Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

Ghostlight (26 page)

BOOK: Ghostlight

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“It doesn't really need any jewelry,” the saleswoman said cannily. “You could just tie a green velvet ribbon around your throat. I think I've got some back here if you'd like to see how it looks.”

Truth held the dress up to the light. It looked as if it might fit her.

“How much is it?” she said firmly, refusing to be seduced by patterns like kingfisher wings against the sky, or a gleaming surface like mist on morning grass.

The saleswoman, defeated, named a figure approximately the size of one of Truth's weekly paychecks.

That isn't too bad
, Truth found herself thinking.
I'd pay twice that in the city.
And she deserved something, some reward, some comfort, a dress to wear to the ball â¦ .

“And that shawl you've bought will go wonderfully with it,” the clerk said hopefully. Truth looked down at the tell-tale corner of Prussian blue chenille peeking out of one of her bags. She doubted the saleswoman could be right, but when she held them up together in the light from the window she saw it was true. Midnight and meadowsweet, and the wild freedom she had denied herself all her life, here for the taking.

“It probably won't fit,” Truth said, grasping at straws.

“Oh, it probably will. Why don't you try it on?”

It fit, of course. Standing in the tiny dressing room, Truth gazed into the mirror and exchanged the sensible gold knots in her ears for the dangling silver earrings. The green in the long, lozenge-shaped stones echoed the greens in the shifting painted surface of the dress, and around her legs the skirt clung and swung, sparkling and flashing, showing bare limb here, patterned silk there, and at the next moment a froth of incandescent gauze.

When she swung the shawl over her shoulders a gypsy princess stared back out of the mirror, powerful and self-possessed.

Clothing is power. That's one secret the mages always knew. How you dress becomes who you are; you can put on power like a robe and become anyone you choose â¦ .

She shook her head and the earrings flashed, and now the only thing out of place were the good brown sensible walking shoes Truth wore on her feet.

She left
“innovations”
fifteen minutes later with the dress wrapped in tissue and boxed, a viridian ribbon still tied around her throat, and the address of the village shoe store in her hand. Who cared if there was nowhere to wear such a fabulous costumeâshe could make a
place and a time to wear it, or wear it anywhere she chose.

When she reached the shoe store the woman sitting behind the cash register looked vaguely familiar. Truth stared at her, trying to place her.

“I'm Mary Lindholm, remember? The Bed-and-Breakfast ?”

“Oh, of course. I just didn't expect to see you here,” Truth said. “How are you doing?”

Mrs. Lindholm made a face. “The adjuster said he'd never seen anything like itâas if somebody'd taken the roof off and soaked the place down with one of those thirty-thousand-gallon-a-minute firehoses. The whole business is going to have to be rewired just to start; I just don't know how it could have happened â¦ .” With an effort she roused herself. “So I'm helping my cousin out here just to get away from the mildew. And what can I do for you today?”

Truth explained what she needed. “I'm hoping to match this color,” she added, pulling out the dress so that the green velvet trim showed.

Mrs. Lindholm smiled. “I think I have just the thing. What size do you take?”

She came back from the back room a few minutes later with a box in her hands. “I thought these were still back there; Roxy was supposed to send them back at the end of the season but she forgot all about it and the jobbers won't take returns after the cut-off date. Try these and see if you like themâI can make you a good price.”

Truth took the box and looked inside. The pumps were green velvet with a gold Cuban heel studded in
faux
emeralds. The vamp of the shoe was garnished in gold lace and studded with more glass emeraldsâshoes worthy of the Queen of Elfland. She glanced at the designer's name, gold-stamped on the insole, and gulped. No way could she afford theseâespecially after buying that dress.

But wouldn't it be fun to try them on, to pretend â¦ . Truth sat down and unlaced her sensible brown walking shoes. She put on the anklets Mrs. Lindholm offered herâshe hadn't meant to be trying on dress shoes today and hadn't come prepared for itâand then slipped the shoes on.

She walked over to the mirror, conscious of the twinkling flash of the shoes at every step. She felt like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, only her shoes were emerald, not ruby.

“They're perfect,” Mary said, and named a price that was only slightly more than the dress had costâand a third of what the shoes ought to cost by right.

“But these are Stuart Weitzmans!” Truth said. The glamorous designer's shoes were the last word in eleganceâand more than a thousand dollars the pair.

“We all have our moments of reckless indulgence,” Mary Lindholm said. “Why shouldn't this be yours? Roxy saw them at a trade show and couldn't resist them either, but you'll notice they're still here. I told her they wouldn't sell in Shadowkill.”

“You were wrong,” Truth said firmly, handing over her charge card without a fight. Mary Lindholm was right. Let there be one reckless indulgence, one memorial to the woman Truth Jourdemayne might have been.

Truth stepped out of the shoe store with yet one more shopping bag, as breathless as if she'd outfaced demons, and knew it was time to go home.

On the walk back to Shadow's Gate Truth let her mind ramble, hoping her unconscious would come up with some answer to all of the problems and puzzles surrounding her. Her mind, unreasonably, refused to settle any of them, fastening instead upon the most nebulous and least urgent of her present concernsâher future.

What was she to do with the rest of her life? She had as much job security as anyone did, until recently she'd
found the field of statistical parapsychology to be exciting and challenging, and her personal life wasâ

Was nonexistent. She had colleagues and acquaintances, but no close friends. Dylan was the closest thing to a friend she had, and she knew she'd taken unfair advantage of that this morning, trading on his kindness to get what she wanted.

Oh, but he doesn't want
me! Truth protested inwardly.

Why not let him decide for himself?
a Blackburnish inner voice responded.
Stop biting his head off every time the conversation veers beyond “Good morning, Ms. Jourdemayne.”

Okay. She might. But what was she doing with the rest of her life? Was she going to spend it sitting behind a desk at the Bidney Institute? If she wrote the book she planned to write about Thorne Blackburn and saw it published, things would inevitably change for her. Lectures, tours, fieldwork â¦

If she stayed in the field at all.

But at that point even imagination faltered, since if Truth were not working at the Bidney Institute or one of its sister organizations she could not imagine what she would be doing. For all the years of her life her tastes, education, interests, and training had led her to the field of parapsychology, just as if she were an arrow streaking unerringly for its targetâor a religious with a calling.

But now for the first time she was taking a good look at herself, and, examining her past with brutal honesty, Truth wondered if her serene satisfaction with her career path weren't just one more link in what she now saw as a long chain of errors of judgment. What if her life had been aimed, not at parapsychology, but at its darker sibling?

Was Science her callingâor Magick?

When Truth came up the drive toward the house she could see one of the menâDonner, at a guessâriding a
lawn tractor around in circles across the wide side lawn, its vacuum attachment sucking up the fallen leaves and leaving velvet greensward behind. He waved as he saw her and Truth waved back. Behind him, atop the rolling hills that were all New York State could claim in the way of mountains, thunderheads piled up, a more concrete promise of the coming storm than Caradoc's prediction from this morning.

Considering what had happened during the last storm she'd been here for, Truth thought it was a good thing that she'd be retiring early and sleeping hard.

Julian's sleek black BMW was back, parked under the portico next to Truth's Saturn and the white Volvo. Its presence reminded her that she needed to talk to himâand see Light. She shifted her bags to a more comfortable distribution in her arms and started up the steps to the front door of the house. As she gained the topmost step, Gareth came around the side of the house, dragging two enormous bags of lawn waste. He brightened when he saw her.

“Hi,” Gareth said, abandoning the bags for the moment. “Been down to town? Say; did you hear what happened last night?” he went on before she could answer, his enthusiasm obvious. “And this morning? The Powers are gatheringâJulian says we're already having manifestations of the Elemental Kings, and soon we should be seeing the astral vessels of the Guardians of the Gate as well.”

It was peculiar, Truth reflected, and not for the first time, to see someone like Gareth, wholesome and normal looking in his worn denims and grass-stained T-shirt, spouting cant that belonged at some decadent Bloomsbury opium-and-absinthe gathering. To hear it in the cool Fall sunshine of the Hudson Valley was even more of a shock.

“Well, that's nice,” Truth said inadequately.

Gareth grinned at her, the expression so endearing
and normal that for just an instant Truth felt that
she
was the lunatic.

“But you were thereâI forgotâyou've
seen
it happen. Isn't it terrific?”

This time he stopped and waited, obviously expecting her to agreeâthat psychic vortexes and falling pictures and ghostly stags were, indeed, terrific.

Only Gareth didn't know about the stag, because she'd told nobody about the animals she'd seen on her drive back to the house yesterday. Julian had prophesied that one on his own.

But if ghostly stagsâand, she supposed, horses, wolves, and dogsâwere a manifestation of the Blackburn Work and not a symptom of the Paranormal Event native to Shadow's Gate, what did that do to her theory that all of Blackburn's problems had been caused by his haunted houseânot by his magick?

Which came firstâthe magick or the magician?

“Truth?”

“Oh. I'm sorry, Gareth. I was justâthinking.”

“It's pretty awesome, being on the spot when the New Aeon starts, isn't it?” Gareth said cheerfully. “Say, are you sure you don't want to join us? You could probably go right through Neophyte and become a Zelator almost overnight, and then you could have the Freedom of the Temple and come to all the rituals and everything.”

For a moment Truth hesitated. She didn't have the faintest idea of what a Zelator actually was, although it seemed to be the Blackburnian equivalent of a Brownie Scout, but the idea of being able to decide on the evidence of her own senses what was really going on in whatever rituals the Circle of Truth was holding now seemed more attractive than repugnant.

“Well, I'll think about it; good enough?” she said.

“Sure!” Gareth's delighted grin widened, and Truth had a sudden cruel insight that part of Gareth's pleasure stemmed from the status that being able to report he had
gained even this tentative assent from her would bring him. With her growing intuition, she sensed that Gareth Crowther was very much an outsider hereâin one sense, even more so than Michael was.

Because Gareth wanted very much to be a part of things hereâand Michael did not.

Gareth's attention returned to the leaves. “Well, I'd better get a move on with these. We've got an incinerator on the grounds to burn trash like this, and there used to be a zoning variance for it, but the village says it's lapsed and they'll only issue us a two-week permit now, so we've got to store all of it until November. What a pain.”

Truth smiled in sympathy. It was easy enough to imagine that the village's objections stemmed less from any real-world cause than from its profound unease with Shadow's Gate and its tenants.
All
its tenants, stretching back to old Elkanah Scheidow himselfâ

Who had bound what must be free, who had tampered with that which was inviolate, with that which would rage against its shackles until it was loosed to take its rightful place among Those Who Ride â¦

Truth blinked, and found that Gareth was halfway down the upper loop of the drive, dragging the bags behind him.

“Gareth!” Truth called. He stopped. “I need to talk to Lightâdo you know where she is?”

“Out by the maze, I think. You can go around the house to get thereâleave your stuff there if you want; I'll take it up.”

BOOK: Ghostlight

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