Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Julian was sitting behind the Snake's table, reading the expensive copy of La Tesoraria del Oro.

  "You're going to ruin your eyes, reading in the dark like that," 1 said. The surface of the table looked as if it had been rearranged. I hoped sales had been good.

  "You sound like my mother," Julian said, setting the book aside. It wasn't one of our Tesorarias, 1 realized when I got a closer look: its leather binding gleamed with use and handling and the pages were no longer mashed flat in the way of book pages that have just come from the bindery. Julian's own copy, then. I wondered if he intended to do the Tesoraria Work.

  He stood up. "What now?"

  It took me a moment to remember that this was Julian's first HallowFest, just as it was for Xharina and the POingons.

  "Merchanting's over for the day. We pack up, then there's dinner. Ritual starts at eight o'clock, Pagan Standard Time. After that's Bardic Circle."

  Julian removed his glasses and began pushing them on his coattail. It made him look younger. Maybe more accessible.

  "I don't want to go to the ritual," he said neutrally.

  'That's okay," I reassured him. Some people don't. I'd be there, because the Opening Ritual at HallowFest is one of my personal touchstones.

  "Fine, then," Julian said, as if we'd settled something. There was a pause. "I'm going to be doing a working tonight. I'd like to use the cabin."

  It took a beat, but I translated that without effort: Julian wanted privacy. I'd like to think he felt as awkward and off balance as I did about what we'd done, and given time, I might be able to convince myself he did.

  "Yeah, sure; I can always sleep in the van." Which would be cold, but not much colder than the cabins, and I might end up sleeping somewhere else anyway. I wondered if there was room in Ironshadow's tent.

  "Good," Julian said. "I'll let you close up, then." He tucked his copy of La Tesoraria under his arm and walked off. I paused a moment to get used to the sense of relief I felt at one more postponement of a confrontation with Julian. If there's going to be a confrontation at all, I emended scrupulously.

  I walked around to the seller's side of the table and began to tuck things away. Out of the comer of my eye I registered that Glitter had come upstairs. She stopped first at the bake sale table and then drifted over to me.

  "Want one?" Glitter said. She held out a muffin. "Banana-chocolate chip. Oooh, what's that?" she said, peering down at the table.

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  I took the muffin. 'The same stuff you can see any day of the week in New York," I told her, biting into the muffin. It was a little sweet for my taste, but I ate it anyway.

  Glitter was admiring a pair of sugalite "point" earrings. Sug-alite is purple, which makes it a natural for Glitter, though not naturally pointed—or for that matter, crystalline. The Snake stocks a wide variety of carved pseudo-crystal "points." (My favorite is turquoise, as turquoise in its natural state appears in masses resembling cottage cheese, but thanks to the mercantile magic of New Age Crystal Power, even turquoise is vended as a six-sided point-ended cylinder complete with a specious set of mystic "properties.")

  "I'll take them," Glitter said, fishing her wallet out of her purple rip-stop nylon fanny-pack.

  I took her fifteen dollars — a mere three times what the things had cost wholesale —and added the money and the sales slip to the cashbox. Someone from Summerisle came through, ringing a handbell to close Merchanting.

  Glitter told me I was welcome to join Changing for dinner. I told her I'd be there. Then she went her way, and I was left to my own devices.

  I picked up the nearest empty box and put both The Snake's Tesorarias, the jewelry, and a few other small, high-end items into it, then set the cashbox on top. The rest of the stock—mostly books, plus a few small plaques and statues —could take its chances with the reasonably honest HallowFest membership. I covered the table with a cloth. Beside me, Ironshadow was also closing up. He was taking all his inventory with him, though; his wares were more likely to take a walk than the Snake's were.

  I set the box I was taking with me down on a flat space on my table and idled over.

  "How's business?" I asked.

  "You made up your mind about that knife yet?" Ironshadow said. He held it up. In the sunset light the copper sickle looked as if it had been dipped in blood. The opalized bone glittered faintly.

  "What was that special order Julian picked up from you toda}^" I asked. "I didn't see it out on our table." Sometimes the Snake commissions pieces from Ironshadow, then retails them at an outrageous markup.

  "Personal," Ironshadow said. "Silver blade."

  He made a face. Ironshadow does not like to work in metals that

  won't hold a cutting edge, even if most of his work will never cut anything more substantial than air. But he does do special orders, and some forms of ceremonial magic call for weapons of copper, sliver, and even gold.

  "Well, I hope you soaked him for It," I said amiably, and Iron-shadow grinned.

  "Some of us are having a private party after the Bardic Circle. You're Invited," he said.

  "I'll be there." Ironshadow's parties Involve home-brewed mead. "And I'll take the boline." I'd figure out a way to pay for It somehow.

  He twirled It In his fingers and presented It to me butt first.

  "I can't pay you for It now," I said, alarmed.

  "You'll pay when you can," he said. "I trust you."

  The vote of confidence made me feel absurdly mellow. I remembered the other business I had with Ironshadow.

  "About Reverend Harm," I began.

  Ironshadow grinned, showing large white teeth. "Yeah. I'd been wondering myself where the hell somebody In Gotham County came up with a kukri."

  If you've seen Alec Baldwin's beautiful but stupid movie version of The Shadow, you've seen a kukri: it's a Tibetan ceremonial knife with the sort of three-flanged blade that—if you stuck someone with it—would probably leave the sort of hole that had been left in Jackson Harm. In real life, of course, it doesn't fly around by itself, so someone had to have been holding onto it to make it do what it did.

  What was unlikely about this scenario is that the kukri isn't really so much a knife as it is a knife symbol used in Tibetan Buddhism. It's cast, not forged; the only ones I've seen are dull as a letter opener, if not duller.

  And, like Ironshadow, I couldn't Imagine where anyone would get one around here.

  I took the Snake's box of goodies down to the van, and took the opportunity to transfer Maidjene's registration forms from my pocket to a better hiding place in the back of the van. I still didn't feel good about what I'd done, but the hell of it was, I would have felt equally bad about any of the other choices I could see to make, some of which Involved Maidjene's being arrested. I would have

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  liked it if there had been someone else around to tell me what to do, but Witches don't even allow that privilege to the Goddess.

  Speaking of Maidjene, Larry's Warwagon was at the other end of the parking area. I could see lights on inside, although the shades were down: Larry Wagner, doing his Charles-Bronson-in-Death Wish vigilante imitation and draining his RVs batteries. I wished I believed he'd stay where he was and spend the rest of the night communing with his technology, but I couldn't manage that.

  I locked the Snake's van, then went back up to the cabin; if I was going to be shut out tonight I wanted my sleeping bag and toothbrush.

  The cabin was empty when I got there, although Julian'd been back to it; the Tesoraria I'd seen him reading upstairs in the bam was on the tray-table altar next to the mirror, and next to it was a newspaper-wrapped bundle that was probably his new Iron-shadow knife. I grabbed my sleeping bag and pillow and tried to decide how much else I could carry in the one trip I was willing to make. I dumped the bedding by the door while I made up my mind.

  Julian'd said he was going to do a working—what Pagans would call a ritual —tonight, and I saw no
reason to doubt it. Lots of people took the opportunity presented by HallowFest to do some pretty intensive ritual. But Julian wasn't a Pagan; he was a Ceremonial Magician. What could he be working on, this far from all the special paraphernalia that magicians used?

  The Tesoraria? I glanced guiltily at the door, then went over and unwrapped Julian's Ironshadow bundle. I saw the white gleam of fine silver—pure silver, not sterling, expensive as gold and just as soft—and the coarse, mock-ivory sheen of bone. This was out of Lai Tesoraria, all right. I knew the book reasonably well — although I'd only worked on it, not read it—the knife was part of the Adept's new tools, for use when La Tesoraria's year of ritual preparations were complete. I wondered if it were really built to spec, and if so, where Ironshadow'd gotten a lamb's thighbone.

  I wrapped the knife back up again, wondering why the sight of it made me so uneasy. The only thing a blade like that would ever cut or be able to cut was air.

  "These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air . . ." [Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1).

  Suddenly I didn't care about my toothbrush and I didn't care about my clothes. 1 grabbed my sleeping bag and my pillow and fled as if there were someone there to chase me.

  * * * By the time I got back down to the van again the feeling was gone, and the aftermath of the adrenaline rush made me conscious of how tired I was. I glanced at my watch. Five-twenty. Four hours, at least, until the start of the evening ritual—assuming anything like an on-time start was being charitable. I opened the back doors of the van and climbed in, shutting them after me.

  It was dark inside the van, and so cold that there was no particular smell to it, though I knew when it was warm the van ponged of all the oils and incense that had been spilled there over time. I spread out the dirty packing quilts to form a comfortable foundation, zipped my sleeping bag up into a bag again, and pulled off my boots and p£irka. Then I wriggled down into the bag, pulling my pillow in after me. HallowFest parties have a way of going on all night and I'd already been up for twelve hours at least on top of a short night; I was weary to the bone and thought I could best spend my time grabbing a catnap while the grabbing was good.

  Once I was lying there, though, I felt false. Theatrical; as if I were not here to sleep, but, rather, to be seen to be sleeping for some unknown watcher who must be persuaded of the fact. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the sensation, but it wouldn't go away, even when I actually did slide over the borderland into sleep.

  Lucid dreaming is the flavor of the month on the New Aquarian Frontier; insusceptible to objective proof, like so much in our lives, because it relies on the subjective testimony of the participant. Put as simply as possible, to dreamt lucidly is to be aware that you are asleep and dreaming while you are doing so, and even to manipulate dream-events with the conscious mind. All of us do at least the former at some point in our sleeping lives. I prefer not to meddle, but to leave my dreams alone, searching for what they're trying to say through the mute symbol-driven interface dividing the conscious and unconscious mind.

  And so I let myself be carried from reverie into dream, without really noticing the moment when I crossed over.

  It seemed logical to me to be back up in the pine forest, since I'd spent so much of the day there, at least in spirit. I wanted to talk to Jackson Harm: I wanted him to tell me what he was doing here at this hour of the morning.

  Associative memory happily presented me with the leopard

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  frozen in the snows of Kilimanjaro. No one knew why it had been there, either.

  In my dream I realized that there was an appointment I must keep; a rendezvous that 1 was unaware of, although I'd begun planning for it years ago. The night was both Friday night and Saturday night—Jackson Harm was somewhere in the woods —alive— at the same time the Saturday bonfire blazed in the meadow below. The irrational conflation of images common to dreams made perfect sense, too, although they did cause me to suspect 1 was asleep. The bonfire shed no light here where I was, and there was something waiting for me in the wood.

  Half-aware, 1 dismissed this thought as a shopworn Jungian archetype: the wood is a sjmibol of the preverbal unconscious, and there's always something waiting in it for the unwary traveler. But at the same time I knew that this wood was objectively real on some level, and so was what waited —a particular something, and no archetype —and whatever it was, to see it truly would change me forever.

  To be changed like that frightened me even while I disbelieved in it: with my waking mind, I knew that the only thing that could be in this wood was the dead body of Reverend Harm, which I'd already seen. The dead body whose sight had changed me was in the past: Miriam Seabrook, whose murder I'd avenged, if not exactly solved. These woods are dark and dangerous, I'd told her once, but it had been too late to save her even then.

  And when I remembered that, suddenly Miriam was here, clutching at me and demanding that I see before it was too late.

  Now I realized these were dreams, not thoughts. 1 wrenched myself free and found I was standing at the edge of the fire pit, certain now that I was awake and pseudo-remembering that I had fallen asleep at the Bardic Circle. It was dawn, and I was thinking "what a strange dream that was" when I saw that what I'd thought were the campfire's remains were charred bones, burnt but recognizable —

  And then I did wake up.

  It was pitch-dark inside the van; I thrashed around disorient-edly until I banged my face against the side and came completely awake, completely conscious of where I was. My heart was racing, and the dream images were already fading. The pine forest. Miriam. A dead fire of bones. A dream-pun that, I realized: bonfire = bone-fire; an etymology that Murray, among others, cites in her work on premodem witchcraft.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes. The glowing numbers on my watch-dial told me it was a little after six pip emma, but I didn't feel like trying for sleep again if that was the sort of thing that was waiting for me in Dreamland. Dead friends and an urgent sense of mission: now there's hubris for you. Lady Bast, Lone Ranger of the Wicca, off on another quixotic quest for truth, justice, and the Aquarian Way.

  Forget it. There were real live police investigating this homicide, and no place in their investigations for a talented amateur, or even me. Fayrene had told me what help I could be, and Fd been it, and that was that. I'd get in touch with her tomorrow, probably, and give her (maybe) the HallowFest registration forms I'd stolen, and that would be that.

  And though I've made a career out of listening to what I didn't want to hear and seeing when it would be more comfortable to be blind, I told myself there would be enough time later to see what needed to be seen in the landscape of my dreams. And so I wormed out of the sleeping bag in the darkened van, wishing I'd had the brains to bring a flashlight down with me. Wishing I was warmer. Wishing.

  There's a lot of distraction to be found at a HallowFest on a Saturday night if distraction suits your fancy. I'd seen lights on in the cabin I now only nominally shared with Julian. I hadn't stopped.

  The dinner hour was just getting under way when I got back up to the bam around seven. It was warm in the bam —a combination of the now-functioning radiators and all the bodies packed into the area. People flowed into and out of the kitchen area in a random tidal fashion, sharing and offering food to anyone who passed; no one at the Festival would go hungry tonight. I mingled, searching out old friends and new acquaintances.

  The Klingons had brought "Romulan ale"; whatever it was, it was luridly blue and wonderfully alcoholic. They'd also brought a whole Boar's Head deli roast beef, which they were eating in chunks off their daggers, which drew a few looks even from people who did the same thing themselves at SCA events. I introduced Orm Klash to Belle.

  Belle was cool —she invited Klash's tribe to join Changing's meal and started trying to sell him on the idea of attending one of her monthly Pagan Leadership meetings. The fact that he was dressed out of a TV show
and speaking every other sentence in interstellar Esperanto was something she appeared not to notice.

  366 Bell, Book, and Murder

  but then. Belle was a red diaper baby and believes in Solidarity Uber Alles, which is part of the particular rock and hard place that's led to our (amicable) parting of the ways. 1 moved on, and found Lark partying with Hoodoo Lunchbox, as was (surprise) Ac-taeon. I joined them, and Ironshadow joined us, and everything was all right.

  For a while.

  "... all! can say is, it'd be nice if somebody persecuted them for a chainge," Lark was saying after two or three beers. "Hell, what's wrong with one fewer Christo-Nazi in the world? Fire up the barbecue, boys, and throw another Christian baby on the coals, right?"

  "They'd kill us, if they had the chance," a boy in this year's Hal-lowFest T-shirt saiid solemnly. I wondered if I'd ever been that young.

  " 'Never again the burning.' " Someone on the group's outskirts quoted the old radical tag line. It's a highly romantic concept: claim some suitably persecuted ancestors and write yourself a moral blank check for anything you choose to do.

  'That is a stupid and evil idea," I heard myself say loudly.

  "Well, who the hell are you?" T-shirt said.

  Who do I have to he? as James T. Kirk is fond of saying. "Do you really think that anybody has the right to kill somebody else just because they worship a different god?" I said.

  "Christians do," T-shirt said smugly, as if that were either entirely true or am ainswer.

  "Look, he didn't mean anything," a woman next to T-shirt said. "You're overreacting."

  "If he didn't mean anything he should shut the fuck up," 1 said, getting to my feet. "I'm sick of hearing people cheer on a murderer in order to pretend they're sanctimonious little right-thinking Pagans — especially you," I said to Lark. I felt my hackles rise: anger and power are closely linked; it's one of the tragedies of the Left-Hand Path. 1 headed out the front door before I either started crying or said something worse.