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 

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