with demons than with my mother's relatives by blood or marriage. I even based my main Chaos form upon one of their kind.
He absorbed a chair from the room's corner for extra mass, changing shape to accommodate my adult size. As I climbed upon his elongated torso, catching a firm hold, he exclaimed, «Ah, Merlin! What magics do you bear these days?»
«I've their control, but not full knowledge of their essence,» I answered. «They're a very recent acquisition. What is it that you feel?»
«Heat, cold, strange music,» he replied. «From all directions. You have changed.»
«Everyone changes,» I said as he moved toward the window. «That's life.»
A dark thread lay upon the wide sill. He reached out and touched it as he launched himself.
There came a great rushing of wind as we fell downward, moved forward, rose. Towers flashed past, wavering. The stars were bright, a quarter moon just risen, illuminating the bellies of a low line of clouds. We soared, the castle and the town dwindling in an eyeblink. The stars danced, became streaks of light. A band of sheer, rippling blackness spread about us, widening. The Black Road, I suddenly thought. It is like a temporary version of the Black Road, in the sky. I glanced back. It was not there. It was as if it were somehow reeling in as we rode. Or was it reeling us in?
The countryside passed beneath us like a film played at triple speed. Forest, hill, and mountain peak fled by. Our black way was a great ribbon heaving before us, patches of light and dark like daytime cloud shadows sliding past. And then the tempo increased, staccato. I noted of a sudden that there was no longer any wind. Abruptly, the moon was high overhead, and a crooked mountain range snaked beneath us. The stillness had a dreamlike quality to it, and in an instant the moon had fallen lower. A line of light cracked the world to my right and stars began to go out. There was no feeling of exertion in Gryll's body as we plunged along that black way; and the moon vanished and light grew buttery yellow along a line of clouds, acquiring a pink cast even as I watched.
«The power of Chaos rises,» I remarked.
«The energy of disorder,» he replied.
«There is more to this than you've told me,» I said.
«I am but a servant,» Gryll responded, «and not privy to the councils of the mighty.»
The world continued to brighten, and for as far ahead as I could see our black ribbon rippled. We were passing high over mountainous terrain. And clouds blew apart and new ones formed at a rapid rate. We had obviously begun our passage through Shadow. After a time, the mountains wore down and rolling plains slid by. Suddenly the sun was in the middle of the sky. We seemed to be passing just above our black way, Gryll's toes barely grazing it as we moved. At times his wings hardly fluttered before me, at other times they thrummed like those of a hummingbird, into invisibility.
The sun grew cherry-red far to my left. A pink desert spread beneath us…
Then it was dark again and the stars turned like a great wheel.
Then we were low, barely passing above the tops of the trees…
We burst into the air over a busy downtown street, lights on poles and the fronts of vehicles, neon in windows. The warm, stuffy, dusty, gassy smell of city rose up about us. A few pedestrians glanced upward, barely seeming to note our passage.
Even as we flashed across a river, cresting the house tops of suburbia, the prospect wavered and we passed over a primordial landscape of rock, lava, avalanche, and shuddering ground, two active volcanoes - one near, one far - spewing smoke against a blue-green sky.
«This, I take it, is a shortcut?» I said.
«It is the shortest cut,» Gryll replied.
We entered a long night, and at some point it seemed that our way took us beneath deep waters, bright sea creatures hovering and darting both near at hand and in the middle distance. Dry and uncrushed, the black way protected us.
«It is as major an upheaval as the death of Oberon,» Gryll volunteered. «Its effects are rippling across Shadow.»
«But Oberon's death coincided with the re-creation of the Pattern,» I said. «There was more to it than the death of a monarch of one of the extremes.»
«True,» Gryll replied, «but now is a time of imbalance among the forces. This adds to it. It will be even more severe.»
We plunged into an opening in a dark mass of stone. Lines of light streaked past us. Irrregularities were limned in a pale blue. Later - how long, I do not know - we were in a purple sky, with no transition that I can recall from the dark sea bottom. A single star gleamed far ahead. We sped toward it.
«Why» I asked.
«Because the Pattern has grown stronger than the Logrus,» he replied.
«How did that happen?»
«Prince Corwin drew a second Pattern at the time of the confrontation between the Courts and Amber.»
«Yes, he told me about it. I've even seen it. He feared Oberon might not be able to repair the original.»
«But he did, and so now there are two.»
«Yes?»
«Your father's Pattern is also an artifact of order. It served to tip the ancient balance in the favor of Amber.»
«How is it you are aware of this, Gryll, when no one back in Amber seems to know it or saw fit to tell me?»
«Your brother Prince Mandor and the Princess Fiona suspected this and sought evidence. They presented their findings to your uncle, Lord Suhuy. He made several journeys into Shadow and became persuaded that this is the case. He was preparing his findings for presentation to the king when Swayvill suffered his final illness. I know these things because it was Suhuy who sent me for you, and he charged me to tell them to you.»
«I just assumed it was my mother who'd sent for me.»
«Suhuy was certain she would - which is why he wanted to reach you first. What I have told you concerning your father's Pattern is not yet common knowledge.»
«What am I supposed to do about it?»
«He did not entrust me with that information.»
The star grew brighter. The sky was filled with splashes of orange and pink. Shortly, lines of green light joined them, and they swirled like streamers about us.
We raced on, and the configurations came to dominate the sky fully, like a psychedelic parasol rotating slowly. The landscape became a total blur. I felt as if a part of me dozed, though I am certain I did not lose consciousness. Time seemed to be playing games with my metabolism. I grew enormously hungry and my eyes ached.
The star brightened. Gryll's wings took on a prismatic shimmer. We seemed to be moving at an incredible pace now.
Our strand curved upward at its outer edges. The process continued as we advanced until it seemed we were moving in a trough. Then they met overhead, and it was as if we sped down a gun barrel, aimed at the blue- white star.
«Anything else you're supposed to tell me?»
«Not so far as I know.»
I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her behind in Brand's apartment. Why had I done that? I-my mind felt cloudy, the memory dreamlike.
This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory. Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the clouding effect of glamor. I had walked into a spell back in Brand's apartment. I'd no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I'd activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more general, enlivened by the disaster - possibly even an unintentional side effect of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.
