Sign of the unicorn (20 page)

“Not all of it.”

“Then stop me whenever we’ve caught up on this. I only obtained it later, myself. Eric’s crowd learned of the accident, got your location, and had you transferred to a private place. Where you could be better protected, and kept you heavily sedated, so that they could be protected.”

“Why should Eric protect me, especially if my presence was going to wreck his plans?”

“By then, seven of us knew you were still living. That was too many. It was simply too late to do what he would have liked to do. He was still trying to live down Dad’s words. If anything had happened to you once you were in his power, it would have blocked his movement to the throne. If Benedict ever got word of it, or Gerard . . . No, he’d not have made it. Afterward, yes. Befare, no. What happened was that general knowledge of the fact of your existence forced his hand. He scheduled his coronation and resolved to keep you out of the way until it had occurred. An extremely premature bit of business, not that I see he had much of a choice. I guess you know what happened after that, since it happened to you.”

“I fell in with Bleys, just as he was making his move. Not too fortunate.” He shrugged.

“Oh, it might have been-if you had won, and if you had been able to do something about Bleys. You hadn’t a chance, though, not really. My grasp of their motivations begins to dissolve at this point, but I believe that that entire assault really constituted some sort of feint.”

“Why?”

“As I said, I do not know. But they already had Eric Just about where they wanted him. It should not have been necessary to call that attack.”

I shook my head. Too much, too fast . . . Many of the facts sounded true, once I subtracted the narrator’s bias. But still . . .

“I don’t know. ..” I began.

“Of course,” he said. “But if you ask me I will tell you.”

“Who was the third member of your group?”

“The same person who stabbed me, of course. Would you care to venture a guess?”

“Just tell me.”

“Fiona. The whole thing was her idea.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that right away?”

“Because you would not have sat still long enough to hear the rest of what I had to say. You would have dashed off to put her under restraint, discovered that she was gone, roused all the others, started an investigation, and wasted a lot of valuable time. You still may, but it at least provided me with your attention for a sufficient time for me to convince you that I know what I am about. Now, when I tell you that time is essential and that you must hear the rest of what I have to say as soon as possible-if Amber is to have any chance at all-you might listen rather than chase a crazy lady.”

I had already half risen from my chair.

“I shouldn’t go after her?” I said.

“The hell with her, for now. You’ve got bigger problems. You had better sit down again.”

So I did.

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, Gamath, 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, lhe 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.