The Road to Amber (52 page)

Ken St. Andre, creator of the first Amber role-playing game and editor of
Hellride
, wrote Zelazny to ask him a series of questions about Amber. “This questionnaire will show you that the players are not taking this game or your creation of Amber lightly… I don’t know ifyou will answer all of these, but some of them are obviously more important than others. Questions 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 27!!! seem the most vital to me.”
[1]

Zelazny responded, noting, “this seems to cover everything.”
[2]
An edited version of the questions and answers appeared as “The Great Amber Questionnaire” in
Hellride
#3, published January 28, 1978. Reproduced here are St. Andre’s unedited questions and Zelazny’s answers, taken from their archived correspondence.

Zelazny answered these questions in the year after he completed
The Courts of Chaos
. Some of his answers (Julian’s and Fiona’s colors; Llewella’s mother) contradict statements in later essays (“Amber and the Amberites,”
The Visual Guide to Castle Amber
) and in the Merlin novels. This implies that he did not keep notes but replied upon memory to keep the details of Amber straight.

1. Letter from Ken St. Andre to Roger Zelazny, January 13, 1978.
   
2. Letter from Roger Zelazny to Ken St. Andre, January 21, 1978.
   

S
he raised an eyebrow. “I thought better of you, brother. It seems I was wrong.”

I sipped my wine. “It seems you were. Again.”

Silence. She raised the other brow.

I gave her more silence.

“Well, Corwin?”

“Disappointment,” I observed, over the rim of my glass, “is a beast that runs in packs.”

* * *

“Whereas wit is a bird that eludes the hand of rather too many princes.”

I shrugged. “Your disapproval concerns me even less than usual, Fi. All things considered.”

She tossed her head, red hair like a fall of flame. “Yet perhaps it should. All things considered.”

I did things with my own eyebrows, emptied my glass, swung my boots down from the table, and headed for the door.

She chuckled, behind me.

I stopped, refrained from turning, and waited. Fiona could never resist showing the rest of us that she was a step ahead. Or pretending to be.

“You are wearing your blade,” she said. “Good.”

I went out, uttering no clever comments. With at least three murderous ghosts stalking Castle Amber, the time for such things was past.

* * *

Lightning struck Kolvir, somewhere outside the windows, as I made my way back to my room. I saw no one.

There was a fire going on the grate, and everything was as I had left it. Which meant drink of my choosing was handy. I chose generously.

Full of good spirits, I cracked a better book and waited for whatever spirits might come.

* * *

It was very late, or rather early, before one of the walls opened in a place where it should not have done, and something that was both silver and shadow joined me.

Grayswandir felt good in my hand as I put down what I was finished drinking anyway, and waited.

Patience, they say, is chiefly a virtue for statues, but I’d made more than my share of mistakes, thus far, and blood is hell to get out of good rugs.

Came a whisper, out of darkness: “Corwin. Is it time?”

* * *

So it knew me. You have the advantage, and all that. Time for what?

“No,” I said very firmly. “Go away.”

A stirring of silver, rising before me. “Ffear not, Prince of Amber. I must have the blood I came for.” The whisper was close, and hungry, and utterly unfamiliar.

I stepped back, slicing the air before me with my blade. “Suppose you tell me why. And your name, while you’re at it.”

The reply was a chuckle that did seem familiar, somehow, in the moment before the shadows boiled up into a half a dozen stabbing, slashing blades, and Grayswandir rang in protest, sparks flying around me.

I considered some obscenities and then discarded them all.

Fiona had been ahead of me. Again.

“The Fool Prince,” she’d called me once. And would again, if I was lucky enough in these next few panting minutes. Or swift enough.

Lightning struck the Castle, somewhere nearby. Which itself should not have happened, what with the enchantments—

A sword point melted back into shadow, and then another, and my blade bit into nothing beyond.

A nothing that spilled silver out across my floor, scorching the rugs with sudden plumes of smoke.

“Prince of Amber!” my visitor hissed in pain. “You fight well!”

I struck again.

* * *

And shadows fled before me, and I was alone.

My book was on the floor, blackened. Damn. I watched lightning flicker and wondered if I would ever know what I fought, or why. Family politics seemed as tiresome as ever.

Three ghosts, Benedict had said, and had been on the brink of saying more ere his face had smoothed and he’d turned away. Which meant he’d recognized the one he’d seen.

So had the lamplighter, before the ghost that slew him caught up with him and burned his skull bare, from within.

Coln had died, before that, and one of the cooks. Seven maids, or more by now, since.

Then they’d started on us. Flora had almost fallen to one, and then Julian. Almost.

We’re tough meat, we of Amber.

* * *

My wall was as solid as ever, so I got out a lantern, and went looking for trouble. Something Princes of Amber never do, according to one of Droppa’s little ditties.

Ho ho.

“Do not be too hasty, ” Dad had told me once, when I’d broken something in a rage at Eric. But then, a lot had changed since Dad’s disappearance.

A lot, indeed. I was descending a stair when shadows and silver spun up again. Below me and above me, to the accompaniment of ghostly laughter.

I sighed. It was going to be one of those nights.

Zelazny and Ed Greenwood co-wrote this fragment. In 1977 Greenwood wrote the first section on a bookmark he then placed in his father’s copy of Nine Princes in Amber. When asked to sign Greenwood’s book at a 1979 convention, Zelazny read the bookmark, realized that Fiona and Corwin were talking, and added the next few sentences. Greenwood and Zelazny wrote alternating passages intermittently over the next fifteen years whenever they met at conventions. After they wrote the last two sections in 1992, Greenwood expected Zelazny to continue the story at a convention in summer 1995—but Zelazny died that June. This fragment is Zelany’s only Amber collaboration, and it became his last original piece of Amber fiction published when it finally appeared in 2005. In 1993, a year after his last contribution to “A Secret of Amber,” Zelazny wrote the first of five linked Amber short stories, “The Salesman’s Tale.”

G
lad I’d planned on leaving Merlin in the Crystal Cave for a long while. Glad he didn’t stay the entire time.

As I interrupted our trumped conversation by kicking over my glass of iced tea and shouting “Shit! I spilled it—” I turned over the Trump of Doom in my good hand.

Junkyard Forest. Nice sketch, that. Though it didn’t matter what it depicted, which is why I’d had Merlin fan the cards face down and had drawn one at random. That was for show, to confuse the Pattern. All of them led to places within spitting distance of the Crystal Cave—which had been the real reason for their existence in the first place. Their only purpose had been to draw Merlin into the Cave’s orbit, at which point a blue crystal warning system was to have alerted me. The plan was for me to get there in a hurry and find a way to make him a prisoner. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gotten the message when he’d drawn the Sphinx to escape from mom. Her neurotoxins had canceled a necessary trigger signal from his nervous system—just one of the many ways she’s messed up my plans without half-trying. Didn’t matter, though, in the long run. I got Merlin there, anyway. Only…everything changed after that.

“Luke! You fool!” The Pattern’s message blasted through me like the closing number at a rock concert.

But the Junkyard Forest had already come clear, and I was trumping out, before the Pattern realized that tea rather than my blood was flowing upon it.

I rose to my feet as the Pattern faded, and I moved forward amid the rusty sawblade bushes, the twisted girder trees, the gaily colored beds of broken bottles. I began to run, blood spilling from the slashed palm of my left hand. I didn’t even take the time to bind it. Once the Pattern recovered from its shock and discovered itself undamaged, it was going to begin scanning Shadow for me, for the others. They’d be safe within the ambit of the other Pattern, and that left me. The walls of the Crystal Cave had the effect of blocking every paraphysical phenomenon I’d been able to test them for, and I’d a hunch they’d screen me from the Pattern’s scrutiny as well. It was just a matter of my getting there before it shadow-shuffled this far.

I increased my pace. I’d stayed in shape. I could run. Past rusting cars and swirls of bedsprings, broken tiles, shattered crates… Down alleys of ashes, up trails of bottlecaps and pulltabs… Alert. Waiting. Waiting for the world to spin and waver, to hear the voice of the Pattern announce, “Gotcha!”

I rounded a bend and caught a glimpse of blue in the distance. The Junkyard Forest—result of an ancient Shadow storm—ended abruptly as I entered upon a downward slope, to be succeeded within paces by a wood of the more normal variety.

Here, I heard a few birdcalls as I passed, and the humming of insects, above the steady striking of my feet upon the earth. The sky was overcast, and I could tell nothing of temperature or wind because of my activity. The shimmering mound of blue grew larger. I maintained my pace. By
now
, the others should be safe, if they’d made it at all. Hell! By now they should be well out of harm’s way. Just a little while in this time-stream was a much longer time back on the main drag. They could be sitting around eating and joking by now. Even napping. I bit back a curse to save breath. That also meant that the Pattern could have been searching for even longer than it seemed…

Larger, even larger now, the blue ridge. I decided to see how well my finishing spurt had held up, and I went into high gear and held it there.

The earth and air were vibrated by what seemed a rumble of thunder. It could be a reaction of the irate design on having finally located me. I could also just be a rumble of thunder.

I kept pumping, and moments later, it seemed, I was braking so as not to smash up against that crystal base. No lightning bolts yet, and I scrambled for hand and toeholds—never having tried climbing this face of it before—as my lungs worked like a bellows and a light rain began to fall, mingling with a layer of my perspiration. I left bloody smears on the stone, but that should soon wash away.

Achieving the summit, I rushed to its opening on all fours and entered feet first, hanging, then dropping into the dark interior despite the presence of a ladder. Haste was all. Not until I stood within that shadowy blueness, still puffing, did I feel at all safe. As soon as I caught my breath I allowed myself to laugh. I had done it. I had escaped the Pattern.

I walked about the chamber beating upon my thighs and slapping the walls. A victory such as this tasted good, and I would not let it pass unmarked. I hustled back to the larder, located a bottle of wine, opened it, and took a drink. Then I repaired to a side cavern which still contained a sleeping bag, seated myself upon it, and continued to chuckle as I reenacted in my mind our experience there at the primal Pattern. My lady Nayda had been so magnificent. So had Merlin, for that matter. Now…

I wondered whether the Pattern really held grudges. That is, how long would it be before it was safe to me to go forth without feeling in imminent peril?

No real way to tell. Unfortunate. Still, the Pattern must have too much to occupy it to behave in any manner similar to those people who hung about in its vicinity—
i.e.
, Amberites. Mustn’t it? I took another drink. I might be here for a long time.