Gravelight (26 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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Should she call her agent? She knew the answer to that, but she dreaded what she'd hear when she did. You were only as good as your next deal, and she hadn't made one.
Slowly she began to realize the scope of the trouble she was in. Her mind was going, her career was probably in ruins, and her only ally was a self-destructive alcoholic.
“Anybody home?” Wycherly said, and Sinah blinked slowly, focusing on him. The sun had sunk farther into the west and was shining right into her eyes.
“I was just thinking I probably don't have any money,” she said.
“You'll survive,” Wycherly said briefly. “Now, since we were wondering about which asylum to check you into, why don't you tell me what just happened?”
As she finished her tea Sinah told him the details of the vision—or memory. Wycherly didn't seem to take it seriously, but at least he was willing to talk about it.
“So instead of finding the Holy Grail she ended up a captive of these Indians who adopted her—”
“Tutelo.”
“—and in a generation or two her mixed-blood Tutelo descendants married back into the European population and here you are,” Wycherly finished.
“I guess so. There must be something written about them somewhere. If they're real, it would be some kind of
proof,
don't you see?” Sinah said hopefully.
“What does proof matter? Knowing whether it's objective fact or your personal fantasy isn't going to affect what's going on inside your head,” Wycherly answered bluntly.
Except to tell her whether it was real or not—and she already knew it was.
“I want her to leave me alone,” Sinah whispered.
“Then find out what she wants, and give it to her. Ghost,
delusion, or old girlfriend, it always works,” Wycherly said with cynical assurance.
But she wants my life. And she doesn't want to go away at all. And Quentin Blackburn wants …
Vivid as a resurfacing memory, the image of Quentin Blackburn that she'd had in the ruined sanatorium hung before her eyes. He'd wanted her to join him or die, she remembered that much—but what, exactly, did that involve?
“Look, Sinah, you really do look wasted. Maybe you ought to get inside where it's cool,” Wycherly said.
Sinah cast a doubtful glance toward the cabin's open door. Wycherly grinned.
“I was thinking more of your place. Central air? Indoor plumbing? Remember?”
Sinah closed her eyes wearily. Her pretty refuge—it seemed like an isolation tank now. A straitjacket—or a prison. “I don't want to be there alone.”
“Then I'll go up with you. Just let me close up the place, God knows why.”
He took the mug but pointedly left her the box of cookies. A few moments later he was back, his shoulder bag slung over one shoulder and the walking stick in his other hand.
“Time for a nice walk in the fresh country air—since I don't see your Jeep,” he said.
“But your ankle,” Sinah protested, belatedly remembering.
“It's fine. Everything's fine,” Wycherly said.
It was much later than she thought it ought to be. The sky was dark with only the last vestiges of light, and there was a wet electric feel to the air that meant there was a storm brewing.
As Truth attempted to unbend her cramped fingers from around the rim of the scrying mirror, she realized she had been gone from her body much too long—dangerously long. Every muscle protested with cold, cramp, and hunger;
she felt lightheaded and shocky and hadn't had the forethought to bring so much as a candy bar with her.
By the time she managed to pack the mirror safely away into her bag, the light was nearly gone. Truth didn't relish the long walk back to the center of Morton's Fork in the dark, and among the things she'd forgotten to bring with her when she'd started out this morning was a flashlight. By the time she managed to make it back, Dylan would have—justifiably—worried himself sick.
Let him worry
, a cold inhuman part of her urged.
Let him
see how desperately he wants to keep you safe. It will render him much more docile afterward.
Truth shook her head, denying that part of herself. Her right hand closed over her left, turning her pearl-and-emerald engagement ring around on her finger. She didn't want to do something like that to Dylan.
But didn't she? After what he'd said to her last night? Didn't he deserve a little payback?
Maybe so,
Truth thought, but vanishing for the whole day and half the night wouldn't get
her
anything she wanted. It would just reinforce Dylan's notion that she was … unstable.
Unstable?
Truth regarded her own word choice with horror. Was that what Dylan really thought? Was that what she was?
No.
The reassuring faith in her own perceptions steadied Truth. She'd been right, hadn't she? There
was
a Gate here.
Now all I have to do to close it is find someone in the direct line and teach them how to close it. How hard can that be, really? Since there hasn't been much emigration from Morton's Fork, it should be fairly easy to find someone in the bloodline to get the Gate closed down, even if just by checking the land poll deeds to find out who owned this land before Quentin Blackburn built his sanatorium on it.
Her mental voice rambled on, soothing her with the sheer quantity of its words. All those things would be easier with Dylan's cooperation—or even his active help—and she
wouldn't get them by sitting here. Telling him the truth wasn't going to be fun—but she was damned if she was going to behave like the idiot heroine in a Gothic novel and not tell him what had happened up here today.
Truth shook her head ruefully, and groaned as she got to her feet. At least it shouldn't be impossible to prove to Dylan that she was right; an uncontrolled Gate—as Truth knew from experience—acted like an enormous generator on every psychic within its range, wakening the gifts in those who had never shown them before and increasing the power of those who had them.
Truth felt a sudden, guilty, selfish thrill. Didn't that mean that Rowan and Ninian should both test significantly higher while they were here? She ought to be able to test that.
First things first,
she reminded herself with a sigh
. Go and face the music, then carry on from there.
Half an hour later, Truth would have been happy to exchange her present situation for Dylan at his most disapproving.
She was lost.
This isn't possible. All I had to do was follow the drive back to the gate and then go down the road back to the general store. Even in the dark, all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other
.
But that wasn't what had happened.
The night had gotten progressively darker. It was the blanketing darkness of the country, without even a firefly to break the monotony. Crickets and frogs, made restless by the oncoming storm, called with shrill rhythm, making a cushion of insulating sound.
The first time she'd realized she was going the wrong way, she'd simply turned around and retraced her tracks. She'd passed the white marble bench on which she'd spent so many hours earlier today, its whiteness reduced to a dim grey smudge in the darkness. The bench was on the left side of the road.
Then, about ten minutes later, when she thought the gates
should be appearing any moment now, she'd passed the bench again.
On the right.
Truth stopped dead, staring at it. She was certain it was the same bench—and more to the point, she'd sat down on the
first
bench she saw. There should be no other benches between her and the road.
How had she gotten turned around?
She'd tried again, placing the bench on her left hand and heading down the drive. She held her mental wards firmly against outside influence; there was a name for what was happening to her—
pook-ledden
—and if she could only hold her Will strong she ought to be able to keep from walking in circles.
But she'd passed the bench again—on the right—and that was when Truth had decided to leave the road and try to reach Morton's Fork going cross-country.
But that didn't seem to be working either. Truth was lost. And no matter how she twisted and turned, she suspected she was being drawn closer and closer to the sanatorium ruins.
But … why? The Wildwood Gate has rejected me, and of all the people on earth, I should be most immune to its lure. This can't be any of its doing-what's going on here?
The bag over her shoulder clinked as its contents shifted. She was hungry, and thirsty, and she could feel the tingling effects of sunburn even through the sun block she'd carefully applied this morning. Her working tools seemed to get heavier by the moment. Nothing seemed farther from actuality just now than the cold perfection of her
sidhe
heritage.
At that moment, as if Nature Herself were goading Truth, a fat, cold marble of rain spattered against the back of her neck. It was followed by another, and another, as the storm finally broke. Within moments Truth was soaked to the skin, wet and freezing. It was, somehow, the last straw.
Hardly caring what she was doing, Truth seized the power of the storm, meaning to turn it upon the force that
was tormenting her. She felt the energy rise in her, crescendoing toward its climax, but before it reached its peak it was snatched away as if it had never been. As dark tidal forces sucked at Truth, she realized she'd managed to accomplish one thing here today.
She'd gotten the Gate's attention.
She struggled through the rain to the tree where the man—her lover, her father, her son—waited for her. Rain slicked back his flowing hair, plastered his shirt to his chest. He raised his eyes to hers; smiled and stretched out his hands.
She raised the hammer and the spike.
No!
Truth tried to pull herself free of the vision that was no vision—that was, in another space and time, reality. She might as well have tried to hold back the ocean. The hammered spike sheared down through flesh and tendon and bone—fire-hardened ash, it was, and he the sacrifice by oak and ash and thorn, as the ancient law demanded. She could smell the coppery-sharp scent of blood as she struck again and again, driving the spike into the wood of the living tree.
She raised her hand again, and
the face beneath the blood streaming down from the laced crown of holly and thorns was her father's.
She heard his voice, telling her it was all
right, that he was the sacrifice ordained, that this was his penance, but she could not bear it. Truth fought to stop herself as
the second spike was hammered through his other hand,
securing him to the tree.
Then she took up the knife, but it was not
her hand that held it.
She was the tool of a power far more terrible-it was the sidhe, whose Gates these were, whose anger had bound Thorne Blackburn to this eternal sacrifice and service.
Whose grant of power to their human servants demanded a
teind
be paid each generation.
“Father! Forgive
me!” Truth cried
,
and in her hand was a knife of polished bone.
She brought it down
… .
And the shock of its impact was the shock of her fall as Truth slammed into the ground, her foot tangled in a gorgon's-nest of branches. There was a blue-white shock of lightning overhead, and in its illumination she saw the road that led down to the general store only a few yards away.
Truth struggled to her knees, wiping her hands over and over again on her pants, but there was no blood on them, only water and mud.
What had she done?
Truth shook her head. Her sodden hair clung to her cheeks and neck. She'd done nothing—whatever had happened, it was a dream, a vision.
She had to get back. She had to talk to Dylan.
If only he'd listen.
Wycherly rolled over in the California King and checked his watch with a sigh, listening to the distant roll of thunder. All around him, Sinah's house thought its cool electric thoughts, performing all the tasks that insulated them from the outside world in a cocoon of cool dry silence … like a tomb.
Beside him Sinah slumbered heavily. He'd gotten her to take one of his sleeping pills, promising her sleep without dreams. Now she lay there, helpless and drugged, at the side of a man she'd known less than a week.
He could do anything he wanted to her. They'd probably never even find the body until the bones were picked clean. Who knew where she was, anyway?

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