Umber

Tenser directs the adventurers to a mysterious island where years ago he was forced to abandon the Crook of Rao, now Oerth’s best hope for curing the disease rampaging across it.

“Even dogs stop turning in circles,” Willie complained when Brin stirred restlessly again.

“You’re not exactly a model of repose yourself, you know,” she retorted. The sky shaman in the lone friendly village they’d found on the mad demigod Zagyg’s island playground – and its friendship won only by slaying a prehistoric psionic monster and returning with its massive head – had shown them a place to rest, but rest was coming hard to both Brin and Willie.

The weasel’s bright black eyes were peevish. “Too long without Hadrack for you.”

“Ah yes,” she said bitterly. “My phylactery of morality – the place that I go to visit my hidden humanity from time to time when I need to remind myself that it’s still there.”

“Not true or you’d be calm now. You want to see harmony here.”

“Order,” she corrected him.

“Two faces, not so different.”

“I suppose we don’t need to argue over semantics – whichever it is, I’m not likely to get it. These people are so – ignorant, and where they’re not ignorant they’re arrogant. As for me, I’m no Clement, or even Ammitai. People don’t exactly jostle one another to follow in my footsteps.”

Willie reached up with his nose and tapped the skull mask that obscured all but her eyes. “Doesn’t help.”

“Really? I didn’t notice much difference, after I started wearing it.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why I’m letting it bother me. We came for the Crook of Rao, we should just get it and leave them to their mess. It isn’t as if we created it.”

“Could make it worse, though. May already have,” he pointed out. “You think.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she sighed. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“First,” he said. “Then you.”

“We’ll see.”

His whiskers twitched downward into something like a frown, but he said, “The steel men threatening Corwin.”

“From Mechanus?” That had been an unpleasant surprise, finding herself trapped in a force cage with Corwin, a Marut to either side. They gave him a week to correct his “transgression,” and only that long because he traveled with a priestess of their ally Wee Jas, then vanished. It didn’t take an archmage’s brain to guess what the transgression was, either.

She was beginning to question the wisdom of her conviction, which Vayel seemed to share with equal fervor, that more information was better than less when walking into an unknown situation. What had it gotten them lately? Spears and attack birds, mostly. And after they’d defeated the “tyrant,” as the sky shaman called him, that overgrown reptile with jaws and belly big enough to swallow both Ammitai and Vayel whole, in the name of information they’d jumped through the water at the top of the ziggurat from which it had emerged, only to find themselves in – what was it, anyway? A physical representation of Zagyg’s mind? More like being caught in an avalanche.

Rather to her amazement they all managed to dodge the small projectiles that hurtled toward them with apparent ill will. Ammitai thought they would merely eject them from the strange space they had entered, but Brin wasn’t so sure of that. She was even less certain when Dryden vanished from their sight after touching one of the larger spheres. Ammitai tried to follow, reaching toward a different sphere when the one Dryden had touched proved unresponsive. He disappeared as well, and the telepathic link she and the paladin shared was broken.

It was the cursed desire for information that impelled her to reach out for a third. It turned out all right, the first time at least, for all of them: cryptic messages, unlocked power, for Vayel a pair of large simian eyes – Oonga’s they supposed – gazing curiously at her across a void. And she, Vayel and Ammitai left well enough alone. But Corwin and Dryden…always reaching for more, those two: Corwin for straightforward power, Dryden for something – mastery perhaps. And was that anything other than power as well? “All it ever comes down to, in the end,” she murmured.

“Jungle and jungle people hurt your eyes,” Willie said as though she had spoken all of her thoughts aloud. “Don’t see clearly here.”

Not seeing clearly, not thinking clearly…she and Dinadel could ward off the oppressive heat with spells to protect the body, but what about the mind? Hers felt sweltering, swollen inside the skull inside the flesh inside the skull…she laughed at that, but it was a manic thing, and Willie nipped her softly.

“I’m all right,” she reassured him. “Just tired. Lingering effects of the shaman’s fire. Something like that.”

But is Dryden? she wondered. He returned a second time from a sphere less empty. A free reward from Zagyg for the tyrant’s brave slayers, but for a second helping you must pay. Dryden returned, drained but victorious, with his tale of an oath sworn and and an intellect devour defeated, but who is the teller of the tale? The victor emerged, but was it really Dryden? It is what they do, after all. Do we know? Do I know?

“The jungle hurts,” Willie repeated. “You know.”

And Corwin…Corwin went in, Corwin came out, and there was no doubt he wasn’t the same. Gwydion’s silver sword was perverted to the psions’ ends, and like everything they touch made weaker, but this githyanki’s sword was not. Corwin may have defeated the gith, claimed the sword, shaped it to his will, but it has just as surely done the same to him.

“Steel men.” Willie brought her back to his present concerns. “Tenser said no magic traveling.”

“You’re wondering how the Marut got here then.” The weasel’s head bobbed up and down in a nod. “Well, in the first place, they’re called Inevitables for a reason. I suspect they’re even more alert to paths of interplanar travel than creatures like the Black. Certainly I’ve never heard of anywhere they can’t reach. Besides, it would be very much like Tenser to assume that because he can’t come and go from a place, neither can anyone else. But this is the mad demigod Zagyg’s island – he’s not a being who believes in rules, and being a deity he can retain or discard whatever he likes.”

“I see. But steel men,” he repeated. “Corwin undead?”

She stared at him in confusion for a moment, then laughed. “Oh, you’re thinking of liches. No, Corwin isn’t undead, he is – for the moment, at least – both an elf and a githyanki.” And that had been more of a shock than Corwin’s possessing another silver sword, which was shock enough, him emerging from the sphere taller, more gaunt, the pattern of freckling along his face delineating his new racial affinity with dismaying clarity. “The Marut usually hunt those who cheat death, like liches, but certainly being more than one race simultaneously is an aberration of life. Their charter might reasonably be extended to include it. I don’t think it comes up very often.”

“Choosing?”

“Yes, he must choose one or the other. The sky shaman is helping with that right now, I believe.”

“Not both?”

“Not if he doesn’t want the Marut on his back for the rest of his not entirely natural life. And much as it might pain me, if they returned I wouldn’t be able to help him.”

“Not friend?”

“Of course he’s my friend. But the Inevitables represent Justice, and I can’t lay that aside for personal feeling.”

“Didn’t turn in to Dunthrane,” he pointed out.

“That was different. The scheme Hadrack and Legifer – or whoever was behind it – cooked up to insert Corwin into Grenell’s command chain wasn’t justice, it was expediency, subterfuge. They didn’t even want us to turn him in. But when a Marut or a Kolyarut comes calling, it isn’t playing games for political advantage.”

“Choose elf?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. Where the body goes, the nature might follow, and a githyanki traveling with us…” she shuddered. “They breathe chaos.”

“Law is not always good,” he chirped.

She grinned and scratched him behind the ears. “Less so, perhaps, for men – and weasels – with good hearts, although I’ll deny I ever said that if you tell anyone. But a man like Corwin, freed from the constraints of the rule of law? I think that would be a dangerous thing. I trust his word, and his sense of honor, but if he were to forsake those, what would be left? Rule of law,” she sighed, “the thing that’s been abandoned here.”

“Not your responsibility to put it back.”

“No? Natives reject our gauntleted hand of friendship and I yank the ground out from under them. If that’s justice, Hadrack should have dropped a flamestrike on my head when we met again at the Three Feathers. He offered me his affection and I tried to use him. You could argue I bore an even greater weight of guilt, because I knew he was benevolent.”

“Jungle people thought stronger. Not wise to let them think. And can’t talk to spears,” Willie scolded.

“I suppose not,” she said gloomily. “But still…this situation is all wrong.”

“Psions corrupt everything.”

“They certainly haven’t helped matters by conducting their experiments here. But these people were divided before the psions came. And once they weren’t. I keep coming back to that. When they were a whole people, it seems they would summon Oonga. Voluntarily. It’s not as if he were some rampaging monster who threatened to lay waste to their village unless they offered him virgins. Don’t summon him, don’t see him. So he must have done something for them. And now they’ve forgotten. Or the sky shaman knows and isn’t telling.”

“Don’t believe that.”

“No, I’m not sure I believe that either. But if Oonga was somehow a helpful or at least necessary presence why did the Grandfather, as the sky shaman calls him, run the risk of corrupting the summoning ritual by sundering it? Were his people already fragmenting and he hoped it would keep them together? Or did he hasten their decline by creating three factions proud of their secret and greedier to keep it than to share it?”

“Mystery,” Willie suggested, his black eyes piercing.

“Thank you for quoting my own precept back to me,” she said a little irritably. “But I have a nagging fear that the solution to this mystery may matter to us.”

“Why? Have ritual pieces. Open Oonga gate, take Crook, go.”

“You’re forgetting Zagyg. Tenser, Robilar and company weren’t hedgewizards and little boys playing with wooden swords. And they still ended up fleeing to the Prime Material naked, and grateful they still had skins if not clothes. Fight the tyrant,” she mused, “win a carnival prize. What do we need to do to win the Crook of Rao?”

“Fight Oonga?”

“I can’t say I have any real desire to fight a psionic ape who apparently makes that reptile we killed look like a child’s doll. And if he has a place in the natural order here, a function, some important relationship to the natives, then we shouldn’t kill him.”

“What natural order?” Willie asked. “Ruined by jungle people. Ruined by psions. Only chaos.”

She rubbed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “I know. That’s what disturbs me. Rao is the god of peace and reason, both in dismally short supply here. Suppose to win the Crook we have to restore them?”

“Zagyg’s island, you said, not Rao’s. Mad god cares about reason?”

“I don’t know. I’m probably wrong. We’ll end up killing Oonga, taking the Crook by force, waiting out our month on the island for Tenser and his boat and letting the natives here go back to killing each other. Maybe the sky shaman will take Corwin up on his offer to leave, maybe he won’t. Maybe we’ll take away those psionically infected weapons the psions left with the cave people, so the cannibals can wipe them out. Maybe we’ll leave them behind, and eventually they’ll wipe out the cannibals. It won’t matter to us. We’ll return to the Prime Material and heal Oerth so its people can go back to killing each other. And Corwin will talk to bards, and the bards will call us heroes.”

“Circling mind not good,” Willie said. “Think less. Jungle hurts.”

She saw Willie shiver beneath his thick coat of fur and ran her fingers along his back. “The jungle hurts you, too.” She had managed to throw off the effects of the disease today, but he hadn’t. “We’ll fix it in the morning, again. You shouldn’t have to go through all this. You should have stayed on Oerth. Why didn’t you? Why don’t you, if we ever make it back?”

“Where to go?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Anywhere you like. Back to Svengali, stay with Meepo – I’m sure he’d love to have you – or go live, I don’t know, a normal weasel’s life.”

“Few men heroes. Yes?”

“Yes,” she replied, perplexed, “I suppose that’s true.”

“Fewer weasels, still. Where to go?” He touched his nose to the back of her neck, and though the spell to ward off the heat gave her some protection it still felt blessedly cold. “Used to heroes.”

She smiled at him affectionately. “Try to rest. I will too. I promise.”