As a child, this had been a favored playground of mine, for a time. I met here almost daily, for dozens of cycles, with a little shadow girl named Rhanda. Kicking through boneheaps, brushing by damp shrubbery, I came at length to the damaged mausoleum where we had played house. Pushing aside the sagging gate, I entered.
Nothing had changed, and I found myself chuckling. The cracked cups and saucers, tarnished utensils, were still stacked in the corner, heavy with dust, stained with seepage. I brushed off the catafalque we'd used as a table, seated myself upon it. One day Rhanda had simply stopped corning, and after a time I had, too. I'd often wondered what sari of woman she had become. I'd left her a note in our hiding place, beneath a loose floor stone, I recalled. I wondered whether she'd ever found it.
I raised the stone. My filthy envelope still lay there, unsealed. I took it out, shook it off, slid out my folded sheet.
I unfolded it, read my faded childish scrawclass="underline" What happened Rhanda? 1 waited and you didn't come. Beneath it, in a far neater hand, was written: I can't come anymore because my folks say you are a demon or a vampire. I'm sorry because you are the nicest demon or vampire I know. I'd never thought of that possibility. Amazing, the ways one can be misunderstood.
I sat there for a time, remembering growing up. I'd taught Rhanda the bonedance game in here. I snapped my fingers then, and our old ensorcelled heap of them across the way made a sound like stirring leaves. My juvenile spell was still in place; the bones rolled forward, arranged themselves into a pair of manikins, began their small, awkward dance. They circled each other, barely holding their shapes, pieces flaking away, cobwebs trailing; loose ones-spares-began to bounce about them. They made tiny clicking sounds as they touched. I moved them faster.
A shadow crossed the doorway, and I heard a chuckle. “I'll be damned! All you need's a tin roof. So this is how they spend their time in Chaos.”
“Luke!” I exclaimed as he stepped inside, my manikins collapsing as my attention left them, into little gray, sticklike heaps. “What are you doing here?”
“Could say I was selling cemetery lots,” he observed. “You interested in one?”
He had on a red shirt and brown khakis tucked into his brown suede boots. A tan cloak hung about his shoulders. He was grinning.
“Why aren't you off ruling?”
His smile went away, to be replaced by a moment of puzzlement, returned almost instantly.
“Oh, felt I needed a break. What about you? There's a funeral soon, isn't there?”
I nodded.
“Later on,” I said. “I'm just taking a break myself. How'd you get here, anyway?”
“Followed my nose,” he said. “Needed some intelligent conversation.”
“Be serious. Nobody knew I was coming here. I didn't even know it till the last minute. I—”
I groped about in my pockets.
“You didn't plant another of those blue stones on me, did you?”
“No; nothing that simple,” he replied. “I seem to have some sort of message for you.”
I got to my feet, approached him, studying his face.
“Are you okay, Luke?”
“Sure. As okay as I ever am, that is.”
“It's no mean stunt, finding your way this near to the Courts. Especially if you've never been here before. How'd you manage it?”
“Well, the Courts and I go back a long ways, old buddy. You might say it's in my-blood.”
He moved aside from the doorway and I stepped outside. Almost automatically, we began walking.
“I don't understand what you're saying,” I told him.
“Well, my dad spent some time here, back in his plotting days,” he said. “It's where he met my mother.”
“I didn't know that.”
“It never came up. We never talked family, remember?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and no one I asked seemed to know where Jasra came from. Still, the Courts... She's a long way from home.”
“Actually, she was recruited from a nearby shadow,” he explained, “like this one.”
“Recruited?”
“Yes, she worked as a servant for a number of years-I think she was fairly young when she startedat the Ways of Helgram.”
“Helgram? That's my mother's House!”
“Right. She was a maid-companion to the lady Dara. That's where she learned the Arts.”
“Jasra got her instruction in sorcery from my mother? And she met Brand at Helgram? That would make it seem Helgram had something to do with Brand's plot, the Black Road, the war—”
“-and the Lady Dara going looking for your father? I guess so.”
“Because she wanted to be a Pattern initiate as well as one of the Logrus?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I wasn't present.”
We moved down a gravelly trail, fumed at a huge cluster of dark shrubbery, passing through a forest of stone and over a bridge that crossed a slow black stream that reflected high branches and sky, monochrome. A few leaves rustled in a stray breeze.
“How come you never mentioned any of this later?” I asked.
“I intended to, but it never seemed urgent,” he said, “whereas a lot of other things did.”
“True,” I said. “The pace did seem to keep picking up each time our trails crossed. But now– Are you saying it's urgent now, that I suddenly need to know this?”
“Oh, not exactly.” He halted. He reached out and leaned upon a headstone. His hand began to grip it, growing white about the knuckles, across the back. The stone at his fingertips was ground to powder, fell snowlike to the earth. “Not exactly,” he repeated. “That part was my idea, just because I wanted you to know. Maybe it'll do you some good, maybe it won't. Information is like that. You never know.” With a crunching, cracking sound, the top of the headstone suddenly gave way. Luke hardly seemed to notice this, and his hand kept on squeezing. Small pieces fell from the larger one he now held.
“So you came all this way to tell me that?”
“No,” he answered, as we turned and began walking back the way we had come. “I was sent to tell you something else, and it's been pretty hard holding off. But I figured if I talked about this first, it couldn't let me go, would keep feeding me till I got around to the message. “
There came a huge crunch, and the stone he held turned to gravel, falling to mix with that on the trail. “Let me see your hand.”
He brushed it off and held it out. A tiny flame flickered near the base of his index finger. He ran his thumb over it and it went out. I increased my pace, and he matched it.
“Luke, you know what you are?”
“Something in me seems to, but I don't, man. I just feel-I'm not right. I'd probably better tell you what I feel I should pretty quick now.”
“No. Hold off,” I said, hurrying even more.
Something dark passed overhead, too quick for me to make out its shape, vanishing among the trees. We were buffeted by a sudden gust of wind.
“You know what's going on, Merle?” he asked.
“I think so,” I said, “and I want you to do exactly what I tell you, no matter how weird it might seem. Okay?”
“Sure thing. If I can't trust a Lord of Chaos, who can I trust, eh?”
We hurried past the clump of shrubs. My mausoleum was just up ahead.
“You know, there really is something I feel obliged to tell you right now, though,” he said.
“Hold it. Please.”