Sign of the Unicorn

Chapter 10

A raft of moonbeams… the ghostly torchlight, like fires in black-and-white films… stars… a few fine filaments of mist…

I leaned upon the rail, I looked across the world… Utter silence held the night, the dream-drenched city, the entire universe from here. Distant things — the sea, Amber, Arden, Garnath, the Lighthouse of Cabra, the Grove of the Unicorn, my tomb atop Kolvir… Silent, far below, yet clear, distinct… A god’s eye view, I’d say, or that of a soul cut loose and drifting high… In the middle of the night…

I had come to the place where the ghosts play at being ghosts, where the omens, portents, signs, and animate desires thread the nightly avenues and palace high halls of Amber in the sky, Tir-na Nog’th…

Turning my back to the rail and dayworld’s vestiges below, I regarded the avenues and dark terraces, the halls of the lords, the quarters of the low… The moonlight is intense in Tir-na Nog’th, silvers over the facing sides of all our imaged places… Stick in hand, I passed forward, and the strangelings moved about me, appeared at windows, on balconies, on benches, at gates… Unseen I passed, for truly put, in this place I was the ghost to whatever their substance…

Silence and silver… Only the tapping of my stick, and that mostly muted… More mists adrift toward the heart of things… The palace a white bonfire of it… Dew, like drops of mercury on the finely sanded petals and stems in the gardens by the walks… The passing moon as painful to the eye as the sun at midday, the stars outshone, dimmed by it… Silver and silence… The shine…

I had not planned on coming, for its omens — if that they truly be — are deceitful, its similarities to the lives and places below unsettling, its spectacle often disconcerting. Still, I had come… A part of my bargain with time…

After I had left Brand to continue his recovery in the keeping of Gerard, I had realized that I required additional rest myself and sought to obtain it without betraying my disability. Fiona was indeed flown, and neither she nor Julian could be reached by means of the Trumps. Had I told Benedict and Gerard what Brand had told me, I was certain that they would have insisted we begin efforts at tracking her down, at tracking both of them. I was equally certain that such efforts would prove useless.

I had sent for Random and Ganelon and retired to my quarters, giving out that I intended to pass the day in rest and quiet thought in anticipation of spending the night in Tir-na Nog’th — reasonable behavior for any Amberite with a serious problem. I did not put much stock in the practice, but most of the others did. As it was the perfect time for me to be about such a thing, I felt that it would make my day’s retirement believable. Of course, this obliged me to follow through on it that night. But this, too, was good. It gave me a day, a night, and part of the following day in which to heal sufficiently to carry my wound that much the better. I felt that it would be time well spent.

You’ve got to tell someone, though. I told Random and I told Ganelon. Propped in my bed, I told them of the plans of Brand, Fiona, and Bleys, and of the Eric-Julian-Caine cabal. I told them what Brand had said concerning my return and his own imprisonment by his fellow conspirators. They saw why the survivors of both factions — Fiona and Julian — had run off: doubtless to marshal their forces, hopefully to expend them on one another, but probably not. Not immediately, anyhow. More likely, one or the other would move to take Amber first.

“They will just have to take numbers and wait their turns, like everyone else,” Random had said.

“Not exactly,” I remembered saying. “Fiona’s allies and the things that have been coming in on the black road are the same guys.”

“And the Circle in Lorraine?” Ganelon had asked.

“The same. That was how it manifested itself in that shadow. They came a great distance.”

“Ubiquitous bastards,” Random had said.

Nodding, I had tried to explain.

…And so I came to Tir-na Nog’th. When the moon rose and the apparition of Amber came faintly into the heavens, stars showing through it, pale halo about its towers, tiny flecks of movement upon its walls, I waited, waited with Ganelon and Random, waited on the highest crop of Kolvir, there where the three steps are fashioned, roughly, out of the stone…

When the moonlight touched them, the outline of the entire stairway began to take shape, spanning the great gulf to that point above the sea the vision city held. When the moonlight fell full upon it, the stair had taken as much of substance as it would ever possess, and I set my foot on the stone… Random held a full deck of Trumps and I’d mine within my jacket. Grayswandir, forged upon this very stone by moonlight, held power in the city in the sky, and so I bore my blade along. I had rested all day, and I held a staff to lean upon. Illusion of distance and time… The stairs through the Corwin-ignoring sky escalate somehow, for it is not a simple arithmetic progression up them once motion has commenced. I was here, I was there, I was a quarter of the way up before my shoulder had forgotten the clasp of Ganelon’s hand… If I looked too hard at any portion of the stair, it lost its shimmering opacity and I saw the ocean far below as through a translucent lens… I lost track of time, though it seems it’s never long, afterward… As far beneath the waves as I’d soon be above them, off to my right, glittering and curling, the outline of Rebma appeared within the sea. I thought of Moire, wondered how she fared. What would become of our deepwater double should Amber ever fall? Would the image remain unshattered in its mirror? Or would building blocks and bones be taken and shaken alike, dice in the deepwater casino canyons our fleets fly over? No answer in the man drowning, Corwin-confounding waters, though I felt a twinge in my side.

At the head of the stair, I entered, coming into the ghost city as one would enter Amber after mounting the great forestair up Kolvir’s seaward face. I leaned upon the rail, looked across the world.

The black road led off to the south. I could not see it by night. Not that it mattered. I knew now where it led. Or rather where Brand said that it led. As he appeared to have used up a life’s worth of reasons for lying, I believed that I knew where it led.

All the way.

From the brightness of Amber and the power and clean-shining splendor of adjacent Shadow, off through the progressively darkening slices of image that lead away in any direction, farther, through the twisted landscapes, and farther still, on through places seen only when drunk, delirious, or dreamingly illy, and farther yet again, running beyond the place where I stop… Where I stop…

How to put simply that which is not a simple thing…? Solipsism, I suppose, is where we have to begin — the notion that nothing exists but the self, or, at least, that we cannot truly be aware of anything but our own existence and experience. I can find, somewhere, off in Shadow, anything I can visualize. Any of us can. This, in good faith, does not transcend the limits of the ego. It may be argued, and in fact has, by most of us, that we create the shadows we visit out of the stuff of our own psyches, that we alone truly exist, that the shadows we traverse are but projections of our own desires… Whatever the merits of this argument, and there are several, it does go far toward explaining much of the family’s attitude toward people, places, and things outside of Amber. Namely, we are toymakers and they, our playthings — sometimes dangerously animated, to be sure; but this, too, is part of the game. We are impresarios by temperament, and we treat one another accordingly. While solipsism does tend to leave one slightly embarrassed on questions of etiology, one can easily avoid the embarrassment by refusing to admit the validity of the questions. Most of us are, as I have often observed, almost entirely pragmatic in the conduct of our affairs. Almost…

Yet — yet there is a disturbing element in the picture. There is a place where the shadows go mad… When you purposely push yourself through layer after layer of Shadow, surrendering — again, purposely — a piece of your understanding every step of the way, you come at last to a mad place beyond which you cannot go. Why do this? In hope of an insight, I’d say, or a new game… But when you come to this place, as we all have, you realize that you have reached the limit of Shadow or the end of yourself — synonymous terms, as we had always thought. Now, though…

Now I know that it is not so, now as I stand, waiting, without the Courts of Chaos, telling you what it was like, I know that it is not so. But I knew well enough then, that night, in Tir-na Nog’th, had known earlier, when I had fought the goat-man in the Black Circle of Lorraine, had known that day in the Lighthouse of Cabra, after my escape from the dungeons of Amber, when I had looked upon ruined Garnath… I knew that that was not all there was to it. I knew because I knew that the black road ran beyond that point. It passed through madness into chaos and kept going, the things that traveled across it came from somewhere, but they were not my things. I had somehow helped to grant them this passage, but they did not spring from my version of reality. They were their own, or someone else’s — small matter there — and they tore holes in that small metaphysic we had woven over the ages. They had entered our preserve, they were not of it, they threatened it, they threatened us. Fiona and Brand had reached beyond everything and found something, where none of the rest of us had believed anything to exist. The danger released was, on some level, almost worth the evidence obtained: we were not alone, nor were shadows truly our toys. Whatever our relationship with Shadow, I could nevermore regard it in the old light…

All because the black road headed south and ran beyond the end of the world, where I stop.

Silence and silver… Walking away from the rail, leaning on my stick, passing through the fog-spun, mist-woven, moonlight-brushed fabric of vision within the troubling city… Ghosts… Shadows of shadows… Images of probability… Might-bes and might-havebeens… Probability lost… Probability regained…

Walking, across the promenade now… Figures, faces, many of them familiar… What are they about? Hard to say… Some lips move, some faces show animation. There are no words there for me. I pass among them, unnoted.

There… One such figure… Alone, but waiting… Fingers unknotting minutes, casting them away… Face averted, and I wish to see it… A sign that I will or should… She sits on a stone bench beneath a gnarly tree… She gazes in the direction of the palace… Her form is quite familiar… Approaching, I see that it is Lorraine… She continues to regard a point far beyond me, does not hear me say that I have avenged her death.

But mine is the power to be heard here… It hangs in the sheath at my side.

Drawing Grayswandir, I raise my blade overhead where moonlight tricks its patterns into a kind of motion. I place it on the ground between us.

“Corwin!”

Her head snaps back, her hair rusts in the moonlight, her eyes focus.

“Where did you come from? You’re early.”

“You wait for me?”

“Of course. You told me to —”

“How did you come to this place?”

“This bench…?”

“No. This city.”

“Amber? I do not understand. You brought me yourself. I —”

“Are you happy here?”

“You know that I am, so long as I am with you.”

I had not forgotten the evenness of her teeth, the hint of freckles beneath the soft light’s veil…

“What happened? It is very important. Pretend for a moment that I do not know, and tell me everything that happened to us after the battle of the Black Circle in Lorraine.”

She frowned. She stood. She turned away.

“We had that argument,” she said. “You followed me, drove away Melkin, and we talked. I saw that I was wrong and I went with you to Avalon. There, your brother Benedict persuaded you to talk with Eric. You were not reconciled, but you agreed to a truce because of something that he told you. He swore not to harm you and you swore to defend Amber, with Benedict to witness both oaths. We remained in Avalon while you obtained chemicals, and we went to another place later, a place where you purchased strange weapons. We won the battle, but Eric lies wounded now.”

She stood and faced me.

“Are you thinking of ending the truce? Is that it, Corwin?”

I shook my head, and though I knew better I reached to embrace her. I wanted to hold her, despite the fact that one of us did not exist, could not exist, when that tiny gap of space between our skins was crossed, to tell her that whatever bad happened or would happen —

The shock was not severe, but it caused me to stumble. I lay across Grayswandir… My staff had fallen to the grass several paces away. Rising to my knees, I saw that the color had gone out of her face, her eyes, her hair. Her mouth shaped ghost words as her head turned, searching. Sheathing Grayswandir, recovering my staff, I rose once again. Her seeing passed through me and focused. Her face grew smooth, she smiled, started forward. I moved aside and turned, watching her run toward the man who approached, seeing her clasped in his arms, glimpsing his face as he bent it toward her own, lucky ghost, silver rose at the throat of his garment, kissing her, this man I would never know, silver on silence, and silver…

Walking away… Not looking back… Crossing the promenade…

The voice of Random: “Corwin, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Anything interesting happening?”

“Later, Random.”

“Sorry.”

And sudden, the gleaming stair before the palace grounds… Up it, and a turn to the right… Slow and easy now, into the garden… Ghost flowers throb on their stalks all about me, ghost shrubs spill blossoms like frozen firework displays. Sans colors, all… Only the essentials sketched in, degrees of luminosity in silver the terms of their claim on the eye. Only the essentials here. Is Tir-na Nog’th a special sphere of Shadow in the real world, swayed by the promptings of the id — a full-sized projective test in the sky, perhaps even a therapeutic device? Despite the silver, I’d say, if this is a piece of the soul, the night is very dark… And silent…

Walking… By fountains, benches, groves, cunning alcoves in mazes of hedging… Passing along the walks, up an occasional step, across small bridges… Moving past ponds, among trees, by an odd piece of statuary, a boulder, a sundial (moondial, here?), bearing to my right, pressing steadily ahead, rounding, after a time, the northern end of the palace, swinging left then, past a courtyard overhung by balconies, more ghosts here and there upon them, behind them, within…

Circling around to the rear, just to see the back gardens this way, again, for they are lovely by normal moonlight in the true Amber.

A few more figures, talking, standing… No motion but my own is apparent.

…And feel myself drawn to the right. As one should never turn down a free oracle, I go.

…Toward a mass of high hedging, a small open area within, if it is not overgrown… Long ago there was…

Two figures, embracing, within. They part as I begin to turn away. None of my affair, but… Deirdre… One of them is Deirdre. I know who the man will be before he turns. It is a cruel joke by whatever powers rule that silver, that silence… Back, back, away from that hedge… Turning, stumbling, rising again, going, away, now, quickly…

The voice of Random: “Corwin? Are you all right?”

“Later! Damn it! Later!”

“It is not too long till sunrise, Corwin. I felt I had better remind you —”

“Consider me reminded!”

Away, now, quickly… Time, too, is a dream in Tir-na Nog’th. Small comfort, but better than none. Quickly, now, away, going, again…

…Toward the palace, bright architecture of the mind or spirit, more clearly standing now than the real ever did… To judge perfection is to render a worthless verdict, but I must see what lies within… This must be an end of sorts, for I am driven. I had not paused to recover my staff from where it had fallen this time, among the sparkling grasses. I know where I must go, what I must do. Obvious now, though the logic which has seized me is not that of the waking mind.

Hurrying, climbing, up to the rearward portal… The side-biting soreness comes home again… Across the threshold, in…

Into an absence of starshine and moonlight. The illumination is without direction, seeming almost to drift and to pool, aimlessly. Wherever it misses, the shadows are absolute, occulting large sections of room, hallway, closet, and stair.

Among them, through them, almost running now… Monochrome of my home… Apprehension overtakes me… The black spots seem like holes in this piece of reality now… I fear to pass too near. Fall in and be lost…

Turning… Crossing… Finally… Entering… The throne room… Bushels of blackness stacked where my eyes would drive down lines of seeing to the throne itself…

There, though, is movement.

A drifting, to my right, as I advance.

A lifting, with the drifting.

The boots on feet on legs come into view as forward pressing I near the place’s base.

Grayswandir comes into my hand, finding its way into a patch of light, renewing its eyetricking, shapeshifting stretch, acquiring a glow of its own…

I place my left foot on the step, rest my left hand on my knee. Distracting but bearable, the throb of my healing gut. I wait for the blackness, the emptiness, to be drawn, appropriate curtain for the theatrics with which I am burdened this night.

And it slides aside, revealing a hand, an arm, a shoulder, the arm a glinting, metallic thing, its planes like the facets of a gem, its wrist and elbow wondrous weaves of silver cable, pinned with flecks of fire, the hand, stylized, skeletal, a Swiss toy, a mechanical insect, functional, deadly, beautiful in its way…

And it slides aside, revealing the rest of the man…

Benedict stands relaxed beside the throne, his left and human hand laid lightly upon it. He leans toward the throne. His lips are moving.

And it slides aside, revealing the throne’s occupant…

“Dara!”

Turned toward her right, she smiles, she nods to Benedict, her lips move. I advance and extend Grayswandir till its point rests lightly in the concavity beneath her sternum…

Slowly, quite slowly, she turns her head and meets my eyes. She takes on color and life. Her lips move again, and this time her words reach me.

“What are you?”

“No. That is my question. You answer it. Now.”

“I am Dara. Dara of Amber, Queen Dara. I hold this throne by right of blood and conquest. Who are you?”

“Corwin. Also of Amber. Don’t move! I did not ask who you are —”

“Corwin is dead these many centuries. I have seen his tomb.”

“Empty.”

“Not so. His body lies within.”

“Give me your lineage!”

Her eyes move to her right, where the shade of Benedict still stands. A blade has appeared in his new hand, seeming almost an extension of it, but he holds it loosely, casually. His left hand now rests on her arm. His eyes seek me in back of Grayswandir’s hilt. Failing, they go again to that which is visible — Grayswandir — recognizing its design…

“I am the great-granddaughter of Benedict and the hellmaid Lintra, whom he loved and later slew.” Benedict winces at this, but She continues. “I never knew her. My mother and my mother’s mother were born in a place where time does not run as in Amber. I am the first of my mother’s line to bear all the marks of humanity. And you, Lord Corwin, are but a ghost from a long dead past, albeit a dangerous shade. How you came here, I do not know. But it was wrong of you. Return to your grave. Trouble not the living.”

My hand wavers. Grayswandir strays no more than half an inch. Yet that is sufficient.

Benedict’s thrust is below my threshold of perception. His new arm drives the new hand that holds the blade that strikes Grayswandir, as his old arm draws his old hand, which has seized upon Dara, back across the arm of the throne… This subliminal impression reaches me moments later, as I fall back, catting air, recover and strike an en garde, reflexively… It is ridiculous for a pair of ghosts to fight. Here, it is uneven. He cannot even reach me, whereas Grayswandir —

But no! His blade changes hands as he releases Dara and pivots, bringing them together, old hand and new. His left wrist rotates as he slides it forward and down, moving into what would be corps a corps, were we two facing mortal bodies. For a moment our guards are locked. That moment is enough…

That gleaming, mechanical hand comes forward, a thing of moonlight and fire, blackness and smoothness, all angles, no curves, fingers slightly flexed, palm silverscribbled with a half-familiar design, comes forward, comes forward and catches at my throat…

Missing, the fingers catch my shoulder and the thumb goes hooking — whether for clavicle or larynx, I do not know. I throw one punch with my left, toward his midsection, and there is nothing there…

The voice of Random: “Corwin! The sun is about to rise! You’ve got to come down now!”

I cannot even answer. A second or two and that hand would tear away whatever it held. That hand… Grayswandir and that hand, which strangely resembles it, are the only two things which seem to coexist in my world and the city of ghosts…

“I see it, Corwin! Pull away and reach for me! The Trump —”

I spin Grayswandir out of the bind and bring it around and down in a long, slashing arc…

Only a ghost could have beaten Benedict or Benedict’s ghost with that maneuver. We stand too close for him to block my blade, but his countercut, perfectly placed, would have removed my arm, had there been an arm there to meet it…

As there is not, I complete the stroke, delivering the blow with the full force of my right arm, high upon that lethal device of moonlight and fire, blackness and smoothness, near to the point where it is joined with him.

With an evil tearing at my shoulder, the arm comes away from Benedict and grows still… We both fall.

“Get up! By the unicorn, Corwin, get up! The sun is rising! The city will come apart about you!”

The floor beneath me wavers to and from a misty transparency. I glimpse a light-scaled expanse of water. I roll to my feet, barely avoiding the ghost’s rush to clutch at the arm he has lost. It clings like a dead parasite and my side is hurting again…

Suddenly I am heavy and the vision of ocean does not fade. I begin to sink through the floor. Color returns to the world, wavering stripes of pink. The Corwin-spurning floor parts and the Corwin-killing gulf is opened…

I fall…

“This way, Corwin! Now!”

Random stands on a mountaintop and reaches for me. I extend my hand…