The hand of Oberon (9 page)

Dworkin continued on down to the Pattern, right up to the edge beside the darkened area. He waved his staff over it and turned to look at me just as I came near.

“There you are,” he announced, “the hole in my mind. I can no longer think through it, only around it. I no longer know what must be done to repair something I now lack. If you think that you can do it, you must be willing to lay yourself open to instant destruction each time you depart the Pattern to cross the break. Not destruction by the dark portion. Destruction by the Pattern itself when you break the circuit. The Jewel may or may not sustain you. I do not know. But it will not grow easier. It will become more difficult with each circuit, and your strength will be lessening all the while. The last time we discussed it you were afraid. Do you mean to say you have grown bolder since then?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “You see no other way?”

“I know it can be done starting with a clean slate, because once I did it so. Beyond that, I see no other way. The longer you wait the more the situation worsens. Why not fetch the Jewel and lend me your blade, son? I see no better way.”

“No,” I said. “I must know more. Tell me again how the damage was done.”

“I still do not know which of your children shed our blood on this spot, if this is what you mean. It was done. Let it go at that. Our darker natures came forth strongly in them. It must be that they are too close to the chaos from which we sprang, growing without the exercises of will we endured in defeating it. I had thought that the ritual of traveling the Pattern might suffice for them. I could think of nothing stronger. Yet it failed. They strike out against everything. They seek to destroy the Pattern itself.”

“If we succeed in making a fresh start, might not these events simply repeat themselves?”

“I do not know. But what choice have we other than failure and a return to chaos?”

“What will become of them if we try for a new beginning?”

He was silent for a long while. Then he shrugged. “I cannot tell.”

“What would another generation have been like?”

He chuckled.

“How can such a question be answered? I have no idea.”

I withdrew the mutilated Trump and passed it to him. He regarded it near the blaze of his staff.

“I believe it is Random’s son Martin,” I said, “he whose blood was spilled here. I have no idea whether he still lives. What do you think he might have amounted to?”

He looked back out over the Pattern.

“So this is the object which decorated it,” he said. “How did you fetch it forth?”

“It was gotten,” I said. “It is not your work, is it?”

“Of course not. I have never set eyes on the boy. But this answers your question, does it not? If there is another generation, your children will destroy it.”

“As we would destroy them?”

He met my eyes and peered.

“Is it that you are suddenly becoming a doting father?” he asked.

“If you did not prepare that Trump, who did?”

He glanced down and flicked it with his fingernail.

“My best pupil. Your son Brand. That is his style. See what they do as soon as they gain a little power? Would any of them offer their lives to preserve the realm, to restore the Pattern?”

“Probably,” I said. “Probably Benedict, Gerard, Random, Corwin. . .”

“Benedict has the mark of doom upon him, Gerard possesses the will but not the wit, Random lacks courage and determination. Corwin . . . Is he not out of favor and out of sight?”

My thoughts returned to our last meeting, when he had helped me to escape from my cell to Cabra. It occurred to me that he might have had second thoughts concerning that, not having been aware of the circumstances which had put me there.

“Is that why you have taken his form?” he went on. “Is this some manner of rebuke? Are you testing me again?”

“He is neither out of favor nor sight,” I said, “though he has enemies among the family and elsewhere. He would attempt anything to preserve the realm. How do you see his chances?”

“Has he not been away for a long while?”

“Yes.”

“Then he might have changed. I do not know.”

“I believe he is changed. I know that he is willing to try.”

He stared at me again, and he kept staring.

“You are not Oberon,” he said at length.

“No.”

“You are he whom I see before me.”

“No more, no less.”

“I see. . . . I did not realize that you knew of this place.”

“I didn’t, until recently. The first time that I came here I was led by the unicorn.”

His eyes widened.

“That is-very-interesting,” he said. “It has been so long . . .”

“What of my question?”

“Eh? Question? What question?”

“My chances. Do you think I might be able to repair the Pattern?”

He advanced slowly, and reaching up, placed his right hand on my shoulder. The staff tilled in is other hand as he did so; its blue light flared within a foot of my face, but I felt no heat. He looked into my eyes.

“You have changed,” he said, after a time.

“Enough,” I asked, “to do the job?”

He looked away.

“Perhaps enough to make it worth trying,” he said, “even if we are foredoomed to failure.”

“Will you help me?”

“I do not know,” he said, “that I will be able. This thing with my moods, my thoughts-it comes and it goes. Even now, I feel some of my control slipping away. The excitement, perhaps. . . . We had best get back inside.”

I heard a clinking noise at my back. When I turned, the griffin was there, his head swinging slowly from left to right, his tail from right to left, his tongue darting. He began to circle us, halting when he came to a position between Dworkin and the Pattern.

“He knows,” Dworkin said. “He can sense it when I begin to change. He will not let me near the Pattern then. . . . Good Wixer. We are returning now. It is all right. . . . Come, Corwin.”

We headed back toward the cave mouth and Wixer followed, a clink for every pace.

“The Jewel,” I said, “the Jewel of Judgment . . . you say that it is necessary for the repair of the Pattern?”

“Yes,” he said. “It would have to be borne the entire distance through the Pattern, reinscribing the original design in the places where it has been broken. This could only be done by one who is attuned to the Jewel, though.”

“I am attuned to the Jewel,” I said.

“How?” he asked, halting.

Wixer made a cackling noise behind us, and we resumed walking.

“I followed your written instructions-and Eric’s verbal ones,” I said. “I took it with me to the center of the Pattern and projected myself through it.”

“I see,” he said. “How did you obtain it?”

“From Eric, on his deathbed.”

We entered the cave.

“You have it now?”

“I was forced to cache it in a place off in Shadow.”

“I would suggest you retrieve it quickly and bring it here or take it back to the palace. It is best kept near the center of things.”

“Why is that?”

“It tends to have a distorting effect on shadows if it lies too long among them.”

“Distorting? In what fashion?”

“There is no way to tell, in advance. It depends entirely upon the locale.”

We rounded a corner, continued on back through the gloom.

“What does it mean,” I said, “when you are wearing the Jewel and everything begins to slow down about you? Fiona warned me that this was dangerous, but she was not certain why.”

“It means that you have reached the bounds of your own existence, that your energies will shortly be exhausted, that you will die unless you do something quickly.”

“What is that?”

“Begin to draw power from the Pattern itself-the primal Pattern within the Jewel.”

“How is this achieved?”

“You must surrender to it, release yourself, blot out your identity, erase the bounds which separate you from everything else.”

“It sounds easier said than done.”

“But it can be done, and it is the only way.”

I shook my head. We moved on, coming at last to the big door. Dworkin extinguished the staff and leaned it against the wall. We entered and he secured the door. Wixer had stationed himself just outside.

“You will have to leave now,” Dworkin said.

“But there are many more things that I must ask you, and some that I would like to tell you.”

“My thoughts grow meaningless, and your words would be wasted. Tomorrow night, or the next, or the next. Hurry! Go!”

“Why the rush?”

“I may harm you when the change comes over me. I am holding it back by main will now. Depart!”

“I do not know how. I know how to get here, but-“

“There are all manner of special Trumps in the desk in the next room. Take the light! Go anywhere! Get out of here!”

I was about to protest that I hardly feared any physical violence he could muster, when his features began to flow like melting wax and he somehow seemed much larger and longer-limbed than he had been. Seizing the light, I fled the room, a sudden chill upon me.

. . . To the desk. I tore open the drawer and snatched at some Trumps which lay scattered within it. I heard footsteps then, of something entering the room behind me, coming from the chamber I had just departed. They did not seem like the footsteps of a man. I did not look back. Instead, I raised the cards before me and regarded the one on top. It was an unfamiliar scene, but I opened my mind immediately and reached for it. A mountain crag, something indistinct beyond it, a strangely stippled sky, a scattering of stars to the left

. . . The card was alternately hot and cold to my touch, and a heavy wind seemed to come blowing through it as I stared, somehow rearranging the prospect.

From right behind me then, the heavily altered but still recognizable voice of Dworkin spoke: “Fool! You have chosen the land of your doom!”

A great clawlike hand-black, leathery, gnarled-reached over my shoulder, as if to snatch the card away. But the vision seemed ready, and I rushed forward into it, turning the card from me as soon as I realized I had made my escape. Then I halted and stood stockstill, to let my senses adjust to the new locale.

I knew. From snatches of legend, bits of family gossip, and from a general feeling which came over me, I knew the place to which I had come. It was with full certainty as to identity that I raised my eyes to look upon the Courts of Chaos.

Where? The senses are such uncertain things, and now mine were strained beyond their limits. The rock on which I stood . . . If I attempted to fix my gaze upon it, it took on the aspect of a pavement on a hot afternoon. It seemed to shift and waver, though my footing was undisturbed. And it was undecided as to the portion of the spectrum it might call home. It pulsated and flashed like the skin of an iguana. Looking upward, I beheld a sky such as I had never before set eyes upon. At the moment, it was split down the middle-half of it of deepest night-black, and the stars danced within it. When I say danced, I do not mean twinkled; they cavorted and they shifted magnitudes; they darted and they circled; they flared to nova brilliance, then faded to nothing. It was a frightening spectacle to behold, and my stomach tightened within me as I experienced a profound acrophobia. Yet, shifting my gaze did little to improve the situation. The other half of the sky was like a bottle of colored sands, continuously shaken; belts of orange, yellow, red, blue, brown, and purple turned and twisted; patches of green, mauve, gray, and dead white came and went, sometimes snaking into belthood, replacing or joining the other writhing entities. And these, too, shimmered and wavered, creating impossible sensations of distance and nearness. At times, some or all seemed literally sky-high, and then again they came to fill the air before me, gauzy, transparent mists, translucent swaths or solid tentacles of color. It was not until later that I realized that the line which separated the black from the color was advancing slowly from my right while retreating to my left. It was as if the entire celestial mandala were rotating about a point directly overhead. As to the light source of the brighter half, it simply could not be determined. Standing there, I looked down upon what at first seemed a valley filled with countless explosions of color; but when the advancing darkness faced this display away the stars danced and burned within its depths as well as above, giving them the impression of a bottomless chasm. It was as if I stood at the end of the world, the end of the universe, the end of everything. But far, far out from where I stood, something hovered on a mount of sheerest black-a blackness itself, but edged and tempered with barely perceptible flashes of light. I could not guess at its size, for distance, depth, perspective, were absent here. A single edifice? A group? A city? Or simply a place? The outline varied each time that it fell upon my retina. Now faint and misty sheets drifted slowly between us, twisting, as if long strands of gauze were buoyed by heated air. The mandala ceased its turning when it had exactly reversed itself. The colors were behind me now, and imperceptible unless I turned my head, an action I had no desire to take. It was pleasant standing there, staring at the formlessness from which all things eventually emerged. . . . Before the Pattern, even, this thing was. I knew this, dimly but purely, at the very center of my consciousness. I knew this, because I was certain that I had been here before. Child of the man I had become, it seemed that I had been brought here in some distant day-whether by Dad or Dworkin, I could not now recall-and had stood or been held in this place or one very near to it, looking out upon the same scene with, I am certain, a similar lack of comprehension, a similar sense of apprehension. My pleasure was tinged with a nervous excitement, a sense of the forbidden, a feeling of dubious anticipation. Peculiarly, at that moment, there rose in me a longing for the Jewel I had had to abandon in my compost heap on the shadow Earth, the thing Dworkin had made so much of. Could it be that some part of me sought a defense or at least a symbol of resistance against whatever was out there? Probably.