The Chronicles of Amber

by Roger Zelazny

  “I’d imagine you would have. It’s not everyone has a ty’iga following him about, periodically seducing him in various forms, and making life, in general, very complicated with unwanted efforts at protection.”

  “It shows that I care, dear.”

  “It also shows that you have no respect for my privacy nor trust in my judgment.”

  Mandor cleared his throat.

  “Hello, Dara,” he said then.

  “I suppose it must seem that way to you,” she stated. Then, “Hello, Mandor,” she went on. “What happened to your arm?”

  “A misunderstanding involving some architecture,” he replied. “You’ve been out of sight, though hardly out of mind, for some time.”

  “Thank you, if that’s a compliment,” she said. “Yes, I go a bit reclusive every now and then, when the weight of society becomes troublesome. Though you’re hardly the one to talk, sir, vanishing for long stretches as you do in the labyrinths of Mandorways—if that be indeed where you take yourself.”

  He bowed.

  “As you say, lady, we appear to be creatures of a kind.”

  Her eyes narrowed, though her voice was unchanged, as she said, “I wonder. Yes, I can sometimes see us as kindred spirits, perhaps even more than in our simplest cycles of activity. We’ve both been out and about a lot of late, though, haven’t we?”

  “But I’ve been careless,” said Mandor, indicating his injured arm. “You, obviously, have not.”

  “I never argue with architecture,” she said.

  “Or other imponderables?” he asked.

  “I try to work with what is in place,” she told him.

  “Generally, I do, too.”

  “And if you cannot?” she asked. He shrugged.

  “Sometimes there are collisions.”

  “You’ve survived many in your time, haven’t you?”

  “I can’t deny it, but then it has been a long while. You seem made of very survivable stuff yourself.”

  “So far,” she responded. “We really must compare notes on imponderables and collisions one day. Wouldn’t it be strange if we were similar in all respects?”

  “I should be very much surprised,” he answered.

  I was fascinated and slightly frightened by the exchange, though I could go only by feeling and had no notion of specifics. They were somehow similar, and I’d never heard generalities delivered with quite that precision and emphasis outside of Amber, where they often make a game of talking that way.

  “Forgive me,” Mandor said then, to the company in general, “but I must absent myself to recuperation. Thank you for your hospitality, sir.” He bowed to Suhuy. “And for the pleasure of crossing-paths with you”—this to Dara.

  “You’ve barely arrived,” Suhuy said, “and you’ve taken no refreshment. You make me a poor host.”

  “Rest assured, old friend, there is none could perform such a transformation,” he stated. He looked at me as he backed toward the opening way. “Till later,” he said, and I nodded.

  He passed into the way, and the rock solidified with his vanishment.

  “One wonders at his deliveries,” my mother said, “without apparent rehearsal.”

  “Grace,” Suhuy commented. “He was born with an abundance.”

  “I wonder who will die today?” she said.

  “I am not certain the implication is warranted,” Suhuy replied.

  She laughed.

  “And if it is,” she said, “they will certainly expire in good taste.”

  “Do you speak in condemnation or envy?” he asked.

  “Neither,” she said. “For I, too, am an admirer of grace—and a good jest.”

  “Mother,” I said, “just what’s going on?”

  “Whatever do you mean, Merlin?” she replied.

  “I left this place a long time ago. You sent a demon to find me and take care of me. Presumably, it could detect someone of the blood of Amber. So there was some confusion between myself and Luke. So it settled by taking care of both of us—until Luke began his periodic attempts to kill me. Then it protected me from Luke and tried to determine which of us was the proper party. It even lived with Luke for a time, and later pursued me. I should have guessed at something of this because it was so eager to learn my mother’s name. Apparently, Luke was just as close-mouthed about his parentage.”

  She laughed.

  “It makes a beautiful picture,” she began. “Little Jasra and the Prince of Darkness—”

  “Don’t try to change the subject. Think how embarrassing that is for a grown man—his mother sending demons to look after him.”

  “The singular. It was just one demon, dear.”

  “Who cares? The principle’s the same. Where do you get off with this protective business? I resent—”

  “The ty’iga probably saved your life on more than one occasion, Merlin.”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “You’d rather be dead than protected? Just because it was coming from me?”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “It seems you just assumed I couldn’t take care of myself, and—”

  “Well, you couldn’t.”

  “But you had no way of knowing that. I resented your starting with the assumption that I needed chaperoning in Shadow, that I was naive, gullible, careless—”

  “I suppose it would hurt your feelings if I said that you were, going to a place as different from the Courts as that Shadow is.”

  “Yes, I can take care of myself!”

  “You weren’t doing that great a job of it. But you are making a number of unwarranted assumptions yourself. What makes you think that the reasons you gave are the only possible ones for my taking such an action?”

  “Okay. Tell me that you knew that Luke was going to try to kill me every April thirtieth. And if the answer is yes, why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I did not know that Luke was going to try to kill you every April thirtieth.”

  I turned away. I clenched my fists and relaxed them. “So you just did it for the hell of it?”

  “Merlin, why do you find it so difficult to admit that other people might sometimes know things you don’t?”

  “Start with their unwillingness to tell me these things.”

  She was silent a long moment. Then, “I’m afraid there is something to what you say,” she replied. “But there were strong reasons for not talking of such matters.”

  “Then start with the inability to tell me. Tell me now why you didn’t trust me then.”

  “It wasn’t a matter of trust.”

  “Is it okay to tell me now what it was?” Another, longer silence followed.

  “No,” she finally said “Not yet.”

  I turned toward her, keeping my features composed and my voice level.

  “Then nothing has changed,” I said, “nor ever shall. You still do not trust me.”

  “That is not true,” she answered, glancing at Suhuy. “It is just that this is not the proper time or the proper place to go into these matters.”

  “Might I fetch you a drink or something to eat, Dara?” Suhuy said immediately.

  “Thank you no,” she replied. “I cannot stay much longer.”

  “Mother, tell me, then, something about the ty’iga.”

  “What do you wish to know?”

  “You conjured it from someplace beyond the Rim.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Such beings are bodiless themselves, but capable of taking over a living host for their own purposes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Supposing such a being took over the body of a person at or near the moment of death, making it the sole animating spirit and controlling intelligence?”

  “Interesting. Is this a hypothetical question?”

  “No. It’s really happened with the one you sent after me. It doesn’t seem able to quit that body now. Why not?”

  “I am not rea
lly certain,” she said.

  “It is trapped now,” Suhuy offered. “It can only come and go by reacting with a resident intelligence.”

  “The body, with the ty’iga in control, recovered from the illness that killed its consciousness,” I said. “You mean it’s stuck there now for life?”

  “Yes. So far as I know.”

  “Then tell me this: Will it be released when that body dies, or will it die with it?”

  “It could go either way,” he replied. “But the longer it remains in the body, the more likely it is that it will perish along with it.”

  I looked back at my mother.

  “There you have the end of its story,” I stated. She shrugged.

  “I’ve done with this one and released it,” she said, “and one can always conjure another should the need arise.”

  “Don’t do it,” I told her.

  “I shan’t,” she said. “There is no need to, now.”

  “But if you thought there were, you would?”

  “A mother tends to value her son’s safety, whether the son likes it or not.”

  I raised my left hand, extending the forefinger in an angry gesture, when I noticed that I was wearing a bright bracelet—it seemed an almost-hologramatic representation of a woven cord. I lowered my hand, bit back my first response, and said, “You know my feelings now.”

  “I knew them a long time ago,” she said. “Let us dine at the Ways of Sawall, half a turning hence, purplesky. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Till then. Good turning, Suhuy.”

  “Good turning, Dara.”

  She took three paces and was gone, as etiquette prescribed, out the same way by which she had entered.

  I turned and strode to the pool’s edge, stared into its depths, felt the muscles in my shoulders slowly unknot. Jasra and Julia were down there now, back in the citadel of the Keep, doing something arcane in the lab. And then the strands were flowing over them, some cruel truth beyond all order and beauty, beginning to form themselves into a mask of fascinating, frightening proportion.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Family,” Suhuy said, “intrigues and maddens. You are feeling the tyranny of affection at the moment, are you not?”

  I nodded.

  “Something Mark Twain said about being able to choose your friends but not your relatives,” I answered.

  “I do not know what they are up to, though I have my suspicions,” he said. “There is nothing to do now but rest and wait. I would like to hear more of your story.”

  “Thanks, Uncle. Yeah,” I said. “Why not?”

  So I gave him all the rest of my tale. Partway through it, we adjourned to the kitchen for further sustenance, then took another way to a floating balcony above a lime-colored ocean breaking upon pink rocks and beaches under a twilit or otherwise indigo sky without stars. There, I finished my telling.

  “This is more than a little interesting,” he said, at last.

  “Oh? Do you see something in it all that I don’t?” I asked.

  “You’ve given me too much to consider for me to give you a hasty judgment,” he said. “Let us leave it at that for now.”

  “Very well.”

  I leaned on the rail, looked down at the waters.

  “You need rest,” he said after a time.

  “I guess I do.”

  “Come, I’ll show you to your room.”

  He extended a hand and I took hold of it. Together, we sank through the floor.

  And so I slept, surrounded by tapestries and heavy drapes, in a doorless chamber in the Ways of Suhuy. It might have been in a tower, as I could hear the winds passing beyond the walls. Sleeping, I dreamt. . . .

  I was back in the castle Amber, walking the sparkling length of the Corridor of Mirrors. Tapers flickered in tall holders. My footsteps made no sound. The mirrors came in all manner of shapes. They covered the walls at either hand, big ones, little ones. I passed myself within their depths, reflected, distorted, sometimes re-reflected. . . .

  I was halted before a tall, cracked mirror to my left, framed in tin. Even as I turned toward it I knew that it would not be me whom I regarded this time.

  Nor was I mistaken. Coral was looking at me from out of the mirror. She had on a peach-colored blouse and was not wearing her eyepatch. The crack in the mirror divided her face down the middle. Her left eye was the green I remembered, her right was the Jewel of Judgment. Both seemed to be focused upon me.

  “Merlin,” she said. “Help me. This is too strange. Give me back my eye.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. “I don’t understand what was done.”

  “My eye,” she went on, as if she had not heard. “The world is all swarming forces in the Eye of Judgment, cold—so cold!—and not a friendly place. Help me!”

  “I’ll find a way,” I said.

  “My eye . . . ” she continued.

  I hurried by.

  From a rectangular mirror in a wooden frame carved at its base in the form of a phoenix, Luke regarded me. “Hey, old buddy,” he said, looking slightly forlorn, “I’d sure like to have my dad’s sword back. You haven’t come across it again, have you?”

  “’Fraid not,” I muttered.

  “It’s a shame to get to hold your present for such a short period of time. Watch for it, will you? I’ve a feeling it might come in handy.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said.

  “After all, you’re kind of responsible for what happened,” he continued.

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “ . . . And I’d sure like to have it back.”

  “Yeah,” I said, moving away.

  A nasty chuckle emerged from a maroon-framed ellipse to my right. Turning, I beheld the face of Victor Melman, the shadow Earth sorcerer I had confronted back when my troubles were beginning.

  “Son of perdition!” he hissed. “’Tis good to see you wander lost in Limbo. May my blood lie burning on your hands.”

  “Your blood is on your own hands,” I said. “I count you as a suicide.”

  “Not so!” he snapped back. “You slew me most unfairly.”

  “Bullshit,” I answered. “I may be guilty of a lot of things, but your death is not one of them.”

  I began to walk away, and his hand emerged from the mirror and clutched at my shoulder.

  “Murderer!” he cried.

  I brushed his hand away.

  “Bugger off!” I said, and I kept going.

  Then, from a wide, green-framed mirror with a greenish haze to the glass, Random hailed me from my left, shaking his head.

  “Merlin! Merlin! What are you up to, anyway?” he asked. “I’ve known for some time that you haven’t been keeping me abreast of everything that’s afoot.”

  “Well,” I replied, regarding him in an orange T-shirt and Levi’s, “that’s true, sir. Some things I just haven’t had time to go into.”

  “Things that involve the safety of the realm—and you haven’t had time?”

  “Well, I guess there’s something of a judgmental factor involved.”

  “If it involves our safety, I am the one to do the judging.”

  “Yes, sir. I realize that—”

  “We have to have a talk, Merlin. Is it that your personal life is mixed with this in some way?”

  “I guess that’s true—”

  “It doesn’t matter. The kingdom is more important. We must talk.”

  “Yes, sir. We will as soon as—”

  “‘As soon as,’ hell! Now! Stop screwing around at whatever you’re up to and get your ass back here! We have to talk!”

  “I will, as soon as—”

  “Don’t give me that! It verges on the traitorous if you’re withholding important information! I need to see you now! Come home!”

  “I will,” I said, and I hurried away, his voice joining a continuing chorus of the others, repeating their demands, their pleas, their accusations.

  Out of the next on
e—circular, with a blue braided frame—Julia regarded me.

  “And there you go,” she said, almost wistfully. “You knew I loved you.”

  “I loved you, too,” I admitted. “It took me a long time to realize it. I guess I messed up, though.”

  “You didn’t love me enough,” she said. “Not enough to trust me. And so you lost my trust.”

  I looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Not good enough,” she responded. “Thus, we are become enemies.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “Too late,” she said. “Too late.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, and I hurried away.

  Thus, I came to Jasra, in a red, diamond frame. Her bright-nailed hand reached out and caressed my cheek. “Going somewhere, dear boy?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  She smiled crookedly and pursed her lips.

  “I’ve decided you were a bad influence on my son,” she said. “He lost his edge when he became friends with you.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “ . . . Which may make him unfit to rule.”

  “Unfit or unwilling?” I asked.

  “Whichever, it will be your fault.”

  “He’s a big boy now, Jasra. He makes his own decisions.”

  “I fear you’ve taught him to make the wrong ones.”

  “He’s his own man, lady. Don’t blame me if he does things you don’t like.”

  “And if Kashfa crumbles because you’ve softened him?”

  “I decline the nomination,” I said, taking a step forward. It was good that I was moving, for her hand shot out, nails raking at my face, barely missing. She threw expletives after me as I walked away. Fortunately, they were drowned amid the cries of the others.

  “Merlin?”

  Turning to my right again I beheld the face of Nayda within a silver mirror, its surface and curled frame of a single piece.

  “Nayda! What are you down on me for?”

  “Nothing,” the ty’iga lady replied. “I’m just passing through, and I need directions.”

  “You don’t hate me? How refreshing!”

  “Hate you? Don’t be silly. I could never do that.”

  “Everyone else in this gallery seems irritated with me.

  “It’s only a dream, Merlin. You’re real, I’m real, and I don’t know about the others.”