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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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Too bad things hadn't worked out that way. Like that T-shirt she'd seen one of the students wearing. LET THE MEEK INHERIT THE EARTH-THE REST OF US WILL GO TO THE STARS, those who could had gone to the cities, and left their less-fortunate kindred behind in places like Morton's Fork. In the rush to separate the worthy and the unworthy, everyone always assumed the line would be drawn to include them among the elect. The real truth was that nobody could go to the stars if everyone couldn't
—
anything else created a haves versus have-nots culture that only led, inevitably, to bloodbath.
What morbid thoughts! Do you think the glorious revolution is going to start here in Morton's Fork?
Truth jeered at herself.
No
, she replied to that inner audience.
But it could
. And the people who were so casually ready to leave half the human race behind in search of their own comfort were the ones who'd cause it.
“I think dinner had better show up soon,” Truth muttered aloud.
She'd thought the balance of the book would be bibliography and sources, but in fact it was an essay written for the 1993 edition of the book, covering the changes in the county since the early fifties, and ending on a rather surprising note.
Lyonesse County owes most of its modern fame to the ground-breaking work of Nicholas Taverner, a turn-of the-century folklorist and preservationist who saw the country ways he had grown up with vanishing almost overnight with the increasing industrialization of the United States. The gasoline engine was beginning to replace the horse as the motive force on farms and in towns, and in the headlong rush to progress, both the country ways of doing things and the stories a dying generation had to tell were being lost.
Taverner, like many of his post-World War I generation, had an abiding interest in Spiritualism, and collected many more stories of magic and the supernatural than did his contemporaries. Despite its thinly-settled nature, a disproportionately large number of the folktales of ghosts, hauntings, and wandering spirits have their location in the hills of Lyonesse County, and eventually, the mass of material he had collected on his travels led him to publish
Ha'ants, Spooks,
and Fetchmen,
where he noted the peculiarly fey nature of the area and mentioned in passing that one town
—
named Morton's Fork—seemed to be populated by whole families of poltergeists.
Truth checked for the name of the author of the Afterword, and found it to be the rather unlikely one of Pennyfeather
Farthing.
Well, Mr. Farthing, we know in what direction YOUR interests lie
, she thought with a smile. Mr. Farthing seemed to share Dylan's interests, and might be able to give them an idea of where to start. She wondered if Evan Starking knew where the man was now.
The savory scent of roasting burgers began to waft skyward. The bubble tents that would hold Ninian, Rowan, and much of their gear were up, and now Rowan was setting the table for dinner; cups, plates, cold salads they'd bought in Pharaoh, brownies they'd brought from Bread Alone in Glastonbury. They could have been any group of friends on a social outing. The fact that tomorrow Dylan and his students would begin looking for the ghosts or other supernatural events that haunted Morton's Fork and trying to confirm each event symbolized by a colored pushpin on Dylan's map only added an air of surreality to the evening.
Oddly, the fact that the Unseen World was such a natural, accepted part of Truth's life didn't mean she was any more willing to see it as a normal part of others'.
When it's only me I don't have to think about it. I only need to react to what I see and feel. It's almost as if I can't trust other people to have similar perceptions.
And why should she? She could blame her gift on the
sidhe
legacy from her father, the nonhuman heritage that forever separated her from the human race.
That's my excuse. What's theirs?
Truth was abstracted all evening, though the others, excited by the morrow's prospects, hardly noticed. After dinner and clean up
—
involving a sparing use of the RV's water supply
—
the party separated for the night. Truth helped shift the two polybarometers around inside the Winnebago to make room for the transformation of the dinette into a double bed, and then stood in the doorway looking out at the night. She'd loaned Ninian the book on Lyonesse County, and his bubble tent glowed like a bright orange night-light from the illumination of the battery-powered lamp inside.
“It doesn't work.” Rowan's voice was raised in indignant
disgust. Truth saw the door flap of the blue tent unzip, and Rowan scrambled out. She came toward the Winnebago, a small portable TV/VCR in hand. “It's broken,” she said to Truth in an aggrieved voice.
“Did you test it before we left? You know there's no radio or television reception here,” Truth reminded her.
“It worked fine then—now it won't even play tapes,” Rowan said more quietly. “Anyway, could you take it inside there with you, Truth? If it isn't going to work, I'm not going to give it tent-room.”
“That should teach it a lesson,” Truth said gravely, opening the screen door and taking the portable television set. It was only a little larger than a shoebox—and Rowan was right, it
had
worked just fine in Glastonbury. She stared at the TV, as though she could force it to explain itself.
“Well … goodnight,” Rowan said, half waving. She walked back to her own tent, and a few moments later Truth could see her silhouette moving around inside the blue nylon dome again. Truth set the TV/VCR on the counter and closed the Winnebago's door.
“Trouble?” Dylan said, settling the last of the blankets into place on their bed.
“Her VCR didn't work.” Truth attempted to deliver the information with the seriousness that Rowan obviously felt it deserved. She didn't quite manage.
“The batteries are probably dead. I'll plug it in here tomorrow when I've got the motor running and see if they'll hold a charge. They might not, of course—”
Impulsively, Truth reached out and ruffled his wheat-blond hair. “I think she's got a crush on you, Dylan.”
“Ah.” Dylan smiled. “All women do, Truth—didn't I warn you about that?” He stepped forward and put his arms around her, and Truth snuggled into his warm solidity, glad to leave the puzzles and problems of the day behind.
She was dreaming. Blackburn's sidhe daughter, Mistress of Shadow's Gate, rode upon the back of the white mare. The red stag bounded ahead, her guide through the Otherworld,
and behind her loped the black dog and the grey wolf—tenacity and ferocity; loyalty and cunning. Surrounded by her kindred spirits, Truth searched the Otherworld.
In the dim distance, the sparks of working Blackburn Circles burned bright, and scattered among them like brief candles were the lights of the powerful on other paths: Wiccan covens, White Lodges, the Brotherhood of the Rose … .
She was searching for something else.
Abruptly, the white mare was no longer running over the featureless plains of the Otherworld; the animal's legs splashed through the icy water of a running stream, and a wholly realistic forest had sprung up in what had been trackless mist. A leafy branch brushed Truth's cheek, and the red stag was nowhere to be seen.
In the Otherworld, which had no shape save that which human minds gave it, such definition was a warning sign that she was intruding into territory which some entity had made its own. At the same time Truth realized that she was not dreaming—her body might be asleep in Morton's Fork, but her spirit was roving in an equally real though intangible realm, doing what New Agers called “lucid dreaming.”
Time to go.
Truth tried to turn her mount, and felt a faint thrill of disquiet when the mare did not even slow her headlong pace. The White Mare was one of the four Guardians of the Gate, servants and protectors of the Gatekeeper—an extension of her will. Her servant should not disobey her like this!
Truth struggled to leave the Otherworld by any means possible: to wake, to dismount. She could not—it was as if she were frozen in place, cut off from her Will and carried forward no matter what her wishes.
A moment later she realized why.
Once she had stood beside Thorne Blackburn upon a hill of vision, before a Gate barred by spinning sword blades, behind which sidhe armies waited to ride forth into the
world of Men. She had closed that Gate and locked it with the force of her intention in a realm where words were made real—but the Gate she had closed was not the only Gate that lay between the pleasant worlds of Men and the dread realms of the Lords of the Outer Spaces.
There was the clash of water upon rocks. Deep in her bones Truth felt its ungoverned power—a spinning whirlpool in a turbid river that lured swimmers to their deaths—and knew that there was no keeper for this Gate. If there were, it would not stand as it did—open to any entrant, able to pass things that should remain safely locked in the world beyond.
“IT IS POWER—AND I SHALL HAVE IT.”
The symbolic nature of the Otherworld turned the churning whirlpool to a silver snake, a gleaming serpent that struggled vainly in the hands of a tall man who bore the dark aura of a magus about him.
“Leave the Gate alone. It is nothing to do with you,” Truth said. He was not the Gatekeeper. The Gates answered only to women; it was women's magic to open or close them.
“IT IS POWER—AND I SHALL HAVE IT,” the dark man repeated. Cold flames played about his body, as though he stood on a pyre, and the coldness radiated from him as strongly as heat. Coldness—control—power—
Truth's Guardians had long since vanished, driven from her side by this man's antithetical power. Truth had no choice but to face him alone, to learn why she'd been brought here; to free the serpent, to find the Gate's Keeper if she could—
To close the Gate herself if she could not.
But first, she must put an end to this charade. Summoning all the force of her directed will, Truth sketched a glyph in the air between herself and the dark usurper. It burned as she shaped it; a tangible silver knot; fire against ice.
“I charge you to go from this place; to deliver up what you have seized; by Fire and Air, by Earth living and unliving, by Water and—”
He swept his hand down, and in it was a sword she had not seen before. Her glyph dissolved like smoke.
“Best go back to your kitchen, witch-girl; you've met your match in Quentin Blackburn! By blind Azathoth and the Black Christ: Eno, Abbadnio, Iluriel—”
Each of the Names he spoke seemed to swarm out of his mouth like clouds of insects, surrounding Truth and stinging the strength from her limbs. She hadn't recognized him for what he was, and now it was too late: If she couldn't escape this attack she'd pay the price for her bravura.
Truth summoned her power once more, and summoned, too, its animal aspects: dog and wolf, horse and stag. The magus's attention wasn't entirely focused on her: He was wrestling with the serpent he still held, trying to bend the power of the Gate into another weapon to attack her. At the moment that he was most distracted, Truth turned and ran, on foot now in the tangling forest.
She heard a crashing in the underbrush; a moment later she saw the grey wolf, pacing her as she ran. The wolf was power, but it was also danger; there was always the possibility that it could turn upon her if she were weak enough. The black dog would never turn upon her, but this more reliable servant would never act independently of her, either.
Behind her, she felt the darkness gathering for another try at her. If Quentin Blackburn—that name!—could make her a sacrifice to the Gate's insatiable appetite, he would have gained further power over it.
And she would be dead.
There was a flash of moon-whiteness through the underbrush ahead, and Truth threw herself against the body of the white mare and twined her fingers through its mane, letting the force of the spirit-animal's flight draw her up onto its back. A few moments later—if such a thing as time could be imputed to the events of the Otherworld—Truth and her Guardians had broken free of the last of the tangled undergrowth, and were running free upon the plains of the Otherworld once more. Quickly Truth dismounted,
dismissing her companions, and retreated further, down the spiral stair into manifestation, into matter … .
Wycherly's first conscious thought was that nothing hurt. He was wise enough to know that this meant that something ought to hurt, and to lie very still until he woke up completely and remembered what it was.
He was lying in his bed in the cabin in Morton's Fork. The sun was up—cautiously he located his left wrist, and moved the arm enough to bring his wristwatch into view. It was the day after he'd gone to bed—he made sure of the date—and a little after noon. His face, his neck, his arms—they all felt raw and stiff. Sunburn, to add to his luck.

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