Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (86 page)

 
          
But
Brian was too furious to reckon the difference in their sizes
—
he grabbed the heavy carved
mask of the Horned One and ripped it from Hay's face . . .

 
          
And
hit him with it.

           
The whole thing took only seconds.
Hay fell backward, his mouth spraying blood, and hit the corner of the altar
with an awful, final sound. By the time he stopped moving, no one in that room
had any doubt that he was dead.

 
          
Someone
screamed. Panic ripped through the room, borne on a wave of psychoactive drugs.
Ritual ecstacy was transmuted into the mother of all bad trips in less than a
heartbeat. People turned on
—
or
to
—
one another blindly. Brian grabbed Sally in his arms, and
Colin turned slowly toward them, gesturing with his gun. His face was grey
with pain.

 
          
"Come
on!" he shouted hoarsely, and began to push through the mob.

 
          
/
spend too much time in sickrooms,
Claire thought sourly.
Thank God it
wasn't a stroke
—
thank God Brian's a doctor
—
or Colin would be dead now.

 
          
Arkham General
Hospital
was a small rural hospital
without a cardiac care wing; the doctors there had freely confessed that Colin
would receive better care in
Boston
, and plans were being made
now to fly him out.

 
          
They'd
been at the police station, making their statements
—
carefully edited of anything
that would sound impossible to mundane ears
—
when Colin had fainted.
She'd known all day that he was in pain, and the diagnosis, from the symptoms,
was pretty obvious. But there had been nothing they could do until Brian and
Sally were free, and Claire hadn't realized just how serious Colin's illness
was until he collapsed. The first thing Claire had feared was some kind of
magickal backlash from the Antique Rite; a simple heart attack seemed wholesome
and innocent next to the corruption they had faced together earlier that night.
Fortunately he recovered enough to tell Brian his symptoms
—
and Brian had taken the
trouble to retrieve his medical bag on the way to the police station.

 
          
"You've
got to be on the lookout for this sort of thing when you get to be his
age,"
one of the interns had said offhandedly when they got to the
hospital. Colin had been admitted over his protests
—
Brian had been fiercely
insistent
—
and > Claire had stayed with him, watching over him as
he slept.

 
          
By
the next morning, the previous night seemed as much like a dream to Claire as
it must to the surviving members of the coven
—
who were, reasonably
enough, also at Arkham General. Matthew Hay was dead, and a woman named Tabitha
Whitfield was under heavy sedation, but everyone else would recover in a day or
so with no particular ill effects. Sally and Brian had shrugged the whole
experience off with surprising speed, but Claire had seen behavior like that
before. It was the mind's attempt to cope with something it couldn't understand
by simply sweeping it aside. The two of them were already talking about
getting married
—
but it was tacitly understood that Brian would have his
rural medical practice somewhere else.

 
          
And
now I've got to figure out some tactful way to tell Justin that he has nothing
more to fear from the local coven.

 
          
"Can
I come in?"

 
          
Claire
jerked awake and realized she'd been dozing. Justin Moorcock stood in the
doorway.

           
"Maybe I'd better come
out," she answered, and tiptoed past Colin's bed out into the hall.

 
          
"It's
over, isn't it?" Justin said simply.

 
          
"Yes,"
Claire answered. "I don't think there'll be any more trouble now."
She could feel it in the air
—
though that might be no more than summer sunlight and
wishful thinking. "What are you doing here, Justin?"

 
          
"Well,
Rowan called last night to tell me she thought you were in trouble. You'll say
it's silly, but her hunches always seem to be right. I phoned the sheriff's
station and the hospital, and figured I was just going to have to drive around
until I found you, when the sheriff called back to say that Colin was in the
hospital and you were staying with him. So I guess Rowan was wrong, for
once."

 
          
"Yes
and no," Claire said evasively.
There are no secrets in the country,
she
reflected. She wondered what story was going around about last night's events,
or if everyone would decide simply to pretend nothing had happened. Nearly
everyone in this part of the county was related to someone in the coven, after
all.

 
          
"Is
Colin all right? I figured it was better to wait until something closer to
visiting hours to stop by, and I didn't want to leave Grandpa alone in the
house at night."

 
          
Especially
considering what might be trying to get in,
Claire thought. "I'm glad
you came, Justin. Colin . . . well, all the signs have been there for months,
and like an utter fool I missed them all. Brian wants to transfer him to a hospital
in
Boston
as soon as possible."

 
          
"So
you'll be leaving then," Justin said. "We'll miss you. I'll miss
you." He hesitated. "Are they all dead? Matthew Hay, and Witch-Sara
and all?"

 
          
His
tone was grave and serious. In his heart, Justin Moorcock believed in monsters.
He'd grown up in Madison Corners, after all. He knew that shadows were more
tenacious than light.

 
          
"Matthew
Hay is dead, and I don't think Sally Latimer is going to stay in this part of
the country."
Not if she's smart.
"But I'd rather tell the
story only once; I'll need to pack up Colin's things and then I'll drive out to
the farm and give you both the whole story."

 
          
"You'd
probably better call Rowan, too," Justin said. "And I wish . . .
well, I wish you'd had a better time here."

 
          
"Oh,
it had its moments," Claire said, smiling.

AUGUST 1990

 
          
COLIN
WAS IN THE HOSPITAL FOR SOME MONTHS AFTER THAT
—
FIRST AT Arkham General,
then in
Boston
, and finally he was allowed
to return home to a strict regimen of diet, medicine, and exercise. It seemed
only reasonable that he should confine himself now more to the role of
consultant, letting younger men and women bear the stress of confrontation with
the Unseen.

 
          
But
the doctors had called him, in simple obliviousness, something I had never
before thought of him as being: an old man.

 
          
Yes,
Colin was not young. He was seventy the year we smashed the Church of the
Antique Rite, and had reached his biblical allotment of threescore and ten. But
his life had never seemed to me to have anything of a completed quality.
Somehow I imagined him still on the threshold of it, his greatest tasks
unbegun.

 
          
That
Colin felt something of the same sense I knew. Even at the end of this long
career of service to the Light there was something more he needed to do, and as
the shadows of his life's twilight deepened, that undone task preyed upon his
mind more and more.

SAN FRANCISCO
,
CALIFORNIA
,
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 21,  1998

Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the
heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And
thinking of the days that are no more.

—
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

 
          
THE
YEARS PASS SO QUICKLY NOW,
COLIN MACLAREN THOUGHT TO HIMSELF, the October
sun warmed his spirit, if not his bones, and though he was expecting company,
he lingered on the terrace, unwilling to forsake the sun and the sky so soon.

 
          
He
was nearly eighty, and even by the most generous possible estimate had already
lived far more years than he had left to live. The ebb and flow of world events
took on a certain remoteness and inevitability from Colin's hard-won new
perspective. The time remaining to him was short, and more and more these days
he realized how much he did not wish to leave behind him unfinished business
when he left this life: to be called back to the Light with the weight of tasks
undone and penances unpaid weighing him down.

 
          
Sometimes
he wondered how a life could just rush past
—
it seemed as if he'd only
paused for a moment to look back on what he'd already accomplished, and
suddenly all his allotted years had fled. Time, as the cliche put it, marched
on, and life turned out to be something lived in moments of inattention, while
one's thoughts were elsewhere.

 
          
The
last decade had been filled with milestones, as if even history knew that the
Western world was approaching the millennium and wished to get its housekeeping
done. Sometimes he wondered what his younger self, unburdened by the weight of
experience, would have thought of them. Things he would once have raged against
he now accepted as being beyond his power to affect.

           
Two more wars
—
they didn't even call them
that anymore
—
and the two Germanies were reunited at last. The war Colin
still thought of as "his" war was half a century in the past now, but
the peace that should have been established through the Allied victory had
never really come
—
the
Pax Americana
had been a cruel fraud, the full
extent of its dishonesty slowly unfolding as the postwar decades passed. And
now events had buried even those grave betrayals
—
and the shining moments of
triumph
—
beneath
the weight of sheer incident.

 
          
The
Soviet
Union
had dissolved, seventy-five years after its birth, in a move almost completely
unexpected by Cold Warriors and Soviet analysts in the West. There'd been new
race riots here at home, as terrifying in their way as the
Watts
riots had been, and this
time their violence was broadcast live, thanks to the new flexibility of
television. In
New York
and
Oklahoma City
, the terrorist bombings
that had been a feature of European life for so long finally reached American
shores, and television had been there too, broadcasting pictures of the
carnage before the first dust had settled.

 
          
When
he'd made this last relocation
—
to what the younger generation called a "planned
community"
—
Colin had gotten rid of his television set. He had always
mistrusted its false intimacy, and what he saw through its medium had come to
sadden him in a deep and inarticulate way. His generation had hoped for so much
from television
—
the electronic global village
—
and instead television had
become an ever-flowing conduit of inanity, of trivial concocted details that
Colin found less and less important with each passing day.

 
          
Old
friends had left him and new friendships were formed. Cassie Chandler had died
tragically two years ago in a fire that had gutted the Ancient Mysteries
Bookshop. The disaster had somehow seemed to sever Claire's ties to the Bay
Area for good. Over the years, her visits back East to her cousin's farm in
Massachusetts
had slowly become more
frequent, and lasted longer, until now her time was divided equally between
Glastonbury
and Madison Corners, with
occasional trips back to the Bay Area. She wrote frequently, always urging
Colin to visit the farm, but Colin doubted he would. For now, his work was
here.

 
          
Caroline
Jourdemayne had died in 1995, three years ago this month. A letter had come a
few weeks later
—
written long before her death and left with her lawyer for
just this event. She'd asked him to keep watch over her niece, but by the time
Colin received Caroline's letter, Truth was far beyond the help that Caroline
had intended.

 
          
Truth
had come to visit him a few months after the letter had reached him. Since he
had last seen her, eight years before, she had embraced her father's Path
—
there was so much of him in
her now that it had been quite a wrench to see her again. It was almost as if
Thorne Blackburn stood before him once more, with all their old quarrels about
Light and Darkness unresolved.

 
          
But
Colin was no longer the Sword of the Order and had not been for many years. And
there must always be change. There must always be someone willing to try that
which was perilous, that which had once been forbidden.

           
Someone to venture into the lands
beyond what was known to bring back information from the numinous place where
imagination faltered. He was an old man
—
let him be the one to take
the dangerous chance.

 
          
When
Truth had asked if she could call on him, Colin had welcomed her
—
even though the life that
he had spent in the service of the Light had been spent learning over and over
again the harsh and bitter lesson of the dangers of the path of compromise. The
worlds he and Truth had been born into were unimaginably different, but their
fealty was to Knowledge and Service, however differently denned.

 
          
He
had been able to do his small part to help Truth Jourdemayne along her path to
understanding, but they both knew that her path was not his, nor could it ever
be, so long as she held true to the oaths she had sworn. Much of what he had in
him to tell was not for her to know, and Colin thought with grave serenity of
the disciple to whom he must impart all that he had learned, the disciple he
had not found in a lifetime of searching. Colin only hoped the Lords of Light
would send someone to him soon, because there was much he must do to prepare
for his own final exit.

 
          
He
felt no fear of that inevitable future day
—
only a mild curiosity as to
the mechanics of the event itself, and the anticipation of meeting old friends
once more. But whatever the spirit in which he contemplated it, preparation for
his own departure was sometimes a wearying task. There was a lifetime's worth
of research and memories to organize; he had donated many of his books and
personal papers to the Bidney Institute before his last move, and more were
earmarked to go there upon his death.

 
          
There
would be time enough for that much. He knew it. But why did he feel there was
so little time left for what mattered more?

 
          
"Colin!
I rang the bell but there wasn't any answer, so I thought I'd see if you were
around back."

 
          
Hunter
Greyson pushed through the garden gate, his walking stick in his hand and his
laptop slung over his shoulder. He didn't need the cane as much these days
—
not after nearly two years
of rigorous physical therapy
—
but the fearless recklessness of youth was gone in the
accident that had claimed so many years of his life, replaced by the prudence
of maturity.

 
          
Colin
got to his feet and shook Grey's hand. Grey's reentry into Colin's life was one
of time's great gifts; the chance to repair, or at least understand, the
negligence and missteps of his younger days.

 
          
"I
was just woolgathering. We'll call it a privilege of age," Colin said,
smiling. "How are Winter and the baby?"

 
          
"Fine,
both of them; Winter says you have to come to dinner again soon, but you
already know that. And you've got to see Colleen
—
you won't believe how she's
grown. I can't believe it's only been a year since she was born; she's just so
amazing."

 
          
"A
year
—
that
means Truth and Dylan will be coming up on their first anniversary soon,"
Colin said.

 
          
"December
twenty-first," Grey said promptly. "Have to send them a card or
something. It's a wonder they haven't killed each other yet, the way they knock
heads."

 
          
Colin
and Grey had both attended the wedding held at Shadow's Gate
—
Thome's estate was still a
tangled mess, but Truth had finally begun to take steps to be legally declared
Thorne Blackburn's daughter. It was at her wedding that Colin had met Grey
once more.

 
          
"Have
you heard from her lately? Is she having any luck with the search?" Colin
asked.

 
          
At
the same time she had taken steps to declare her own legitimacy, Truth had
begun to search for her other half-siblings, but the quest for Thorne
Blackburn's missing children was a slow business, even in the modern cyberspace
world where physical boundaries meant almost as little as they did in the
Overlight.

 
          
"Not
yet," Grey said, shrugging. "Those records are buried pretty deep.
Circle of Fire's giving her all the help we can, of course, and so are the
other Circles, but ..." He sighed.

 
          
Colin
knew
—
though
they rarely discussed it these days
—
that Grey was still active
in the Blackburn Work, doing his best to carry on Thome's willfully fragmented
legacy. It was easier now that cyberspace had become the newest Aquarian
frontier; the seekers who had once hunted in vain for their kindred now could
form closely-knit communities bound together by phone lines and technology.

 
          
"It's
just so hard these days," Grey said, sitting down. "Everybody wants a
quick fix
—
become a master shaman in ten easy lessons, that sort of
thing. It's hard to find people willing to dedicate themselves to the Work
—
hell, I hear that even
Holy Mother
Church
is having trouble getting
enough nuns for the penguin suits. It's not like it was in the olden
days."

 
          
"Times
change," Colin said. "I know it's the custom now to romanticize the
sixties, but they weren't romantic while you were there, believe me. Most of my
generation thought that the Communists were going to bomb us back into the
Stone Age, and the kids on the streets thought their parents had all become
Nazis."