“Then whose idea was the blinding?”
He was silent again for a long while. Then he spoke very softly, almost a whisper: “Hear me out, please. It was mine, and it may have saved your life. Any action taken against you had to be tantamount to death, or their faction would have tried for the real thing. You were no longer of any use to them, but alive and about you possessed the potentiality of becoming a danger at some future time. They could have used your Trump to contact you and kill you, or they could have used it to free you in order to sacrifice you in yet another move against Eric. Blinded, however, there was no need to slay you and you were of no use for anything else they might have in mind. It saved you by taking you out of the picture for a time, and it saved us from a more egregious act which might one day be held against us. As we saw it, there was no choice. It was the only thing we could do. There could be no show of leniency either, or we might be suspected of having some use for you ourselves. The moment you assumed any such semblance of value you would have been a dead man. The most we could do was look the other way whenever Lord Rein contrived to comfort you. That was all that could be done.”
“I see,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed, “you saw too soon. No one had guessed you would recover your sight that quickly, nor that you would be able to escape once you did. How did you manage it?”
“Does Macy’s tell Gimbel’s?” I said.
“Beg pardon?”
“I said — never mind. What do you know of Brand’s imprisonment, then?”
He regarded me once more.
“All I know is that there was some sort of falling out within his group. I lack the particulars. For some reason, Bleys and Fiona were afraid to kill him and afraid to let him run loose. When we freed him from their compromise — imprisonment — Fiona was apparently more afraid of having him free.”
“And you said you feared him enough to have made ready to kill him. Why now, after all this time, when all of this is history and the power has shifted again? He was weak, virtually helpless. What harm could he do now?”
He sighed.
“I do not understand the power that he possesses,” he said, “but it is considerable. I know that he can travel through Shadow with his mind, that he can sit in a chair, locate what he seeks in Shadow, and then bring it to him by an act of will without moving from the chair; and he can travel through Shadow physically in a somewhat similar fashion. He lays his mind upon the place he would visit, forms a kind of mental doorway, and simply steps through. For that matter, I believe he can sometimes tell what people are thinking. It is almost as if he has himself become some sort of living Trump. I know these things because I have seen him do them. Near the end, when we had him under surveillance in the palace he had eluded us once in this fashion. This was the time he traveled to the shadow Earth and had you placed in Bedlam. After his recapture, one of us remained with him at all times. We did not yet know that he could summon things through Shadow, however. When he became aware that you had escaped your confinement, he summoned a horrid beast which attacked Caine, who was then his bodyguard. Then he went to you once again. Bleys and Fiona apparently got hold of him shortly after that, before we could, and I did not see him again until that night in the library when we brought him back. I fear him because he has deadly powers which I do not understand.”
“In such a case, I wonder how they managed to confine him at all?”
“Fiona has similar strengths, and I believe Bleys did also. Between the two of them, they could apparently annul most of Brand’s power while they created a place where it would be inoperative.”
“Not totally,” I said. “He got a message to Random. In fact, he reached me once, weakly.”
“Obviously not totally, then,” he said. “Sufficiently, however. Until we broke through the defenses.”
“What do you know of all their byplay with me — confining me, trying to kill me, saving me.”
“That I do not understand,” he said, “except that it was part of the power struggle within their own group. They had had a falling out amongst themselves, and one side or the other had some use for you. So, naturally, one side was trying to kill you while the other fought to preserve you. Ultimately, of course, Bleys got the most mileage out of you, in that attack he launched.”
“But he was the one who tried to kill me, back on the shadow Earth,” I said. “He was the one who shot out my tires.”
“Oh?”
“Well, that is what Brand told me, but it jibes with all sorts of secondary evidence.”
He shrugged.
“I cannot help you on that,” he said. “I simply do not know what was going on among them at that time.”
“Yet you countenance Fiona in Amber,” I said. “In fact, you are more than a little cordial to her whenever she is about.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling. “I have always been very fond of Fiona. She is certainly the loveliest, most civilized of us all. Pity Dad was always so dead-set against brother-sister marriages, as well you know. It bothered me that we had to be adversaries for so long as we were. Things returned pretty much to normal after Bleys’s death, your imprisonment, and Eric’s coronation, though. She accepted their defeat gracefully, and that was that. She was obviously as frightened at the prospect of Brand’s return as I was.”
“Brand told things differently,” I said, “but then, of course, he would. For one thing, he claims that Bleys is still living, that he hunted him down with his Trump and knows that he is off in Shadow, training another force for another strike at Amber.”
“I suppose this is possible,” Julian said. “But we are more than adequately prepared, are we not?”
“He claims further that the strike will be a feint,” I continued, “and that the real attack will then come direct from the Courts of Chaos, over the black road. He says that Fiona is off preparing the way for this right now.”
He scowled.
“I hope he was simply lying,” he said. “I would hate to see their group resurrected and at us again, this time with help from the dark direction. And I would hate to see Fiona involved.”
“Brand claimed he was out of it himself, that he had seen the error of his ways — and suchlike penitent noises.”
“Ha! I’d sooner trust that beast I just slew than take Brand at his word. I hope you’ve had the sense to keep him well guarded — though this might not be of much avail if he has his old powers back.”
“But what game could he be playing now?”
“Either he has revived the old triumvirate, a thought I like not at all, or he has a new plan all his own. But mark me, he has a plan. He has never been satisfied to be a mere spectator at anything. He is always scheming. I’d take an oath he even plots in his sleep.”
“Perhaps you are right,” I said. “You see, there has been a new development, whether for good or ill, I cannot yet tell. I just had a fight with Gerard. He thinks I have done Brand some mischief. This is not the case, but I was in no position to prove my innocence. I was the last person I know of to see Brand, earlier today. Gerard visited his quarters a short time ago. He says the place is broken up, there are blood smears here and there, and Brand is missing. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Neither do I. But I hope it means someone has done the job properly this time.”
“Lord,” I said, “it’s tangled. I wish I had known all of these things before.”