The star grew brighter. The sky was filled with splashes of orange and pink. Shortly, lines of green light joined them, and they swirled like streamers about us.
We raced on, and the configurations came to dominate the sky fully, like a psychedelic parasol rotating slowly. The landscape became a total blur. I felt as if a part of me dozed, though I am certain I did not lose consciousness. Time seemed to be playing games with my metabolism. I grew enormously hungry and my eyes ached.
The star brightened. Gryll's wings took on a prismatic shimmer. We seemed to be moving at an incredible pace now.
Our strand curved upward at its outer edges. The process continued as we advanced until it seemed we were moving in a trough. Then they met overhead, and it was as if we sped down a gun barrel, aimed at the blue-white star.
“Anything else you're supposed to tell me?”
“Not so far as I know.”
I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her behind in Brand's apartment. Why had I done that? I-my mind felt cloudy, the memory dreamlike.
This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory. Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the clouding effect of glamor. I had walked into a spell back in Brand's apartment. I'd no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I'd activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more general, enlivened by the disaster-possibly even an unintentional side effect of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.
For that matter, I doubted any generality about the business. It was just too right to have been a booby-trap Brand had left lying about. It had confounded a trained sorcerer, me. Perhaps it was only my present distancing from the vicinity of its occurrence that had helped to clear my mind. As I reviewed my actions from the time of exposure I could see that I had been moving in something of a haze since then. And the more I reviewed the more I felt the spell to have been specifically tailored to enfold me. Not understanding it, I could not consider myself free of it with this knowledge either.
Whatever it was, it had caused me to abandon Frakir without thinking twice about it, and it had caused me to feel-well-strange. I could not tell exactly how it might have influenced, might still be influencing, my thoughts and my feelings, the usual problem when one is caught up inside a spell. But I didn't see how it could possibly have been the late Brand himself who had set the thing up against such an unpredictable occurrence as my having rooms next to his old ones years after his death, from which I would be prompted to enter his quarters in the disastrous aftermath of an improbable confrontation between the Logrus and the Pattern in an upper hall of Amber Castle. No, it seemed that someone else had to be behind it. Jurt? Julia? It didn't seem too likely that they'd be able to operate undetected in the heart of Amber Castle. Who then? And could it have had anything to do with that episode in the Hall of Mirrors? I drew blanks. Were I back there now I might be able to come up with a spell of my own to ferret out the one responsible. But I wasn't, and any investigation at that end of things would have to wait.
The light ahead flashed more brightly now, winking from heavenly blue to baleful red.
“Gryll,” I said. “Do you detect a spell upon me?”
“Aye, m'Iord,” he replied.
“Why didn't you mention it?”
“I thought it one of your own-for defense, perhaps.”
“Can you lift it? I'm at a disadvantage, here on the inside.”
“'Tis too tangled in your person. I wouldn't know where to begin.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?”
“Only that it's there, m'lord. Does seem rather heavy about the head, though.”
“Could be coloring my thoughts a certain way, then?”
“Aye, a pale blue.”
“I wasn't referring to your manner of perceiving it.
Only to the possibility that it could be influencing my thinking.”
His wings flashed blue, then red. Our tunnel expanded suddenly and the sky grew bright with the crazy colors of Chaos. The star we followed now took on the proportions of a small light-magically enhanced, of course-within a high tower of a sepulchral castle, all gray and olive, atop a mountain the bottom and middle of which had been removed The island of stone floated above a petrified forest. The trees burned with opal fires-orange, purple, green.
“I'd imagine it could be disentangled,” Gryll observed. “But its unraveling be a bafflement to this poor demon.”
I grunted. I watched the streaking scenery for a few moments. lfien, “Speaking of demons...” I said.
“Yes?”
“What can you tell me about the sort known as a ty' iga?” I asked.
“They dwell far out beyond the Rim,” he replied, “and may be the closest of all creatures to the primal Chaos. I do not believe they even possess true bodies of the material sort. They have little to do with other demons, let alone anyone else.”
“Ever know any of them-uh-personally?”
“I have encountered a few-now and then,” he replied.
We rose higher. The castle had been doing the same. A fall of meteors burned its way, brightly, silently, behind it.
“They can inhabit a human body, take it over.”
“That doesn't surprise me.”
“I know of one who has done this thing, several times. But an unusual problem has come up. It apparently took control of one on the human's deathbed. The passing of the human seemed to lock the ty' iga in place. It cannot vacate the body now. Do you know of any way it might escape?”
Gryll chuckled.
“Jump off a cliff, I suppose. Or fall on a sword.”
“But what if it's tied to its host so closely now that this doesn't free it?”
He chuckled again.
“That's the breaks of the game, in the body-stealing business.”
“I owe this one something,” I said. “I'd like to help her-it.”
He was silent for a time, then replied, “An older, wiser ty'iga might know something about these matters. And you know where they are.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry I can't be more help. They're an old breed, ty iga.
And now we bore down upon that tower. Our roadway under the shifting kaleidoscope that was the sky dwindled before us to but the tiniest of streaks. Gryll beat his way toward the light in the window and I peered past him.
I glanced downward. The prospect was dizzying. From some distant place a growling sound came up, as if portions of the earth itself were moving slowly against each other-a common enough occurrence in this vicinity. The winds beat at my garments. A strand of tangerine clouds beaded the sky to my left. I could make out detail work in the castle walls. I caught sight of a figure within the room of the light.
Then we were very near, and then through the window and inside. A large, stooped, gray and red demonic form, horned and half-scaled, regarded me with elliptically pupiled yellow eyes. Its fangs were bared in a smile.
“Uncle!” I cried as I dismounted. “Greetings!”
Gryll stretched and shook himself as Suhuy rushed forward and embraced me-carefully.
“Merlin,” he said at last, “welcome home. I regret the occasion but rejoice in your presence. Gryll has told you..?”
“Of the passing of His Highness? Yes. I'm sorry.”
He released me and stepped back a pace.
“It is not as if it were unanticipated,” he said. “Just the opposite. Too much so, in fact. Yet there is no proper time for such an event.”
“True,” I replied, massaging a certain stiffness out of my left shoulder and groping in my hip pocket after a comb.
“And he had been ailing for so long that I had grown used to it,” I said. “It was almost as if he'd come to terms with the weakness.”