Flicker.
It seemed there had been some momentary breaking of the visual field to my right, near subliminal in its brevity. I reached out and felt nothing.
It had been so brief a thing that I was uncertain whether it had really occurred. It could easily have been an hallucination.
But it seemed to happen again, this time to my left. How long the interval between, I could not say.
Then I heard something like a groan, directionless. This, too, was very brief.
Next-and for the first time, I was certain-there came a gray and white landscape like the surface of the moon. There and gone, perhaps a second’s worth, in a small area of my visual field, off to my left. Star snorted.
To my right appeared a forest-gray and white-tumbling, as though we passed one another at some impossible angle. A small-screen fragment, less than two seconds’ worth.
Then pieces of a burning building beneath me . . . Colorless…
Snatches of wailing, from overhead . . .
A ghostly mountain, a torchlit procession ascending a switchback trail up its nearest face . . .
A woman hanging from a tree limb, taut rope about her neck, head twisted to the side, hands tied behind her back…
Mountains, upside down, white; black clouds beneath …
Click. A tiny thrill of vibration, as if we had momentarily touched something solid-Star’s hoof on stone, perhaps. Then gone . . .
Flicker.
Heads, rolling, dripping black gore . . . A chuckle from nowhere . . . A man nailed to a wall, upside down . . .
The white light again, rolling and heaving, wavelike . . .
Click. Flicker.
For one pulsebeat, we trod a trail beneath a stippled sky. The moment it was gone, I reached for it again, through the Jewel.
Click. Flicker. Click. Rumble.
A rocky trail, approaching a high mountain pass . . . Still monochrome, the world . . . At my back, a crashing like thunder . . .
I twisted the Jewel like a focus knob as the world began to fade. It came back again. . . . Two, three, four . . . I counted hoofbeats, heartbeats against the growling background. . . . Seven, eight, nine . . . The world grew brighter. I took a deep breath and sighed heavily. The air was cold.
Between the thunder and its echoes, I heard the sound of rain. None fell upon me, though.
I glanced back.
A great wall of rain stood perhaps a hundred meters to the rear. I could distinguish only the dimmest of mountain outlines through it. I clucked to Star and we moved a little faster, climbing to an almost level stretch that led between a pair of peaks like turrets. The world ahead was still a study in black and white and gray, the sky before me divided by alternate bands of darkness and light. We entered the pass.
I began to tremble. I wanted to draw rein, to rest, eat, smoke, dismount and walk around. Yet, I was still too close to that stormscreen to so indulge myself.
Star’s hoofbeats echoed within the pass, where rock walls rose sheer on either hand beneath that zebra sky. I hoped these mountains would break this stormfront, though I felt that they could not. This was no ordinary storm, and I had a sick feeling that it stretched all the way back to Amber, and that I would have been trapped and lost forever within it but for the Jewel.
As I watched that strange sky, a blizzard of pale flowers began to fall about me, brightening my way. A pleasant odor filled the air. The thunder at my back softened. The rocks at my sides were shot with silver streaks. The world was possessed of a twilight feeling to match the illumination, and as I emerged from the pass, I saw down into a valley of quirked perspective, distance impossible to gauge, filled with natural-seeming spires and minarets reflecting the moon-like light of the sky-streaks, reminiscent of a night in Tir-na Nog’th, interspersed with silvery trees, spotted with mirror-like pools, traversed by drifting wraiths, almost terraced-seeming in places, natural and rolling in others, cut by what appeared to be an extension of the line of trail I followed, rising and falling, hung over by an elegiac quality, sparked with inexplicable points of glitter and shine, devoid of any signs of habitation.