Ghostlight (43 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Ghostlight
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“The old cistern,” he said briefly.
Truth followed him down the stair into a room every bit as large as the Temple above, a great drum-shaped room made of brick and stone centuries old. The chaos within the Temple retreated from her senses till she could see the physical world once more and, staring at one curving wall, Truth realized that she was looking at part of the original foundation of the 1648 house.
“Come on,” Thorne said.
The staircase was wrought iron; it creaked and shook as Thorne and Truth ran down it, Truth clutching the book tightly against her chest. When they reached the bottom, Truth saw that the illumination was coming from a glass-chimneyed hurricane lamp, vintage unknown, that was set into a niche in the wall.
“The spring's down there.” Thorne's mouth quirked as he gestured toward the floor. “Scheidow convinced the Taghkanics that he was a great
manitou
by diverting
it to his own purposes. It's how he got them to cooperate in his fur trade.”
“I guess this area just attracts con men,” Truth shot back, and Thorne laughed.
“Come on. There's a tunnel to the outside off this way.”
 
She was too afraid of other things to be frightened at the time, but for the rest of her life that escape from Shadow's Gate would return as the stuff of her nightmares. The old network of brick and marl tunnels had not been kept in repair; the walls bowed inward with the weight of spring rain and winter ice, and roots had plunged through the roof, their lowering tangle sometimes making it necessary to go on hands and knees in order to get through. There was the constant fear that the tunnel would collapse and bury both of them alive; each time the thunder shook the valley Truth's hands jerked faintly, but at the time her mind was worlds away from the purely animal terror.
She could feel the power of the open Gate loose all around her, its pulsations unbound from the rhythm of the interrupted ritual, building and growing to the summons of a pattern all its own. Everything she saw glowed with a spectral light, as if Shadow's Gate was no longer wholly of this world.
At last she and Thorne came to a place where timbers reinforced the roof, and the door before them was timber-framed, set in a lime-washed wall.
“The old ice house,” Thorne explained, opening the door.
The ice house was even filthier than the tunnel, if possible, but its outer door—half-rotting, falling off its hinges—led to the outside. The night was a pale silver, as if lit by a full moon, although the witchstorm still raged over the valley. Truth brushed dirt and cobwebs from her skirt with her free hand; through the door she
could smell the sharp sweetness of the night air, electric with the power of the storm.
“Out there?” she said dubiously. A gust of rain blew through the doorway, spangling her skirt with drops and making her shiver.
“Next time I rescue you I'll bring an umbrella,” Thorne promised.
Truth stuffed the book under her sweater and pushed past Thorne. The rain was icy and sweet, sluicing the dirt and taint from her even as it drenched her to the skin. Above her peal after peal of thunder sounded, as lightning stitched the sky like the flash of far-off artillery fire.
Thorne came to stand beside her on the brambled hillside. Truth heard him swear as the rain soaked him. She looked around. Shadow's Gate was nowhere in sight.
“Hurry,” Thorne said. “There isn't much time.” Taking her hand once more, he began to run through the mud and the pounding storm.
 
They were both covered in mud and bleeding from a hundred bramble scratches by the time they reached Thorne's destination, and each of them had fallen at least once. Truth had nearly lost the book half a dozen times—only her stubbornness had allowed her to retain her hold upon it at all, and that at the cost of bruises and broken fingernails.
Thorne stepped slowly into the clearing, pulling Truth after him. She scrubbed rain and hair out of her eyes and stared around herself.
They were deep in the forest behind Shadow's Gate now, where old-growth trees stood like the pillars of a temple among lesser vegetation. Here the force of the rain was broken somewhat by the branches of the trees, though it was late autumn and the trees had few leaves left.
The clearing was surrounded by a horseshoe-shape of
pale granite pillars, rough-hewn like the bones of Stonehenge itself and sunk deep into the earth. The stones were set fairly close together, no more than four feet apart, and there were twelve of them. The earth they surrounded had been raked and smoothed, but that had been many years ago, and now the short, deer-cropped grass was drifted with fallen leaves.
“We worked on this all that first summer. Carl broke his wrist and Irene got the worst case of poison ivy you ever saw,” Thorne said. He was gasping for breath from the run, his hair plastered to his skull, but even now he was grinning, as if no matter what the outcome, it was the fight that mattered to Thorne Blackburn.
Truth reached out and touched the nearest pillar. She'd thought it would be cold, but it was as warm as if the sun had been shining on it for hours, and it vibrated faintly beneath her fingers. After everything else that had happened to her tonight, Truth wasn't even frightened by this new strangeness.
“What do we do? Why are we here?” Truth said. She shook her dripping hair out of her eyes again, resisting the temptation to cuddle the pillar for warmth. Whatever the source of its heat was, it would not serve her body's needs.
Thorne walked to the head of the sarsen crescent, where a distinct gap separated the two tallest stones. He hesitated, as if what he was about to do next would cause him pain.
“Pilgrim found this place, but Irene never told him the truth about it—I made sure of that much. Evil is oddly gullible—he knew as little of me as you did—but he chose to believe a different part of my legend. It's true that the house was your mother's magick—but mine was here.”
Then Thorne took a step backward, placing himself directly between the two columns. They vibrated, a high sweet singing that cut through the roar of the storm, and
suddenly all the stones seemed to glow with an ice blue radiance like starlight.
His body jerked—as if electricity were coursing through it, completing some powerful circuit. Truth could see the gleam of his bared teeth in the eldritch blue glow of the stones.
“Daddy!”
Truth screamed, lunging forward.
She slipped in the mud and went sprawling, the grimoire a hard uncompromising weight beneath her sodden sweater. She struggled to her knees and knelt in the mud, staring up at her father—he wasn't hurt, as she'd thought, but in some way Thorne's body
completed
the circuit of power here.
Slowly, he held his hands out to her, coronaed in blue-white power. She knew what he wanted her to do.
Still kneeling, Truth pulled
Venus Afflicted
out from under her sweater. Its cover was damp and slimy with rain, and some last shred of mundane pragmatism grieved at its soaked and mud-spattered state. She reached up from where she knelt, holding the book out to Thorne.
He said something, but she could not hear it over the hiss of the rain and shook her head. Then he touched the book.
The power of the Circle poured through her body, seeking escape into the earth, and Truth's body spasmed as Thorne's had done, even as the power held her rigid. There was no escape—she felt it as the power flowed into the earth and met an even greater power, a river flowing to a measureless ocean that returned its power to the river again. The power cascaded back through her body, through Thorne, through the stones, and down into the earth again and again, onward without end. Truth's eyes closed; here was the peace she had sought; here at last, asking only her surrender to its eternal tidal call.
“No!” Thorne's shout roused her. She stared up into his blazing blue eyes, and knew this surrender was not
what he had brought her here for. The power must be ruled, the Gate must be closed. She must take the tide of power that flowed through her and impose her will upon it—she was the Gatekeeper, and here was the Gate.
But how?
Thorne's chest rose as he inhaled, drawing in both breath and strength. Then he began to chant, the strange short phrases that had haunted Truth's dreams since her first night at Shadow's Gate—the words that in this world were only that, but in another place were living things, real and solid and aware.
The night, the storm, the forest and the ring of stones, all fell away from Truth's senses as an outmoded garment from the body. She passed beyond the Gate, and stood with Thorne upon a high hill where fantastic armies gathered all about them awaiting the signal to ride. The ocean roared on the cliffs below, and above the heads of the host Truth could see a Wheel spinning among the stars—a Wheel of blinding silver, and every spoke was a double-edged sword.
Into the earth; up from the earth; the endless sacrament of gift and gift
… Thorne had never ceased his chanting, but now Truth could understand the words which were not words, but Reality.
“I am a hawk/Above the cliff—”
And now her voice joined with his. Each phrase was a rune, a word, a spell woven with living breath … .
“I am a thorn/Beneath the nail—”
And now she saw the shape of it all. She could see what she must do; saw the task that Thorne had meant her for and how to accomplish it; saw the price and the pain and measured her strength against the task, and now her voice went on alone:
“I am a lure/From Paradise—”
And somewhere upon the horizon of her sight she could see the shape of Pilgrim's twisted working, saw it
and knew she must deal with it too. Thorne's voice joined with her own again, and the book burned between their hands like forging iron, but neither of them would release it.
“I am a wizard, who but I/Shall know the Gate Between The Worlds?”
Pilgrim's tangled creation fell away, and now the Gate burned before her inward eyes, argent and gleaming, its blades the perils the seeker must pass through to reach Paradise.
She knew what she had to do. The words kindled clearly in her mind, but to speak them would commit her to a path that she must walk the rest of her days.
She must. There was no one else.
“I am the birth of every hope—”
Her hands burned. Her will and her honor bound her; the passion to know and to make that had brought her to this moment.
“I am the door for every wall—”
And she could feel it rushing toward her; the massive weight of intention, as if on some plane far beyond her own some great balance shifted, and the Gate Between The Worlds swung closed again, righting a balance that had long been wrong. The moment at which she could stop what she had begun came and vanished, and Truth felt the terror of any wild thing standing in the path of an onrushing train as the power she had invoked peaked and exploded through her, gathering momentum, seeking its release; she screamed with the sensation of it and on her hands the blisters broke; the liquid spilled over her fingers like tears, but the Gate was closed at last; she had closed it, and now there was only one last thing she must do.
“I am the key for every lock—”
And the key was her body, her soul, wrenched and twisted from its living shape, and now Thorne could no longer help her.
“I am the lock for every gate—”
Her voice failed; her tongue was bleeding with the words she had forced from it, but if she stopped now the damage would not be undone, and all the sorrow and pain they had suffered would be for nothing.
“I am a wizard, who but I/Shall seal the Gate Between The Worlds?”
And it was done. The hill was gone, and the armies. The Gate was gone from among the stars, and so was the light.
 
She was lying in the mud. Truth opened her eyes, but the ghostly sight that had sustained her was gone; everything was black. All that was left was the dazzling scraps of her vision, already fading like a dream.
Except for the choice she had made, that she must now learn to live with.
She was freezing, numb and wet and cold and sick. The rain was a far-off pattering; the fury of the storm was past, and the storm was moving away. Truth pulled herself to her knees with a sucking sound. She was covered in a thick sheet of mud from her chin to her ankles.
“Daddy?” Truth said hoarsely. There was mud in her mouth; she spat.
“Here,” Thorne said. She could see him only faintly; he was standing between the pillars, his arms crossed over his chest, and she could see that he held
Venus Afflicted
in his hands.
“You—I—” She sat back on her heels, shoving her hair out of her face with muddy hands. “It worked. We did it. It's real.” The words were only shadows of what true speech might be—this was how she would see the world from now on; how the world was for those who had seen Paradise and must live out their days among shadows.

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