Falcons of Narabedla, Marion Zimmer Bradley [best short novels txt] 📗

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.

CHAPTER FOUR
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 blond 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 super-imposed 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, finally emerging into a long corridor. I strode down it, hearing my own steps echo; a second rhythm joined them imperceptibly, and Gamine stole out of the darkness, swathed in the luminous veiling, creeping noiselessly as a ghost behind me. Later I became conscious of Evarin's padding cat-steps behind Gamine, trailing us, single-file. And other figures came from darkened recesses to stretch the silent parade; a slim girl in a winged cloak, flame color; a dwarfed man who walked beneath the amethyst huddle of purple cap and furs. Memory fitted names to them, but I did not speak to them, or they to me.

After a long time, the immense corridor began to tilt upward, climbing toward a glimmer of light at the end. Without realizing it I had swung into an arrogant, loping stride; now I brushed away the slave-soldier who headed the column and took the lead myself. Behind me the others fell into place as if I had bidden them; the flame-clothed girl in the winged cloak, the cat-footed Evarin, the dwarf bent in his jester's cap, Gamine in the blue shroud. Without warning, we came out into a vast court; an enclosed space, yet wide as the outdoors, a yard, a plaza, a place of imposing grandeur. A place of memory.

The red sun above us glowed like a lurid coal. There were tall pillars on three sides of the courtyard, and at the far end, a vaulted archway led into a treelined drive that stretched away for miles into the twilight. Between two pillars, Karamy waited; slim, shimmering golden from head to foot. A hungry impatience sparked in her cat's eyes. "You're late."

"I'm ready," I said. What I was ready for, I was not sure.

Karamy waved an impatient signal to the Narabedlans who were coming up. "Adric is with us again," she said in her curious lazy voice, "Your allegiance to Adric—children of the Rainbow!"

I stood at her side, mute, waiting; a guard of silent men behind us. "Lord Idris;" Karamy summoned. The hunchback came to bow jerkily before us. "Welcome home—Lord!"

The girl in flame-color darted to where we stood and her dipping curtsy was like the waver of a moth toward a flame. "Adric—" she murmured. The wings of her cloak lifted and fluttered across her shoulders as if they would fly of themselves. She was a shy thing, and her dark hair waved softly as if it too were winged. I touched her fingers lightly, but under the smolder of Karamy's gaze I let her go. She watched me, shyly, with averted face.

Evarin's face was slyly malicious, but his voice was pure silk. "It is—pleasure to follow you again, my brother," he almost purred, and I scowled at the mockery at his face and refused his offered hand. Only Gamine said nothing, coming forward on gliding feet to bow briefly and retire; but the silver-sweet, sexless voice of the spell-singer murmured in a singing, almost wordless, croon.

"Save your spells, Gamine," said Karamy savagely, and Evarin jerked round at the shrouded form, but Gamine heeded neither of them, and the sweet contralto chanting went on.

From somewhere the silent men brought horses. Horses—here, in this nightmare world? I had never been on a horse in my life. I found myself vaulting, with a nice co-ordination of movement, into the saddle. The courtyard, for all the bustle of department, seemed to hold the silence of a grave. Karamy kept me close to her. When we were all mounted, she threw the amber rod upward, and the last rays of the red sun caught its rays and sent a pure shaft of light down the darkened alleyway lined with trees. At the sight of that gleam, a curiously familiar emotion stole through me. I threw up one arm over my head, mimicking Karamy's gesture. "Ride!" I shouted.

And the flying steeds kept pace with mine.

The driveway under the arch of trees led for miles under the thick boughs. Through the easy drumming of hooves, I could still hear the sweet distant sound of Gamine's singing, which floated on the wind, keeping pace with the rise and fall of the rolling road, in a quick cadence. The wind whipped Karamy's golden hair like a halo about her head. I glanced over my shoulder to where the rainbow towers stood, now black, silhouetted against the greater darkness of the mountains. Overhead in the pink sky, the crescent of the tiny moon was brightening, and lower in the sky I saw another, wider disc, nearly at full. Cold air was stinging my cheeks and nipping my bones with frost, and I felt the sparks struck from hooves beating on the frozen ground.

Cold! Yet in Karamy's garden flowers had glowed in a tropical glory—

And for a moment, it was entirely Mike Kenscott—sick, bewildered and panicky—who glanced about him with horror, feeling the swirling cold and a colder chill from the golden sorceress at my side. It was Mike Kenscott's will that jerked at the reins of the big gelding to end this farce now—

"What is it?" Karamy cried, over the noise of the hooves.

And I heard my own voice, raised above the galloping rhythm, cry back "Nothing!" and call out a command to the horse.

Good God! I was Mike Kenscott—but prisoner in a body that would not obey me—a mind that persisted in thoughts and habits I could not share, a—soul?—that would carry me to destruction! I was Mike Kenscott—trapped on a nightmare ride through hell!

CHAPTER FIVE
Where the Dreamer Walks

I had been scared before. Now I was panicked, wild with a nerve-destroying fright. I'm not a coward. I set up a radar transmitter in Okinawa within ninety feet of a nest of Japs. That was something real. I could face it. But under two suns and a pair of little moons, with weird people I knew were not human—all right; I was a coward. I steadied myself in the saddle, trying with every scrap of my will to calm myself. If this was a nightmare, well, I'd had some beauties—

But it wasn't. I knew that. The frost hurting my face, the sound of shod steel on stones, the vivid colors around me, told