Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (65 page)

 
          
Colin
walked back to the center of what had been the Floor of the
Temple
. The half-dissolved paint
was slightly greasy under his shoe soles.

 
          
As
Colin knew from his reluctant studies, there were seven Gates and four Summonings
for the Initiate to master in the early stages of the Blackburn Work; the
Summonings were four of the six rituals involved in Laying the Floor of the
Temple
, and involved the Elemental
Powers: Earth, Wind, Ocean, and Fire.
A Blackburn Circle
could
—
at least in theory
—
call on any of the Elemental
Kings to manifest, though that was a dangerous proposition at best.

 
          
It
looked
—
at
least from the damage done here tonight
—
as though Grey had indeed
summoned one of them: Salamander, Prince of Fire. He'd said he would burn his
books, and he'd kept his word. Colin shuddered at the thought of the power that
had been so casually unleashed here.

 
          
No,
not casually.
Deliberately
—
the power of the Adept's
will fueled by strong emotion
—
misery and rage
—
drawing its power from man's
animal nature as the Blackburn Work taught. Furious and grief-stricken, Grey
had known precisely what he was doing: he'd summoned Fire without any attempt
to balance it, and this had been the result. No wonder the boy was dead on his
feet, if that was what he'd been doing.

 
          
But
Fire was gone now, and the woods were in no danger of burning. He'd better get
back before Claire started to worry.

 
          
Colin
drove back to the farmhouse in a contemplative frame of mind. Grey plainly
blamed the Blackburn Work for his break with Winter
—
or blamed it for not getting
her back for him, which amounted to the same thing in the end. If what Colin
had seen here tonight was any indication, Grey had chosen to make a clean
break with the Work.

 
          
That
might be a foundation we can build on.
Colin shut the thought out of his
mind
—
it
was too pragmatic to truly appeal to his sense of himself
—
but he could not deny its
allure. He had wanted Grey to renounce the Blackburn Work, and now, for all
intents and purposes, he had.

 
          
It
was only later that Colin realized how much more Grey had given up that night.

 
          
He'd
given up everything.

SAN FRANCISCO
,
WEDNESDAY,
MARCH  16,  1983

Even here prowess has its due rewards, there are tears shed
for things even here and mortality touches the heart.

—
Virgil,
Aeneid

           
ON A WINDY DAY IN MARCH, IN THE CITY
BY THE BAY, ALISON MARGRAVE'S friends gathered in a chapel on a hill to pay
their last respects and to see her to her final resting place.

 
          
While
Alison had been granted a long and peaceful life
—
she'd turned eighty-four
this January
—
and a quick and peaceful death, Colin was once again
reminded forcefully of something he had already known: that no day was a good
day to die. Alison's death was like the removal of some invisible protection
from his own mortality, forcing him to acknowledge what he'd thought he
understood long before: that someday, fewer years from now than he had already
lived, he must leave this life behind.

 
          
Claire
sat beside him in the chapel, weeping with silent unreconciled bitterness.
Alison had been like a parent to her, and this fresh loss reopened old scars.

 
          
Alison
had requested that her ashes be scattered on
Mount
Tamalpais
, and those she had known
throughout her long life had gathered here in this eccentric nondenominational
chapel to witness the fulfillment of her last request.

 
          
At
least one of Alison's own was here to conduct this last farewell. Colin glanced
back toward the podium, where Kathleen Carmody stood. She and her husband had
been members of Alison's Lodge since their introduction to the Path many years
ago. Today Kathleen was dressed all in white
—
a long open robe over a more
mundane turtleneck and pants
—
but the large gold ankh pendant she wore was all she needed
as indication of her standing.

 
          
She
spoke of her years of friendship with Alison, of the many people seeking the
Light whom Alison had helped in all her long life
—
a life in which the
knowledge of the mystic arts had gone from being a secret shared by an elite
few, to the common currency and public property of the flower children, to the
trivial stuff of comic book entertainment.

 
          
As
the century
—
and the millennium
—
drew toward their ends, it
seemed to Colin that mankind had withdrawn from the spiritual in the same way
that the burned child spurned the fire. Today's world did not so much assert
that nothing existed outside the material world of the five senses as it
insisted that nothing was more important than that world and its potential
wealth.

 
          
Meanwhile,
as if in some subtle corollary, crimes became more terrible. Only last
September seven people near
Chicago
had died from taking what
seemed to be randomly-poisoned Tylenol, and international affairs seemed ever
more complicated and ghastly.
Vietnam
had been a simple little
war fought for simple ends compared to current entanglements in
Libya
and
Nicaragua
, and in response to its
worldly confusion,
America
was greedily returning to
its enchanted political sleep of the 1950s.

 
          
Only
the world had grown too wide for that, Colin realized. And this slumber might
well become a terminal coma, as the psychic rot at the root of its nation-soul
continued to fester. Something was terribly wrong in the world: anyone could
see that. But what was harder to see was what could be
—
what must be
—
done to change things for
the better. . . .

 
          
Conscious
that he was letting his mind wander, Colin forced his attention back to
Kathleen. As he focused on her, she suddenly stopped speaking, staring toward
the back of the sanctuary with a stunned expression. It was impossible not to
look, and so Colin did.

 
          
Simon
Anstey stood in the doorway of the chapel.

 
          
The
scars of his terrible maiming had faded with the years, but Simon still wore
the black eyepatch over his left eye and both hands were gloved. He wore a
black suit and tie, and looked formidably formal
—
as if he wore not a simple
suit but the most potent armor.

 
          
Colin
did not need psychic powers to feel the ripple of distress that passed through
the congregation at Simon's arrival. Colin supposed that mourning should cancel
all feuds, but Alison had known her health was frail ever since the first stroke
in 1972. If she had wanted Simon here at her memorial, she would have left
explicit instructions to that effect.

 
          
"How
dare he come here?" Claire said in an outraged whisper.

 
          
"He
loved her too," Colin said. But was that really true, considering how much
Simon had gone against Alison's wishes and pleas?

 
          
Claire
half-rose from her seat, and Colin put a restraining hand on her arm.

 
          
"No,"
Colin said quietly. "He's probably counting on someone to cause
scene."

 
          
At
the moment when the whispers of embarrassment might have broken into words,
Simon moved, striding down the aisle, taking command of the space with the easy
competence he still retained from his performing days. In all things save the
use of his hand and eye, Simon seemed recovered from that traumatic accident of
years ago.

 
          
At
least physically . . .

 
          
The
Path was no pastel sugar-coated confection of rainbows and moonbeams whose
white-robed Adepts drifted through this life dispensing homilies like a
television hero. To be an agent of the Higher Power meant much more than taking
on the chains of manifestation long beyond one's required span. It meant the
possibility of the sort of failure that could destroy not only lives but souls.
It was just this dilemma that drove many Adepts to refuse the fearful burden of
action when it was offered
—
and to steadfastly withhold action could also be a sin.

 
          
Thus,
the first act of the Adept must be to call the fires of Karma into his own
life, to burn away the merely human imperfections that lay there. This was the
test that Simon had failed. He had summoned up the cleansing fire, but when the
accident had taken his skill from him, he had refused to see it as the act of
Karma that it was, and saw it instead as a flaw in the plans of the Lords of
Light.

 
          
But
there are no accidents in this life. Simon was taught that much as any of us
who walk the Path were. Only he could not bear to remember it
—
to take responsibility for
his own maiming.

 
          
Ignoring
the consternation around him
—
though he surely heard it and must have expected it
—
Simon stepped up to the
podium. Kathleen stepped back
—
or recoiled
—
ceding him the space.

 
          
"I
have come to say good-bye to Alison Margrave, the woman who gave me life, more
so than any mother," Simon began. His rich, full, voice filled the room,
casting them all irresistibly in the role of audience.

 
          
"When
I first met Alison Margrave I was a child ... a prodigy whose gift was a curse,
insofar as it alienated me from those who surrounded me. Alison took me into
her home and her heart and helped me to understand what I was . . .
all
that
I was. Because in addition to being both healer and musician, Alison was more
—
she was Priestess.

 
          
"For
many of you, such an old-fashioned word conjures up lurid New Age images of
young women playing at being witches, but Alison was a priestess in the older
—
I may say, oldest
—
sense. She was a guide and a
refuge for the troubled, bringing the Higher Learning within their reach and
setting their feet upon the Path. She did much good in the world, and that is
what we
—
what I
—
will
remember here today as we say good-bye: not the rigid insistence on cleaving
to an archaic standard of practice that darkened her last years
—
"

 
          
He
can't leave it alone, even here,
Colin thought. That left-handed slam at Alison's
rejection of him was something that everyone here today would recognize.
Undoubtedly her judgment of him still rankled: Simon's ego was Luciferian in
its arrogance.

 
          
"Good-bye
and Godspeed, Alison Margrave. We will meet again," Simon finished.

           
With an actor's sure intuition, he
stepped from the stage just as the consternation among the gathering was about
to break out into audibility. As quickly as he had come, Simon made his way
through the doors at the back of the chapel and was gone.

 
          
His
appearance had cast a bad, dangerous glamour over the whole memorial, though
others spoke after him, and even when those closest to Alison went to scatter
her ashes to the turbulent spring winds, a troubling sensation lingered in
their minds. And the sense of Simon's presence hovered over the gathering that
followed as well.

 
          
San Francisco
had a long tradition of
wakes
—
Janis
Joplin's had been held here, in the city that she loved best
—
and Alison's was in the
grand tradition. It was held at Greenhaven; the old house flung open to allow
all who had known Alison to say one last good-bye. Next week the house would go
on the market, its sale to benefit distant heirs, and Colin wondered who would
be the next person to call these rooms home.

 
          
Colin
had been away from the Bay Area for nearly fifteen years, and even when he had
been living here back in the sixties, he had never been a part of what had
since become "the New Age community." For many years, his mission
had been to help those who had no previous experience with the Unseen, and it
was their needs upon which much of his work with the Bidney Institute had been
focused.

 
          
Perhaps
it was time now to change.

 
          
Without
conscious volition, his mind strayed back to Hunter Greyson. It was almost a
year now since Grey had vanished.

 
          
After
that April night at
Nuclear
Lake
, Grey had been withdrawn,
but Colin had marked that down to the loss of Winter, something from which Grey
would surely recover, given time. In his heart Colin had begun to hope that in
this life Grey would be the disciple he'd sought, the one who would take all
that Colin had learned in this life and carry it forward, taking up part of the
burden Colin could not yet himself renounce, the burden of the Great Work. He
had hinted as much, and Grey had seemed to welcome the challenge.