He extended his hand.
“Come with me, and I will set your feet upon the new Pattern you must follow, in a game to be played out between the Powers.”
“I still don’t understand you, but I am certain that the real Oberon would not be stopped by these simple wards. You come to me and clasp my hand, and I will be glad to accompany you and take a look at whatever it is you want me to see.”
He drew himself up to an even greater height.
“You would test me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“As a man, it would hardly have troubled me,” he stated. “But being formed out of this spiritual crap now, I don’t know. I’d rather not take the chance.”
“In that case, I must echo your sentiment with respect to your own proposal.”
“Grandson,” he said levelly, a ruddy light entering his eyes, “even dead, none of my spawn may address me so. I come for thee now in a less than friendly fashion. I come for thee now, and this journey shall I hale thee amid fires.”
I took a step backward as he advanced.
“No need to take it personally…” I began.
I shaded my eyes as he hit my wards, and the flashbulb effect began. Squinting through it, I saw something of a repetition of the flensing of Dworkin’s flesh by fire. Oberon became transparent in places; other places he melted. Within him, through him, as the outward semblance of the kind passed away, I saw the swirls and curves, the straits and channels — black-lined, geometrizing abstractly inside the general outline of a large and noble figure. Unlike Dworkin, however, the image did not fade. Having passed my wards, its movement slowed, it continued toward me nevertheless, reaching. Whatever its true nature, it was one of the most frightening things I had ever encountered. I continued to back away, raising my hands, and I called again upon the Logrus.
The Sign of the Logrus occurred between us. The abstract version of Oberon continued to reach, scribbled spirit hands encountering the writhing limbs of Chaos.
I was not reaching through the Logrus’s image to manipulate it against that apparition. I felt an unusual dread of the thing, even at our distance. What I did was more on the order of thrusting the Sign against the image of the king. Then I dived past them both, out the cave mouth, and I rolled, scrabbling for handholds and toeholds when I struck a slope, coming up hard against a boulder and hugging it as the cave erupted with the noisy and flash of an ammo dump that had taken a hit.
I lay there shuddering, my eyes squeezed shut, for perhaps half a minute. Any second, I felt, and something would be on my ass — unless, perhaps, I crouched perfectly still and tried hard to look like another rock…
The silence was profound, and when I opened my eyes, the light had vanished and the shape of the cave mouth was unaltered. I rose slowly to my feet, advanced even more slowly. The Sign of the Logrus had departed, and for reasons I did not understand I was loath to call it back. When I looked within the cave, there were no signs that anything at all had occurred, save for the fact that my wards were blown.
I stepped inside. The blanket still lay where it had fallen. I put out a hand and touched the wall. Cold stone. That blast must have taken place at some other level than the immediate. My small fire was still flickering feebly. I recalled it yet again to life. But the only thing I saw in its glow which I had not seen previously was my coffee cup, broken where it had fallen.
I let my hand remain upon the wall. I leaned. After a time, there came an uncontrollable tightening of my diaphragm. I began laughing. I am not sure why. The weight of everything which had transpired since April 30 was upon me. It just happened that laughter had edged out the alternative of beating my breast and howling.
I thought I knew who all the players were in this complex game. Luke and Jasra seemed to be on my side now, along with my brother Mandor, who’d always looked out for me. My mad brother Jurt wanted me dead, and he was now allied with my old lover Julia, who didn’t seem too kindly disposed toward me either. There was the ty’iga — an overprotective demon inhabiting the body of Coral’s sister, Nayda, whom I’d left sleeping in the midst of a spell back in Amber. There was the mercenary Dalt — who, now I thought of it, was also my uncle — who’d made off with Luke for points and purposes unknown after kicking Luke’s ass in Arden with two armies watching. He had nasty designs on Amber but lacked the military muscle to provide more than occasional guerrilla-style annoyance. And then there was Ghostwheel, my cybernetic Trump dealer and minor-league mechanical demigod, who seemed to have evolved from rash and manic to rational and paranoid — and I wasn’t at all sure where he was headed from here, but at least he was showing some filial respect mixed in with the current cowardice.
And that had been pretty much it.
But these latest manifestations seemed evidence that there was something else at play here also, something that wanted to drag me off in yet another direction. I had Ghost’s testimony that it was strong. I had no idea what it really represented. And I had no desire to trust it. This made for an awkward relationship.
“Hey, kid!” came a familiar voice from down the slope. “You’re a hard man to find. You don’t stay put.”
I turned quickly, moved forward, stared downward.
A lone figure was toiling up the slope. A big man. Something flashed in the vicinity of his throat. It was too dark to make out his features.
I retreated several paces, commencing the spell which would restore my blasted wards.
“Hey! Don’t run off!” he called. “I’ve got to talk to you.
The wards fell into place, and I drew my blade and held it, point lowered, at my thigh, entirely out of sight from the cave mouth when I turned my body. I ordered Frakir to hang invisible from my left hand also. The second figure had been stronger than the first, to make it past my wards. If this third one should prove stronger than the second, I was going to need everything I could muster.
“Yeah?” I called out. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“Hell!” I heard it say “I’m no one in particular. Just your old man. I need some help, and I like to keep things in the family.”
I had to admit, when it reached the area of firelight, that it was a very good imitation of Prince Corwin of Amber, my father, complete with black cloak, boots, and trousers, gray shirt, silver studs, and buckle — and even a silver rose — and he was smiling that same quirky sort of smile the real Corwin had sometimes worn on telling me his story, long ago… I felt a kind of wrenching in my guts at the sight. I’d wanted to get to know him better, but he’d disappeared, and I’d never been able to find him again. Now, for this thing — whatever it was — to pull this impersonation… I was more than a little irritated at such a patent attempt to manipulate my feelings.
“The first fake was Dworkin,” I said, “and the second was Oberon. You’re climbing right down the family tree, aren’t you?”
He squinted and cocked his head in puzzlement as he advanced, another realistic mannerism.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Merlin,” he responded. “I —”
Then it entered the warded area and jerked as if touching a hot wire.
“Holy shit!” it said. “You don’t trust anybody, do you?”
“Family tradition,” I replied, “backed up by recent experience.”
I was puzzled, though, that the encounter had not involved more pyrotechnics. Also, I wondered why the thing’s transformation into scrollwork had not yet commenced.
With another oath, it swirled its cloak to the left, wrapping it abut its arm; its right hand crossed toward an excellent facsimile of my father’s scabbard. A silverchased blade sighed as it arced upward, then fell toward the eye of the ward. When they met, the sparks rose in a foot-high splash and the blade hissed as if it had been heated and were now being quenched in water. The design on the blade flared, and the sparks leaped again this time as high as a man — and in that instant I felt the ward break.