Ghostlight (39 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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Fiona's was easily guessed. Fiona had wads of currency snuggled away in odd locations, and at the bottom of a drawer Truth found one of Julian's charge slips and a sheet of paper covered with Fiona's careful copies of his signature. But Fiona didn't have the book, much as Truth longed for her to.
Ellis's room was a sad clutter, liquor bottles neatly tucked out of sight in every possible place. What had he been trying to tell her, there at the end? Truth searched his room especially carefully, but there was nothing to find.
Four more rooms. Caradoc and Hereward and Donner and Gareth's, but it was hard to tell what belonged to whom. Whose was the suitcase full of books on magick, and whose the gun and box of ammunition? Was Gareth the one with the can of gasoline in his room? Or was his the stack of porno magazines, shocking in their rawness?
The room she thought was Michael's was nearly empty; at first Truth had thought it
was
empty. But there were Michael's dark suits hanging in the closet—and in the back of the closet, a narrow black leather case six feet long and two feet wide but only six or eight inches deep; a case of the sort that could contain nearly anything from an electric guitar to a high-powered rifle, heavy and locked.
Venus Afflicted
might be in there, but Truth doubted it.
Which meant none of them had the book.
Her head ached—with the tension, the stress, the glittering candle flame. The scent of incense was chokingly strong everywhere she went, and the entire house seemed to throb to the beat of the ritual being conducted at its heart. If she only closed her eyes she could
see
it: the ring of unwinking candles; the blaze of power around Light; Julian crowned with the sun and the moon, his flaring aura blunt testimony to his inheritance of Thorne's power.
Power that was strong enough to do just what it promised. Power that could open the gate to the world beyond.
A spill of hot wax jarred her to consciousness. Truth's eyes flew open; she steadied the candle and realized that she'd been asleep on her feet.
It had been a dream.
Of course it had.
Unfortunately the headache was real. Truth rubbed her eyes with her free hand, and imagined that even now she could hear the chanting. She was standing in front of the door to Julian's suite. She'd saved him for last; perhaps unconsciously she did not want to uncover what she already suspected was true—that Julian had taken
Venus Afflicted.
She opened the door gingerly, but of course there was no one there—Julian was in the Temple with the others. The nagging delusion that she could feel what was going on in the Temple was hard to push away; whenever she
relaxed her concentration she could feel the power building like the current of the sounding sea. She could even smell the incense …
Truth brought herself back to reality with a start. That much at least was no hallucination; Julian's room reeked of incense—and why not? His clothes were probably saturated with it.
She pushed unreality from her mind and began to search.
The others were only visiting, but Shadow's Gate was Julian's home; this room held more of personal possessions than any of the other rooms had. But the file drawers of papers didn't interest her, nor did any other thing that was not
Venus Afflicted.
In the drawer of Julian's nightstand she found a curl of paper torn from a photograph lying atop a manila envelope. She smoothed it out—a picture of a child, a thin, intense boy in a tie-dyed T-shirt, his long hair pulled back. It looked familiar; she knew she ought to recognize something about it, but there wasn't time. She picked up the envelope and shook out a clutch of photographs. They were old and yellowed and curled, and all of them were of the boy in the torn photo.
She leafed through them quickly by the light of the candle, and found one with Thorne in it. Pilgrim. The boy must be Thorne's son Pilgrim, the one who had run away.
Now she knew why the picture had looked familiar. The scrap had been torn from the edge of the group photo of Thorne's Circle in front of Shadow's Gate—as if someone had wanted to eliminate Pilgrim from the group.
But why were these pictures here instead of in the album downstairs?
There was no time to think of that. She had to hurry. She pulled the travel alarm out of her pocket and glanced at it. It still seemed to be working. Three A.M., and miles
to go before she slept. She put the photos back in the drawer.
Venus Afflicted
wasn't in Julian's room.
Truth went downstairs to his office, moving through the ritual's radiating current of power as if through a blood-hot ocean. There were unlit candles waiting in Julian's office; recklessly she lit them all. As the power hammered at her she tore through the files, the bookshelves, the drawers of Julian's desk with a reckless disregard for covering her tracks.
Nothing. Julian didn't have it.
Truth got slowly to her feet and stepped away from the desk.
No.
No.
Her hands trembled; she felt as if at any moment she might start screaming. She blew out all the candles but her own, quivering with exhaustion. She'd been positive Julian had it, she realized now; so damned certain that now she couldn't think of what to do next.
Her candle glittered off the decanter on the chinoiserie liquor cabinet in the corner; leaving the lone candle burning on the desk, she strode over to it, slopping the glass beside it full of a liquid that looked almost black in the dimness. She sniffed it before she drank—one of the sweet wines that Julian seemed to favor.
I hope it's amontillado. For the love of God, Montresor? Yes, Fortunato; for the love of God.
She slugged the drink back as if it were Kool-Aid and poured another. She drank it more slowly; the first one hit when she was halfway through it—the world gave a violent subjective wrench and her feeling of agonizing sensitivity to the ongoing ritual snapped. What was it Julian had said when he was feeling the brandy to Light? Something about alcohol blunting the
chakras
, whatever they were.
No wonder Ellis drinks—I mean drank—if it was to shut this out.
Julian would call it occult sensitivity, and Dylan the emergence of an hereditary psychic gift. Truth
didn't care what they called it—she just wanted it to go away.
The wine made her flushed and lazy, but it didn't eliminate the need to
do
something.
But there was nothing she could do. Only go to Julian tomorrow and let him laugh at her or cry with her. Or say and do nothing, and let the book simply vanish. She sat down behind the desk again and stared at the candle mournfully.
Now that it was too late she saw all the things she should have done. Why hadn't she told Dylan everything while he was here? She'd been willing enough for him to read her journals. She'd been going to send him a copy of
Venus Afflicted
—why had she been so unwilling to tell him it existed?
She'd been …
She wasn't sure now
what
she'd been. But it was four o'clock in the morning and she was out of choices. She sipped at her wine. After a long moment she picked up the phone.
The dial tone sounded reassuringly, and she dialed Dylan's home number from memory.
Nothing. She let it ring long enough that even the most determined sleeper would know it was an emergency. He wasn't there. She got the dial tone again and phoned the office. The voice mail picked up at Dylan's extension. Truth hung up.
She phoned the lab on the direct line. Someone answered there, but it wasn't Dylan and he wasn't there, and who else could she talk to? Who else could she tell—and tell what, exactly?
That I'm losing my mind? That the old rules don't apply? That I'm sitting here in the modern day trying to make up my mind not even if magick exists, but whether some particular magick is white or black? I haven't been trained for this!
She put down the phone, defeated. There was no point
in looking any further. She'd been outmaneuvered even before she'd known the game had begun. She filled her glass one more time, and took her candle and went to bed.
 
“Maybe I'm wasting my breath—maybe you're suicidal. Or just hard of hearing. But I come all this way—and you have
no
idea what that took—out of simple family feeling; I show you enough signs and wonders to incite feelings of self-preservation in most people, and
you're still here.
Now
why
is that, do you suppose?”
The (by now) half-familiar scolding tones dragged Truth up out of a heavy sleep. She sat up, feeling queasy—she'd had
far
too much to drink and still didn't feel entirely sober. The room was filled with a faint, predawn grayness, through which a pacing Thorne Blackburn was clearly silhouetted.
“Thorne,” Truth said with a sense of groggy unreality.
“Right,” Thorne shot back, and the tranquillity with which she accepted this convinced Truth she must still be asleep and dreaming. “Now pack your bags and get your hat and you can be home by breakfast time.”
Truth sat up. As the light grew stronger she could see Thorne more clearly—he was wearing his necklace once again, and the lapis scarab was a dark oval on his hand.
“You've got your jewelry,” she pointed out.
“And you've been drinking. This is a fine time to embrace the rites of Bacchus, but you always did have a great sense of timing. Get up. Get dressed. Get out.”
“I can't go without Light,” Truth protested, feeling more confused by the moment. “And I can't—don't you want the Gate opened? If I take Light away now they can't do the ritual, and Julian's worked so hard—think of his feelings—I can't do that to—”
“
Julian's
feelings?” Thorne exploded. Truth winced. He stopped at the foot of the bed and glared at her, real
beyond debate, and fear began to penetrate the alcohol-induced fuzziness in Truth's mind.
“You're worried about hurting
Julian's
feelings?” Thorne roared. “Wake up and smell the brimstone, baby—
there is no Julian
! That's your half-brother Pilgrim down there in the Temple—and you're just not up to his weight, darling girl. You haven't got the guts to be a hero,” Thorne sneered.
Blood will out.
She must have suspected this truth from the first moment—why else her strange reluctance in the face of Julian's seductions? She felt a peculiar sensation—half revulsion, half attraction—at how nearly she'd succumbed to Julian's advances.
To her half-brother's advances.
“But he loves …” she faltered.
“Himself,” Thorne finished. “Anything else is just an act.”
“Like yours? Did you ever really care about anyone but yourself?” Truth demanded. But she was talking to empty air.
Truth blinked, and drew a long shuddering breath. No one there. Of course there wasn't—Thorne's presence had merely been a vivid dream brought on by nerves, exhaustion, and too much sherry.
No. She was tired of lying to herself, of denigrating Thorne's memory and the evidence of her senses. If it was a dream, it had been a true one.
There was no Julian Pilgrim, and that changed everything. Julian had told her that no one knew where Pilgrim really was. Thorne told her Julian
was
Pilgrim. Which man was lying—the living, or the dead?
Thorne would never lie to her.
But why would Julian?
So I haven't got the guts to be a hero? We'll see about that!
Truth dressed quickly, stuffing her keys into her pocket
as a sop to her conscience. She was going to get the truth out of Julian right now.
 
They were just leaving the Temple when she reached it. The door was open and the lights were on, making everything inside look false and garishly artificial. The members of the Circle of Truth looked like actors after a draining performance; moving like automatons, obviously interested only in reaching their beds. Truth stepped inside.
The sour smell of snuffed candles vied with the salt-sweet smell of the incense they used. Smoke still hung in a flat blue cloud halfway to the ceiling. There was an oblong altar in the center of the room; it was draped with animal skins, and Truth could see that it was on casters.
Some of the others looked up when they saw her, but most concentrated on their tasks—taking things from the tables around the edge of the room and packing them away. The men and Irene were in green robes, while Light's was red and Fiona was wearing a decidedly non-magickal blue cotton kimono. She was sitting on one of the wooden stools, smoking a cigarette and staring at nothing, looking drained. Truth didn't see Julian anywhere.
Light's red robe made her look even more bloodless; her eyelids fluttered half-closed as she saw Truth, and Hereward, who was standing closest, put a steadying arm around her. His skin held the ash undertone of fatigue, and there were dark hollows under his eyes. He said something to Light, and she nodded, and Hereward began to lead her toward the door. He did not seem surprised to see Truth, only brushed past with a mutter of what might be apology, carrying Light with him.

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