“Gryll,” I said, naming an old family servant from the Courts.
“Aye, Lord,” it replied. “The same as taught you the bonedance game.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Business before pleasure, Lord. I’ve followed the black thread a long and horrid way to come calling.”
“The threads didn’t reach this far,” I said, “without an awful lot of push. Maybe even not then. Do they now?”
“It’s easier now,” he replied.
“How so?”
“His Majesty Swayvill, King of Chaos, sleeps this night with the ancestors of darkness. I was sent to fetch you back for the ceremonies.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Yeah. Well, okay. Sure. Just let me get my stuff together. How’d it happen, anyhow?”
I pulled on my boots, donned the rest of my garments, buckled on my blade.
“I am not privy to any details. Of course, it is common knowledge that his health was poor.”
“I want to leave a note,” I said.
He nodded.
“A brief one, I trust.”
“Yes.”
I scrawled on a piece of parchment from the writing table, Coral, Called away on family business. I’ll be in touch, and I laid it beside her hand.
“All right,” I said. “How do we do this?”
“I will bear you upon my back, Prince Merlin, as I did long ago.”
I nodded as a flood of childhood memories returned to me. Gryll was immensely strong, as are most demons. But I recalled our games, at Pit’s-edge and out over the darkness, in burial chambers, caves, still-smoking battlefields, ruined temples, chambers of dead sorcerers, private hells. I always seemed to have more fun playing 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.