The card seemed to grow cold beneath my touch. Was it just my imagination, or was the strength of my regard beginning to activate it? I moved forward in my mind, focusing. It seemed to grow even colder as I did so.
“Dad?” I said. “Corwin?”
Colder still, and a tingling feeling in my fingertips that touched it.
It seemed the beginning of a Trump contact. It could be that he was much nearer to the Courts than to Amber, within a more reachable range now…
“Corwin,” I repeated. “It’s me, Merlin. Hello.”
His image shifted, seemed to move. And then the card went totally black.
Yet, it remained cold, and a sensation like a silent version of contact was present, like a telephone connection during a long pause.
“Dad? Are you there?”
The blackness of the card took on the aspect of depth. And deep within it, something seemed to be stirring.
“Merlin?” The word was faint, yet I was certain it was his voice, speaking my name. “Merlin?”
The movement within the depth was real. Something was rushing toward me.
It erupted from the card into my face, with a beating of black wings, cawing, crow or raven, black, black. “Forbidden!” it cried. “Forbidden! Go back! Withdraw!”
It flapped about my head as the cards spilled from my hand.
“Stay away!” it screeched, circling the room. “Forbidden place!”
It passed out the doorway and I pursued it. It seemed to have vanished, though, in the moments it was lost to my sight.
“Bird!” I cried. “Come back!”
But there was no reply, no further sounds of beating wings. I peered into the other rooms and there was no sign of the creature in any of them.
“Bird …?”
“Merlin! What’s the matter?”-this from high overhead.
I looked up to behold Suhuy, descending a crystal stair behind a quivering veil of light, a sky full of stars at his back.
“Just looking for a bird,” I replied.
“Oh,” he said, reaching the landing and stepping through the veil which then shook itself out of existence, taking the stair along with it. “Any particular bird?”
“A big black one,” I said. “Of the talking sort.” He shook his head.
“I can send for one,” he said.
“This was a special bird,” I said.
“Sorry you lost it.”
We walked out into the hallway and I turned left and headed back to the itting room.
“Trumps all over the place,” my uncle remarked.
“I was attempting to use one and it went black and the bird flew out of it, shouting, ‘Forbidden’! I dropped them at that point.”
“Sounds as if your correspondent is a practical joker,” he said, “or under a spell.”
We knelt and he helped me to gather them.
“The latter seems more likely,” I said. “It was my father’s card, I’ve been trying to locate him for a long while now, and this was the closest I’ve come. I actually heard his voice, within the blackout, before the bird interrupted and cut us off.”
“Sounds as if he is confined to a dark place, perhaps magically guarded as well.”
“Of course! “ I said, squaring up the edges of my deck and recasing it.
One cannot shift the stuff of Shadow in a place of absolute darkness.
It is as effective as blindness in stopping one of our blood from escaping confinement. It added an element of rationality to my recent experience. Someone wanting Corwin out of commission would have to keep him in a very dark place.
“Did you ever meet my father?” I asked.
“No,” Suhuy replied. “I understand that he did visit the Courts briefly, at the end of the war. But I never had the pleasure.”
“Did you hear anything of his doings here?”
“I believe he attended a meeting with Swayvill and his counselors, along with Random and the other Amberites, preliminary to the peace treaty. After that, I understand he went his own ways, and I never heard where they might have led him.”
“I’d heard as much in Amber,” I said. “I wonder… He’d killed a noble-a Lord Borel-near the end of the final battle. Any chance Borel’s relatives might have gone after him?”