Ghostlight (42 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“You're so thin!” Truth said. “Are you sure you're eating enough?”
“Worry about yourself.” Thorne laughed. “You don't believe in magick yet—not quite. But before the night is out we're going to put on a show here that I guarantee you'll never forget.”
“I'm looking forward to it,” Truth said, and this time it was the truth.
Thorne raised his hand, the first two fingers spread. “Peace,” he said. He walked around a crook in the cellar wall and was gone.
Truth sat back down, pulling the blanket around her again. Now all she had to do was wait.
 
There were sandwiches in the cooler and after a while Truth ate one, but it was boring sitting in the cellar with nothing to read except an apple juice bottle, and after some unmeasurable time Truth dozed off. She was awakened some unknown time later by the rattle of keys against a padlock, and a moment later the door across from her opened and Fiona stepped in.
“Well,” Fiona sneered, looking around at the lantern and the ice chest. “All the comforts of home. Was this your idea, Gareth?”
“Uh, no.” Gareth entered the cellar behind Fiona. They were both in green robes, and Gareth looked uncomfortable.
“Well, come on—since you've managed to get out of those cuffs already,” Fiona snapped. Truth stood up, stretching.
“Shouldn't we—?” Gareth began.
“Oh, Jesus Christ—what do you want me to do, read her her rights? Okay, bitch—you have the right to do just what I tell you or get your face rearranged. And if Gareth won't do it, Julian will.”
“There is no Julian,” Truth said.
“Oh yeah? That's sure going to come as a big shock to the guy upstairs in the antlers. Move your ass.” Fiona grabbed Truth's arm and yanked.
Truth staggered forward, and would have fallen if Gareth hadn't caught and steadied her.
“Gareth,” Truth said. “Why are you going along with this? You know it isn't right.”
“I—” Gareth said.
“He's doing it for
me
,” Fiona said mockingly. “Because I love him. Isn't that right, Gareth?” She grabbed Truth's arm, digging in with sharp nails, and between them, the two members of the Circle of Truth hustled Truth out of the cellar and up the stairs.
As soon as they reached the first floor Truth knew that things had gone somehow horribly wrong. Power radiated from the Temple as from the open mouth of a blast furnace, and everything in her vision seemed to have acquired multicolored haloes, making phosphorescent trails through the trembling air.
It was raining outside, a hard driving downpour that Truth could hear clearly, but over the sound of the storm she could hear the chanting, as certainly as if she were already in the room with it. The sharp smoke of the incense was in her nose, her throat, choking her.
They reached the door to the Temple, and at last Truth understood. This was not the start of the ritual, when she and Thorne could easily seize control and change things. The ritual had already been going on for hours.
Where was Thorne? Why hadn't he come and gotten her?
Gareth opened the doors.
As if the mere physical barrier could hold back intangible psychic power, a new wave of force rolled over Truth—a black sucking whirlpool that nourished as it devoured. The energy dragged at her, pulling her into the past, into the other night, the other death … and the baby girl, barely two, whose frantic attempts to follow her mother into the courts of Death had caused her agony enough to seal off her psychic powers forever … until now.
As if she had suddenly been released from a too-tight garment, Truth felt her perceptions flower and change, until with newfound confidence she could sense the rhythm of Being and Becoming as it flowed though her.
This
was the real world, to which she had been awakened perhaps too late.
Inside the Temple, the perimeter of the circle was a blaze of candles, the sound of drumming—the rain, magnified a thousand times by the room's acoustics—and Light's chanting pounding at her with a force that made her shudder—a force far beyond the power of the Temple's inhabitants to produce. Truth strained to see, though her vision was filled with a galaxy of sparks and blazing rainbows, and her entire body vibrated to the beat of the house's power.
Light stood at the head of the altar, head thrown back. She was deep in trance: Her eyes were closed; she cried out line after line of speech in some unknown tongue and her body was a pillar of viridian flame in Truth's new sight. Each word seemed to hang upon the air, as if the sound waves had suddenly become visible, and Light trembled with the power pouring through her, oblivious to the others. Light's will and that of what spoke through her held the ritual in focus—having come this far, Pilgrim no longer needed the others.
Irene stood frozen, her face a paint-streaked mask of incredulous tears. Beside her, Hereward knelt upon the floor, his hands folded tightly against his stomach. His face was ghastly pale and there was blood on his mouth, and more blood oozing between his clutching fingers. Blue light pooled about him on the floor—his life force, slowly draining away.
As Truth entered he looked toward her.
Sorry
, he mouthed and shook his head, trying to get to his feet.
Caradoc stood beside the altar. He held a censer of incense, and his face was perfectly blank. Was this sort of thing what he'd had in mind? He gave no indication that he'd noticed that anything out of the ordinary was going on at all. Truth looked at Caradoc and saw nothing, only a howling silence, the leading edge of a gale upon which some soaring inhumanity spread its wings.
Where was Donner? She looked for him and found him at last. He was standing very still, his entire strained attention focused on Pilgrim.
“Looking for your white knight?” Pilgrim said to Truth. His cheeks were flushed, and he wore an elaborate antlered headdress and a wolfskin about his shoulders. He was naked, and held an enormous ritual sword in one hand and a small black pistol in the other, pointed at the only other person in the room who was likely to do him harm. The gun glowed like a burning coal in Pilgrim's hand, scarlet with recent use to Truth's otherworldly sight. He'd already shot Hereward—was Donner next? Were these the deaths that Pilgrim was counting on to fuel his sorcery and open the Gate?
Or was the death to be hers?
Truth began to struggle. She tore loose from Fiona's grip, but Gareth's hand was locked around her arm like an iron vise.
“Let me go! Gareth—for God's sake!” Truth cried. She felt the power Pilgrim had called drawing her forward, sucking her irresistibly into the pattern Pilgrim
had created, the pattern that would end in the horror of Chaos come again.
“I'm afraid your god and his messengers won't be coming tonight—and neither will Thorne Blackburn!” Pilgrim shouted over the sound of her voice and Light's. “Really, Truth—did you think one feeble old man who has rejected the gift of the gods could defeat
me
? Now come here—I'm going to cut your heart out, you stupid bitch—once the Gate is open I don't need you! Come on, Gareth—it is expedient that one woman should die for the good of the people!”
Pilgrim laughed crazily, but the gun never wavered from Donner's chest.
Incredibly, Gareth began to drag her forward—out of weakness, of being lost in the ritual, in the desire to give himself to anything outside himself. Truth fought him, and even then she might have broken free, but Fiona hit her in the stomach with one of the heavy candlesticks and when Truth gagged at the blow Gareth wrenched both of her arms up behind her back.
He brought her in front of Pilgrim. Heat radiated off Pilgrim, and power—she could see it with her new senses; a dull violet glow gathering on the surface of his skin, as if some astral double inside him were soon about to burst this mortal chrysalis.
“Now we chain her to the altar, violate and mutilate her, and cut her heart out. Oh come
on
, Irene, stop sniveling—these aren't the sixties any more! Donner, be a good boy and come over here and help,” Pilgrim said, his face a maniacal mask of glee.
Oh how could any of them think he'd let them live after what they'd seen here tonight? How many of them were here like Irene—secretly, illegally, with no one to notice them when they were gone?
“Donner! Don't do it!” Truth screamed. “He'll kill you!”
Pilgrim brandished the gun and laughed again, the
sound high and jagged against Light's chanting. Even if you didn't believe in magick, couldn't feel the power raging here, there was still the gun. Truth felt Gareth lift her toward the altar, and she began to kick.
“In the name of the White Christ and Yod-He-Vau-He, the Tetragrammaton all powerful!”
a voice roared from the doorway.
Light's voice cut off as if she'd been slapped. Gareth swung around, dragging Truth with him.
Michael Archangel stood in the doorway. His hair was wet with blood; beads of red formed a spiky decoration along his brow. He wore a priest's long robes, and in his bleeding hands he carried a sword like nothing Truth had ever seen. A white radiance blazed from it, as if it were bathed in a spotlight that fell upon it alone.
“I charge you to cast off these errors of darkness and surrender yourself to the judgment of the Lord!” Michael shouted, and Truth felt the power in Whose name he acted reach out, burning and implacable.
Pilgrim swung his sword, and Gareth jumped back out of the way, dragging her with him. Truth felt the opposing forces come together, and for one moment the Veils of Time and Birth were rent, and everyone in the room stood in the presence of Eternity.
“Domaris!”
screamed Light.
“Help me!”
She fell to her knees and screamed again, in purely human fright and pain.
“Deoris!” The ancient, the eternal name was on Truth's two lips—two sisters who had sworn before a shrine at the beginning of the world never to be parted until Time itself would end. For one moment Truth saw the whole uncoiling of their shared lives through birth after birth, back to the moment of this ancient sin that had bound them to the Wheel forever.
Then the moment was gone. She struggled loose from Gareth without difficulty now, and headed for her sister,
half-blind in the vortex of powers swirling through the room.
“I bow to no creature—god or devil!” Pilgrim shouted. The ritual sword he carried was darkness visible, its black blade a hole in the fabric of Creation itself as he raised it. “It is you, slave-god's pawn, who will bow to me—and worship!”
Michael stepped forward, his bare feet leaving bloody prints upon the Temple floor, his own blade raised to meet Pilgrim's attack. A shimmering fog seemed to cut the two men off from the others in the Temple, as if their bodies were no longer wholly upon the mortal plane.
Truth reached Light and knelt beside her. The screaming had stopped—her sister lay, limp and unconscious, upon the floor. Her skin was icy. Truth felt for a pulse, terrified, and finally found it, faint but strong. She clutched her sister to her chest, watching the battle.
Michael's voice was raised in sonorous, deep-pitched Latin, and each syllable seemed to claw at the fabric of reality. Pilgrim swung his sword, but it was not from its blade that his attack came. With his other hand, he sketched a shape in the air, and Truth seemed to see the glyph he had drawn hanging there, as if drawn in some dark and bloody fog.
“Adonai!”
Michael cried, and the swirling symbol began to fade.
“Come on,” Thorne said, grabbing Truth by the shoulders. She screamed at his touch, nearly dropping Light, and saw the curtains of the alcove swinging where Thorne had pushed through them. She could barely see; the whole Temple was choked with blazing sound, and Truth felt as though she were drowning in the intangible made real.
“No! Light—”
“There is no time!”
Thorne shouted in her ear. “It's gone too far! It isn't going to stop—we have to shut it down!”
He was right—Truth could feel it; the imbalance created here was feeding on Michael and Pilgrim's struggle. It did not matter now if the ritual were ever finished—the Gate would open, unless the two of them could stop it.
Reluctantly she let Light slip to the floor and got to her feet. “Will she be all right?”
“Not if we don't win,” Thorne said grimly. He reached out and plucked
Venus Afflicted
from the altar, and Truth snatched it away from him. Its hardness was burning and icy at once beneath her hands and it burned like a captive star.
Thorne grabbed her wrist and dragged her through the curtains of the archway. It was pitch black behind the curtain, but Thorne moved unerringly in the darkness, opening a door and revealing a set of stairs that curved downward. A faint glow, almost phosphorescent, radiated up from below; enough to navigate by, at least if you were desperate.

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