Extracts from the Journal of

Chapter II
HMS Unicorn’s Flight, 118 PPF

Crimine ab uno, disce omnis (From one crime, learn the nature of them all)

- Virgil

ermission, contrary I think to all our expectations, was forthcoming. The Trump contact swam into focus before our eyes, and then swam a little more, the reason being that we were staring into a dim and murky submarine scene. The Unicorn's Flight had been forcibly relocated to the bottom of the sea, and at some considerable depth too. We could make out a few indistinct objects floating about, and the hull in the background seemed to have been torn open - not battered in by cannon- or catapult-fire, but wrenched and twisted. We contemplated the sight in silence for a moment. Things did not look overly bright for Gerard. They didn't look enormously convenient for us either if we wanted to be able to poke around. Nevertheless, I made the suggestion. "If we could pass someone through long enough for them to get a feel of the Shadow," I said, "then we'd at least be able to find the place ourselves." Tristan grabbed an orange from the fruit bowl on the table, and pushed it through the link. It was immediately crushed by the pressure of the water. "I'll go," said Altair, who evidently considered citrus fruit to be poor experimental models for a Princess of Amber. "I can survive that," she added, just to make the temptation of fate complete. "It might be wise," opined the ever-prudent Ibrahim, "to acquire a pressure chamber, and to pressurise before going through." Wisdom and prudence, however, lost out to haste and expedience, since none of us particularly felt like a shopping break. Altair, a mere Trump away from finding out whether her missing father was alive or dead, was especially impatient. "Then I will risk it as well," the no-longer-quite-so-prudent Ibrahim volunteered. "The rest of us should Trump them as soon as they go through to the ship," said Tamarind, a sensible suggestion, since the cabin sketch would be a door that swung but one way. A lengthy reconnaissance seemed to be in the offing, rather than just a quick sampling of the local qualitas umbrarum, as Altair ordered the assemblage of an assortment of ropes, lumps of wood, sturdy glass floats and half-inflated airbags. She and Ibrahim stood around for a couple of minutes hyperventilating, whilst passing a brandy bottle back and forth, and then we passed them through, roped together, into the ruptured belly of the flagship. I kept one hand on the sketch so that I could still observe as I shuffled out my Trumps. I had been planning to Trump Ibrahim, but I saw him make a couple of mystic passes as he arrived in the sunken stateroom, and decided that he probably wouldn't appreciate having his protective spells brought down by a sudden surge of Trump energy. I palmed Altair's card instead, and took one last look at the scene before dropping out of the link to concentrate on establishing one of my own. Our two explorers seemed to have bobbed their way over to a body, which fortunately looked too small to be Gerard's. The two of them had swum free of the vessel and were on their way to the surface by the time I got through. "We're OK," said Altair in response to my first question, and then pre-empted my second with "But there's not much ship left." She glanced down into the depths beneath her. "The whole stern's crushed," she said, "Like it's been in the coils of a sodding great snake. Or a sea serpent." I passed this observation on to the others, remembering as I did her earlier question about a possible Great Old One connection. As far as I was aware, the denizens of R'lyeh were still asleep and dreaming about turning up late for school without any slime, or whatever it is that star-spawned polypi dream about, but if their astronomical alarm clock had gone off, then I couldn't see them being wildly pleased at finding a somewhat damp "Removed for Conservation" card in place of their non-Euclidean frescoes. Making off with cargoes of luxury goods seemed an odd way of retaliating, but on the other hand, their aeon-long slumber had also saddled them with an awful lot of water damage, and those kinds of home repairs cost money. Altair and Ibrahim gained the surface before this train of thought became completely derailed in whimsy. Ibrahim seemed slightly the worse for nitrogen narcosis, but Altair was bearing him up. The sky, from what I could see, was a rather pustulant yellow-grey, slightly overcast, and the sea in which they were bobbing about was the drab unsaturated green of a hospital wall. There appeared to be a few bits and bobs of debris floating on the surface, but otherwise the watery expanse appeared to be unbroken. "They've reached the surface," I told the others. "Good," said Tristan, "Let's go through to them." What? Oh, all right, I could see the plan here. We left Caleb in charge of the ship that no-one was supposed to know about, and first Tristan, and then Tamarind, and then myself splashed through to Altair. The water was cold. This was the point where Tristan either summoned Corvallin tout de suite, or suffered a severe ducking. Fortunately for him, a large silver castle soon detached itself from the ragged grey clouds, and swooped down towards us, a boarding ramp extending from the main barbican. We swam over and clambered aboard. "Well," said Tristan, as servants brought towels and dressing gowns and steaming cups of hot cocoa, one of which I fortified from my hip flask, "we still seem to be in the Golden Circle. Time flow's a little faster than Amber, though, maybe ten percent." "We're on the path between Derima and Fendir," said Altair authoritatively. So the Unicorn's Flight had gone down immediately on arrival in the area Gerard had wanted to investigate, suggesting that the culprits had either been in no particular hurry to move on after their last haul of booty, or more worryingly, that they had been waiting for him. Altair and Ibrahim quickly reported their findings. The entire stern section of the ship had been torn off, they told us, and they hadn't been able to see the rest of the vessel, although it was presumably down there somewhere. They had found a couple of dead crew-members, but no immediate sign of Gerard himself. A quick consensus was reached regarding our next move - we would dive down to the wreck again and perform a complete search, plus what forensic analysis we could. Tristan took us down to Corvallin's voluminous cellars, where he claimed to have deep-sea diving gear and air pumps in storage. Concentrating briefly on the Pattern, he also claimed that it was likely that he had a diving bell hidden away somewhere in one of the less used storerooms. "Can you do that in your own Castle?" asked Tamarind, as Tristan's probability manipulation bore fruit behind a large, cobwebbed door. "Oh, I tell my servants to load up with random junk every so often," he said, "That way I can make it likely that I've got pretty much anything down here." Said servants began to manhandle the diving bell onto a trolley so that it could be wheeled up into the light of day. Some of the more fastidious of them flicked dusters over its brass fittings. "And just how likely is that?" I asked, indicating a shape in a corner. It appeared to be a life-size wax statue of Bleys, although on closer inspection it turned out to have a wick poking out of the top of its head. I wondered if it burned at both ends. "Er," said Tristan. He looked at his servants, who shrugged in bemusement. No-one seemed to know how it had got there. Since none of us could see any use for a giant Bleys candle other than feeding it to the supposed sea serpent and hoping it choked, we left it behind. The diving bell was brought forth, and work began on assembling a crane with which to lower it into the sea. The diving suits were laid out, and handles were spun on the pumps to make sure that they were in working order. They wheezed and huffed a bit at first, but then a mouse shot out of the tube at some velocity, and after that everything was fine. I wondered if I should get one for Sebek - a compressed-air dormouse-dispenser. He would have loved it. Tristan produced a small piece of jewelry and blew the dust off it. It looked like a spell rack. Surely he wasn't going to set aside the habits of a lifetime and resort to such mundane powers as magick? Ibrahim had Trumped back to Amber to get his communication rings, and was now returning via Tamarind. "What time of day is it in Amber?" I heard Tamarind ask him. "Late afternoon," he was told. I gathered that Tamarind was planning his rescue bid tonight, the first night of Amber's full moon. Just enough time then to limber up with a brisk stroll across the ocean floor. Except we still weren't ready yet. "I should hang some more of my Environmental Protection spells," said Ibrahim, "We may well have need of them." "I want to rack a few light spells," said Tristan, in a tone that also suggested "If I can remember how." "Oh, hell," I said, "I could do with a couple of extra spells as well." Tamarind gave up his Trump of the villa without demur, and the three of us spent a sunny summer's morning chanting and waving our arms, while birds sang in the sky and fish splashed in the lake. Then we Trumped back to the others at the Sea of Drabness. "You know," said Tristan, sniffing around as we climbed into the diving suits, "I thought I'd noticed some Shadow disturbance earlier. There's definitely another Shadow trail here, as well as the path itself. I'm sure someone's been shifting Shadow using the Pattern, or something very similar to it. Two or three days ago by the feel of it. Goes off that way." He indicated a heading that angled off from the path by a goodly number of degrees. "Pattern, huh?" said Altair, "Well, sea serpents on their own aren't exactly known for selling off looted brandy." "Could it have been left by Gerard when he arrived?" I asked. Just because Gerard had been aiming for a Shadow path, it didn't automatically mean that he had followed the path itself, and it would be embarrassing to go haring off along the first Shadow disturbance we found only to discover that we had backtracked all the way to Diega. Tristan however could tell the difference. It was an outgoing trail and it wasn't getting any warmer. "If we want to follow it before it decays," he warned, "then we're going to have to dive quickly." "Let's dive then," said Altair, "But first, can you lower an anchor over the side?" Tristan looked slightly perplexed at this request, but at his bidding a large anchor was located in the Storerooms of Plenty, and dropped over the side on the end of a very long chain. "What's it for?" he asked. "I wanted a plumb-line to follow," replied Altair, as if it should have been obvious. The servants who had manhandled the massive hunk of iron up ramps and stairs looked at each other with barely-disguised disbelief. "You could have just asked for a plumb-line," said Tristan in mild vexation, although he should have remembered that subtlety and finesse were but distant cousins to the mysterious forces at work inside Altair's head. True, we were going to be diving at depths that would kill a normal Shadow dweller stone dead, with all the risks attendant thereon, and one had to admit that a piece of ironmongery that could have anchored an aircraft carrier was going to be damned hard to miss should narcolepsy or some related condition cause us to lose track of the cardinal directions. But on the other hand, a large brass diving bell on the end of a cable three inches thick was going to stand out pretty effectively too. Some of the aforementioned risks Ibrahim had set about mitigating, by casting his protective spells on the rest of us. Guaranteed good against extremes of temperature and pressure, he assured us. Then he doled out the communication rings, and we clambered into the cramped confines of the diving bell, our helmets clutched in our laps. The bell lurched as the crane took up the slack in the supporting cable, and then we wobbled up and out and down. Cold green water spilled across our feet as we sank beneath the surface of the sea, the waves tilting us to one side for a moment, but then we were under water, and the turbulence ceased. For several minutes we descended in silence, taking it in turns to peer out through the thick glass portholes. The water level inside the bell slowly rose to our knees as the pressure outside increased. Even with Ibrahim's anti-pressure warding at work I could still feel my ears pop. Below us we could discern the dim outline of the shattered stern section, illuminated by a large shoal of softly glowing fish, who seemed to be swarming in a distinctly purposeful manner. A couple of them bumped their noses against the glass, gulping excitedly at Tristan. Tristan however seemed to have changed his mind regarding the utility of his bioluminescent piscifauna of desire, and cast a light spell instead. A miniature submarine sun flashed bright, scaring the unfortunate fish away. The stern of the Unicorn's Flight was now clearly visible. And it did indeed look as if massive coils or tentacles had wrenched it asunder. Another section of the ship could be seen some way off, a barely recognisable tangle of timbers from which the stump of a mainmast rose at an angle. We signalled to the crane-operators via a tinny speaking tube that they could cease lowering, and we came to a stop some eight feet above the sea bed. We donned our helmets and untangled our breathing tubes, except for Altair, who had decided to dispense with the suit and rely instead on an inflated bladder for air, and a belt of lead weights for ballast. The stern loomed over us as we trudged forth, small creatures oozing and scuttling through the clouds of particulate matter kicked up by our weighted boots. There were bits of debris scattered all around, where the innards of the ship had spilled out across the ocean floor during her untimely descent. We mounted the stern section and clumped our way down into Gerard's cabin. The two fish-nibbled bodies that Altair and Ibrahim had found appeared to be deck hands who had taken refuge below decks. One of them had evidently succumbed to a fatal case of having an arm ripped bodily from its socket, while the other had met a more prosaic fate. He had drowned. The cabin windows, not to mention their frames and most of the walls in which they were set, had been smashed inwards, as if something large, flexible and very, very strong had poked its way in to rummage around. Altair began salvaging what remained of her father's personal effects. She managed to turn up a few knickknacks, but anything of value seemed to have gone, including his numerous and extensive charts. A small crab-like creature with four legs and pincers at both ends was ambling across the chart table, its albino carapace emphasising the bareness of the mahogany surface. This ship hadn't simply been torn apart and sent to the bottom - at some stage during its final moments it had been looted as well. A wider search revealed a few more bodies, all members of Gerard's crew, the major cause of death seeming to be cutlass or boarding axe trauma. Other signs of more localised violence included an emptied strong-room, its heavy oaken door smashed in with sledgehammers, and the occasional fragment of cloth caught on splinters and nails. They did not seem to be from any of the standard Amber Navy uniforms. I secured a few samples, our first concrete trace of the perpetrators of the attack. Up on deck, there was further evidence of fiercely-fought combat, and our first tentative confirmation that Gerard had been there to greet the miscreants when they came aboard. There aren't very many people who can knock an opponent straight through a wall. A couple of things, however, were beginning to push their way to the front of the queue for consideration and analysis. Firstly, the only bodies we were finding were those of the ship's crew. The attackers must have suffered casualties, especially at Gerard's hands, but they had left behind none of their dead. That suggested that they had had time for an orderly evacuation, which in turn suggested that the sea serpent, or whatever it was that had done for the ship itself, was either under close and careful control, or was capable of intelligent and deliberate co-operation. Or indeed, thinking of certain polypous Great Old Ones again, could in fact have been the entity doing the controlling. And secondly ... "We're not finding very many bodies," observed Tamarind via his communication ring, "A ship this size sinking in the way it did, you'd expect to find more." And indeed this was true. Not only were the attackers unrepresented amongst the dead, the defenders were decidedly scarce on the ground as well. "I think they were eaten," said Altair optimistically, as she joined us on deck with a box of Trumps she seemed to have found. They turned out to be Gerard's spare set. "Or sold as slaves," she added, perhaps realising that a hungry sea serpent who could work its way though several hundred sailors was unlikely to have baulked at swallowing her father. "That would be too risky for them," countered Tamarind. Well, it would depend on where they took them. If the raiders could move through Shadow under their own steam, then a slave market sufficiently distant from Amber might not be beyond their reach. We wandered over to the forward section of the ship, which turned out to be not one but two piles of wreckage. The prow was intact to the extent that it was at least recognisable as a prow, the unicorn figurehead gritting her wooden teeth under the languid inspection of a couple of fish, but the mid-section was completely mangled. Again we found the aftermath of a bloody boarding action, and again far fewer bodies than we should. The sequence of events seemed clear enough. The sea serpent - or more likely something with tentacles, Altair opined - had seized the ship, enabling the attackers to board. There had been a battle, in which the enveloping leviathan had probably also contributed a helping pseudopod or two. The ship had been looted - swiftly, Tamarind thought, although I'd have preferred "with brutal efficiency" myself - and then the attackers had withdrawn, in manifest good order, whereupon their friendly sea monster had concluded the affair by ripping the vessel apart. Everything suggested a well-practiced assault by a disciplined, experienced force who had done this kind of thing before. Gerard had indeed found his pirates. Now the only question we needed to answer was: How did we now find Gerard? The only positive discovery we had made was that he had not, apparently, gone down with his ship. "Could we use magick to find out more?" Tamarind asked, looking at me and Ibrahim. Ibrahim looked at me. The old-fashioned occult stuff like scrying was usually my area. Of course, a scrying spell was one of the incantations I hadn't hung, but against that, complex rituals tend not to lend themselves well to racking. Too many linchpins. I returned to the stern section, since that was where Gerard seemed to have been, and got started. Tamarind came with me, while the others remained with the prow for one last poke around. Casting a spell from scratch underwater in a bulky oil-skin and canvas diving suit was not something I'd tried before, and I sounded as if I was chanting from the bottom of an antique bath, but slowly the ritual began to come together. Tristan and Ibrahim came back to join my audience, as did a couple of the little crab-things and a large eel. Altair went and sat in the diving bell on her own. Wandering about the wreck of her father's flagship could not have been an experience that filled her with wonder and delight, so I didn't begrudge her the choice of solitude over conviviality. In any case, I think she had also discovered the limits of air-bag reservoirs and had run out of air. After the better part of an hour, the last magickal component was slotted into place, and I sat back to observe whatever glimpses of past misdeeds the spell could afford me. I got nothing. Just spots before the eyes, the magickal equivalent of static. Bugger. Someone had cast an anti-scrying spell for just this eventuality. I gloomily informed the others that we had been pre-empted. "Why not ask one of the dead men?" came Altair's voice over the communication rings. Feeling slightly typecast as the sinister necromancer, I nevertheless said that I'd give it a go, although I possessed a strong suspicion that the anti-scrying effect had been intended to kick over all the traces, including any spiritual residues. "Can necromantic spells really summon the spirits of the dead?" asked Tamarind curiously. That wasn't a bad question. We now knew that the deceased decanted themselves from all over Shadow to the gloomy mirror realm we kept on visiting, and it seemed unlikely that mere magick was likely to suffice to tear them away from their dizzying social whirligig. On the other hand, I did know that my spells worked on real spirits. Nitocris would still be haunting her sarcophagus lid if they hadn't. Most likely, in the greater number of cases, the spell just fastened on to the spiritual echoes left behind by the original ghost as the next best thing available. But either way, the results might still prove informative, so I set about calling spirits from the vasty deep, aided, I was hoping, by the fact that I was there with them. No lugubrious wisps of summoned shade appeared. I briefly considered the idea of taking one of the bodies to another Shadow and trying again, but the problem wasn't an anti-scrying barrier to be worked around, but the brute fact that every last trace had been erased. The entire site was psychically dead. Now that I knew what I was looking for, though, I had a closer look at the magick that was blocking me. It was Shadow sorcery, I discovered, with no linchpin for adapting the spell to the local magick. That suggested either that the spell-caster was a mundane sorcerer with no access to the trans-Shadow techniques enjoyed by Amberites, or else the spell had been cast from scratch on site, which would have produced much the same effect. Or, just possibly, someone wanted to confuse us. I called it a day and reported my findings to the others. Seeing little reason to tarry further, we decided to return to the surface. "Maybe we should check some of the other sites for a similar magickal effect," suggested Ibrahim, as we made our way back through the silt to the diving bell. Not unreasonable, I supposed. It would also give us a chance to see if the magick of Shadow had been the same where the other ships had disappeared. If it was, then that would tend to confirm the Shadow sorcerer hypothesis. It might also be advantageous to us should our enemies be confined to Shadows of a particular magickal type. The eye-watering architecture of R'lyeh again sprung to mind. I quickly checked. No, the magickal qualities of wreck site and corpse city were quite different. That was one thing less to worry about - this wasn't a campaign for the return of my prize exhibits. I glanced back down at the wreck as the diving bell was slowly reeled back in. A few faint flickers in the murkiness beyond suggested that Tristan's glow fish were still in the vicinity. If they were as sad and uncritical of their summoner as Sebek, then I could not help but envisage them returning to the wreck once the light spell had run its course, circling overhead in a darting, mindless vigil, contentedly oblivious to the fact that only the dead were left to gaze upon their pale effulgence. It would be a melancholy but not inadequate marker for the sea grave of a flagship of Amber, although part of me was wondering if it was possible to dismiss a creature of desire once you no longer needed it. Tristan, however, was probably not the person to ask. We were hauled back onto Corvallin, where towels, dry clothing and hot drinks were again provided. The castle began to rise as Tristan led us up the central keep to the observation platform. "Before we start following the trail," he said, "there's just one last thing I'd like to try." He concentrated for a moment. Down in the waters below, a few bloated corpses hoved into view, bobbing and turning slackly in the grey-green waves. "No survivors," Tristan muttered gloomily, "All right, let's go." Not even the Pattern can bring about a contingency with a probability of zero. Tamarind meanwhile was preparing to depart. It would be getting dark in Amber soon, and Tir-na Nog'th would be poised to shimmer forth into the world of substance. Now that his mysterious and long-awaited Trump Device was ready, he was eager to see if would work. The others wished him luck. "Say hello to Beltaine for me," I said. "Maybe you'll be able to tell her yourself," he said. He faded away on a Trump of Amber's Courtyard. I turned to the battlements as Tristan began shifting Shadow, following the trail. The sky changed colour to something less acrid. Would Tamarind succeed? Too many of us had tried too many times to extricate Beltaine and Owen from their little island of onierism for me to be willing to invest too much hope in the prospect. But then he'd been working on this scheme for five years now, and he'd had the resident expert in the form of Brand on whom to fall back for advice. Supposing it worked, then. Would Beltaine be the same as I remembered her? Brand had once used the word "chrysalis" to describe her situation. Would she emerge a being more of the waking world, or even more of Tir-na Nog'th? Would the balance between those two facets be restored? And how would Beltaine feel about the developments that had taken place during her ethereal exile? How would she react to the confirmation that Evander was indeed no brother to her, not to mention the revelation that he had never been more than an artificial construct behind which Amber's enemies had lurked and plotted? Or indeed to the fact that he was dead, or worse, depending on what Fiona had really done with him. And what would she think of the additions to our Family, both the hyperactive new arrivals and the returnees? Like Brand, to name but one. As for Owen, much as I would welcome his return, I couldn't really see him reacting much differently to Amber as it was now than he had before. He'd probably want to know, though, why the new museum took up so much space when I could have put up some more affordable housing instead. Lanterns and torches were being lit all over Corvallin as the day darkened, and then went out again a little later as dusk in one Shadow turned to dawn in another without any intervening night. A reddish sun rose over a slow ocean swell. Part of me rather wished that we'd ganged up on Tamarind and made him accept some assistants or observers, but to be fair it was entirely his show, and it was unclear what, if anything, our presences might add. If he wanted to take sole responsibility for its success or failure, then I for one could hardly gainsay him. I've always hated asking for help as well. In the meantime, the rest of us could make ourselves useful by ensuring that Gerard would be able to make the welcome home party. Shadows reeled around us, and Corvallin glided on. She wasn't exactly the velociraptor of the open skies, more indeed the brachiosaurus, but she always got to where she need to go.

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