“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.
Trapped!
Afterward, when I had found my way back to the Crimson Tower, I searched for hours for something that might give a clue to Adric’s mystifying past. I was puzzled about this Adric who came and went as he pleased in the chambers of my memory. But I found nothing; whoever had stolen Adric’s memory, had made sure that nothing in his surroundings should clear up the puzzle in his mind. I knew only one thing. Adric was feared, disliked, distrusted by all the Narabedlans, and all except Gamine had something to gain by feigning friendship. I could not decide whether Karamy’s attitude was love that pretended contempt to mold Adric, or me, to her will, or contempt that pretended love for the same reason. And although habit found affection for Evarin, I could not trust him long. Trust a cyclone sooner than that half-mad effeminate! The name, Narayan, stuck burr-like in my mind. Friend, or enemy? I sat at the barred window of Adric’s high room, trying to force memory from the alien mind in which I was prisoner. And whether it was sheer effort of will, or the result of the fragmentary look in Evarin’s mirror, or whether, as Gamine insisted, I was really Adric and Mike Kenscott was a mere superficial illusion of my conscious mind, memory did begin to pulse back.
In the early days....
In the early days, before the vagueness came on my mind, I, Adric of the Crimson Tower, had been a power in the Rainbow City. The memories of that time were not the kind Mike Kenscott would have cared to own, but I, as Adric, found them vastly pleasing. Unlike Gamine, who loved only knowledge, or Evarin, who toyed with pleasure and trickery, I had wanted power. I had it, unlimited, from a Dreamer who stirred only vaguely in sleep. Half the known portions of this world had known the Crimson Tower as lord. And Karamy—
Some memories were triumphant. Some were humorous in Adric’s cynical mind. Some were terrible beyond guessing—for Adric had not counted cost, and even he shuddered from the price the Dreamer had exacted.
Then, to this wilful and wild man, something had happened. I had no idea what; Karamy had reached that far back and blurred, though not entirely erased, my memory. It had something to do with a blonde boy’s face, lifted in incredulous terror—or joy; and a fleeing form, veiled, that retreated down the long corridor of my mind, averting its face as I followed. Whatever had happened, it had come when Adric was sick with blood and horror, when he was surfeited, even if momentarily, with conquest, and sickened at the price the Dreamer extorted. The power, forced through the mind of the Dreamer, called for energy; kinetic energy, available from one source and one only. Adric had fed the Dreamer with that power. For a while.
One day, as a whim, I had redeemed a young woman slave—then the vagueness came and choked me. I might think; I might burst my brain, but so far and no farther my memories would carry me. I could not force memory of that chain of events. But after that, Adric’s reign had collapsed like the unstable arch it had been. His armies scattered, and he had shut himself up or been imprisoned in his Tower; his memories had been stolen and he had gone, or been sent, spinning along a time line forward, or perhaps back, until somewhere in the abyss of time he touched Mike Kenscott.
It had been then, perhaps, that Adric had escaped. He had reached, drawn Mike Kenscott back—and switched the two. It was a perfect escape from a life Adric had come to hate.
But I was Adric. There was an explanation for that, too. The physical body could not make the transit in time. I had Adric’s body; the convolutions of his brain, the synaptic links of habit. His memory banks. Only the Ego, the superimposed pattern of the conscious identity, insisted I was Mike Kenscott. In Adric’s body, the old patterns ruled, and to all intents and purposes, I was Adric. And back in my own time, I thought, Adric was living in my body—living Mike Kenscott’s life, going through the motions, with only the same queer lapses I was making here. And after a while, even these would stop. I was wholly trapped. Here, living Adric’s life, the part of me that was Adric would grow stronger and stronger till—he?— unseated the other identity wholly. And he, in my body? Andy, I thought with a wild swift fear, what will he do to Andy?
Nothing. He could not hurt Andy—not in my pattern—any more than I could hate Evarin. Or could he?
I had to get back! God, I had to get back!
When the white sun had set and the red sun glowed a darkening ember across the Sierra, a summons came, brought by one of Karamy’s toy-soldier cohorts. I dressed—in crimson again, for there was no other clothing anywhere—and followed the voiceless sentry down through a labyrinth of elevators,