“What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think we should go,” he said, “offering no resistance—and when we find out who’s behind this, we take him apart with hot irons.”
“I like the way you think,” I said. “Deirdre, show us the way.”
“I’ve bad feelings about this one, Corwin.”
“If, as you said, we’ve no choice in the matter, what difference does it make? Lead on, lady. Lead on.”
She took my hand. The world began to spin around us.
Somebody owed me a chicken and a bottle of wine. I would collect.
I awoke lying in what seemed a glade under a moonlit sky. I kept my eyes half-lidded and did not move. No sense in giving away my wakefulness.
Very slowly, I moved my eyes. Deirdre was nowhere in sight. My right-side peripheral vision informed me that there might be a bonfire in that direction, with some folks seated around it.
I rolled my eyes to the left and got a glimpse of Luke. No one else seemed to be nearby.
“You awake?” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“No one near,” I said, rising, “except maybe for a few around a fire off to the right. We might be able to find a way out and take it—Trumps, Shadowalk—and thus break the ritual. Or we might be trapped.”
Luke put a finger into his mouth, removed it, and raised it, as if testing the wind.
“We’re caught up in a sequence I think we need,” he said.
“To the death?” I said.
“I don’t know. But I don’t really think we can escape this one,” he replied.
He rose to his feet.
“Ain’t the fighting, it’s the familiarity,” I said. “I begrudge knowing you.”
“Me, too. Want to flip a coin?” he asked.
“Heads, we walk away. Tails, we go over and see what the story is.”
“Fine with me.” He plunged his hand into a pocket, pulled out a quarter.
“Do the honors,” I said.
He flipped it. We both dropped to our knees.
“Tails,” he said. “Best two out of three?”
“Naw,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Luke pocketed his quarter, and we turned and walked toward the fire.
“Only a dozen people or so. We can take them,” Luke said softly.
“They don’t look particularly hostile,” I said.
“True.”
I nodded as we approached and addressed them in Thari:
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Corwin of Amber and this is Rinaldo I, King of Kashfa, also known as Luke. Are we by any chance expected here?”
An older man, who had been seated before the fire and poking at it with a stick, rose to his feet and bowed.
“My name is Reis,” he said, “and we are witnesses.”
“For whom?” Luke said.
“We do not know their names. There were two and they wore hoods. One, I think, was a woman. We may offer you food and drink before things begin . . . ”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m out a meal because of this. Feed me.”
“Me, too,” Luke added, and the man and a couple of his cohorts brought meat, apples, cheese, bread, and cups of red wine.
As we ate, I asked Reis, “Can you tell me how this thing works?”
“Of course,” he said. “They told me. When you’re finished eating, if you two will move to the other side of the fire, the cues will come to you.”
I laughed and then I shrugged.
“All right,” I said.
Finished dining, I looked at Luke. He smiled.
“If we’ve got to sing for our supper,” Luke said, “let’s give them a ten-minute demonstration and call it a draw.”
I nodded.
“Sounds good to me.”
We put aside our plates, rose, moved to the fire, and passed behind it.
“Ready?” I said.
“Sure. Why not?”
We drew our weapons, stepped back, and saluted. We both laughed when the music began. Suddenly, I found myself attacking, though I had decided to await the attack and put my first energies into its counter. The movement had been thoughtless, though quite deft and speedy.
“Luke,” I said as he parried, “it got away from me. Be careful. There’s something odd going on.”
“I know,” he said as he delivered a formidable attack. “I wasn’t planning that.”
I parried it and came back even faster. He retreated.
“Not bad,” he said, as I felt something loosened in my arm. Suddenly I was fencing on my own again, voluntarily, with no apparent control but with fear that it might be reasserted at any moment.
Suddenly, I knew that we were fairly free and it scared me. If I weren’t sufficiently vicious, I might be taken over again. If I were, someone might slip in an unsolicited move at the wrong moment. I grew somewhat afraid.
“Luke, if what’s happening to you is similar to what’s been happening to me, I don’t like this show a bit,” I told him.
“Me neither,” he said.
I glanced back across the fire. A pair of hooded individuals stood among the others. They were not overlarge and there was a certain whiteness within the cowl of the nearer.
“We’ve more audience,” I said.
Luke glanced back; it was only with great difficulty that I halted a cowardly attack as he turned away. When we returned to hard combat, he shook his head.
“Couldn’t recognize either of them,” he said. “This seems a little more serious than I thought.”
“Yeah.”
“We can both take quite a beating and recover.”
“True.”
Our blades rattled on. Occasionally, one or the other of us received a cheer.
“What say we injure each other,” Luke said, “then throw ourselves down and wait for their judgment on whatever’s been accomplished. If either of them come near enough, we take them out just for laughs.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you can expose your left shoulder a bit, I’m willing to take a midline cut. Let’s give them lots of gore before we flop, though. Head and forearm cuts. Anything easy.”
“Okay. And ‘simultaneity’ is the word.”
So we fought. I stood off a bit, going faster and faster. Why not? It was kind of a game.
Suddenly, my body executed a move I had not ordered it to. Luke’s eyes widened as the blood spurted and Grayswandir passed entirely through his shoulder. Moments later, Werewindle pierced my vitals.
“Sorry,” Luke said. “Listen, Corwin. If you live and I don’t, you’d better know that there’s too much crazy stuff involving mirrors going on around the castle. The night before you came back, Flora and I fought a creature that came out of a mirror. And there’s an odd sorcerer involved—has a crush on Flora. Nobody knows his name. Has something to do with Chaos, though, I’d judge. Could it be that for the first time Amber is starting to reflect Shadow, rather than the other way around?”
“Hello,” said a familiar voice. “The deed is done.”
“Indeed,” said another.
It was the two cowled figures who had spoken. One was Fiona, the other Mandor.
“However it be resolved, good night, sweet prince,” said Fiona.
I tried to rise. So did Luke. Tried also to raise my blade. Could not. Again, the world grew dim, and this time I was leaking precious bodily fluids.
“I’m going to live—and come after you,” I said.
“Corwin,” I heard her say faintly. “We are not as culpable as you may think. This was—”
“—all for my own good, I’ll bet,” I muttered before the world went dark, growling with the realization that I hadn’t gotten to use my death curse. One of these days . . . .
I woke up in the dispensary in Amber, Luke in the next bed. We both had IVs dripping into us.
“You’re going to live,” Flora said, lowering my wrist from taking my pulse. “Care to tell me your story now?”
“The
y just found us in the hall?” Luke asked. “The Hall of Mirrors was nowhere in sight?”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t want to mention any names yet,” I said.
“Corwin,” Luke said, “Did the Hall of Mirrors show up a lot when you were a kid?”
“No,” I said.
“Hardly ever, when I was growing up either,” Flora said. “It’s only in recent years that it’s become this active. Almost as if the place were waking up.”
“The place?” Luke said.
“Almost as if there’s another player in the game,” she responded.
“Who?” I demanded, causing a pain in my gut.
“Why, the castle itself, of course,” she said.
About the Author:
— Photo from: The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Roger Zelazny: American science fiction and fantasy writer, who often based his stories on myths and legends. Zelazny was one of the most important writers of the New Wave of science fiction along with Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Harlan Ellison. He published 50 novels, some 150 stories and three collections of poetry.
Roger Zelazny was born in Euclid, Ohio. He received his M.A. in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from Columbia University in 1962. Zelazny briefly enlisted with the Ohio National Guard and then worked for the Social Security Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, and Baltimore, Maryland. Zelazny’s first published story was‘Passion Play’ which appeared in 1962. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1969, Zelazny concentrated on short stories and novellas. At the age of 38, he moved to Santa Fe, where he lived until his death.
In the 1960s Zelazny became highly visible in a group of science fiction writers known as the‘New Wave’. Up until that time the genre had been dominated by writers producing action-adventures set in space. The new generation felt that they had freedom to experiment; they focused on psychology and believed science fiction should be taken seriously as literature. Zelazny’s novel This Immortal won the 1966 Hugo for Best Novel, and the self-mocking, immortal, jokester became Zelazny’s favorite character type. The Dream Master won the 1966 Nebula for Best Novella. In the same year The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth won a Nebula for Best Novellette. The Immortal told of a post-apocalyptic Earth, which have become a wasteland and place of entertainment for aliens, the Vegans. Conrad Nomikos, the many-talented protagonist, is employed as a guide to an alien official. The Vegans want to turn Earth into a holiday resort, but Nomikos has his own ideas and he helps to preserve the remnants of humanity. The Dream Master was about a psychiatrists who is able to enter and affect his client’s dreams - and thus cure the neuroses of their patients. Its shorter version,‘He Who Shapes’ (1965) won a Nebula.
Zelazny’s interest in magic, myths and dreams are already at present in these early stories which are considered among his best works. In 1970 he started the enormously popular Amber series, which have been adapted for comics and used as the basis for a computer game. Zelazny spent much of his later life in the writing of this series. The nine books, beginning with Nine Princes in Amber, evoked the betrayals of Jacobean drama. The narrator Corwin and rival princes and princesses double-cross one another, all seeking the crown. One of the siblings is responsible for Corwin losing his memory and one tries to kill him. Corwin’s arch-rival is Eric, his brother. Amber is a higher, sophisticated plane, and the actions of its godlike inhabitants reflect in the human actions - humans being the apes of gods. Corwin and his many siblings are more real than mortals, or the Gods of any Shadow realm - our world among others. The concept of Shadow has much in common with Jungian psychology. Jung considered the‘shadow’ the sum of those characteristics we wish to conceal - the most famous example found in literature is R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. However, when the story continues, it turns out that Amber itself is not an ultimate reality, but shares a Ying-Yang relationship with the forces of Chaos.
The Chronicles of Amber included Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon (1972), Sign of the Unicorn (1975), The Hand of Oberon (1976) and The Courst of Chaos (1978). Triumps of Doom (1985) opened a follow-up starring Corwin’s son Merlin. The series included Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos (1987), Knight of Shadows (1989) and Prince of Chaos (1991). The first five novels were collected together as The Chronicles of Amber (2000). Two further related works were A Rhapsody in Amber (1981) and Roger Zelazny’s Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988, with Neil Randall).
— Excerpted from: Books & Writers, Petri Liukkonen
The Great Book of Amber - Chronicles 1-10 Page 196