The Chronicles of Amber

After all the magic and wonders I had witnessed over the last few hours, suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

Chapter 5

I focused my attention on the pattern of cards around the table, trying to see them as Freda did. Was there a pattern? All the subjects were male, five probably dead, four definitely alive.

Somehow I had recognized two of the dead men—recognized them and knew without a doubt that they were dead. And yet I had never met them. Of the four still living, I knew only Dworkin. As I studied their features, I was fairly certain I had never seen Aber, Locke, or Fenn before.

“You’re the fortune-teller,” I said to Freda. “What do you make of this pattern?”

“I’m not sure.” She bit her lip, gazing from one miniature portrait to the next, not letting her gaze linger long. “It’s only people, thus no clues as to past, present, or future destinations. Clearly the whole family is tied up with you in events to come, but with war on the horizon, that may not be much of a surprise. Father and the others, dead or alive, all play a part in it—but what part?”

“You tell me.” Leaning back, I studied her.

She seemed truly puzzled. Her brow furrowed; she drummed her fingertips on the tabletop. Clearly she took her card reading quite seriously. Finally she leaned back with a sigh.

“I see more questions than answers,” she admitted.

“Do you want me to turn another card over?”

“Just one. That is more than I usually use for a personal reading, but in this case…”

I turned over the next Trump. This one showed a place I’d never been before—a gloomy keep half lost in night and storm, half illuminated by dazzling light. I say half because the sky seemed to be split almost in two, with star-pocked darkness to the left and a dazzling orange-yellow-red sky on the right, like a bottle of differently colored sands that had been shaken so that you could still see individual grains, but no one color ruled.

My palms itched. I could not look at it for more than a second or two without glancing away. I had the sensation that this mad picture was no artist’s whim, but an actual place… a place at once dark and light, night and day, cold and hot, without season, shapeless and changing. I did not like it.

“The Grand Plaza of the Courts of Chaos?” she said. “That is odd. It should not be there. I did not even know I had that particular card with me… I had not meant to bring it!”

There it was again—Chaos.

Wherever the Grand Plaza was, it didn’t look welcoming, I decided with a little shudder. The buildings, the lightning-shapes in the air, the very essence of the place—it all made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and gooseflesh rise on my arms.

On impulse, I reached out and turned the card face down. The instant I no longer looked upon it, with its unnatural angles and weird geography, I began to feel better. I realized I’d begun to sweat all over just from having the Trump where I could see it.

“Why did you do that?” Freda asked. Luckily, she made no move to turn the card back over.

“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It felt like the right thing to do. Somehow, I didn’t want to look at it.”

I don’t think I could have looked at it any longer. Just thinking about it made my head ache.

“I see.” Again her brow furrowed. “Mattus felt the same way,” she said. “We had to all but drag him there when…”

“When what?”

She hesitated. “When he came of age.”

I gestured toward the face-down card. “Does it mean anything? My finding the Courts of Chaos?”

“Every action has meaning with the Trumps. They reflect the world around them.”

“What is the meaning this time?”

“I… cannot say.”

I swallowed, suddenly uneasy again. Cannot say—or won’t? Her choice of words left me wondering, and her suddenly nervous manner gave me the distinct impression that she hadn’t told me everything she’d seen.

An unsettling thought came to me. I tapped the back of the Chaos card.

“This isn’t where we’re headed, is it?”

“No, Juniper is about as far from the Courts of Chaos as you can get. Hopefully far enough to keep us safe.”

Safe from what? Hell-creatures? Someone or something else?

I bit back my questions, though—call it pride or my own obstinate nature, but I thought it prudent to watch and learn. I would keep my queries to a minimum, and try to make them brief and unassuming.

Freda scooped up her deck of Trumps and sorted through them, finally pulling out a card that showed a sleepy, moss-draped castle atop a distant hill. She passed the card across to me.

“This is Juniper,” she said. “At least, as it used to be. Aber painted it about two years ago.”

In front of the hill sat a small, peaceful looking village, with perhaps seventy or so brick-and-mortar buildings with yellow-thatched roofs. Before and beyond stretched verdant acres of farmland and rich pastures, dotted with houses and barns, small ponds and even a broad blue stream. Juniper looked like any of a dozen small keeps in Ilerium, and unlike the Courts of Chaos, it didn’t make my skin crawl. That alone made me feel a lot better.

“A lot can change in two years,” I said.

“It has.”

As I stared, the tiny cows, sheep, and horses sketched with unerring skill began to move across the fields. I swallowed and forced my attention back to Freda. She took the card when I offered it.

“What’s different now?” I asked.

“An armed camp surrounds it—Father’s troops, of course. Juniper is not under siege, at least not yet, but it has grown loud and dirty. I do not think it will ever be the same again.”

I nodded. Wars did that. A year of battling hell-creatures had forever changed Ilerium, and not for the good.

“Since Juniper has changed so much,” I said slowly, hoping to get another clue as to the nature of these mysterious Tarot cards, “will your Trump still work?”

“Yes… after a fashion. It just takes longer. The essence of the place remains the same even as the landscape changes.”

I handed back her Juniper card. With a sad little sigh, Freda put it with the rest of her cards, shuffled them once, and stashed them away in a small wooden box. It looked like teak, inlaid with an intricate mother-of-pearl pattern of a lion.

“You said Aber made all your cards?” I asked. Might as well try to gather as much information as I could since she seemed to be in a more talkative mood now.

“Yes.” She smiled, eyes far off, and I could tell she liked her brother. “He is good at it, too… almost as good as Father, though Aber tends to make fun of everyone when he draws them.” She focused on me. “I wonder how he will draw you… nicely, I hope. I do think he will like you.”

I snorted. “Why should he bother drawing me?”

“Why not? He draws everyone and every place he thinks might be useful. He must have hundreds or even thousands of Trumps stashed away in his rooms by now. I do not know where he possibly keeps them all.”

I glanced out the window. Still rolling green hills, still a dozen odd horsemen with extra joints in their arms. We had to be nearing our destination, I thought, since the landscape hadn’t changed much. Either that, or Dworkin was now resting up from all his magics.

“Do you know how much longer we’ll be traveling?” I asked.

“Father did not tell you?”

“He was… vague.”