Free Blood of Amber by Roger Zelazny

about.   Is that you, Jasra? I-“
    The rumbling began again, softly at first, then building once more.
    “I’ll make a deal,” I said.   “You call off the storm, and I’ll promise not to move any more markers.”
    Again, the laughter as the storm sounds rose.
    “Too late,” came the reply.   “Too late for you.   Unless you’re a lot tougher than you look.”
    What the hell! The battle is not always to the strong, and nice guys tend to win because they’re the ones who get to write their memoirs.   I’d been fiddling with the Logrus projections against the insubstantiality of the mask until I found the link, the opening leading back to its source.   I stabbed through it-a thing on the order of an electrical discharge-at whatever lay behind.
    There came a scream.   The mask collapsed, the storm collapsed, and I was on my feet and running again.   When whatever I’d hit recovered I did not want to be in the same place I had been because that place might be subject to sudden disintegration.
    I had a choice of cutting off into Shadow or seeking an even faster path of retreat.   If a sorcerer were to tag me as I started shadow-slipping I could be followed.   So I dug out my Trumps and shuffled forth Random’s.   I rounded the next fuming of the way then, and I would have had to halt there anyway, I saw, because it narrowed to a width impossible for me to pass.   I raised the card and reached with my mind.
    There followed contact, almost immediately.   But even as the images solidified I felt a probe.   I was certain that it was my blue-masked nemesis seeking me once more.
    But Random came clear, seated before a drum set, sticks in hand.   He set aside the drumsticks and rose.
    “It’s about time,” he said, and he extended his hand.
    Even as I reached I felt something rushing toward me.   As our fingers touched and I stepped forward, they burst about me like a giant wave.
    I passed through into the music room in Amber.   Random had opened his mouth to speak again when the cascade of flowers fell upon us.
    Brushing violets from his shirtfront, he regarded me.
    “I’d rather you said it with words,” he remarked.
4
    Portrait of the artists, purposes crossed, temperature falling   .   .   .
    Sunny afternoon, and walking through small park following light lunch, us, prolonged silences and monosyllabic responses to conversational sallies indicating all’s not well at other end of communication’s taut line.   Upon bench, seated then, facing flower beds, souls catch up with bodies, words with thoughts...
    “Okay, Merle.   What’s the score?” she asks.
    “I don’t know what game you’re talking about, Julia.”
    “Don’t get cute.   All I want’s a straight answer.”
    “What’s the question?”
    “That place you took me, from the beach, that night.   .   .   .   Where was it?”
    “It was-sort of a dream.”
    “Bullshit!” She turns sideways to face me fully, and I must meet those flashing eyes without my face giving anything away.   “I’ve been back there, several times, looking for the way we took.   There is no cave.   There’s nothing! What happened to it? What’s going on?”
    “Maybe the tide came in and-“
    “Merle! What kind of an idiot do you take me for? That walk we took isn’t on the maps.   Nobody around here’s ever heard of anything like those places.   It was geographically impossible.   The times of day and the seasons kept shifting.   The only explanation is supernatural or paranormal-whatever you want to call it. What happened? You owe me an answer and you know it.   What happened? Where were you?”
    I look away, past my feet, past the flowers.   “I-can’t say.”
    “Why not?”
    “I-“ What could I say? It was not only that telling her of Shadow would disturb, perhaps destroy, her view of reality.   At the heart of my problem lay the realization that it would also require telling her how I knew this, which would mean telling