Read Online The courts of chaos by Roger Zelazny - Free Book Online

of the dark waves that I could take a little rest. Still, he might be wrong, and it could just be an unusual storm. But I did not want to take the chance. I rose and turned to the rear of the cave. I whistled.
    No response. I went back and groped around.
    “Something the matter?”
    “My horse is gone.”
    “Could it have wandered off?”
    “Must have. I’d have thought Star’d have better sense, though.”
    I went to the cavemouth but could see nothing. I was half-drenched in the instant I was there. I returned to my position beside the left wall.
    “It seems like an ordinary enough storm to me,” I said. “They sometimes get pretty bad in the mountains.”
    “Perhaps you know this country better than I do?”
    “No, I am just traveling through—a thing I had better be continuing soon, too.”
    I touched the Jewel. I readied into it, then through it, out and up, with my mind. I felt the storm about me and ordered it away, with red pulses of energy corresponding to my heartbeats. Then I leaned back, found another match and relit my pipe. It would still take a while for the forces I had manipulated to do their work, against a stormfront of this size.
    “It will not last too long,” I said.
    “How can you tell?”
    “Privileged information.”
    He chuckled.
    “According to some versions, this is the way that the world ends-beginning with a strange storm from out of the north.”
    “That’s right,” I said, “and this is it. Nothing to worry about, though. It will be all over, one way or the other, before too long.”
    “That stone you are wearing . . . It is giving off light.”
    “Yes.”
    “You were joking about this being the end, though-were you not?”
    “No.”
    “You make me think of that line from the Holy Book-The Archangel Corwin shall pass before the storm, lightning upon his breast. . .. You would not be named Corwin, would you?”
    “How does the rest of it go?”
    “. . . When asked where he travels, he shall say, ‘To the ends of the Earth,’ where he goes not knowing what enemy will aid him against another enemy, nor whom the Horn will touch.”
    “That’s all?”
    “All there is about the Archangel Corwin.”
    “I have run into this difficulty with Scripture in the past. It tells you enough to get interested, but never enough to be of any immediate use. It is as though the author gets his kicks by tantalizing. One enemy against another? The Horn? Beats me.”
    “Where do you travel?”
    “Not too far, unless I can find my horse.”
    I returned to the cavemouth. It was letting up now, with a glow like a moon behind some clouds to the west, another to the east. I looked both ways along the trail and down the slope to the valley. No horses anywhere in sight. I turned back to the cave. Just as I did, however, I heard Star’s whinny far below me.
    I called back to the stranger in the cave, “I have to go. You can have the blanket.”
    I do not know whether he replied, for I moved off into the drizzle then, picking my way down the slope. Again, I exerted myself through the Jewel, and the drizzle halted, to be replaced by a mist.
    The rocks were slippery, but I made it halfway down without stumbling. I paused then, both to catch my breath and to get my bearings. From that point, I was not certain as to the exact direction from which Star’s whinny had come. The moon’s light was a little stronger, visibility a bit better, but I saw nothing as I studied the prospect before me. I listened for several minutes.
    Then I heard the whinny once more-from below, to my left, near a dark boulder, cairn or rocky outcrop. There did seem to be some sort of turmoil in the shadows at its base. Moving as quickly as I dared, I laid my course in that direction.
    As I reached level ground and hurried toward the place of the action, I passed pockets of ground mist, stirred slightly by a breeze from out of the west, snaking silvery, about my ankles. I heard a grating, crunching sound, as of something