The Hand of Oberon

Chapter 13

On the highest ridge of Kolvir there is a formation which resembles three steps. I sat on the lowest of these and waited for more to occur above me. It takes night and moonlight to do this, so half of the requirements had been met.

There were clouds to the west and northeast. I was leery of those clouds. If they massed sufficiently to block all moonlight, Tir-na Nog’th faded back to nothingness. This was one reason why it was always advisable to have a backup man on the ground, to Trump you to safety should the city vanish about you.

The sky overhead was clear, however, and filled with familiar stars. When the moon came up and its light fell upon the stone at which I rested, the stairway in the sky would come into being, sweeping upward to a great height, taking its way to Tir-na Nog’th, the image of Amber that rode the night’s middle air.

I was weary. Too much had occurred in too brief a time. Suddenly to be at rest, to remove my boots and rub my feet, to lean back and rest my head, even against stone, was a luxury, a pure animal pleasure. I drew my cloak together before me against the growing chill. A hot bath, a full meal, a bed would be very good things. But these assumed an almost mythic quality from that vantage. It was more than sufficient simply to rest as I was, to let my thoughts move more slowly, drifting, spectatorlike, back over the day’s happenings.

So much… but now, at least, I had some answers to some of my questions. Not all of them, certainly. But enough to slake my mind’s thirst for the moment… I now had some idea as to what had been going on during my absence, a better understanding of what was happening now, a knowledge of some of the things that had to be done, of what I had to do… And I felt, somehow, that I knew more than I realized, consciously, that I already possessed pieces that would fit the growing picture before me, if I were only to jiggle them, flip them, rotate them properly. The pace of recent events, particularly today’s, had not allowed me a moment’s reflection. Now, though, some of the pieces seemed to be turning at odd angles…

I was distracted by a stirring above my shoulder, a tiny effect of brightening in the higher air. Turning, then standing, I regarded the horizon. A preliminary glow had occurred out over the sea at the point where the moon would ascend. As I watched, a minute arc of light came into view. The clouds had shifted slightly also, though not enough to cause concern. I glanced up then, but the overhead phenomenon had not yet begun. I withdrew my Trumps, however, riffled them, and cut out Benedict’s.

Lethargy forgotten, I stared, watching the moon expand above the water, casting a trail of light over the waves. A faint form was suddenly hovering on the threshold of visibility high overhead. As the light grew, a spark limned it here and there. The first lines, faint as spider webbing, appeared above the rock. I studied Benedict’s card, I reached for contact…

His cold image came alive. I saw him in the chamber of the Pattern, standing at the designs’ center. A lighted lantern glowed beside his left foot. He became aware of my presence.

“Corwin,” he said, “is it time?”

“Not quite,” I told him. “The moon is rising. The city is just beginning to take form. So it will only be a little longer. I wanted to be certain you were ready.”

“I am ready,” he said.

“It is good that you came back when you did. Did you learn anything of interest?”

“Ganelon called me back,” he said, “as soon as he learned what had happened. His plan seemed a good one, which is why I am here. As for the Courts of Chaos, yes. I believe I have learned a few things —”

“A moment,” I said.

The moonbeam strands had assumed a more tangible appearance. The city overhead was now clear in outline. The stairway was visible in its entirety, though fainter in some places than in others. I stretched forth enough to slake my mind’s thirst for the moment…

Cool, soft, I encountered the fourth stair. It seemed to give somewhat beneath my push, however.

“Almost,” I said to Benedict. “I am going to try the stairs. Be ready.”

He nodded.

I mounted the stone stairs, one, two, three. I raised my foot then and lowered it upon the fourth, ghostly one. It yielded gently to my weight. I was afraid to raise my other foot, so I waited, watching the moon. I breathed the cool air as the brightness increased, as the path in the waters widened. Glancing upward, I saw Tir-na Nog’th lose something of its transparency. The stars behind it grew dimmer. As this occurred, the stair became firmer beneath my foot. All resiliency went out of it. I felt that it might bear my full weight. Casting my eyes along its length, I now saw it in its entirety, here translucent, there transparent, sparkling, but continuous all the way up to the silent city that drifted above the sea. I raised my other foot and stood on the fourth stair. If I’d the mind, a few more steps would send me along that celestial escalator into the place of dreams made real, walking neuroses and dubious prophecy, into a moonlit city of ambiguous wish fulfillment, twisted time, and pallid beauty. I stepped back down and glanced at the moon, now balanced on the world’s wet rim. I regarded Benedict’s Trump in its silvery glow.

“The stair is solid, the moon is up,” I said.

“All right. I am going.”

I watched him there at the center of the Pattern. He raised the lantern in his left hand and for a moment stood unmoving. An instant later he was gone, and so was Pattern. Another instant, and he stood within a similar chamber, this time outside the Pattern, next to the point where it begins. He raised the lantern high and looked all around the room. He was alone.

He turned, walked to the wall, set the lantern beside it. His shadow stretched toward the Pattern, changed shape as he turned on his heel, moved back to his first position.

This Pattern, I noted, glowed with a paler light than the one in Amber — silvery white, without the hint of blue with which I was familiar. Its configuration was the same, but the ghost city played strange tricks with perspective. There were distortions-narrowings, widenings — which seemed to shift for no particular reason across its surface, as though I viewed the entire tableau through an irregular lens rather than Benedict’s Trump.

I retreated down the stairs, settled once again on the lowest step. I continued to observe.

Benedict loosened his blade in its scabbard.

“You know about the possible effect of blood on the Pattern?” I asked.

“Yes. Ganelon told me.”

“Did you ever suspect — any of this?”

“I never trusted Brand,” he told me.

“What of your journey to the Courts of Chaos? What did you learn?”

“Later, Corwin. He could come any time now.”

“I hope no distracting visions show up,” I said, recalling my own journey to Tir-na Nog’th and his own part in my final adventure there.

He shrugged.

“One gives them power by paying them heed. My attention is reserved for one matter tonight.”

He turned through a full circle, regarding every part of the chamber, halted when he had finished.

“I wonder if he knows you are there?” I said.

“Perhaps. It does not matter.”

I nodded. If Brand did not show np, we had gained a day. The guards would ward the other Patterns, Fiona would have a chance to demonstrate her own skill in matters arcane by locating Brand for us. We would then pursue him. She and Bleys had been able to stop him once before. Could she do it alone now? Or would we have to find Bleys and try to convince him to help? Had Brand found Bleys? What the hell did Brand want this kind of power for anyhow? A desire for the throne I could understand. Yet… The man was mad, leave it at that. Too bad, but that’s the way it was. Heredity or environment? I wondered wryly. We were all of us, to some degree, mad after his fashion. To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to have so much and to strive so bitterly for just a little more, for a bit of an edge over the others. He carried this tendency to its extreme, that is all. He was a caricature of this mania in all of us. In this sense, did it really matter which of us was the traitor?

Yes, it did. He was the one who had acted. Mad or not, he had gone too far. He had done things Eric, Julian, and I would not have done. Bleys and Fiona had finally backed away from his thickening plot. Gerard and Benedict were a notch above the rest of us — moral, mature, whatever — for they had exempted themselves from the zero-sum power game. Random had changed, quite a bit, in recent years. Could it be that the children of the unicorn took ages in which to mature, that it was slowly happening to the rest of us but had somehow passed Brand by? Or could it be that by his actions Brand was causing it in the rest of us? Like most such questions, the benefit of these was in the asking, not the answering. We were enough like Brand that I knew a particular species of fear nothing else could so provoke. But yes, it did matter. Whatever the reason, he was the one who had acted.

The moon was higher now, its vision superimposed upon my inward viewing of the chamber of the Pattern. The clouds continued to shift, to boil nearer the moon. I thought of advising Benedict, but it would serve no other end than distraction. Above me, Tir-na Nog’th rode like some supernatural ark upon the seas of night…

…And suddenly Brand was there.

Reflexively, my hand went to Grayswandir’s hilt, despite the fact that a part of me realized from the very first that he stood across the Pattern from Benedict in a dark chamber high in the sky.

My hand fell again. Benedict had become aware of the intruding presence immediately, and he turned to face him. He made no move toward his weapon, but simply stared across the Pattern at our brother.

My earliest fear had been that Brand would contrive to arrive directly behind Benedict and stab him in the back. I would not have tried that though, because even in death Benedict’s reflexes might have been sufficient to dispatch his assailant. Apparently, Brand wasn’t that crazy either.

Brand smiled.

“Benedict,” he said. “Fancy… You… Here.”

The Jewel of Judgment hung fiery upon his breast.

“Brand,” Benedict said, “don’t try it.”

Still smiling. Brand unclasped his sword belt and let his weapon fall to the floor. When the echoes died, he said, “I am not a fool, Benedict. The man hasn’t been born who can go up against you with a blade.”

“I don’t need the blade, Brand.”

Brand began walking, slowly, about the edge of the Pattern.

“Yet you wear it as a servant of the throne, when you could have been king.”

“That has never been high on my list of ambitions.”

“That is right.” He paused, only part way about the Pattern.

“Loyal, self-effacing. You have not changed at all. Pity Dad conditioned you so well. You could have gone so much further.”

“I have everything that I want,” Benedict said.

“…To have been stifled, cut off, so early.”

“You cannot talk your way past me either, Brand. Do not make me hurt you.”

The smile still on his face. Brand began moving again, slowly. What was it he was trying to do? I could not figure his strategy.

“You know I can do certain things the others cannot,” Brand said. “If there is anything at all that you want and think that you cannot have, now is your chance to name it and learn how wrong you were. I have learned things you would scarcely believe.”

Benedict smiled one of his rare smiles.

“You have chosen the wrong line,” he said. “I can walk to anything that I want.”

“Shadows!” Brand snorted, halting again. “Any of the others can clutch a phantom! I am talking of reality! Amber! Power! Chaos! Not daydreams made solid! Not second best!”

“If I had wanted more than I have, I knew what to do. I did not do it.”

Brand laughed, began walking again. He had come a quarter of the way about the Pattern’s periphery. The Jewel burned more brightly. His voice rang.

“You are a fool, to wear your chains willingly! But if things do not call out to you to possess them and if power holds no attraction, what of knowledge? I learned the last of Dworkin’s lore. I have gone on since then and paid dark prices for greater insight into the workings of the universe. This you could have without that price tag.”

“There would be a price,” Benedict said, “one that I will not pay.”

Brand shook his head and tossed his hair. The image of the Pattern wavered for a moment then, as a wisp of cloud crossed the moon. Tir-na Nog’th faded slightly, returned to normal focus.

“You mean it, you really mean it,” Brand said, apparently not aware of the moment of fading. “I shan’t test you further then. I had to try.”

He halted again, staring.

“You are too good a man to waste yourself on that mess in Amber, defending something that is obviously falling apart. I am going to win, Benedict. I am going to erase Amber and build it anew. I am going to rub out the old Pattern and draw my own. You can be with me. I want you on my side. I am going to raise up a perfect world, one with more direct access to and from Shadow. I am going to merge Amber with the Courts of Chaos. I am going to extend this realm directly through all of Shadow. You will command our legions, the mightiest military forces ever assembled. You —”

“If your new world would be as perfect as you say, Brand, there would be no need for legions. If, on the other hand, it is to reflect the mind of its creator, then I see it as something less than an improvement over the present state of affairs. Thank you for your offer, but I hold with the Amber which already exists.”

“You are a fool, Benedict. A well-meaning one, but a fool nevertheless.”

He began to move again, casually. He was within forty feet of Benedict. Thirty… He kept moving. He finally paused about twenty feet away, hooked his thumbs behind his belt, and simply stared. Benedict met his gaze. I checked the clouds again. A long mass of them continued a moonward slide. I could pull Benedict out at any time, though. It was hardly worth disturbing him at the moment.

“Why don’t you come and cut me down then?” Brand finally said. “Unarmed as I am, it should not be difficult. The fact that the same blood flows in both our veins makes no difference, does it? What are you waiting for?”

“I already told you that I do not wish to hurt you,” Benedict said.

“Yet you stand ready to, if I attempt to pass your way.”

Benedict simply nodded.

“Admit that you fear me, Benedict. All of you are afraid of me. Even when I approach you weaponless like this, something must be twisting your guts. You see my confidence and you do not understand it. You must be afraid.”

Benedict did not reply.

“…And you fear my blood on your hands,” Brand went on, “you fear my death curse.”

“Did you fear Martin’s blood on your own?” Benedict asked.

“That bastard puppy!” Brand said. “He was not truly one of us. He was only a tool.”

“Brand, I have no desire to kill a brother. Give me that trinket you wear about your neck and come back with me now to Amber. It is not too late to set matters right.”

Brand threw back his head and laughed.

“Oh, nobly spoken! Nobly spoken, Benedict! Like a true lord of the realm! You would shame me with your excessive virtue! And what is the sticking point of this all?”

He reached down and stroked the Jewel of Judgment.

“This?”

He laughed again and strode forward.

“This bauble? Would its surrender buy us peace, amity, order? Would it ransom my life?”

He halted once more, ten feet from Benedict now. He raised the Jewel between his fingers and looked down at it.

“Do you realize the full powers of this thing?” he asked.

“Enough of th —” Benedict began, and his voice cracked in his throat.

Brand hurriedly took another step forward. The Jewel was bright before him. Benedict’s hand had begun to move toward his blade, but it did not reach it. He stood stiffly now, as if suddenly transformed into a statue. Then I began to understand, but by then it was too late.

Nothing that Brand had been saying had really mattered. It had simply been a running line of patter, a distraction thrown up before him while he sought cautiously after the proper range. He was indeed partly attuned to the Jewel, and the limited control this gave him was still sufficient to enable him to produce effects with it, effects which I was unaware it could produce, but of which he had known all along.

Brand had carefully contrived his arrival a good distance from Benedict, tried the Jewel, moved a little nearer, tried again, kept up this movement, this testing, until he found the point where it could affect Benedict’s nervous system.

“Benedict,” I said, “you had better come to me now,” and I exerted my will, but he did not budge nor did he reply.

His Trump was still functioning, I felt his presence, I observed events because of it, but I could not reach him. The Jewel was obviously affecting more than his motor system.

I looked to the clouds again. They were still growing, they were reaching for the moon. It seemed they might come across it soon. If I could not pull Benedict out when it happened, he would fall to the sea as soon as the light was fully blocked, the city disrupted. Brand! If he became aware of it, he might be able to use the Jewel to dissipate the clouds. But to do that, he would probably have to release Benedict. I did not think he would do it. Still… The clouds seemed to be slowing now. This entire line of reasoning could become unnecessary. I thumbed out Brand’s Trump though, and set it aside.

“Benedict, Benedict,” said Brand, smiling, “of what use is the finest swordsman alive if he cannot move to take up his blade? I told you that you were a fool. Did you think I would walk willingly to my slaughter? You should have trusted the fear you must have felt. You should have known that I would not enter this place helpless. I meant it when I said that I was going to win. You were a good choice though, because you are the best. I really wish that you had accepted my offer. But it is not that important now. I cannot be stopped. None of the others has a chance, and with you gone things are going to be much easier.”

He reached beneath his cloak and produced a dagger.

“Bring me through, Benedict!” I cried, but it was no use. There was no response, no strength to trump me up there.

I seized Brand’s Trump. I recalled my Trump battle with Eric. If I could hit Brand through his Trump, I might be able to break his concentration sufficiently for Benedict to come free. I turned all of my faculties upon the card, preparing for a massive mental assault. But nothing. The way was frozen and dark.

It had to be that his concentration on the task at hand, his mental involvement with the Jewel, was so complete that I simply could not reach him. I was blocked at every turn.

Suddenly, the stairway grew paler above me and I cast a quick glance at the moon. A limb of cumulus now covered a portion of its face. Damn!

I returned my attention to Benedict’s Trump. It seemed slow, but I did recover the contact, indicating that somewhere, inside it all, Benedict was still conscious. Brand had moved a pace nearer and was still taunting him. The Jewel on its heavy chain burned with the light of its use. They stood perhaps three paces apart now. Brand toyed with the dagger.

“…Yes, Benedict,” he was saying, “you probably would have preferred to die in battle. On the other hand, you might look upon this as a kind of honor — a signal honor. In a way, your death will allow the birth of a new order…”

For a moment, the Pattern faded behind them. I could not tear my eyes from the scene to examine the moon, however. There, within the shadows and the flickering light, his back to the Pattern, Brand did not seem to notice. He took another step forward.

“But enough of this,” he said. “There are things to be done, and the night grows no younger.”

He stepped nearer and lowered the blade.

“Good night, sweet Prince,” he said, and he moved to close with him.

At that instant, Benedict’s strange mechanical right arm, torn from this place of shadow and silver and moonlight, moved with the speed of a striking snake. Thing of glinting, metallic planes like the facets of a gem, wrist a wondrous weave of silver cable, pinned with flecks of fire, stylized, skeletal, a Swiss toy, a mechanical insect, functional, deadly, beautiful in its way, it shot forward with a speed that I could not follow, while the rest of his body remained steady, a statue.

The mechanical fingers caught the Jewel’s chain about Brand’s neck. Immediately, the arm moved upward, raising Brand high above the floor. Brand dropped the dagger and clutched at his throat with both hands.

Behind him, the Pattern faded once again. It returned with a much paler glow. Brand’s face in the lantern light was a ghastly, twisted apparition. Benedict remained frozen, holding him on high, unmoving, a human gallows.

The Pattern grew dimmer. Above me, the steps began to recede. The moon was half-occluded.

Writhing, Brand raised his arms above his head, catching at the chain on either side of the metal hand that held it. He was strong, as all of us are. I saw his muscles bunch and harden. By then, his face was dark and his neck a mass of straining cables. He bit his lip; the blood ran into his beard as he drew upon the chain.

With a sharp snap followed by a rattling, the chain parted and Brand fell to the floor gasping. He rolled over once, clutching at his throat with both hands.

Slowly, very slowly, Benedict lowered his strange arm. He still held the chain and the Jewel. He flexed his other arm. He sighed deeply.

The Pattern grew even dimmer. Above me, Tir-na Nog’th became transparent. The moon was almost gone.

“Benedict!” I cried. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said, very softly, and he began to sink through the floor.

“The city is fading! You’ve got to come to me right away!”

I extended my hand.

“Brand…” he said, turning.

But Brand was sinking also, and I saw that Benedict could not reach him. I clasped Benedict’s left hand and jerked. Both of us fell to the ground beside the high outcrop.

I helped him to his feet. Then we both seated ourselves on the stone. For a long while, we did not say anything. I looked again and Tir-na Nog’th was gone.

I thought back over everything that had happened, so fast, so sudden, that day. A great weight of weariness lay upon me now, and I felt that my energies must be at their end, that shortly I must sleep. I could scarcely think straight. Life had simply been too crowded recently. I leaned my back against the stone once more, regarding cloud and star. The pieces… the pieces which it seemed should fit, if only the proper jiggle, twist, or flip were applied… They were jiggling, twisting, and flipping now, almost of their own accord…

“Is he dead, do you think?” Benedict asked, pulling me back from a half-dream of emerging forms.

“Probably,” I said. “He was in bad shape when things fell apart.”

“It was a long way down. He might have had time to work some escape along the lines of his arrival.”

“Right now it, does not really matter,” I said. “You’ve drawn his fangs.”

Benedict grunted. He was still holding the Jewel, a much dimmer red than it had been so recently.

“True,” he finally said. “The Pattern is safe now. I wish… I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is best now if he is dead. But it is a waste of something that might have been.”

I did not answer him. What he had said might or might not be right. It did not matter. Brand might have been borderline psychotic, whatever that means, and then again maybe not. There is always a reason. Whenever anything has been mucked up, whenever anything outrageous happens, there is a reason for it. You still have a mucked-up, outrageous situation on your hands, however, and explaining it does not alleviate it one bit. If someone does something really rotten, there is a reason for it. Learn it, if you care, and you learn why he is a son of a bitch. The fact is the thing that remains, though. Brand had acted. It changed nothing to run a posthumous psychoanalysis. Acts and their consequences are the things by which our fellows judge us. Anything else, and all that you get is a cheap feeling of moral superiority by thinking how you would have done something nicer if it had been you. So as for the rest, leave it to heaven. I’m not qualified.

“We had best get back to Amber,” Benedict said, “There are a great number of things that must be done.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’ve been thinking.”

When I did not elaborate, he finally said, “And…?”

I riffled slowly through my Trumps, replacing his, replacing Brand’s.

“Haven’t you wondered yet about the new arm you wear?” I asked him.

“Of course. You brought it from Tir-na Nog’th, under unusual circumstances. It fits. It works. It proved itself tonight.”

“Exactly. Isn’t the last a lot of weight to dump on poor coincidence? The one weapon that gave you a chance up there, against the Jewel. And it just happened to be a part of you — and you just happened to be the person who was up there, to use it? Trace things back and trace them forward again. Isn’t there an extraordinary — no, preposterous — chain of coincidences involved?”

“When you put it that way…” he said.

“I do. And you must realize as well as I do that there has to be more to it than that.”

“All right. Say that. But how? How was it done?”

“I have no idea,” I said, withdrawing the card I had not looked upon in a long, long while, feeling its coldness beneath my finger tips, “but the method is not important. You asked the wrong question.”

“What should I have asked?”

“Not ‘How?’ but ‘Who?’”

“You think that a human agency arranged that entire chain of events, up through the recovery of the Jewel?”

“I don’t know about that. What’s human? But I do think that someone we both know has returned and is behind it all.”

“All right. Who?”

I showed him the Trump that I held.

“Dad? That is ridiculous? He must be dead. It’s been so long.”

“You know he could have engineered it. He’s that devious. We never understood all of his powers.”

Benedict rose to his feet. He stretched. He shook his head.

“I think you have been out in the cold too long, Corwin. Let’s go home now.”

“Without testing my guess? Come on! That is hardly sporting. Sit down and give me a minute. Let’s try his Trump.”

“He would have contacted someone by now.”

“I don’t think so. In fact — Come on. Humor me. What have we got to lose?”

“All right. Why not?”

He sat down beside me. I held the Trump where both of us could make it out. We stared at it. I relaxed my mind, I reached for contact. It came almost immediately.

He was smiling as he regarded as.

“Good evening. That was a fine piece of work,” Ganelon said. “I am pleased that you brought back my trinket. I’ll be needing it soon.”