I stared and concentrated.
Nothing, nothing—
Something?
Something.
There came a responding movement, though ever so weak, and the figure on the card turned in upon itself and shriveled to a shadow of the man he had been.
“Father?” I asked.
Nothing.
“Father?”
“Yes . . .” Very faint and distant, as though through a seashell, immersed in its monotone humming.
“Where are you? What has happened?”
“I . . .” Long pause.
“Yes? This is Corwin, your son. What came to pass in Amber, that you are gone?”
“My time,” he said, sounding even further away.
“Do you mean that you abdicated? None of my brothers has given me the tale, and I do not trust them sufficiently to ask them. Eric now holds the city and Julian guards the Forest of Arden. Caine and Gerard maintain the seas. Bleys would oppose all and I am allied with him. What are your wishes in this matter?”
“You are the only one—who—has asked,” he gasped. “Yes. . .”
“ ‘Yes‘ what?”
“Yes, oppose—them. . .”
“What of you? How can I help you?”
“I am beyond help. Take the throne. . . .
“I? Or Bleys and I?”
“You!” he said.
“Yes?”
“You have my blessing. . . . Take the throne—and be quick—about it!”
“Why, Father?”
“I lack the breath—Take it!”
Then he, too, was gone.
So Dad lived. That was interesting, What to do now?
I sipped my drink and thought about it.
He still lived, somewhere, and he was king in Amber. Why had he left? Where had he gone? What kind of, which, and how many? Like that.
Who knew? Not I. So there was no more to say, for now.
However . . .
I couldn‘t put the thing down. I want you to know that Dad and I never got along very well. I didn‘t hate him, like Random or some of the others. But I, sure as hell, had no reason to be especially fond of him. He had been big, he had been powerful, and he had been there. That was about it. He was also most of the history of Amber, as we knew it, and the history of Amber stretches back for so many millennia that you may as well stop counting.
So what do you do?
As for me, I finished my drink and went to bed,
The following morning I attended a meeting of Bley‘s general staff. He had four admirals, each in charge of roughly a quarter of his fleet, and a whole mess of army officers. Altogether there were about thirty of the high-ranking brass at the meeting, big and red or small and hairy, as the case might be.
The meeting lasted perhaps four hours, and then we all broke for lunch. It was decided that we would move three days hence. Since it would require one of the blood to open the way to Amber, I was to lead the fleet aboard the flagship, and Bleys would take his infantry through lands of Shadow.
I was troubled by this, and I asked him what would have happened had I not shown up to give this assistance. I was told two things in reply: one, if he had had to go it alone, he would have led the fleet through and left them at a great distance from shore, returned in a single vessel to Avernus and led his foot soldiers forward to rendezvous at a given time; and two, he had purposely sought for a Shadow in which a brother would appear to give him aid.
I had some misgivings when I heard about the latter, though I knew I was really me. The former smacked of being a bit unworkable, since the fleet would be too far out to sea to receive any signals from the shore, and the chance of missing the date—allowing for mishaps when it came to a body that large—was too great, as I saw it, to encourage a whole big lot of faith In his general plan.
But as a tactician, I had always thought him brilliant; and when he laid out the maps of Amber and the outlying Country which he himself had drawn, and when he had explained the tactics to be employed therein, I knew that he was a prince of Amber, almost matchless in his guile.