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  Sign of chaos

  ( The Chronicles of Amber - 8 )

  Roger Joseph Zelazny

  Following the cliffhanger ending of Blood of Amber, Merlin is stranded in surrealistic Alice in Wonderland-esque bar where the Mad Hatter serves cocktails. Managing to escape, Merlin meets new family members--one of whom is intent on killing him. As events escalates, Merlin finds himself surrounded by his worst enemies including his ex-girlfriend--back from the dead.

  Roger Zelazny

  Sign of chaos

  Chapter 1

  I felt vaguely uneasy, though I couldn’t say why. It did not seem all that unusual to be drinking with a White Rabbit, a short guy who resembled Bertrand Russell, a grinning Cat, and my old friend Luke Raynard, who was singing Irish ballads while a peculiar landscape shifted from mural to reality at his back. Well, I was impressed by the huge blue Caterpillar smoking the hookah atop the giant mushroom because I know how hard it is to keep a water pipe lit. Still, that wasn’t it. It was a convivial scene, and Luke was known to keep pretty strange company on occasion. So why should I feel uneasy?

  The beer was good and there was even a free lunch. The demons tormenting the red-haired woman tied to the stake had been so shiny they’d hurt to look at. Gone now, but the whole thing had, been beautiful. Everything was beautiful. When Luke sang of Galway Bay it had been so sparkling and lovely that I’d wanted to dive in and lose myself there. Sad, too.

  Something to do with the feeling… Yes. Funny thought. When Luke sang a sad song I felt melancholy. When it was a happy one I was greatly cheered. There seemed an unusual amount of empathy in the air. No matter, I guess. The light show was superb…

  I sipped my drink and watched Humpty teeter, there at the end of the bar. For a moment I tried to remember when I’d come into this place, but that cylinder wasn’t hitting. It would come to me, eventually. Nice party…

  I watched and listened and tasted and felt, and it was all great. Anything that caught my attention was fascinating. Was there something I’d wanted to ask Luke? It seemed there was, but he was busy singing and I couldn’t think of it now, anyway.

  What had I been doing before I’d come into this place? Trying to recall just didn’t seem worth the effort either. Not when everything was so interesting right here and now.

  It seemed that it might have been something important, though. Could that be why I felt uneasy? Might it be there was business I had left unfinished and should be getting back to?

  I turned to ask the Cat but he was fading again, still seeming vastly amused. It occurred to me then that I, too, could do that. Fade, I mean; and go someplace else. Was that how I had come here and how I might depart? Possibly. I put down my drink and rubbed my eyes and my temples. Things seemed to be swimming inside my head, too.

  I suddenly recalled a picture of me. On a giant card. A Trump. Yes. That was how I’d gotten here. Through the card…

  A hand fell upon my shoulder and I turned. It belonged to Luke, who grinned at me as he edged up to the bar for a refill.

  “Great party, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah, great. How’d you find this place?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I forget. Who cares?”

  He turned away, a brief blizzard of crystals swirling between us. The Caterpillar exhaled a purple cloud. A blue moon was rising.

  What is wrong with this picture? I asked myself.

  I had a sudden feeling that my critical faculty had been shot off in the war, because I couldn’t focus on the anomalies I felt must be present. I knew that I was caught up in the moment, but I couldn’t see my way clear.

  I was caught up…

  I was caught…

  How?

  Well… It had all started when I’d shaken my own hand. No. Wrong. That sounds like Zen and that’s not how it was. The hand I shook emerged from the space occupied by the image of myself on the card that went away. Yes, that was it… After a fashion.

  I clenched my teeth. The music began again. There came a soft scraping sound near to my hand on the bar. When I looked I saw that my tankard had been refilled. Maybe I’d had too much already. Maybe that’s what kept getting in the way of my thinking. I turned away. I looked off to my left, past the place where the mural on the wall became the real landscape. Did that make me a part of the mural? I wondered suddenly.

  No matter. If I couldn’t think here… I began running… to the left. Something about this place was messing with my head, and it seemed impossible to consider the process while I was a part of it. I had to get away in order to think straight, to determine what was going on.

  I was across the bar and into that interface area where the painted rocks and trees became three-dimensional. I pumped my arms as I dug in. I head the wind without feeling it.

  Nothing that lay before me seemed any nearer. I was moving, but Luke began singing again.

  I halted. I turned, slowly, because it sounded as if he were standing practically beside me. He was. I was only a few paces removed from the bar. Luke smiled and kept singing.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the Caterpillar.

  “You’re looped in Luke’s loop,” it replied.

  “Come again?” I said.

  It blew a blue smoke ring, sighed softly, and said, “Luke’s locked in a loop and you’re lost in the lyrics. That’s all.”

  “How’d it happen?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” it replied.

  “Uh, how does one get unlooped?”

  “Couldn’t tell you that either.”

  I turned to the Cat, who was coalescing about his grin once again.

  “I don’t suppose you’d know —” I began.

  “I saw him come in and I saw you come in later,” said the Cat, smirking. “And even for this place your arrivals were somewhat… unusual — leading me to conclude that at least one of you is associated with magic.”

  I nodded.

  “Your own comings and goings might give one pause,” I observed.

  “I keep my paws to myself,” he replied. “Which is more than Luke can say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s caught in a contagious trap.”

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  But he was gone again, and this time the grin went too.

  Contagious trap? That seemed to indicate that the problem was Luke’s, and that I had been sucked into it in some fashion. This felt right, though it still gave me no idea as to what the problem was or what I might do about it.

  I reached for my tankard. If I couldn’t solve my problem, I might as well enjoy it. As I took a slow sip I became aware of a strange pair of pale, burning eyes gazing into my own. I hadn’t noticed them before, and the thing that made them strange was that they occupied a shadowy corner of the mural across the room from me that, and the fact that they were moving, drifting slowly to my left.

  It was kind of fascinating, when I lost sight of the eyes but was still able to follow whatever it was from the swaying of grasses as it passed into the area toward which I had been headed earlier. And far, far off to my right beyond Luke — I now detected a slim gentleman in a dark jacket, palette and brush in hand, who was slowly extending the mural. I took another sip and returned my attention to the progress of whatever it was that had moved from flat reality to 3-D. A gunmetal snout protruded from between a rock and a shrub; the pale eyes blazed above it; blue saliva dripped from the dark muzzle and steamed upon the ground. It was either quite short or very crouched, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was the entire crowd of us that it was studying or me in particular. I leaned to one side and caught Humpty by the belt or the necktie, whichever it was, just as he was about to slump to the side…
r />   “Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me what sort of creature that is?”

  I pointed just as it emerged — many-legged, long-tailed, dark-scaled, undulating, and fast. Its claws were red, and it raised its tail as it raced toward us.

  Humpty’s bleary eyes moved toward my own, drifted past.

  “I am not here, sir,” he began, “to remedy your zoological ignore — My God! It’s — ”

  It flashed across the distance, approaching rapidly. Would it reach a spot shortly where its cunning would become a treadmill operation — or had that effect only applied to me on trying to get away from this place?

  The segments of its body slid from side to side, it hissed like a leaky pressure cooker, and steaming slaver marked its trail from the fiction of paint. Rather than slowing, its speed seemed to increase.

  My left hand jerked forward of its own volition and a series of words rose unbidden to my lips. I spoke them just as the creature crossed the interface I had been unable to pierce earlier, rearing as it upset a vacant table and bunching its members as if about to spring.

  “A Bandersnatch!” someone cried.

  “A frumious Bandersnatch!” Humpty corrected.

  As I spoke the final word and performed the ultimate gesture, the image of the Logrus swam before my inner vision. The dark creature, having just extended its foremost talons, suddenly drew them back, clutched with them against the upper left quadrant of its breast, rolled its eyes, emitted a soft moaning sound, exhaled heavily, collapsed, fell to the floor, and rolled over onto its back, its many feet extended upward into the air.

  The Cat’s grin appeared above the creature. The mouth moved.

  “A dead frumious Bandersnatch,” it stated.

  The grin drifted toward me, the rest of the Cat occurring about it like an afterthought.

  “That was a cardiac arrest spell, wasn’t it?” it inquired.

  “I guess so,” I said. “It was sort of a reflex. Yeah, I remember now. I did still have that spell hanging around.”

  “I thought so,” it observed. “I was sure that there was magic involved in this party.”

  The image of the Logrus which had appeared to me during the spell’s operation had also served the purpose of switching on a small light in the musty attic of my mind. Sorcery. Of course.

  I — Merlin, son of Corwin — am a sorcerer, of a variety seldom encountered in the areas I have frequented in recent years. Lucas Raynard — also known as Prince Rinaldo of Kashfa — is himself a sorcerer, albeit of a style different than my own. And the Cat, who seemed somewhat sophisticated in these matters, could well have been correct in assessing our situation as the interior of a spell. Such a location is one of the few environments where my sensitivity and training would do little to inform me as to the nature of my predicament. This, because my faculties would also be caught up in the manifestation and subject to its forces, if the thing were at all self consistent. It struck me as something similar to color blindness. I could think of no way of telling for certain what was going on, without outside help.

  As I mused over these matters, the King’s horses and men arrived beyond the swinging doors at the front of the place. The men entered and fastened lines upon the carcass of the Bandersnatch. The horses dragged the thing off. Humpty had climbed down to visit the rest room while this was going on. Upon his return he discovered that he was unable to achieve his former position atop the barstool. He shouted to the King’s men to give him a hand, but they were busy guiding the defunct Bandersnatch among tables and they ignored him.

  Luke strolled up, smiling.

  “So that was a Bandersnatch,” he observed. “I’d always wondered what they were like. Now, if we could just get a Jabberwock to stop by — ”

  “Sh!” cautioned the Cat. “It must be off in the mural somewhere, and likely it’s been listening. Don’t stir it up! It may come whiffling through the tulgey wood after your ass. Remember the jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Don’t go looking for troub —”

  The Cat cast a quick glance toward the wall and phased into and out of existence several times in quick succession. Ignoring this, Luke remarked, “I was just thinking of the Tenniel illustration.”

  The Cat materialized at the far end of the bar, downed the Hatter’s drink, and said, “I hear the burbling, and eyes of flame are drifting to the left.”

  I glanced at the mural, and I, too, saw the fiery eyes and heard a peculiar sound.

  “It could be any of a number of things,” Luke remarked.

  The Cat moved to a rack behind the bar and reached high up on the wall to where a strange weapon hung, shimmering and shifting in shadow. He lowered the thing and slid it along the bar; it came to rest before Luke.

  “Better have the Vorpal Sword in hand, that’s all I can say.”

  Luke laughed, but I stared fascinated at the device which looked as if it were made of moth wings and folded moonlight…

  Then I heard the burbling again.

  “Don’t just stand there in uffish thought!” said the Cat, draining Humpty’s glass and vanishing again.

  Still chuckling, Luke held out his tankard for a refill. I stood there in uffish thought: The spell I had used to destroy the Bandersnatch had altered my thinking in a peculiar fashion. It seemed for a small moment in its aftermath that things were beginning to come clear in my head. I attributed this to the image of the Logrus which I had regarded briefly. And so I summoned it again.

  The Sign rose before me, hovered. I held it there. I looked upon it. It seemed as if a cold wind began to blow through my mind. Drifting bits of memory were drawn together, assembled themselves into an entire fabric, were informed with understanding. Of course…

  The burbling grew louder and I saw the shadow of the Jabberwock gliding among distant trees, eyes like landing lights, lots of sharp edges for biting and catching…

  And it didn’t matter a bit. For I realized now what was going on, who was responsible, how and why.

  I bent over, leaning far forward, so that my knuckles just grazed the toe of my right boot.

  “Luke,” I said, “we’ve got a problem.”

  He turned away from the bar and glanced down at me.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Those of the blood of Amber are capable of terrific exertions. We are also able to sustain some pretty awful beatings. So, among ourselves, these things tend to cancel out to some degree. Therefore, one must go about such matters just right if one is to attend to them at all…

  I brought my fist up off the floor with everything I had behind it, and I caught Lake on the side of the jaw with a blow that lifted him above the ground as it turned him and sent him sprawling across a table which collapsed, to continue sliding backward the length of the entire serving area where he finally came to a crumpled halt at the feet of the quiet Victorian-looking gentleman — who had dropped his paintbrush and stepped away quickly when Luke came skidding toward him. I raised my tankard with my left hand and poured its contents over my right fist, which felt as if I had just driven it against a mountainside. As I did this the lights grew dim and there was a moment of utter silence.

  Then I slammed the mug back onto the bartop. The entire place chose that moment in which to shudder, as if from an earth tremor. Two bottles fell from a shelf; a lamp swayed, the burbling grew fainter. I glanced to my left and saw that the eerie shadow of the Jabberwock had retreated somewhat within the tulgey wood. Not only that, the painted section of the prospect now extended a good deal farther into what had seemed normal space, and it looked to be continuing its advance in that direction, freezing that corner of the world into flat immobility. It became apparent from whiffle to whiffle that the Jabberwock was now moving away, to the left, hurrying ahead of the flatness. Tweedledum, Tweedledee, the Dodo, and the Frog began packing their instruments.

  I started across the bar toward Luke’s sprawled form. The Caterpillar was disassembling his hookah, and I saw that his mushroom was tilted at
an odd angle. The White Rabbit beat it down a hole to the rear, and I head Humpty muttering curses as he swayed atop the bar stool he had just succeeded in mounting.

  I saluted the gentleman with the palette as I approached.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But believe me, this is for the better.”

  I raised Luke’s limp form and slung him over my shoulder. A flock of playing cards flew by me. I dew away from them in their rapid passage.

  “Goodness! It’s frightened the Jabberwock!” the man remarked, looking past me.

  “What has?” I asked, not really certain that I wished to know.

  “That,” he answered, gesturing toward the front of the bar.

  I looked and I staggered back and I didn’t blame the Jabberwock a bit.

  It was a twelve-foot Fire Angel that had just entered russet-colored, with wings like stained-glass windows and, along with intimations of mortality, it brought me recollections of a praying mantis, with a spiked collar and thornlike claws protruding through its short fur at every suggestion of an angle. One of these, in fact, caught on and unhinged a swinging door as it came inside. It was a Chaos beast — rare, deadly, and, highly intelligent. I hadn’t seen one in years, and I’d no desire to see one now; also, I’d no doubt that I was the reason it was here. For a moment I regretted having wasted my cardiac arrest spell on a mere Bandersnatch — until I recalled that Fire Angels have three hearts. I glanced quickly about as it spied me, gave voice to a brief hunting wail, and advanced.

  “I’d like to have had some time to speak with you,” I told the artist. “I like your work. Unfortunately — ”

  “I understand.”

  “So long.”

  “Good luck.”

  I stepped down into the rabbit hole and ran, bent far forward because of the low overhead. Luke made my passage particularly awkward, especially on the turns. I heard a scrabbling noise fat to the rear, with a repetition of the hunting wail. I was consoled, however, by the knowledge that the Fire Angel would actually have to enlarge sections of the tunnel in order to get by. The bad news was that it was capable of doing it. The creatures are incredibly strong and virtually indestructible.