FicWad

(Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes: ‘Winter’ – maybe not as obvious as it appears…)

Chapter 6 – Winter

White.

White as the Abyss was black.

Completely, inescapably, deathly-freezing white, broken up behind her eyes only, where it transmuted into the violently bright emerald of snow-blindness.

There was, in fact, no further reason to bother looking at all. She knew what would be there.

What would always be there.

What would be there when she lay down and died.

Sarah had rapidly trundled all the way out to the glacier she had spotted from the Keep of the Four Worlds; she had even managed to will closer to her! But upon seeing what the far side of it had hidden, that she had also been mentally working on, her heart sank: nothing. No sign of human or even alien life whatsoever. She had been concentrating so hard on her intended shadow-shift that she had actually managed to give herself a throbbing headache, but it obviously hadn’t been sufficiently uniform intention; her current sensory stimuli was simply too harsh, too viscerally extreme, to keep it from invading her thoughts!

Although the effect was good at propagating more of the same: an uneasy glance over her shoulder confirmed her worst fears: the Keep, and its other adjacent shadowlands, were gone. The Courts of Chaos weren’t Hell; Denjak was. There was nothing here but ancient death and suffering, in body and mind. Any respite that the sunstar could possibly provide was yet hours away… which meant that it might even get colder. Doing her best not to cry (for fear that the moisture would instantly freeze to her skin), Sarah hurriedly dug her ice-cold stiff trousers and blouse out of her bag, momentarily warming her fingertips with the Stone first; using it had taken far too much out of her before – she was likely only prolonging the inevitable. Ripping off her boots and cloak, she thrust the extra garments on as fast as humanly possible as the cold wind bit any exposed skin like fire, then donned the rest over it again. The extra layer wasn’t much warmer, but it was better than nothing. What she could remember of that scanty map of Denjak wasn’t worth knowing: the weather shifted the landscape slowly over time, eons. An unnatural cataclysm had caused a partial fallout of the upper atmosphere, burying all the life that had once been here beneath several miles of solid water-based ice, artificially increasing the planet’s surface girth by approximately 20,000 feet (or so had been hastily estimated by the unknown cartographer, who must’ve had an easier exit plan.)

Big friggin’ whoop.

She had to at least keep moving; it was the only option left. She hadn’t even had any time to gather supplies. Pulling the generously-sized hood closed over her face to warm her ears and nose (she was starting to feel her eyeballs, too, which couldn’t be good), Sarah desperately tried to center herself once more.

Okay, brain, I’m going to run backwards and widdershins in a tight circle until I feel certain that there’s a Swiss ski chalet with free hot cocoa and a roaring fireplace up on the base of that glacier, she deliberately willed, not above a little self-programming at this point if it would work. Twenty-two circuits… twenty-five…closer… closer… she smelled burning wood from the fireplace at last, opened her eyes-

And screamed in frustration: still nothing! She was too damned cold to think of anything else! The sound of her voice echoed for miles, loosening a little of the accumulated snow pack from the near-side of the glacier, rolling it down in silent snowballs. She glanced up, suddenly fearful that she might have triggered a serious slide… but nothing further happened, and she shuddered a sigh of relief.

Over what?! a rather cynical part of her thought. At least it would’ve been over with quick! Demons tend to overestimate what a human can handle; you know that! Every sentient being is individuo-centric until sufficiently educated otherwise, and sometimes not even then! She forced herself to start walking again just to keep her legs from freezing stiff; that alone was a rather ominous feeling. Patterners were admittedly handicapped by their inherent need for self-propulsion in the shifting process; even when physically paralyzed, the fingers of the Logrus could be relied upon to pull an incapacitated Chaosian to safety if they were not otherwise injured and still of sound enough mind. Order was, ironically enough, more demanding…

What to do, what to do… if only she could just be warmer for one second maybe she could think straight! A light blanket of snow was silently accumulating over her cloak as thick, dry flakes fell all about her…

A nice down jacket, a fur rug, a serape, anything! Please! she mentally pled with the multiverse, not really expecting an answer.

Just a few yards on a muffled sound other than the snow crunching beneath her feet met her ears… then stopped. Had some benevolent power just dropped her a care package?! She listened intently for a few seconds, then reluctantly peeked out of her woolly cocoon…

Not fifty yards from where she stood, downhill, there were little wisps of steam rising… like breath. Then that stopped as well.

Carefully picking her way sideways down the icy, snow-covered slope, trying not to roll, she finally spotted something that was not white, but a dun-brown-and-cream in the harsh moonlight that was breaking through the cloud-cover. With huge pale antlers…

Oh, no. Nonononono, not this! she thought frantically, skidding the rest of the way down and over to the fallen animal: it was a huge adult male reindeer of all things, seemingly healthy, no outward signs of any disease, any wasting or starvation, in the prime of life. She had just watched it die! The creature hadn’t even gotten to close its gentle brown eyes, the carcass warm enough that a little steam could be seen lifting from it at close-range! Sarah felt as if she would be physically sick: if she was personally responsible for this magnificent animal’s untimely demise she would never forgive herself! It had been such a stupid, selfish, vague wish! The whole situation was more than she could bear: she fell to her knees, lying upon the reindeer’s cooling side, her right arm flung about its back, and sobbed her eyes out. It was all her fault. This was all her fault! If only she’d been braver or cleverer or stronger or prouder or humbler, maybe it wouldn’t have gone this way! Maybe everything would still be as it should be!

If only, if only, if only…

Once she had spent the worst of her outburst, sogging up the musky beast’s fur coat where her face had been, she pulled back, stiffly standing, coldly reminding herself that both food and clothing were present in this unwanted sacrifice, and that it would be an even greater sin to let it go to waste out here, but Sarah didn’t have it in her to attempt to roughly skin the animal, although makeshift tools of sharp rock and ice could be had at a moment’s notice. She bent and stroked the soft, thick muzzle, driftingly watching how it sparkled in the moonlight, with delicate snowflakes beginning to decorate it… It was so beautiful… it almost reminded her of something…

The Dreamstone! The unbidden thought shocked her alert again, in spite of her cold-enhanced fatigue. Did the artifact contain enough power to reanimate something? Not in the manner of the Courts’ voodoo-like rites to infuse fresh corpses with foreign spirits, but to return true Anima to a previously living being?

Sarah rationally knew that such a power-surge would likely mean the end of her own life, but frankly at this point she was beyond caring. She was going to do one thing right before she went! Clumsily digging the Stone out of the bottom of the bag where it had fallen when she had retrieved the other clothing, her fingers now painfully numb and decidedly red, she managed to bring it over her head once more, wincing her eyes closed against the impending glare… Light shone redly through her eyelids as she firmly clasped the artifact in her hands, feeling the gathering energy – dragging on her own over-extended life-force – then leaned forward, to press it to the fallen reindeer…

And fell on her face in the snow, absorbing the jolt herself! Coughing and spluttering, she sat back up in confusion… only to discover that the corpse had vanished clean off the face of Denjak! There was a sizable indent where the animal had lain but moments before, but no further traces to be found whatsoever! Forcibly straightening her legs to stand, Sarah commenced to inwardly curse her own naïve stupidity once again-

A deep, odd, almost hog-like snorting sound cut the negative thought-pattern short; she automatically looked up, and over…

Standing there proudly not thirty feet away, watching her intently, was a silver reindeer! At first Sarah thought she might be hallucinating from hypothermia and her fraught nerves, and she blinked a few times, shaking her head to clear it.

The magnificent creature was still there, puffing warm breaths, watching her expectantly. She could swear there was a look of intelligence in its large grey eyes… not brown, grey!

Oh, of course! The Stone’s still affecting my vision! Chastising her incredulous faith in her senses (the suddenly pearlescent snow should’ve been a dead giveaway), Sarah lifted the heavy silver chain up over her head again…

The animal was still silver, starkly so in the silvery moonlight that was cutting through the sporadic clouds… and he was still watching her, his pale eyes shining clear! With another snort and a slight nod of the head, he commenced cantering away from her at an easy ‘slow’ speed… and Sarah found that her feet were no longer cold, her legs truly warming, and her torso and arms – and it was not the final fiery warmth of freezing to death! She wasn’t tired at all!

It only took her another second to realize what was happening: she tore off after the creature, having to run to try to keep up, certain that it was magickal now, perhaps even more than it seemed at this moment! Away they flew, across snowy embankments and over fluffy hills, until at length there began to be less and less of the freezing substances, the white covering of the sterile ground thinner and thinner, leaving exposed patches of rock in certain places that she had to be careful not to trip over-

Green! There – and here again: moss! And were those tiny yellow flowers peeking up through a drift?! She heard the hair-raisingly eerie sound of wolves vocalizing as a hunting pack off in the distance, but the reindeer didn’t even pause, plunging ahead through Shadow-tundra, once looking over his great shoulder, as if to make sure that Sarah was still behind him! Her blood was certainly pumping now; she was so hot she was sweating in spite of the frigid temperature… which must’ve been slightly warmer now, for these ground plants to be alive! The reindeer had to dodge a boggy marsh to their left, the human girl behind him carefully marking his tracks; there were more of them coming up ahead. The back of her throat was burning and her mouth tasted terrible, but at least they were amongst life again! The scent of a bear came, but went just as quickly…

Sarah’s head was finally beginning to spin from the exertion – and likely dehydration – as the reindeer led her up an easy incline… was it a hill? She could barely pay attention, her conscious mind starting to drift again, for other reasons than before. All she knew was that when he reached the top, he vocalized loudly, high and clear, then looked back… and when she reached the plateau herself, staggering, her legs shaking, she was suddenly dreadfully cold, shivering again, weak… blurry, shimmering human shapes were running toward her… but the silver reindeer was gone…


Messy palimpsest
Overlapping negative
In a stark moonlight
Rendering the cobblestones
Of the True City
Bright as day
As phantoms trade, barter, sell
Their colorless wares
On the streets of Amber:
Translucent fruit
Pearlescent fabrics
And ephemeral metalworking
From a smith that looks strangely familiar
Yet none will approach.
Closed shops bustle silently
With their ghostly clientele
As frightened children are hushed
By frightened mothers
And fathers
Upstairs.


… the smell of dried herbs, pungent fermentation, and… fish?

Sarah cracked her eyes open through a notably thick layer of sleep-crud, slowly becoming aware of her surroundings again: at least she was warm. She was reclined, covered in soft leathers of some kind from the feel, the smell-

Leather! The Silver Reindeer! Her eyes flew open wide and she looked down… and relaxed: it wasn’t reindeer-hide; they were made from something else, furrier, softer. She was lying on a thin pallet bed which was raised a couple feet off the dirt floor, alongside a mud-daub wall, with support timbers that showed through every few feet, surrounded by other such beds circling the periphery of the room – with the forms of people in them! She appeared to be in some sort of longhouse: away over there was the communal fire pit in the center of the room, smoke collecting up at the ceiling, slowly exiting a tiny vent chimney. The roof was sloped down to the walls about halfway, and at the moment the light was dim. As her eyes slowly adjusted, Sarah finally noticed the small ivory-carved figurine that had been suspended on a tiny piece of string over her cot, but it was difficult to distinguish at first, until the air currents from the fire turned it a bit more…

Oh, it’s supposed to be a reindeer…

Right. Somehow, a magickal creature had just happened to be in the right place at the right time to hear her screaming her lungs out on Denjak in her desperately dire need, then, for whatever reason, decided to stick around and not only hear but honor her vague petition for help?! The more she thought about it, the more the whole situation was beginning to look staged. Those cosmic playing-pieces were being moved – that much was almost dead-certain – but by who? Dworkin or Suhuy? Whose turn had caused this outcome?

She tried to sit up… only to find that her hands were wrapped snugly in strips of leather, fur-side in. Oh, man, did I actually sustain frostbite? she briefly wondered. It didn’t hurt like it, though. Maybe the step had just been preventative. Slowly raising herself, feeling her stiff back, she finally noticed that she was still sort of weak, like she’d been bedridden with illness. As she quietly surveyed the room in hopes of spotting the latrine, she saw a woman in a heavy leather coat trimmed with fur bringing in more earthen kindling on the wrapped pack on her back, but at the sight of Sarah sitting up she quickly set it down by the slim hallway she had just come out of, ripped off her leather glove-mittens and hurried over to the fire, pouring something white into an ivory cup, walking over, presenting it to the girl, speaking quietly and gently to her in a foreign tongue, her dark-brown almond-eyes filled with concern!

Sarah accepted the unknown hot libation awkwardly with a slow nod, cradling the cup in her still-wrapped hands, studying the woman as she sipped it; the steaming substance was sourer than unsweetened yogurt, but was probably about as nourishing, she would guess, some form of animal dairy. The woman’s cast and facial features made her appear somewhere between Inuit and Mongolian in ethnicity, her black hair braided back, currently tucked into her collar, but Sarah had no idea where this place lay on the Shadow-spectrum; it was almost certainly not Earth! The woman watched Sarah in turn curiously as she crossed the room, removing her own outer wraps and hanging them up along the wall to dry; once Sarah had finished the unknown drink, she moved to fill her cup again, but the girl finally managed to sign what she really needed, and was led to a small, dark side-room down the thin hallway, away from the light, from the main living quarters. The woman unwrapped the girl’s hands before she left her, casually throwing the spent herb-stalks that had been hidden within into the frozen hole in the ground.

By the time Sarah wandered back in, more women were awake and up: there were only women here! At her appearance, a hushed babble in a long-flowing, consonantal speech commenced among them; she awkwardly lifted one of her still-pink hands in greeting at the short doorway as a few began to approach.

“Nobody here speaks any Thari, right?” she tried experimentally, slowly walking back in, toward the fire. “How about English? Please tell me ‘paleface’ explorers haven’t come speaking this tongue yet?”

Like she thought, the only languages she knew were foreign to them also, but they still managed to communicate with her by rough signs that she was welcome here, although some eyed her with thinly-veiled caution, as if she had just fallen from the sky!

All their clothing was leather and fur, and almost all their food appeared to be animal-based; the latitude had to have been too high to grow or otherwise cultivate anything much that humans could eat. It wasn’t mere elevation; there was plenty of air. To Sarah’s surprise, ‘breakfast’ consisted of dried berries and raw fatty fish – frozen! – cut into thin strips and obviously meant to be eaten that way!

It’s just sushi on ice, she thought, chewing down her larger portion ravenously; it actually wasn’t half-bad, but the method was probably an acquired taste. Water was provided in the form of ice slabs, melted in skin-containers near the fire, and once the meal was concluded Sarah drank her fill, carefully rinsing off her hands and face so as not to waste any of what she had been given.

Once this was finished, most of the women seemed to set about what were likely their normal tasks, like this was just another day-in-the-life for them, even with the peculiar company: some sewing hides together by hand with sinew thread and bone needles to make more clothing, or scraping and preparing fresh skins, or tending to the smoked preserved meat Sarah now saw near the fire, or bundling up to the teeth to go outside for whatever reasons.

Basically being ignored for the moment, Sarah wandered back over to her cot and sat down, noting that her carryall and cloak had been carefully placed beneath it. It was sort of warm in here, but not overly toasty; she stripped off the blouse-top from over her long woolen dress, but left the pants on underneath it. With many small tallow-fires lit to see better by, Sarah could now see that the women’s house was beautifully decorated with animal designs carved into the walls, on stone and ivory implements alike: oxen – yaks, perhaps? – bears, different kinds of birds, wolves, reindeer… whales? Possibly; the style was naturalistic enough to identify the others.

Thoughts of the Dreamstone returned to plague her: she was clearly nowhere near getting the help she needed on that count, solving the riddle of how to get it back before… actually she didn’t know what she was afraid of happening! It wasn’t like the thing had even left Order; the true Jewel had been taken on extended excursions. Maybe everybody was severely overreacting here… but the idea still gnawed at her, like one of the bone knives she was hearing scrape, scrape, scraping away the flesh remnants of some dead creature off to her right, alongside. It was tempting to try to slip the Stone on inconspicuously, to try to communicate clearly with these people, to obtain better information about where she was and what had happened to her, but she refrained for fear of freaking somebody out; where would she be then?!

There was no way of marking the time, but after a while two of the women who had gone out came back in, one of them carrying a gray, furry bundle of something. They carefully approached Sarah and presented it: it was a long, hooded sealskin jacket, with mitten-gloves and a hat besides, all leather! Sarah thanked them in her own tongue, smiling… but it quickly became apparent that she was to don it all and follow them out – now! They even helped her with the unfamiliar bone-toggle fasteners as she pulled on the toasty-fuzzy cap and fat gloves, grabbing her bag, even though they motioned that she could leave it. But Sarah was adamant: she wasn’t leaving the Dreamstone unguarded for one minute!

Properly attired for the climate now, she followed the two women out of the long living quarters, down the thin, dark hallway in the other direction, through a heavy door covered with layers of skins… and out into the freezing-yet-fresh air, brilliant sunlight warming her face, glinting off banks of accumulated snow! Even the outside of the longhouse – which she now realized was partially buried in the ground, as she stepped up and out over a few frozen earthen stairs – was covered in feet of deliberately packed snow for insulation. Out in the open, she spotted several more buildings like the one she had just exited, all formed like spokes in a wheel about an open center area; both women and men were out here, busy at various tasks, once again mostly to do with meat and fish, some rather fresh and bloody on the snow. Bundled as she was now, Sarah barely garnered any attention at all as she was led across the open space and over to a sunken building opposite, walking down the stairs: the door was opened by a muscular man standing there, looking rather official, and she was ushered in alone. It closed behind her.

The first thing she noticed was just how quiet it was in here, and that there was a distinctly pungent tang to the air, like the remnants of burned medicinal herbs. She warily made her way down the tiny side hall (which was likely also for purposes of insulation, she now realized) and into the long main room…

Which stood completely empty of people, save for the old man seated before the fire pit, facing her. His long white hair was beaded with carved bone and ivory chips, and many strings of what Sarah took to be fetishes and charms made of bones, claws and teeth were strung about his neck. His leathers looked softer, made more for comfort than for physical labor.

The chief, the medicine-man, maybe both, Sarah thought, cautiously approaching him with a nod of recognition; he spoke not a word, but gestured for her to be seated before him on the floor, near the warmth. He stared into her alienly green eyes for a very long time, then slowly reached out his hand in the direction of her forehead, narrowing his own brown eyes; when she felt him trying to ‘read’ her arcanely after his own fashion, she knew that the proper time for the use of the Stone had come.

“Wait,” she said in Thari, removing her gloves, turning aside to open her bag, taking her new hat off, opening the top of the jacket. The old sage’s dark eyes widened as far as they possibly could go as she extracted the shining Dreamstone from her bag, and he made what was unmistakably a warding gesture, beginning to chant under his breath… but the necklace was on in a moment, the dark longhouse suddenly as bright for Sarah as if the place were lit with multiple 60-watt lightbulbs! Let me speak with him, she willed, clutching the object, ignoring the eyeball-stalk lichen which were now watching them from the walls…

“Please don’t be afraid of this – I won’t let it hurt you,” she said after a few more seconds, not certain what language she was speaking. White eyebrows raised in surprise: he’d understood that! “If you are this people’s leader, I am grateful to you, and your people, for saving my life. I would have likely died had you not taken me in!”

He was still eying her rather dubiously, like the lichen. “Your gratitude is accepted in the spirit it is offered, but you bear such rare mana-power like a star! Are you one of the lesser Great Powers of the Sky, fallen from your place in the heavens? We sometimes see them in passing in the Growth season, but have heard of them landing but rarely.”

Sarah shook her head, smiling. “I’m just a person like you, I think, just a specially lucky or unlucky one, whichever way you choose to look at it,” she laughed a little self-consciously, unable to resist glancing at those deeply concerned, inhuman stares that only she could see... that probably weren’t there. “Although I am well and truly lost out here! Oh! Did anyone happen to see a silver reindeer in these parts? I sort of wasn’t doing very well at the end there; I don’t remember clearly. How long was I unconscious? Forgive me; I haven’t even asked your name!”

But the old man solemnly shook his head once. “I give my true name to no one, and I will not ask yours also out of respect, but you may call me Grandfather. You slept two whole days; this is your third morning among us. Indeed, your ‘silver reindeer’ was seen – and heard – by many. He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou is not our friend, yet he is not our enemy. Perhaps it is because we have given those of his totem little reason to trust us,” he gestured to his clothing, the smoked meat hanging from the rafters along with bundles of various drying herbs. “You must not eat their flesh or wear their hides from this time on, for it was he who saved you, who told us of your presence just outside our village: this is taboo for you now. How did you even find us, if I may ask that? Did he show you the way?”

“As far as I can tell…yes! One minute I was busy freezing to death… someplace else, and he… he tested me first,” she realized, remembering out loud, “to see what I would do – and I must have passed muster because he let me live! I don’t honestly know how far I followed him, but I think he must’ve leant me a bit of strength also, ‘mana’ in your sense of the word; I would’ve never made it otherwise!”

The medicine-man nodded, as if this were perfectly normal conversation. “Then He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou is your friend, and that is rare indeed.”

“Forgive me for interrupting, but why do you keep calling him that? I must confess I am a very long way from anything I am familiar with; your local gods and powers would all be foreign to me.”

The old man sighed. “Some of the Great Ones are shapeshifters, as is your friend; he most often appears as a caribou, but sometimes he has been witnessed changing into a man.”

Sarah’s eyes widened at a sudden, wild possibility; stranger things had happened in Shadow! “Are there accounts of when he has been seen in manform? Does he have black hair, like that of your people, but skin pale like mine? And eyes as green as… as the sheets of light in the night sky?” she searched for a meaningful comparison. “Do you see that phenomena out here?”

The sage slowly nodded, beginning to smile. “He is your friend. You knew not who and what he was when you saw him like this? Such is often the case with Trickster-gods; luckily for you, yours seems generally benign, at worst only uninterested in us. But he must have had a reason to bring you to us!”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking! I…” She looked down at the packed earth floor, pausing, embarrassed. “I need… help,” she awkwardly admitted. “I was told I needed to speak with … him, or someone like him, when he is a man, to ask for advice about something terribly important.” She looked back up at the medicine-man; his expression had changed into one of quiet amusement. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to go about doing that, would you, Grandfather?” she inquired dubiously.

“I might. But I must ask Raven, for he is my friend; he travels far in this world and the others, and sees much, sometimes even that which is yet-to-come. Rest as you can today, then come back to me after sunset, and we will learn what we may. Perhaps Raven knows what He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou is up to these days, for he is also Trickster, but of a more talkative, personable sort,” he genuinely smiled, coming to his feet; Sarah took the cue to stand also, the interview obviously concluded… but his eyes had drifted back down to the Dreamstone again. “Am I allowed to ask about that? For my own knowledge?”

“It’s probably best that you don’t, although that’s what it’s about, alright. I wish I’d never laid eyes on it myself.”

He nodded in sympathy. “Even I can tell it makes you weak when you wear it – don’t, not even tonight; leave it behind in the lodge. If Raven wants to speak to you, he will make himself understood. Do what you can to protect your own mana; it is limited. But that star-stone is surely a thing of the Great Ones,” he added, just before she took it off, properly stashing it away this time, refitting the new hat and gloves.

“Thank you,” she said distinctly in Thari, sure that he understood the meaning anyway from his look of acknowledgement, before she turned and went out again on her own, back to the lodge of women without young children.

No one noted her much again, save at mealtimes; she seemed strangely recovered for the most part (although they continued to feed her generously in comparison to their own portions, just to make sure.) For Sarah the day passed slowly, the lack of outdoor light and burrow-like living conditions putting her in mind of her stint in Chaos yet again, in a vague, lateral fashion; it was simply too strong of an experience to ever truly put aside. She felt vaguely guilty lounging about here idle when there were clearly communal tasks that needed to be completed. After about three hours she couldn’t take it anymore, and, screwing up her nerve, approached a middle-aged woman busy at the sewing and signed if there was anything that she could help with. Before she knew it, Sarah had a pile of freshly-cured leathers on her lap (probably reindeer from the appearance of the pelts, but they weren’t for her), and she was doing her best not to stab herself as she hand-hemmed a simple, long seam in very tough material for the rest of the afternoon. By dinnertime her right hand was aching, but she was in better spirits and the company seemed a little warmer toward her than previously, even if she still couldn’t understand what they were saying, some of it obviously about her.

Judging nightfall through the chimney, she bundled up again, making a show of leaving her belongings behind so that they knew she meant to come back, better confident now that they would be safe, stepping out into the brutally frigid dusk, partially covering her nose and mouth with her right glove-mitten as she quickly paced across the open area to the shaman’s lodge (for that was what he truly was, not just a chief or a doctor.) She thought of trying to knock on the skin-frame door, but the portal was opened from the inside by a different man, who was also wearing religious fetishes over his heavy outside jacket (though not as many) as well as bearing a spear like a weapon; he ushered her in and her nose was immediately assaulted by the strong sharp-green smell of unfamiliar burned herbs – there was a fair amount of smoke in the air, even in the outer hall! Walking into the main room, she heard a quiet hand-drum being played softly and quickly in the lefthand corner by a third man: thin, unshirted and darkly tattooed, his brown eyes vacant in trance, his hands continuing their movements automatically. The moment Sarah took her seat by the fire, already feeling a bit lightheaded and drowsy, the first man went back out, closing the door, likely to make sure that they would not be disturbed.

Something moved in the shadows to her right, and she started with a gasp – she hadn’t even seen the shaman, he had blended into the darkness so well! The old man was also shirtless, wearing a long cloak of black feathers over his buskined trousers and boots, an elaborately carved mask in the shape of a huge bird’s head with a long beak, blackened with ashes, completely covering his face; she couldn’t even see his eyes. Her vision was already starting to waver as he walked toward the fire and tossed another handful of plant materials into it, chanting softly in time to the odd drumbeat, taking a bite of whatever remained in his right hand. The lodge was suddenly hot, the walls fading into darkness spangled with dancing starlight; Sarah could barely keep her eyes open…

And then it happened: the shaman’s body vanished into blackness, yet not Void, the limbs lengthening as he grew taller and taller, as the blackened sharp-beaked mask and feathers took on the features and form of life! Imperious, inquisitive bird-eyes stared down at Sarah from the height, the half-human shape graced with enormous black wings on its arms!

“Greetings, strange child of Light!” the larger-than-life mythic figure uttered – in English! “My servant tells me you have a good heart but a confused mind, and I see that it is so. If only he knew,” his chuckle sounded like raven-croaking, “but we’ll not tell him. Your reason for inquiring of me is also good: you wish to know more of the one my people call He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou. Alas, I can tell you but little of him; the Path that one treads is of his own making. He is one of us, and yet he is not one of us, a foreign power who occasionally makes inroads into our territory, but who does not contest our rule. I have no argument with him, but neither do we commune in mind and spirit. Like me, he is a far-traveler… as are you, for that matter,” the huge figure stooped to examine Sarah a little more closely; the drumbeat was like a long roll of muffled thunder, far in the distance, barely audible. “But you carry not the item! I am somewhat irritated with my servant for telling you not to wear it in my presence, but I suppose he had no way of knowing whether I would be gravely insulted by a direct rival power in my sacred space. Nevermind: I sense it in you as I sense it in the Caribou – obviously not at the same level, but the same power, in slightly different iterations. Your is of the Great Horned Mare-Horse, correct?”

Sarah felt herself slowly nodding, blatantly staring!

“Then it is as I suspected, he is Her son. Do not wonder at this; our visible forms are more descriptive of our essences than any strictly biological phenomena. But it is not the Caribou you seek – it is his father…”

“His name… is Corwin,” Sarah uttered in slow-motion – but a shadow-dark hand thrust up between them!

“Tell me not his true name!” the figure thundered! “I wish no quarrel with him, for he also is powerful; I know him from mental-impressions alone from the Caribou, and I know that he is far less temperate than his son! Yet you would seek his aid in disposing of the unlooked-for power you are currently burdened with, of returning it to the High Powers in the Dreamtime.” The figure straightened to his full height once more – at least thirty feet! – training his sharp, black eyes upon the night-dark horizon. “I see the Caribou’s father, along with his many false images, far to the west, worlds from this place, perhaps within your reach. You are free to search for him there, yet insight tells me he will not be found until the proper time, when the Lady in Black fails and the world gives way… then will you see his son the Caribou also. Many crave the power you carry, yet in the end you must choose which traitor you will trust, for an element of sacrifice is involved.” The figure looked back down at her. “Beyond this I cannot council you, but to advise you to keep to warmer climes in the future, as much as it is possible in your current life-journey; your meat is not as tough as that of my people,” he croaked a few more times, the sound carrying for miles. “I will allow you one question which pertains, for I feel you need to hear the answer from one such as myself.”

“Can you see… if I make it… if I live, to go home?”

The darkness shook his great feathery head. “That is almost entirely up to you, but this is not a bad thing – it is part of the business you call ‘free-will’ and often consider unnecessarily bothersome without comprehending the full implications of what you would condemn. And what is ‘home’ but where your spirit currently resides? No matter where you are, you are home. Now go with my blessing – and give the Caribou and his father my greetings also, when the time comes…”

Sarah’s eyelids slipped closed heavily as the sky began to spin like a top above her, the drumming growing louder, deeper…

She came to lying on the packed dirt floor of the shaman’s lodge, next to the smoldering, crackling embers of the peat fire; the old medicine-man was crouched at her side, dressed in his normal clothing again, pressing a warm bone cup into her hands, helping her to sit up. It was filled with the same soured milk as before, but it helped to ground her senses… as did the now-clear air. How long had she lain here like that?

Bright daylight conspicuously painted the floor of the outside hallway as the door opened, and the woman from the lodge that Sarah had done sewing for the previous day came in and helped her to her feet, offering a shoulder to steady against as she tiredly staggered back to the other longhouse, lay down on her cot without removing the cozy jacket, and proceeded to sack out for hours.

Awakening – far better refreshed this time – to the smell of food, Sarah managed to roll up in time for dinner… and would’ve wished that she’d missed it if she hadn’t been so hungry from missing breakfast and lunch: great slabs of bloody fat were being passed around with obvious excitement and joy, along with the fish she was allotted specially; the preserved meat the rest were consuming like a side-dish had to have been reindeer. Closing her eyes, forcibly reminding herself it probably had something to do with necessary vitamins, Sarah managed to chew it down, chasing it with bites of frozen fish. Granted it was filling, even nominally warm…

Of course it was difficult for her to fall asleep that night since she’d already slept through most of the day. She just lay there, staring at the little Caribou figurine above her bed, thinking of the peculiar vision, turning its truly scanty contents over in her mind. She didn’t know if these people prayed as such, but it felt sort of nice that there was at least one relatively good-natured being looking out for this community, if not her. And yet…

To the west, eh? Sarah finally got up and silently pulled the geography tome out of her pack, tiptoeing over to the fire to try and read it quietly by the dim light, having to lean in close to make out the flowing Thari script, checking against the index. Raven admittedly hadn’t given her good odds, and some of his portents sounded positively threatening, but at least he had given her a definite direction to strike out in…

Before she slept again, she had the beginnings of a plan.


Mortals of Earth call him Weland,
But the Phantom Smith of Tir-na Nog’th
Has no name,
Only a profession:
Forger of steel and silver,
Moonlight and blood
And Pattern.
He rides out

With his king
And the knights of the Ghost City
From Amber
Questing for the first time in
Millennium
Tracking the Dreamstone
By means of its setting
(and the vial of blood the Smith
still carries on his person
- relic of Oberon –
link of Stone, Jewel and Star)

On through the Forest
And the night
Speeding ghosts
Flashby of silver
In the unnaturally bright moonlight
- like in the Ghost City -

Up to the Arden encampment
Straight through the soldiers
To the house of the prince
Bursting through the door
Without opening it
Inquiring of its master without words
Mouthing the demand:
Where is it?

And his daughter, Sarilda,
Protesting her innocence
By reason of conscience:
“I kept her safe,
which is more than any of you
would have done!”

A hand raises
To strike an impertinent mouth,
But the king signals ‘Weland’
To stop her father,
Holding back his arm,
The Smith’s strong and dark!

Let her be,
The king mouths,
(Hated familiarity of face
For the prince,
Doubly so for the Crown of Amber
Upon that pale brow.)
The Stone has gone,
But we must stay
Until it is returned
And our way home is clear,
For we cannot follow it.

The prince grudges assurance
Of search parties through Shadow
In the morning
And trumps his liege-

A hand he cannot feel
Touches his shoulder
As the contact is made…


The following morning brought dried meat for a change, which Sarah would’ve been hard-pressed to identify by taste (except for the knowledge of what it couldn’t be), along with more dried berries and fermented milk, before she headed out in search of the medicine-man once more… with the Dreamstone secreted away in her left glove-mitten, where she’d wrapped it the night before while everyone was still asleep.

The enormous aquatic carcass that had provided the previous night’s blubber was still being carefully stripped and cleaned outside; no part would be wasted, she was sure. This time she did knock on the door, feeling that she might not be as expected today, but it opened before she could even rap twice! Grandfather himself simply waved her in out of the cold, closing the door after her. She suddenly wondered whether the old man had always been alone, whether he had family or kin yet living, whether his profession – his ‘calling’ – had forced him into more-or-less solitary existence, save for special occasions. He well-noted that the Dreamstone was in her hands when she took off her gloves; she slipped it over her head once the other wraps were removed.

“Do you live alone, Grandfather?” she asked as he shuffled back to his place by the fire, slowly sitting at the foot of a Dreamstone-invisible stone bench carved to look like books. “I haven’t been in your community long, but hardly anyone seems to come here except for me.” She sat also, at a respectful distance away; the magickal artifact still seemed to make him uneasy.

He gave a small smile at her question. “I am alone yet not alone – which is as it should be. Most of my friends are spirits of the land, but the people take good care of me in spite of my age and infirmity, because of this. You will not see many old men in a community such as ours: food and provisions are allotted chiefly to those who can physically contribute. There is not much leftover for those who cannot, and they try not to burden their families,” he shrugged. “There is only one shaman here, and so I am kept alive. I have an apprentice, a man now called Tarkik, who will someday change his true name and take my place when I am gone; you saw him last night, for he drummed.” He smiled again. “But I know you do not come to visit me today only out of charity. Did Raven teach you what you needed to learn?”

“As much as he was going to, I think,” she answered, a little unsure of herself. “Don’t you know? You were there, too!”

But the old sage shook his head. “Sometimes he talks to me directly or lets me listen as he speaks through me to others, but I remember nothing of the night you came to inquire of him from the time you entered the room to the time Tarkik awoke me the next morning – it happens, but not often. Sometimes all he wants of me is a body, a shell to hold himself down into our world, so he may manifest more easily to interact with us. Did you sense the speeding up after the slowing down?”

Sarah nodded quickly, wide-eyed.

“Even at times when he is physically present, Raven has always seemed to be somewhere else to me, where the night runs faster than it does here, that he comes and stands in an open doorway. I cannot explain it, but I wished to reassure you that it was no trick you experienced. I have felt it many times.”

Sarah quietly gasped in realization, looking up toward the ceiling (and more faeries, flitting about the ‘chimney’): it was the uniquely disturbing phenomena of seeing the time-differential between distant shadow-worlds, when it was not cleanly mediated by arcane assistance like the trumps!

“You know it also, from experience?”

Sarah decided that the best course of action was to just keep her mouth shut. Raven was right: the full truth would destroy his old retainer’s mind, expanded as it was. She only nodded mutely, carefully considering her words. “You’re more right that you know, but the knowledge doesn’t appear to make any difference in your case, and knowing it won’t make you happy,” she quietly added out of pity, unable to look at him: the old man was within slapping distance of the truth, and he would never grasp it.

Grandfather seemed to take this also in the stride; could anything ruffle his feathers, so-to-speak? “Did he help you decide what to do about speaking with He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou?”

“I must seek him to the west – that’s about the only directions I got that might be of any practical use, but it’s something, anyway. I’m afraid I must likely travel by foot to do what I need to. Are there any maps of this land that I could look at, anything of the sort? He is not here, but I must pass through at least some of your country on the way to find him.”

“You cannot travel directly west from here, for you will soon run into a large ocean!” the shaman laughed. “But if you travel southwest for a long time, you will find tree-country and freshwater streams with easy fishing; from there you will have to decide for yourself which way to follow. If He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou truly wants you to find him, perhaps he will let you walk his Path. Were you planning on leaving us soon, then?”

“Yes, as soon as I can be ready.” She looked down a bit ruefully at the warm seal-jacket. “I have no way of paying your people for these warm wraps, or the food – I came carrying nothing that would be of any real use to you here!”

But Grandfather waived off her concern. “They are ‘things-given-to-someone-who-has-none’, our gift to one under the protection of He-Who-is-Sometimes-a-Caribou: when the Hunted seeks the aid of the Hunter, strange things are abroad in the world. We will spare you some dried moose-meat also, a little to last you until you reach the first river.”

Sarah very nearly replied that she probably wouldn’t even see the rivers… then wisely remembered her cautious prudence once more, and simply accepted the proffered generosity, getting back up, starting to take the necklace back off – when Grandfather stopped her with a look.

“I do not know where you came from or where you are going, but I am glad that you were here,” he made a hand-sign she took for a blessing-gesture, “and that my friend could help you somewhat.”

“For whatever it’s worth, thank you.” She stopped then, thinking. “Grandfather, why is it that oracles are never spoken in plain, understandable language? Some of what Raven told me toward the end I couldn’t comprehend even in my own tongue!”

The medicine-man silently laughed. “Raven’s wisdom is earned. He teaches us in riddles; that is his path, his way. Besides, future-knowledge is really only good for future-woman, not the woman you are right now. But it can be taken as an assurance, that you have a future.”

Sarah smirked. “Maybe it’s just a ‘black-bird-creature’ thing. I’ve known a… minor one, who delighted in talking circles around me intellectually!” And the synchronicity abruptly popped into the foreground in her mind. “Raven, and her,” she started thinking aloud, “and the centaur, and the black…”

She started breathing a little faster. The thought was stunning. “What does it mean?! All those – black? Almost everything that willingly interacts with me!”

Grandfather frowned in thought. “You speak of power-creatures, not normal animals?”

Sarah nodded rapidly.

“It signifies change.”

“… what sort of change?”

“Good change. Bad change. Both. Neither. Sometimes it is only difference. But it is change. Transformation.”

Sarah just looked at the old man, not sure of what to say.

“The only reason to fear it would be if you did not care about the outcome; you do, and so you have agency in it. It is your own, and you own it. Make friends with it.”

For a single moment as he said that last little sentence, Sarah thought she saw Raven’s black eyes instead of the shaman’s – but he blinked, and the irises were deep-brown once more. He slowly came to his feet as she donned the jacket and gloves again, finally removing the Dreamstone and stuffing it into her left glove before putting on the hat. He followed her through the now-darkened room back to the door, put on a hooded jacket lined with seal-fur himself, and accompanied her back to the women’s lodge; he would not enter, but she heard him speaking at the door, and a packet of dried meat and berries was prepared for her while she refilled her canteen with clean, fresh ice-melt water. Placing both into her carryall amid smiles and what sounded like mostly kind tones-of-voice, she closed it up and slung it over her now-padded shoulder, bracing herself for the cold, but far better prepared for it now. She felt a tap on her arm: one of the younger women held the small ivory-carved caribou that had been hung over Sarah’s cot in her hands… and was presenting it to her, like ‘go on, take it: gift.’ Sarah nodded reverently, accepting the little naturalistically-carved figurine, carefully sticking it in the inside pouch of the bag where it would be better cushioned from the heavy book and canteen, before heading back outside.

The shaman was still there, waiting for her, as were a handful of the men she had barely seen before: strong, weathered, hairless complexions that made them look some kind of Asian, counterpart to the mostly softer, rounder faces of the women she had been surrounded by. Walking her out to the edge of the village, Grandfather pointed out the path that she should take, a partly snowy causeway over firm ground, running crazily between the marshy bogs, a couple of which actually had a few ducks in them! If Sarah had to guess, it might’ve been late summer/early autumn here, but it was only a guess; the type of landscape was too unfamiliar. She was ‘told’ to keep the mounting morning sun behind her left shoulder, but that it would set directly in front of her face.

Sarah glanced back at the small, guarded gathering, watching her in turn. This had to have seemed sheer madness to them.

“Thanks for everything,” she said in Thari with a quirk-smile, as Grandfather conveyed her gratitude to the others in their own rolling, many-syllabled tongue. Putting up the hood and pulling the sinew lacing of the neck of the sealskin jacket tight enough to cover her mouth, she started off down and across the half-frozen tundra, finally warm; she inwardly laughed at the thought. The light, freezing breeze was still nipping the tip of her nose, but it was no longer the deadly distraction of her previous trip. Still, she decided to follow the landscape for a while to get the feel for it before trying to shift again, to see what would feel most ‘natural’. The whole world was wide open out here, as far and as much of it as her eyes could possibly take in, the air punishingly bracing but clean, the faint warmth of the daystar to her back, on her raised furry hood. There were even distant herds of yaks and a moose or two, grazing the half-buried grasses. The sound of geese calling signaled an overhead migration south in a very long ‘v’ formation.

She suddenly remembered that there were bears out here, too – possibly even polar; they were latitudinally high enough – and wolves as well. As picturesque as some of the wildlife was, she logically knew that it would have to be the first thing to go in the shadow-shifting, even before the snow. Being killed and eaten was too much of an actively ongoing liability!

Pacing through the crunchy, slushy snow at a more determined clip once she was well out of sight of the native village, perhaps three miles away, she concentrated on her fuzzy warmth and the sparse plant life that was growing up in spite of the snow and the temperature, ignoring the muddy bogs on all sides, willing the land to be fuller, more lush, quieter… grass and flowers, grass and flowers… less marsh…goodbye Caribou, new totem animal… sun riding high now, the shifts evolutionarily simple; she broke into a run just for the hell of it… no fauna company now… warmer – oh yes, warmer… pine trees in the distance, rapidly coming closer…

Sarah slowed back down as she entered evergreen forest again, stopping to impulsively hug one of the thick boles: trees meant collective temperature control, shelter, possibly even the presence of forage-food. Taking a fast drink, she picked up her pace in an easy jog along the softer, thickly-needled carpet, the sharp rosin smell invigorating… was it just her, or was the tint of the sky above tending toward lavender again? At least the weather was still holding clear for the time-being, even though there were a few cumulous clouds. Perhaps half-an-hour later, Sarah felt certain that if she had still been on the shadow that those people lived on that she would be treading seawater by now – and carefully readjusted her course to what she hoped was true west. Now then…

Sarah tried not to think about it, but certain inherent aspects of shadow-shifting were still rather personally troubling to her on a philosophical level, if not a psychological one, to wit, how real could any of this be if she could will it here and gone in the blink of an eye? How could Raven speak of souls as if there were true continuity experienced anywhere in the middle-spectrum of Shadow? In retrospect, she felt certain that the being had sensed her lingering unease about her current state-of-being (among many other things!), but his statement about it cleared up nothing from her point-of-view. She knew where her soul was: Syracuse, New York! That was the whole problem!

She irritatedly shoved the enigma to the back-burner of her mind yet again, and forced herself to focus, to breathe. The demon-lady Nayda was likely right that this was possible, but looking for a specific person in this fashion was practiced so seldom…

Sarah closed her eyes and tried to remember what the portrait of the prince had looked like, in that Chaosian shrine which had been his prison: shiny-black hair, roughly shoulder-length (emphasis on the word ‘rough’; he’d probably just let it go at the time the likeness was painted), the shape of his nose and cheekbones, the set of his somewhat handsome jaw, the slight, sardonic twist of his lips, as if mulling over a private joke at the viewer’s expense (though more in a spirit of irony than outright meanness from the rest of the expression), those utterly impossible Arden-green emerald irises, the silver neck-clasp on his black cape cast in the form of the blooming rose…

Holding the image firmly in her mind, she opened her eyes and strode purposefully forward, barely even marking her surroundings now save that it got warm enough that she had to open up her heavy jacket, lowering the hood and removing her hat, as the pines began to vary, finally mixing with larger deciduous trees as the forest thickened in breadth and height, darkening somewhat, the air damp and comfortably cool…

Sarah abruptly stopped: she could feel someone or something staring at her, from behind. She scanned about with her eyes first, not moving a muscle; it was quiet, but not unnaturally so. Slowly turning, gazing upward, she finally spotted a splotch of white with round, yellow-irised eyes, perched up high in a tall oak tree...

A snowy owl? The thought jolted her a little – but, no, this was not Jareth’s totem form; wrong species. The bird had more likely than not just followed her through Shadow by mistake and wound up someplace strange, poor thing; this latitude was a little low for the creature, but the one she had just come from wasn’t. Most of the casualties associated with shadow-walking were non-humanoid. She couldn’t entirely shake the strangeness of the incident, though…

Refocusing her energies on her memory of Prince Corwin again, she continued moving, and the primeval forest continued to unfold about her as the sky shaded into a decidedly dusty light-violet: a mist came swirling through as the humidity reached dew point, ground plants brushing against her ankles, her calves, her thighs, with blue-green leaves like cups, collecting the moisture as foreign birds trilled back-and-forth far above in the canopy. The primitive conifers eventually vanished as the land began to gently rise again…

Emerald eyes, midnight hair…

The dew was silvery in the warming afternoon, as were the wild roses she didn’t see…

Smiling at the joke of existence, possibly weary of it…

Twigs quietly snapped underneath her leather boots, the ground softening with humus…

With Grayswandir at his side, rapier as legendary as its owner…

Rays of sunlight unexpectedly cut through the cathedral-like canopy, thinning walls of growing sanctuary…

A thousand years old if a day, yet only appearing to be about forty…

Thick tiers of fungus were eating away heartwood, leaving moss-covered shells of great trees… thinner, signs of woodcutters – stumps, fresher ground cover…

His heart for his kingdom, even in exile…

An eight-point buck startled her out of her reverie, galloping by! Followed by the sound of a natural hunting horn? People! Sarah barely had time to think, but she made the right decision for a change, digging the Dreamstone out of her mitten, all but throwing the hefty silver chain over her head, willing herself invisible just as the hunt arrived… and then she had to make a mad-dash to get out of the way of the racing cavalcade! The men were of obvious European-type ancestry of some kind: they wore no armor, but rather tight-fitting decorative military uniforms, and the coloring was possibly right – black, black, and even more black, with stylized silver flowers embroidered over their hearts! She heard one of the last ones curse his steed’s slowness as they passed by… and she could understand him without the Stone: they spoke a dialect of Thari! Once she was certain that they were gone, she booked it up the artificially brightened hill, past enormous phantom visions of glittering spider-webs, dead-certain of what couldn’t be even a mile away! Over the hills denuded of trees by man, long grasses and shrubs and stands of wildflowers eating up the destroyed areas, she finally came to the edge… but when she saw what was there, her eyes widened involuntarily: this was not what she had been expecting!

True, the enormous, sprawling city was walled, but those walls were made of houses with red tile roofs… and apartment buildings?! Still concealed by the Stone, she wandered through the outer decorative wrought-iron gates past the guards and on into town, down quaint cobblestone streets, past surprisingly ‘modern’-looking men and women who could’ve stepped out of early twentieth-century Western Shadow Earth! ‘Dapper’ was the descriptive that most readily came to mind: top-hats-and-tails of various shades even at this hour of the day, and showy walking gowns with elaborate headgear and parasols to match! Less ostentatious artisans and other workers were about their usual business in shops, with produce carts and flower stalls (to say nothing of the dream-goblins hawking their wares)… Tables from small European-style cafés, bars and restaurants dotted the sidewalks just outside their respective establishments… Further in, there was a brass band playing in the bandstand in a perfectly manicured park, elegant people of all ages enjoying the concert out on the lawn; there were picnics, children playing tag… About a dozen artists painted down by a stone bridge that ran over a sedate river with swans floating by on it, various styles and subject matter being laid down on their canvasses… Horse-drawn open carriages lazily rolled by along the circular avenue with the sculpture fountain of sea-nymphs, their gaily-attired passengers leisurely taking in the air…

What in the worlds was this place?! Sarah’s heart was aching… but more in the physical sense, to say nothing of how she was melting away in her current wraps in this climate! The former problem (along with the goblins) was undoubtedly the work of the Stone, delivering her a nasty energetic pounding from using it so frequently, which she would partially remedy it in a moment. She took advantage of her invisibility one last time by ducking into a thin alley and stripping down right there save for the necklace, taking off not only her outer wraps but also the woolen dress, putting the sturdy cotton blouse back on, hoisting the rest over the side of her laden, stuffed bag, burying the Stone safely inside it once more, in its sack. If the locals thought she looked like a radical tramp in trousers, that was tough; it was the coolest clothing she currently had!

Cautiously stepping back out into the foot traffic with all that stuff, Sarah was certainly conspicuous, but the only comment she heard at all was from a thin, balding man who was smoking a pipe over a cup of black coffee at one of the café tables, scribbling in a notebook; he must’ve seen the odd pile walking by first out of his peripheral vision, because he looked up, then asked what production she was in, taking her for an actress! Sarah only shook her head with a smile, continuing on her way, mentally admitting that the idea could make for a good alibi if she needed one…

Taking a much-needed break from walking, crashing on a park bench in a rounded alcove, she ate some of her provisions under a mature chestnut tree; they were planted simply everywhere there was room for one, even in the sidewalks, though she had seen long rows of tall poplars far off in the distance, on a hillside. The Shadow Earth 1900 élan was completely inescapable – there went a dressed-up man and woman on a bicycle built for two! The place was clearly idealized, and yet there was something oddly familiar about it. It was almost like… like…

Paris. Paris?!

Oh… She had nearly forgotten – actually, truth be told, she had forgotten about it the very moment the word ‘Avalon’ had come out of the prince’s mouth – but Corwin had told her during that crazy car ride through Shadow, that Paris at the turn-of-the-last-century had been one of two places he had been happiest in his entire life, even without his memory! This world was an Amberite’s dream of Paris… at least parts of the city; the Eiffel Tower was conspicuously absent, as were the cathedrals! The temptation to go pawn her Antarctic coat and go be a tourist for a while here was almost overwhelming, but she brought her excited emotions to rein. Maybe if all went well, she could come back to sight-see someday. Right now, what she was truly about was far more important, as hard as it was becoming to think about. If this was Corwinia, then Corwin – or his Pattern-Ghost – was in charge, and he would agree to see her.

And if it wasn’t… well, she could deal with that, too. But her first order of business had to be finding him: a capitol building seemed an obvious enough place to start her search; even if he had chosen not to be in charge of this world but merely to enjoy it, there had to be some records of his whereabouts. Following her instinct, she kept asking directions from random strangers – everyone she ran into here seemed casually friendly, sharing in the pervasive good mood of the locality – until she had wound her way around to the very center of the city… to the palace! Possibly based on memories of Versailles and heavily embellished from there, the place practically screamed power and authority with its extreme level of ostentatious display. Approaching Corwin there would likely be every bit as difficult as trying to get in to see the king of Kashfa – or Amber, for that matter! Smartly uniformed guards, armed with both sabers and rifles with bayonets, stopped her at the high gates to the complex, of course.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of a joke, miss?” one of them brusquely put to her with a rather severe frown upon hearing her request: to see the man in charge.

Sarah earnestly shook her head no. “I didn’t think so. Lord Corwin Barimen does not rule this city?”

“Someone has pranked you, miss, if anyone told you that as serious information, for no such person exists here,” another promptly informed her. “You are in Cordelia, not… Corwinia, did you say? And our ‘lord’ is his Grace, the most honorable Duke Cordell Barihieux of the North Country. And the likes of him doesn’t speak to just any wandering nabob who comes along asking after him!”

Oh, close enough, Sarah resigned herself: nothing could be this easy. Really, the sky should’ve been the clue: the world generated by the true Argent Pattern had archetypal Order coloring to it, like Shadow Earth. Might as well see how far I can get with this one. “Are there cases where his Grace would ever grant an audience, without legal proceedings?” she queried cautiously.

“Depends on the reason. He won’t directly interact with his common subjects unless it cannot be avoided, usually. Or it involves acquiring something that he desires,” the first guard leered a bit. “What could the likes of you afford to offer his Grace?”

This was all wrong and Sarah knew it! The real Corwin very well might’ve been a snob on his home-turf; the topic had legitimately never come up. He had probably looked down on the lesser beings of Shadow at least whilst growing up in Amber, and likely earlier in his adult life. But to completely abstain from their company, even if only for his own amusement and general entertainment, was too far removed from the man’s true personality. This Cordell would see nothing in her except a rare power-item… which she could all-too-easily imagine him taking from her by force without so much as a ‘by-your-leave’, possibly even killing her to keep the matter quiet; it would be so easy since she was an unknown here! The thought abruptly made her go cold, the sequence too familiar for any surety, let alone comfort!

“I think I did make a mistake; sorry to have bothered you,” she nodded in agreement, apologizing awkwardly, backing away.

“Go on, get out of here!” they shooed her off.

Sarah gratefully fled the painting-like main thoroughfare, taking to the smaller side-streets with the full intention to make good her escape before the strange incident filtered back to the ducal palace, and his Grace! The yeasty smell of fresh-baked bread lured her down another winding lane, however, reminding her that she was still hungry. Checking the few silver coins she had leftover from Eregnor, she observed that they had converted into sous right on cue, and she bought a big, custardy brioche with a couple of them, devouring it as she strode quickly back through the city, spending her last coin on a milky latte with lots of sugar to wash it down. She almost regretted having to leave; the place seemed to naturally engender a kind of peculiar nostalgia, even in a stranger who hadn’t been here half-an-hour!

That was probably the danger, too: an emotional attachment to the present so strong that it entirely precluded any future…

She made it back through the gates without incident, but wasn’t quite certain which way to strike out in next. Keep going in the same direction, I guess. She began tallying the prince’s less general traits; physical description obviously wasn’t sufficient for this. Cast again and see if I can reel him in. The experience she had just managed to walk away from unscathed was rather disheartening, but realistically it probably wasn’t a bad first attempt. As she was ambling away along a dirt road that appeared to lead off into the distance, she heard horses again and, turning back, beheld the mounted hunting party she had last seen in the forest, carrying back the fruits of their labor. The duke must have had a taste for venison…

Reflecting further on the true Corwin’s personality as she knew it, Sarah meandered along past vineyards and apple orchards (helping herself to a couple while nobody was looking), following the lines of poplars throughout the afternoon, finally cutting through a field of green wheat that was just now turning golden, to stay true to compass. As nice as it had been, the nearly familiar style of ‘civilization’ had proven to be almost too distracting. She had to force herself to think like an Amberite, not allowing herself to become emotionally attached to her current surroundings, reminding herself of what they truly were: mere phenomena of chance and probability, single specimens of endless iterations of varieties of shadow-existence.

…wheat… to long, seedy grasses… to plain, turning arid…

The sun was directly in her face now; she had to shield her eyes from it with her free hand. The fur and woolen garments riding on her left hip were almost burningly hot through her trousers, but she knew now that she was thinking more clearly again that she shouldn’t abandon any of them too readily. Stopping for another drink and another apple, she noted that the sky was tingeing gradually from lavender to salmon-color now, the sandy ground beneath her feet currently slate-gray, shot through with tough, hardy little sage-green powdery weeds. It wasn’t a particularly worrisome environment for the moment, but if the sky continued in this bizarre fashion she might have to force it blue again soon, at least before the sun went down completely. A little brown lizard darted through the chaparral to an open spot and proceeded to sun itself.

Hard and cynical from too much life-experience, yet still capable of compassion, occasionally even kindness…

In fifteen minutes walking, all the plant life gave way to plain rock, like a mesa-top, but the tint of the sky was turning to cooler hues again…

Feeling the weight of the world at times, yet still in love with the world…

A canyon appeared at the edge, with a fast-moving creek at the bottom; she followed the ledge until an easy footpath down the side presented itself…

A man not above mentioning that he has a taste for chicken-fried dinosaur, she smiled at the memory.

The floor of the arroyo that the foot trail had wound down to was widening into a parallel track, pacing the white-water creek on the left side. But as the walls of the water-cut canyon began to peel away from the gorge in both directions, revealing their showy mineral streaks and multi-colored sedimentary layers, the creek itself abruptly shaded to black – not from any sort of noticeable pollution or chemical or mineral content. This was blackness of a very different nature altogether…

It was far too familiar to Sarah – and it definitely felt hostile!

The Black Road! She thought in alarm, dashing away from it to the left as fast as her burning leg muscles would carry her! She must’ve accidentally ventured too close to the Dancing Mountains and the Dreamstone’s presence had been arcanely noted by someone! She risked a glance back… in time to see about twenty of those gray-skinned, hairless, elongated barracuda-men rising from the occulted waterway, their black-and-red uniforms sticking wetly to their strong, skinny bodies! And they were armed with fish-hook spears! As one, the unit came dashing after her like bloodhounds, dead-silent, their long strides rapidly closing the distance between! If only there were somewhere she could hide, could shift away to quickly, to provide some kind of barrier! As it was, she had been forced out into the open in an environment that superficially resembled Shadow Earth’s Death Valley – or Mars, for the coloring – and she was already too far spent to be able to keep up this pace for much longer without dropping in her traces!

But she had a hunch, a vague feeling – desperate hope, more like – that if she voluntarily surrendered, they might, might spare her life; anything beyond that would have to be bargained for dearly, but the situation probably wasn’t as terrifying to her as it would’ve been to any Order-based shadow-person with no prior knowledge of how Chaosian society worked! More often than not (unless there was a predetermined ulterior motive and/or stealth operations in progress), you were only treated like an enemy if you presented yourself as one… usually. Depending on the creatures. And the average proximity of the Abyss; one’s chances of coming out of an encounter alive, let alone in one piece, admittedly took a severe nosedive the further from the Courts one was! But she felt slight confidence in the fact that at least this shadow-breed was nominally familiar to her: in fact, she had had the rare opportunity to observe some of them on their best behavior in a home-setting with their young. Intimidating? Yes, beyond any doubt. But monsters? No, not by a longshot.

Her legs were starting to shake from the exertion; she was going to have to stop, which was probably just as well because they were about to close in on her and she did not relish the idea of being tackled en masse like that, not to even mention what might come next! She was panting so hard she could scarcely breathe: this was it. Making a deliberate show of raising her hands and placing them behind her head, she steadily slowed down, jogging to a halt, her heart pounding in her chest, in her throat, in her ears, her face flushed hot as they circled her closely like the predacious pack that they were. Sarah momentarily thought of going for the Stone to try and use it, but quickly thought better of it; she was hemmed in too closely – there was no reason to show them where it was!

“May I at least know whose captive I am to be?” she tried cautiously in clear Chaosian Thari.

The barracuda guards gave no reply at first except for a couple of rather rude snickers, followed by some mumbly words in their own tongue.

That’s right – they don’t speak Thari, either, she remembered, finally beginning to panic a little, wishing that collection of nasty-looking hook-spears wasn’t quite so close to her skin! But the fact that (for better or worse) she was still here intact and not stabbed or whisked away said something…

One of them in front finally addressed her emphatically and distinctly in his own language, staring straight into her eyes with his own terribly bloodshot ones, as if she should be able to understand him… but of course she couldn’t; the very tip of his wickedly curved dagger-type blade slowly approached the hollow of her throat, bringing on a powerful wave of karmic déjà vu-

“Stand down, all of you!” a familiar male voice barked an order at them from somewhere above in the air; even though it sounded like a foreign tongue, Sarah could understand it! “I want her alive and unharmed!”

As one, the alien soldiers all simultaneously took four long strides backwards with their naked heads bowed reverently, forming a large circle about her as a freezing whirlwind descended from the sky right in front of her! The rotation gradually slowed enough that she could see facial features in the center, where the head should’ve been!

“Mandor?!”

The disembodied mouth smirked lopsidedly at her as her former guardian finished the shift down into his humanoid form, bits of frost melting away here and there!

And then an utterly crazy realization unexpectedly popped in Sarah’s mind like a bubble: his face looked ever-so-slightly different, and not just from age, mind you. It was the placement, the precise shape of his features, the actual width between his eyes, the length of his nose, the curve of his chin: it wasn’t the same as when she had seen him last… and that last time he’d been different, too, but she hadn’t thought to notice, she’d been so distracted by that outrageous costume he’d been forced to wear!

And every time before that…

He was only approximating his humanoid form! Mandor Sawall’s mandarin-collared black ‘vinyl’ travel jacket was produced more uniformly than he was!

“Hello, Sarah,” he sighed quietly. “I did warn you of what would happen should you actively choose to enter the contest of the powers again. You shouldn’t be as shocked as you seem to be to see me,” he calmly lectured her.

“How the hell did you even find me?!” she physically sagged, wide-eyed! “You don’t even have a tracking spell on me anymore!”

The former Chaos lord tisked disapprovingly, shaking his head. “Such language; you must’ve picked it up in Amber; we certainly didn’t teach you the curse-debasement of that particular word. At any rate, your initial observation is technically correct… but only up to a certain point,” he smiled again, unzipping his long jacket partway, reaching into his breast pocket, producing something tubular and very thin that seemed to twitch hard even in his firm-handed grasp…

Sarah recognized it at once: it was her bespelled pen! But that meant… “You raided my apartment?! How dare you-”

But he put up a hand to silence her incensed tirade.

“I can explain everything, Sarah; save your ire. Are you aware that ghosts from Tir-na Nog’th have been wandering down into Amber-proper, both the Castle and the City, every night for the past ten days local-time there? No matter – I see from your reaction that this is news to you, which is as I suspected. As enmeshed as you currently are in this proverbial web, it must be difficult to comprehend what is going on all around you,” he added with a sympathetic note.

“And I gather that you’re about to enlighten me,” Sarah laconically replied, crossing her arms, wishing that they weren’t being forced to play this stupid game. Lord Suhuy must’ve just moved his ‘bishop’…

“Lose the surly attitude, Sarah,” Mandor answered her levelly, “it isn’t befitting a grown woman. The chief reason I decided to check in on you was because when anything truly strange happens in Amber, his majesty King Random automatically suspects his blood relations have a hand in it somehow, which I must confess still strikes me as more than just a little paranoid when the man has worked to acquire so many other enemies in his earlier private life. I imagine it’s a certain type of psychological damage control, to believe one can easily keep one’s thumb on most potential culprits. My wife, of course, received a rather rude and forwardly accusatory trump-call from him in which she was naturally assumed guilty until proven innocent – and only then when she performed a rite with me maintaining the live contact for her, proving beyond a doubt that neither of our magickal ‘fingerprints’ matched those uncovered at the scene of the crime, and that she was willing to grant her considerable talents to aid in the multi-shadow hew-and-cry. Such Patternish, horizontal-world thinking,” he gave a quick little lip-smile. “She did manage to figure out what was actually going on for him, with the theft of the… artifact, but not who had done it or why. Once we were alone again, we had a long heart-to-heart about potential suspects, though, and the names that we bandied about were all so dangerous that I began to have serious misgivings about her going on this particular expedition at all, even if it meant directly disobeying the king of Amber. Do not mistake me: I am aware that my Princess is a highly accomplished sorceress in the Pattern as well as in animus magick, but there are certain routes to greater power that she has eschewed essaying, considering what happened to her brother when he tried it.”

He didn’t have to explain; Sarah knew: Brand, poor maddened Brand, who became convinced he could become God.

“I believe Fiona is right in her choice to remain where she is in her art,” the former lord of Sawall continued, “its mistress and not the other way around. But lack of such knowledge, despite any rationale involved in its copious absence, is a potentially fatal liability when dealing with an opponent who so clearly has less scruples about such things. I myself have not followed the darkest passages, either, but unlike her I have studied their shapes, and I feel sufficiently acquainted with them to be capable of anticipating and deflecting dirtier powers than we normally employ. And I have promised her younger half-brother Prince Julian that I would do whatever was in my power to keep her safely out of harm’s way, if you would care to recall,” he frowningly smirked at Sarah. “In the end I managed to convince her to let me go in her stead. The fact that the artifact had been spotted by a few Family members over the course of several thousand years and yet apparently could not be physically touched, even by an item inscribed with the Pattern such as Brand’s sword Werewindle – yes, they tried it back-in-the-day, during ‘the troubles’ – immediately made me think that a different kind of agent had to be involved somehow, if even involuntarily.”

He paused, studying her. “You are simply too unique for your own good, Sarah,” he ruefully half-smiled. “At the very least, I decided to satisfy my own curiosity on my way out, as it were, by confirming that you still were where you should be… except that you weren’t. Don’t worry, I left your ‘double’ alone,” he swallowed a laugh, “a harmless enough trick in itself effectually, as far as you’re concerned; don’t lose sleep over it. But her presence still confirmed my worst fears: that the rogue agent is Chaosian in origin, and potentially very powerful, to have pulled off both of those stunts and in such a relatively short period of time, not to mention eluding Prince Julian – no small feat in itself; the man’s the best non-arcane tracker this side of the Divide. And, lo and behold, your ‘double’, out of concern for you, indeed for herself, gave me a surprisingly reliable way of seeing where you’d gotten off to,” he brought the squirming pen up to eye-level in amusement; a short verbal command stilled it. “Write well of me, when it is time,” he whispered to it teasingly, putting it back away in his pocket… probably next to his trump pouch. “That wasn’t as easy as it might seem, either: the backlog of information stored in that lowly vessel of recording is simply not to be believed. It took a considerable effort of labor to force the item to run in reverse, starting with the most recent information rather than where it truly left off approximately four years back local-time on Shadow Earth. Which means that there is still considerable knowledge to be gleaned from you here, especially before going forward with what I had in mind to rectify the situation.”

Sarah had all-but relaxed back into her old mindset concerning her former guardian, almost relieved to have been intercepted by the ‘good guys’ (albeit in barracuda-man skins… and teeth! Jeez, those things were ugly!) But that last statement, harmless as it had been, was enough to instinctually raise her hackles at this point – or at least her suspicion.

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” she tried prompting him. “I mean, I’m assuming that this is a rather logical foregone conclusion with you nominally working in Amber’s favor, but I’d just like to hear you say it out loud. I’m sort of getting sick of being lied to – not that I’m accusing you or anything. It’s just how my life has been going lately.”

“I’m so terribly sorry to hear that; you have had a rough time of it this round, haven’t you?” he empathized. “It was coercion, then. I’m just trying to fix this, Sarah, really I am, but in order to do that I’m going to need your cooperation-”

“You aren’t answering my question,” she calmly interrupted him.

Mandor actually hesitated. “The Dreamstone cannot be returned to Tir-na Nog’th, or, indeed, to any of Amber’s environs, until further notice.”

“May I ask why?” Sarah eyed him dubiously.

He gave a slightly irritated little huff, crossing his arms. “Because that is precisely what our enemy is counting on. They are lying in wait like a trapdoor spider in whatever collapsing pocket-universe they’re currently holed up in, for this exact thing to occur so that they can intercept it once more. It would be in far safer hands with his Excellency.”

Sarah suddenly went ice-cold; she took a step back from him, then another. “You mean to deliver it to Chaos!” she whispered. “You mean to turn traitor! Have you lost your mind recently?! That signals Armageddon!”

“Only with the true Jewel, the real Eye,” Mandor reassuringly replied. “Lord Suhuy believes that the Dreamstone, while still only a shadow-reflection, is more akin to a third-eye,” he placed one finger to his forehead between the white seagull wings of his brows. “Merlin has attunement to the Left Eye of the Serpent; he could wield the Dreamstone with ease, effecting our mutually desired outcome here.”

“But even he can’t hold the chain to put it on! This stupid thing’s like Excalibur!” Sarah blurted before realizing what she was saying – and the next instant clammed up, mouth covered, eyes wide!

An unsettling light had dawned in Mandor’s pale-blue eyes. “Of course… but you can! Why?”

Sarah shook her head, too frightened to say anything else!

“I think you do know,” he continued in a reproving tone, frowning thoughtfully. “I think that whether or not you realize it consciously, you hold the key to who’s really behind this… why do you tremble, Earth-child? I’m not going to harm you; I am trying to help you!” he laughed a little.

“By helping yourself to the power! Just like she did!”

“Oh, for all the – Sarah, if that’s all our enemy wanted, you would be brainwashed, under a heavy slave-spell, or dead by now! There’s something vital that I can’t see here, and I can’t even read you at present because you’re carrying the blessed thing! You have to trust me, Sarah – too much is at stake here!”

For who?! Sarah suddenly thought incredulously: he was too worked up to only be upset about what they had just been discussing, she knew him far too well! Mandor Sawall simply didn’t do outbursts like this over anything.

But it might mean…

“You can’t legally cross the Dancing Mountains, however that’s arcanely enforced in the Courts,” she floated the weather-balloon of an idea cautiously. “You have no direct way of contacting the king yourself. Or do you? Is he even aware of this little plan of yours? Is the Princess? Is Lord Suhuy in on it? How would you propose to even approach Chaos with your prize?”

“The Way would stand open,” he answered confidently.

“And I suppose there’s some monster of a reward for handing this thing in? Like, say for instance… a dukedom?”

“Well, there is an age-old standing finder’s fee for the return of the Missing Eye of the Serpent – of course, no one would ever live to collect it,” he mused. “Despil could keep our old man’s Ways; the place never really suited me anyway, and he deserves it for being a good boy. For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine Merlin voluntarily keeping the Stone; he’d hand it straight off to his Uncle Random the moment the danger is past, with the full Council roaring sedition in his ears and down his neck, readying their blades and assassination curses.”

Voluntarily. Sarah just shook her head, lips pressed into a line. “I appreciate your honesty here – believe me, I do – but you have to realize that I can’t possibly buy what you’re trying to sell me. And I still think he couldn’t use it; on top of everything else, you’d be wasting time!”

“Ah, yes, we never did get around to answering that question, did we? There has to be some trick to it, of course. Care to confide in your old guardian?”

“Not particularly.”

“Are you certain you won’t change your mind? We could discuss it in more comfortable surroundings over hot chocolate.”

She had to smile at that particular psychological tack. “Nope. Sorry.”

“So am I, Sarah.”

It was then and only then that Sarah realized that he had added that second-to-last little comment as a deliberate distraction to keep her from noticing his right hand smoothly sliding into the lower right-hand pocket of his jacket… for his spheres! Only a split-second passed between the time that she became aware of this and when one of them was clicked on-

And she found herself incapable of voluntary physical movement beyond breathing! Her eyes automatically flicked to his, panicked, furious!

His own singular, ice-blue eyes were perfectly calm, serene even, and she found that she couldn’t look away…

“Please consciously note for posterity’s sake before we begin that I gave you ample opportunity to cooperate with me of your own freewill. You leave me with no choice but to obtain what I need this way.” He presented the silvery metal sphere before her; it commenced making a little clockwise orbit around her torso. “Seat yourself however you would be most comfortable here physically, and be at your complete ease,” he bid her.

Sarah found that her body obeyed him! She sat down loosely cross-legged upon the desert floor, her bag and accoutrements resting to her side, as a curious peacefulness settled over her…

“That’s right,” he added smoothly, crouching on his heels in front of her, “just relax – it does feel nice after all that tension and exertion, doesn’t it? Now,” his low voice turned serious, “I am going to ask you a series of relatively simple, straightforward questions, and you will verbally answer them truthfully. Do you understand, Sarah?”

“Yes,” Sarah heard her own voice reply quietly, as if she were dreaming, yet she was not troubled by the strangeness; it was sweet somehow…

Mandor graced her with one of his most winning P.R. smiles. She smiled back at him languidly.

It was too easy.

“Firstly, would you prefer I ask the questions in Thari or in English?”

“In English, please.”

Carefully keeping his commentary to himself, he readied a second sphere as a translation device without looking away.

“Very well,” he continued in American English. “Are you hungry or thirsty at all at the moment, Sarah? Have you been locating adequate nutritional sources to sustain your bodily health out here in these foreign shadows?”

“I ate not too long ago, and although I slightly thirst at the moment, there is still water in my canteen. I have mostly been capable of providing for my needs in order to survive.”

“It pleases me to hear that you are still benefiting from at least some of your training. You may do what is necessary to quench your thirst.”

Arms that were attached to her body smoothly, gently shoved the wraps aside and extracted the canteen from her carryall, carefully removed the cork, and poured some of its contents down her easily receiving throat before putting it away again!

“Now then, I want you to think back to the day that you were brought back to Amber, Sarah,” Mandor gently probed. “Behold it as it was, as it happened. Think of the one who coerced you into going. Describe them to me as you experienced them on that day.”

“They overlap – the images blur together.”

“Then treat with them one at a time, in chronological order.”

“It was a female, over seven feet tall, sized to scale, naked, translucent-blue, with eyes of cobalt fire, beautiful and terrible – she almost blinded me at first, but I begged her not to shine so brightly, and then she glowed. I both feared and loved her at first. But I feared her more.”

“And how is your physical sight functioning now? Did you sustain any damage?”

“It was strained at first, but my vision has been fine for some time now.”

“Good,” he reassuringly crooned. “Continue recounting her, please.”

“She… changed, after we were in Amber, before I retrieved the Dreamstone: still tall, but on a human scale, just under six feet: long white hair, white skin, white dress, dark green cloak, still impossibly beautiful. Her eyes were always cobalt blue, always… I feared her less then, until… she changed again, in the Arden Forest: first she vanished, then she was a towering flame of violet, then an enormous black ram with her cobalt eyes burning – it was terrifying! Blood and gore everywhere! The hellhounds! Do not ask me to see more of that, I beg of you! I thought I was going to die of fright!”

“Peace, Sarah – you are only remembering; you are here. It is over,” he uttered steadily, and she calmed down once more, breathing a genuine sigh of relief. “Think back to when you were still in your apartment with her earlier that day, but do not see it. You say you felt both love and fear toward her. Did you sense her using her powers on you then?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel suspicion toward her at any time at that point?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I… I do not know! Have mercy, I do not know!”

“I withdraw the question,” he continued calmly. “Was it an instinctual response, then?”

“Yes, but… there… there was something else that I couldn’t work out at the time, something that felt important, and I could only stall her for so long…”

“Go on.”

“It was something that she said; I knew it as soon as I heard it, but I didn’t understand why! I still don’t!”

“Tell me in her exact words what it was; perhaps I will recognize it myself.”

“I will absorb the renegade power and establish a tenth incarnation of My Pattern there,” Sarah flawlessly recited in a strange-sounding tone-of-voice, “perfecting six shadow-copies not in Amber. All will be wiped clean. If Corwin has been rash enough to build there, his city must be destroyed, and those within that populate it, if he will not surrender them to the Change.”

Upon hearing this, Mandor paused for a moment, thinking, before continuing on.

“Think of Tir-na Nog’th, when you were there. Behold it now. Did you see anything that interested you, that seemed strange to you, while you were in the Ghost City?”

“You were the king. And Dworkin Barimen was there in the flesh, guarding the stairs against my retreat.”

Mandor’s eyes widened a little involuntarily.

“You saw a phantom of me as the king?” he repeated incredulously, doing his best to control his voice.

“Yes.”

“Where was Random Barimen?”

“Further down the table, with Fiona.”

The portent was so portentous, the omen so ominous, he didn’t even have the time to contemplate the full possible implications at present!

“Did Dworkin Barimen say anything to you?”

“To be careful of how I played this round of the game. To not trust that all was as I thought it was. To hurry before the stairs were broken up by the sunlight…”

Her breathing had quickened, lost in the memory as if it were a stress-dream.

“It is over. Return to the here and now, Sarah.”

Her eyes cleared and refocused upon his as she did so.

“Two final questions. Why is it that you can wield the Dreamstone when even a Prince of Amber cannot?”

“Because that of the Ghost City is closer to Shadow than to Substance. The Stone passes through Substance like ether. Yet one must be marked by the Pattern to wield its power.”

Mandor regarded her very carefully, suddenly aware of just how delicate the situation really was. Of why she might still be alive. “Is there anything that I could say or do, short of post-hypnotic suggestion, which would induce you to hand over the Dreamstone of your own freewill into my keeping, even temporarily?”

“I would only give you the Dreamstone if you would first agree to help me to return it to the king of Tir-na Nog’th immediately, to whom it rightly belongs.”

“I see,” he smiled quietly. Reaching out toward her, the orbiting sphere flew into his hand. “Please consciously remember for posterity’s sake that I only probed your memories and opinions, not influenced them in any way, including your memory of this session, and apart from these disclaimers, which you will continue to remember clearly no matter what, I have used no direct suggestion to influence you whatsoever at this time, save what was necessary to obtain the information and to keep you calm in the interim. I free you of my power, Sarah.”

He clicked both spheres back off simultaneously, pocketing them.

Sarah gasped, wide-eyed, and frantically scooted away from him, feeling strangely violated! The barracuda men laughed at her rather obvious, visceral reaction, holding formation.

Mandor simply stayed where he was, sitting on his heels, calmly observing the after-effects of his work. “You brought that upon yourself, Earth-child,” he casually scolded her, resuming his natural Thari. “I hadn’t wanted it to come to that, but we don’t have all the time in the worlds, as you pointed out, and you were being intractably obstinate.”

“You could’ve just taken it! Or me, for that matter!” she laughed a little recklessly. “What in the worlds stopped you?!”

Mandor slowly rose to his feet, momentarily stretching his arms, his shoulders. “As gauche as this is to say aloud, honesty is the currency that you value, and so I will candidly tell you that in spite of your training and experience with the power of Disorder, I could easily snap you – physically, mentally and spiritually – like a dried twig… but it is not my desire to do so. I would much rather that you bend instead, of your own freewill, and so continue to grow and to thrive.” He crookedly smirked. “That, and the fact that his Excellency would never even consider going along with this if he discovered that you had been subconsciously directed to come with me today.”

“What? Whoa, whoa, whoa, back it up there: going with you where?”

“To Chaos, of course – I am only saving your life; you’re welcome. I had my suspicions, but I know with certainty who our enemy is now, and I will openly state that it is a very good thing that I intercepted you in time.”

“…is it anybody I would know?”

He studied her as she warily came to her feet, still watching him like he was an animal that could attack her at any moment. “I want to see if you can work this out logically for yourself, Sarah; in many respects you’ve already beaten the curve just to be here – I am impressed. Any number of operatives from both sides want to dismantle to Argent Pattern, but this one it would seem had a very particular bone to pick with the prince. What it was that you heard but could not place was most likely a restatement of a rather trite piece of Chaosian propaganda that dates back to the War, that you must’ve run across in one of your textbooks: ‘Amber must be destroyed, to make way for a New Order.’” He observed the proverbial lightbulb go off over Sarah’s head; she nodded quickly, her fear almost forgotten: he had her attention now! “What most struck me in your recounting of the incident was not so much the content of what the lady said, but the passion with which she said it: that was real; she made no efforts to hide it from you. There are many in Chaos who have reason to hate Prince Corwin and his renegade creation, but only one who has loved him enough to do so.”

“… Lady Dara Sawall?!”

“Very good,” he praised her. “There was a reason I hadn’t wanted you anywhere near the Ways of Sawall; you wouldn’t believe what I was forced to do to induce her to leave the compound during your brief visit with us. And for all my careful planning you still managed to find your way into her business. I had worked out that she had to have hidden that small dungeon-cell in the art gallery from your brief account and the few places you could’ve been there, but by the time I returned to Chaos after the trial and deliberately set about searching for it, she had moved it of course. Just out of academic curiosity, what did it look like?”

“An abandoned shrine,” Sarah answered cautiously.

Obviously not cautiously enough: Mandor’s eyes flew open wide at the words, as if he knew exactly what she was talking about! Had he seen the place himself?!

“She did love him, then! I had wondered of it when word initially filtered back to us of the studding of Merlin – of a new king of Amber of our own choosing, who we could influence – but the lady had simply brushed off any hint of emotional attachment to the sperm donor. This vendetta of hers runs deeper than even I suspected, if she loved him enough to hate him this much!”

“So, what I’m hearing from you is ‘don’t visit the Argent Pattern’; I get that. There are an awful lot of nice places we can go visit instead to not do that,” Sarah tried to wheedle.

“You still don’t see the full picture, Sarah. My stepmother never knew of the prince’s original escaping from that cell: she thinks that somehow you are personally responsible for that. Think. Why are you still alive, Sarah? Why did she arm you as she did and turn you loose on him? What would the First Order do to the Second?”

“I’m presuming destroy it somehow… and possibly me with it…”

He nodded. “Keep working.”

“Is the effect anything like electromagnetic polarity?”

“You’re right on the cusp, Sarah…”

It felt just like the old days, when he had been her mentor, her friend. She stifled the sudden welling up of emotion, trying to process… “It is! They’re like the same sides of a magnet!” And then it hit her: she gasped, covering her mouth, horrified.

Mandor grimly nodded. “The presence of the Stone would literally shove Corwinia off its physical planes and clean out of existence, blurring it, marring the city and its Pattern, and consequently any Shadow-worlds it has produced, beyond any hope of repair. But would this automatically give rise to Order, even in the presence its harbinger?”

“No! That has to be willed to exist; it doesn’t just happen!”

“Let us follow this then to its logical conclusion,” he continued to lecture calmly, as if she were back in ‘class’. “What power is physically closest to that place, that would immediately rush in to fill a sudden propitious void like that?”

Sarah shivered. “The Fixed Logrus – the Labyrinth!”

“Therefore,” he goaded her, making a rotating gesture with his wrist, like ‘come on, you can do it...’

“The balance would be drastically thrown off again… in Chaos’ favor!”

“Excellent! I knew you could solve this, provided sufficient information; for a native of Order you were a surprisingly apt pupil. But you must now concede the physical danger you are presently in, that it is in your best interests to place yourself under my protection once more,” he held out his left hand toward her expectantly. “It is time for us to depart.”

For as badly as Sarah’s mind was scrambling to come up with a plan, a method of escape, the glinting silver upon his pale thumb temporarily distracted her: it was a ring in the shape of a delicately rendered snake in the process of swallowing its own tail: an ouroboros serpent!

“Is that your wedding ring?” she suddenly asked out of genuine curiosity, not even as an attempt to stall.

Mandor glanced down at it, then chuckled quietly. She hadn’t changed at all.

“Not in the manner that you would think of it; the tradition does not exist in the Courts, and it is only sparsely practiced in Amber… although in a sense you could think of it thus, for it was the princess’ idea. We each wear one constantly, energetically linking us together; should anything inopportune befall one party, the other knows of it instantly, and can be there quickly if need be. They are not unlike the ring I once gifted you with in that regard,” he gave answer patiently, still awaiting the clasp of her hand.

Sarah took a very long sidling step away from him, then another. She knew that in the absence of true physical danger she could not count on the Dreamstone to save her, and she likely only had seconds at best before he would strike with a subduing spell. A sketchy, desperate plan began to form in the back of her mind, something he wouldn’t expect…

“Sarah, do not try my patience,” he uttered warningly. “I am under no obligation to be hospitable to an enemy combatant – which is what you will technically become, should you be foolish enough to strike at me in any manner at all – and I cannot guarantee that I would be able to stop my guard in time, should they believe my person to be in danger.” His physical form was wavering, beginning to shift uncertainly.

She had to fake; that was the dangerous part. She had to draw his claws before-

A refreshingly cool, soothing wind caressed her all over – she nearly wept from the sweetness!

Mandor stood with his arms opened to embrace her. “Come here, Sarah. Everything is going to get better again; I promise.”

She took a single small step forward, her will faltering momentarily – then resisted, hard, remembering herself, what she had to do!

The wondrous sensation instantly morphed into a coddlingly warm, blanket-like, strength-sapping fatigue! “Then stand where you are, stubborn girl,” he added flatly, lowering his arms. “You may sleep on the way home.”

Sarah was struggling hard to keep her eyes open – it couldn’t end this way! Mentally reaching out to the Stone with a painful slowness, she finally felt the contact… and rather than tiredness, she felt fully alert mentally, albeit as if in dreamstate, yet thinking clearly again! But she couldn’t let onto the change; she had to draw him in, using her own body for bait! She carefully allowed her eyes to unfocus and fall closed, letting her head and shoulders droop, even sagging to buckle her knees as much as she could and remain upright for good measure, all the while buttressing her consciousness, her stamina, with the Stone, pulling more power…

“Yes, that’s it,” Mandor was intoning, “just release the tension, the anxiety, the fear. Cease to struggle. We’re not really opponents, Earth-child, except on the fencing strip. I will never harm you; you are my charge to care for.” He began to pace toward her, trying to anticipate when she would drop, when he would have to catch her to keep her from falling.

He would kill her with kindness yet; it was all Sarah could do not to cry, hearing him say those words. From his own worldview it might’ve even been the truth. But he wasn’t close enough – yet. Come on, just another step…

“When you awaken, you will not consciously remember any of this confrontation,” he was adding carefully, “merely that you collapsed in exhau-”

A whirlwind of forces catapulted them both into the air in a sheer vertical leap of a hundred feet, trapping Mandor in the Pattern-antithesis of a Diamond Bubble, one of his own spells of containment he’d had primed on his person! The wind tunnel held Sarah aloft directly above him, safely out of range of the fish-hooked spears that were thrust in her direction, accompanied by what was doubtless a thorough volley of cursing! Gone was the gentle, caring Chaosian she had nearly committed cosmic treason for: Mandor Sawall was shifting forms in lightning-fast progression in there, trying everything at his disposal to break free, his magic obviously failing him! Huge disembodied eyes of green fire blazed up at Sarah in open, demonic fury!

“Jeez, calm down in there!” she shouted to him. “It’s not like I’m leaving you to die! There’s a trick to it, of course,” she echoed his earlier speech mockingly. “Think on my lessons, what you yourself taught me! And if you can’t figure it out, the princess will be along to save you by-and-by!” She looked up and saw her old white skyboard coming for her as she had desired; when it arrived, she carefully mounted it, securing the foot straps. And looked down once more…

And had to wrench her eyes away! His eyes were mesmerizing! She momentarily closed hers, ignoring the continuing commotion down below.

“I’m sorry it has to be like this between us – all of it, the whole damn mess. I wish we weren’t opposing playing pieces on some demigod’s chess board,” she added quietly, bitterly, certain he could at least read her lips, “but from your own chosen course of action here, I guess that’s just my personal hang-up. I still can’t hurt you.”

She heard him scream her name then, muffled by the barrier, but she quickly soared away before she could hear any more and lose her nerve…