Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Gravelight

  PROLOGUE

  MORTON'S FORK, AUGUST I4TH, I9I7

  This grave shall have a living monument.

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  THE POWER OF THE WELLSPRING SURGED AROUND HER, even through the thick stone walls that kept her from it. The hour was late, and the mountain would have been robed in moonlight save for the summer storm boiling up through Watchman's Gap.

  Attie swore under her breath as she shook the sanatorium's locked doors. How could Quentin dare to try the Wellspring and think she would not know? She could forgive him much, but she could not forgive him this. The Wellspring was hers—he'd stolen her land with his flat-lander lawyers and her brother's weakness, but he could not steal this. It was in her blood, in her mother's blood, back to the Bright Beginning. But he'd balked her at every turn, binding her with chains of law and wealth and making her powerless in his search for power.

  "Quentin!" Attic's voice cracked like a whip. She slammed the heavy glass-and-oak door with the flat of her hand, knowing that wherever he was he heard her, that he must have expected her to come. Expected her to join him.

  But he was wrong.

  ''Quentin!'' Attie shouted again. The storm was through the Gap now, and the first fat drops of rain made fat dark stars on the fancy flagstone terrace.

  She abandoned the front door and turned, running to the back of the building, where the kitchen door was. As she ran, she felt in the pocket of her nurse's uniform for the ring of keys. Quentin had been so pleased to have her come work for him at his fancy hospital—as if she'd had any choice, her with a daughter to feed and no man's help to command as if by right. Briefly she thought of her young daughter at home asleep in her bed. Little Melly, whose charge the Wellspring would one day be—or would have been. Already she thought it might be too late; Quentin Blackburn had flung open the sacred path to the Bright Lords with no thought for the consequences—there was no escape now, for either of them.

  A bright blue-white flash of lightning illuminated the pale stone wall beside her, and, as if this were a signal, water fell from the heavens like the spill from a broached dam. The icy drench took Attie's breath away, shocking her consciousness back into the material realm, but its effect lasted only a moment. The Wellspring was roused, and the power of it made the natural world around her seem like something in a conjure-man's shew-glass—unreal. Attie moved forward as if she were underwater, and in her mind she was already within, in the vault above the Wellspring with Quentin and his loathsome congregation. Their words echoed in her inner ears:

  ''We call upon the Goat to command thee! Come, thou elemental prince, Undine, creature of water: Thou who was before the world was made — hornless, uncreated, exile from the elemental City! As death calls to death, as slave to master, we call thee —"

  Attie shook her head, trying to drive the chanting from her mind, and as she did the fear returned, stronger than before. For a hundred generations, the Dellon women and those who'd come before them had approached this hidden Wellspring in dread and lamentation. Even now she would have begged mercy for her lover from the powers that he had so rashly awakened, but the Bright Lords were as implacable as the stony earth itself.

  She reached the back door. Her stolen key opened the lock.

  The darkened kitchen reverberated like a drum with the sound of rain.

  The matches trembled in her hand, and she broke three before she coaxed one to light. Once the kerosene lamp was lit, the hulking shapes of the black iron stove and purring kerosene refrigerator cast shifting, looming shadows upon the whitewashed plaster walls. The hanging pots swung faintly, as if disturbed by the power in the air. Attie clutched the lamp tighter.

  Carrying the fragile lantern carefully, Attie hurried through the kitchen into the dining room beyond. Lightning flared through the tall glass windows and the tables, already set for breakfast, glowed with white damask and silver plate.

  Where was the entrance to his temple? Where? He had been so secretive. What if she could not find it?

  "Quentin ..." Attie moaned, and this time her voice held a note of defeat.

  One hundred feet below the surface of the earth the liturgy approached its peak in the temple Quentin Blackburn had made. The stone of its building had once comprised the walls of a convent's chapel in France, infused with centuries of the prayers of holy virgins. The altar upon which the sacrifice lay was a thing of an even older magic; from its Egyptian temple the worn black basalt had seen the rise and fall of Imperial Rome herself.

  Surrounded by the members of his black coven, Quentin Blackburn, Magister Magus of The Church of the Antique Rite, loomed over the naked woman upon the altar, the goat-horn crown upon his head, his robes open to reveal his own painted nakedness. The red-hiked knife of sacrifice was in his hand, and the consecrated blade seemed to quiver with eagerness to be about its bloody work. He had told Sarita that tonight would bring her immortality—but he had not told her how.

  Around the walls, the torches that were the room's only light leapt and guttered, painting the walls with dancing shadows as his congregation whipped themselves with chant and dance to new orgiastic heights, but it was Sarita's blood that would bind the power of this Gate Between the Worlds to him ... if the Gate accepted the sacrifice of one not of the Bloodline.

  He could have had this power months ago, if the little Dellon girl had cooperated. How dare she set her foolish backwoods superstitions against the illumination of the full power of twentieth-century Occult Science?

  lO MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  Couldn't she see how the old world was changing? Even now, the war that was the earthly manifestation of the conflict on the Inner Planes was raging across the map of Europe, sweeping away the old order in the name of the evolution of the Superman to whom all the races of the Earth would someday bow. Once the power was his, Attie Dellon would bow down to him as well—or she would be his next gift to the Gate.

  The frenzy reached its peak. Quentin raised the dagger over his head, not caring now if Sarita saw it.

  "Stop!" The cry cut across the nimbus of power like a flash of cold lightning. The rhythm of the ceremony faltered; the momentum of the worshippers was lost. Quentin Blackburn raised his head and met Attie Dellon's eyes. On the altar, Sarita sat up abruptly. She pulled her ritual robe around her and stared, whimpering, at the knife in Quentin's hand.

  There were two loci for the power now, and it swirled between them, pulling the man and the woman together, binding them into one great event. Silence spread out from Attie Dellon like the ripples from a stone dropped into a pool. She was dressed in white—her nursing uniform— and held a burning kerosene lantern in her hand.

  "So you've come to join us, Athanais Dellon?" Quentin said, forcing a confidence into his voice that he was far from feeling.

  "No." Her voice was as hard and as harsh as stone. "I've come to stop you, Quentin Blackburn."

  Her body was haloed in a golden haze; it took Quentin a few moments to realize that he was seeing that halo through temporal, not spiritual, eyes. It was the light of the lantern in her hand reflecting from the smoke in the air that surrounded her.

  "I warned you from the first not to trifle with the Wellspring," Attie said. "You've stolen everything else from my family, Quentin Blackburn, but you won't steal this. I warned you," she said again, and now, at last, over the perfume of the incense, Quentin could smell the smoke.

  Quentin began—slowly, oh so slowly—to move toward her. In the center of the elaborately decorated temple the members of his coven milled, frightened and disorganized, turning toward the entrance that Attie blocked.

  "Stand aside, woman!" Quentin barked, summoning up
the power that had let him raise an encampment of The Church of the Antique Rite in this place. And Attie did move, but the mantle of a greater Power was

  about her now, and she curtseyed in mocking silence as she stepped away from the passage.

  Half a dozen worshippers rushed into the stairwell in that instant, their elaborate ritual robes an impediment now rather than a manifestation of the occult forces at their command. A moment afterward the first screams came, as someone opened the door at the top of the stairs and a wall of oily black smoke began rolling down into the passage. Distantly, above the screams, Quentin could hear the iron tocsin of the sanatorium's fire alarm.

  Wildwood Sanatorium was burning.

  He ran to the door—the other door, the one whose steps led down, not up—and dragged futilely at it. It was locked, and, thinking himself clever to be so on guard, he had not brought the key down with him tonight. Tonight there was only one exit from the temple.

  There was a crash behind him. Quentin whirled, searching for Attie and finding her standing before the altar, laughing madly as the spilled fuel from the lamp she'd flung ignited the altar's draperies. The roar of the flames eradicated any other sound—the storm, the shouting, the raging cthonic waters over which they stood.

  "Why?" His demand was a roar of disappointment and rage.

  "I warned you." He saw her lips move in soundless reproach, saw the fire that licked among her skirts, feeding on anything it could catch.

  He could see the tears that coursed down her cheeks in the moment before the surviving members of the coven surged around him, pushing the two of them apart as they pleaded with him to save them where there was no deliverance possible. For one betraying instant the man broke through the mask of the Magus; in despair he shouted out his lover's name.

  "Athanais!''

  And then there was nothing but the fire.

  A GRAVE AND PRIVATE PLACE

  A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day. — PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  MORE THAN THREE CENTURIES AGO THE FIRST EUROPEANS

  had penetrated these mountains; people driven by the need to see what lay beyond the horizon of the strange new land they had come to. In the wake of these trailblazers followed those whose purpose it was to take this land and hold it; it was they who had named the place of their settlement Morton's Fork, after a churchman's judgment whose unfairness still rankled after generations.

  Through the 1700s and into the nineteenth century the town flourished after its fashion, until coal was found in the West Virginia hills, coal enough to fuel a young nation's expansion—if only it could be harvested from the bones of the mountains in which it lay. And so the mining companies moved into the West Virginia mountains, bringing wealth and despotism, poverty and hope, and changing the landscape and the people forever. The corporations that owned the coal did not care how lavishly it spent men, or at what cost to the future the coal was harvested.

  Morton's Fork was strangely unaffected by the wildcat growth of company towns and mine-heads that transformed and destroyed other communities; what coal the mountains of Lyonesse County held was too poor and scant to attract the attention of the Eastern robber barons. Those men who worked the mines traveled miles to do it: Morton's Fork itself slumbered on. And when the time of coal was past, the big corporations left nothing in their wake but a desolation and blight greater than their presence had caused, but Morton's Fork remained unchanged.

  Four great wars did little more than the mines had to change the lives of the people who lived in those hills; in 1914, on the eve of America's entrance into the European War, there was a sanatorium built in the hills above Morton's Fork, and more than a decade later a WPA road-building project left behind a cluster of cabins that imposed a false uniformity upon the wild Appalachians. Then the world moved on, and in its wake the isolated hamlet of Morton's Fork slid back into its decades-long sleep, willing to dream the rest of the twentieth century away as it had slumbered through the nineteenth, and the eighteenth.

  Neither radio nor television disturbed these sheltering hills with their rambling cover of pine and birch and laurel. The nearest library was twelve miles away, the nearest supermarket, twenty. There was no FedEx nor MTV to interrupt the even tenor of the passing days.

  It was a good place to hide.

  He had been driving all night, and now, several hours past dawn, the view through the convertible's windshield alternated between sharp-cut valleys still filled with July-morning mist and the abrupt darkness of pine-covered mountainsides; coal country, as beautiful and uncharitable as a rich man's daughter. Each time the car swung to follow the road, the assortment of bottles lying on their sides in the passenger footwell clanged together with a high sweet sound, and he found himself hoping one of them would break and spill. As a parched man dreams of water in the desert, he wanted to smell the liquor. It was the only constant in his life, and it had taken everything he had so eagerly given it.

  Despite the craving, he hadn't opened any of the bottles yet. Perhaps he would. Perhaps a drink or two—or three—would make the highway beneath his wheels more challenging.

  His name was Wycherly Ridenow Musgrave, and at the moment he had only the faintest idea where he was. Somewhere west of New York,

  GRAVELIGHT

  15

  he knew that much, but the days he'd spent behind the wheel of the Ht-tle foreign car had blurred into a mosaic of road signs seen by moonlight and sunrises that revealed odd and unfamiliar landscapes. He was not lost. To be lost required a destination, and Wycherly Musgrave had none.

  The dawn chill windstream pulled his coppery hair—too long; it made his father furious to see it—straight back from his forehead, and inside his expensive leather coat he shivered, but Wycherly was unwilling to stop driving even long enough to put up the Ferrari's top. If he were not driving he would have to do something else, and he didn't want to do something else. He wanted the road to be everything, to blot out thought, to destroy time.

  There was an unmarked turnoff ahead. He jerked the wheel left to take it, fighting the wheel as the car slewed back and forth across the narrow road. The low-slung car responded gallantly, its racing engine skirling in protest as Wycherly downshifted and gunned it. The road was barely wide enough for it; Wycherly wondered briefly what he'd do if he met another vehicle, but it never occurred to him to slow down. He took a certain satisfaction from his easy mastery of the fast car on the difficult road; a symbol of competence in a life that normally had none. The car swerved. The bottles clanged. One of them would have to break soon.

  Broken. All broken. Nothing left. The thought gave Wycherly perverse pleasure. Everything was broken now, and it was Winter who had broken it. Winter Musgrave, his perfect trophy sister, who had launched the blow that set the Musgrave family spinning like a burst pifiata. The golden girl had failed, and as if her failure were a magic dagger, the web of family and privilege and not getting caught that the Winters and the Musgraves and the Ridenows had spun round themselves for more than a century was rent asunder, and everything began to unravel.

  For a moment the Ferrari drifted slyly to the right; the wheel—as Wycherly yanked it in the opposite direction—turning with frightening freedom beneath his hands. Then the wheels found the road surface again, and bit, and held. The car snapped back along the curve of the narrow road as if it were a greyhound after a rabbit, and Wycherly's mind drifted free of the present once more.

  He didn't understand most of what had happened to the Musgrave family in the last year, but he did know that last fall Kenneth Jr.—petted, pampered, perfect Kenny—had finally committed some banker's crime that the authorities had taken notice of. Now the young prince—

  the aging, bloated, deteriorating prince, Wycherly emended viciously— had lost his Wall Street throne and his Wall Street salary. He and his perfect Patricia had been forced to give up all their expensive privileges and move home to Wychwood, living off his parents' c
harity, and the legal bills yet to come would put even more of a strain on the family finances.

  At the same time—as if money had been his lifeblood in truth—the Musgrave patriarch, Kenneth Sr., had fallen gravely ill, a series of strokes knocking him from his Jovian throne and forcing him to retreat to Wychwood as a wounded animal would seek the shelter of its cave. Now the Musgrave patriarch was a ruined colossus, his remaining lifespan a thing to be measured in months.

  Father was dying.

  And Wycherly had fled. Because he needed—Because he needed—

  He needed to know if he was supposed to die, too, and no one at Wychwood would tell him that. In the Musgrave family, facts were often a matter of opinion, and all the Musgraves were good at keeping secrets.

  Echoes of fear and anger made him press harder on the accelerator, and the convertible was going much too fast for the road when it shot over the crest of the hill. For a moment it hung weightless and tractionless upon the air. Wycherly, not understanding had happened, ground the pedal harder into the floor: When the car struck the ground again, the forward thrust caught him by surprise, and in that fatal moment of inattention the car slewed right instead of left—away from the road entirely.

  There wasn't even a guardrail.

  Wycherly felt the car's wheels leave the pavement again, and instead of the brief hang time, this time the sensation went on and on. In the brief moment of weightless fall there came a menacing sense of peace, and then the implacable reality of thrust and gravity.

  Impact came an instant before he expected it, swift and vicious as the executioner's blade.

  In the days when Morton's Fork had been a flourishing community, this building had been a schoolhouse, and even now its red brick walls preserved something of that past. But now the building possessed both electricity and running water instead of a wood stove and outhouse; expensive modern furniture mingled with the charming country antiques that had replaced the blackboard and the rows of desks, and the spacious great room that had been created within the shell of the one-