Sign of the Unicorn

Light values shifted next. The sky grew black, not as night, but like a flat, nonreflecting surface. So did certain vacant areas between objects. The only light left in the world seemed to originate from things themselves, and all of it was gradually bleached. Various intensities of white emerged from the planes of existence, and brightest of all, immense, awful, the unicorn suddenly reared, pawing at the air, filling perhaps ninety percent of creation with what became a slowmotion gesture I feared would annihilate us if we advanced another pace.

Then there was only the light. Then absolute stillness.

Then the light was gone and there was nothing. Not even blackness. A gap in existence, which might have lasted an instant or an eternity…

Then the blackness returned, and the light. Only they were reversed. Light filled the interstices, outlining voids that must be objects. The first sound that I heard was the rushing of water, and I knew somehow that we were halted beside the spring. The first thing that I felt was Star's quivering. Then I smelled the sea.

Then the Pattern came into view, or a distorted negative of it…

I leaned forward and more light leaked around the edges of things. I leaned back; it went away. Forward again, this time farther than before…

The light spread, introduced various shades of gray into the scheme of things. With my knees then, gently, I suggested that Star advance.

With each pace, something returned to the world. Surfaces, textures, colors…

Behind me, I heard the others begin to follow. Below me, the Pattern surrendered nothing of its mystery, but it acquired a context which, by degrees, found its place within the larger reshaping of the world about us.

Continuing downhill, a sense of depth reemerged. The sea, now plainly visible off to the right, underwent a possibly purely optical separation from the sky, with which it seemed momentarily to have been joined in some sort of Urmeer of the waters above and the waters below. Unsettling upon reflection, but unnoted while in effect. We were heading down a steep, rocky incline which seemed to have taken its beginning at the rear of the grove to which the unicorn had led us. Perhaps a hundred meters below us was a perfectly level area which appeared to be solid, unfractured rock - roughly oval in shape, a couple of hundred meters along its major axis. The slope down which we rode swung off to the left and returned, describing a vast arc, a parenthesis, half cupping the smooth shelf. Beyond its rightward jutting there was nothing - that is to say the land fell away in steep descent toward that peculiar sea.

And, continuing, all three dimensions seemed to reassert themselves once more. The sun was that great orb of molten gold we had seen earlier. The sky was a deeper blue than that of Amber, and there were no clouds in it. That sea was a matching blue, unspecked by sail or island. I saw no birds, and I heard no sounds other than our own. An enormous silence lay upon this place, this day. In the bowl of my suddenly clear vision, the Pattern at last achieved its disposition upon the surface below. I thought at first that it was inscribed in the rock, but as we drew nearer I saw that it was contained within it - gold-pink swirls, like veining in an exotic marble, natural-seeming despite the obvious purpose to the design.

I drew rein and the others came up beside me. Random to my right, Ganelon to my left.

We regarded it in silence for a long while. A dark, rough-edged smudge had obliterated an area of the section immediately beneath us, running from its outer rim to the center.

«You know,» Random finally said, «it is as if someone had shaved the top off Kolvir, cutting at about the level of the dungeons.»

«Yes,» I said.

«Then - looking for congruence - that would be about where our own Pattern lies.»

«Yes,» I said again.

«And that blotted area is to the south, from whence comes the black road.»

I nodded slowly as the understanding arrived and forged itself into a certainty.

«What does it mean?» he asked. «It seems to correspond to the true state of affairs, but beyond that I do not understand its significance. Why have we been brought here and shown this thing?»

«It does not correspond to the true state of affairs,» I said. «It is the true state of affairs.»

Ganelon turned toward us.

«On that shadow Earth we visited - where you had spent so many years - I heard a poem about two roads that diverged in a wood,» he said. «It ends, 'I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. ' When I heard it, I thought of something you had once said - 'All roads lead to Amber' - and I wondered then, as I do now, at the difference the choice may make, despite the end's apparent inevitability to those of your blood.»

«You know?» I said. «You understand?»

«I think so.»

He nodded, then pointed.

«That is the real Amber down there, isn't it?»

«Yes,» I said. «Yes, it is.»