Ghostlight (21 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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A flutter of movement at the front of the room caught her eye. It made her jump, but after a moment she saw what it was and relaxed. Only a curl of paper-ash blowing across the floor in the breeze from the forced-air heating.
But what papers were being burned
here?
Reluctantly, Truth passed to the front of the room. That papers had been burned was patently obvious; the grate was choked with them, to the point that page upon page, only half-burned, filled the fireplace on each side of the grate. She wondered how she could have missed seeing them before: even from here she could see the lines of handwritten purple scrawl that covered them, turning to black against brown at the charred periphery.
She knew what they were. She'd seen them her first afternoon here.
Why—and
who
—would be burning Irene's various attempts to reconstruct the Opening of the Way ritual from
Venus Afflicted
?
Had Light done it—and if so, why? Was burning the pages the thing that had triggered the event that had nearly killed her?
More unanswered questions. Hitching her purse up higher on her shoulder, Truth headed for her car.
 
She returned to the house a few moments later, purse and book both safely locked in the trunk of her car. She missed the jewelry, but no matter how it had vanished, tomorrow would be soon enough to look for it. Now to see if she could find the dining room again without a Sherpa guide; Shadow's Gate had a certain fey instability when it came to the locations of its rooms.
Despite her misgivings, the house did not seem to intend to play any more tricks tonight, and through a half-open door. Truth saw a familiar room. She stepped inside.
“—more time. You can't expect the results you want in the time you've allowed.”
Irene.
Truth stood in the entryway of the salon where she and the others had all gathered for drinks two nights before. Through the now-closed sliding doors at the far end of the room the dining room could be reached.
“I
need
the results you say I ask for. Without them I have no choice, save to act, or to countenance evil where it blooms, and so destroy myself as well. All the time in the world cannot change that, or my nature, or the nature of what I fight. And I don't think there is any more time, Irene,” Michael said in his faintly foreign inflection.
The voices were coming from a small alcove—what had been the telephone room during the house's Gilded Age. Truth took a step backward, out of possible sight. They hadn't heard her.
“There must be,” Irene said, and now Truth marked the desperate note in her voice. “There must be! It isn't fair for you to judge—not yet. I've had so little time to—” Irene's voice dropped suddenly, and Truth had to hold herself back from stepping inside in order to hear better. In a moment Irene's voice grew intelligible again. “—father's seed. I think there is change already; in a few more weeks I know everything will be fine. I've worked so hard, Michael—all my life—it can't all have been for naught. If you'll just let me—”
“Do what you can.” Michael's deep voice cut through Irene's words with a tone of dismissive finality. “And I will do what I must. Don't you see, child? This is no judgment—I, of all creatures, have no right to judge the shifts that others are driven to. It is a prophecy. I see no alternative before me but intervention—”
Michael's voice broke off abruptly, and when it resumed it was so soft that Truth had to strain to hear it.
“Weep not, daughter, for this ending was written in the Book of Life before the world was made, and in the end there is nothing either of us may do to erase a line of it. You have done your best, in service to your master—now you must let me serve my own.”
Truth didn't stay to hear more—she wouldn't have been able to manage many more minutes of silence anyway, not with all that mystic talk of serving masters in the air. But elitism aside, there had been real sorrow
both in Michael's voice and Irene's. What sort of delusion had they cooked up between them this time?
And about whom? Truth frowned. She'd assumed, after the conversation she'd had with Michael yesterday, that they'd been discussing
her
, but it could as easily have been Light—or even Julian. She tried to reconstruct the dialogue she had just heard, but the phrases kept slipping from her tired mind. Something hadn't changed, and time was running out, and now Michael and Irene were whispering in corners about it.
Julian wouldn't like that. If there was one thing Truth was sure of, it was that.
But when she finally reached the dining room—having taken the long way around—she wondered if the whole overheard conversation had merely been another haunting, because both Irene and Michael were there, seated at the table, as if they hadn't stirred from their seats at any time in this past hour.
Truth stepped into the room, blinking a little at the brighter lights. She glanced about herself for Julian, only to see him coming in behind her. The seat at his right was vacant, and a plate with a warming cover over it was placed on the table before it.
“Will somebody tell me what's going on here?” Fiona demanded shrilly.
“No,” Hereward told her kindly. He smiled and his white teeth gleamed wolfishly.
The gray wolf.
Realization struck Truth like a shove between the shoulder blades, idiotic and undeniable. Hereward was the gray wolf.
Exhaustion and alcohol caught up to her all at once, drugging her senses into a spurious half-dreaming state in which manifest impossibilities became plausible realities. Hereward the gray wolf was one of the four Guardians of the Gate—but where were the others?
She glanced around the table. To her dazzled perceptions, each of the diners seemed to wear another face
above his own: Caradoc, the vulpine features of the Trickster; Donner, the wide, bland face of some animal she couldn't identify. Gareth's
anima
was faint, more a hint than a true seeming; Fiona's a jumbled impression of a glittering eye, and a sharp black beak—or needle fangs.
She would not look at Michael with this doubled sight. The same inner prompting responsible for these hypnogogic visions told her that she must not, and she obeyed. But she
would
find the others.
Ah. Here he is
, she thought to herself with mazed satisfaction. Over Ellis Gardner's features hung, somehow, the nimbus of the black dog. But where were the white mare and the red stag?
She looked toward Julian, expecting to see the stag's golden horns—and received the greatest shock of all, for over Julian there was no halo, no nimbus, no spirit mask.
Over Julian there shone nothing at all.
STRANGER THAN TRUTH
What should I say,
Since faith is dead,
And Truth away
From you is fled?
—SIR THOMAS WYATT
 
 
 
“WELL,” JULIAN SAID, AS TRUTH TOOK HER SEAT. “I see everyone's here now. Light won't be joining us, I'm afraid; she isn't feeling well.”
Irene made an abortive move to rise; Julian smiled her down into her seat again. Truth thought he looked frazzled, somehow, although he'd seemed to be all right when she'd left him in his sitting room a few minutes before. The strange, half-fey mood that had possessed her when she'd entered the dining room had vanished with the sight of his face: People and things were now, once again, no more than they seemed, and Truth was able to dismiss the visionary insight as nothing more real than a waking dream.
Or nearly. Was this other vision the way Light saw the world all the time? Truth thought of the fearful scars she had seen on the younger woman's body and shuddered inwardly. If one did see the world in that guise, much, much better to keep it to one's self.
Truth looked down at the covered plate before her. It was still warm; the scent of meat and gravy rose up from it, making her stomach lurch profanely. The last thing she wanted in this moment was something to eat.
“I have a small announcement to make,” Julian went on, “and I thought I'd take this opportunity when you are all gathered together here to make it. There is a change to our working schedule.”
The announcement seemed far too innocuous to be the cause of such tense anticipation, but looking about the table, Truth could see clearly who was caught in the Blackburn mystique and who was not. Most of the men—Ellis, Donner, Caradoc—fairly vibrated with it. Gareth merely looked puzzled, as if there were something he wanted to grasp but could not; Hereward seemed aloofly intense.
But Irene looked worried rather than interested, and Fiona was clearly more interested in looking well than in anything anyone else had to say.
“As you know, we have been unable to re-create the material lost with the disappearance of
Venus Afflicted.
Despite this, we will be moving forward with the Blackburn Work. We will open the Gate on All Hallows' Eve, two weeks from tonight. This will be a full working, with all Initiates robed and sealed as to their Grades. I realize that we are under-strength, so that some of you will have doubled roles, but I think we can make it work. Now …”
It was bizarre, really, how Julian managed to make it all sound like an RAF briefing in an old WWII movie. Truth tried not to smile as she reached for her wineglass. All this work and all this fuss; this wasn't what magick was … .
“Julian, you can't be serious!”
Irene Avalon stood, facing Julian down the length of the table. The garish makeup she wore tonight made her look cruelly older, and the light from the chandeliers glittered off her earrings as she trembled with agitation.
“You know that Thorne meant that ritual to be done at Beltane—at the rising tide, not the falling one!”
“And so that was when he tried it—but did it work?” Julian asked rhetorically. “No. It did
not
work. It failed because not enough power was available in the rising tide, which is why I propose to use the falling tide instead.”
“The falling tide; the
qlipothic
energies … It might work,” Donner said slowly.
“Oh, dearie me, yes—and if a cow had an engine she'd be a Volkswagen,” Ellis said waspishly. “Julian, I've been involved in the Work for more than twenty years. A little reconstruction is one thing—”
“Look—you don't know anything better!” Gareth told Ellis, rising a little out of his chair.
“I don't suppose it's worth suggesting that we try it Thorne's way first, and then yours?” Caradoc said, pitching his voice intentionally lower than Ellis or Gareth's.
Julian smiled. “A prudent suggestion, Caradoc, and worthy of your position in the Temple—only Halloween is in two weeks and Beltane is six months after that. I don't want to wait another year to inaugurate the New Aeon, do you? We'll try my way now—and if that fails, we'll give Thorne's method a try in six months.”
“You won't
live
to try Thorne's way!” Irene burst out. “Julian, Thorne knew that the powers of the falling tide were not to be lightly broached. He said it wasn't for humankind to tamper with chthonic energies, only the tellurian ones—the powers manifest in the
living
world. The chthonic powers are prehuman—
in
human—involvement with them is too dangerous; the Lodge isn't full strength—you don't even have anyone to work the higher Grades! You said—”
“Look.” Julian leaned forward, palms on the table. “Unless we're going to go in for human sacrifice—and may I remind you all that even
that
didn't work in nineteen sixty-nine?—we need to find some other way of
pouring more power into the Opening of the Gate that we will be able to raise and focus next Spring. We don't need a lock pick for this Gate—we need a crowbar. Now. I've recently found out some things that I'll share with you at the proper time and place, but I'll tell you now that I think that the forces we can evoke at Hallows will give us that crowbar. If we start preparations tomorrow we've got just time for the run-up to the Opening of the Gate—if you're all with me.”
Silence stretched—but Julian, Truth realized, was too canny to break it. She had the frustrating sense of standing at a fulcrum point, where events could be changed as she willed, and lacking the knowledge to do it.
“What do we do about not having the ritual?” Donner asked.
“We work with what we have,” Julian answered promptly, “and improvise the rest. And in opening the Gate, we complete Thorne's life's work and usher in a new golden age of gods and men.”
He had them; Truth felt the weight of acceptance shift as if she stood on the tilting deck of a ship. They would do Julian's bidding at Samhain, even though they felt it was wrong. He'd dazzled them, just as Thorne Blackburn had dazzled his circle a quarter of a century ago, innocent of what the end was to be.
And despite all of Julian's promises, Truth was filled with growing dread that it would end the same way this time.
 
Truth didn't remember afterward what dessert had been or if she'd eaten it. She'd drunk more wine than she'd meant to, but couldn't feel any effect. Every time her mind veered away from remembering the hauntings plaguing Shadow's Gate—and
her
—the chill fact of Aunt Caroline's death would challenge her bruised psyche once more. Aunt Caroline was dead, and Truth was filled with a dangerous sense of failure.
What had she left undone that she ought to have done? What had she done that she ought not to have done—and what could she do to remedy matters?
Too late, too late, too late, too late
… The voice echoed in her head.
It was a relief to rise from the table when the others did. They were going about their business—Thorne Blackburn's business—and she felt an aversion growing toward Blackburn's work that was entirely different from the unreasoning hatred she'd brought with her.
She glanced toward the end of the table. Michael was standing behind his chair, gazing toward Julian with a look of anguished hunger in his eyes.
So might the damned in Hell gaze on Paradise
, Truth thought, then wondered where the oddly rococo reference had come from. Her mind seemed to be sliding toward theology frequently these days, dragging up the massive questions of Good and Evil that she'd used to feel were so irrelevant to her twentieth-century life.
Michael, sensing himself watched, looked away from Julian and glanced toward Truth. She tossed off the last of her wine and turned away, unwilling to meet his midnight gaze.
“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones,”
Shakespeare's words, retrieved from the lumber-room of memory, were a fitting garment for her thoughts. Evil had certainly survived its maker here at Shadow's Gate, if what she had uncovered today at Shadowkill library held any truth at all.
And where, oh where, did Michael Archangel fit in to all this? Not a follower of Thorne Blackburn, but here at Shadow's Gate for some reason he found overridingly important.
What?
She'd worry about it tomorrow, Truth decided. Whatever it was, she was too tired to think about it now. All she wanted was a bath and bed. Whatever mysteries
Shadow's Gate held, surely they could wait until she was rested enough to deal with them.
 
But when she ascended the stairs it was not toward her own room that her steps took her, but toward Light's.
Her sister. If she could believe Julian, of course, but in her heart Truth knew that she hadn't needed Julian to tell her what the truth was. She had known Light was a part of her from the first moment she'd seen her.
A
sister.
Truth cherished the thought, and the others that came with it—that Light did not have to stay here, that Truth could take her away with her, care for her, love her as she had always longed to have someone to love.
Someone who was safe.
The stab of unwelcome self-analysis jarred her, demanding examination, but she put it aside as she put so many things aside these days. It would have to wait. As if the house approved of her goal, she reached Light's room without difficulty and pushed open the door.
A night-light burned on the table beside the bed, filling the small room with soft amber glow. Light lay sleeping just as Truth and Julian had left her. Her cheeks were faintly flushed, and her breathing was deep and regular.
Truth stepped inside and closed the door. Relief eased the tautness in her body, as if she had reached some sort of haven by reaching this room. She lifted a wooden chair and carried it over beside the bed, intending to sit for a while beside Light before seeking her own bed and whatever absolution she might gain in sleep.
She set the chair down carefully and took a moment to glance at her watch. Ten o'clock. It had certainly been a busy evening, all things considered.
“I don't know why you're carrying on so over the jewelry.”
A man's voice, with the faint drawl of the stage-trained. Truth jerked as if she'd been struck and glanced
wildly around, but the door was shut. There was no one in the room save for her and Light.
“If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to me. Caro didn't have any right to take it, and no right at all to give it away, even to you.”
Horror crawled over Truth's skin like serpents. The mocking male voice was issuing from Light's mouth.
“Who are you?” Truth forced herself to keep her voice low and even, lest she waken Light—and see
who
staring out from the girl's eyes?
“A prophet is without honor in his own country.”
With the clinical detachment of shock, Truth saw Light's face twist in a sardonic grin, although the girl's eyes were closed and she still gave every evidence of being asleep. “You're not Saint Peter—how many times are
you
going to deny me, Truth?”
Even if Light were the greatest mimic who ever lived, Truth did not think she would be able to produce that undeniably masculine voice with such effortless exactness.
“Three times is traditional,” she said evenly.
“Very well. This makes three, then—next time you should know me. And if you really want the jewelry back, it's in the top drawer of the dresser—but I warn you, it's mine. Take it, and you'll be taking more than you bargained for.”
So you're claiming to be Thorne Blackburn?
Truth bit down on the words before she could say them. She didn't want to hear the answer. Instead, she walked over to the dresser—two steps—and jerked open one of the top drawers.
The ring and the necklace were lying atop a neatly-folded pile of linen.
“You'd be surprised what I've bargained for,” Truth said, forcing the words out past numbness.
There was no answer.
She turned back. Light was sleeping, undisturbed.
“Blackburn!”
Truth's voice was a whip-crack in the stillness. Light stirred and murmured fretfully in her sleep. There was no other response.
Truth ran a hand through her hair.
I'm losing my mind. I know I am.
She turned back to the drawer and lifted out the necklace. She put it on, slipping it under her sweater. The amber beads warmed instantly, while the gold remained a chill heaviness against her bare stomach. She picked up the ring and slipped it into a pocket of her skirt.

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