“Slow down,” he said. “It’s the first obstacle.”
I did. and another grist of sand swept over us.
Before I could switch on the lights, it was gone, and I blinked my eyes several times. All the cars were gone and silent their horns. But the roadway sparkled now as the sidewalks had for a time, and I heard Random damning someone or something under his breath.
“I’m sure I shifted just the way he wanted us to, whoever set up that block,” he said. “and it pisses me off that I did what he expected—the obvious.”
“Eric?” I asked,
“Probably. What do you think we should do? Stop and try it the hard way for a while, or go on and see if there are more blocks?”
“Let’s go on a bit. After all, that was only the first.”
“Okay.” he said, but added, “who knows what the second will be?”
The second was a thing—I don’t know how else to describe it.
It was a thing that looked like a smelter with arms, squatting in the middle of the road, reaching down and picking up cars, eating them.
I hit the brakes.
“What’s the matter?” Random asked. “Keep going. How else can we get past them?”
“It shook me a bit,” I said, and he gave me a strange, sidelong look as another dust storm came up. It had been the wrong thing to say, I knew. When the dust cleared away, we were racing along an empty road once more. And there were towers in the distance.
“I think I’ve screwed him up.” said Random. “I combined several into one, and I think it may be one he hasn’t anticipated. After all, no one can cover all roads to Amber.”
“True,” I said, hoping to redeem myself from whatever faux pas had drawn that strange look.
I considered Random. A little, weak looking guy who could have died as easily as I on the previous evening. What was his power? And what was all this talk of Shadows? Something told me that whatever Shadows were, we moved among them even now. How? It was something Random was doing, and since he seemed at rest physically, his hands in plain sight, I decided it was something he did with his mind. Again, how? Well, I’d heard him speak of “adding” and “subtracting,” as though the universe in which he moved were a big equation.
I decided—with a sudden certainty— that he was somehow adding and subtracting items to and from the world that was visible about us to bring us into closer and closer alignment with that strange place, Amber, for which he was solving. It was something I’d once known how to do. And the key to it, I knew in a flash, was remembering Amber. But I couldn’t.
The road curved abruptly, the desert ended, to give way to fields of tall, blue, sharp-looking grass. After a while, the terrain became a bit hilly, and at the foot of the third hill the pavement ended and we entered upon a narrow dirt road. It was hard-packed, and it wound its way among greater hills upon which small shrubs and bayonet like thistle bushes now began to appear.
After about half an hour of this, the hills went away, and we entered a forest of squat, big-boled trees with diamond-shaped leaves of autumn orange and purple. A light rain began to fall, and there were many shadows. Pale mists arose from mats of soggy leaves. Off to the right somewhere, I heard a howl.
The steering wheel changed shape three more times, its latest version being an octagonal wooden affair. The car was quite tall now, and we had somewhere acquired a hood ornament in the shape of a flamingo. I refrained from commenting on these things, but accommodated myself to whatever positions the seat assumed and new operating requirements the vehicle obtained. Random, however, glanced at the steering wheel just as another howl occurred, shook his head, and suddenly the trees were much higher, though festooned with hanging vines and something like a blue veiling of Spanish Moss, and the car was almost normal again. I glanced at the fuel gauge and saw that we had half a tank.