Extracts from the Journal of

Chapter V
Amber, 113 PPF

Anguilla est, elabitur (He is an eel, he slips away)

- Plautus

aven't you been trying to ban private firework displays?" I asked Tristan. In less fraught times he would probably have favoured me with some pedantry along the lines of fireworks not working in Amber. As it was, he just scowled. I turned to Tamarind. "You and Beltaine used to go up to Tir-na Nog'th a lot," I said, "Did you do a Trump of the steps?" Tamarind had. He passed it to Altair, who began concentrating on it, while he began fiddling with Evander's Trump. There was a display case along one wall of Random's office, a tasteful arrangement of seemingly antique weapons from a variety of cultures. All of them, I knew, were in fact in perfect working condition, a private armoury concealed in full view amidst the formal trappings of power. I had even donated a couple of them myself, from the collections in the Museum. Tristan was helping himself to a blade - the longsword of some doomed Celtic hero, if I remembered correctly - while I purloined a hunting crossbow from a Shadow where they'd discovered a means of imparting spin to their quarrels by way of careful fletching and the cunning use of twisted leather cords. In the past I'd been able to put a bolt through a magpie in flight at three hundred yards with such a device, so it would probably be quite adequate for a human-sized target at thirty paces. Ibrahim was coaxing the Pattern blade back from Random, having evidently lost his appetite for a night in the cells. Gerard punched the wall that had taken up residence in the doorway. Other than bruising his knuckles, this had no effect. The stone didn't even crack. Tristan was concentrating on something, and I could feel the beginnings of a build-up of Pattern energy around him. Random was looking between him and Gerard in an expectant "Is one of you going to do something useful?" fashion. Caine was slouching by the desk, as if to say "I don't have to do anything because I set up contingency plans for this sort of event five hundred years ago". Ibrahim was staring out the window towards the top of Kolvir. "We should try and alert the guards by the Pattern Room," he said, "If something bad happens, that's probably the safest place to be." "Good idea," said Random, pulling out his Trump of the guardroom by the Pattern. "Got it," said Altair, seeming to focus on the curtains, "I can see him. I don't know who he is, but he doesn't look like Evander." I stepped forwards. "Someone look after her," I said, indicating the Chief Inspector, still slumped in a chair. "Of course," I heard Caine say as I jumped through the Trump link. Damn. And I hadn't even had time to search her properly. But since I'd neglected to say "Someone apart from Caine look after her", I suppose I wasn't in a position to complain. I arrived in the chill mountain air a few feet short of the three carved steps. Thirty yards away - as I had correctly estimated - was a tall individual with reddish skin and bright red hair. It looked as if the Irish had beaten Columbus to the New World. He was clad in dark purple, with a military cut to the cloth, and he was looking at the sky, his back turned to me. This, unless one wanted to stretch coincidence to beyond its normal tensile limit, was one of the individuals responsible for my having to waste two days being dead. He and I had potentially had a lot to talk about. However, I was quite happy to conduct the conversation via Brand. I raised the crossbow, adjusted for the brisk alpine breeze and fired. There are some people who will flatly disbelieve that I am capable of shooting someone in the back. They just don't know me well enough. In any case, he had red hair, so I could make believe that he was Bleys. I was already running towards him as he turned at the sound of the twang and lurched back, the quarrel only grazing his arm. That meant he was fast, fast enough to be a member of the Family or a Chaos Lord, not that the two categories were necessarily mutually exclusive. I was going to have to go in hard, to take him down before he could adopt a defensive stance which would allow him to retreat, even if that meant taking a few cuts in the process. I was ten yards away, and he had his own sword out, and a dagger had appeared in his other hand. I tried to make it look as if I was expecting to run him through on the spot with my first thrust, then sidestepped, twisted my blade and lunged up and under his guard. He fell for the feint, but recovered just a little too quickly. Instead of spearing him through the chest, I gouged a chunk out of his sword arm, just below the shoulder. I started to step back and to the side, but his own motion had carried him onto the spot which I had been coveting myself, obliging me to change my plans slightly. Further reconsideration was prompted when his main gauche went under my arm and into me. This was extremely embarrassing, although from a "first blood" point of view I could at least console myself that I was ahead on points. My insides, after a split second of numbness, felt as if they were on fire. However, my humour brightened somewhat when I realised that he had simultaneously immobilised his parrying weapon and left himself open to my backslash. Never being a man to disoblige, I drew my sword back from left to right, opening his throat. I should have been drenched in a bright arterial spray as steel grated against spine, but all I had to show for my efforts was an admittedly unpleasant-looking gash through which blood seeped reluctantly. He retaliated by lifting me up on his dagger. A disagreeable experience, causing most of the blood in my face to depart southwards and start queuing for the exit that was opening in my abdomen. Fortunately he had stabbed me just below the breastbone, so when his blade ground to a halt against my sternum, the aperture had been lengthened barely an inch. I was thereby spared having to explain to the others when they caught up what my intestines were doing around my knees. My opponent apparently wanted to play, otherwise he might have paid a little more attention to the tactical implications of our relative positions. Consequently, he had no grounds for complaint when I ran him through under the left armpit, driving Dashwood deep into his chest cavity. We were now at an impasse, each impaling the other, the stalemate marred only by the fact that he had a sword in his free hand and I didn't. At this point Ibrahim and Tamarind arrived. The Purple Man looked me in the eye. "You should surrender, all of you," he said. You should be coughing up blood, I didn't respond, but twisted the sword in him instead, just in case he'd forgotten. Even if I'd missed his heart, his lungs ought to be mincemeat by now. He at least had the courtesy to wince. Something spun under my feet to hack into his shins, stuck there for a moment and then fell out. It looked like Ibrahim's khopesh. "The Council for Victory will have you all," said Mr Unperturbable. Council for Victory? Who comes up with these names? I jiggled the sword about inside his chest a bit more, which seemed to serve only to remind him that he was in a position to return the favour. Everything went grey for a moment. I clawed my way back to consciousness in time to see him parry Tamarind, his sword arm twisting at an impossible angle. Even I can work these things out eventually. He had to be a shapeshifter. "The Council for Victory will have Amber," he declaimed, fishing about for a variant on his original slogan, "You will submit." Presumably the name had been thought up by the same person who wrote his script for him. Tamarind jumped back, scrabbling for his Trumps again. It hadn't occurred to me that he demoralised that easily. But all he did was take up position out of range, fingers glued to a particular card, so I assumed that he was doing something useful. Ibrahim tried to disable our foe's dagger arm with Eric's Pattern blade, and at long last one of us managed to do some damage that even our purple-clad councillor couldn't laugh off. His arm parted from the rest of him, and the agonising pressure on my breastbone suddenly eased. I landed on my feet and kept going, but retained the presence of mind to hang onto my sabre, dragging it around the inside of his rib cage as I fell. He hissed in pain, the way one doesn't usually have time to do when one's heart has just been bisected and one's aorta severed. Really, I've met shoggoths that were easier to kill. "He's in a Trump link!" Tamarind shouted. My sword finally slipped free, and I landed on my back. I wondered if it was just me, or whether the light really was brighter, the shadows more sharply defined, a hint of warmth on the mountain wind. I mentally prepared myself for my next encounter with Brand and Deirdre: "There was something I forgot to ask you ..." "I didn't design it as a fairground ride," Brand would grumble. Ibrahim hit our now somewhat reduced friend over the head with ... the hilt of his sword. Fine. Find something that works, so try something else. Stops you getting bored. Always works for me. The man collapsed - finally - and then went on collapsing, deflating like a punctured balloon. A pile of clothes and a bag of skin landed on the grass beside me. Tamarind seemed to react to something he saw in the Trumps, which suggested than our quarry had escaped us, shedding his outer integument as a lizard sheds its tail. "Damn, he was good," I said, to no-one in particular. Not that good, of course, but sufficiently so that I would treat him with a little more respect next time round, not to mention considerably more firepower. I decided that my environs definitely were getting warmer and brighter, since the normal symptoms of shock generally tend in the opposite direction. Well, enough resting. Time to get myself back on my feet. I started to unwind my cravat. Tamarind was beckoning frantically back the way we had come, and Altair and her father promptly arrived. They and Ibrahim clustered round the Trump Tamarind was holding, which I gathered was probably Evander's. I folded the cravat, whilst wondering irritably why my hands kept shaking. The wound in my stomach was still pumping blood. Another shirt ruined. I slapped the cravat on as a compress, whilst slotting in the lynchpins of a healing spell. Drained of most of its potency by Amber's innate reality, it was still sufficient to staunch the bleeding somewhat. Evander was being dragged through the Trump contact, looking surprised. Gerard punched him, and like most things that aren't made of stone and three feet thick, he collapsed. "Evander was in the link to ... to him," explained Tamarind, waving his hand at the epidermal remnants of our opponent, "But he seemed surprised when we grabbed him. They might have been able to divert the link somehow, but ..." "Maybe he doesn't know that it's him," I noted, watching the cravat slowly turn red. I wasn't terribly sure why I said this, but on reflection, the most effective sleeper agent is the one who doesn't even know he's asleep. And a talented shapeshifter like Mr Skin could probably pull all manner of bizarre tricks, like rewiring people's brains or hiding inside them. I mentioned as much. You can get away with all manner of outrageous suggestions like that when you're half-delirious with shock and blood-loss. Ibrahim paused in his task of gathering up what was left of Mr Skin, and started staring out to sea. "Where have all the other ships gone?" he asked. As rhetorical questions went, it had a sort of superficial depth, if you see what I mean. "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" I countered under my breath, before being seized by a fit of coughing. Gerard pulled out a telescope and examined the ocean blue. I gathered from their conversation that the merchantmen that habitually trundled into Amber from all points Shadow-wards seemed to have ceased trundling - those that were visible were still heading into port, but it looked as if no new ones had appeared over the horizon in quite some time. So we were being blockaded. And the sun was definitely getting brighter. The Council for Victory seemed to have learned at least one lesson from history that has escaped a lot of other people in the past, to whit, that no frontal assault on Amber has ever succeeded. So they were going to try and smoke us out. Tamarind was now in receipt of a Trump call, and was beckoning us to go through with him. We arrived in the Castle gardens, where Tristan was shooing away an unusually large congregation of palace guards. His and Ibrahim's doubles had apparently ordered a series of war games amidst the rhododendrons to keep the guards occupied while they in turn played with their magickal masonry outside Random's study. Tristan handed me a red armband, ostensibly so that people could tell who was an impostor and who wasn't. I was already wearing enough of that particular clashing colour, so I declined. Orderlies were summoned to attend me as I lay on the somewhat churned-up lawn, while Tristan brought Tamarind up to date, and Tamarind returned the favour. Tristan had apparently overcome the embarrassing problem whereby the King had been immured in his own study, simply by dint of waving the Pattern at the barricade. A deceptively straightforward feat of low-grade magick, a small piece of stone had been enchanted into the form of a large section of wall. With the enchantment suppressed by the Pattern, it had reverted to its original form. This raised the interesting question of how the perpetrators had managed to suppress the enchantment themselves, in order to get the stone into place. Random's secretary and the two guards who should have been outside had been found unconscious in a storeroom, which suggested that at least three hostile shapeshifters had been wandering about the castle in the recent past. The manoeuvres in the gardens had been the only other item of mischief so far uncovered, but they'd had the run of the place for at least two days, so doubtless more would come to light. The only other news was that Caine had gone off in search of Benedict, and that no-one had been able to reach Margot or Caleb by Trump. Ibrahim was of the opinion that if current meteorological trends were set to continue, we might well be obliged to retreat underground or to abandon Amber itself. Tristan hmm-ed and then pulled out a Trump of Random. "Can you use the Jewel to cover Amber with cloud?" he asked as soon as he got through. The answer seemed to be yes. Tristan passed on the rest of the tale, as related to him by Tamarind and Ibrahim, concerning the mountain-top encounter with the local representative of the Council for Victory, and the apparent indications of a blockade. The medics were taking their time, so to stave off boredom I began searching the bundle of skin and clothing that Ibrahim had brought with us. The weapons were almost absurdly anonymous, with no distinguishing features whatsoever. If they had been handguns, they would have had the serial numbers filed off. The dark purple clothing yielded nothing of interest either. The skin itself seemed to be the same both inside and outside, with no sign of blood other than the quantities of my own that I seemed to be smearing across it. It had been sloughed away neatly, almost as if a new epidermis had been growing beneath it even as it was shed. Or as if there had been nothing inside it in the first place. But there definitely had been real flesh and blood inside it - my opponent had bled; I had felt resistance as I mangled his insides. And he had thoughtfully left most of his left forearm behind too, whole and intact. The stump was still bleeding slightly, but then I didn't recall it ever doing much more than this, even when Ibrahim had severed it. Shapeshifting prowess or some cauterising effect of the Pattern blade, one or the other or possibly both. No doubt the owner of the abandoned limb would soon grow another one, not that I was planning on giving him much time in which to cultivate it. In short, he had been physical, and anything physical can be killed. Eventually. Tristan looked down at me and the shapeless membrane flapping in the gentle breeze. "He was a bit better than me," I explained. True enough - he hadn't been that much faster than I was. His only significant advantage had been the shapeshifting abilities that had allowed him to toughen his skin and to keep his internal organs one step ahead of the edge of my sabre. And there were ways round that. Tamarind was searching Evander. "His Trumps are inside him," he announced. That's another thing about shapeshifters. They're never at a loss when they run out of pockets. "We'll have to remove them surgically," Tamarind decided. In a way it was almost comforting to know that the reticent young artist possessed a streak of ruthlessness. The orderlies had arrived, and myself and Evander were deposited on stretchers, a third one of which was commandeered to transport the regrettably not-quite-mortal remnants of Mr Skin. We set off for the infirmary, with Tamarind as our escort. We were about halfway there when Tamarind suddenly stopped. "Do you still have the stone Brand gave you?" he asked. Awkwardly I fished it out of my pocket. I was really going to have to find something to wrap it in; it was like lying on a caltrop that had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. Tamarind took it, made a face as he discovered how disagreeably sharp and cold the thing was, and then gripped it gingerly betwixt thumb and forefinger. He began concentrating on it. The orderlies seemed unsure whether or not to continue. I gestured to them to set me down and wait. I wanted to see what would happen. And then I wanted it back. Tamarind was radiating coldness, and a black aura seemed to be forming about him. As I watched, he began to take on the monochromatic appearance redolent of the Realm of the Dead. No trumpets or ectoplasm though. He didn't even say "Is there anybody there?" Instead, he said "Hello?" His demeanour suggested that he had received a reply. "I wanted to ask you about your children," he said. Ah yes. I glanced at the unconscious Evander. That was what we'd forgotten to ask. Tamarind seemed satisfied with the response. "Amber's under attack at the moment," he informed the unseen Brand, "I'll contact you again when we're ready to bring you out." The black glow began to fade. Tamarind shivered, and then handed me the stone again, his one-man seance at an end. I eased it into another pocket where I would be less uncomfortably aware of its presence. "The only child he knows of is Beltaine," reported Tamarind, "He's never heard of Evander." He began to massage some warmth back into his arms. I flexed my fingers to rid them of the cold, and as I did so my sleeve slipped back. I looked at my forearm. Something was wrong with this picture. "How many needle tracks do you have in your arms?" I asked, "Just the IV you were hooked up to, or more?" As far as I could tell, practically every major vein in my arm had been tapped into, and possibly an artery or two as well. Tamarind rolled up his sleeves and took stock. "More," he announced. I took a deep breath, ignoring the twinge in my diaphragm. "Then I suggest that someone checks with Random that the Pattern Room is properly guarded," I told him, "and someone should Trump Llewella to ask her to guard the Rebma Pattern as well." Brain-dead Amberites being kept alive so that people could stick needles in them: this meant only one thing, and Amberite blood has only a limited number of practical applications. Unless the Council for Victory came from a Shadow where Pattern-blood pudding is considered a delicacy. I extracted my Trump of Llewella. I doubted she'd be particularly pleased to gaze upon my countenance once more, but I imagined she'd be even less pleased if she woke up one morning to a blackened and useless Pattern. Presumably a gallon or so of Amberite blood would be even more devastating on a underwater Pattern, since once suspended in the water it would be able to spread out more before it settled. I concentrated on the card. Llewella's smooth, melancholy features swam before me through a greenish haze, and it took me a moment to realise that I hadn't actually got through to her in her undersea kingdom, and that my exertions were just making me light headed. I flopped back on the stretcher while the walls did somersaults. "Why don't we wait until we've dealt with Evander?" said Tamarind firmly, "Then we'll do it." He wasn't the one with a large hole in him and I was, so I reluctantly allowed myself to be hoisted up and carted off again. The infirmary of Amber Castle does not, despite the semi-serious recommendations of the Royal Physician, possess a revolving door. It does however have swing doors like those of most modern hospitals in Shadow. We barged in, and were met by an autoclave of surgeons, or whatever the appropriate collective noun is. I noticed one of them glance curiously at the remains of Mr Skin, before turning away. "You forgot to say 'I can do nothing for this patient'," I mumbled at him. He examined me. "We'll need to operate," he said. I waved irritably at Evander. "Do him first," I said, forcing myself to enunciate clearly, "I want to know what you find." So did Tamarind. Evander was deposited on an operating table, there was a brief chorus of snapping latex, and then the doctors got to work. Helped onto a table of my own, I tried to prop myself up so that I could observe the Trump-opsy. For some reason my elbow seemed reluctant to support me, and kept sliding out from under me. When I almost managed to pitch myself head first onto the floor, one of the doctors threatened to strap me down. "You and whose army?" I muttered, and then "Oh." Suddenly there seemed to be twice as many people in the room as there had been previously. I noted that they were apparently trained in light infantry techniques, since they were all moving in pairs. I decided to pretend to be weaker than I was, and lay back down again. Half of their number were promptly stood down again. How little did they know. The doctors around Evander stepped back, and Tamarind rolled up his sleeve and plunged his hand into Evander's chest cavity. It emerged bearing a small, Trump-sized box, dripping body fluids. He wiped it clean, and then began to ruffle through its contents while Evander was sewn up again. "This is just the standard Family deck," he said, frowning, "All his Chaos Trumps are gone." I had a theory for this, but I couldn't remember what it was. Or maybe it was a theory for something else entirely. On Tamarind's orders, Evander was removed to the far end of the infirmary, which I thought displayed a disappointing lack of trust. "I wasn't planning on doing anything to him," I protested muzzily. Did he think I was going to challenge him to a duel or something? Our seconds would have to prop us up on sticks. A Zen duel. What is the sound of one sword fencing? Mortlake, I told myself, a grip. Get one. Now. "I want him placed in a Trump-proof cell as soon as one is ready," Tamarind was saying. "The poison used in the attack on Telgadi," I said, "The stuff that inhibits shapeshifting. You could try using that as well." I was glad to note that I was thinking clearly again. It probably went swish, swish. "I believe that the samples are currently in the possession of Prince Caine," said one of the doctors. "Hmm," said Tamarind thoughtfully. "Well, we all know who scuppered the peace talks," I said irritably. It had been so obvious for so long that I had never even bothered to lay odds on it. Caine and Julian. Swish, swish. The doctors were now turning their attention to me, and seemed to decide that I was being far too lucid, because the first thing they did was start pumping me full of opiates. Who trained these people? "Get me something to drink," I snapped. I was handed a glass of water. Idiots. Didn't they know anything about replacing lost body fluids? The water was quickly replaced with brandy. I knocked it back, and the room seemed to grow dim, but it was only Random summoning some cloud cover, blocking out the sun's rays. I felt much better. I beamed at one of the doctors, a young woman with huge blue eyes and dark blonde hair tied back in a bun, and tried to think of something to say other than how lovely she looked in rubber. Tamarind was standing beside me as I was prepped for the operation. He was holding up Llewella's Trump. Oh yes. I reached out to touch it, but only managed to poke a nurse in the eye. "Just concentrate on not dying," said Tamarind as he applied his will to the card. Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do. Apart from come back again, of course. Back and forth, back and forth. We went to the Land of the Dead last year, and we enjoyed it so much that we're going again this year. Swish. Ah, he seemed to have got through. I dictated a message regarding the recent decanting of Family blood and the disposition of the Rebman Pattern. Tamarind rearranged the words into the right order and passed them on. "She says she'll double the number of guards on the Pattern," he informed me as he put Llewella's Trump away and brought out Random's. Random, it transpired, had already tripled the guard on our own. "Ask him if anyone's been able to get through to the Primal Pattern recently," I said. "No," reported Tamarind a moment later, "He says it's still unreachable." I realised all of a sudden that all they had to do was ask Tristan, because it was obvious that he had sealed it off himself because people fought duels on it. Swish, crackle. However, before I could pass this insight on to Tamarind, he waved to me and disappeared through the Trump to Random. I was now alone with a Tamarind-shaped rainbow and a gang of masked individuals with knives. And they'd taken my weapons away. "The English ambassador will hear about this," I warned them. "Give him more opium," said one of them, a blonde woman with nice eyes. Was it the same one? Maybe they weren't so bad after all. I decided I had nothing to lose. "You look lovely in rubber," I informed her. "Did he just say I was fumbling blubber?" came her voice from very far away. Some people just can't take a compliment. Like Llewella, for example. "He's delirious," said another voice even more distant, "Now pay a tension. This is the fur styme Lord Mortlake sever beaning heron die want this tug of perfectly. I don't one two end up defending animal practice shoot at jaundice beak awesome one miscounts the surging call clumps. Our weak leering this?" After this, things began to get somewhat confused. We were having a laudanum drinking contest. "Oops," said Byron, running me through with a billiard cue. "The Council for Victory will suck your blood," said Polidori, as Nitocris, fetchingly clad in a black latex mini-dress, stuffed him into a coffin. "You look lovely in rubber," I said. "How dare you?" said Llewella, her arms buried up to the elbows in the carcass of a whale, which promptly turned into Evander. "Keep looking," he told her, as she unravelled his intestines, "I know I put them in here somewhere." "What a glorious day," said Esmée, whereupon her parasol combusted in the heat. Brand turned the handle and around we went. The carousel moved faster and faster, and Eric and Isabel fell off. How we laughed. "Buy me some candy floss," said Fiona, and we skipped off hand in hand, to where a familiar-looking tentacled fellow was selling Pattern-blood pudding on a stick. "Oh, I got it all down my front," said Fiona, before turning black and fading away. The music changed, becoming more discordant. Bleys now controlled the carousel, and the horses were trampling the passengers. I turned to leave, and found my mother sitting on her gravestone. "You left me behind," she said. This really wasn't what I wanted to hear right now. Or indeed at any other time. I looked around for support, but none was forthcoming. "You did," agreed Nitocris, "You could have restored her to life, but you abandoned her." "It's true," sighed Esmée, wiping away a tear, "I don't understand how I could ever have loved you." "Damien Barimen," said Elspeth Carpen, reading from a list of prepared charges, "You are under arrest for failing to aid a dead person in distress." Mr Skin's severed hand just pointed accusingly. "I'm sorry," I said. No-one seemed impressed, least of all my mother. "How could I bring you back when I was sure you'd just curse me for it?" I asked desperately. "You didn't ask," said Elizabeth Mortlake sadly, "You never gave me any choice in the matter. I don't know you any more, Damien. You're no better than your father." My knees gave way. "That's not true," I whispered, "Please, Mother, you have to believe me. It's not true." She just looked at me, with that same desolate expression I knew only too well. "It's too late to deny it," she said, "It's too late for you to do anything, Damien." With that, she vomited a billowing cloud of black mist, and just before it enveloped her, I could see her starting to shrivel away. "No!" I screamed, throwing myself forwards, but the mist was dissipating, and I found myself clutching only the last dank tendrils as it melted away into the night. The others glanced away, as if embarrassed by my outburst. Brand looked at the silver spike in his hand, and then shook his head and put it back in his pocket, unused. Bleys stepped forward. "Well, young man," he said jovially, "What do you have to say for yourself?" "How about 'If I ever find you, I'll kill you'?" I snarled, glad of the distraction. What if I really had been wrong? What if I could have brought her back? Tristan, wearing a "Hooray for Bleys" T-shirt, patted me on the shoulder. "You see, Damien," he said kindly, "If only you hadn't been so arrogant and assumed that you knew everything, it would have been fine. Look, I got Isabel back." He wound her up and she did a little dance, which won a round of applause. "Maybe you should make a law against people being dead," I snapped. Tristan beamed, delighted at the idea, and then his expression turned to one of terror. I turned, just as the earth of the cemetery erupted and formed itself into a hulking clay figure that looked like Oberon, the massive carved spike still buried in his chest, the Word of the Unicorn engraved on his forehead. "I can't control him!" cried Rabbi ben Brand, his ringlets flapping. Tristan hurriedly packed Isabel back into her box, and fled down the narrow twisted streets of the Prague Ghetto, the Oberon-golem lurching behind him. "Never mind," said Bleys, "We've still got the stuffed crocodile for you." "Sentence will be carried out immediately," said Chief Inspector Carpen. Something leapt from behind Nitocris to land beside me. It was Sebek, freshly mummified. He pivoted, and his sickle claws flashed, once. I found myself on my knees again, my guts spilling out into my lap. Opium dreams are so single-minded. Once they latch onto an idea they never let go. The embalmed velociraptor bent to bury his jaws in my bloodied intestines, and then ripped them free. He and Nitocris began to eat them. I looked down at myself. Where were the masked scalpel-wielders when you needed them? Probably off playing golf somewhere. A pack of Trumps fell out of my gaping abdomen. "You found them!" cried Evander, except this time he looked like the sinister red-eyed fellow from Beltaine's vision, "Thank you, I'll be able to talk to myself now." "Do you mind?" said Bleys, "My son here is trying to have a drug-induced nightmare, and I don't want him distracted by any potential insights." "I'm not your son," I rasped, trying to get up and draw my sword, but of course the doctors had taken it away from me. Everything had been taken away from me. Bleys shook his head, trying and failing to look sad. "What will it take to convince you?" he mused. He turned to his fellow accusers. "Any ideas?" he asked. "Sew him up and put him to bed," suggested the blonde medic. Bleys nodded, a grin spreading over his face. "I like it," he said. The others took up the cry. "Sew him up and put him to bed! Sew him up and put him to bed!" They started to close in on me. I crawled off amidst the tombstones, but there was a war machine standing astride the church, heat ray pulsing, ready to cut off my escape. I changed direction, trying to keep to the shadows, only to find myself blocked by a large piece of monumental masonry. The disembodied hand was sitting on top of it, fingers tapping nonchalantly. Erected To The Memory Of Princess Dara Of Amber And Chaos read the inscription. I sighed irritably. "Is this suppose to mean something to me?" I asked. The hand shrugged, in the way that most hands can't, unless they happen to be attached to a native of France. Then Bleys grabbed my ankles and dragged me back out into the moonlight. Hands clutched at me, distorted faces leered. They were still chanting that ridiculous slogan. I struggled, I fought, but it didn't do me any good. They sewed me up and put me to bed.

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