The Great Book of Amber

by Roger Zelazny

“None of this discussion, this speculation, would be necessary,” I said, “if we had all of the facts right now. And there may be a way to get them-right now. That is why you are here.”

  That did it. I had them. Attentive. Ready. Maybe even willing.

  “I propose we attempt to reach Brand and bring him home,” I said, “now.”

  “How?” Benedict asked me.

  “The Trumps.”

  “It has been tried,” said Julian. “He cannot be reached that way. No response.”

  “I was not referring to the ordinary usage.” I said.

  “I asked you all to bring full sets of Trumps with you. I trust that you have them?”

  There were nods.

  “Good,” I said. “Let us shuffle out Brand's Trump now. I propose that all nine of us attempt to contact him simultaneously.”

  “An interesting thought,” Benedict said.

  “Yes,” Julian agreed, producing his deck and riffling through it. “Worth trying, at least. It may generate additional power. I do not really know.”

  I located Brand's Trump. I waited until all the others had found it. Then, “Let us coordinate things,” I said. “Is everyone ready?”

  Eight assents were spoken. “Then go ahead. Try. Now.”

  I studied my card. Brand's features were similar to my own, but he was shorter and slenderer. His hair was like Fiona's. He wore a green riding suit. He rode a white horse. How long ago? How long ago was that? I wondered. Something of a dreamer, a mystic, a poet, Brand was always disillusioned or elated, cynical or wholly trusting. His feelings never seemed to find a middle ground. Manic-depressive is too facile a term for his complex character, yet it might serve to indicate a direction of departure, multitudes of qualifications lining the roadway thereafter. Pursuant to this state of affairs, I must admit that there were times when I found him so charming, considerate, and loyal that I valued him above all my other kin. Other times, however, he could be so bitter, sarcastic, and downright savage that I tried to avoid his company for fear that I might do him harm. Summing up, the last time I had seen him had been one of the latter occasions, just a bit before Eric and I had had the falling out that led to my exile from Amber.

  ...And those were my thoughts and feelings as I studied his Trump, reaching out to him with my mind, my will, opening the vacant place I sought him to fill. About me, the others shuffled their own memories and did the same.

  Slowly the card took on a dream-dust quality and acquired the illusion of depth. There followed that familiar blurring, with the sense of movement which heralds contact with the subject. The Trump grew colder beneath my fingertips, and then things flowed and formed, achieving a sudden verity of vision, persistent, dramatic, full.

  He seemed to be in a cell. There was a stone wall behind him. There was straw on the floor. He was manacled, and his chain ran back through a huge ring bolt set in the wall above and behind him. It was a fairly long chain, providing sufficient slack for movement, and at the moment he was taking advantage of this fact, lying sprawled on a heap of straw and rags off in the corner. His hair and beard were quite long, his face thinner than I had ever before seen it. His clothes were tattered and filthy. He seemed to be sleeping. My mind went back to my own imprisonment-the smells, the cold, the wretched fare, the dampness, the loneliness, the madness that came and went. At least he still had his eyes, for they flickered and I saw them when several of us spoke his name; green they were, with a flat, vacant look.

  Was he drugged? Or did he believe himself to be hallucinating?

  But suddenly his spirit returned. He raised himself. He extended his hand.

  “Brothers!” he said. “Sisters...”

  “I'm coming!” came a shout that shook the room.

  Gerard had leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair. He dashed across the room and snatched a great battle ax from its pegs on the wall. He slung it at his wrist, holding the Trump in that same hand. For a moment he froze, studying the card. Then he extended his free hand and suddenly he was there, clasping Brand, who chose that moment to pass out again. The image wavered. The contact was broken.

  Cursing, I sought through the pack after Gerard's own Trump. Several of the others seemed to be doing the same thing. Locating it, I moved for contact. Slowly, the melting, the turning, the re-forming occurred. There!

  Gerard had drawn the chain taut across the stones of the wall and was attacking it with the ax. It was a heavy thing, however, and resisted his powerful blows for a long while. Eventually several of the links were mashed and scarred, but by then he had been at it for almost two minutes, and the ringing, chopping sounds had alerted the jailers.

  For there were noises from the left-a rattling sound, the sliding of bolts, the creaking of hinges. Although my field of perception did not extend that far, it seemed obvious that the cell's door was being opened. Brand raised himself once more. Gerard continued to hack at the chain.

  “Gerard! The door!” I shouted.

  “I know!” he bellowed, wrapping the chain about his arm and yanking it. It did not yield.

  Then he let go of the chain and swung the ax, as one of the horny-handed warriors rushed him, blade upraised. The swordsman fell, to be replaced by another. Then a third and a fourth crowded by them. Others were close on their heels.

  There was a blur of movement at that moment and Random knelt within the tableau, his right hand clasped with Brand's, his left holding his chair before him like a shield, its legs pointing outward. He sprang to his feet and rushed the attackers, driving the chair like a battering ram amid them. They fell back. He raised the chair and swung it. One lay dead on the floor, felled by Gerard's ax. Another had drawn off to one side, clutching at the stump of his right arm. Random produced a dagger and left it in a nearby stomach, brained two more with the chair, and drove back the final man. Eerily, while this was going on, the dead man rose above the floor and slowly drifted upward, spilling and dripping the while. The one who had been stabbed collapsed to his knees, clutching at the blade.

  In the meantime, Gerard had taken hold of the chain with both hands. He braced one foot against the wall and commenced to pull. His shoulders rose as the great muscles tightened across his back. The chain held. Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen...

  Then, with a snap and a rattle, it parted. Gerard stumbled backward, catching himself with an outflung hand. He glanced back, apparently at Random, who was out of my line of sight at the moment. Seemingly satisfied, he turned away, stooped and raised Brand, who had fallen unconscious again. Holding him in his arms, he turned and extended one hand from beneath the limp form. Random leaped back into sight beside them, sans chair, and gestured to us also.

  All of us reached for them, and a moment later they stood amid us and we crowded around.

  A sort of cheer had gone up as we rushed to touch him, to see him, our brother who had been gone these many years and just now snatched back from his mysterious captors. And at last, hopefully, finally, some answers might also have been liberated. Only he looked so weak, so thin, so pale...

  “Get back!” Gerard shouted. “I'm taking him to the couch! Then you can look all you—”

  Dead silence. For everyone had backed off, and then turned to stone. This was because there was blood on Brand, and it was dripping. And this was because there was a knife in his left side, to the rear. It had not been there moments before. Some one of us had just tried for his kidney and possibly succeeded. I was not heartened by the fact that the Random-Corwin Conjecture that it was One Of Us Behind It All had just received a significant boost. I had an instant during which to concentrate all my faculties in an attempt to mentally photograph everyone's position. Then the spell was broken. Gerard bore Brand to the couch and we drew aside; and we all knew that we all realized not only what had happened, but what it implied.

  Gerard set Brand down in a prone position and tore away his filthy shirt.

  “Get me clean water to bathe him,” he said. “And towels. Get me saline solu
tion and glucose and something to hang them from. Get me a whole medical kit.”

  Deirdre and Flora moved toward the door.

  “My quarters are closest,” said Random. “One of you will find a medical kit there. But the only IV stuff is in the lab on the third floor. I'd better come and help.” They departed together.

  We all had had medical training somewhere along the line, both here and abroad. That which we learned in Shadow, though, had to be modified in Amber. Most antibiotics from the shadow worlds, for example, were ineffectual here. On the other hand, our personal immunological processes appear to behave differently from those of any other peoples we have studied, so that it is much more difficult for us to become infected-and if infected we deal with it more expeditiously. Then, too, we possess profound regenerative abilities.

  All of which is as it must be, of course, the ideal necessarily being superior to its shadows. And Amberites that we are, and aware of these facts from an early age, all of us obtained medical training relatively early in life. Basically, despite what is often said about being your own physician, it goes back to our not unjustified distrust of virtually everyone, and most particularly of those who might hold our lives in their hands. All of which partly explains why I did not rush to shoulder Gerard aside to undertake Brand's treatment myself, despite the fact that I had been through a med school on the shadow Earth within the past couple of generations. The other part of the explanation is that Gerard was not letting anyone else near Brand. Julian and Fiona had both moved forward, apparently with the same thing in mind, only to encounter Gerard's left arm like a gate at a railway crossing.

  “No,” he had said. “I know that I did not do it, and that is all that I know. There will be no second chance for anyone else.”

  With any one of us sustaining that sort of wound while in an otherwise sound condition, I would say that if he made it through the first half hour he would make it. Brand, though... The shape he was in... There was no telling.

  When the others returned with the materials and equipment, Gerard cleaned Brand, sutured the wound, and dressed it. He hooked up the IV, broke off the manacles with a hammer and chisel Random had located, covered Brand with a sheet and a blanket, and took his pulse again.

  “How is it?” I asked.

  “Weak,” he said, and he drew up a chair and seated himself beside the couch. “Someone fetch me my blade-and a glass of wine. I didn't have any. Also, if there is any food left over there, I'm hungry.”

  Llewella headed for the sideboard and Random got him his blade from the rack behind the door.

  “Are you just going to camp there?” Random asked, passing him the weapon.

  “I am.”

  “What about moving Brand to a better bed?”

  “He is all right where he is. I will decide when he can be moved. In the meantime, someone get a fire going. Then put out a few of those candles.”

  Random nodded.

  “I'll do it,” he said. Then he picked up the knife Gerard had drawn from Brand's side, a thin stiletto, its blade about seven inches in length. He held it across the palm of his hand.

  “Does anyone recognize this?” he asked.

  “Not I,” said Benedict.

  “Nor I.” said Julian.

  “No,” I said.

  The girls shook their heads.

  Random studied it.

  “Easily concealed-up a sleeve, in a boot or bodice. It took real nerve to use it that way...”

  “Desperation,” I said.

  “...And a very accurate anticipation of our mob scene. Inspired, almost.”

  “Could one of the guards have done it?” Julian asked. “Back in the cell?”

  “No,” Gerard said. “None of them came near enough.”

  “It looks to be decently balanced for throwing,” Deirdre said.

  “It is,” said Random, shifting it about his fingertips. “Only none of them had a clear shot or the opportunity. I'm positive.

  Llewella returned, bearing a tray containing slabs of meat, half a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and a goblet. I cleared a small table and set it beside Gerard's chair.

  As Llewella deposited the tray, she asked, “But why? That only leaves us. Why would one of us want to do it?”

  I sighed.

  “Whose prisoner do you think he might have been?” I asked.

  “One of us?”

  “If he possessed knowledge which someone was willing to go to this length to suppress, what do you think? The same reason also served to put him where he was and keep him there.”

  Her brows tightened.

  “That does not make sense either. Why didn't they just kill him and be done with it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Must have had some use for him,” I said. “But there is really only one person who can answer that question adequately. When you find him, ask him.”

  “Or her,” Julian said. “Sister, you seem possessed of a superabundance of naivete, suddenly.”

  Her gaze locked with Julian's own, a pair of icebergs reflecting frigid infinities.

  “As I recall,” she said, “you rose from your seat when they came through, turned to the left, rounded the desk, and stood slightly to Gerard's right. You leaned pretty far forward. I believe your hands were out of sight, below.”

  “And as I recall,” he said, “you were within striking distance yourself, off to Gerard's left-and leaning forward.”

  “I would have had to do it with my left hand-and I am right-handed.”

  “Perhaps he owes what life he still possesses to that fact.”

  “You seem awfully anxious, Julian, to find that it was someone else.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right! You know this is self defeating. Only one of us did it, and this is not the way to smoke him out.”

  “Or her,” Julian added.

  Gerard rose, glowered, glared.

  “I will not have you disturbing my patient,” he said. “And, Random, you said you were going to see to the fire.”

  “Right away,” Random said, and moved to do it.

  “Let us adjourn to the sitting room off the main hall,” I said, “downstairs. Gerard, I will post a couple of guards outside the door here.”

  “No,” Gerard said. “I would rather that anyone who wishes to try it get this far. I will hand you his head in the morning.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you can ring for anything you need-or call one of us on the Trumps. We will fill you in in the morning on anything that we learn.”

  Gerard seated himself, grunted, and began eating. Random got the fire going and extinguished some lights. Brand's blanket rose and fell, slowly but regularly. We filed quietly from the room and headed for the stairway, leaving them there together with the flare and the crackle, the tubes and the bottles.

  CHAPTER 7

  Many are the times I have awakened, sometimes shaking, always afraid, from the dream that I occupied my old cell, blind once more, in the dungeons beneath Amber. It is not as if I were unfamiliar with the condition of imprisonment. I have been locked away on a number of occasions, for various periods of time. But solitary, plus blindness with small hope of recovery, made for a big charge at the sensory-deprivation counter in the department store of the mind. That, with the sense of finality to it all, had left its marks. I generally keep these memories safely tucked away during waking hours, but at night, sometimes, they come loose, dance down the aisles and frolic round the notions counter, one, two, three. Seeing Brand there in his cell had brought them out again, along with an unseasonal chill; and that final thrust served to establish a more or less permanent residence for them. Now, among my kin in the shield-hung sitting room, I could not avoid the thought that one or more of them had done unto Brand as Eric had done unto me. While this capacity was in itself hardly a surprising discovery, the matter of occupying the same room with the culprit and having no idea as to his identity was more than a little disturbing. My only consolation was t
hat each of the others, according to his means, must be disturbed also. Including the guilty, now that the existence theorem had shown a positive. I knew then that I had been hoping all along that outsiders were entirely to blame. Now, though... On the one hand I felt even more restricted than usual in what I could say. On the other, it seemed a good time to press for information, with everyone in an abnormal state of mind. The desire to cooperate for purposes of dealing with the threat could prove helpful. And even the guilty party would want to behave the same as everyone else. Who knew but that he might slip up while making the effort?

  “Well, have you any other interesting little experiments you would care to conduct?” Julian asked me, clasping his hands behind his head and leaning back in my favorite chair.

  “Not at the moment,” I said.

  “Pity,” he replied. “I was hoping you would suggest we go looking for Dad now in the same fashion. Then, if we are lucky, we find him and someone puts him out of the way with more certainty. After that, we could all play Russian roulette with those fine new weapons you've furnished-winner take all.”

  “Your words are ill-considered,” I said.

  “Not so. I considered every one of them,” he answered. “We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it might be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed.”

  “Now you see that we have. We also notice that the real you is no improvement over the old one.”

  “Whichever you prefer, both of us have been wondering whether you have any idea what you are going to do next.”

  “I do,” I said. “I now intend to obtain answers to a number of questions dealing with everything that is plaguing us. We might as well start with Brand and his troubles.”

  Turning toward Benedict, who was sitting gazing into the fire, I said, “Back in Avalon, Benedict, you told me that Brand was one of the ones who searched for me after my disappearance.”

  “That is correct,” Benedict answered.

  “All of us went looking,” Julian said.

  “Not at first,” I replied. “Initially, it was Brand, Gerard, and yourself, Benedict. Isn't that what you told me?”