The big door creaked, commenced a slow movement as I walked backward.
“These are amazingly like a section of caverns in Kolvir beneath Amber Castle,” I replied.
“Great,” he said. “And what’s behind the door?”
“This is much like the entrance to the chamber which houses the Pattern in Amber.”
“Wonderful,” he said. “I’ll probably go up in a puff of smoke if I set foot inside.”
“But it is not quite the same,” I continued. “We had Suhuy come and look at the Pattern itself before I walked it. He didn’t suffer any ill effects from the proximity. “
“Our mother walked the Pattern.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Frankly, I think anyone of proper consanguinity in the Courts could walk the Pattern-and vice versa for my relatives in Amber with the Logrus. Tradition has it we’re all related from back somewhere in the dim and misty.“
“Okay I’ll go in with you. There’s room to move around inside without touching the thing, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
I drew the door the rest of the way open, braced my shoulder against it, and stared. This was it. I saw that our glowing trail ended a few inches beyond the threshold.
I drew a deep breath and muttered some expletive as I let it go.
“What is it?” Jurt asked, trying to see past me.
“Not what I expected,” I told him.
I moved aside and let him have a look.
He stared for several seconds, then said, “I don’t understand.”
“I am not certain that I do either,” I said, “but I intend to find out.”
I entered the chamber, and he followed me. This was not the Pattern that I knew. Or rather, it was and wasn’t. It conformed to the same general configuration as the Pattern in Amber, only it was broken. There were several places where the lines had been erased, destroyed, removed in some fashion-or perhaps never properly executed in the first place. The ordinarily dark interline areas were bright, bluewhite, the lines themselves black. It was as if some essence had drained from the diagram to permeate the field. The lighted area seemd to ripple slowly as I viewed it.
And beyond all of this was the big difference: The Pattern in Amber did not contain a circle of fire at its center, a woman dead, unconscious, or under a spell within it.
And the woman, of course, had to be Coral. I knew that immediately, though I had to wait for more than a minute before I got a glimpse of her face beyond the flames.
The big door shut itself behind us while I stood staring. Jurt stood unmoving for a long time also before he said, “That Jewel is certainly busy at something. You should see your face in its light right now.”
I glanced downward and observed its ruddy pulsations. Between the blue-white flux in which the Pattern was grounded and the flickering of that circle of flame had not noted the sudden activity on the part of the stone.
I moved a step nearer, feeling a wave of coldness similar to that of an activated Trump. This had to be one of the Broken Patterns of which Jasra had been speaking-representative of one of the Ways in which she and Julia were initiates. This placed me in one of the early shadows, near Amber herself. Thoughts began to race through my mind at a ferocious pace.
I had only recently become aware of the possibility that the Pattern might actually be sentient. Its corollary, that the Logrus was sentient, seemed likely also. The notion of its sentiency had been presented to me when Coral had succeeded in negotiating the Pattern and then had asked it to send her where she should go. It had done so, and this was the place to which she had been transported, and her condition was obviously the reason I couldn’t reach her by means of her Trump. When I had addressed the Pattern following her disappearance, it had-almost playfully, it seemed at the time-shifted me from one end of its chamber to the other, apparently to satisfy me on the matter of its sentience.
And it wasn’t merely sentient, I decided, as I raised the jewel of Judgment and stared into its depths. It was clever. For the images that I saw within the stone, showing me what it was that was desired of me, represented something I would not have been willing to do under other circumstances. Having come away from that strange realm through which I had been led on this guest, I would have shuffled out a Trump and called someone for a fast exit-or even summoned the image of the Logrus and let the two of them slug it out while I slipped away through Shadow. But Coral slept in a circle of flame at the heart of the Broken Pattern. …She was the authentic Pattern’s hold over me. It had to have understood something back when she was walking it, laid its plan, and set me up at that time.