“Why?” I asked. “Why would it have been so important to her that I be born?”
“I can only remember her final words when she had completed the Pattern, turning into a demon in the process. ‘Amber,’ she said, ‘will be destroyed.’ Then she was gone.”
I was shaking now. The implications were so unsettling that I wanted to cry, sleep, or get drunk. Anything, for a moment’s respite.
“You think that my existence might be part of a long-term plan for the destruction of Amber?” I asked.
“ ‘Might,”’ he said. “I could be wrong, kid. I could be very wrong, and if that’s the case I apologize for troubling you this much. On the other hand, it would also be wrong of me not to let you know what the possibility is.”
I massaged my temples, my brow, my eyes.
“What should I do?” I said then. “I don’t want to help destroy Amber.”
He clasped me to his breast for a moment and said, “No matter what you are and no matter what’s been done to you, there will have to be some element of choice for you, sooner or later. You are greater than the sum of your parts, Merlin. No matter what went into your birth and your life up to now, you’ve got eyes and a brain and a set of values. Don’t let anybody bullshit you, not even me. And when the time comes, if it comes, make damn sure the choice is your own. Nothing that’s gone before will matter then.”
His words, general as they had to be, drew me back from the place in my spirit where I had retreated. “Thanks,” I said.
He nodded. Then, “While your first impulse may be to force a confrontation on this matter,” he said, “I would advise against it. It would achieve nothing other than making her aware of your suspicions. It would be prudent to play a more careful game and see what you can learn.”
I sighed.
“You’re right, of course,” I said. “You came after me as much to tell me this as to help me escape, didn’t you?”
He smiled.
“Only worry about important things,” he said. “We’ll meet again.” And then he was gone.
I saw him, suddenly, over near the car, talking to Luke. I watched as he showed him where the caches were located. I wondered what time it was back in the Courts. After a while, they both waved to me. Then Corwin shook hands with Luke and turned and walked off into the fog. I could hear the radio playing “Lili Marlene.”
I focused my mind on the Pattern’s transporting me to the Ways of Sawall. There was a momentary swirling of blackness. When it cleared I was still standing at the center of the Pattern. I tried again, this time for Suhuy’s castle. Again, it refused to punch my ticket.
“How close can you send me?” I finally asked.
There was another swirling, but this one was bright. It delivered me to a high promontory of white stone beneath a black sky, beside a black sea. Two semicircles of pale flame parenthesized my position. Okay, I could live with that. I was at Fire Gate, a way-exchange in Shadow near to the Courts. I faced the sea and counted. When I’d located the fourteenth flickering tower on my left, I walked toward it.
I emerged before a fallen tower beneath a pink sky. Walking toward it, I was transported to a glassy cavern through which a green river flowed. I paced beside the river till I found the stepping-stones that took me to a trail through an autumn wood. I followed this for almost a mile till I felt the presence of a way near the base of an evergreen. This took me to the side of a mountain, whence three more ways and two filmies had me on the nail to lunch with my mother. According to the sky, I had no time to change clothes.
I halted near a crossroads to dust myself off, straighten my apparel, comb my hair. I wondered, as I was about the business, who might receive my calling were I to try to reach Luke via his Trump-Luke himself, his ghost, both? Could the ghosts receive Trump calls? I found myself wondering what was going on back in Amber, too. And I thought of Coral, and Nayda… Hell.