Roger Zelazny - Prince of chaos

«If you do need a place to hide…»

«Talk to you sometime later perhaps,» I said, and I sent her back to the temple at the edge of everything.

«Good vermin,» Glait remarked, as I commenced my shift humanward. (It's always easier that way for me than the demon-shift.)

«I'd like to send you back to Sawall's sculpture garden,» I said.

«Why there, Masster Merlin?»

«To wait for a time, to see whether you behold a sentient circle of light. And if you do, to address it as Ghostwheel and tell it to come to me.»

«Where shall I tell it to sseek you?»

«That I do not know, but it is good at that sort of thing.»

«Then ssend me. And if you are not eaten by ssomething bigger, come tell me your sstory one night.»

«I shall.»

It was the work of but a moment to hang the serpent back in her tree. I've never been sure when she's joking, reptilian humor being more than a little strange.

I summoned fresh garments and garbed myself in gray and purple. Fetched me blades long and short then, also. I wondered what my mother might have been up to in her chapel, but decided against trying to spy on her. I raised the spikard and regarded it for a moment, then lowered it. It seemed possibly counterproductive to transport myself to Kashfa when I was uncertain how much time had passed and whether Luke was actually still there. I took out my Trumps, which I had had along in my mourning garb, uncased them.

I located Luke's, focused upon it. Before too long it went cold and I felt Luke's presence.

«Yes?» he said.

«That you, Merle?» at about the same time as his image swam and altered, causing me to see him mounted and riding through a part-blasted, part-normal countryside.

«Yeah,» I answered. «I gather you're no longer in Kashfa.»

«Right,» he said. «Where're you?»

«Somewhere in Shadow. How's about yourself?»

«Damned if I know for sure,» he responded. «We've been following this black path for days - and I can only say `somewhere in Shadow,' too.»

«0h, you located it?»

«Nayda did. I didn't see anything, but she just led me on. Eventually, the trail got clear to me. Hell of a tracker, that gal.»

«She's with you now?»

«That's right. She says we're gaining on them, too.»

«Better bring me through then.»

«Come ahead.»

He extended a hand. I reached forward, clasped it, took a step, released his hand, began walking beside him, a pack horse to the rear.

«Hi, Nayda!» I called, to where she rode at his other side. A grim figure was mounted upon a black horse ahead and to her right.

She smiled.

«Merlin,» she said. «Hello.»

«How about Merle?» I said.

«If you wish.»

The figure on the dark horse turned and regarded me.

I halted a death strike that ran from reflex to the spikard so fast that it scared me. The air between us was smudged and filled with a screeching note, as of a car grabbing pavement to avert collision.

He was a big, blond-haired son of a bitch, and he had on a yellow shirt and black trousers, black boots, lots of cutlery. The medallion of the Lion rending the Unicorn bounced upon his broad chest. Every time I'd seen or heard of the man, he'd been about something nasty, damn near killing Luke on one occasion. He was a mercenary, a Robin Hood figure out of Eregnor, and a sworn enemy of Amber - illegitimate son of her late liege Oberon. I believed there was a price on his head within the Golden Circle. On the other hand, he and Luke had been buddies for years, and Luke swore he wasn't all that bad. He was my uncle Dalt, and I'd a feeling that if he moved too quickly the flexing of his muscles would shred his shirt.

«…And you remember my military adviser, Dalt,» Luke said.

«I remember,» I stated.

Dalt stared at the black lines in the air that faded, smokelike, between us. He actually smiled then, a little.

«Merlin,» he said, «son of Amber, Prince of Chaos, the man who dug my grave.»

«What's this?» Luke asked.

«A little conversational gambit,» I replied. «You've a good memory, Dalt - for faces.»

He chuckled.

«Hard to forget something like a grave opening itself,» he said. «But I've no quarrel with you, Merlin.»

«Nor I you - now,» I said.

He grunted then and I grunted back and considered us introduced. I turned back toward Luke.

«Is the path itself giving you any trouble?» I asked.

«No,» he replied. «It's nothing at all like those stories I'd heard about the Black Road. It looks a little bleak at times, but nothing's really threatened us.» He glanced downward and chuckled. «Of course it's only a few yards wide,» he added, «and this is the broadest it's been, so far.»

«Still,» I said, opening my senses and studying its emanations with my Logrus sight, «I'd think something might have threatened.»

«I guess we've been lucky,» he said.

Again, Nayda laughed, and I felt foolish. The presence of a ty' iga would count as surely as my own in offsetting the dire effects of a Chaos roadway in the realm of Order.

«Guess you had a little luck coming,» I said.

«You're going to need a horse, Merle,» he said then.

«I suppose you're right,» I agreed.

I was afraid to use Logrus magic and call attention to my location. Still, I had already learned that the spikard could be used in a similar fashion, and I entered it with my will, extended, extended, made contact, summoned…

«It'll be along any minute,» I said. «Did you say something about our gaining on them?»

«That's what Nayda tells me,» he explained. «She has an amazing rapport with her sister - not to mention a high sensitivity to this pathway itself.

«Knows a lot about demons, too,» he added.

«Oh, are we likely to encounter any?» I asked her.

«It was demonformed warriors from the Courts who abducted Coral,» she said. «They seem headed toward a tower up ahead.»

«How far ahead?» I asked.

«Hard to say, since we're cutting through Shadow,» she answered.

T'he trail, which consisted of blackened grasses and which produced the same effect on any tree or shrub that so much as overhung it, wound its way through a hilly area now; and as I stepped onto and off of it I noted that it seemed brighter and warmer each time I departed. It had reached this point now after having been virtually undetectable in the vicinity of Kashfa - an index of how far we were into the realm of the Logrus.

A little past the next bending of the trail, I heard a whinny from off to the right.

«Excuse me,» I said. «Delivery time,» and I departed the trail and entered a grove of oval-leafed trees.

Snorting and stamping sounds reached me from ahead, and I followed them down shaded ways.

«Wait up!» Luke called. «We shouldn't separate.»

But the wood was fairly dense, not at all easy going for someone on horseback, so I hollered back, «Don't worry!» and plunged ahead.

… And that, of course, was why he was there.

Fully saddled and bridled, his reins tangled in the dense foliage, he was cursing in horse-talk, shaking his head from side to side, pawing at the earth. I halted stared.

I may have given the impression that I would rather pull on a pair of Adidas and jog through Shadow than plunge through on the back of a beast driven half-mad by the changes going on about it. Or ride a bicycle. Or hop through on a pogo stick.

Nor would this impression be incorrect. It is not that I don't know how to drive the things. It is just that I'd never been particularly fond of them. Admitted, I never had the use of one of those wonder horses, such as Julian's Morgenstern, Dad's Star, or Benedict's Glemdenning, which stood to mortal horses in terms of life span, strength, and endurance as did Amberites to the inhabitants of most shadows.