Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  The fin de siecle shopping frenzy was intense but brief; a little later I dumped the last packet of Three Kings Incense into the last red-and-black paper bag and made change for the last customer. The second floor was still crowded, but people were standing around in the open space, not clumped near the tables.

  I glanced over at Ironshadow—his table was bare of everything except the museum pieces and he gave me the "thumbs-up" sign that indicated business had been good. Hallie's rack of tie-dyed robes was almost empty, and the baked goods table was completely gone.

  "So how'd we do?" I said to Julian.

  "Well enough," he said. "Look, are you ..." There was a pause. "Are you coming back to the cabin tonight?"

  Coming as it did, while my mind was full of Lark, what might

  434 Bell, Book, and Murder

  be a perfectly innocent question seemed remarkably fraught. Was this Julian's bid to retain my favors, or his acknowledgment of my might-be relationship with Lark? I opened my mouth to suggest leaving tonight instead, but finally remembered a good concrete real-world reason why I'd been so reluctant after all to leave tonight. Tomorrow morning Wyler Pascoe would be coming for his books, and I'd promised him I'd be here. I might even find time tonight to get that reading list from Belle.

  But that left tonight to get through. And asking Juliain whether he wanted me to come back to the cabin tonight would be playing into all those old boy-and-girl games we're supposed to have left behind now that we've entered the Aeon of Horus. So I said, "I haven't made up my mind yet," instead.

  Julian smiled coolly and stood up. "I don't think I'm going to go to the party," he saiid. "I've got some reading to do. You could drop by if it gets too noisy for you." He walked away before I could collect enough brain cells to field a reply.

  The sharp snap of the locks on Ironshadow's case jarred me out of my woolgathering. I looked around and saw him closing his case and starting to fold up the table.

  "Nothing left to sell," he said happily. "And I've got to hit the road early tomorrow."

  Ironshadow lives somewhere in New Jersey—or, as its habitues refer to it. Fucking jersey—smd has a trip home that is longer by several hours than the one I was facing.

  "Good luck," I said. "When do we see you again?"

  "I'm going to be in the city for Twelfth Night; maybe then."

  "Call me," I said, meaning it. He grinned a toothy troll-grin and picked up his table, chair, and case.

  'Too bad about Larry," he said, and his tone made the words into an epitaph, "but that boy was definitely asking for it."

  Yeah, a traitor part of my mind said, but what did he do besides want to be a hero?

  People began to wander downstairs from the selling floor. There was still light in the sky outside, but it was that lucent misleading brilliance that comes just before you realize it's dusk, when things seem very clear but relationships are hard to judge. Eventually it was just me and someone I didn't know well who had a table full of herbs and oils. She started clearing her table and packing her stuff away. It was about time for me to do the same.

  The Gotham County Sheriffs Department had not objected to

  my plans to leave the county, providing I was willing to come back if they asked. I was, even if not very, and at the moment the thought of getting back to the big city had an obsessive glamour to it. Only the thought of packing the truck in the dark—and the knowledge that, come hell or high water, 1 still had to talk to Maid-jene and meet Wyler—kept me here.

  I tried to distract myself. Monday would be a short selling day, with a long load-up at the end of it, but I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to leave out for Monday's last-minute impulse shoppers, and I might as well pack the rest of the stuff now. When I got back to New York it'd be early enough that maybe I'd call Lace and we'd have a big Chinese dinner and then maybe cruise her favorite bars.

  Unless Lark . . .

  Damn Lark. And Julian, too, for good measure.

  Meanwhile, I could get together the books I'd promised Wyler, that he might or might not be back to buy. And I still had to ask Belle about getting Lark a place to stay, which meant after that I'd have to go and find hin% and . . .

  I started to work.

  Every year it's the same thing; Julian sends more stock than any six Festivals could absorb, on the theory that Goddess forbid he should miss a sale. Every year 90 percent of it goes back to the shop untouched. Julian is not daunted by this —and I did have to admit it would make filling Wyler's shopping list easier, since who but Julian would bring Wicca 101 books to a Pagan Festival where everyone who came had bought and read them years ago?

  I found Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft and Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense without much trouble, but I wanted to include What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar and I was pretty sure I'd seen Julian take a copy of it off the shelf back in New York. The only question was, where was it now?

  I packed while I searched, trying to group titles by subject and get all the remaining copies together into the same box, although since I wouldn't be the one unpacking them in New York there wasn't a lot of reason for me to bother. An inventory to check things off against would have made life ever so much easier, but every year the van is packed at the last minute and there's no time to do one.

  It was while shifting the half-full boxes that I came on the full one.

  436 Bell, Book, and Murder

  It was under and behind everything, shoved into a comer and sealed, and if I hadn't had a suspicious nature I would have thought it belonged to Paradise Lake and not to me. But I knew this comer had been empty when I set up and so it must be mine.

  Right?

  The first thing I saw when I slit the tape was a bundle of cloth, which annoyed me. This must be the wizard's robes that I'd spent the morning looking for; I'd known we'd brought a couple and if I could have found them I'd have been able to sell them. I lifted them out. Maybe I could find Gerry sometime tonight and tell him they were here.

  Under the robes was an odd collection of things—cheap brass incense holders, some of the eight-inch beeswax candles that we retail for thirteen dollars each (wholesale they're somewhere around $4.50). Not stuff that we wouldn't have brought, but stuff that shouldn't have been packed together. And at any rate, stuff I might be able to sell tomorrow.

  I lifted the candles out, annoyed and puzzled, and saw beneath them one of the Ziploc bags that the Snake uses to pack jewelry, specula, and other small objects up in. Some moron —I had my candidates —must have packed the candles on top of a bunch of jewelry, and it was pure luck and not planning that there wasn't something heavy on top of the candles, because beeswax candles are brittle rather than soft and will break given the right encouragement.

  Then I took a good look at the bag.

  Those who don't believe in the power of the abstract threat reject the power the imaginative mind has over the body. What I saw had no ability to hurt me, but I looked into the box and felt a sudden rush of adrenaline that made my hands shake and my ears ring.

  Lying in the bottom of the box in one of the Snake's Ziploc bags was a kukri.

  It was not like the Tibetan ones. Its three-flanged blade was made of brass or bronze, and the hilt was a plain shaft of white bone —antler, I thought—finished with a flat brass pommel. There was a dark line where the hilt met the blade. It could be epoxy. But it was so much more likely that it was blood.

  I stared at the knife in the bag. I had no doubt that I was looking at what had killed Jackson Harm. And it was here. In the Snake's stock.

  I looked around. The herbalist was gone. There was nobody up here on the barn's second floor but me. I picked up the bag. It was sealed; there was crumpled white tissue bunched loosely around the knife. I broke the seal on the bag. Trapped air hufled out, redolent of clove and bergamot; chypre, cinnamon, and civet . . .

  Julian's ritual oil.

  There were any number of people who could be wearing a mix like that, I told myse
lf. And it was true, but I knew too many facts to take that easy out. Holding the knife carefully through the bag I held it up and angled it to catch the weak bulb-light. Its entire surface glinted, even the hilt, glossy with the oil that had been used to wipe it clean after it had been used; the reason that it and the bag reeked of the mix now. I sealed the bag shut again and knelt there holding it.

  People who've never experienced it talk all the time about feeling desolated, when what they mean is the mild disappointment of a missed opportunity. Real desolation is when you've lost everything, including things you hadn't known you had. Like innocence. Like ignorance, because now I had the answer that I hadn't wanted.

  I'd suspected everyone else this weekend, but never Julian— Julian, who had been out of character from first to last, in coming to HallowFest at all and then in everything that followed. Julian, who made no secret of the fact that he was doing La Tesoraria—if you knew what the indicators were. And I did, but I hadn't looked until now. Either at Julian, or at the end of the operation, at the two acts that must be performed.

  Love and Death. But as metaphor, as simile —not literal, not actual, not real. The language of magic is metaphor. The requirements of the Tesoraria were supposed to be allegorical; their accommodation a symbolic one. I did not expect a real death to proceed from the Tesoraria work any more than the Catholic expects his priest to hand him a chunk of bleeding human meat at the Communion rail.

  And so I hadn't looked at the most obvious suspect—because to me he'd been the least possible suspect. Julian. Who was, first and always, a Ceremonial Magician.

  And a killer?

  No! He's a magician, and magic is real, but there are LIMITS. Nobody commits MURDER in the name of magic, for Goddess's sake, no matter what their beliefs!

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  Yet the true magician is amoral, and recognizes no law but his own —that's what the books say, isn't it? What was the distance, really, from my perception of the immanence of the Goddess, to the Klingons' embrace of a culture that never was, to Xharina and Arioch in the moonlight, to . . .

  To Jackson Harm, dead not for anything he was or had done, but because his death was the last component of a ritual? I looked down at the knife in my hands. The end does not justify the means, nor the means, the end. Human life must be valued so highly that it can never become a component in a marketplace transaction; not for slavery, and not for murder. Someone had killed Harm, that was simple fact. And the oil on the body would match the oil on the knife, on Julian.

  On me, Friday night. I swallowed hard.

  But I wasn't sure, I told myself. Not sure enough to make the ghastly unbelievable accusation. Julian could have been performing Lai Tesoraria and Harm could have been murdered, and these two events might have only a psychic connection. Or be sheer coincidence, something I'd seen enough of to believe in as devoutly as I did in magic.

  I'd said I was willing to pay any price for justice, back when the question was an abstract one and the price was only friendship. But now the bill had been presented, and the price was higher than I could have imagined. And if I was going to pay it, I had to be sure.

  lO

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 8—7:00 p.m. ^«-^^

  I put the bag with the knife in it into the pocket of my parka, where it seemed to burn with malignant intention. Blood shapes the purpose of the blade for once and all; 1 could barely imagine the shape of the intent in a blade that had been used to kill. 1 didn't want to hold it any longer than I had to, for fear of the consequences, yet Julian had been willing to sell it.

  That made things even worse, but if one thing was true, the other was, too. The kukri had been packed up with the rest of the stock and would have been going back to New York tomorrow, to the glass case in the front of the shop, to end someday in the hands of someone ignorant of what it had been, and what it might still do . . .

  If it were the murder weapon.

  If Julian was the killer.

  I had to know.

  But when I left the bam, it was not to confront Julian. I went instead to the beginning of things; to the place I'd been drawn to all weekend. To the pine forest where Jackson Harm had died.

  It was dark outside now, and cold. Traffic was all the other way, toward the bam, and light, and dinner. I met no one on my way to the Bardic Circle, and up the hill beyond. The winch and the net were gone from the lakeside. Even the deputies seemed to be gone.

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  I knelt where the body had lain, and reached for the knife. My fingers were cold and clumsy, and the bag in my pocket was slick and unpleasant to touch. Overheated imagination? Or the exercise of directed intuition that is the gift of every magician and Witch? I laid the bag with the knife in it on the pine needles and breathed slowly, letting my imagination and subconscious build a narrative without censorship from my daylight mind. Guided imagery, the New Agers call it, though the whole point is not to be guided. I called the Guardians to stand around me, and protect me from what I was about to see.

  It was the blackest part of night, and Harm was here. Where were the leaflets? His plan had been to distribute them at the gathering; he'd left some with Mrs. Cooper, but he couldn't have counted on her to hand them out.

  — Give them to me. I'll pass them, out for you.

  Who was speaking? 1 didn't know. The words echoed in the mind's ear, unattributable as a line of print.

  —ril pass them out for you.

  Harm had felt no fear, only trust in this ally. He'd given —

  He'd taken—

  1 could see the silver flask glinting in the moonlight; the sportsman's friend.

  The flask in the moonlight.

  —Here, why don't you . . .

  I jerked out of trance state, unable to retain the detachment I needed to be there. The white hilt of the kukri on the forest floor seemed to glow balefully in the last of the twilight. There was a coppery taste in my mouth: the fight-or-flight reflex of danger.

  The sweet musty undertaste in the wine that first night. I'd never slept better—or more soundly. I hadn't heard Julian get up at all. Who sleeps that soundly in a strange place?

  "/ didn't kill you." Julian's words to me the following morning. I'd been too embarrassed at the time to pay close attention, but had there been the slightest, most scrupulously accurate stress on the last word of the sentence? "/ didn't kill YOU." Who, then, if not me?

  Where were the leaflets? That was the real-world proof I had to have. I could not believe that Harm hadn't brought them with him Friday night. They'd been the whole point.

  I picked up the kukri and put it back in my pocket.

  It was after eight o'clock when I got to the bungalow, and I was shivering inside my parka from standing so long in the chill. It had been easy to get to the Bardic Circle, hard to make myself leave it. Harder still to cross the bridge over the lake to reach the path that led to the bungalows. I was filled with a desperate reluctance to take each step, an unwillingness to force the conclusion. Only an act of will kept me moving forward; the trained will that is the root of magical discipline, the training that links the magician and the Witch.

  I could see the light on in the bungalow. I knew that Julian was waiting for me; that he knew I was here. And I knew that I would have to move first; the opening gambit in a chess game that could have no winner. How different were Julian and I, if both of us were willing to sacrifice everything for our beliefs? I opened the door.

  Julian had been sitting on a folding stool, reading. The light flashed on his glasses as he looked up, dressed as always in clerical black and white, the collar that would have made Harm trust him on sight, there in those midnight woods.

  I tried to speak and couldn't. The room seemed to be filled with reflective surfaces, all dazzling me. The knife against the red cloth. The silver-framed mirror. The lit candle.

  And beneath the table, a box.

  I knelt before it, moving as if Julian weren't there. It wasn't t
aped shut; I pulled open the flaps and felt weak with relief when all I saw was wadded newspaper—some stock from the Snake that hadn't made it upstairs.

  But there was something wrong with the newsprint. I reached for it. Pulled some out. Saw what I didn't want to see beneath, even while I saw that the newsprint and design on the sheet I held were all wrong for any of the New York papers — and why should Julian have packed anything in pages from the Tamerlane Gazette Advertiser?

  It was the same newsprint I'd seen wrapped around the silver knife, and where would Ironshadow have gotten a Tamerlane Gazette when he was home in New Jersey wrapping his custom orders for delivery at the festival? Julian had unwrapped it to look at it, and wrapped it back up in a fresh sheet of newspaper from the box. That was what I had seen without seeing when I was here before. That was why I'd been afraid.

  I stared down at stacks of Harm's pamphlet.

  Here. Give them to me. Fll pass them out for you.

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  "You didn't pass out his pamphlets, Julian," I said without moving. "You have to keep your promises."

  "I didn't say where I'd pass them out," Julian answered.

  I stood up. Every muscle ached. Turning to face him was agony. "You killed him," I said.

  "Who?" Julian said calmly. Julian, who'd killed to complete La Tesoraria. Completed the work and achieved his result. But when you obtain a bill of divorcement from all that is, what do you have left? What did Julian have left?

  "Did you kill Jackson Harm?" I said evenly, because nothing must be subjective, nothing left to interpretation.

  "Yes." He turned a page in his book.

  "Why?" I said despairingly.

  "You know why," Julian said reprovingly.

  Perhaps I should have been afraid, but I knew Julian too well for that. "It's only a book," I said.