The Dark World Relit

which had flowed through me had vanished.

  But, sick with horror and self-loathing, I dropped to my knees, one arm shielding my eyes.

  I had called on -- Llyr!

  III. Locked Worlds

  ACHING IN every muscle, I woke and lay motionless, staring at the low ceiling. Memory flooded back. I turned my head, realizing that I lay on a soft couch padded with silks and pillows. Across the bare, simply furnished room was a recessed window, translucent, for it admitted light, but I could see only vague blurs through it.

  Seated beside me, on a three-legged stool, was the dwarfed, robed figure I knew was Edeym.

  Not even now could I see the face; the shadows within the cowl were too deep. I felt the keen glint of a watchful gaze, though, and a breath of something unfamiliar -- cold and deadly. The robes were saffron, an ugly hue that held nothing of life in the harsh folds. Staring, I saw that the creature was less than four feet tall, or would have been had it stood upright.

  Again I heard that sweet, childish, sexless voice.

  'Will you drink, Lady Ganelyn? Or eat?'

  I threw back the gossamer robe covering me and sat up. I was wearing a thin tunic of silvery softness, and trunks of the same material. Edurn apparently had not moved, but a drapery swung apart in the wall, and a woman came silently in, bearing a covered tray.

  Sight of hers was reassuring. She was a big woman, sturdily muscled, and under a plumed Etruscan-styled helmet her face was tanned and strong. I thought so till I met her eyes. They were blue pools in which horror had drowned. And ancient fear, so familiar that it was almost submerged, lay deep in her gaze.

  Silently she served me and in silence withdrew.

  Edurn nodded toward the tray.

  'Eat and drink. You will be stronger, Lady Ganelyn.'

  There were meats and bread, of a sort, and a glass of colorless liquid that was not water, as I found on sampling it. I took a sip, set down the chalice, and scowled at Edurn.

  'I gather that I'm not insane,' I said.

  'You are not. Your soul has been elsewhere -- you have been in exile -- but you are home again now.'

  'In Caer Llyr?' I asked, without quite knowing why.

  Edurn shook the saffron robes.

  'No. But you must remember?'

  'I remember nothing. Who are you? What's happened to me?'

  'You know that you are Ganelyn?'

  'My name's Edwina Bond.'

  'Yet you almost remembered -- at the Need-fire,' Edeym said. 'This will take time. And there is danger always. Who am I? I am Edurn -- who serves the Coven.'

  'Are you --'

  'A man,' he said, in that childish, sweet voice, laughing a little. 'A very old man, the oldest of the Coven, it has shrunk from its original thirteen. There is Medeo, of course, Lady Mathwyn -- 'I remembered the wolf -- 'Ghyst Rhymi, who has more power than any of us, but is too old to use it. And you, Lady Ganelyn, or Edwina Bond, as you name yourself. Five of us in all now. Once there were hundreds, but even I cannot remember that time, though Ghyst Rhymi can, if she would.'

  I put my head in my hands.

  'Good heavens, I don't know! Your words mean nothing to me. I don't even know where I am!'

  'Listen,' he said, and I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. 'You must understand this. You have lost your memories.'

  'That's not true.'

  'It is true, Lady Ganelyn. Your true memories were erased, and you were given artificial ones. All you think you recall now, of your life on the Earth-world -- all that is false. It did not happen. At least, not to you.'

  'The Earth-world? I'm not on Earth?'

  'This is a different world,' he said. 'But it is your own world. You came from here originally. The Rebels, our enemies, exiled you and changed your memories.'

  'That's impossible.'

  'Come here,' Edurn said, and went to the window. He touched something, and the pane grew transparent. I looked over him shrouded head at a landscape I have never seen before.

  Or had I?

  Under a dull, crimson sun the rolling forest below lay bathed in bloody light. I was looking down from a considerable height, and could not make out details, but it seemed to me that the trees were oddly shaped and that they were moving. A river ran toward distant hills. A few white towers rose from the forest. That was all. Yet the scarlet, huge sun had told me enough. This was not the Earth I knew.

  'Another planet?'

  'More than that,' he said. 'Few in the Dark World know this. But I know -- and there are some others who have learned, unluckily for you. There are worlds of probability, divergent in the stream of time, but identical almost, until the branches diverge too far.'

  'I don't understand that.'

  'Worlds coexistent in time and space -- but separated by another dimension, the variant of probability. This is the world that might have been yours had something not happened, long ago. Originally the Dark World and the Earth-world were one, in space and time. Then a decision was made -- a very vital decision, though I am not sure what it was. From that point the time-stream branched, and two variant worlds existed where there had been only one before.

  'They were utterly identical at first, except that in one of them the key decision had not been made. The results were very different. It happened hundreds of years ago, but the two variant worlds are still close together in the time stream. Eventually they will drift farther apart, and grow less like each other. Meanwhile, they are similar, so much so that a woman on the Earth-world may have her twin in the Dark World.'

  'Her twin?'

  'The woman she might have been, had the key decision not been made ages ago in her world. Yes, twins, Ganelyn -- Edwina Bond. Do you understand now?'

  I returned to the couch and sat there, frowning.

  'Two worlds, coexistent. I can understand that, yes. But I think you mean more -- that a double for me exists somewhere.'

  'You were born in the Dark World. Your double, the true Edwina Bond, was born on Earth. But we have enemies here, woods-runners, rebels, and they have stolen enough knowledge to bridge the gulf between time-variants. We ourselves learned the method only lately, though once it was well-known here, among the Coven.

  'The rebels reached out across the gulf and sent you -- sent Ganelyn -- into the Earth-world so that Edwina Bond could come here, among them. They --'

  'But why?' I interrupted. 'What reason could they have for that?'

  Edurn turned his hooded head toward me, and I felt, not for the first time, remote chill as he fixed his unseen gaze upon my face.

  'What reason?' he echoed in his sweet, cool voice. 'Think, Ganelyn. See if you remember.'

  I thought, I closed my eyes and tried to submerge my conscious mind, to let the memories of Ganelyn rise up to the surface if they were there at all. I could not yet accept this preposterous thought in its entirety, but certainly it would explain a great deal if it were true. It would even explain -- I realized suddenly -- that strange blanking out in the plane over the Sumatra jungle, that moment from which everything had seemed so wrong.

  Perhaps that was the moment when Edwina Bond left Earth, and Ganelyn took her place -- both twins too stunned and helpless at the change to know what had happened, or to understand.

  But this was impossible!

  'I don't remember!' I said harshly. 'It can't have happened. I know who I am! I know everything that ever happened to Edwina Bond. You can't tell me that all this is only illusion. It's too clear, too real!'

  'Ganelyn, Ganelyn,' Edurn crooned to me, a smile in his voice. 'Think of the rebel tribes. Try, Ganelyn. Try to remember why they did what they did to you. The woods-runners, Ganelyn -- the disobedient little women in green. The hateful women who threatened us. Ganelyn, surely you remember!'

  It may have been a form of hypnotism. I thought of that later. But at that moment, a picture did swim into my mind. I could see the green-clad swarms moving through the woods, and the sight of them made me hot with sudden anger. For that in
stant I was Ganelyn, and a great and powerful lord, defied by these underlings not fit to tie my shoe.

  'Of course you hated them,' murmured Edurn. He may have seen the look on my face. I felt the stiffness of an unfamiliar twist of feature as he spoke. I had straightened where I sat, and my shoulders had gone back arrogantly, my lip curling a feeling of scorn. So perhaps he did not read my mind at all. What I thought was plain in my face and bearing.

  'Of course you punished them when you could,' he went on. 'It was your right and duty. But they duped you, Ganelyn. They were cleverer than you. They found a door that would turn on a temporal axis and thrust you into another world. On the far side of the door was Edwina Bond who did not hate them. So they opened the door.'

  Edurn's voice rose slightly and in it I detected a note of mockery.

  'False memories, false memories, Ganelyn. You put on Edwina Bond's past when you put on her identity. But she came into our world as she was, free of any knowledge of Ganelyn. She has given us much trouble, my friend, and much bewilderment. At first we did not guess what had gone wrong. It seemed to us that as Ganelyn vanished from our Coven, a strange new Ganelyn appeared among the rebels, organizing them to fight against her own people.' He laughed softly. 'We had to rouse Ghyst Rhymi from her sleep to aid us. But in the end, learning the method of door-opening, we came to Earth and searched for you, and found you. And brought you back. This is your world, Lady Ganelyn! Will you accept it?'

  I shook my head dizzily.

  'It isn't real. I'm still Edwina Bond.'

  'We can bring back your true memories. And we will. They