Roger Zelazny

The dawn of Amber


Part 3

To rule in Amber




This one is especially for KIM

CHAPTER ONE

Grayness surrounded me. Gray the color of morning twilight. Hours and days and years
and centuries of gray. A featureless, all-consuming, all-encompassing gray that sucked the
strength from your limbs and the will to live from your heart. So much gray that you couldn't take
it all in no matter how hard you tried.

I fell through that gray, thinking of my crazy brother Aber, who had run out on me. Then I
thought about my crazy father, Dworkin, who had left me guarding his back while he destroyed
the universe.

For a while I wanted to kill them both. That lasted a long, long time. Then I wanted to
hurt them. That lasted even longer.

Finally I didn't care.

And still I fell.

Uncountable ages passed. My mind wandered; I dreamed unhappy dreams. Now and
again my father's voice spoke to me.

"Be patient," it would say. "The end has come, and the beginning lies ahead."

"What's in it for me?" I asked warily.

"Nothing," he said. "You were a tool, nothing more, used and discarded."

"No!"

I jerked around and tried to grab him, but my arms windmilled through nothingness. He
hadn't really been here. I had imagined it.

Dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, imaginings. Call them what you will. They were one
and the same.

And still I plunged through that gray, a never-ending sea of it.

Forever passed. At least twice.

The end came with no sense of motion. Had I really been falling? Aber would know,
some distant part of me remarked. Aber knew everything about magic.

Frowning, I tried to remember something important. Something about having to kill
someone...

I couldn't recapture the thought. My head hurt. My muscles seemed to groan and my
bones to creak, as though they hadn't been used in a long, long time.

Lurching, I almost fell. Suddenly I had direction again: a clear sense of up and down, left
and right, forward and back. Thick, impenetrable grayness still surrounded me, but something
had definitely changed. Something big.

"Aber!" I shouted. The air seemed to swallow my words.

"Aber! Where are you?"

No reply.

Besides, I knew my brother hadn't done anything to save me. He would have gone...
where? I frowned. Back to the Courts of Chaos, probably. Who else could help me, then?

A face, a name on the tip of my tongue...

"Dworkin?" I whispered. That sounded right. "Dad?"

Memories suddenly flooded back. Our flight from Juniper to the strange Courts of Chaos.
Someone named Lord Zon trying to kill my whole family. My half-brother Aber, who painted



magical cards called Trumps that could be used to travel between worlds... my half-sister Freda,
who saw the future... and most especially our father, the dwarf I'd grown up calling Uncle
Dworkin. It turned out he'd been lying to protect me. He reallywas my father, a...

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