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AMBER
Boadice’s diary,
Session 73
Played on the 21st of November, 1997
Written by Jopie Schekkerman, based on a campaign by Astrid Tops.
woke up lying in garbage. I’ve done that before but this time I did not
recall getting drunk. I did remember a fight, though, and someone smashing a
mirror. I seemed to be lying on my belly on a pile of rotting straw and cabbage
leafs. There was no pain, but I was horrified to find I could not move my legs.
To my great relief, the paralysis turned out to be Llewella's unconscious body
pressing my legs into the straw. She was unharmed, like me, but she was out
cold and did not respond to my attempts to rouse her. Slowly, all that had happened
in Overshadow came back to me. I thought I had brought only her essence with
me, safely stored in a bottle. Where did this body come from? My aunt had green
hair and she wore a green dress, but there was nothing particularly bottle green
about her. And why was I in my human shape when I had entered Overshadow in
chaosform? Where were we, for that matter?
We seemed to have landed in an alley in some city in shadow. Walls of dark stone surrounded us left, right and behind, there was filth underfoot and a small rectangle of washed out blue over our heads. According to the light, it was early morning. Not many people were around; the night people were turning in and the day people would be trying to get started. I checked my pockets for money. Maybe I could let Llewella sleep it off in a suitable inn and then we could go home together. After that, it would be off to Overshadow again for me; Orchis and that Number Six would wonder if I had deserted them. I threw my aunt over my shoulder and started walking.
It was an unpleasant kind of place, this city we had ended up in. Narrow streets met narrow streets and I don't think I saw a window that was not protected by bars. In some ways it reminded me of the architecture of the City in Overshadow I had left, but only in atmosphere, not in architecture. There were no iron streetlamps and the place did not have the look of great age about it. In fact, it looked rather new. Walls were sagging not because they were old but because their foundations were bad. The thatch was badly tended but not overgrown and paint peeled not from exposure but because it was badly applied. If the shadow had been mine, I would have put this city to the torch. The place felt like it was going through a crisis of some sort, an economical depression with matching poverty and crime rate so I counted myself lucky I was armed. There was something I could not place, though. Here and there strange pyramids rose above the architecture, if I may call it that. They did not seem to belong because they reminded me of jungle-shrouded temples where mad priests sacrificed virgins a monthly basis. I decided to avoid them. Not that I count myself as a virgin, or even a maiden, but there are some places a woman should not show her face if she wishes to avoid trouble. The first more-or-less decent looking inn (called the Tavern of the Sun God) I had to pass by because it lay right across the street from one of the bigger pyramids. Just my luck...
As I wandered into another alley, I heard a hissing behind me. In a flash I
turned around and drew my sword, worrying about how well I would be able to
fight with Llewella weighing me down. At first I saw only rubbish and shadows,
but then something black and hairy rose out of a puddle and unfolded eight black,
wet legs. The spider hissed again. The monster was more than three feet high
at its knees and its sickle-like jaws dripped a clear fluid. I backed up, made
a few half-hearted swipes at it with my sword and told it to go away. It followed
me and its eight eyes caught the light.
"Shoo!" I shouted but that did not scare it off.
"Go away!" made it hiss even more. I had had enough! This was a strange
place and my aunt was about as much use as a sack of flour, so I turned and
ran.
. . . _ . . .
The spider scuttled after me, and I sprinted towards the wider streets, cursing
this place with my very best swearwords. I would trump to Amber as soon as I
had a moment to concentrate! Then I heard a double 'twang' and the scuttling
stopped. I had almost run into a huge, smelly man with a big beard. He blocked
my path and lowered an empty crossbow. Behind me, the spider was a sorry mass
of pulp and twitching legs. As I looked back to my saviour I prepared a 'my
hero' speech. Maybe my luck had turned for the better and a bit of charm could
get me a free bodyguard. I had to take a step back to see my rescuers face over
his beard, though; he looked like he had swallowed a bear cub and left the back
end hanging out.
"Thank you sir," I lisped, looking up through my eyelashes. The head
with the beard was attached to a huge muscled frame, and I guessed he was the
type to wear his shirt open to his navel, showing lots of gold chains and a
lawn of chest hair. The chest hair would blend in seamlessly with the beard
and totally obscure any gold he would be wearing.
"Whatcha doing here, a woman by herself!" The man rumbled from above.
"This ain't no place for a girl alone."
"Ehm, no," I said, "My aunt here is not quite well, and--"
"This ain’t no place for two wimmen eider."
"But I had to…, she ran out of the house and--"
"Who's your pimp?" the man demanded. Drat! No bodyguard, it seemed.
"But, I'm a decent girl," I stammered.
Bear-beard looked me up and down with a sneer, and I glanced down to see what
he was looking at. He did have a point...
My travelling clothes, though dull and grey, had been designed to accommodate
my chaos form. They would stretch where needed, and could be opened and closed
along the seams with little press studs and velcro. Now I had unconsciously
shifted back to my human form, my clothes still more or less fell open in places
where I, under the circumstances, would have preferred them to keep me covered.
A slight wind chose that moment to pick up and play with the strips of my skirt,
showing my thighs.
"I can use 'nother one," the man mused and my mood shifted from
'slightly worried' to 'better get out of here soon'.
"Who's y'r husband?" he demanded.
"John of the upperlands," I lied. Nasty man. I wished Llewella would
wake up so she could get herself out on her own two feet.
"Dun't now him. Where 's he live? If he can't take care of 's woman, he
ain't got no right to her," Bearbeard said and he made to grab my arm.
Lies would not do anymore. I kicked him in the balls and ran back into the alley,
avoiding the spider's messy corpse.
. . . _ . . .
In the alley I franticly searched my deck for Fiona's trump. When I got it, it was warm and would not work. The whole deck felt wrong, as warm as the pouch I kept it in. Perhaps the Logrus was damaged again? Gods, would I have to raise my child here? I closed my eyes and concentrated on the memorized trump of my home in the Carth Islands. That would not work either, I could call the picture to mind but could not fill it with the necessary power. If I was stranded in this shadow, I was well and truly f*cked! I took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. The towers of a dark and gloomy palace obstructed the light of morning. Another place where Llewella and I would not go for help.
Carefully, I called the Pattern to mind. After a while it responded and I could
trace its lines before my mind's eye. It was subtly wrong: lines bent and curved
where they had not, and it did not fit—
It did not fit me.
The Pattern looked as subtly wrong as a shapeshifter trying to copy the face
of my mother; it looked more or less the same but it was obvious it wasn’t.
Had someone re-drawn it while I was in Overshadow? I was all alone in a hostile
city, without my powers and burdened with an aunt who might wake up, or not,
but until she did she was a liability.
The Unicorn chose that moment to provide a glimmer of hope. It came in the form of a trump contact. As I habitually fanned through my trumps to identify the caller, I noticed that, like the time when the Logrus had broken down, some of my cards weren’t as warm as the others. The trumps of Murlas and Adrian were as cool as they should be, and it seemed it was Adrian who was calling me. Gladly, I allowed the contact.
"Can we come through?" Adrian asked. "Me and Murlas and a cousin
of Murlas's?"
"Yes," I hesitated, "but--"
"No," Adrian interrupted, "We're a bit stuck here, so we shall
come to you, okay?"
He turned a bit to his side. "Murlas, hold on to your cousin."
As I held out my hand I saw the face of my un-friend Murlas come into focus.
They were standing in a small, dark, stone chamber, quite as unpleasant as my
alley or perhaps more so. Murlas was kicking at something black by his feet,
held on to Adrian with one hand and with the other he held the sleeve of a brown
haired young man I had not seen before. The young man seemed drugged, or perhaps
he was not quite right in the head. He didn’t seem to mind his awful surroundings
and the anxiety of my cousins didn’t seem to touch him. He looked more
like a spectator at a boring play than an active participant in what seemed
to be a rescue operation. I wondered who was rescuing who.
With a brief glow of familiar rainbow colours the three of them entered my
alley. In the daylight, I looked at Murlas' cousin again. He had blue eyes in
a regular but unremarkable face, a face that wore an expression that could best
be described as 'vague'. Murlas, on the other hand, was anything but vague:
he was staring unashamedly at my legs and various uncovered body parts. It made
my skin creep but I would die rather than show my discomfort and close the slits.
"Hello," Adrian said. At least he did not stare.
"Boys, what happened?" I asked. "Where are we, and why don't
my trumps work?"
"We are in a copy-world, in a mirror image of Sherwyn."
Sherwyn is Adrian's kingdom, the Amber of Corwin's pattern. I did not know Adrian
had screwed up this bad.
"And how are we getting out?" Murlas asked. I was surprised he had
to ask, didn’t they know?
"We must find a mirror," Adrian answered.
"Couldn't you have brought one?" Murlas demanded.
"It would not have been big enough or I would have--"
"So let's go find a mirror!" I interrupted. "We're in a city,
for the gods' sake."
The three of us looked around, (Murlas' cousin seemed to contemplate infinity)
and realised simultaneously --in unison-- how difficult it would be to find
a full length mirror in a place where not even glass windows survived. But perhaps...
A posh tailor would have one, I suggested, and Murlas pointed out that mirrors
could also be found a brothel.
"Would the surface of a large body of water do?" I asked Adrian. Women
can get into trouble in a brothel. Adrian started to say that it would not be
reliable when we heard a groan down and beside us. Llewella was coming round
and I helped her up. She was pale and unsteady on her feet, and regarded us
with a bleary gaze.
"Where am I?"
Despite her sorry state she still managed to sound demanding.
"You are with me again, Llewella," Adrian answered. An odd way to
inform someone about her location...
"Adrian!" Llewella exclaimed, recognizing her nephew.
"What happened?" Adrian quickly asked her.
"Shall we start with getting the hell away from here?" Murlas interrupted
them. "Instead of he--"
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" Llewella ignored Murlas and kept addressing
Adrian. "What happened after we investigated that trough?"
"Quite a lot--" was the answer.
"Let's go and find an inn," I said, but Murlas insisted we would just
get out of here.
Llewella and Adrian were still in their own small world of questions and explanations.
"We are in a mirror world." Adrian told his aunt.
"A mirror world," Llewella repeated, digesting the information. I
let go of her arm.
"And now you are looking for a way to leave, I assume?" she said.
Adrian nodded.
"Great!" Llewella exclaimed with surprising vivacity. "If we...
Hmmm. If you've got a moment--"
"Don't go out of your body!" Adrian almost shouted. There was something
going on between them, something that spoke of a shared past. It had to do with
these mirror worlds, and Llewella going out of her body, and Adrian knowing
about it. Interesting, I would say!
"I'm not," Llewella assured him. "Now be quiet."
Llewella closed her eyes and raised her hands. Beads of sweat formed on her
brown but nothing happened. Soon she dropped her hands and said she had a headache.
I would have been surprised if she hadn't. There must be a link between Adrian's
concern about her leaving her body (how, why, when?) and me taking only her
essence from Overshadow into this mirror-Sherwyn.
"What did you try to do?" Adrian asked. So he did not know everything,
then.
"Creating a mirror, of course," Llewella answered.
"Maybe later, if we're in a really tight spot," Adrian said. "There
won't be many mirrors here, perhaps in a brothel or in the castle, but I don't
think going there would be a good idea."
After a short discussion we decided to try our luck in a high-class brothel.
We would need money, but when Murlas insisted money was always easy to come
by I had to point out to him that my (and therefore: our?) Pattern did not work
here, and that we could not shift. Adrian explained that if we were in a mirror
image of Sherwyn, we could not expect the pattern to be all ours, could we?
The atmosphere in the alley became tenser by the second.
"Just look someone in the eyes for a moment," Murlas growled. "Money
a-plenty."
"Good idea," I snapped, pointing at Bear-beard. "There lies one,
go ahead."
The still prone body of Bear-beard provided a bit of much-needed comic relief for our little group. It seemed I had kicked him quite hard. He was half unconscious but still whimpering. While Adrian went through his pockets I picked up his crossbow. A few coins fell from Bear-beard's purse and I picked them up also. They had the emblem of Sherwin on one side and the profile of a man called 'Emperor Assuo' on the other. On the edge was written 'In Kreel We Trust'. I kept them as a souvenir.
. . . _ . . .
With the money, we set out for the red light district. It turned out we did
not need to look far, brothels were as plentiful as bars. After passing by the
ones which offered children or pain, we found a likely-looking establishment.
A fat madam with too much make-up and a perfume that threatened to knock me
out if I dared to come closer opened the door. She smiled sugar-sweet at Adrian
and Murlas but frowned when she discovered Llewella and me, and sourly intoned
that the gentlemen were not supposed to bring their own amusement.
"I shall pay handsomely," Adrian said, which pacified the woman somewhat.
He added: "Yes, it does, money makes everything all right, doesn't it,"
in a bitter tone, as if it was a truth he had just discovered for himself. Poor
Adrian, I wonder how old he is. Things would have gone smoothly from then on,
if only Bear-beard's money had been sufficient for our plans. I had to alter
the old whore's mind slightly to make up the difference, but soon she led us
to our room; a room with a big mirror, as specified.
While we walked through the tackily decorated corridors, I introduced myself to Murlas's cousin. He said he was called Alwin and we shook hands. Nothing more seemed to be forthcoming and I took a second look at this Alwin character. He was not crazy as I first thought, but more like a man in a dream; uninvolved, just along out of habit or because he was told to. Odd to think he was related to Murlas. Again, I wondered who was rescuing who. Adrian had seemed awfully glad to have me take them out of their dark room. Alwin did not seem capable of any action that was not first described to him, but now they were more or less rescuing Llewella and me from this mirror world.
Once in our room we dismantled the four poster bed to get at the mirror in
its ceiling. Guided by Llewella, Adrian started to perform a kind of magic.
He seemed to be turning the mirror, which we had propped up against a wall,
into a doorway of sorts, with Llewella commenting on and adjusting his technique.
There seemed to be an old teacher-student relationship there, and Murlas and
I watched with interest. It was nice of them to give us a demonstration of this
unfamiliar mirror power, with explanations and all for free. While Adrian was
concentrating, I turned to Llewella and said:
"Aunt Llewella, I remember that, when I came here, your body was somewhere
else and I only brought your essence with me?"
"Hmmm," Llewella said and she thought it over, but Adrian interrupted;
insisting that we first get back before discussing this. Murlas agreed with
him. I shook my head, this was too important to let slide. I insisted I was
afraid that if we went back, Llewella would be--.
I could not finish my sentence because Murlas looked into my eyes and invaded my mind. No! I would never, never allow that again! He was there, probing, looking for- and finding the entrance to my thoughts..! His mind was like an avalanche, a mountain falling on me, pressing--
My reflexes saved me: my hand shot out with a dagger, I guess I hit Murlas
in the shoulder. He had felt my intention and had thrown himself back, which
had saved his life, but the wound broke his concentration and I was free.
"Never, never do that again!" I shouted with my eyes averted and my
sword at his throat. "Never, do you hear me Murlas, don--"
Then something smashed into the back of my head and the world went black.
. . . _ . . .
