“Not so far as I know.”
I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her behind in Brand’s apartment. Why had I done that? I-my mind felt cloudy, the memory dreamlike.
This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory. Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the clouding effect of glamor. I had walked into a spell back in Brand’s apartment. I’d no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I’d activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more general, enlivened by the disaster-possibly even an unintentional side effect of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.
For that matter, I doubted any generality about the business. It was just too right to have been a booby-trap Brand had left lying about. It had confounded a trained sorcerer, me. Perhaps it was only my present distancing from the vicinity of its occurrence that had helped to clear my mind. As I reviewed my actions from the time of exposure I could see that I had been moving in something of a haze since then. And the more I reviewed the more I felt the spell to have been specifically tailored to enfold me. Not understanding it, I could not consider myself free of it with this knowledge either.
Whatever it was, it had caused me to abandon Frakir without thinking twice about it, and it had caused me to feel-well-strange. I could not tell exactly how it might have influenced, might still be influencing, my thoughts and my feelings, the usual problem when one is caught up inside a spell. But I didn’t see how it could possibly have been the late Brand himself who had set the thing up against such an unpredictable occurrence as my having rooms next to his old ones years after his death, from which I would be prompted to enter his quarters in the disastrous aftermath of an improbable confrontation between the Logrus and the Pattern in an upper hall of Amber Castle. No, it seemed that someone else had to be behind it. Jurt? Julia? It didn’t seem too likely that they’d be able to operate undetected in the heart of Amber Castle. Who then? And could it have had anything to do with that episode in the Hall of Mirrors? I drew blanks. Were I back there now I might be able to come up with a spell of my own to ferret out the one responsible. But I wasn’t, and any investigation at that end of things would have to wait.
The light ahead flashed more brightly now, winking from heavenly blue to baleful red.
“Gryll,” I said. “Do you detect a spell upon me?”
“Aye, m’Iord,” he replied.
“Why didn’t you mention it?”
“I thought it one of your own-for defense, perhaps.”
“Can you lift it? I’m at a disadvantage, here on the inside.”
“’Tis too tangled in your person. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?”
“Only that it’s there, m’lord. Does seem rather heavy about the head, though.”
“Could be coloring my thoughts a certain way, then?”
“Aye, a pale blue.”
“I wasn’t referring to your manner of perceiving it. Only to the possibility that it could be influencing my thinking.”
His wings flashed blue, then red. Our tunnel expanded suddenly and the sky grew bright with the crazy colors of Chaos. The star we followed now took on the proportions of a small light-magically enhanced, of course-within a high tower of a sepulchral castle, all gray and olive, atop a mountain the bottom and middle of which had been removed The island of stone floated above a petrified forest. The trees burned with opal fires-orange, purple, green.
“I’d imagine it could be disentangled,” Gryll observed. “But its unraveling be a bafflement to this poor demon.”
I grunted. I watched the streaking scenery for a few moments. Then, “Speaking of demons …” I said.
“Yes?”
“What can you tell me about the sort known as a ty’iga?” I asked.