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--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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