I retreated down the stairs, settled once again on the lowest step. I continued to observe.
Benedict loosened his blade in its scabbard.
“You know about the possible effect of blood on the Pattern?” I asked.
“Yes. Ganelon told me.”
“Did you ever suspect-any of this?”
“I never trusted Brand,” he told me.
“What of your journey to the Courts of Chaos? What did you learn?”
“Later, Corwin. He could come any time now.”
“I hope no distracting visions show up,” I said, recalling my own journey to Tir-na Nog’th and his own part in my final adventure there.
He shrugged.
“One gives them power by paying them heed. My attention is reserved for one matter tonight.”
He turned through a full circle, regarding every part of the chamber, halted when he had finished.
“I wonder if he knows you are there?” I said.
“Perhaps. It does not matter.”
I nodded. If Brand did not show up, we had gained a day. The guards would ward the other Patterns, Fiona would have a chance to demonstrate her own skill in matters arcane by locating Brand for us. We would then pursue him. She and Bleys had been able to stop him once before. Could she do it alone now? Or would we have to find Bleys and try to convince him to help? Had Brand found Bleys? What the hell did Brand want this kind of power for anyhow? A desire for the throne I could understand. Yet. . . The man was mad, leave it at that. Too bad, but that’s the way it was. Heredity or environment? I wondered wryly. We were all of us, to some degree, mad after his fashion. To be honest, it had to be a form of madness, to have so much and to strive so bitterly for just a little more, for a bit of an edge over the others. He carried this tendency to its extreme, that is all. He was a caricature of this mania in all of us. In this sense, did it really matter which of us was the traitor?
Yes, it did. He was the one who had acted. Mad or not, he had gone too far. He had done things Eric, Julian, and I would not have done. Bleys and Fiona had finally backed away from his thickening plot. Gerard and Benedict were a notch above the rest of us-moral, mature, whatever-for they had exempted themselves from the zero-sum power game. Random had changed, quite a bit, in recent years. Could it be that the children of the unicorn took ages in which to mature, that it was slowly happening to the rest of us but had somehow passed Brand by? Or could it be that by his actions Brand was causing it in the rest of us? Like most such questions, the benefit of these was in the asking, not the answering. We were enough like Brand that I knew a particular species of fear nothing else could so provoke. But yes, it did matter. Whatever the reason, he was the one who had acted.
The moon was higher now, its vision superimposed upon my inward viewing of the chamber of the Pattern. The clouds continued to shift, to boil nearer the moon. I thought of advising Benedict, but it would serve no other end than distraction. Above me, Tir-na Nog’th rode like some supernatural ark upon the seas of night
. . . And suddenly Brand was there.
Reflexively, my hand went to Grayswandir’s hilt, despite the fact that a part of me realized from the very first that he stood across the Pattern from Benedict in a dark chamber high in the sky.
My hand fell again. Benedict had become aware of the intruding presence immediately, and he turned to face him. He made no move toward his weapon, but simply stared across the Pattern at our brother.
My earliest fear had been that Brand would contrive to arrive directly behind Benedict and stab him in the back. I would not have tried that though, because even in death Benedict’s reflexes might have been sufficient to dispatch his assailant Apparently, Brand wasn’t that crazy either.