Gravelight (33 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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“And do you have any idea of how to shut your Wildwood Gate?” Dylan asked gently.
Truth glanced at him then, startled by his insight. The question was more of a concession than she'd expected from him—a willingness to meet her on her own ground, if only theoretically. Perhaps Dylan, too, mourned for what they were losing.
“No,” Truth admitted, though the honesty cost her. “I don't. But going up there with Sinah Dellon is the first step
to finding out. You can't build theories without facts, remember?”
“Fair enough,” Dylan said. “And in that case, you'll want an impartial observer with you. You know that I want more proof before going along with your particular theory—but I'm willing to take a look.”
Truth bit back her immediate response.
Dylan's presence was the last thing in the world that Truth wanted: a non-Adept—someone who could be manipulated by the power of the Wildwood Gate in just the way that he thought Truth would be by a simple haunting. But Dylan was still thinking like a scientist, intent upon verification and proof.
Still? Dylan was a scientist—he always would be. When had
she
stopped requiring objective proof for the things she saw?
When I realized they were real.
Truth bowed her head, as if in defeat.
“Truth?” Dylan said.
“What?” She'd been swept away by her own melancholy thoughts, and came back to the moment with a jolt. “I guess you're going to come along then,” she said slowly.
And may all your gods help you, Dylan, when I'm the one proven right.
“But that isn't all I did today,” Truth went on hastily, to change the subject before she heard Dylan's reply. There was something she'd almost forgotten to mention to Dylan.
Something he might actually be useful for
, a small part of her mind sniped spitefully. She drew a deep breath. “I came across something rather curious—and rather nasty. I'd like your opinion on it.”
She dug through her purse until she found the book again—it was at the bottom of her bag, since she'd thrown it in first—and drew it out. The blood-stained newsprint wrapping it was crumpled and rather ragged by now, but it covered the book well enough.
“Tell me what you think of this,” she said neutrally, setting the bundle down on the table between them.
Dylan unwrapped it, as carefully as if he thought it might bite. “Yuck,” he said, when he saw the blood-soaked cover. “Is all this blood?”
“I don't know,” Truth said. “It might be. Wycherly had cut his hand pretty badly when I saw him. It's probably that.”
“Wycherly?” Dylan said, flipping quickly through the book.
“Wycherly
Musgrave
—Winter's brother.”
“Oh. The adult-onset RSPK you worked with last year,” Dylan said, placing the reference. “And he had this? What's he doing out here?”
“Well, he's living in the old Dellon cabin—not the place Sinah has—and trying to practice Black Magick, at least from what I could tell,” Truth said. The memory of the nastiness she'd encountered in that cabin made her pull a wry face.
“Sinah says the book is hers, but as far as I could tell, she didn't have much interest in it. Wycherly was obsessed by it, though; when he found out I'd taken it, he was almost raving.”
“I see you managed to fend him off, though,” Dylan said absently. “I'm glad you brought this back—it disappeared from the Special Collection about five years ago. The Atheling translation isn't all that rare, but it's damned expensive to replace—and it isn't the sort of thing I'd want running around loose, either.”
“What is it?” Truth asked. “Some kind of grimoire, I'd guess?”
Dylan grinned at her. “Do you want the Cook's Tour, darling? I warn you, it could be rather lengthy.”
Truth smiled back, warmed as much as saddened by the fragile camaraderie. Once she and Dylan had been able to talk about almost anything—when had she started to weigh her words with him?
“Tell me everything,” Truth said honestly. “I'm fascinated.”
“All right.” Dylan smiled at her and then drew his face into an expression of professorial dignity.
“Late in the sixteen hundreds a young relative of King Louis of France became obsessed with finding the survivals of pre-Christian worship that he was sure must exist among the peasants on his own lands.
“To begin with, you must understand that the lands he held were in the Languedoc, which has been Christian longer than most of the rest of Europe, although it's generally also been known as a hotbed of Christian heresy for most of that time. In any event, whatever it was that the Comte d'Erlette found when he went looking, what he eventually circulated in manuscript as a faithful report of his peasants' activities was a peculiar mixture of blasphemy and demonolatry.”
“Demonolatry—worshipping demons, not evoking them?” Truth asked. Despite her mandate as Gatekeeper and Grey Angel, the occult was not her field of study, and she frankly found classic ritual magick's endless obsession with the names of demons pretty boring.
“Got it in one,” Dylan said. “Whether the Comte stumbled onto one of the Black Virgin cults common in Western Europe and completely misunderstood what he saw, whether he made it all up out of dope-dreams, or whether some of what he saw was actually there is something we'll never know. A few years after he started circulating the manuscript, d'Erlette vanished. The manuscript survived, as those things tend to, which brings us to The Church of the Antique Rite.”
“Antique Rite?
Which
Antique Rite?” Truth asked. As names went, that one was about as generic as they came.
“The ones in
Les Cultes des Goules,
apparently, which is what our unfortunate French Comte titled his manuscript,” Dylan said. “The Church of the Antique Rite's practices are probably based on the descriptions in
Les Cultes
des Goules—
although we can't be absolutely sure. What we do know is that at least some of the cultists migrated to the New World and managed to flourish here and
there around New England, as much as that sort of thing ever does. You'll find mentions of them now and again in local histories, mostly hopelessly garbled.
“I imagine most of the congregations stuck to drugs and orgies, and didn't go in for the Comte's vision of wholesale human sacrifice—that's a lot less common both through history and today than TV news would like to think. The rest of the Church's development and history is really only of interest to a specialist, but I could go into it, if you'd like.”
“No, thanks,” Truth said frankly. “Call it vanity if you have to, but the Blackburn Work and what it stands for seems light-years away from … that.” The memory of Wycherly's red-rimmed glaring eyes was suddenly vivid. “Does anyone actually do this sort of thing today?” Truth asked, poking at the blood-stained book with a wary finger.
Dylan shrugged. “I doubt it—but we wouldn't know if they did, because damn near everything the cult prescribes is utterly illegal. I think Hunter Greyson did a paper on the history of the cult while he was at Taghkanic—you might want to give him a call.”
“Hmm,” Truth said, not wanting to commit herself to any particular course of action. And
Les Cultes
was less her business than the Wildwood Gate was, anyway, though the book seemed to be bad medicine indeed for a vulnerable and unbalanced personality like Wycherly's.
“Let's see how tomorrow goes,” Truth suggested. She would have liked to be more grateful for even this small recovery of the harmony she'd once taken for granted, but she knew that tomorrow's events would probably smash it into a thousand pieces.
You ought to have asked that woman to come to dinner and bring her friends,
Sinah thought, but even so simple an expression of hospitality seemed to be beyond her strength. Once Truth had left she'd retreated to her bed—as if she were a wounded animal retreating to its burrow—and now hovered between waking and sleeping. The scene with
Wycherly had left her aching with grief, and all Truth Jourdemayne's talk about ley lines, ancient power spots, and opened and closed Gates made a threatening and incomprehensible muddle in her mind.
Sinah thrashed fretfully, tangling the covers around her in an uncomfortable knot, sliding through dreams where she awaited judgment by an English court that had been dust for three hundred years into a waking where she knew she had gambled her heart and her sanity on an attempt to discover who she really was … and lost them both. Now the curse that defined her life faded away into the memories of all those other lives, as Sinah's fierce sense of self dissolved, leaving her to become only the latest child of the bloodline, Guardian of the Wellspring.
She didn't even have the energy to condemn the idea of her transformation as foolish nonsense. The one thought that rode uppermost in her thoughts was that the Wellspring—Truth called it Wildwood Gate—must be guarded, protected. And Truth threatened that, both with her knowledge of the bloodline's secrets and her desire to meddle.
But if she closed the Gate—sealed the Wellspring away from human contact—wouldn't that make it safe, too? And then no one else would have to die … .
Soft—weak—spineless—
The first Athanais' scorn scoured her, making Sinah writhe in anguish on her restless bed. Abruptly she sat upright, unsure what had pulled her to the surface of sleep. Some noise outside—raccoons or foxes? The phone? The phone was her link to the outside world, the world of sanity and common sense. She should use it; pick up the phone, call someone.
Sinah ran her hand fretfully through her hair. Call who? And what could she tell them—that she'd discovered she was some sort of hereditary druid who'd gotten back to her ancestral home just in time to sacrifice a fresh crop of virgins? That there wasn't any Sinah Dellon—or if there was, she was only an empty vessel, to be filled by the memories of generations of guardians?
Why was I born, if it was for this?
She rested her head
in her hands, only to be roused from her misery by the sound of a car's engine starting up.
Not even stopping to grab her robe, Sinah ran downstairs and flung open the door. She was just in time to see the Jeep Cherokee's taillights receding into the darkness as it drove away.
“Wycherly!” Sinah shouted uselessly.
It was him—she knew that even if she could not see or feel him. Who else could it have been?
When she turned back into the house she saw her disheveled purse lying open on the couch. Wycherly must have come in while she drowsed fitfully upstairs, found her purse, and taken the Jeep Cherokee's keys.
She sat down and slowly began to put her purse back in order. Wycherly's actions baffled rather than angered her. She would have loaned him the Jeep Cherokee if he'd asked—or driven him anywhere he wanted to go, since she wasn't sure Wycherly was really a safe driver these days. Surely he knew he had only to ask.
Unless he no longer trusted her.
Sinah didn't have to see into Wycherly's mind to know what lay there: He thought she'd lied to him, and her pitifully inept—too little, too late—confession of how she knew what she did had been misunderstood, only serving to implicate her even further in his eyes. He was convinced that he was responsible for the Starking girl's disappearance—
And he wasn't. It was her—the bloodline—the Wellspring. The time for the Great Sacrifice of one of the blood-line grew near, and she'd done nothing to protect the people from the influence of the power. She who could raise up the dead, heal the sick, call spirits, and quicken wombs by the power of that portal into the spirit realms, had failed in this simplest of her tasks.
With a moan, Sinah buried her face in her hands. She could no longer distinguish between fact and wild imagination. She was losing her mind. She didn't know what
was real any more. She wasn't psychic—she probably couldn't even read people's minds.
And there wasn't a wizard's cave up on the mountain that demanded human sacrifices every summer when the moon was full.
But there was.
She knew there was. And until she gave it its due sacrifice, no one was safe.
No one was safe at all.
“I had a bad night,” Sinah said, in answer to Truth's look of shock at her appearance. She knew she looked terrible—the chameleon who'd dazzled producers and audiences with her charisma was revealed at last as a wan little hedgewren, all her illicit fairy glamour stripped away. A few hours ago she'd managed to pull on last night's discarded clothes, but they hung on her, slovenly and unkempt, as though she'd somehow lost a dozen pounds between yesterday and today. She hadn't even been able to manage perfunctory makeup.
“Come in,” Sinah said dutifully, though every word was an effort.

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