Prince of chaos

«Supposing such a being took over the body of a person at or near the moment of death, making it the sole animating spirit and controlling intelligence?»

«Interesting. Is this a hypothetical question?»

«No. It's really happened with the one you sent after me. It doesn't seem able to quit that body now. Why not?»

«I am not really certain,» she said.

«It is trapped now,» Suhuy offered. «It can only come and go by reacting with a resident intelligence.»

«The body, with the ty'iga in control, recovered from the illness that killed its consciousness,» I said. «You mean it's stuck there now for life?»

«Yes. So far as I know.»

«Then tell me this: Will it be released when that body dies, or will it die with it?»

«It could go either way,» he replied. «But the longer it remains in the body, the more likely it is that it will perish along with it.»

I looked back at my mother.

«There you have the end of its story,» I stated. She shrugged.

«I've done with this one and released it,» she said, «and one can always conjure another should the need arise.»

«Don't do it,» I told her.

«I shan't,» she said. «There is no need to, now.»

«But if you thought there were, you would?»

«A mother tends to value her son's safety, whether the son likes it or not.»

I raised my left hand, extending the forefinger in an angry gesture, when I noticed that I was wearing a bright bracelet - it seemed an almost - hologramatic representation of a woven cord. I lowered my hand, bit back my first response, and said, «You know my feelings now.»

«I knew them a long time ago,» she said. «Let us dine at the Ways of Sawall, half a turning hence, purplesky. Agreed?»

«Agreed,» I said.

«Till then. Good turning, Suhuy.»

«Good turning, Dara.»

She took three paces and was gone, as etiquette prescribed, out the same way by which she had entered.

I turned and strode to the pool's edge, stared into its depths, felt the muscles in my shoulders slowly unknot. Jasra and Julia were down there now, back in the citadel of the Keep, doing something arcane in the lab. And then the strands were flowing over them, some cruel truth beyond all order and beauty, beginning to form themselves into a mask of fascinating, frightening proportion.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

«Family,» Suhuy said, «intrigues and maddens. You are feeling the tyranny of affection at the moment, are you not?»

I nodded.

«Something Mark Twain said about being able to choose your friends but not your relatives,» I answered.

«I do not know what they are up to, though I have my suspicions,» he said. «There is nothing to do now but rest and wait. I would like to hear more of your story.»

«Thanks, Uncle. Yeah,» I said. «Why not?»

So I gave him all the rest of my tale. Partway through it, we adjourned to the kitchen for further sustenance, then took another way to a floating balcony above a lime-colored ocean breaking upon pink rocks and beaches under a twilit or otherwise indigo sky without stars. There, I finished my telling.

«This is more than a little interesting,» he said, at last.

«Oh? Do you see something in it all that I don't?» I asked.

«You've given me too much to consider for me to give you a hasty judgment,» he said. «Let us leave it at that for now.»

«Very well.»

I leaned on the rail, looked down at the waters.

«You need rest,» he said after a time.

«I guess I do.»

«Come, I'll show you to your room.»

He extended a hand and I took hold of it. Together, we sank through the floor.

And so I slept, surrounded by tapestries and heavy drapes, in a doorless chamber in the Ways of Suhuy. It might have been in a tower, as I could hear the winds passing beyond the walls. Sleeping, I dreamt…

I was back in the castle Amber, walking the sparkling length of the Corridor of Mirrors. Tapers flickered in tall holders. My footsteps made no sound. The mirrors came in all manner of shapes. They covered the walls at either hand, big ones, little ones. I passed myself within their depths, reflected, distorted, sometimes re-reflected…

I was halted before a tall, cracked mirror to my left, framed in tin. Even as I turned toward it I knew that it would not be me whom I regarded this time.

Nor was I mistaken. Coral was looking at me from out of the mirror. She had on a peach-colored blouse and was not wearing her eyepatch. The crack in the mirror divided her face down the middle. Her left eye was the green I remembered, her right was the Jewel of Judgment. Both seemed to be focused upon me.

«Merlin,» she said. «Help me. This is too strange. Give me back my eye.»

«I don't know how,» I said. «I don't understand what was done.»

«My eye,» she went on, as if she had not heard. «The world is all swarming forces in the Eye of Judgment, cold - so cold! - and not a friendly place. Help me!»

«I'll find a way,» I said.

«My eye…» she continued.

I hurried by.

From a rectangular mirror in a wooden frame carved at its base in the form of a phoenix, Luke regarded me. «Hey, old buddy,» he said, looking slightly forlorn,