Sometime during the night my sister had died. I wasn't too upset, because it had happened every night for the last eight years, but it still tends to give me a stomach ache. Especially on nights when I'm not sure whether it's really Rasoïf dying…we do look awfully similar. Someone was knocking at the door now, and I wondered in the vague, musing way I have of a morning why I could never remember any Poe when I wanted to quote. Of course, the door they were knocking on was at least a room away (it's nice to be well connected), and it was really more of a "thudding" than a tapping, but still, my fallible memory was irritating. Irritated is a bad way to start a day, so I stayed in bed and pretended I didn't hear. Soon enough, I was sound asleep again.
Instead of visions of sugarplums, I had a very strange dream about being yelled at by my least favorite relative (an aunt who likes nothing better than taking her ego problems out on me), while having snow shoveled on me by what I could swear was an escalator with arms. Then my mother told me that I had better stop messing around with "those people" (by which I could only assume she meant the aunt and the escalator) and get my ass back home to finish this cup of coffee. Apparently it had taken her great trouble to make and would be spoiled if allowed to get cold. For a while I could not figure out what bothered me about that, until I realised with relief that it was impossible to get coffee in Ildiri. I tried telling Mother this, but she only screamed at me about taking responsibility for things. So I threw my cup of coffee at her and she resolved into a puddle of lava, which crystallised almost instantly because of all the stupid snow.
I was almost sorry to be woken by the near-frantic banging on my door. I got up, draped a robe around me, and struggled to get it closed while still navigating my shutter-darkened apartments. To the great chagrin of the servant who was sweating nervously in the hallway, I failed miserably. "Um, La-um…" "Please, just your business, no honorifics, no stuttering, no unnecessary keeping me from being asleep." Or at least, that's what I intended to say, my Thari is bad and I might very well have instructed her to put her business in her honorific and shove it. She stuttered a little more, and then I got bored of her and shut the door in her face, because sometimes, being an asshole can be fun. But before I could get naked and get back in bed I was interrupted by a moment of detachment, a microcosm of surreality, a faint tingling sensation, and the all too un-ghostly apparition of a very irritated uncle.
"I realise," and his voice dripped acid, "that you of all people need your beauty sleep, but in case you haven't looked out your windows recently, we're in crisis time." I wasn't sure that I had ever looked out of my windows, but I didn't tell him this. "And we've only been trying to wake you for an hour now. So, if you don't mind, get your ass down to this library now." He raised his hand, and then stopped himself, "Oh, and for the love of fuck's sake, put some clothes on."
Then he cut out, leaving me grumbling about pushy monarchs and Demosthenes. I opened the shutters. What? It seemed a logical thing to do, if I was to arrive at least somewhat informed. I could get a look at our crisis while I dressed.
Of course, I hadn't expected to literally be able to see the problem out the window. The trouble was, it was difficult pretending that nothing was wrong with all that ash raining from the sky. And what happened to a tranquil view of one of the many inconveniently situated but very pretty gardens? What stretched out for a good distance below my window was the plant equivalent of a very efficient, perhaps even nuclear, bombing. Something had turned the gardens of the palace of Amber into massive expanses of desiccated husks, and ash was falling from a sky so black it made my heart ache. Hellfire and damnation, the sun had been just fine when I went to bed. Please, it's not that I'm slothful, really, I was just having a bad week.
I left my rooms at a dead run leaving door, window, and wardrobe open, shoeless, and without so much as throwing pants over my newly donned leotard. I nearly threw myself head first through the library door when I found it closed, but I hadn't put enough effort into it, and all I did was hurt my head. Badly. There was even a slight trickle of blood down the bridge of my nose, which I displayed ruefully to yet a third semi-sibling of my mother's when he opened the door to my unintentional knock. "I always knew this door had a violent streak," Corwin chuckled as he gave me a hand up. Normally the joke might have irritated me, but it was good to know that at least someone could keep their sense of humour at a time like this.
If Random had put out the call to the whole family, then I certainly was not the last one to arrive. I counted six heads in the room, including myself, out of nine resident relatives. Oh, yeah, and Vialle, who I don't count, simply because I like her far better than anyone I'm blood-kin to, and don't want to have to count her with that lot. Even if she had the bad taste to marry into it. Her husband, of course, was the one in the middle of the room having a cross between a bitch-fit and a panic attack. Not that I really blamed him, for what was that was happening outside our windows was going to be blamed on him, and there was no avoiding it. It's good to be the king.
You know how they say it's amazing what you can do when you don't know you can't? It's amazing what you can endure when you forget you're supposed to be in pain. If Corwin hadn't glanced quizzically at my bandages when rescuing me from the floor and my own idiocy, I might never have remembered that I had shattered my shin so badly that a fragment of the bone had pierced the skin. Fresh blood had saturated the bandages, and as soon as I saw it, the pain came back to me. It wasn't going to kill me, and it had hurt far worse when it had broken, but it put so successful a damper on my panic that I was even induced to think rationally for a moment. But only a moment, because that brief flash of rational thought slid me quickly into anger and frustration as I remembered exactly why it was that I was about to spend at least an hour listening to my relatives bicker uselessly about something out of a nightmare which they all suspected each other (and me) to be complicit in. I was standing here, in excruciating pain, dizzy from a blow to the head, because they each and every one of them wanted all the kin they could lay hands on somewhere they could watch them. Jerks, I was going to do something about this nonsense. I sat down.
The realization was followed by five or ten minutes of sulking, in which I thought little, heard less, and said nothing. Eventually fear cut through again, and the combination of the two un-reasons was almost reasonable. Why, I asked myself, continuing to ignore the faux civility being tossed back and forth above, was I so afraid? Surely, the scene outside was dreadful, but hardly terrifying. Mystifying, alright, depressing, even tragic, but not terrifying. It came to me slowly. I had "seen" this calamity before. I had heard of these things from my father as an infant, from teachers in each phase of my dance training, from the head of the Court of the Dance the day they confirmed my status as All'decani. I had heard it from Ramero as… but I did not need to think of Ramero to understand my fear. It is an old, old tale, one which dancers of the Alluran, the great dance,must learn as part of the dance teaching, it is the tale of the Alluvar, the hated dance, and the one woman who has ever danced it. A knot formed in my stomach; call me a traitor, but when I thought the word Alluvaris my sister's face came to me. No, no. I would know if Raso was an Alluvaris, I had only thought of her because of those drawings…
"Not that anyone particularly cares what I think, but I don't suppose any of you knows a practicing Alluranis?" I said it very quietly, and it had occurred to none of them that I might speak, and so I thought at first that no one had heard me, which was perfectly alright by me. Some one among them managed to calm emotions enough that those among them who feel the need to physically express nerves agreed at last to sit. It was something, but it was a very little thing.
I recognise how childish I sound in caricaturing the family so harshly. They have reasons to be as they are, valid reasons, if not good ones. I had my own reasons to be venomous and irritable, though. The first you know: my injury. The pain tended to make me short of temper, sour of mood, snappish and, as I said before, unreasonable.
As for the second, I thought they could only be wasting their time and their efforts. Looking around the room, I saw a group of people singularly immune to the blame for this catastrophe. Don't think me a fool, the best of them are people I wouldn't trust to hold my drink at a party, let alone my life in their hands, but I was certain that the destruction being wreaked on Amber as we spoke had not originated with any of them.
Random's
guiltlessness was evident, as not even the craziest (or stupidest) person in Amber,
Chaos, or anywhere between would cause himself that sort of migraine. He had gotten very quiet, had drifted slightly from the neat square of
chairs his siblings had taken, and now sat looking forlornly into the bottom of
a scotch. I suspect that, despite the
obvious competence he has displayed as a monarch and (amazingly enough) a
person, he still has something of an inferiority complex to work through when
it comes to family.
To my right, struggling
valiantly but vainly to look cool and composed was Bleys. Bleys was one of those who preferred to put
worry, strain, enthusiasm, etc. into motion: he paced, he gesticulated, he did
not, in short, sit still very well. I am
under the impression that he wasn't always like that, but then you see, someone
threw him off a mountain, and his brother went stark raving mad and tried, in
the best show of comic-super-villaininess the real world has ever known, to
destroy the world and remake it in his own image....And there was that business
with Chaos and strange demons thronging in all sorts of places one wouldn't
expect strange demons to be.
Apparently all of this affected Bleys quite badly, in some respects. Still, he might have been involved in something of this ilk. I am a great believer in bad blood, after all, it may say something that that least favourite and most egomaniacal of all my relations is Bleys' and (yes, I'll say it, and 'speak of the devil' be damned) Brand's full sister.
I
didn't know Bleys well enough to judge his culpability on character, but I did
know him well enough to say, without a doubt in my mind that he'd nothing to do
with it. If he had, he'd not have been
sitting there. He'd have gone for cover
by then. Hell, it amazed me that he was
still around as it was. He tended to go
to ground when things get rough in Amber (which, in my eight years of acquaintance
with the place, had not been too frequent an occurrence).
Then, of course, there was
Fiona. Now, as far as sheer capacity,
Fiona was suspect. The woman was eerily
able at just about everything she'd ever tried.
I hated Fiona enough that I'd've loved to implicate her. It just wouldn't work. She was, and I say this with the whole family
in mind, the mistress of
intrigue. Her methods are exaggeratedly
complicated, elegant, subtle, staged.
Raining ashen death over the city just wasn't her style.
Beyond Fiona, separated from each other by a bottle of something and their glasses, were Corwin and Flora. Flora was and is incompetent. If she knew something, it would come out soon enough, and she had not been a direct cause of this. She could not have been.
And say what you like about Corwin, he was not behind this. I would be less surprised to watch him calmly and purposelessly gnaw off his own right hand than to learn that he had so much as speculated about considering the tiniest possibility of doing something that might endanger Amber. Again.
Then there was Julian. Ah, Julian. Folks, when I say I distrust Julian as much as the rest of them, it means something different. You don't trust your neighbour's German Shepherd not to break into your garden and maul your child, but you damn well trust her to do her job. Julian's job was protecting Amber, and he'd do it.
I'd have said the same for Caine, but Caine was not there. Nor was Benedict, nor Gérard. Noteworthy absences, and I suspected that Benedict had come to similar conclusions to mine, and chosen to do something useful instead of wasting his time with us jokers. Gérard might very well be with him, or, at least, on the same page. Perhaps Gérard was organising riot control. I felt a brief flash of affection for Benedict and Gérard. They made twice as much sense as anyone else in this crazy family, excepting perhaps Del', and Del' was far away and utterly disinterested, not only in the affairs of Amber, but in most affairs. Not that he is lackadaisical, rather, impartial a completely different species from the rest of us.
And of course, despite how far-fetched it seemed, I could not shake the ghost of the Alluvar. To be Alluvarsis, one first had to understand the Alluran, and the though of any of these people being outliftedwas ludicrous. I was being ridiculous, I was being-
Looked at by most, if not all of them. I wonder, sometimes, if they're even capable of looking in the same direction all at once. Quick, Piro, say something to suggest you've been paying attention. "Um, hello?" I ventured. "Well, what of it?" Random demanded.
I blinked rapidly and tried to pretend I wasn't wishing them all away. "What of what?" I asked, weakly, opening my eyes to find most of them still looking at me. My leg hurt badly, and I was once again on the verge of panic. Fiona cleared her throat and gave me a very prettily executed pained look. "You asked," she said, slowly, clearly, and condescendingly, leaning forward in her chair so she could turn to face me, "if any of us knew an Alluranis. Well, it so happens that we, all of us, do know such a person. So, perhaps, you could explain yourself?"
I didn't even bother to wonder how many of them knew what we were talking about. I stifled a groan, because I could see all too clearly that Fiona was loving this. She hates not knowing things, and I'd managed to keep her in the dark about just about everything about me for eight years. She would drag it out as far as she could, collecting every slur and evasion for later inspection. She would catch her lovely, evil fingers in my past and I would never again know just how much she knew.
There was nothing for it but to cross my fingers and attack the loophole. "I asked if you knew a practicing Alluranis. In case you hadn't noticed," and here I raised my injured leg as high as I could from a sitting position, despite discovering with disgust that my whole body was shaking, "I'm incapacitated. I can't take step one of the great dance." I dropped the limb unceremoniously and winced as it cracked smartly against the leg of the chair.
"That doesn't quite answer my question, Piroin." Damn. Fiona caught my eyes and I let her hold them, contemplating the delightful feeling I'd get from slamming something heavy across the back of her skull until she promised never to say the name my father gave me again. "Well?"