The hand of Oberon (23 page)

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,” Ganeton said. “I am pleased that you brought back my trinket. I’ll be needing it soon.”