“No. Why?”
“Just curious.”
“See what it does for you.”
“All right.”
I raised my right foot and lowered it slowly toward the line. About a foot above it, I stopped.
“Something seems to be holding me back,” I said.
“Strange. There is no electrical discharge for you.”
“Small blessing,” I responded, and I pushed my foot a couple of inches farther downward. Finally, I sighed. “Nope, Fi. I can’t.”
I read the disappointment in her features.
“I was hoping,” she said as I drew back, “that someone other than Corwin might be able to walk it. His son seemed the most likely choice.”
“Why is it so important that someone walk it? Just because it’s there?”
“I think it’s a menace,” she said. “It has to be explored and dealt with.”
“A menace? Why?”
“Amber and Chaos are the two poles of existence, as we understand it,” she said, “housing as they do the Pattern and the Logrus. For ages there has been something of an equilibrium between them. Now, I believe, this bastard Pattern of your father’s is undermining their balance.”
“In what fashion?”
“There have always been wavelike exchanges between Amber and Chaos. This seems to be setting up some interference.”
“It sounds more like tossing an extra ice cube into a drink,” I said. “It should settle down after a while.”
She shook her head. “Things are not settling. There have been far more shadow-storms since this thing was created. They rend the fabric of Shadow. They affect the nature of reality itself.”
“No good,” I said. “Another event a lot more important along these lines occurred at the same time. The original Pattern in Amber was damaged and Oberon repaired it. The wave of Chaos which came out of that swept through all of Shadow. Everything was affected. But the Pattern held and things settled again. I’d be more inclined to think of all those extra shadow-storms as being in the nature of aftershocks.”
“It’s a good argument,” she said. “But what if it’s wrong?”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Merle, there’s some kind of power here – an immense amount of power.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“It has always been our way to keep an eye on power, to try to understand it, to control it. Because one day it might become a threat. Did Corwin tell you anything, anything at all, as to exactly what this represents and how we might get a handle on it?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing beyond the fact that he made it in a hurry to replace the old one, which he’d figured Oberon might not have succeeded in repairing.”
“If only we could find him.”
“There still hasn’t been any word?”
“Droppa claims that he saw him at the Sands, back on the shadow Earth you both favor. He said he was in the company of an attractive woman, and they were both having a drink and listening to a music group. He waved and headed toward them through a crowd, and he thought that Corwin saw him. When he got to their table, though, they were gone.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“That’s not much.”
“I know. If he’s the only one who can walk this damned thing, though, and if it is a menace, we could be in big trouble one day.”
“I think you’re being an alarmist, Aunty.”
“I hope you’re right, Merle. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
I studied the place once more, for details as well as feeling, because I wanted to be able to construct a Trump for it. I never told anyone that there had been no resistance as I had lowered my foot, because once you set foot into the Pattern or the Logrus there is no turning back. You either proceed to the end or are destroyed by it. And as much as I love mysteries, my break was at its end and I had to get back to class.
Power.
We were together in a wood within the Black Zone, that area of Shadow with which Chaos holds commerce. We were hunting zhind, which are horned, short, black, fierce and carnivorous. I do not much like hunting because I do not much like killing things I don’t really have to. However, it was Jurt’s idea, and since it was possibly also my last chance to work some reconciliation with my brother before I departed, I had decided to take him up on the offer. Neither of us was that great an archer, and zhind are pretty fast. So with any luck at all nothing would get dead and we’d have some chance to talk and perhaps come away on better terms at the end of the hunt.