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AMBER
Boadice’s diary,
Session 93
Played on the first of October, 1999
Written by Jopie Schekkerman, based on a campaign by Astrid Tops.
was late. I should have left Ornach Ways days ago but I hadn’t. The hours that passed there were only minutes in the outside world and there was so much I wanted to do. Then Alexander called, and I had to make a decision.
He needed a trump artist to help him do something in Galoria, and I needed another person to trump my troops to a place near the Keep of the Four Worlds (Ornach, Bleys and Taureth were busy) so we came to an agreement easily. Getting Alexander’s assistance in exchange for a couple of hours of my time was a good deal. In addition to his help in transporting the troops, he promised to help me lead the army, and Alexander is an exceptionally canny general. So, I stopped procrastinating and swept my fear of facing Flora under the rug, so to speak, and prepared for a brief stint in Galoria.
Alexander used a Nexus trump to take us from Ornach ways to a muddy clearing between large canvas tents. I looked around and breathed the air, trying to determine my position in Shadow. This wasn’t Galoria itself but one of its neighbouring shadows. They call their allies the Sapphire Girdle. We had arrived in the middle of a busy army camp. Soldiers bustled between the tents and a brisk wind whipped the smells of cooking, leather and latrines around. I followed Alexander out of the camp. A ten minute walk took us to a quiet grove of oak trees. Between the trees, a handful of people were waiting for us.
The first one I met was Galoran. His grey beard touched the belt of his simple robe. Myrthe stood by a tree, talking to a woman I did not know. Myrthe looked nice in blue trousers, a blouse and boots. With her snub nose and sun-streaked honey blonde hair she strongly resembled her father. Monias is as handsome as his daughter is pretty, but he wasn’t here. The woman Myrthe was talking to wore a tan jacket with a matching, very short skirt. She had long black hair in a braid on her back and did not behave like a servant. Alexander saw me looking at her and told me she was called Janice. Janice was a friend of Dorian’s from Shadow. Dorian, in grey and blue, was talking to Adrian—
No, not Adrian, Justin. If I looked closely and with the eye of a trump artist, I could tell the difference. Justin wore white trousers and a white shirt with one black sleeve. That sleeve had to be a statement of some sort, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was trying to say.
A handful of servants were hovering around the edge of the grove. When Alexander and I stepped in among the trees, one of them approached us with a tray of glasses. Alex waved him away. Everyone took our arrival as a sign to break off their conversations, and with nods and murmured ‘hello’s’ we gathered into a circle. Galoran gave a little welcome speech and explained what we were about to do:
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “In a shadow next to this one, the Enemy from Outside is growing a crystal tower. When it is finished, it is going to be used as a portal to bring in their invading army. We, that is Galoria, don’t have the resources to destroy the tower or defeat the army, so we decided to build a “cordon sanitair”, an insulating girdle around the blight. More specifically; we’re going to build a wall of Power right through all the shadows that border on the one where the tower is going to be. Any questions?”
After only a heartbeat, he went on:
“Dorian suggested we’d simply destroy the shadow where the tower is growing, but unfortunately that isn’t an option. If we do this, I’d guess the tower will not be destroyed but simply re-manifest itself in all the neighbouring shadows. Which would leave us worse off than before.”
Now the questions came. How would we make that Great Wall, that barrier of Power and make it span several shadows? Galoran, Alexander and Dorian answered. The idea was that all of us would add our own power to the mix and Galoran would co-ordinate our efforts and weave it into the construct he wanted.
I wasn’t sure what they needed me for so I asked:
“Do you need trump to knit it all together?”
Galoran shook his head.
“Nexus will do that,” he said. “Nexus is an insulating, work-around sort of power. We’ll use that to keep conflicting forces apart. Your job will be to give it a Trump quality, just to make things run smoothly.”
Dorian must have seen the expression on my face. He shrugged and said:
“Trump does something. It’ll have a beneficial effect. In theory things go better when you’ve got Trump in the mix. No one knows for sure what it really does, but…” He shrugged again.
The next moment, everyone spoke at once. We realised we didn’t know what we were about to do because nothing even vaguely similar had ever been tried. We had only guesswork and our theories to go on. I listened, offered opinions and waited until everyone was done. There was no doubt in my mind that this wall was going to be built. Whatever our objections and fears, we damned sure were going to give it a try! The whole idea of building an object out of different major Powers was just too interesting to let go.
We talked about our powers, and came to the conclusion we needed to add Logrus to the mix, for flexibility and to balance out the Pattern. Unfortunately only Galoran knew how to use Logrus and he was going to be busy coordinating our powers and actually building the wall. Alexander and, on a beginners level, Myrthe would be providing the Nexus. Dorian would give Galoran Pattern, I would do Trump and Justin would add his own flavour of Pattern –call it Corwin Pattern– to add a different and very exclusive Power to the wall. The woman from shadow; Janice, would stand by and lend assistance when anything got out of hand. How exactly she would do this was unclear to me, but that was Dorian’s problem because he had brought her in.
. . . _ . . .
So you see, we had every major Power in the universe except for Logrus, but brining in a Logrus master could prove difficult. If we did, the Logrus would have to be kept well away from our Pattern. If we proceeded without it, our project would not withstand ‘the essential flux of shadow’ as Galoran called it. We also needed it for balance, Galoran said. But where would we get a Logrus master at such short notice?
Luckily, one of the Hendrakes who had emigrated to Galoria (thereby becoming an ex-Hendrake) had taken the Logrus. The man was sent for and soon joined us. I don’t remember his face or his name, just his black and orange robe. Galoran explained the situation to him and he quickly agreed to help his new country, but apologised in advance for knowing only battle Logrus. Galoran said that didn’t matter as long as it was the real thing.
We were lucky to find a Logrus master at such short notice. There are whole Chaos Houses without a single Logrus master, the house Ysarn for example. I wondered how Murlas was doing in the king finding procedure. Was he dead yet? Probably not; only the good die young.
. . . _ . . .
With the ultra-short planning stage over, we gathered into a circle. Galoran stood in the middle. Dorian stood opposite, facing him. The Logrus master stood behind Galoran’s back, facing Dorian, and to Galoran’s left and right Myrthe, Alexander, Justin completed the circle. Myrthe and Alexander stood to the Logrus master’s left and right, I stood between Myrthe and Dorian and Justin between Dorian and Alexander. The black haired woman, Janice, stood outside the circle and watched us. Dorian had asked her to warn us if she felt any activity from the crystal tower. We were ready. Everyone took a deep breath.
For the first time since I arrived, nobody spoke. I could hear the birds and the wind through the leaves overhead. I closed my eyes, relaxed and flexed my mental muscles. No Pattern for me today, just trump, which would ride the other forces and channel their power.
I opened my eyes to blend what I could see with what I was feeling. Concentrating on Trump had given the world extra colour because it showed me another level of reality. Galoran was reaching out to a number of shadows and weaving tingling blue Nexus into them, laying the foundation for what we were about to do.
“It’s heavy,” he said to us while working with the shining threads. “Heavier than usual. Something’s emanating from the spire, opposing me.”
Dorian had been gathering sparking blue Pattern, a much lighter shade than the glow of the Nexus. He tamed it and let it flow toward Galoran. Watching Dorian, Alexander and Myrthe had called up Nexus energy, which Galoran immediately took and used, making their Power look like a dark blue stream. I felt their Nexus flow past but at the same time I didn’t, like the way you can’t smell clean air. The ex-Hendrake offered sickening stinking Logrus tentacles in colours that hurt. The tentacles almost obscured Justin’s Pattern, which to me looked sunset-red.
Now it was my turn. My trump was colourless water, and like water it sometimes threw rainbow sparks. Galoran had said putting Nexus into the shadows was difficult, so I figured that if I added my trump to the Pattern Dorian and Justin provided, I could adapt their work to the shadows where the wall was going to be and anchor it there.
It seemed like a good plan. Not so good in execution, though. When I touched Justin’s Pattern… I think I need something other than colour to describe what happened. Justin’s pattern was nice but unfamiliar. It was like… If my own Pattern is chocolate, Corwin Pattern was a fizzy lemon drink: very nice but very different. What I did was… How do I put this…
My Trump was like banana. It went famously with the chocolate but with the fizzy lemonade you got… regurgitation.
Justin felt something had gone awry and stopped giving Pattern. But he could not cut off his supply in time and got a build-up of Pattern, which slipped away from him in a flash. That scared the Logrus master, who withdrew his tentacles. Galoran drew so hard on Alexander to get enough Nexus to keep the Corwin-Pattern away from the Logrus that the blue Nexus light almost hid Alexander from my sight. Alexander furrowed his brow and bowed his head, and after half a dozen heartbeats Galoran had re-established equilibrium and the Logrus master and Justin were giving Galoran their powers again.
Yes, of course had I stopped messing with Justin’s Pattern as soon as I realised what I was doing. When Galoran had restored the balance I glanced around, expecting reproaching looks. None were forthcoming. Odd: it was still my fault. For the rest of the time I demurely limited my Trump to the Pattern Dorian was providing.
To my surprise we did not stop and start over. I would have, because my mistake had done something to the structure Galoran was building. The mix of Power he had made had polarised into Logrus and Pattern, with Nexus as glue and insulation between them. But Galoran was ignoring it and slowly and steadily continued to build. How should I describe what we were making…? Maybe with another food simile.
Do you know how mayonnaise is made? No? Me neither, but I hear you need eggs and vinegar and oil. Apparently it takes a lot of skill to mix the three properly because oil and vinegar are like oil and water. The Pattern was the oil, Logrus the vinegar and Nexus was the egg that was supposed to bind it all together. And, like with mayonnaise, we should have worked slowly. Maybe it was my fault our brew had gone lumpy but I could be mistaken, I had not paid attention to the texture of our work before now. Galoran did not seem to mind. Maybe he saw the Pattern and Logrus as bricks and Nexus as the mortar between them.
Alex gestured to Galoran to stop drawing so much Nexus from him. When I looked at him, I felt Alex’s discomfort and the strain Galoran was putting on him.
“Even less?” I heard Dorian murmur. He had been handing out Pattern steadily, unfazed by my mistake earlier.
He was right, we were going slow. A couple of hours had passed and the wall was just high enough to stub a toe on. But Alex was giving as much as he could, as was Myrthe. It was just as well that after a while, as such things go, we got into a rhythm and picked up speed. Galoran started adding Nexus himself and the demand on Pattern from Dorian and Justin increased. I kept up with Dorian, feeling little strain. After several more hours our power wall was about knee-high. How much time had passed? Four, five hours? Six or seven? The shadows under the trees had moved and lengthened and the wind had died down.
I was tired and hungry. This was not as easy as putting Pattern into a trump; it felt more like continually casting spells. Standing right next to a stream of foul stinking Logrus wasn’t helping either. It was just as well that Galoran kept the Logrus away from the Pattern users or it would have made us sick. I compensated by focusing on the Pattern. Pattern felt soothing and familiar and good, very much like chocolate actually. Damn, I was hungry. I should have eaten before I came to Galoria. With effort, I raised an arm and beckoned a servant.
That was my second mistake of the day. That little action made my trump skill waver, which made the flow of Pattern unstable. Dorian noticed and stopped pushing the Pattern flow, letting it carry on on momentum, which tipped the balance in favour of the Logrus. Justin saw this and quickly added more Corwin Pattern to make up for the imbalance. Galoran needed more Nexus to deal with the changes so he drew hard on Alexander, who started to sway. Seeing my cousin totter, Galoran left off and added Nexus himself instead but this left him less time to co-ordinate. The Logrus master was reeling too and it looked like he was losing control over his Logrus tentacles.
Frightened, I whispered to Dorian:
“Time for a break, we’re losing it.”
“Can’t,” Dorian whispered back.
But I knew I could not keep this up without eating. I was nauseous with hunger and starting to see spots. And still the wall wasn’t nearly high enough.
It was the Chaosian who gave in first, falling on his face. A second later, Alexander dropped to his knees. Their Logrus and Nexus winked out, the smell blown away on the wind. Without it, the wall started to unravel like a badly knitted sweater. Dorian tried to hold it together but it was too large for him to handle on his own, even if he wasn’t as tired as the rest of us. Myrthe was panting with her hands on her knees. Justin and I exchanged worried glances.
I called for food again before I went back into the fray. Maybe trump could mend the gaps and stop the fraying. I reached out to our crumbling construct and saw what had happened. Trump would not help because it isn’t a power in itself, so I had nothing to work with. What I had been doing was not just fixing Pattern into an object like when I’m painting a trump, but modifying Dorian’s Pattern so it would be fit for the things Galoran wanted to do with it. When I make a trump, I make the Pattern in it flexible enough to reach different people, or go to a number of locations. On hindsight it made sense; a trump artist who makes trumps with Logrus captures and freezes the chaotic power into a single object and purpose. It is only logical that a Pattern trump work the other way around. To think that after all this time I could still learn something new about my trumps... And such a basic thing too. Nevertheless, it was of no help here.
. . . _ . . .
Galoran and Dorian had found a way to stabilize the wall and were keeping it together. I wanted to join them but someone had put a pile of bread rolls in front of me. The mystic sight had gone and all I could see was the outside: Galoran, Dorian, Justin and Myrthe still standing, Alexander had recovered and was eating, the Hendrake in orange lay quietly on his side on the grass. After a minute Myrthe dropped out too, her face wet with sweat. We weren’t finished. With my mouth full of bread but on my knees, I went back to what was left of the circle.
The wall was tottering and waves of power were crashing through it, pulling the thing apart. Dorian was trying to damp them down, with limited effect. The elements that made up the wall would not blend; our mayonnaise was runny with lumps and would not hold together. The different powers were attracting their like and repelling their opposites; the mixture was curdling and Galoran was too tired to add enough Nexus. Swallowing, I looked for the Logrus. There it was: forming dangerous pockets of chaos. I had heard of them. If they became too big they would become a primal chaos that destroys worlds.
“I can’t hold it any longer,” Galoran said through clenched teeth. Justin had dropped out too and was drinking from a bottle. We needed another Logrus Master, and fast. Alexander rejoined the circle and I saw him offering his blue-wind power to Galoran.
I knew a Logrus master, and he wasn’t tied up in the Major Council with the king-finding procedure either. But could I ask Gran? He would be awfully busy, ensuring the future of his House. Sereva (Adrian’s ex-fiancée and defacto ruler of Sherwyn) might help but I didn’t have a trump of her and besides, I wasn’t sure if she had walked the Logrus or not. Asking Ornach was out of the question. Taureth would be ideal to have around but he was too busy; he didn’t even have time to help me save his sister (which was why I was helping Galoran: so that I could defeat Flora to get the black-and-white trump Jasra owned).
I couldn’t think of anyone else who could handle Logrus, so Gran it had to be. The Hendrake was still out cold, tended by a kinsman.
“I know a Logrus master,” I whispered to my fellow cooks. “But I don’t know if he wants to come. I’m going to ask.”
No one took notice of me and I carefully withdrew. While I was doing that, I felt something strange. Being half in- half out of the circle allowed me to see that Justin was changing into something odd. To the eye it looked as if his body was dissolving into glowing lines of Power; pleasantly fizzy yellow strings of Corwin’s Pattern. He was also shapeshifting, moving, like had I never seen before. He was changing… on another level. Something familiar was added, something that reminded me of the old Adrian, the fun guy I drank with in Amber. It mixed with something that was alien and female, a lot like Pattern and yet not, something sentient. What had joined the circle was one and yet three, had little ego, changed colour from yellow to a light lightning blue and vanished. From a ‘distance’ I saw the creature of energy head off into the shadows, following the line of the wall we had made.
Putting off calling Gran, I went back into the circle to tell the guys what I had seen. At first I no-one could listen; everyone was too busy on a Power level to listen to actual words. So, with the fallout of the power and the psychic connection that was already there, I set up a communication web with me at its centre. That went off perfectly; I was really amazed at how well I did this. I should have made a talking-web right at the start. Now we had a forum anyone could use to contact anyone else. (Anyone except for the us-entity, the trinity that used to be Justin. They were hard to reach, being far away, emotionally weird and physically different.)
I was describing what had happened to Justin over the link when Alexander interrupted me with a warning. He showed us something swirling in the pocket of Logrus he was isolating. The piece of wall he was working on was pulsating, but Alexander did something mystical and thickened the layer of Nexus around the bubble. Now it held, but the Logrus inside matured into a tiny chaos storm. While we were watching this, a message from the us-entity came over the line:
“There. There. Boom.”
We turned our attention to the entity that used to be Justin and found another clot of chaos. Galoran sent Nexus to the spot but could not generate enough to contain it.
“We need another Logrus master,” I said. “The only one I can get to is Gran. Shall I trump him?”
Over the link, Galoran moaned:
“Time…”.
“Better idea?”
“Trump,” he said. “…Trump!”
Obediently I studied the lump of Logrus and tried to figure out where Trump came in. I could see small elements of trump dissolved into everything: it mixed well with Pattern, less so with Nexus and not at all with Logrus. The Nexus bubble Alexander was making had a rainbow shine to but I did not see how I could use that. This was one heck of a wall, never before had all these powers been combined.
“Get Myrthe,” Alexander’s voice came to me. I called Myrthe’s attention over to the chaos concentration and she started to weave her own Nexus bubble around the Logrus, taking hints from Alex. He used a link that went through me to convey the advice to Myrthe. The mind-contact aspect of it didn’t bother me; if I could handle Murlas in my mind I could handle anything.
. . . _ . . .
Alexander’s Nexus bubble looked healthy and stable. I suggested turning it into a booby-trap encased in the wall, something that would go off if the wall was tampered with. My colleagues didn’t like the idea and wanted to concentrate on keeping the wall intact. Alex said we should put the contained Logrus back into the wall. Unfortunately, Galoran was too busy to do that and the Logrus master was still out. But I could see the sense in what Alexander had said: without sufficient Logrus our wall looked brittle. Again, I asked if Gran could help. He might not come because his father’s death had put his house in major danger and put Escallwyn’s seat in the Council on the line. Galoria would have to promise Gran a big favour to make him leave the Courts of Chaos.
“That’s local politics,” Alexander grumbled.
“Taureth?” Dorian suggested. Apparently I was the only one who could use the link for full sentences.
“He’s too busy,” I explained. “He wouldn’t even help save his sister.”
Silence ensued.
“Sereva!” the entity of three called out. But Justin’s body had disappeared so I could not search his pockets for trumps.
“More Logrus!” Dorian yelled in my ear. “Now!”
I removed myself from the circle and trumped Gran.
Soon, I felt Gran’s presence. His happy, hopeful presence…
“Gran, I—“ I started to say.
Gran happily interrupted:
“You made a decision and it’s yes. Tell me it’s yes!”
If he had been here he would have hugged me.
“Shut up!” I said, angry that I wasn’t even allowed to finish a sentence. “It’s about something else. We’re in Galoria, doing a big experiment. We need a Logrus master. Soon, or else we’ve got Primal Chaos.”
Gran frowned.
“Galoria,” he said and his expression darkened. “Galoria…” He had no fond memories of the place.
I scribbled ‘Remember the Enemy?’ on my sketchpad and held it up.
Gran sighed.
“Boadice, you know what I really want to talk about.”
I held up another note.
‘Primal chaos: Yes/No’.
“What are you talking about?”
“What did I say at the start of this conversation?”
I did not want to talk about the wall-project over trump.
“Something about Galoria. I’m not interested, I don’t care about Galoria, I care about you. You would call me when you made up your mind, I want to hear your answer.”
“What, now?”
It was not fair, it was not fair that I would have to pay the price for saving Galoria, not fair that I had to buy the safety of the region with my future. Galoran should have offered Gran a price for his help, not me! I was not going to promise Gran marriage to save the wall! My heart pounded.
“I don’t know what you’re doing in Galoria,” Gran said. “They put you in prison, remember? Don’t you remember how they treated you? Did they brainwash you or something?”
“It’s not about that!”
“It is for me!”
We glared at each other for a moment, catching our breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Will you come through?”
Gran held out his hand and came to me. I tried to lead him into the ring, saying ‘this way please’, but Gran held back.
“I thought we were talking about something else.”
Gran got down on one knee and took my hand.
“Boadice, I’m asking you again: will you marry me?”
I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Not now. I would be very unhappy. But wasn’t there something I had thought of before? Just after the first time Gran asked me to marry him, I had a good idea. What was it again? Just in time, I remembered.
I stood up straight and gave Gran my other hand.
“I will set you a quest. If you fulfil it, I will marry you.”
I saw my lover’s doubtful looks and smiled at him.
“It’s not an impossible quest.”
Gran looked disappointed.
“What is it?”
The grove was unnaturally silent. The servants had frozen in place, dishes halfway to the pile, bottles hanging still over empty cups.
“Win Bleys’s respect. Then I can marry you.”
Gran accepted with a single nod and the wind was allowed to blow again.
. . . _ . . .
My fiancé got up, brushed off his knees and looked around.
“What are all those people doing here?”
“Well, what I was trying to tell you—“
“Yuk, it stinks of Pattern.”
In as few words as possible I explained what we were trying to do.
“Why are you helping Galoria?”
“Remember the Enemy with a capital E? I know you do. What we’re building is a containment field.”
“So what if the Enemy takes over Galoria?”
I sighed. “If they do, they gain a beachhead in this reality. The Enemy should be stopped here or else…” I sighed again, flapping my hands.
“If they take the primal Nexus gate, or whatever the most important point of the Nexus is called, they have a back door into every shadow with a Nexus gate. And that’s everywhere.”
“All right,” Gran said, “but then I want Monias, or who ever is king here now, to go down on his knees and offer you his apologies for the way in which they treated you. I don’t want things like that to happen to my fiancée.”
I smiled on the inside.
“That would be Myrthe. Get into the circle so we can tell her your conditions.”
I went back into the circle. Gran did not follow me so I approached Myrthe alone. She was still wrestling with her bubble of Primal chaos and without Alexander’s help, she was losing the fight. She was very inexperienced, even I could guide power better than that. Together, we worked on containing the Logrus and soon our clothes clung to our bodies with sweat. When we had a moment to spare, I said:
“We need a Logrus master.”
“I know!” Myrthe said, frustrated.
“I was able to get Gran, he wanted—“
“Oh,” she squeaked, suddenly quiet. “Gran! Is he here? Oh..!”
Amazed, I watched her crumble from a young queen into an infatuated teenager.
“Oh,” Myrthe breathed, “I knew he would come to help us…”
I pretended not to notice the change.
Right… So that was the way of things. After I found out Gran had betrayed me with Trisha, I stormed off into Overshadow. To get to Overshadow, I had to go through Tir Na-nog’th. In the city of dreams I’d had a vision of Gran running into the arms of Myrthe. At that precise moment, my ex-lover had been on a diplomatic mission in Galoria. How much of the truth had the Silver City shown me? Had Gran hit on Myrthe on the rebound? Or did she have a crush on him long before that, did they attend magic class together when they were young? Did Gran like Myrthe as much as she liked him?
And why didn’t I care more?
“The problem is,” I said, “he only wants to help if the current king…”
That wasn’t right. Try again.
“You know how I was treated after they captured Estefan and me? The case of Galoria versus Boadice of Amber?”
“I heard a little about that, yes,” Myrthe said, still a dewy eyed girl instead of the woman she should be. I tried to be gentle.
“Well, Galoria kind of did me serious injustice, and Gran only wants to help if… the king or queen of Galoria offers me her apologies. On her knees.”
I checked the lines, no one was listening in. Unfortunately, Myrthe wasn’t listening either.
“Oh, yes, ehm…” she said, ‘looking’ around her, trying to sense if Gran had joined the ring. “I’ll have to speak with Gran about that. But this bubble here…”
She tried to hand me the bubble but I refused to take it, keeping my ‘mental hands’ behind my back.
“Boadice, would you hold this bubble for me for a moment? Please?”
Myrthe still wasn’t paying attention to me, aching to be gone.
“Myrthe, did you hear what I just said?”
The chaos in the Nexus bubble started swirling again and I asked Alexander to take over, please. He did and Myrthe and I left the circle.
As soon as she was free, Myrthe ran up to Gran and threw her arms around his neck.
“Oh Gran, it’s been so long!”
Gran grinned, embarrassed, and over her shoulder threw glances at me. I just smirked and waited for them to part. That took a while. Gran patted Myrthe’s shoulders while she snuggled contentedly against his breast.
“It’s so wonderful that you dropped by,” she said. “And that you’ve come to help us. So nice!”
“You know how I am,” Gran said, keeping a worried eye on me. “Of course I’m glad to be of service. It’s no trouble at all.”
“So you’re dropping your original demands?” I asked Gran.
“Ehm, no. No, ehm… It’s just a misunderstanding, Boadice. Myrthe and I will settle this, okay?”
Gran took his admirer a couple of yards away from the group and talked to her, earnestly by the look of it, holding her hands. How wonderful. A dramatic little love triangle against the backdrop of universe-shattering powers. It was just as well that the others could not see Myrthe make a fool of herself while they worked to keep her empire safe. Soon, Gran and Myrthe returned.
“Myrthe had very little to do with it, you know?” Gran said, meaning my incarceration in Galoria and the subsequent trial. “Would you agree with her just offering her apologies, without her being on her knees?”
I didn’t mind. In fact, I had planned on being magnanimous and going down on my knees as well if Gran had demanded a kneeling apology from Myrthe. Too bad I couldn’t do that now, it would have made me look very good.
Myrthe nodded, looked me in the eye and earnestly offered me her apologies on behalf of the Kingdom of Galoria for the way they treated me the last time I was there.
“That’s very nice,” I said, “But it doesn’t count if no-one’s there to hear it. I’m very sorry but—“
I checked myself. If you draw the last drop from the tankard you’ll get the lid on your nose. I was already one and a half apologies ahead, with the one Murlas gave me and the one Dorian offered the entire family. With most of the rest of the second generation either on zero or one-down, this would put me on two-and-a-bit, and I could afford to be generous. People would hear of it soon enough.
“O never mind,” I said and hugged her.
. . . _ . . .
The price paid, Gran joined the circle. I would rather he had asked for something that would assure his future place in the Major Council but Gran has to make his own decisions. The first thing he did after studying the situation was keeping his Logrus presence well away from the Pattern. Gran was a more experienced Logrus master than the Hendrake. When I linked him into the communication grid, he set to work. The three-entity that used to be Justin still wasn’t back. I could feel it working on the wall but it was far away.
“Primal chaos,” Gran muttered over the general line so everyone could hear him.
“Tough… Extinguish…?”
For a moment nothing happened. Then he said:
“Boadice, trump!”
“Should I make the Pattern more flexible with Trump?” I asked. I didn’t know what I had to do.
“Boa,” came Galoran’s voice. “Trump! Move!”
“Transport!”
“Trump the Primal Chaos to somewhere else?” I asked, nervous. How should I do that?
“Or give it back to you for redistribution?”
No answer came. I had to trump the primal chaos away from here. I knew how to do that; I could push it through a trump gate but I only could make trump gates to places of which I had a trump memorised. And which of them could withstand an injection of primal chaos?
Amber was out: I had plenty of places memorised in Amber but using those would get me excommunicated. Chaos was out too: Ornach would fire my ass faster than you could say ‘criminal incompetence’. For a moment I considered dropping the Chaos in Ornach’s waste disposal shadow but even that place wasn’t strong enough. Sherwyn then? Justin and Corwin would not thank me for it. Escallwyn Ways? Frewar had no Logrus and no way to get to a Logrus Master in time. That left Ygg and he was sentient and defenceless.
Suddenly I remembered. Only a few days ago I had made another one, a trump of a place three shadows removed from the Keep of the Four Worlds. Alexander and I were going to use it to trump-gate the army as close to the Keep as possible. Perhaps, if I dropped the primal chaos there, it would even do us some good! Flora certainly would not expect that. In fact it would be perfect! I had no emotional ties to the area, it was far away from my own shadows and from Cardane where Dorian keeps his children. And if things got really out of hand there was a Nexus master nearby to mop up the mess. I grinned to myself. Oh boy would Flora be pissed. And Jasra too… Let’s see how they liked a Keep of the Three Worlds…
. . . _ . . .
So I did it. I build a trump gate, took the Nexus bubbles they gave me and tossed them through the gate. Once out of our shadow, they burst like water balloons. It took extra effort to steady the trump gate but it worked. Alexander and Myrthe wrapped the Chaos Clots in Nexus and handed them to me while Gran, Galoran, Dorian and the returned (and normal-again) Justin stabilised what was left of the wall.
It took the better part of two hours before all the Logrus lumps were removed. That left our wall a little brittle and tottering. We went back to the building the wall like we did before, except that now I also kept the communication going and Gran took the place of the ex-Hendrake. After a couple of hours we had the wall up to the height it was before I got hungry. Still, everyone except Dorian was tired. Myrthe was swaying on her feet.
“Nap time,” I signalled over the link. “We can’t go on like this.”
“Pause,” Dorian said to Galoran but Galoran did not know if that was possible.
“Go on,” Alexander said. Our wall still wasn’t high enough. In fact it was rather pathetic.
“Go on.”
“But how high should we make it?” Galoran asked. No one answered and we went on working. After an infinity of hard labour we had a wall that was five or six feet high.
Galoran could not take much more and we planned to let Alexander, Myrthe and me take over for a minute. We could only support what was already there without building, that way Galoran and the rest could get a break.
It didn’t work.
Holding up the wall by ourselves was like holding back a tidal wave with a plank. In five or ten minutes we were as tired as if we had worked for several more hours. Then, mercifully, Galoran came back and brought the wall back to normal. It was clear we could not go on. Finally we decided that Justin would help ‘lock’ the construct with Corwin Pattern, like leaving the needles in a half-knit sweater. Only he or Corwin could remove those so it should be relatively safe. Galoran was just rested enough to ‘tie off the other ends’ and then we all collapsed.
. . . _ . . .
Tired as we were, no one could resist checking up on our wall before retiring. It stood, but that was all that could be said for it. It wasn’t quite stable; after a while we could see that it moved. It did not stay in place in shadow, but it was as slow as a glacier so it would be centuries before that became a problem. Inside the mystic fabric of the wall things weren’t still either. The Logrus elements kept trying to draw together, we had succeeded in establishing only a tentative balance. Galoran frowned and Justin asked him something I did not catch.
“No,” Galoran answered, “but I had hoped it would stay stable for a little longer.”
“And that we could have made it a little higher,” Dorian said. Our wall was a little under six feet high.
“We could have made it higher,” Galoran said but he was pale. “But it’s… If I think of the amount of energy that would cost… And it hasn’t even been tested yet. Not against Power. I felt no pressure from the Tower yet. It may hold now, but…”
I found two leftover sandwiches on a platter in the grass. They were squashed and soggy but I ate them anyway.
“How risky would it be to have Janice test the barrier?” Alexander asked. “She has the power of the Towers. It could give us an indication.”
Janice shook her head and said she did not think that would be wise, because it might wake up the tower we were trying to isolate.
“And I have no idea what kind of alarms I would set off.”
“It was only an idea,” Alexander muttered.
“It was a good idea,” Justin said. I turned to look at him. Had the brothers made up? But no, Justin is not Adrian. Adrian is dead.
“Then we should protect it with conventional means,” Alexander said, indicating the army outside the grove with a twitch of his hand.
“We should get on with that,” Galoran said.
Someone touched my arm and I looked up. It was Dorian. Quietly, he asked me where I had left the Logrus bubbles.
“Well,” I said, “Remember I told you about Flora and the Keep of the Four Worlds?”
Dorian nodded.
“I dropped the Logrus a couple of shadows from the Keep, in the place where I had planned to bring in my army. I used the trump of that spot for waste disposal. The alternative was Ygg, and he’s sentient.”
“No, okay,” Dorian said. “But you know that Primal Chaos just keeps on growing the more it consumes?”
I didn’t.
“Gosh.”
“You know that usually, someone should be around to contain it?”
I didn’t know that. I never got that far in World Shattering Powers For Beginners. But things weren’t that bad. I said:
“Flora is there and she has Nexus. It’s her problem now.”
Dorian looked pensive, then shook his head.
“I wonder… No never mind.”
“What were you wondering?”
“Well, it’s… No. I just wouldn’t use that trump again if I were you.”
I most certainly would not. It looks like, metaphorically, I took the burning cigarette off the carpet and threw it out the window, right into the haystack. A bucket of water would not douse this fire but at least the house had not burned down.
“Flora’s there,” I said. “It was the lesser of several evils.”
Those sounded like famous last words but I was too tired to care. The nine of us parted with a friendly nod and crawled off to a quiet place to sleep.
. . . _ . . .
To be continued…
