Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  He forgot his fear. He forgot the apparition. His hands molded her body against his, as if he could press out the food for his hunger through the contact. She answered him with an avarice of her own, pulling his head down to hers and kissing him deeply.

  Here was power. The thought flitted across the surface of his mind, taken for granted in the reality that was the elemental contract between man and woman: that one should take and one should give. He did not question the reason for any of this as he boosted Sinah up onto the altar top and clambered up after her. He sought his oblivion in her body as he had sought it in liquor—and found it.

  Around him the spectral voices chanted.

  ". . . back, back from the darkness . . . Asmodeus, Azanoor, dark above me ... my body to the beast and my soul to hell. . ."

  Sinah came back to herself clutching Wycherly's rucked-up shirt in both hands, for a moment unable to remember where she was. Slowly her surroundings began to make sense to her. She was with Wycherly. The two of them were in the basement of Wildwood Sanatorium. The heat she'd sensed from the stone earlier was gone as if it had never been. Her T-shirt and jacket were wadded beneath her head, making a crude pillow, and her jeans still hung around one ankle.

  Wycherly slept his sudden, deep, post-coital sleep against her shoulder. His copper hair spilled across her face, tickling when she breathed.

  What had they done? It had been good, it had been wild—unconsciously she ran her palm down his back, smoothing the shirt and the flesh beneath—but it had been so sudden; almost mindless. They hadn't used protection. She didn't know his medical history. It was almost as if they'd been . . . compelled.

  Oh, stop it! You'll be crying "rape" next!

  But it hadn't been. This sort of thing wasn't her style, but she certainly hadn't been forced—or even overpersuaded. She'd flung herself into his arms, and things had gone on from there, just as if. . .

  What? The thought slid away. She'd flung herself into his arms—

  She'd been running away and flung herself into his arms—

  She'd seen—

  "So you've come back," the man said. He wore a golden helmet, and his wintery eyes were hard as he stared at her — the eyes of a madman, a fanatic, the bogeyman that every twentieth-century woman feared. The killer.

  He stood in the middle of the temple not as it was now, but as it must once have been — outlandishly ornate, filed with symbols Sinah could not quite decipher. The scent of incense was gaggingly sweet in her nostrils, and the room had the

  warm stuffiness of a room far underground. It was like nothing in her entire experience — the spare, open rooms of her friends into channeling and crystals had nothing in common with this . . . theological brothel.

  ''Join us, Athanais —/ will not ask a third time. The Antique Rite is the true power; you know that now. And you will belong to it — living or dead. Quentin Blackburn swears it. "

  Cold radiated from his skin; it rolled through the stagnant air ahead of the fingertips of the hand he reached out to her If he touched her she would die: They were enemies; they always had been and always would be.

  And he would not take her power from her.

  She turned and ran, seeking an ally, a tool to bend to her aid.

  And found him.

  Sinah thrashed at the involuntary recovery of the memory, waking Wycherly. He rolled away, barely saving himself from falling off the altar top entirely. Sinah raised herself on her elbows, fighting to clear her head. The flashback had nothing of the vagueness and subjectivity of the dead woman who haunted her. This—vision—was as crisp and undeniable as a visit to the mall.

  Sinah drew a deep breath, forcing herself to focus on the temple as it was now—stripped, ruined—and not to think of that vulpine priest in the goat's-head helmet, like some ludicrous Star Trek extra. Only there'd been nothing funny about him at the time—he'd been terrifying.

  And what was almost more disturbing was that she'd had no reservations about his reality at the time. She had not even questioned how she could be seeing what she did. And when she'd gotten free of him—when she'd held Wycherly in her arms—she'd been so grateful to Wycherly just for being real. . . .

  No. Sinah shook her head. That wasn't quite right. She had been grateful, but the thing that had made her couple with Wycherly like a cat in heat was something separate from that. Something that—though strange—seemed somehow to be less tainted than the black altar itself.

  "I'm sorry." Wycherly's voice was so low she barely heard him.

  He'd put his clothing back together, and was sitting on the edge of the altar stone, his head in his hands. He did not look at her when he spoke. Sinah came back to reality with a bump.

  These days men—nice ones, anyhow—walked around with a burden of guilt just for being men. And when something like this—something

  that the previous generation would have shrugged off as the exercise of free love, and the one before it chalked up to overwhelming passion— happened, nineties men felt guilty.

  "For what?" With an actress's skill, Sinah made her voice bright and carefree. "Nothing happened here that we both didn't want. No regrets, Wych."

  He turned to look toward her then, his expression one of gratitude mixed with sullen disbelief His eyes were the same pale yellow of the jewels in the goat's-head helmet, and Sinah forced herself not to recoil.

  "I generally prefer beds," Wycherly said neutrally.

  His thoughts were so jumbled that she could not follow any of the threads: guilt, fear, anger—and a strange sort of cringing triumph, though it did not seem to be related to her. It disoriented her just to be close to him, as though she were trying to follow a thousand conversations all going on at once.

  "There's a bed back at my place," Sinah said. She hadn't meant to— just because something like this had happened didn't mean she had to make it continue—but what had happened just now had somehow bound them together as tightly as old lovers, no matter what either of them wanted.

  Wycherly smiled wryly. "I was that good?"

  "Good enough to warrant a second chance," Sinah said through her misgivings. She pulled on her shirt and groped for her jeans, wriggling them back up into position. "Ready to go?"

  When they got back to the Jeep, Wycherly reached into his pocket for the packet he'd dug out of the pillar. It came to pieces in his hand, and all that was inside now was grey dust.

  EIGHT

  THE POWER OF THE GRAVE

  Indeed this counsellor

  Is now most still, most secret, and most grave,

  Who was in life a foolish prating knave.

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  WHAT A HORRIBLE . . . NIGHTMARE?

  I don't think so, somehow.

  Truth sat up in the Winnebago's fold-together bed, careful not to waken Dylan. A glance at her wristwatch showed her that it was a little after two o'clock in the morning; after the exhausting day they'd spent getting here, she would have thought she'd sleep longer. Stealthily, Truth slid from beneath the covers, groped for her robe, and stepped outside into the night.

  The night air was surprisingly cold, and Truth was glad she'd taken the time to put on her quilted robe over her cotton pajamas. All around her was the deep blackness of the country night. The Milky Way was a bright scarf across the sky, and most of the animal sounds had quieted in this deepest part of the darkness. It was the perfect time and place to think; Truth groped her way over one of the chairs left out from last night's dinner, hesitated, and then walked on in the direction of the general store.

  A few years ago Truth would have dismissed what had just happened as no more than a dream—the man, the silver serpent, the whole adventure into the Otherworld—but that was before she'd spent a season at Shadow's Gate and discovered the truth about her father and herself

  According to Thorne Blackburn, the human and divine realms had been separated by the will of the Gods in prehistoric times. The memory of the separation survived in various myths as a
n expulsion of the humans from Paradise, but Thorne believed that it was the Gods who had left the Garden, and not the reverse. Though communication between the Sacred and Mundane—or Natural and Supernatural—realms had continued, humans were no longer able to move freely into the world of the Gods once the two realms had been separated. Only the Gates remained.

  They were most often referred to as Blackburn Gates, though Thorne Blackburn had not invented them. The Gates were passages between the pleasant world of Men and the realms of the dread lords of the Outer Spaces: the sidhe. They were located along the ley line convergences on the surface of the Earth, and each had once had its Guardian.

  But the system of tribal Guardians that had protected these points of access to the world beyond since paleolithic times had been broken down millennia ago by the advent of the Greek states and the Roman Empire, and then smashed forever by the worldwide spread of Christianity. But at least those ancient conquerors had believed in the reality of gods and powers other than their own, and in Europe and the East the conquerors had been careful to seal the Gates beyond reopening, not merely to slay their Gatekeepers. Even Christianity had moved cautiously among the pagan kingdoms of the Western Isles, treating the native powers with caution even as it had sought to eradicate them.

  But Christianity had become careless and arrogant as it consolidated its hold over Europe, and by the time it reached the New World it no longer believed in the ultimate power of any but its own White Christ. In the New World it merely slew those whom it could not convert and bereft the Gates of their Guardians, leaving the Gates in the hands of those who did not understand the nature of their trust—as Truth's own ancestors had not—or, worse, left the Gates running wild, without any controls whatever.

  After great struggle. Truth had sealed the Gate belonging to her bloodline, and accepted the responsibility of who and what she was. But innate talent, no matter how great, was no match for trained skill, and so

  Truth had apprenticed herself to Irene Avalon, who had been the trance medium for Thorne Blackburn's original Circle, in order to receive the training in magick and the occult sciences that she had scorned all her life.

  After only a year or two of work, Truth was very far from being able to call herself Adept in the Blackburn Work, but until tonight, she'd been reasonably confident of her ability to hold her own against anything she was likely to encounter. Until she'd met . . .

  Quentin Blackburn?

  Can that really be his name?

  She'd researched Thome's family for her book, and he did have an uncle or great-uncle named Quentin Blackburn, who'd died about eighty years ago. He'd been a medical doctor in several sanatoriums in the East, and been known primarily for treating his patients with occult naturopathy and mineral magnetism—a little flaky, true, but light-years from what Truth had experienced tonight.

  Which was what, exactly? Truth asked herself.

  By now she'd reached the general store. She sat down on the bench next to the ice machine out in front and wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a little like a lost ghost, as her mind continued, hamsterlike, churning over things she already knew.

  Through Irene's teaching. Truth was familiar with both the Right-and the Left-Hand Paths, the teachings that supposedly split all the world into light and dark, right and left, good and evil, and assigned every thought and action to one or the other. Truth herself was living proof that there were more ways than two: Her own path was neither black nor white, but grey—grey as mist, and often just as hard to nail down. But that didn't mean she denied the existence of evil, and what she'd experienced tonight was unequivocally that.

  But was it Quentin Blackburn?

  This is getting me nowhere. It doesn't matter whether Vm dealing with the ''real' Quentin Blackburn or not. Any sorcerer of the Left-Hand Path would know any number of ways to anchor his spirit in the Otherworld, keeping it from moving onward in its normal progression to a new incarnation. And whether the man was Quentin Blackburn or not, he was truly evil, in the service of an abomination so foul that it made Truth slightly nauseous to remember their encounter.

  She ducked her head, cringing with the anguish of the thought while

  there was no one here to see. She knew the source of her troubling vision: There was a sidhe Gate in Morton's Fork—hadn't she suspected as much when she'd seen all those disappearances?—and without its keeper it was running wild; as dangerous as a nuclear reactor careening toward meltdown.

  And if that weren't bad enough, there was some unauthorized person using the blackest of sorcery to meddle with it.

  "Unauthorized person." It makes it sound as if someone should he issuing ID cards.

  "Truth?"

  Dylan's voice jarred her out of her reverie so completely that for a moment Truth couldn't remember where she was. He sat down beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  "I woke up and you weren't there. Couldn't sleep?" he asked.

  Truth opened her mouth to reply and found herself speechless. What could she say? Dylan was a parapsychologist, but he was normal —she couldn't just hit him with all the paraphernalia of a full-bore occult manifestation complete with evil wizard and expect him to take it seriously. At least, not when he was just roused from sleep.

  "Dylan, have you ever heard of Quentin Blackburn? Outside of my book, I mean," she said instead.

  "Why do you ask?" Dylan's voice was guarded, and Truth's suspicions instantly flared to the alert. She drew away from him.

  "You have heard of him," she accused. She winced at the confrontational tone of her voice, but there was no way to take the words back now.

  "Yes." The word came out on a sigh of. . . defeat? "I've heard of him—and so would you, if you'd read that book you picked up in the general store all the way from cover to cover. I only heard about him last year, after Venus Afflicted had been published. He died here, in Morton's Fork, in 1917."

  "In a fire." Truth remembered the flames flickering around his ritual robes in her vision, flames as cold as death. "He died in a fire."

  Dylan didn't even bother to ask how she knew.

  "There was a sanatorium here in those days—one of those places specializing in diseases of the rich. Blackburn built it entirely with his own money and every penny he could beg, borrow, or steal. There was some kind of local scandal about his title to the land being not quite legal, but once the construction had started, nobody said anything—this was an

  impoverished area even then, and Wildwood Sanatorium meant jobs." Dylan shrugged.

  "You knew." Truth was as stunned as if Dylan had hit her. "You knew about Quentin Blackburn being here—and you let me just walk right into this completely unprotected! Why didn't you tell me he was here?"

  "Because he isn't here," Dylan answered ruthlessly. "He's dead. He died in the fire. And this is just the sort of thing I was hoping to avoid."

  "What sort of thing?" Truth asked dangerously. She stood up and turned to face him. He was still sitting on the bench—he'd taken the time to pull on his jeans and loafers before he'd come after her.

  "You. This. I turn around, and you're wandering down Main Street in your pajamas, talking about Quentin Blackburn as if he were about to jump out of the bushes with a knife."

  He is. He's here. "So you just elected to withhold information—important information, related to my specialty—because you didn't want to upset me?"

  "No," Dylan said brutally. "Not for that reason. Because I didn't want you chasing off after another of your occult hobby horses with nothing more backing you up than . . . the divine right of Blackburn's children, is why. Your specialty is statistical analysis, not High Magick, remember? Sweetheart—"

  "Don't you dare call me that!" Truth heard her voice ring off the buildings, and knew that soon she and Dylan would have any number of interested listeners, but at the moment she didn't care. "First you say I'm some kind of crackpot who—"

  "I did not say that!" Dylan said, raising his own voice. He g
ot to his feet and took a step toward her. Truth backed away.

  "I don't want to see you hurt—you're Thorne Blackburn's daughter— you already know what kind of sideshow the occult can turn into," Dylan said pleadingly. "When I go into the field to study personality transfers and survivals, people expect me to head for the graveyard and start digging up their Uncle Frank—and what you do is worse."

  "And what do I do?" Truth asked in a low, ominous voice.

  "You do magic," Dylan said flatly.

  She winced away from the harsh truth—but that was what it was. Truth was a magician, just as her father and grandfather had been before her. A mage. A sorcerer.

  Just as Quentin Blackburn was.

  "And you don't think that's right?" Truth said, returning to the attack. "Professor MacLaren said that magick was real, that magick was possible—that drawing any line between what the human mind could and could not accomplish created a false dichotomy that prevented any possibility of a whole understanding—".

  "And you're the one who refused toLadmit he was right— iov years!" Dylan shot back with deadly accuracy. "Now all of a sudden you've accepted your inner occultist, but you never could do anything by halves. You meddle, Truth—and I didn't want you meddling here."

  "In your private hunting preserve," Truth finished poisonously. "Were you afraid that I'd keep you from getting publishable results? Is that all the Unseen is to you—a chance to write another paper? What would you do with a ghost if you caught one, Dylan—study it?"

  "Yes. Yes, I would," Dylan said evenly.

  "You'd stick it in a bottle, and weigh and measure it, and never ask why it was there at all. You wouldn't help it to progress to a higher plane—"

  "This is exactly what I'm talking about!" Dylan exploded. "If I do manage to find an intact personality transfer here in Morton's Fork, you're damn right I'm going to measure it—I'm not going to invite it home for dinner or suggest it seek counseling. Ghosts aren't people. Ghosts are things —and dangerous things, besides. I should never have brought you here."

  "Because I'm psychic? I'm not psychic! Ninian and (Rowan both hit a higher mark on the Rhine scale than I do!"