Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (62 page)

 
          
"I
knew you'd come," Hunter Greyson said at his back.

 
          
"Why
didn't you tell me what you were doing?" Colin asked, not turning around.

 
          
"You
wouldn't have liked it."

 
          
Grey
walked around from behind him, casually stepping into the painted sigil and
across it. He lit the propane lantern sitting on the table, and the room was
filled with a hissing and a blue-white light.

 
          
"You're
right. I wouldn't have. And you knew the reasons why, or you would never have
taken such pains to conceal it." The strongest emotion Colin was aware of
at that moment was outraged pride; that the student he'd invested so much time
in had callously discounted his warnings. Paradoxically, it was the
selfishness of the emotion that allowed him to transcend it.

 
          
He'd
fallen prey to this sensation of outrage before, but Colin knew now that it was
misplaced pride. And he would not let pride blind him again.

 
          
"I
knew you'd find out. Five people can't keep a secret, and I figured you'd see
our Circle on the Astral eventually, even if nothing else busted us."

 
          
Though
Grey was doing his best to act as if he didn't care, Colin could tell he was
upset and fighting not to show it. The shoulders of his fringed leather jacket
were dark with melted snow, and the legs of his jeans were wet. He must have
hiked here from Taghkanic.

           
"So you've gotten as far as
that?" Colin asked, trying not to sound incredulous. The
Astral
Temple
—
the work of a group of
Initiates concentrating together on a single image
—
was fairly advanced ritual
work for a group of neophytes.

 
          
"We've
been working together for about a year. I really thought you'd find out before
now." There was no triumph in Grey's voice, though his hair and his
clothes gave him a casual resemblance to a haughty Elflands courtier.

 
          
A
year! This was no casual dabbling, then. Colin pushed his emotions away with a
surgeon's discipline, working to keep his mind clear for the questions he must
ask, for both their sakes.

 
          
"I
wasn't looking for something like this from you, Grey. I thought I'd given you
a better basic grounding than this ..."
dangerous trash,
Colin's
mind supplied, but he kept his mouth shut.

 
          
"You
gave me the background, but magick evolves. In the twentieth century, for the
first time in thousands of years, it's possible to study and question what we
do and why we do it. To develop new methods, to restore our knowledge of old
ones. To bring back everything that was lost when Atlantis fell___ "

 
          
"Some
things should stay lost," Colin said unequivocally. "In the name of
the Light, Grey, who taught you this?"

 
          
Grey
shrugged, the mute adolescent resistance reminding Colin of how young the boy
was.

 
          
"I
bought some books. I didn't start out to do this, but I liked what
Blackburn
was saying, and it made
sense to me." He looked up at Colin, and the older man could see the hope
plain on Grey's face. "If you could only see what I've seen . . . the
Blackburn Work is about reconciliation
—
nobody's perfect, as the
saying goes, but somewhere in the world there's always something to supply what
we lack. And with enough iterations of Balance we obtain the leverage with
which to act consciously, and not just in blind reaction to whether something
is White or Black. And through
that
action, we obtain the power to open
the Gate Between the Worlds, and reconcile the worlds of Men and Gods,
supplying our ultimate lack."

 
          
The
honest idealism, the sincerity, in Grey's voice tempted Colin to agree with him
that what he was doing was right. But the bright promises the
Blackburn
work made were only a
gilded mask over the foulest of realities.

 
          
"You're
talking about hastening the action of entropy," Colin told him curtly.

 
          
The
ultimate goal of entropy
—
if a mindless force could be said to have a goal
—
was the redaction of all
forces to homeostatic equity, reversing the separation of all things and their
opposites that had transpired at the beginning of time.

 
          
"I'm
talking about supplying our lack and perfecting our Selves," Grey said.
"It's the goal of the Great Work, isn't it?"

 
          
"You
know that it is. And you know as well that this is
not
the Great Work,
but a treacherous shortcut leading to a dead end.
Blackburn
's rituals are Black Magick
of the worst sort
—
the sort cloaked in good intentions. He believed that the
tools of the Shadow could be used in the service of the Light, and he was
wrong. Power always
—
ultimately
—
corrupts."

 
          
"You're
saying that the Light has no power," Grey pointed out. He looked down,
fiddling with the fringe on his jacket in a way that betrayed his nervousness
more than he would have wanted to admit.

 
          
"That's
Jesuitical logic and you know it," Colin answered. He could hear the anger
in his own voice and wished it weren't there. "I'm saying that the Light
has built-in safeguards against the misuse of power that the Shadow
—
and the Blackburn Work
—
does not. Thorne was the
most arrogant man I ever knew
—
"
saving present company, alas "
—
and he refused to believe
that the Laws of the Path could ever apply to him."

 
          
"You
knew Thorne Blackburn?" Grey asked, looking up. The expression on his face
and his tone of voice both suggested incredulity.

 
          
"Yes,"
Colin said shortly. He refused to feed Grey's obvious hero-worship with any
tales of the "great man." What Grey had managed already, without
outside help, was bad enough. "And maybe you'll believe me when I tell you
that this so-called Blackburn Work is flawed, dangerous, and ultimately useless."

 
          
"You
don't know that," Grey said stubbornly.

 
          
"You
must think that one of us is pretty stupid," Colin snapped. "How many
ways do I have to say it?
These rituals are dangerous."

 
          
"We're
being careful," Grey persisted.

 
          
"You
—
yes, maybe. When things go
wrong,
you
might notice before it's quite too late and get yourself out
of harm's way. But what about your friends? Or do you just mean to sacrifice
them to your ambitions?" His change of tactic had scored off the younger
man
—
Grey
looked visibly upset now.

 
          
"It
isn't like that! Why do you have to keep painting everything in terms of black
and white?" Grey cried passionately.

 
          
"Because
they are," Colin heard himself say inexorably. The next words were on the
tip of his tongue: to issue Grey an ultimatum
—
to threaten him with
expulsion from the institute's program
—
to demand immediate compliance.

 
          
But
that wouldn't work. If Grey did not abandon the Shadow freely and in full
knowledge, he would not have abandoned it at all, no matter what his actions
were.

 
          
"But
we can talk about that somewhere else," Colin said, more gently.
"Just don't tell me you rode your bike out here today; I don't think my
heart can stand the strain."

 
          
"I
walked," Grey said, relief at the change of subject plain in his voice.
"Well, I hitched a ride as far as the turnoff with Ramsey; he was going
down into Rhinebeck."

 
          
And
how were you planning to get back?
Colin found himself thinking with the
unromantic sensibility of age. But youth never worried about "getting
back" or any other form of retreat and retrenchment. Youth was immortal.

 
          
"Well,
let me give you a ride back to the college. Make no mistake, Grey
—
we
are
going to talk
about this again. I disapprove very strongly, but you knew that when you
decided to start down this road. There's no point in the two of us standing
here shouting like action movie heroes and one of us walking home in the
snow."

 
          
It
was an anticlimactic end to an emotional confrontation, and Grey's face showed
a certain disappointment.

 
          
"Aren't
you going to deliver an ultimatum?" he demanded. "Wave a flaming
sword? Banish me?"

 
          
"What
good would that do?" Colin answered.

 
          
As
much as Colin yearned to grab Hunter Greyson by the scruff of the neck and
shake all the nonsense out of him in the weeks that followed, he restrained
himself. Grey couldn't
—
or wouldn't
—
articulate to Colin just what drew him to the Blackburn
Work, leaving Colin with the muddled sense of the Blackburnites as a
self-appointed Occult Police, interfering in other people's lives in order to
redress their subjective perceptions of a Balance that was out of whack.

 
          
The
other members of the Circle
—
Janelle Baker, Ramsey Miller, Grey's girlfriend Winter,
and, much to Colin's dismay, Cassilda Chandler, the student for whom he'd had
such high hopes
—
were probably only drawn into the Blackburn Work through
friendship. None of them except Cassie was taking any of the parapsych courses,
though Winter had audited a few of Colin's lectures after she'd begun to date
Grey.

 
          
Because
the stakes were so high, Colin reviewed the material that Grey had followed but
the picture he formed of the Blackburn Work didn't become much clearer than the
one he'd held that day at
Nuclear
Lake
.

 
          
When
Colin had known him, Thorne had stressed gnosis through ritual and
enlightenment through direct communion with Outer Plane entities
—
about as safe for novices
as sticking a wet finger into a light socket, and about as informative. But
Thorne had never cared about safety and had stressed apotheosis through
misinformation. The combination made the
Blackburn
rituals devastatingly
perilous when they worked at all
—
which they often didn't. Much of Thome's writing, including
the final rituals of the Opening of the Way, had been lost in the chaos
following his death. Possibly the key to his philosophy had been lost there as
well.

 
          
But
stop Grey's preoccupation with the Work, and Colin did not think that any of
the others would continue with the Circle. Colin found himself with grounds for
hoping that this infatuation with Blackburnism would burn itself out in the way
of any puppy love. All he had to do was win Grey back to the Light, and the
matter would end there.

 
          
Colin
was certain of it.

 
          
As
winter melted into spring, Grey began to relax and become more forthcoming
again. He would be graduating this spring, but he was expecting to go on to his
Master's for the teaching certificate he wanted. The scholarship money would
stop when he took his BA, but there were a couple of TA positions he could
fill to take up that slack, and Colin was expecting to have Grey in his summer
lecture series as well.