Gravelight (47 page)

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Authors: Marion Zimmer Bradley

BOOK: Gravelight
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“Okay. It's ready. Dylan, can you help me carry Wycherly into the middle of the circle? Without smudging the figure too much, if possible, but having drawn it is the most important thing.”
Truth's voice shook slightly as she spoke—she hoped it was with cold, not fear. Fear was death to an Adept.
“What is it you have in mind?” Dylan asked, neutrally.
“We're going to do a full Blackburn Working, the nine powers and the four summonings, all the way up to the Opening of the Way, and reverse it. It's the only thing I can think of,” Truth said baldly.
“Aren't you twelve people and two weeks short?” Dylan asked. So he did know the Work as well as she thought.
“Yes. I think I have a way around that.”
I only hope it works.
“Okay, let's take it slowly this time,” Truth said, keeping her voice level and encouraging.
The four of them were huddled together in the center of the chalk figure on the floor, sitting so close that their knees
touched. Wycherly was propped up between Truth and Sinah—Truth would not have chosen to use a sick man unable to give his consent, but she had no choice. They were out of time.
Time … it was a meaningless construct in the Otherworld. Minutes here could seem to be hours there. Or … days. In the Otherworld, there was all the time they needed to learn what they must.
“Dylan, Sinah, I want you both to try to breathe together. Sinah, you've done this before—don't fight it this time. Let it pass over you as if it were a dream. Dylan, I don't know what you'll see; you might just fall asleep. You can think of this as lucid dreaming, if that helps you work with it.”
“Okay,” Dylan said calmly. “I'll do my best to hit an alpha state, but it's not easy when you're freezing to death.”
“Just do your best,” Truth told him. Gratitude welled up in her for his gift of calm trust when she needed it most. “Sinah?”
“I'm ready,” the actress said. “Break a leg, Truth.”
Truth smiled. “We'll start with something very mundane: a simple hypnotic induction. I'm going to count backward from one hundred, and I want both of you to count with me. Visualize a staircase that you're descending.”
“Not hard, all things considered. I think I'm going to be seeing those stairs in my sleep,” Dylan said.
“Fine. When you get to the bottom, you'll be at the Gate. One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight …”
And in a world where reality was a by-product of the Will, surely Truth could will the Circle, the Sign, and all the rest into being with her desire alone?
Because she
had
to.
BEYOND THE GRAVE
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
——ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
“I CALL UPON YOU, BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE ART, by the blood we share—lend me your power in my father's name!”
There was a flickering moment when Truth was sure that it had worked, when she could feel the braided energies of the other three mingled with her own and with something far greater, all directed by her will. Then they were gone, slithering out of her psychic grasp and leaving her …
Alone.
Try again, Truth thought, and willed her consciousness back to the physical world.
It didn't work.
Her eyes still opened on a landscape of pale mist, sea and sky … .
And another presence. An inhuman one.
Truth could not gaze at it directly. It was a flicker of light, a discontinuity in the world, as far outside Truth's conception of the natural realm as the Otherworld itself
was outside the average person's. Yet it was sentient, self-willed and purposeful.
“You seek the key,” the shining figure said. “Have you the courage to step through the door and take it?”
There was no door—yes, there was. As the wordless question formed in Truth's mind, she was aware of a threefold echo—the others. But she must concentrate on what was before her: trap, or opportunity?
Truth looked through the door. Beyond, on a plinth of black stone, lay a silver key as long as her arm.
“Yes.”
Truth stepped forward, and passed through the door.
He was dreaming, Dylan assured himself, dreaming lightly, so that the awareness of the dream-state was superimposed on the images he saw. Was this what Truth meant when she spoke of traveling to the Otherworld, the Astral Plane that so many psychics talked about? If it was, the Astral Plane—like so many realities—was disappointing after the grandiloquent images conjured up by its description.
Dylan stood in the corridor outside his office at the Bidney Institute, and Miles Godwin, the current Director, was standing in front of his door.
“You seek the key,” Miles said. “Have you the courage to step through the door and take it?”
Yes, he was dreaming, and this wasn't getting them anywhere. He must be heading for Stage Three sleep, but Dylan supposed he should wait for Truth to wake him up. He'd agreed to go along with her playacting, even if it was ridiculous.
The cruel honesty of his thoughts shocked Dylan, though not enough to rouse him to the surface of wakefulness. He'd always respected Truth, even at her most maddening—when had he started dismissing her perceptions as those of a deluded child? He'd seen things for which there was no rational explanation—couldn't this be one?
“Have you the courage?” Miles said again.
Oh, what the hell,
Dylan thought, about to walk into his office
. Sure I do.
But did he? He didn't have the courage to tell his fiancée she'd become a babbling lunatic, did he? And she'd warned him, promised him, pleaded with him …
And that made him a coward. He wasn't brave at all. He was a coward. His little box of scientific open-mindedness was another safe way of not thinking about anything outside it. He'd just drawn the boundaries a little wider than most people's, that was all.
So.
He might owe this attempt to Truth, but Dylan owed it more to himself—to the memory of the brave and open-minded man he'd once thought he was.
In the way of dreams, all this introspection had taken only a moment. The man still stood, facing Dylan in front of his office door. The figure didn't look like Miles now—like someone, but who?
“I don't have the courage,” Dylan said. “But I have the will. And I want the key.”
Now Dylan was standing alone in front of the open door to his office. Inside, on a desk that was simultaneously his own familiar desk and a black double cube, lay a bright copper key as long as his arm:
Dylan stepped forward.
He was moving. Wycherly lay, eyes closed, drifting at the behest of whatever power pulled him forward. Only the sudden tardy realization that the droning was a car engine—he was asleep at the wheel!—made him open his eyes.
But he wasn't in the front seat—he was curled up sideways on the tiny back seat. It was night, and the headlights of oncoming cars turned the raindrops on the windshield to spangles of light.
This was his car. It had been a birthday present and a bribe—he'd just completed six months of sobriety in the course of his third clinic in the last three years.
He was nineteen.
“No,” Wycherly said, struggling to sit up in the Fiat's cramped confines. Had everything else been a dream?
“You awake, Wych?” Camilla Redford said, turning around in the front passenger seat to look at him. Her voice was slurred—she'd been drinking, he'd been drinking, they'd all been drinking. There'd been a party at Randy Benson's house: Wycherly didn't remember all the details.
Who was driving the car? Wycherly sat up, pushing Camilla down in her seat, painfully aware that the Fiat was going much too fast, starting to drift sideways. He caught a glimpse of a blond head—the driver behind the wheel—just as the car hit the edge of the embankment with a sharp shock and went careening down the side.
There was a brief, breathless moment when it seemed that everything would be all right, before any of the passengers realized where they were. Then the car began to fill with water.
Wycherly was terrified. This was the crash that had killed Cammie, and this time he was the one who was going to drown. Wycherly struggled to be somewhere, anywhere but here—and suddenly it was as if he slid like smoke through the car's roof, hovering above the scene.
The moon had been full that night. Now Wycherly's mind allowed him to place the scene properly in the past, and the moon illuminated the scene with a ghostly azure radiance, spectrally bright. It had rained earlier, a brief August shower, but the sky was clear now. Wycherly could see the white Fiat below, its roof just above the surface of the water. Soon it would slip sideways into deeper water, rolling onto its side.
The driver's-side door thrust open, and Wycherly saw the blond who had been driving struggle out of the car, dragging the back seat passenger with him as he struggled toward the shore. Dragging Wycherly.
The shock of recognition jarred Wycherly loose from his peaceful vantage point, and all at once he was lying on
gravel staring up at the stars. Randy Benson was standing over him, crying.
“I can't be here. I can't. My dad has plans for me,” Randy moaned.
Randy and Wycherly hadn't seen much of each other before tonight, but Wycherly had heard about him—the golden boy: athlete, straight-A student, scion of a family that could number senators and signers of the Declaration of Independence among its ancestors. A son, Wycherly's father had told him, that any father would be proud to have. A son like Kenny Jr. should have been.
Like Wycherly should have been.
The Fiat slid further beneath the surface. Camilla was still inside. She'd stay there until the wrecker arrived and pulled the car out of the river.
“She's dead. Oh, God—she's dead. I can't be here,” Randy said again. Tears still ran down his face, but sheer terror had stopped his crying. “She's dead—but you? You're a drunk, a loser. Nobody cares about you. And your dad can buy you off.”
Randy stepped back into the water—clever, clever, not to leave any tracks for the police in case Wycherly remembered something later. In a moment he was gone from sight, and Wycherly lay, looking up at the stars, waiting for the sirens to start.
Randy was the driver. RANDY. Wycherly hadn't even been at the wheel.
The realization worked slowly through him like the dose of a drug. Wycherly hadn't been driving that night. It had been Randy, not Wycherly, who had killed Camilla Redford.
He was innocent. He'd always been innocent.
“Do you want the key, Wycherly?” his father said.
Wycherly sat up. It was cold here on the gravel and he shivered. Kenneth Musgrave, Sr. was standing beside him, gazing down at Wycherly with his usual expression of impatience and distaste—as though Wycherly wasn't good enough.
But he never would be, would he? Nothing Wycherly
could do would be enough for his father. And the golden god that had been held up to him as the measure of perfection was just as far from perfection as Wycherly himself—flawed, fallible … murderer.
“You want the key,” his father said. “Have you the courage to step through the door and take it?”
The key. He'd been searching for the key all his life.
Kenneth Musgrave pointed out over the water.
Wycherly looked. He'd thought it had already sunk, but he'd been wrong. The Fiat was still riding fairly high. Cammie's head must still be above water. And on the driver's seat somehow he could see the gleam of a gold key as long as his arm.
Wycherly hesitated, pure panic gripping him. He could save her. He could get the key. But to do it meant going out into the water where the monsters were. As he faltered, he saw a thick ripple in the surface of the river.
There was something out there.
It didn't work. Sinah had been whipsawed by too many strong emotions in the last twenty-four hours to feel anything more than weariness. She got stiffly to her feet, wincing as cramped muscles protested. She'd almost thought the elaborate theatrics Truth had gone through this time had a chance of working, but here they were: same damp cave, same running water, same flickering candlelight.
“Ah. And do you find our cribbage to your liking, pretty maid?” a voice said.
Sinah spun around—and stared into the eyes of Athanais de Lyon.
She was standing in a cell. There were wisps of straw on the floor. Sinah drew a panicked breath, and almost choked on the smells of rot and sewage. She prayed to wake up, knowing as she did that this could not be a dream. Surely—if this were a dream—surely she would not be able to smell things?
“Do you seek the key?” Athanais asked. She threw back her head and laughed.
This is too real
, Sinah thought, clawing desperately for her sanity. Athanais was wearing a seventeenth-century gown that looked like something out of Richard Lester's Three
Musketeers.
The dress was made of bright yellow satin, and when it had been clean and new it must have accented Athanais' red-haired, green-eyed beauty to perfection.
But now the gown was tattered and soiled, its hem black and draggled. Rats scuttled in the corners of the cell; a stinking tallow candle dripped fatly down into the receiver of a battered pewter candlestick. There was a rhythmic thudding going on outside the cell, and against her will and her better judgment, Sinah went toward the window.
“'Tis the gallows they build, madame—a fit end for those who have not the courage to seek the key!” Athanais cawed.
It was true. Sinah stood on a chair and looked through the small barred window. In the square below, their work lit by torches, men worked to build a gibbet large enough to hang half a dozen people at once.
A fit end to a witch—and wasn't that what Sinah was? A woman who used her special powers to her own advantage, living in a world of privilege while those around her struggled through obstacles and imperfection? Who rejoiced in others' failures, knowing that she'd had a hand in them, standing aloof while others floundered.
“What … key?” Sinah said slowly, stepping down from the chair. She was trapped in this Nightmare on Elm Street dream sequence, and she couldn't see any way out. If she died here, did she die in reality?
Athanais was standing beside the door to the cell.
“You seek the key,” she said. “Have you the courage to step through the door and take it?”

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