Gravelight (23 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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“Sing for me, boy,” she said, ruffling the wolf's thick mane as she knelt beside him, and the grey wolf threw back its head and howled.
The lonely sound echoed from the pillars of the Gate and reverberated through the Otherworld. Truth felt the Gate stir to half-wakefulness at the call. The wolf howled again, and again. Truth waited until the last echo had died.
Waking or sleeping, Adept or innocent, alive or even newly dead, this Gate's keeper should have come in response to that summons—unless the Gate had no keeper now, and the bloodline was lost.
Truth got to her feet, sketching a symbol in the air to dismiss the grey wolf. It capered around her ankles for a few moments—its playfulness a response to the kindred power of the Gate—before loping away. Truth watched after it for a long time before she looked back at the Gate, wishing for a number of things, including that she had not just had a fight with Dylan.
The Gate must be closed. This truth was unambiguous. And its keeper had not come to her summoning. That left Truth to try to close it by herself.
She tried to feel optimistic.
She'd only done this once before, under circumstances that had left the events indelibly printed upon her mind. Truth reached out with every fibre of her being for the spellkeys that would let her lock this Gate. She reached for the fabric of the Gate itself—
And she could not grasp it. Again and again she reached for the reality behind the power cascading all around her, only to feel it slip from her grasp like smoke. It was her SELF that had been the lock of Shadow's Gate, made possible
by the bond of blood, but this Gate was not hers, and Truth could neither open nor close it.
Failure.
With a full working Blackburn Circle
and
five years of ritual preparation, Truth would have been willing to give it another try. The Blackburn work had been designed to affect the Gates, but without a woman of the dedicated line, even Thorne Blackburn himself could not close a Gate.
She had to find its Gatekeeper. But there was no Gatekeeper.
The Astral Plane was growing dim and shadowy around her, the Gate beginning to dwindle as etheric currents swept Truth away from it. In the world below, her body was tired, and she had learned all she could here and now.
Truth let the current pull her away from the Gate, and when she was far enough from its influence, she let herself fall free, back toward her body and the tyranny of the World of Form.
“Stop!”
Heedless of his ankle, Wycherly rushed across the floor and snatched the book bound in white leather out of Luned's hands just as she was about to feed it into the wood stove fire.
He didn't know what had awakened him; he'd come up out of a deep and uneasy sleep, heart hammering in panic. And it looked like he'd woken just in time.
Quickly he riffled through the pages, making sure that the book wasn't damaged. He cursed himself for leaving it where a witless mountain girl could stumble over it.
“Don't you ever take anything that belongs to me—do you understand?
Ever!
” he shouted at her.
Luned regarded him miserably. “It's
evil
, Mister Wych!”
But you were the one who looked inside, weren't you, girl?
a small voice inside Wycherly asked meanly.
His first panic faded and, the book safe in his hands, Wycherly looked—as always—to cover his tracks. Besides, he might need Luned's cooperation later, and right now she
looked like a scared rabbit, white-faced and staring. Tears streaked her cheeks and her hands shook. She stared toward the book as if Wycherly were holding a live adder in his hands.
He almost fancied he could hear her heart beat.
“It's all right,” he said, as gently as he could. “I know that it upset you. You called it evil; you're right. It is. But you have to understand, Luned, that things aren't always what they seem. Sometimes evil can be used in the service of good. I'm sorry you saw it. I wasn't expecting you back so soon. Just relax, Luned. I won't let anything hurt you.”
Wycherly felt oddly guilty, as though he was now responsible for some depravity that placed him more firmly in the power of one who did not wish him well. As if what he said to Luned could actually matter.
“It's an evil thing,” she repeated, less forcefully this time.
“You should get out more.” He pushed his guilty agreement—it
was
a nasty little grimoire—to the back of his mind, and wondered if Luned had ever seen a horror movie—and if not, what she'd make of one.
“Don't worry about it. It's nothing to do with you.”
Luned looked doubtful.
“What are you doing up here, anyway?” Wycherly said. He tucked the book into his waistband and closed his shirt over it.
She smiled with relief at the change of subject. “It's been nigh on two days since I've been here, and I expect you were perishing away here all by yourself.” She turned back to the open door of the stove, picking up the poker and giving the fire a ferocious jab, as it to prove her industry.
Wycherly forced himself to smile, and sat down at the kitchen table, preparing to exercise the not-inconsiderable family charm. He wanted something, after all. And if he turned her up sweet, maybe he could get her to bring him the car's registration and plates. Then nothing would tie him to the crash, except the word of a pack of backwoodsmen who probably didn't want to testify in court.
It was a clever thought, and it warmed Wycherly. It was something his father would have thought of.
“And when Mr. Tanner came up and got the icebox to running, he got the old pump to working, but I s'pect you wouldn't know what to do about things like that, and now I can make you a nice lunch, an wash up your clothes an all, an do for you, an you could take a bath and all—”
“Look,” Wycherly said hastily to stem the flow of domestic babble. “How about some breakfast? I don't know what there is, but—”
“You said you didn't eat breakfast, Mister Wych,” Luned said reproachfully.
That was before I wanted something
. A new cold sense of purpose guided his words, his thoughts, shaping his determination toward an as yet unknown goal. He trusted it because it was the path of least resistance, and because he couldn't see any danger in it.
At least not yet.
“Well, maybe I could manage some … biscuits? And coffee?” he added hopefully.
He smiled, and Luned smiled back, as if all she asked in the world was to cook him breakfast. Oddly, it made him think of Sinah, who had something of the same wistfulness in her expression but was a woman grown.
Fair game.
A few minutes later, Wycherly nursed a cup of coffee—brewed, not instant, and some of the best he'd ever had—as Luned made biscuits from scratch, fried up a skillet full of ham produced from a can, and then made red-eye gravy with coffee and flour. His ankle was better than it had been earlier this morning, but it throbbed sullenly, reminding him of its presence.
By then the inside of the cabin was like an oven; the dry heat of the stove battled the humid heat of the day to produce an overwhelming if curiously pleasant sensation. Luned pumped water when she made the coffee, and Wycherly drank two glasses full. Hydration, nutrition, exercise were the checklist for the recovering alcoholic.
He'd never felt less like an alcoholic—recovering or otherwise—in his life. Gingerly, he probed the edges of his consciousness. The black beast was gone. Camilla was gone. In their place was an undigested sense of promise, of forthcoming delights that verged on terror.
Power.
Luned produced breakfast; it was easier to choke down than Wycherly had anticipated, and easy to refuse the proffered beer. In fact, he ate with a flicker of real appetite, his mind trying ideas as though he were a mechanic sorting through a toolbox for a part that would fit.
“I twisted my ankle when I was out walking the other day,” Wycherly began.
Luned, sitting opposite him, was chasing the last dregs of gravy around her blue enamel plate with a scrap of biscuit. She glanced up, her mobile face filled with worry and curiosity.
“It's fine now, more or less. It happened up at the sanatorium. What do you know about the place, incidentally?”
His unsubtle feint would not have disarmed a more sophisticated subject, but Luned readily accepted the bait. Filled with her own importance, she told him what he already knew: that it had burned in 1917.
“—and ever'body said that Attie Dellon was the one as set the fire, since it was on Dellon land but her brother never could hold his likker and he sold off ever'thing from their stead on up to the Watchtower to that flatlander man, and wasn't nobody surprised when Arioch went off down to the bottom of French Lick and busted his fool neck, but Attie couldn't get the land back nohow, even if she sacrificed her own blood sister to Mr. Splitfoot to make Quentin Blackburn fall down dead of the ague!”
“Quentin Blackburn?” The name made Wycherly sit up and take notice, but Luned didn't seem to notice his increased interest.
“That was the flatlander's name, hear tell. And the sheriff—” she pronounced it “shurf,” slurring the syllables together in the clipped mountain dialect “—he come and took
Attie Dellon up and didn't bring her home for a week, but couldn't nobody find hide nor hair of Miss Jael, and her brother done fell down and bust his neck while she was behind iron bars,” Luned finished in an awestruck rush.
“Well,” Wycherly said. “That would seem to settle it.” The unsolicited corroboration of Quentin Blackburn's existence made his heart beat faster with excitement, as if it made the rest of the events more plausible. He discarded Luned's insistence on Satanic rituals, though … for the moment.
“Wouldn't nobody in the Fork talk to her after she'd done murdered her own kin like that, and then when Wildwood burnt and she went with it, her Mellie got took in by Reverend Goodbook, only she was wild as her ma an' took up with the conjure-man just as soon as she was a woman grown. And then her daughter Rahab become the witch-woman after Thomas Carpenter was called to glory, and
she
was Miss Attie's mother.”
Wycherly reflected that any woman raised by a clergyman who named her daughter Rahab was probably making something in the nature of a personal statement.
“But Attie … Athanais, was it? … Dellon came back to Morton's Fork after the sheriff released her?” Wycherly asked, wanting to make sure of his facts.
Luned looked at him with awe. “How'd you know what her right name was, Mister Wych? Miss Attie was a witch-woman like all the Dellon girls—all their kind is wicked as sin, and we don't want none of that here in the Fork,” Luned finished piously.
Wycherly hesitated between chiding Luned for believing in witches, and telling her that he'd been with Athanais' great-great-granddaughter (he guessed it would be) just last night. But neither statement would serve him—nor would questions about why the locals hadn't driven the family out a few generations earlier.
“You seem to have some use for witches here, though,” he said instead.
Luned turned wide, pale blue eyes on him and laughed.
“Oh, Mister Wych—
you're
not a witch. You're a conjureman.
That's
all right—we hain't had one of them for years either, but we don't mind if you've come to stay.”
“I don't understand,” Wycherly said, probing. “Why is it okay for me to be here and not Athanais Dellon?”
Or her descendant.
Luned bounded to her feet as if he'd offended her. “You're just funnin' with me,” she said uncertainly. “You aren't anything like her. You've got the Lord Jesus on your right hand and Old Scratch under your left foot, like the old-time prophets. But her—wherever she is a pit just naturally opens up among the kingdoms of the Earth, just like for the Scarlet Woman.”
The combination of prim disapproval and Biblical language culled from Sunday sermons made Wycherly smile. The “she” Luned referred to must be Sinah—of course Luned would have met her, or at least know she was here.
He felt a faint qualm when he thought about Sinah. She'd be awake now, wondering where he was.
She'd better get used to my unreliability early
, Wycherly told himself brutally. But was that really true anymore? If the beast was gone …
No, he assured himself after the flash of panic. It wasn't gone. It was only dormant, plotting some fresh new horror. Things could not have changed that much. He took a deep breath, holding his right hand out in front of him.
It did not tremble.

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