Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "Sugar," I said. "Is there milk?" I was deliberately not picking up on their cues for in-group bonding, and I could see it was putting Ruslan just a little off balance.

  "We're going to have to teach you to drink tea like a Khazar!" he s£iid in a hearty-sinister voice, but in all fairness I would have found a discussion of the weather sinister by then.

  "Now, Love," Ludmilla said. 'There's milk in the refrigerator, Karen; I'll—"

  "Oh, I can get it." I was already standing, and the buzzer buzzed, so Ludmilla went to let whoever-it-was in and I went off to the kitchen.

  I did not poke around, but I kept my eyes open. When I opened the refrigerator I saw a lineup of little bottles in the egg-holders in the door that nobody uses for eggs. Insulin. The name on the prescription label was Michael Ruslan.

  One thing verified. He was sl diabetic.

  I heard voices in the living room. I came back with the milk and poured it in my tea and made meaningless friendly noises at the two men and a woman who'd come in. Max, Norris, and Starfawn, if I heard the mumbles right.

  "And what's your name?" Starfawn said. She was small, round, and young—younger than any of the rest of us by a good ten years. Twenty-two, maybe.

  "Jadis," I said firmly, before Ruslan could introduce me. 'That's my magical name," I added. I thought it would be a good idea to establish my alias early on, and I didn't think I'd have trouble sounding plausible to a woman who had chosen to be known to her gods as Starfawn.

  "Hey, right on," said either Max or Norris.

  "It's a good strong name," said Ruslan.

  It should be—I'd stolen it from the witch-queen of Namia. Ludmilla took the milk carton back into the kitchen. I looked down at my tea. The milk had settled about a half inch below the surface, like a ball of taiffy dropped in ice water.

  There was a short awkward time after that. Ludmilla brought out more tea. A couple more people arrived—I was glad not to see anybody I knew—and the talk skittered nervously around Baba Yaga secrets; things they couldn't discuss in front of an outsider.

  It was probably mostly entirely harmless stuff. If it had been any normal coven I would have known that for sure—it would have been about magical healings, divinations, the usual small talk of a busy extended family. Here I didn't know what to think.

  Ruslan ran the conversation. He didn't say much once the company arrived, but the others had a tendency to look at him before they spoke and several times he corrected their opinions.

  Starfawn was the one edited most often.

  "Are we going to do anything else about S —" she began.

  "Secrecy builds power," Ruslan said, looking pointedly at me. "Jadis hasn't taken an oath, Starfawn."

  88 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Starfawn's cheeks went pink and she looked away.

  'That's quite all right," I said. Do anj^ing else about who? S. Sunshrike? Miriam?"

  Whether they could do it or not, simply thinking about dragging someone back from the Summerland was so unethical my teeth hurt. But they hadn't wanted her to reach it, had they? They'd wanted her to wander through the outer dark forever.

  "Oh, what a cute necklace!" Starfawn squealed, fastening her gaze on my chest full of intertwined sterling frottagistes.

  They might be clowns, but nasty ones.

  Eventually everyone was there—ten people, including me —and we got down to the serious business of the evening. There were no coed dressing or undressing rooms; in fact, Baba Yaga worked robed, and I was shuttled off to the bedroom with Starfawn, Lud-milla, and two other women to dress.

  I kept my eyes open, Just as I had in the kitchen. The bedroom had the same distressing air of mundanity that the living room had had. The only thing even remotely out of the ordinary was the neat pile of boxes in the comer. I took a closer look. The boxes were still sealed, bedight with "Fragile" and "Flammable" stickers, and had been shipped to Michael Ruslan at Clean-O-Rama, somewhere in Queens.

  People's day jobs are lousy for the soul of true Romance. Here he was, Ruslan the Great, freelance prince of darkness; by day a mild-mannered laundromat owner. Sure.

  "Here you are, Karen," Ludmilla sang out. She was holding a bundle of white muslin out toward me.

  I stripped down to my Jockey for Hers and put it on. The fabric was scratchy and had a harsh chemical smell that I was determined to ignore. Mothballs? It had a white drawstring sash, and when I looked in the mirror I saw an overaged refugee from Santa Lucia Night.

  Everyone else had on black robes. I remembered Miriam's robe with its careful embroidery. I'd thought about bringing it, but I was glad now that I hadn't gotten cute. The black robes were enlivened by varying degrees of ornamentation, and when the ladies were all suited up the bedroom looked like a cross between a medievalist event and a Roman Catholic reunion.

  Ludmilla's black velvet robe was accented by cuffs, cummerbund, and stola in some gaudy, glittery, patterned material. She

  had a string of antique amber beads around her neck I would gladly have committed several illegal acts to own, and her chicken foot was proudly displayed on its heavy silver chain. It was shriveled and yellow and looked like a depraved saint's relic.

  To top everything off, Lady Ludmilla wore a weird little round hat on her head that made her resemble an escapee from a demented Victorian nursing school.

  Status, wealth, and temporal power—all the things you're supposed to leave outside the circle. Not because they're evil. Because they get in the way. Maybe they didn't get in the way of whatever sort of ritual Ruslan's coven was used to.

  When all five of us were tricked out in what the well-dressed Khazar—and sacrificial victim—will wear, we went back into the living room. I was glad I'd had the chance to see Ludmilla in all her glory first, because then when I saw Ruslan I didn't even blink.

  They say that the "Reverend" Montague Summers used to dress up in full Roman Catholic regalia to attend afternoon tea—which is a case of costume inappropriate to the occasion, but not as much so as wearing the same drag to a Wiccan covenmeet.

  Well, not quite the same. Ruslan had on the alb, the stola, and the embroidered gauntlets, and the hat that looks like a folded napkin, but there were no Christian symbols on them, just a lot of moons and stars and wolves painstakingly hand-embroidered by somebody else. He had on a long necklace of black beads that might very well have been Jet.

  He also wore a bird-footed pendant. I wasn't sure what bird had donated it—it was a little too small for an ostrich, though. He had a whatever the Baba Yaga call their athames sheathed at his waist.

  He opened the door to the other bedroom and led us all into the temple.

  If you're going to get picky about it, a temple is a permanent structure dedicated to the working of magic-with-a-K Magicians have them. Pagans don't.

  Oh, the asatruer in your life will have his Jane, and the san-terio his axe, but a coven is an organization, not a place. The place where it meets is the covenstead, but that's only a special name for a place, not a special place. Wherever a coven meets it builds its Circle, and when the meeting is over and the Circle is broken,

  90 Bell, Book, and Murder

  there's nothing left behind to indicate anything extraordinary ever occurred there.

  This was not the case with Ruslan's Khazar temple, which looked as if it owed more of its inspiration to the Russian Catholic Church than it did to the precepts of Gerald Gardner.

  Julian's words about "the usual mishmash" came back to me again. The floor was painted with a full-dress Solomon's Seal after Francis Barrett's The Magus. It was done in four colors of deck paint and must have taken hours. The walls were painted in the elemental colors (Golden Dawn attribution) and hung with large painted satin banners with the Four Tools on them. There were four large candleholders at the cardinal points, each of which held a faintly oatmeal-colored candle weighing easily five pounds. Assorted icons, oil lamips, and ritual paraphernalia were hung from the hooks on the walls, giving the place
something of the look of the Serpent's Truth's broom closet. The altar was set up in the center of the circle, and everything (still, so far) looked normal.

  At least to me. It had been years since I'd given a thought to walking into a situation like this with a group of more-or-less total strangers. I'd made my decision a long time ago, when I started chasing deity the way Harvard MBAs chase money.

  Ludmilla lit the lamps on the walls and the lamps on the altar. I heard the subway rumble by outside as Ruslan shut and locked the door. That made me a little nervous, but it was his empowerment symbol, and a door locked from the side you're on can be got through easily. Ruslan proceeded to open the closet, and I could see packages of supplies, neatly labeled, inside.

  Ludmilla made another pass around the room and lit the quarter-candles. I was standing next to the northern one; it smelled spicy and sweet as it burned. My skin under the robe itched.

  Ruslan turned away from the closet and walked toward me.

  "I thought you might like to borrow an athame, Kar—Jodis. We keep this one as a spare."

  The smile was enough warning, but there wasn't anything I could do. He held it out and I took it.

  It had about a six-inch blade, and the pommel was amber. An Ironshadow blade —there was his signature near the quillons. The edge of the pommel was rough and shiny where someone had taken a Dremel-tool and sanded Miriam's name off.

  It felt like cold and death and pain and dying alone.

  My stomach convulsed around my Lamb Surprise and tea and 1 swallowed hard, but Ruslan had already turned away from me. This was one reaction he didn't need to see to savor.

  "Brothers and sisters of the Khazar, tonight we meet in worship of the Old Gods. With us is Jadis, a seeker, and out of respect to her, we will engage in worship only this evening."

  He turned back to me. "I have to ask you to respect our privacy, and ask you not to reveal anything you may see or hear tonight." He stared at me, his eyes as bright and horrid as if they were blue glass, and I clutched Miriam's athame, my gift to her, the one thing she would never have given willingly to anyone else.

  I must have said something and it must have sounded normal. Ruslan went over to the altar and he and Ludmilla began the ritual.

  The fondness of the Gardneriain tradition for incense is a standing joke in the Community, but the Baba Yagas went us one better that night. Ten minutes into the ritual the room was actually foggy, with a sharp, clo5mig smell I could taste. It reminded me vaguely of winter woolies, and closets, and things like that, and I found myself swaying back and forth just like everyone else. My .eyes watered. I wondered if what the Khazars were burning on their charcoal was DEA-legal.

  By the time they got around to passing the wine cup—what Belle always calls Sacred Cookies and Milk Time —I had a pounding headache. My mouth and throat were cottony and dry. We were all sitting on the floor with people swaj^ng back and forth to that unheard music which is sweeter. Wolves and winter wind howled in the background, courtesy of a sound-system The Cat would have coveted.

  All my energy was going into keeping the ritual from reaching me at the deep-mind level where it could fuck me up for years — that, and keeping from parting Ruslan's hair with one of his pretentious High Church candlesticks. If I'd wanted to go to Mass I would have stayed a nun.

  My sinuses had given up long ago, and by now my eyes were watering so badly that Baba Yaga Her Own Self could have shown up and I wouldn't have been any the wiser. Despite my best efforts at insulating myself from what Baba Yaga and Ruslan were doing I had that unsettled, hair-prickling feeling of just-before-a-storm, and my skin felt like it was on inside out and backwards.

  92 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I trust my feelings. When the cup reached me I didn't drink.

  Oh, I tilted it back, all right, but I kept my mouth tight shut and I was glad I had. The candles lit up some oily beads of non-wine liquid floating on the surface, and 1 got a caustic breath of something that cleared my sinuses and made my head ring. I held my breath and lowered the cup, and the person next to me took it away from me. I took a deep breath of camphor smoke and tried to stay upright. Camphor, I realized with a sense of how foggy I was. The candles were scented with camphor. Why?

  The sense of something waiting got stronger. Again, there was no need of occult power to guess why. Most people don't realize how much of their information about other people is based on reading nonverbal cues. Their conscious mind offers it to them in the form of "feelings" or "hunches," and they promptly discount it as being irrational.

  I didn't.

  "It is usual, when one of us has gone to live in the dream time forever, to release the last of their ties to the earth-plane," Ruslan said as soon as the cup had gone all the way around the room once. "But we haven't been able to do this for Sunshrike. Can you help us, Jadis? Karen?"

  My head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds and was stuffed with white phosphorus. I had just enough brains left to realize I was blitzed and to be very, very careful of what I said.

  "Can I help you," I repeated thickly. 1 was starting to realize how much earth-plane trouble I was in, and how unequipped I was to deal with it.

  "Miriam had some things that belong to us. They're too dangerous to leave around loose. Weren't you in her apartment after she died?"

  My thoughts turned into little heraldic salamanders, each orange and burning and with a pinpoint of sapphire brilliance lodged in its skull. Take that stone from the salamander and become impervious to fire —or use it to make the Philosopher's Stone, which turns lead into gold and makes men immortal.

  I hadn't been in this condition for years.

  "Karen? I know you were in Miriam's apartment after she died." Ruslan, standing there calm and magisterial. And why not? He was above the worst of the smoke, and I'd bet he hadn't had any of the wine. Everyone else in the room looked like bleary-eyed opium eaters, including Ludmilla.

  "Won't you help us?"

  Actually, I was willing to tell him anything to make him go away. I had an unshakable conviction that he'd know if I didn't teU the truth.

  But, damn it, I was High Priestess and Witch. And Ruslan wasn't. I summoned up all my pride, if nothing else.

  "Miriam's apartment was burglarized," I said carefully. My tongue felt like a cucumber. Bad, bad violation of Craft ethics to use drugs in a Circle without making sure everyone knew in advance and could consent.

  But they hadn't wanted me to know and to consent. They'd wanted to get me to where they could put the boot in. And I'd walked in just like Mary's little lamb.

  I'd made two mistakes that I wasn't ever going to make again. I should have yelled a lot longer and louder when Mr. Michael Ruslan called up my unlisted number with my legal name.

  And 1 should never have assumed that "covener" meant "law abiding."

  "Miriam was talking about leaving. She was talking about showing those things to a friend of hers. That's against the oath. If someone took those things, they took Miriam's oath, too, and the Babayar will find them wherever they are."

  "Hunt them down," said Starfawn, slurrily.

  I wanted to confess. I was going to confess, I was almost sure of it, and then I was going to kill him.

  Goddess Who art bound to me by oaths and love, strengthen me now —

  Someone started to chant; a short sharp line with a lot of plosives. The rest joined in; a conditioned response as automatic as the "amen" at the end of a hymn. Ruslan smiled at me. The wolves on the "Environments" tape howled. In that room Ruslan's Babayar was as real as gravity, and I clenched my teeth to keep from making any noise at all.

  "If you hear of anyone who might have Miriam's things, I'd really appreciate it," Ruslan said again.

  We were back to reality. I was standing in Ruslan's living room, dressed in my own clothes. The clock showed 12:45 a.m., and people were standing around getting ready to leave.

  My nose ran and my lungs hurt, and my (hand wash only silk) shirt was alre
ady soaked through with sweat. I had a putrid

  94 Bell, Book, and Murder

  headache and was too miserable to be self-righteous or even to pitch my voice very loud. In addition, I wasn't sure where the last four hours had gone and I had the vague feeling of impending doom that comes from having made a serious mistake that you don't quite realize yet. I mumbled something.

  "They're dangerous in the wrong hands. Miriam was trying to leave, and look what happened to her."

  Even if it was fevered intuition, there was no mistaking his meaning. I stared at Ruslan. He smiled.

  "Miriam wouldn't have died if she'd kept her oath. But you know that, Karen. Secrecy builds power. And power can be very dangerous when it turns against you. I think Miriam knows that now. Don't you?"

  Someone opened the door to the apartment. I went through it without looking back.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 28, 1:15 a.m

  This was not how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to be sure there was a murder and not know who did it. But I wasn't sure there had been a murder—and I had somebody confessing to it. Hell, bragging about it.

  It was raining as I left the Ruslans' apartment, the peculiarly unpleasant thin warm summer-in-the-city stuff. I could feel the smog-in-solution coating my skin and ensuring that everything I had on would have to be dry-cleaned.

  I felt that special light-headed gratitude that comes from having had a brush with death or root canal and surviving. I didn't even worry about being mugged on the platform as I waited for the downtown train. It was after midnight; the sky had that weird greenish underglow that comes from reflecting a lot of light. New York, the city that never sleeps.

  And now I had my fact, my real-for-true undeniable fact. The fact I'd wanted, angled for, and gone out on a limb to get. Miriam's death was neither accidental nor coincidental. Michael Ruslan of the Baba Yoga Coven, Khazar Tradition, had motive and opportunity and swore he'd put them together and killed Miriam Seabrook.