Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02

by Witchlight (v2. 1)

  But unlike a dream, the sensation did not end with waking. Winter's sense of triumphant success was submerged in the dawning realization that it was much easier to uncork the genie than it was to put it back into the bottle. Her skin tingled and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up; she could feel the intensifying potential pressing outward through her skin, seeking release in violence.

  I've got to get rid of it somehow—ground the charge—

  But it was too late. She felt the power gather itself; slip free of her control. She felt something deep inside her flex—

  The bulb in the lamp did not so much shatter as dissolve, imploding with a clap and a fat blue spark that left the darkened room reeking of ozone.

  Winter felt the residue of power drain from her body, carrying her energy with it—as though the effort she had just made was not merely psychic, but physical as well. Every muscle in her body ached, a familiar—if unwelcome—sensation. It was just like all those times at Fall River— and before.

  "Happy now?" Grey said to her inside her mind. "Or just scared? Once you take responsibility for things, they belong to you—and you belong to them."

  But the exhaustion was swirling through Winter's veins like a drug, and it was so much easier to let it carry her into sleep than to answer.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE HUNTING OF THE WREN

  Summers pleasures they are gone like to visions every one And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.

  —JOHN CLARE

  THE COLD AIR ON HER SKIN ROUSED HER. WINTER AWOKE early that morning with the virtuous sense of well-being she usually associated with an intense workout at her health club, and for a moment after she opened her eyes that sense of satisfaction was so compelling that she could not imagine what she was doing in this stark unfamiliar room. Then the memory of recent events returned, and with them, the sense of guilt and uncertainty—and the nagging sense of blame.

  But for what? Winter could not think of anything she had done— other than end up in Fall River—for which she had to apologize. She shivered in the chill, pulling the blanket haphazardly around her. To be fair, there might be a number of sins in her past that she just couldn't remember right now, but this feeling of omission seemed much more immediate than something like that could account for.

  But she was feeling too restless to chase this particular puzzle for long. Winter swung her legs over the edge of the bed, wincing at the chill, and barely missed stepping on her keys. They were lying in the middle of the floor.

  So I did do it! That discovery made her check the lamp as well, huddling the blanket around her as she stood. It confirmed her recollection; while the shade was untouched, the remains of the bulb were fused into the socket. There was no sign of broken glass anywhere.

  Still a little room for improvement, Winter thought ruefully. She ran her finger gingerly around the welt of melted glass. / guess I owe Ramsey a new lamp.

  The flutter of the curtain caught her eye. No wonder it was so cold in here—the window was open. She went over to it and pulled it slowly shut.

  But did I open it last night before I went to bed?

  Suddenly it was important to know. With a haste that left no time for shoes, Winter pulled on slacks and a sweater and hurried out of the room.

  "Ramsey?"

  Her voice was so low he could not possibly have heard it. Winter swallowed hard, and pushed the front door shut, locking the spring lock and dead bolt and security chain.

  All the living room windows were open. The heavy drapes were drawn back and the thin white curtains underneath billowed in the morning breeze. She closed the windows and pulled the drapes and then went back through the house. Every window in every room was open, as well as closet doors, cabinet doors, everything that could be opened. The dull resentful anger was a physical ache. And escape was only an illusion.

  It's here.

  She'd saved the kitchen for last, out of an unconscious expectation that the worst demonstration of the wrongness that stalked her would be there. But when she arrived, all she found was Ramsey, incongruous in T-shirt and jeans, scrubbing his hands in the sink.

  Scrubbing them to the elbows.

  Scrubbing them hard.

  "Is everything all right?" Winter asked. She'd hoped for bright neutrality, but what came out was fear.

  "You're up early." Ramsey's voice rang as hollowly false as her own.

  Winter glanced up at the clock. 6:30.

  "Careful where you step, it's—" Ramsey stopped.

  It's wet. Winter mentally completed the sentence. She looked down at her bare feet, at the gleaming, freshly scrubbed, recently scrubbed kitchen floor.

  Who mopped a floor at 6 in the morning?

  "Ramsey, what happened here?" Winter asked him, voice low.

  "Nothing," he said with gallant dishonesty. But he could not meet her gaze.

  Scrubbing and scrubbing . . . was it only in her imagination that Winter could smell that faint sweet stench; stale and organic like swamp water on a hot morning, or spoiled meat. . . .

  "I have to go," Winter Musgrave said.

  He did not argue. Ramsey's curse was that he could not tell comforting lies to himself or to others, no matter how unwilling he might be to face the truth. Huddled together forlornly in the kitchen's breakfast nook, they shared one last meal, and Winter wondered if she would ever see him again. On the counter in front of her a cup of tea stewed and cooled, and scrambled eggs neither of them had the appetite for turned rubbery and dry.

  "You'll be okay, won't you? I guess you're going back to New York now?" Ramsey said hopefully. There was an undercurrent in his voice Winter didn't quite understand.

  "I need to find Grey," Winter said stubbornly. Lately it seemed as if everything she tried to hold onto slipped through her fingers like grains of sand, until she existed alone, without anyone to reach out for or to touch. There was no time left to be patient with Ramsey's evasions. "Do you know where he is? Have you kept in touch with him?"

  Ramsey shook his head, but it wasn't an answer. "It wasn't the same at Taghkanic after you left, Winter." But that was not an answer either.

  "Where is he?" she said urgently.

  "I ... don't know. Cassie would," Ramsey said, relief obvious in his voice at having even this much answer for her. "Cassie kept in touch with him. I'm sure she did."

  "I've got an address for her in Berkeley. ..." Winter began doubtfully.

  "No. That's old. She moved to SF about four years ago, when she got the job managing that bookshop." Ramsey spoke with decision, just as if Winter should know what bookshop and why Cassie should be managing it. "I'll get it for you." He left the kitchen quickly.

  Winter pushed her nearly untouched breakfast away from her. Ramsey was as helpful as if he were anxious for her to be gone, and after what she suspected had happened this morning she did not blame him. But be didn't act outraged or puzzled about it, or try to blame someone. As if be expected it. . . or as if it had happened before.

  "Ramsey?" Winter called, suddenly apprehensive.

  "Here it is," Ramsey said, coming back into the kitchen. He set a three-by-five card on the table in front of her, an address copied out on it in Ramsey's neat penmanship.

  Ancient Mysteries Bookstore, Winter read, and an address on Haight Street in San Francisco. She felt a faint surge of discomfort; with a name like that it almost had to be a place like Inquire Within; one of those whole-hearted surges into the irrational. How could Cassie do this to her? Of the lot of them, Cassie had always been the sensible one, the one with both feet firmly planted in reality. . . .

  A reality, anyway.

  "Are you going to go see Cassie?" Ramsey asked.

  "If I can." Winter wasn't sure what impulse made her qualify her promise. "Ramsey, about this morning ... it wasn't you; it was—"

  "If you do, will you do something for me?" Ramsey interrupted her as if he hadn't heard. "I'm—oh, God, I'm no good at this."

  He sat
down across from her. The harsh illumination of the alcove light made him look suddenly old, harsh downward lines pulling his face into a frozen mask of age. "If you're going, you have to understand, I ... When you were asking about Nuclear Lake ..." His voice drifted to a stop.

  "All my life I never took anything seriously I couldn't see or touch. Used cars; there isn't much more rock-bottom real than that, is there? I didn't want to be blindsided by things I didn't have any chance of beating—you know me, Winter; I always liked a fight, but only if it was a fair one. Up at Nuclear Lake ..." His voice trailed off in a sigh.

  So he DOES remember! Winter felt a primal flash of triumph.

  "I didn't like it, but what we did, what happened there, if it didn't come from outside—from objective reality—then it came from me, do you see? I had two choices and I didn't like either one. Jannie was just the opposite; she loved it and I think when she couldn't find that magic any more something in her just . . . broke. A long time before Denny." He picked up his mug and fiddled with it, not meeting her eyes. "Anyway, I didn't forgive reality for being different than I expected. And lately . . ."

  Winter could feel him gathering the determination to go on, to say what was obviously so hard for him to say.

  "There was something Cassie wanted to tell me, Winter. Something that worried her. She wrote to me—pages of stuff. I wouldn't even read it. She even called, and you know, we didn't stay close, at least not that way. But she called me, and I wouldn't even let her talk to me about it. She was looking for help, I think—and I wouldn't let her ask for it. Because I knew that she hadn't run away; she'd stuck with, you know, this stuff—"

  And then she was in trouble—or you thought she was—and you couldn't bear to think about it, because of what it might be. "Oh, Ramsey," Winter said with soft compassion. She put her hand over his.

  "So when you see Cassie, help her, would you? Find out what she needs?" Ramsey said.

  "I will," Winter promised.

  A half an hour later she was on her way.

  As she backed out of the garage Winter could see Ramsey watching her through the living room window, as isolated as a castaway on a desert island. Although she was only yards away, Winter already felt as though she couldn't go back, as if there were some force pushing the two of them apart. She willed herself not to care, to look to what came next. There was no way to go back, after all—there was no "back" to go to.

  She turned onto the street and drove away, and by the time Winter had reached the cross street the house was no longer in sight.

  Surrounded by the sights and sounds of weekday-morning Dayton traffic, Winter brooded. Ramsey had been completely honest with her at the end. Motivated by fear ... or because he had given up trying to protect her? Winter's fingers briefly touched the bag on the seat beside her. It held Cassie's address. Or what Ramsey said was Cassie's address, anyway.

  Now that she was on the road and heading for the interchange that would put her in I-80, Winter realized that her hasty departure from Ramsey's house had been motivated as much by panic and guilt as anything else. She'd taken off without a clear plan in mind, and California was a long way to go by car. There were major air-travel hubs in Chicago and St. Louis; surely it would be more sensible to drive to either place and fly out from there?

  But a part of Winter disliked the thought of being without a car once she arrived—unless she rented one—and, searching her emotions further, she realized she was reluctant to face Cassilda Chandler at all. Had Cassie changed? She was the only one of us who kept faith, Winter thought with an odd pang. From Ramsey's hints, Cassie was still deeply involved in ... whatever the five of them had been deeply involved in. Magic. Occultism. "The dark twin of Science," according to the Thorne Blackburn biography. Taken up during their college days, as far as Winter could reconstruct, and never quite abandoned.

  Not completely.

  Not by all of them.

  She turned onto one of the six-lane roads that led to the interstate, her body moving the car smoothly and automatically through the rush-hour traffic. Could it be Cassie who had sent the magickal child? The idea had a certain repugnant logic.

  "After all, if you can't suspect your friends, who can you suspect?" Grey said out of memory.

  "I wish you were here to tell me what's going on," Winter muttered to the absent Hunter Greyson.

  Somehow she thought that he knew; Grey had always known, or seemed to know, the answer to everything—at least as much as a college student could be expected to know. It was hard now to remember how young they'd all been then. They'd felt like adults, and thought that was all that mattered, but they'd been kids. And now, all these years later, how well could she say she still knew any of them? Janelle, entombed in her sad marriage, Ramsey, complacently accepting his myriad failures— maybe Cassie had undergone the same sort of dark alchemical transformation, into . . .

  The interchange for I-80 West loomed ahead in a blaze of red-white-and-blue shield-shaped signs. Accustomed to making instant decisions, Winter pulled onto the on ramp and merged smoothly with the heavier traffic, buying herself more time to think. She had to go west anyway— to reach Chicago, if she decided to fly; to reach I-90 and California if she didn't. Once she'd settled into the light autohypnosis of long-distance driving, her mind returned unerringly to her original problem. The artificial Elemental—the magickal child.

  A power created and sent by a magician was stalking her. Beyond reason or sense, here, in the declining years of the twentieth century, her problem was a magickal assault by a person or persons unknown. Its danger increased with every day, and she had no idea what to do about it.

  She'd been searching for Grey because he was the only magician she knew. She could not believe he would have returned from nowhere to harm her; but how could she be certain she'd had no contact with Grey since college? Could he be carrying out some agenda she'd forgotten?

  Winter frowned. She remembered the farmhouse outside Glastonbury, and before that, the sanatorium at Fall River. She remembered Arkham Miskatonic King, the day she'd started work there still as bright in her mind as a new-minted penny. . . .

  And before that came the garbled half-memories of college, like bright fish in murky waters. She hardly remembered Grey at all, but she could not believe she could ever have done something to kindle that degree of hatred in a sane person. And Grey, whatever else she might have forgotten about him, had been radiantly sane.

  But not, now that Winter came to think about it, the only magician she knew. If she could believe what Ramsey had said, Cassilda had "kept up with" the Blackburn Work as well, so Cassie could be as much help to Winter as Grey could.

  Or as much harm. Face it, Winter, while sorcerous assault strains the credibility, being a victim chosen at random snaps it right in half. It has to be someone who knows you—and who you know.

  Not Cassie. Not Grey. With the obstinacy of a child lying alone in the dark, Winter clung to that belief. They had been her friends. They would never hurt her. Even Ramsey and Janelle, strange as they were, changed as they were, had meant her no harm.

  / need time.

  Time to reason things out, in a situation where no reason was possible. Time to think. Time to plan.

  Time to learn. About herself, at least, if nothing else.

  * * *

  But Ramsey had said Cassie's problem might be urgent, and so, a couple of hours later, when Winter stopped for gas and to stretch her legs, she sought out a pay phone to call Cassie.

  She was at one of those mass-produced rest stops on the interstate that seemed to have evolved in defiance of every tenet of Lady Bird Johnson's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign thirty years before. The pay phones were located in a not-very-quiet corner where the noise of tired children, cash registers, and Muzak made a deadening background mush of sound. Winter cradled the phone to her ear and thanked her lucky stars that her PhoneCard still worked—she hated to think how many quarters she would have had to feed the phone if it d
idn't. Fortunately the escrow account that had taken care of her bills during the time she'd been at Fall River had seen to it that her checks didn't bounce, her charge cards were paid, and there was money in her drawing account.

  Now that she knew what city's directory assistance to consult, she got Cassie's home number easily. Winter carefully crossed out the old Berkeley number in her Filofax and wrote in the new. There was only one Cassilda Chandler in the San Francisco phone book, but there was no answer at that number. After a moment's hesitation, she dialed again and asked directory assistance for the number of the Ancient Mysteries Bookstore on Haight Street, and once the synthetic robot voice had provided it, dialed it before she had the chance to regret doing so.

  The phone rang mindlessly on; after a dozen rings, Winter lost count and simply watched the second hand sweep around the dial of the clock that was hung over the entrance to the rest-stop cafeteria. As the clock measured off the seconds, Winter felt herself losing patience. Surely any bookstore, no matter how New Agey and laid-back, would answer a phone that had rung for over a minute?

  Finally she hung up and moved slowly away from the bank of phones, worry and relief combining into a disoriented, unsettled feeling. How could she ask Cassie what was wrong if the woman wouldn't even answer her phone?

  She'd have to try again later.

  There was no answer when Winter stopped for lunch, either. Pretty soon she'd cross the Indiana border, and then she was going to have to make up her mind whether to head north for Chicago and fly the rest of the way, or drive straight through, which would take two or three days minimum—at least if she took it easy and didn't push it.

  Driving did have a certain perverse appeal. Behind the wheel Winter could always tell herself that she was on the verge of turning back; that this was a pleasure trip; that her destination was not as fixed and irrevocable as the stars in their courses. Behind the wheel, Winter felt safe.

  And safety—real or illusory—was a commodity in short supply in her life just now.