"So far," Truth said. "Sinah and Wycherly are here, and Luned. She's alive."
"But what . . . ? This is amazing," Dylan said.
"Truth!" Sinah called insistently.
Truth got to her feet—there was nothing she could do for Luned at the moment, except lay her down carefully—and went back to Sinah. Dylan was still standing at the foot of the steps, slowly playing his light over the whole chamber.
"Shine that over here, would you, Dyl?" Truth said. She knelt beside Wycherly and Sinah and felt the arctic cold of the stone bite through the fabric of her thin summer slacks. She'd been down here less than five minutes and she was already shivering; this place was like an icebox.
Dylan obliged. Wycherly was kneeling at the very edge of the Well-spring, head bent as if he'd been gazing into its depths. His hands were balanced on his knees; the right one was swathed in dirty gauze, and the fingers Truth could see poking out of the bandages were badly swollen.
"I can't wake him up, I can't move him," Sinah said, tearfully.
Truth tried, but Wycherly's muscles were tensed and he held his position with robotic stubbornness. His eyes were open, but he neither saw nor heard them. It was as if he were . . . elsewhere.
"He's gone through the Gate," Truth said. Or had he? Wycherly could not have been here more than an hour at most—the Jeep's headlight had still been shining full-strength. Was there still time to summon him back?
Dylan came over to them. "I'm taking Luned up to the Jeep," he said. "It'll be warm inside, and warmth is what she needs most right now. Does Wycherly have the keys? Otherwise I'll smash a window."
Truth rummaged through the pockets of Wycherly's leather jacket. "Here they are." She held the keys out.
Dylan dropped the key ring into his pocket, and held out a bundle of slender cylinders to Truth. "Hazard flares. It's the only other thing I could find on short notice that makes light."
Truth took one and struck it alight, holding it at arm's length. The sulphurous smoke made her cough, and she tossed the flare away from her, only realizing after it had left her hand that she might be tossing it into a pile of flammable material.
Fortunately it landed in an area that was free of the litter of centuries, and burned against the bare stone with a hellish, cherry-colored light. A few feet away, she saw Dylan stoop to lift Luned. The beam from the lamp in his hand jiggled wildly as he stood once more and began to carry her toward the stairs.
"It won't help," Sinah said softly. In the uncertain light of the hazard flare, her face was older, sad and knowing. "She's a-gone. The Power's done took her. It don't matter where her natural body is."
We'll see about that! Truth vowed silently. She closed her eyes, willing herself to see her surroundings with Otherworld sight. Here, right on top of the open Gate, she should not require the elaborate centering and meditation techniques she usually used.
She didn't. It was as if the power that held this place had only been waiting for her consent before replacing her version of reality with its own. The darkness vanished, and the real world was gone.
This was a place she had not seen on her last two attempts to reach the Gate. She stood upon a high cliff, with the sea crashing and foaming on the rocks below. The wind of a gathering storm scudded toward her, and far out to sea Truth could see the shimmering form of an elaborate Gateway.
Quentin Blackburn's influence was gone; his attempts to twist and taint the power of the Gate unsuccessful. This was the thing itself: The Gate Between The Worlds. The place where the intricate network of ley lines that covered the Earth's surface crossed, allowing the Gatekeeper access to the power of the Earth Herself.
"Wycherly!" Truth shouted against the howl of the wind. In this ghostly land it seemed that she could see the shape of a shining path upon the wind — a path more ghostly still, made of wind and sea foam, leading out to the sidhe Gate.
Did she dare to take that path — pass through that portal to confront her inhuman cousins in the land beyond?
Truth hesitated, gazing around her. If that was where Wycherly and Luned had gone, she must follow, and try to ransom them back somehow. Otherwise she would have lost — her vow would he broken, and her penance Michael Archangel's to mete out.
As she strained her eyes toward the unreal ocean Truth saw a tiny figure already on the path, grey and luminous and far distant.
Wycherly?
Truth nerved herself to take the first step into nothingness.
"no!''
A force crashed into her from behind, jostling her forward and yanking her back almost in one gesture. She swung around, staring into Wycherly's face.
He was red-eyed, gaunt, and unshaven — a faithful refection of his physical body in the material world — but here he grasped her shoulders with two good hands, glaring at her wildly as his mouth struggled to form words.
And above and behind him, hovering like smoke, was a shadowy nimbus that seemed to be the darkly lucent form of the golden-eyed Goat, the shambling inhuman creature that Quentin Blackburn's deepest sorceries paid homage to.
But though Wycherly resonated with Quentin's black energy, the unwitting pact between them had not yet been sealed in blood. There was still something of Wycherly that Truth could touch. She reached out for him, preparing to fight with all her might —
— and as her fingertips grazed his stubbly cheek there was a flash of darkness, a jarring discontinuity.
Truth opened her eyes to darkness, with the stinging sensation of a slap still on her cheek. Dylan was standing over her, empty-handed. The lamp lay on the floor, casting its beam out across the dark surface of the Well-spring.
"Don't you ever do that again," Truth told him in a low angry voice.
"He didn't—I did," Sinah said, in a more normal voice. "I thought you were going to be lost forever—like Wycherly."
Quickly Truth reached out and grabbed Wycherly by the arm, willing him to follow her back to the Material Plane while the trail of her own passage was still fresh. She felt the energy flash between them, painful as a spark of static electricity, and then Wycherly began to stir.
As the three of them stared at him, he turned toward Sinah, blinking in the light. Truth looked back at Dylan in baffled apology.
"Grant me a little common sense," Dylan said. The affectionate—
though worried—tone of his voice took the sting out of his words. "I know better than to jar a psychic out of a trance."
Or a magician out of a spirit-walk, Truth corrected mentally.
Dylan looked at Sinah, real anger in his expression. "But I wasn't expecting her to move so fast."
"Sorry," Truth mumbled. She wished she hadn't accused Dylan, but still felt groggy and disoriented. If this was Wycherly, then the other figure Truth had seen in her brief vision must be Luned Starking, closer than Wycherly to passing into the realm of the Bright Lords, but still on the human side of the Gate. She ran a hand through her short, dark hair and looked back toward Sinah.
Sinah was cradling Wycherly in her arms with an expression in which fright and maternal tenderness were equally mixed. He did not seem as alert as he had seconds ago, and even from this distance. Truth could see that his body was wracked with shudders.
"He's burning up with fever," Sinah said. "But he was ice-cold a minute ago."
He wasn't HERE a minute ago, Truth corrected silently. And he could slip hack into the Otherworld at any moment, this close to the Gate. She took a deep breath and tried to marshal her scattered thoughts. There was something about this place that was so peaceful it made thinking difficult.
Too peaceful, in fact. The peace of the grave.
"Close the Gate, Sinah," Truth said. "You have to. If you don't, he'll just go right back there."
The look Sinah shot her was one of pure annoyance. "At a time like this? We've got to get Wych and Luned out of here, to a doctor—"
She's stalling.
"You tried to kill me today," Truth said brutally. "And I think you o
we me five minutes of your time for that. You're the only one who can shut this thing down. Now, it's true that it might not have to be you; I can go dig up a distant relative—you must have one somewhere—but while I'm doing that, Wycherly, Luned, and probably a couple of other people will die. Maybe even you. And that would really irritate me. So are you going to do what I want, or do I get to slap you silly?"
Sinah stared at her, stunned.
"For the record, I endorse the sentiments, if not the expression," Dylan said from behind Truth. "She's right. You can't let this go any farther, Sinah. Not if you have the power to stop it."
Truth felt a pang of gratitude at Dylan's support, but suppressed it quickly. Now was no time to be tangled in her emotions.
"Oh, all right!" Sinah—and it did seem to be Sinah, at least this time—said. "What do I have to do?"
"Just give me your hand," Truth said. Reluctantly, Sinah raised one hand and placed it into Truth s.
And Truth drew Sinah into reality.
The two of them stood on the edge of the sea-swept cliff and Truth could see Luned's tiny figure toiling toward the half-open Gate. Truth looked behind her, to landward, where the astral landscape dissolved into a curtain of grey mist, and thought she could discern, far away, a faint speck that might he an approaching figure. Wycherly, coming toward the Gate once more.
"Okay," Sinah said. "Now what?" She looked seaward, in the direction of the Gate, but plainly she was not drawn to it as Truth was.
This time there was no Thome to show Truth what to do; no grimoire to serve as a touchstone. The memory of what she had done before would have to be enough.
Truth took a deep breath.
"Say what I say:
"I am a hawk/Above the cliff—" Truth began, the words of the spell that had sealed the portal at Shadow's Gate. But this time the words were only words, without inner meaning.
Truth stopped. Sinah looked at her, sullenness fading into real fear.
"It isn't going to work, is it?" she said. "Vm sorry. Truth — Vd help you if I could. But I don't know what to do!"
"It's all right," Truth said soothingly. "We just have to find the right way."
As she spoke, her mind worked frantically. She'd studied her father's grimoire and knew the liturgy meant to end in the opening of the Gates. Could she simply invert the ritual? At least it would give them a pattern to follow. And in the 0th-erworld, the symbol of the thing was the thing itself.
But the two of them couldn't do something like that alone. The ritual was meant for a full working Circle, and a full Blackburn Circle numbered sixteen people: The Gatekeeper and three other Guardians, the Hierophex and Hierolator, the Hierophant and Hierodule, and eight members of lesser grade — a balance of male and female energies. Without that to draw on, it didn't matter who Sinah was — or who Truth was, for that matter.
The Otherworld wavered around them like a candle flame.
"Sinah, don't fight me," Truth said. "Just relax and accept what is. Just — "
Once more the world wavered, and darkness spilled into it like ink into fresh water.
The cold of the cavern was a fresh shock each time she became aware of it, Truth thought. She bhnked, trying to bring things into focus.
Dylan had shut off his flashlight to conserve the batteries. While their attention had been elsewhere, he'd struck another flare to replace the one Truth had lit when he'd taken Luned up to the car. It was just guttering out now—they'd been down here fifteen minutes.
"It isn't going to work," Sinah said flatly.
"Yes it is," Truth said firmly. "At least, I think it will. I've got an idea."
She'd carried her bag of working tools down with her: It was the work of only a few minutes to scribe out a nine-foot circle in chalk and sketch the basic "north-gate" glyph inside it. The needle of the compass she always carried reeled drunkenly about its dial, useless; Truth located the cardinal points almost by guess and set the dish of incense in the North. Opposite it—nine feet away, across the diameter of the circle—she set the one candle she had with her. She filled her small crystal bowl with water from the Wellspring itself and placed it in the West, where it shone like a crystalline lens, and then unwrapped her flint-and-horn knife and placed it meticulously in the East.
"Okay. It's ready. Dylan, can you help me carry Wycherly into the middle of the circle? Without smudging the figure too much, if possible, but having drawn it is the most important thing."
Truth's voice shook slightly as she spoke—she hoped it was with cold, not fear. Fear was death to an Adept.
"What is it you have in mind?" Dylan asked, neutrally.
"We're going to do a full Blackburn Working, the nine powers and the four summonings, all the way up to the Opening of the Way, and reverse it. It's the only thing I can think of," Truth said baldly.
"Aren't you twelve people and two weeks short?" Dylan asked. So he did know the Work as well as she thought.
"Yes. I think I have a way around that." / only hope it works.
"Okay, let's take it slowly this time," Truth said, keeping her voice level and encouraging.
The four of them were huddled together in the center of the chalk figure on the floor, sitting so close that their knees touched. Wycherly was propped up between Truth and Sinah—Truth would not have chosen to use a sick man unable to give his consent, but she had no choice. They were out of time.
Time ... it was a meaningless construct in the Otherworld. Minutes here could seem to be hours there. Or . . . days. In the Otherworld, there was all the time they needed to learn what they must.
"Dylan, Sinah, I want you both to try to breathe together. Sinah, you've done this before—don't fight it this time. Let it pass over you as if it were a dream. Dylan, I don't know what you'll see; you might just fall asleep. You can think of this as lucid dreaming, if that helps you work with it."
"Okay," Dylan said calmly. "I'll do my best to hit an alpha state, but it's not easy when you're freezing to death."
"Just do your best," Truth told him. Gratitude welled up in her for his gift of calm trust when she needed it most. "Sinah?"
"I'm ready," the actress said. "Break a leg. Truth."
Truth smiled. "We'll start with something very mundane: a simple hypnotic induction. I'm going to count backward from one hundred, and I want both of you to count with me. Visualize a staircase that you're descending."
"Not hard, all things considered. I think I'm going to be seeing those stairs in my sleep," Dylan said.
"Fine. When you get to the bottom, you'll be at the Gate. One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight ..."
And in a world where reality was a by-product of the Will, surely Truth could will the Circle, the Sign, and all the rest into being with her desire alone?
Because she had to.
EIGHTEEN
BEYOND THE GRAVE
Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And 1 laid me down with a will. — ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"/ CALL UPON YOU, BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE ART, BY the blood we share — lend me your power in my father's name!"
There was a flickering moment when Truth was sure that it had worked, when she could feel the braided energies of the other three mingled with her own and with something far greater, all directed by her will. Then they were gone, slithering out of her psychic grasp and leaving her . . .
Alone.
Try again, Truth thought, and willed her consciousness back to the physical world.
It didn't work.
Her eyes still opened on a landscape of pale mist, sea and sky. . . .
And another presence. An inhuman one.
Truth could not gaze at it directly. It was a flicker of light, a discontinuity in the world, as far outside Truth's conception of the natural realm as the Otherworld itself was outside the average person's. Yet it was sentient, self-willed and purposeful.
"You seek the key, " the shining figure said. "Have you t
he courage to step through the door and take it?"
There was no door — yes, there was. As the wordless question formed in Truth's mind, she was aware of a threefold echo — the others. But she must concentrate on what was before her: trap, or opportunity?
Truth looked through the door. Beyond, on a plinth of black stone, lay a silver key as long as her arm.
"Yes.''
Truth stepped forward, and passed through the door.
He was dreaming, Dylan assured himself, dreaming lightly, so that the awareness of the dream-state was superimposed on the images he saw. Was this what Truth meant when she spoke of traveling to the Otherworld, the Astral Plane that so many psychics talked about? If it was, the Astral Plane — like so many realities — was disappointing after the grandiloquent images conjured up by its description.
Dylan stood in the corridor outside his office at the Bidney Institute, and Miles Godwin, the current Director, was standing in front of his door
"You seek the key," Miles said. "Have you the courage to step through the door and take it?"
Yes, he was dreaming, and this wasn't getting them anywhere. He must be heading for Stage Three sleep, but Dylan supposed he should wait for Truth to wake him up. He'd agreed to go along with her playacting, even if it was ridiculous.
The cruel honesty of his thoughts shocked Dylan, though not enough to rouse him to the surface of wakefulness. He'd always respected Truth, even at her most maddening — when had he started dismissing her perceptions as those of a deluded child? He'd seen things for which there was no rational explanation — couldn't this be one?
"Have you the courage?" Miles said again.
Oh, what the hell, Dylan thought, about to walk into his office. Sure I do.
But did he? He didn't have the courage to tell his fiancee she'd become a babbling lunatic, did he? And she'd warned him, promised him, pleaded with him . . .
And that made him a coward. He wasn't brave at all. He was a coward. His little box of scientific open-mindedness was another safe way of not thinking about anything outside it. He'd just drawn the boundaries a little wider than most people's, that was all.
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