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 uppermost 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
