The hand of Oberon (18 page)

“Was he wearing the jewel of Judgment?”

“I could not tell. I only had sight of him for a moment, in this bad light.”

“Are they watching the Pattern in Rebma now?”

“Yes. Llewella’s alerted them.”

“Good. Stay on guard, then. I will be in touch again.”

“All right. Corwin-about what happened earlier . . .”

“Forget it.”

“Thanks. That Ganelon is one tough fellow.”

“Indeed,” I said. “Stay awake.”

His image faded as I released the contact, but a strange thing happened then. The sense of contact, the path, remained with me, objectless, open, like a switched on radio not tuned to anything. Bill was looking at me peculiarly.

“Carl, what is happening?”

“I don’t know. Wait a minute.”

Suddenly, there was contact again, though not with Gerard. She must have been trying to reach me while my attention was diverted.

“Corwin, it is important . . .”

“Go ahead, Fi.”

“You will not find what you are looking for there. Brand has it.”

“I was beginning to suspect as much.”

“We have to stop him. I do not know how much you know-“

“Neither do I any more,” I said, “but I have the Pattern in Amber and the one in Rebma under guard. Gerard just told me that Brand appeared at the one in Amber, but was scared off.”

She nodded her small, fine-featured face. Her red tresses were unusually disarrayed. She looked tired.

“I am aware of this,” she said. “I have him under surveillance. But you have forgotten another possibility.”

“No,” I said. “According to my calculations, Tir-na Nog’th should not be attainable yet-“

“That is not what I was referring to. He is headed for the primal Pattern itself.”

“To attune the Jewel?”

“The first time through,” she said.

“To walk it, he would have to pass through the damaged area. I gather that is more than a little difficult.”

“So you do know about it,” she said. “Good. That saves time. The dark area would not trouble him the way it would another of us. He has come to terms with that darkness. We must stop him, now.”

“Do you know any short cuts to that place?”

“Yes. Come to me. I will take you there.”

“Just a minute. I want Drum with me.”

“What for?”

“No telling. That is why I want him.”

“Very well. Then bring me through. We can as easily depart from there as from here.”

I extended my hand. In a moment, I held hers. She stepped forward.

“Lord!” said Bill, drawing back. “You were giving me doubts about your sanity, Carl. Now it’s mine I wonder about. She-she’s on one of the cards, too, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Bill, this is my sister Fiona. Fiona, this is Bill Roth, a very good friend.”

Fi extended her hand and smiled, and I left them there while I went back to fetch Drum. A few minutes later, I led him forth.

“Bill,” I said, “I am sorry to have wasted your time. My brother has the thing. We are going after him now. Thanks for helping me.”

I shook his hand.

He said, “Corwin.” I smiled.

“Yes, that is my name.”

“We have been talking, your sister and I. Not much I could learn in a few minutes, but I know it is dangerous. So good luck. I still want the whole story one day.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will try to see that you get it.”

I mounted, leaned down, and drew Fiona up before me.

“Good night, Mr. Roth,” she said. Then, to me, “Start riding, slowly, across the field.”

I did.

“Brand says you are the one who stabbed him,” I said, as soon as we had gone far enough to feel alone.

“That’s right.”

“Why?”

“To avoid all this.”

“I talked with him for a long while. He claimed it was originally you, Bleys, and himself, together in a scheme to seize power.”

“That is correct.”

“He told me he had approached Caine, trying to win him to your side, but that Caine would have none of it, that Caine had passed the word along to Eric and Julian. And this led to their forming their own group, to block your way to the throne.”

“That is basically correct. Caine had ambitions of his own-long-term ones-but ambitions nevertheless. He was in no position to pursue them, however. So he decided that if his lot was to be a lesser one, he would rather serve it under Eric than under Bleys. I can see his point, too.”

“He also claimed that the three of you had a deal going with the powers at the end of the black road, in the Courts of Chaos.”

“Yes,” she said, “we did.”

“You use the past tense.”

“For myself and for Bleys, yes.”

“That is not the way Brand tells it.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“He said you and Bleys wanted to continue exploiting that alliance, but that he had had a change of heart. Because of this, he claims you turned on him and imprisoned him in that tower.”

“Why didn’t we just kill him?”

“I give up. Tell me.”

“He was too dangerous to be allowed his freedom, but we could not kill him either because he held something vital.”

“What?”

“With Dworkin gone. Brand was the only one who knew how to undo the damage he had done to the primal Pattern.”

“You had a long time to get that information out of him.”

“He possesses unbelievable resources.”

“Then why did you stab him?”

“I repeat, to avoid all this. If it became a question of his freedom or his death, it were better he died. We would have to take our chances on figuring the method of repairing the Pattern.”

“This being the case, why did you consent to cooperate in bringing him back?”

“First, I was not co-operating, I was trying to impede the attempt. But there were too many trying too hard. You got through to him in spite of me. Second, I had to be on hand to try to kill him in the event you succeeded. Too bad things worked out the way they did.”

“You say that you and Bleys had second thoughts about the alliance, but that Brand did not?”

“Yes.”

“How did your second thoughts affect your desire for the throne?”

“We thought we could manage it without any additional outside help.”

“I see.”

“Do you believe me?”

“I’m afraid that I am beginning to.”

“Turn here.”

I entered a cleft in a hillside. The way was narrow and very dark, with only a small band of stars above us. Fiona had been manipulating Shadow while we had talked, leading us from Ed’s field downward, into a misty, moorlike place, then up again, to a clear and rocky trail among mountains. Now, as we moved through the dark defile, I felt her working with Shadow again. The air was cool but not cold. The blackness to our left and our right was absolute, giving the illusion of enormous depths, rather than nearby rock cloaked in shadow. This impression was reinforced, I suddenly realized, by the fact that Drum’s hoofbeats were not producing any echoes, aftersounds, overtones.

“What can I do to gain your trust?” she said.

“That’s asking quite a bit.”

She laughed.

“Let me rephrase it. What can I do to convince you I am telling the truth?”

“Just answer one question.”

“What?”

“Who shot out my tires?”

She laughed again.

“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”

“Maybe. You tell me.”

“Brand,” she said. “He had failed in his effort to destroy your memory, so he decided he had better do a more thorough job.”

“The version I had of the story was that Bleys had done the shooting and left me in the lake, that Brand had arrived in time to drag me out and save my life. In fact, the police report seemed to indicate something to that effect.”

“Who called the police?” she asked.

“They had it listed as an anonymous call, but-“

“Bleys called them. He couldn’t reach you in time to save you, once he realized what was happening. He hoped that they could. Fortunately, they did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Brand did not drag you out of the wreck. You did it yourself. He waited around to be certain you were dead, and you surfaced and pulled yourself ashore. He went down and was checking you over, to decide whether you would die if he just left you there or whether he should throw you back in again. The police arrived about then and he had to clear out. We caught up with him shortly afterward and were able to subdue him and imprison him in the tower. That took a lot of doing. Later, I contacted Eric and told him what had happened. He then ordered Flora to put you in the other place and see that you were held until after his coronation.”

“It fits,” I said. “Thanks.”

“What does it fit?”

“I was only a small-town GP in simpler times than these, and I never had much to do with psychiatric cases. But I do know that you don’t give a person electroshock therapy to restore memories. EST generally does just the opposite. It destroys some of the short term ones. My suspicions began to stir when I learned that that was what Brand had had done to me. So I came up with my own hypothesis. The auto wreck did not restore my memories, and neither did the EST. I had finally begun recovering them naturally, not as the result of any particular trauma. I must have done something or said something to indicate that this was occurring. Word of it somehow got to Brand and he decided that this would not be a good thing to have happen at that time. So he journeyed to my shadow and managed to get me committed and subjected to treatment which he hoped would wipe out those things I had recently recovered. This was just partly successful, in that its only lasting effect was to fuzz me up for the few days surrounding the sessions. The accident may have contributed, too. But when I escaped from Porter and lived through his attempt to kill me, the process of recovery continued after I regained consciousness in Greenwood and left the place. I was remembering more and more when I was staying at Flora’s. The recovery was accelerated by Random’s taking me to Rebma, where I walked the Pattern. If this had not occurred, however, I am convinced now that it would all have come back, anyway. It might have taken somewhat longer, but I had broken through and the remembering was an ongoing process, coming faster and faster near the end. So I concluded that Brand was trying to sabotage me, and that is what fits the things you just told me.”

The band of stars had narrowed, and it finally vanished above us. We advanced through what seemed a totally black tunnel now, with perhaps the tiniest flickering of light a great distance ahead of us.

“Yes,” she said in the darkness before me, “you guessed correctly. Brand was afraid of you. He claimed he had seen your return one night in Tir-na Nog’th, to the undoing of all our plans. I paid him no heed at the time, for I was not even aware you still lived. It must have been then that he set out to find you. Whether he divined your whereabouts by some arcane means or simply saw it in Eric’s mind, I do not know. Probably the latter. He is occasionally capable of such a feat. However he located you, you now know the rest.”

“It was Flora’s presence in that place and her strange liaison with Eric that first made him suspicious. Or so he said. Not that it matters, now. What do you propose doing with him if we get our hands on him?”

She chuckled.

“You are wearing your blade,” she said.

“Brand told me, not all that long ago, that Bleys is still alive. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“Then why am I here, rather than Bleys?”

“Bleys is not attuned to the Jewel. You are. You interact with it at near distances, and it will attempt to preserve your life if you are in imminent danger of losing it. The risk, therefore, is not as great,” she said.

Then, moments later, “Don’t take it for granted, though. A swift stroke can still beat its reaction. You can die in its presence.”

The light ahead grew larger, brighter, but there were no drafts, sounds, or smells from that direction. Advancing, I thought of the layers upon layers of explanations I had received since my return, each with its own complex of motivations, justifications for what had happened while I was away, for what had happened since, for what was happening now. The emotions, the plans, the feelings, the objectives I had seen swirled like floodwater through the city of facts I was slowly erecting on the grave of my other self, and though an act is an act, in the best Steinian tradition, each wave of interpretation that broke upon me shifted the position of one or more things I had thought safely anchored, and by this brought about an alteration of the whole, to the extent that all of life seemed almost a shifting interplay of Shadow about the Amber of some never to be attained truth. Still, I could not deny that I knew more now than I had several years earlier, that I was closer to the heart of matters than I had been before, that the entire action in which I had been caught up upon my return seemed now to be sweeping toward some final resolution. And what did I want? A chance to find out what was right and a chance to act on it! I laughed. Who is ever granted the first, let alone the second of these? A workable approximation of truth, then. That would be enough. . . . And a chance to swing my blade a few times in the right direction: The highest compensation I could receive from a one o’clock world for the changes wrought since noon. I laughed again and made sure my blade was loose in the sheath.