"She did." Evarin murmured, and I realized I had spoken aloud. The room
seemed full of a weighty silence. Evarin's prowling footsteps made no
noise as he came to my side. "I can give it back to you, though. I have
made you a Toy." His effete voice rather disgusted me, and I moved
away, but he followed. "Look here, and find your memory."
And he put something small and hard into my hand; something wrapped in
silvery silks.
I raised my hand curiously, untwisting the wrappings. They were smooth
and shining and colorless, with a bluish cast, like Gamine's veils;
no fabric I had ever seen. Evarin backed slowly away from me. For an
instant all I could see was a blurred invisibility--like Gamine's face
behind the veils--then a sort of mirror became slowly visible. It did
not seem to reflect anything; rather, it was a coldly shining surface,
cloudy, glittering from within. I bent to examine the pattern of the
shadows that moved on the surface. There was a curious pull from the
mirror, a cold that crept sluggishly from my hand. A familiar, soothing
cold. As if drawn by a magnet, my eyes bent closer--
Recognition crashed in my mind. Evarin--and his gilt deadly Toys.... I
dashed the colorless thing to the floor, giving it a savage kick. The
blurred invisibility wavered; I caught a glimpse of a tiny jewelled
mechanism, before it sprang back to gray ice again. Evarin had backed
halfway across the room; I leaped at him, collaring the dandy and
wrenching him close. "I've a good mind to tie the thing across your
throat!" I grated.
Evarin's lip twisted up. Suddenly his whole face melted in a blurring
invisibility and I felt his whole substance evaporate from between
my hands. He writhed like smoke, and I leaped backward just as he
materialized, whole and deadly, too close. "I am always--guarded!" he
jerked out at me, "I might have known--"
He stooped, reaching for the fallen toy. I kicked the little mirror
out of his reach, bent to retrieve it. "I'll keep this," I said, and
wadding the insulated silk around it, I thrust it into a pocket.
Evarin's eyes glared at me helplessly. "You'll stay solid for awhile
now," I jeered. "_Toymaker!_ Damned freak--" I stormed out of the
room, leaving him rubbing his bruised shoulder.
Now that Adric was back in control, I had no trouble discovering
where I wanted to go. Some blind instinct led me through the maze
of elevators and staircases; I stepped into servant's quarters,
kitchens, a roomful of buzzing machinery I dismissed with a glance of
familiarity; and finally found myself in the open, the semicircle of
rainbow towers around me.
Overhead the suns, red and white, sent a curious, double-shadowed
light downward through the neatly-trimmed trees. A little day moon,
smaller than any moon I had known, peeped, a curious crescent, over the
edge of a mountain. The grass under my feet was just grass, but the
brightly-tinted flowers in mathematically regular beds were strange to
me. Paths, bordered by narrow ditches to keep the pedestrian off the
flowers, wandered in and out of this strange pleasaunce; I accepted all
this without conscious thought, but some unconscious scrap of memory
gave me a vague practical reason for the ditches. I carefully avoided
them.
Faint shrill music tugged siren-like at my ears; wordless, like
Gamine's crooning. Staring, I realized that the flowers themselves
sang. The singing flowers of Karamy's garden--I remembered their lotus
song. A song of welcome? Or of danger?
I was not alone in the garden. Men, kilted and belted in the same gaudy
red and gold as the flowers, passed and repassed restlessly, unquiet
as chained flames. For a moment the old vanity turned upper-most in my
mind. For all her slaves, all her--lovers, Karamy paid tribute to the
Lord of the Crimson Tower! Paid--would continue to pay!
The men passed me, silent. They were sworded, but their swords were
blunt, like children's toys; they were a regiment of corpses, of
zombies. Their salutes as I passed were jerky, mechanical.
A high note sang suddenly in the flowers; I felt, not heard, their
empty parading cease. In a weird ballet they ranged themselves into
blind lines that filed away nowhere; toy soldiers, all alike.
And between the backs of the toy-soldiers and the patterned, painted
flowers, I saw a man running. Another me, from another world, thought
briefly of the card-soldiers, flat on their faces in the Red Queen's
garden. Wonderland. I heard myself say, with half-conscious amusement,
"They all look so alike until you turn them over!"
The man running between the ditched flower-beds was no dummy from a
pack of cards. I saw him beckon, still running. He called to me; to
Adric.
"Adric! Karamy walks here--just listen to the flowers! I was afraid
I'd have to get all the way into the tower to find you!" His voice was
urgent, breathless; he slid to a stop not three feet from me. "Narayan
_knew_ they'd freed you! He's outside the gates. He sent me to
help. Come on!"
The sight of the man touched another of those live-wires in my brain;
the name of _Narayan_, another still. "Narayan--" I said in dull
recognition. The word, on my lips, hit a chord of fear, of dread and
danger--
But I had come straight from Evarin. I knew the man; I knew the
response he expected, but the brief glimpse into Evarin's mirror had
set up a chain of actions I could not control. I tried to put out my
hand in friendly greeting; instead I felt, with horror, my fingers
at my belt and tried, without success, to halt the sword that flew
without volition from its sheath. The man backed away, his eyes full
of terror. "Adric--no--the Sign--" he held up one arm, deprecatingly,
then howled with agony, clutching the severed fingers. I heard my own
voice, savage, inhuman, the thin laughter of Evarin snarling through
it. "Sign?? There's a sign for you!"
The man threw himself out of range; but his face, convulsed with pain,
held a stunned bewilderment. "Adric--Narayan promised--you were sane--"
he breathed.
I forced my sword back into the scabbard, staring without comprehension
at the blood from the wound I had inflicted, and at the darting heads
of the flowers. I could not kill this man who carried the name of
Narayan on his tongue.
The flowers twitched--stirred--threw tendrils at the man's bleeding
hand. A quick nausea tightened my throat; I motioned urgently to him.
"Run!" I begged, "Quick, or I can't--"
The flowers shrilled. The man threw back his head, his eyes wide with
panic, and screamed.
"Karamy! Aiiieeeee--!" he staggered back wildly, teetering on the
edge of the ditch. I cried another warning, incoherent--but too
late. He trod on the flowers--stumbled across the little ditch. The
writhing flower-heads shot up shoulder-high. They screamed a wild
paean of flower-music, and he fell among them, sprawling, floundering
helplessly. I heard him scream, hoarsely, horribly--I turned my eyes
away. There was a wild thrashing, a flailing, a yell that died and
echoed among the brilliant towers. There was a sort of purring murmur
from the blossoms.
Then the flowers stilled and were quiet, waving innocently behind their
ditches.
Karamy, gold and fire, walked along the winding path through the trees.
And in the space of a second I forgot the man who lay lifeless in the
bed of the terrible flowers.
Karamy was all gold. From her glowing crown of hair to the tips of her
little slippers, she was one sunny shimmer; there was amber on her
brows and at her throat, and an amber rod twisted lightly between her
fingers, its delicate movement outlining my face. Karamy's smile of
welcome was a dream which made me know I could be well content if this
were my world.
But old habit made me turn my face away; her eyes, cat-eyes of wide
yellow, watched me slyly, but her face was turned to the sprawled man
in the flowers. "So? I thought I heard--something." Without taking her
eyes from my face, she spun the lucent rod. The flower-song rose again,
a soft keening wail. Two of the silent guards moved noiselessly through
the garden, and at an expressive movement of the rod, they lifted the
corpse and bore it away. The music died. The woman's hands went out to
pull me close.
"Adric, Adric! As soon as you are free, they pursue you! That is not
what you want, is it?"
"Isn't it?" I asked shortly. I still could not look full at the
cat-eyes, the caressing face. A memory scuttled, rabbit-fashion, across
my mind, giving name and identity to the man I had betrayed to the
flowers.
Karamy slid in front of me so I had to look at her, and the lovely lazy
voice murmured the name I was beginning to know. "You are angry," the
soft voice caressed me, "I knew it was not right to let Evarin near
you! Adric, we need you, Narabedla needs you! We felt betrayed when
you left us, when you shut yourself up alone with your stars! Have you
forgotten, or are you still--my lover?"
It rang phony! Phony, was the way I put it to myself. Part of me felt
like calling her a lying she-devil and having that much, at least, on
record. But I was fast acquiring a double cunning. The animal cunning
of Adric's old habit--and a desperate, trapped cunning of my own, born
of a desperate fear of this unfamiliar world. There was nothing I could
do except ride on the surface and let my hunches take me where they
would. Karamy was very soft and sweet and something more than lovely
in my arms and I held her crushingly close while I struggled with a
memory. Who was Karamy? Who--and what--was I?
Karamy dropped her arms. The mantle of lazy seductiveness dropped with
them. She spoke with eager annoyance. "You are still angry because
I sent you on the Time Ellipse! You do not know it was for your own
good--you haven't learned your lesson yet--"
That talk meant danger for me. I could think of only one way to silence
it. She seemed to like it; but even with her lips acquiescent under
mine, I was wary. Was I fooling her--or was she only playing my own
game, and playing it a little better?
"Now we can make plans," she said a little later, "First, Gamine."
She looked sharply at me, but I kept my face expressionless. "Gamine
is always with the old Dreamer; she lets him wake; he will grow too
strong. We must send Rhys away from Narabedla. Gamine may stay or
follow him to exile. But Rhys must go."
"Rhys must go," I conceded.
"He should be slain, but Gamine will never do it," said Karamy with
a shrug that disposed of Rhys. "Evarin--" she snapped her jewelled
fingers. "His Dreamer sleeps sound! Evarin fears even his own power!
My Dreamer grows strong--but he serves me!" The beautiful face looked
ruthless and savage. "Your Dreamer walks--free in the forest! Only you
can re-bind him. You, with my help--Adric of the Crimson Tower!"
Her eyes smoldered. "Yes, and my Dreamer shall serve you as well, till
then!" She breathed. "I will pay to put power in your hands!"
The very phrase Evarin had used! A shudder stung me briefly.
Her glowing face burned through my sting of fear. "I go to the Dreamer
this night, Adric! Ride with me, and he shall lead you where the
Dreamer walks--and lead you back to power! I have said enough--" the
lambent eyes tilted at me, "Have I not?"
She had, and too much. For I knew now how the Dreamer must be paid. And
the small part of me that was still Mike Kenscott cowered; the rest of
me accepted the memory with a shrug. It was this Adric part that spoke.
"I'll go. And afterward, I'll go into the forest where the Dreamer
walks--and bring him back to you!"
But even as I swept Karamy into my arms and bent her head back roughly
under my mouth, a warning prickle iced my spine. I said, insinuatingly
"And then, Karamy--" but my eyes narrowed over her golden head.
Karamy had tricked me before this.