A blue moon was rising.

What is wrong with this picture? I asked myself.

I had a sudden feeling that my critical faculty had been shot off in the war, because I couldn’t focus on the anomalies I felt must be present. I knew that I was caught up in the moment, but I couldn’t see my way clear.

I was caught up…

I was caught…

How?

Well… It had all started when I’d shaken my own hand. No. Wrong. That sounds like Zen and that’s not how it was. The hand I shook emerged from the space occupied by the image of myself on the card that went away. Yes, that was it… After a fashion.

I clenched my teeth. The music began again. There came a soft scraping sound near to my hand on the bar. When I looked I saw that my tankard had been refilled. Maybe I’d had too much already. Maybe that’s what kept getting in the way of my thinking. I turned away. I looked off to my left, past the place where the mural on the wall became the real landscape. Did that make me a part of the mural? I wondered suddenly.

No matter. If I couldn’t think here… I began running… to the left. Something about this place was messing with my head, and it seemed impossible to consider the process while I was a part of it. I had to get away in order to think straight, to determine what was going on.

I was across the bar and into that interface area where the painted rocks and trees became three-dimensional. I pumped my arms as I dug in. I head the wind without feeling it.

Nothing that lay before me seemed any nearer. I was moving, but Luke began singing again.

I halted. I turned, slowly, because it sounded as if he were standing practically beside me. He was. I was only a few paces removed from the bar. Luke smiled and kept singing.

“What’s going on?” I asked the Caterpillar.

“You’re looped in Luke’s loop,” it replied.

“Come again?” I said.

It blew a blue smoke ring, sighed softly, and said, “Luke’s locked in a loop and you’re lost in the lyrics. That’s all.”

“How’d it happen?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” it replied.

“Uh, how does one get unlooped?”

“Couldn’t tell you that either.”

I turned to the Cat, who was coalescing about his grin once again.

“I don’t suppose you’d know —” I began.

“I saw him come in and I saw you come in later,” said the Cat, smirking. “And even for this place your arrivals were somewhat… unusual — leading me to conclude that at least one of you is associated with magic.”

I nodded.

“Your own comings and goings might give one pause,” I observed.

“I keep my paws to myself,” he replied. “Which is more than Luke can say.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s caught in a contagious trap.”

“How does it work?” I asked.

But he was gone again, and this time the grin went too.

Contagious trap? That seemed to indicate that the problem was Luke’s, and that I had been sucked into it in some fashion. This felt right, though it still gave me no idea as to what the problem was or what I might do about it.

I reached for my tankard. If I couldn’t solve my problem, I might as well enjoy it. As I took a slow sip I became aware of a strange pair of pale, burning eyes gazing into my own. I hadn’t noticed them before, and the thing that made them strange was that they occupied a shadowy corner of the mural across the room from me that, and the fact that they were moving, drifting slowly to my left.

It was kind of fascinating, when I lost sight of the eyes but was still able to follow whatever it was from the swaying of grasses as it passed into the area toward which I had been headed earlier. And far, far off to my right beyond Luke — I now detected a slim gentleman in a dark jacket, palette and brush in hand, who was slowly extending the mural. I took another sip and returned my attention to the progress of whatever it was that had moved from flat reality to 3-D. A gunmetal snout protruded from between a rock and a shrub; the pale eyes blazed above it; blue saliva dripped from the dark muzzle and steamed upon the ground. It was either quite short or very crouched, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was the entire crowd of us that it was studying or me in particular. I leaned to one side and caught Humpty by the belt or the necktie, whichever it was, just as he was about to slump to the side…

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me what sort of creature that is?”

I pointed just as it emerged — many-legged, long-tailed, dark-scaled, undulating, and fast. Its claws were red, and it raised its tail as it raced toward us.

Humpty’s bleary eyes moved toward my own, drifted past.

“I am not here, sir,” he began, “to remedy your zoological ignore — My God! It’s — ”

It flashed across the distance, approaching rapidly. Would it reach a spot shortly where its cunning would become a treadmill operation — or had that effect only applied to me on trying to get away from this place?

The segments of its body slid from side to side, it hissed like a leaky pressure cooker, and steaming slaver marked its trail from the fiction of paint. Rather than slowing, its speed seemed to increase.

My left hand jerked forward of its own volition and a series of words rose unbidden to my lips. I spoke them just as the creature crossed the interface I had been unable to pierce earlier, rearing as it upset a vacant table and bunching its members as if about to spring.

“A Bandersnatch!” someone cried.

“A frumious Bandersnatch!” Humpty corrected.

As I spoke the final word and performed the ultimate gesture, the image of the Logrus swam before my inner vision. The dark creature, having just extended its foremost talons, suddenly drew them back, clutched with them against the upper left quadrant of its breast, rolled its eyes, emitted a soft moaning sound, exhaled heavily, collapsed, fell to the floor, and rolled over onto its back, its many feet extended upward into the air.

The Cat’s grin appeared above the creature. The mouth moved.

“A dead frumious Bandersnatch,” it stated.

The grin drifted toward me, the rest of the Cat occurring about it like an afterthought.

“That was a cardiac arrest spell, wasn’t it?” it inquired.

“I guess so,” I said. “It was sort of a reflex. Yeah, I remember now. I did still have that spell hanging around.”

“I thought so,” it observed. “I was sure that there was magic involved in this party.”

The image of the Logrus which had appeared to me during the spell’s operation had also served the purpose of switching on a small light in the musty attic of my mind. Sorcery. Of course.

I — Merlin, son of Corwin — am a sorcerer, of a variety seldom encountered in the areas I have frequented in recent years. Lucas Raynard — also known as Prince Rinaldo of Kashfa — is himself a sorcerer, albeit of a style different than my own. And the Cat, who seemed somewhat sophisticated in these matters, could well have been correct in assessing our situation as the interior of a spell. Such a location is one of the few environments where my sensitivity and training would do little to inform me as to the nature of my predicament. This, because my faculties would also be caught up in the manifestation and subject to its forces, if the thing were at all self consistent. It struck me as something similar to color blindness. I could think of no way of telling for certain what was going on, without outside help.

As I mused over these matters, the King’s horses and men arrived beyond the swinging doors at the front of the place. The men entered and fastened lines upon the carcass of the Bandersnatch. The horses dragged the thing off. Humpty had climbed down to visit the rest room while this was going on. Upon his return he discovered that he was unable to achieve his former position atop the barstool. He shouted to the King’s men to give him a hand, but they were busy guiding the defunct Bandersnatch among tables and they ignored him.

Luke strolled up, smiling.

“So that was a Bandersnatch,” he observed. “I’d always wondered what they were like. Now, if we could just get a Jabberwock to stop by — ”

“Sh!” cautioned the Cat. “It must be off in the mural somewhere, and likely it’s been listening. Don’t stir it up! It may come whiffling through the tulgey wood after your ass. Remember the jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Don’t go looking for troub —”

The Cat cast a quick glance toward the wall and phased into and out of existence several times in quick succession. Ignoring this, Luke remarked, “I was just thinking of the Tenniel illustration.”

The Cat materialized at the far end of the bar, downed the Hatter’s drink, and said, “I hear the burbling, and eyes of flame are drifting to the left.”

I glanced at the mural, and I, too, saw the fiery eyes and heard a peculiar sound.

“It could be any of a number of things,” Luke remarked.

The Cat moved to a rack behind the bar and reached high up on the wall to where a strange weapon hung, shimmering and shifting in shadow. He lowered the thing and slid it along the bar; it came to rest before Luke.

“Better have the Vorpal Sword in hand, that’s all I can say.”

Luke laughed, but I stared fascinated at the device which looked as if it were made of moth wings and folded moonlight…

Then I heard the burbling again.

“Don’t just stand there in uffish thought!” said the Cat, draining Humpty’s glass and vanishing again.

Still chuckling, Luke held out his tankard for a refill. I stood there in uffish thought: The spell I had used to destroy the Bandersnatch had altered my thinking in a peculiar fashion. It seemed for a small moment in its aftermath that things were beginning to come clear in my head. I attributed this to the image of the Logrus which I had regarded briefly. And so I summoned it again.

The Sign rose before me, hovered. I held it there. I looked upon it. It seemed as if a cold wind began to blow through my mind. Drifting bits of memory were drawn together, assembled themselves into an entire fabric, were informed with understanding. Of course…

The burbling grew louder and I saw the shadow of the Jabberwock gliding among distant trees, eyes like landing lights, lots of sharp edges for biting and catching…

And it didn’t matter a bit. For I realized now what was going on, who was responsible, how and why.

I bent over, leaning far forward, so that my knuckles just grazed the toe of my right boot.

“Luke,” I said, “we’ve got a problem.”

He turned away from the bar and glanced down at me.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Those of the blood of Amber are capable of terrific exertions. We are also able to sustain some pretty awful beatings. So, among ourselves, these things tend to cancel out to some degree. Therefore, one must go about such matters just right if one is to attend to them at all…

I brought my fist up off the floor with everything I had behind it, and I caught Lake on the side of the jaw with a blow that lifted him above the ground as it turned him and sent him sprawling across a table which collapsed, to continue sliding backward the length of the entire serving area where he finally came to a crumpled halt at the feet of the quiet Victorian-looking gentleman — who had dropped his paintbrush and stepped away quickly when Luke came skidding toward him. I raised my tankard with my left hand and poured its contents over my right fist, which felt as if I had just driven it against a mountainside. As I did this the lights grew dim and there was a moment of utter silence.

Then I slammed the mug back onto the bartop. The entire place chose that moment in which to shudder, as if from an earth tremor. Two bottles fell from a shelf; a lamp swayed, the burbling grew fainter. I glanced to my left and saw that the eerie shadow of the Jabberwock had retreated somewhat within the tulgey wood. Not only that, the painted section of the prospect now extended a good deal farther into what had seemed normal space, and it looked to be continuing its advance in that direction, freezing that corner of the world into flat immobility. It became apparent from whiffle to whiffle that the Jabberwock was now moving away, to the left, hurrying ahead of the flatness. Tweedledum, Tweedledee, the Dodo, and the Frog began packing their instruments.

I started across the bar toward Luke’s sprawled form. The Caterpillar was disassembling his hookah, and I saw that his mushroom was tilted at an odd angle. The White Rabbit beat it down a hole to the rear, and I head Humpty muttering curses as he swayed atop the bar stool he had just succeeded in mounting.

I saluted the gentleman with the palette as I approached.

“Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But believe me, this is for the better.”

I raised Luke’s limp form and slung him over my shoulder. A flock of playing cards flew by me. I dew away from them in their rapid passage.

“Goodness! It’s frightened the Jabberwock!” the man remarked, looking past me.

“What has?” I asked, not really certain that I wished to know.

“That,” he answered, gesturing toward the front of the bar.

I looked and I staggered back and I didn’t blame the Jabberwock a bit.

It was a twelve-foot Fire Angel that had just entered russet-colored, with wings like stained-glass windows and, along with intimations of mortality, it brought me recollections of a praying mantis, with a spiked collar and thornlike claws protruding through its short fur at every suggestion of an angle. One of these, in fact, caught on and unhinged a swinging door as it came inside. It was a Chaos beast — rare, deadly, and, highly intelligent. I hadn’t seen one in years, and I’d no desire to see one now; also, I’d no doubt that I was the reason it was here. For a moment I regretted having wasted my cardiac arrest spell on a mere Bandersnatch — until I recalled that Fire Angels have three hearts. I glanced quickly about as it spied me, gave voice to a brief hunting wail, and advanced.

“I’d like to have had some time to speak with you,” I told the artist. “I like your work. Unfortunately — ”

“I understand.”

“So long.”

“Good luck.”

I stepped down into the rabbit hole and ran, bent far forward because of the low overhead. Luke made my passage particularly awkward, especially on the turns. I heard a scrabbling noise fat to the rear, with a repetition of the hunting wail. I was consoled, however, by the knowledge that the Fire Angel would actually have to enlarge sections of the tunnel in order to get by. The bad news was that it was capable of doing it. The creatures are incredibly strong and virtually indestructible.

I kept running till the floor dipped beneath my feet.

Then I began falling. I reached out with my free hand to catch myself, but there was nothing to catch hold of. The bottom had fallen out. Good. That was the way I’d hoped and half expected it would be. Luke uttered a single soft moan but did not stir.

We fell. Down, down, down, like the man said. It was a well, and either it was very deep or we were falling very slowly. There was twilight all about us, and I could not discern the walls of the shaft. My head cleared a bit further, and I knew that it would continue to do so for as long as I kept control of one variable: Luke. High in the air overhead I heard the hunting wail once again. It was followed immediately by a strange burbling sound. Frakir began pulsing softly upon my wrist again, not really telling me anything I didn’t already know. So I silenced her again.

Clearer yet. I began to remember… My assault on the Keep of the Four Worlds and my recovery of Luke’s mother, Jasra. The attack of the werebeast. My odd visit with Vinta Bayle, who wasn’t really what she seemed.

My dinner in Death Alley… The Dweller, San Francisco, the crystal cave… Clearer and clearer.

… And louder and louder the hunting wail of the Fire Angel above me. It must have made it through the tunnel and be descending now. Unfortunately, it possessed wings, while all I could do was fall.

I glanced upward. Couldn’t make out its form, though. Things seemed darker up that way than down below. I hoped this was a sign that we were approaching something in the nature of a light at the end of the tunnel, as I couldn’t think of any other way out. It was too dark to view a Trump or to distinguish enough of the passing scene to commence a shadow shift.

I felt we were drifting now, rather than falling, at a rate that might permit us to land intact. Should it seem otherwise when we neared the bottom, then a possible means of further slowing our descent came to mind — an adaptation of one of the spells I still carried with me.

However, these considerations were not worth much should we be eaten on the way down — a distinct possibility, unless of course our pursuer were not all that hungry, in which case it might only dismember us. Consequently, it might become necessary to try speeding up to stay ahead of the beast — which of course would cause us to smash when we hit.

Decisions, decisions.

Luke stirred slightly upon my shoulder. I hoped he wasn’t about to come around, as I didn’t have time to mess with a sleep-spell and I wasn’t really in a good position to slug him again. That pretty much left Frakir.

But if he were borderline, then choking might serve to rouse him rather than send him back — and I did want him in decent shape. He knew too many things I didn’t, things I now needed.

We passed through a slightly brighter area, and I was able to distinguish the walls of the shaft for the first time and to note that they were covered with graffiti in a language that I did not understand. I was reminded of a strange short story by Jamaica Kincaid, but it bore me no clues for deliverance. Immediately following our passage through that band of illumination, I distinguished a small spot of light far below. At almost the same moment’ I heard the wail once again, this time very near.

I looked up in time to behold the Fire Angel passing through the glow. But there was another shape close behind it, and it wore a vest and burbled. The Jabberwock was also on the way down, and it seemed to be making the best time of any of us. The question of its purpose was immediately prominent; as it gained, the circle of light grew and Luke stirred again. This question was quickly answered; however, as it caught up with the Fire Angel and attacked.

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 righthand 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 B-12 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?” if 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 noshed 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 hill, 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 hallucinogene 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 coatrack 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.