LITMIR.BIZ

      Flowers of Danger

      I turned my back on the window. “Rhys is a Dreamer,” I said with slow certainty. “What is Gamine?”

      Evarin nodded slowly, ignoring the question. “Rhys is a Dreamer, yes. He is old—so old he is almost mortal now; so he wakes, and he too walks. But he was one of us once—the only Dreamer ever born within the Rainbow City. His loyalty is double; but he will never harm Narabedla, because he is of our blood.” Evarin cleared his throat. “So Gamine takes what knowledge can be had from his old, old mind. And does not pay.”

      “Who is Gamine?” I asked again. Evarin still hesitated.

      “Karamy hates Gamine,” he said, after minutes. “So no man sees Gamine’s face. I would not ask too many questions—unless you ask them of Karamy.” A smile flickered on the mobile features, “Ask Karamy,” he said gleefully, “She will tell!”

      “She will?” I said stupidly, because I could think of nothing else to say. Evarin’s grin was delicately malicious. “Oh, I am sure of that! Karamy is quick to strike. Gamine and I have little love lost, but we agree on one thing; that Karamy’s procession of slaves is monstrous. And that you are a fool to help Karamy pay for her—desires. Karamy is far too fond of power in her own hands, to pay to put it into yours.”

      Karamy. Karamy who took my memory—

      “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 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

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