Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Toller Hasloch had been destroyed, for now and for Ever, as surely and completely as though he had never been born.

  The apartment seemed icy when Colin opened his eyes. Automatically he checked his watch. Less than ten minutes had passed since he’d opened the front door. Hasloch was still breathing, but Colin knew that now it was only an automatic reflex.

  He was shaken to the core of his being by what he had learned. Hasloch was not a mortal soul, a spark begotten of the Light, but a Zeitgeist given human form. Colin was not certain what effect his binding would have upon an artificial soul. Would the chains he had forged hold such a creature?

  Had they even been necessary at all?

  It is done past all undoing, Colin told himself brutally. Now all that remains is to see that no innocents are harmed by what I have done here.

  Working quickly, Colin unbound Hasloch from the chair and dragged him back into the bedroom, wadding the tape up in his pocket and replacing the chair in its place in the living room.

  It wasn’t enough to fool an experienced police officer if foul play was suspected, but now the apartment wouldn’t immediately scream “murder scene” when the body was discovered.

  The body.

  Colin suddenly felt every one of his fifty-two years and more. More than anything the outside world could bestow, he realized, he had always valued his good opinion of himself, and today he had lost it forever. He had perverted the teachings that had been entrusted to him. He had used them to kill.

  He did not question why he felt it so necessary to cover his tracks—to get away with murder when all his Order’s training had been that an individual should accept full responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

  But half an hour’s work had rendered the apartment once more much as he had found it, and at a little past six in the morning, Colin MacLaren exited the building on Central Park South as silently and unnoticed as he had entered.

  He caught a cab at Columbus Circle—the van had been safely garaged hours ago—and rode downtown through the awakening city. He still felt numbed by what he had done, and his imagination painted for him the picture of Toller Hasloch, half-naked in his cold and lonely bed, as his heart slowed … slowed … stopped.

  And all because Colin MacLaren had set his own judgment above that of the Law which he served, acting on his own Will instead of at the urging of the Lords of Karma. He felt soiled, unclean, and ill. He wanted nothing more than a drink and the comfort of his own bed, though no matter what he did, he could not elude his own condemnation.

  He was so wrapped up in his own bleak thoughts that Colin didn’t even notice that the lights were on in his apartment until Claire opened the door.

  “Colin! Where have you been?” She flung herself into his arms, holding him tightly.

  He could not imagine what she was doing here, when he’d left her at the door to her own apartment less than two hours before.

  “I was so worried—I thought something had happened to you, too!” she said.

  It took a moment for the sense of her words to penetrate the fog that seemed to veil Colin’s wits, and at first they only confused him. Something had happened to him. Something terrible.

  “Has Jamie … ?” he began.

  “No!” Claire said fiercely. “It’s Simon—there’s been an accident—he’s been hurt.

  “He’s dying,” Claire added raggedly.

  FOURTEEN

  SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 1973

  Some random truths he can impart,—

  The harvest of a quiet eye,

  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  THE HARSH, DRUGGED BREATHING OF THE MAN IN THE BED WAS the loudest sound in the room. Colin sat in the uncomfortable chair beside the bed, watching Simon sleep.

  His face was swathed in bandages, both eyes covered. Just after the accident, the doctors had been sure he’d lose his sight. Now they thought they’d be able to save at least the right eye, but Simon Anstey would never again be cover-model handsome.

  Disfigurement was bad, and blindness would have been worse, but it was not the most terrible injury that Simon had sustained in the accident.

  Automatically, Colin’s gaze strayed to Simon’s left hand. It, too, was swathed in bandages, held immobile in a brace to keep him from flexing it.

  The doctors had wanted to amputate, but Simon would not give them permission. He’d been hysterical—Colin could well imagine the scene—refusing opiates, refusing to let the doctors touch him unless they would promise to leave his hand alone. If he had not been a fixture in the Bay Area musical community for so many years they might not have listened to him, but everyone in that emergency room had known Simon Anstey, who soloed with the San Francisco Symphony and taught at the conservatory.

  He’d held them off until Alison had gotten there, and only after he’d extracted her promise to help him did he allow the doctors to begin their work. And Alison had kept her promise, fighting the doctors until they had given in, refusing to consider the possibility of amputation.

  They had worked miracles, but though Simon’s hand was intact, no one thought he would ever use it again. The bones of two fingers were crushed, the delicate nerves destroyed. Though someday he might lift a cup to his lips with his left hand, it was unthinkable that he would ever regain the fine control over it that a concert musician required. His career—his life—was over.

  He was twenty-nine years old.

  This is my fault. Though he knew it smacked of hubris, Colin could not shake that conviction. Somehow, he thought, if he had been stronger, if he had not surrendered to temptation to act without sanction …

  If that is so, then this, too, is part of your punishment, Colin had told himself inexorably.

  The door to the hospital room opened.

  “How is he?” Alison said in a whisper.

  “Still sleeping,” Colin answered softly. Alison tiptoed into the room and seated herself in a chair on the other side of the bed. She was haggard and drawn, looking every day of her seventy-four years even in the soft January light.

  “If only I’d been with him,” she said.

  “Then you’d be dead, too, just like the girl who was with him,” Colin pointed out.

  “Damn all drunk drivers to hell,” Alison said with quiet venom. The driver who had killed Simon’s passenger and ended his performing life had walked away from the collision without a scratch, as drunk drivers almost always did. At least the culpability was clearly his—Simon had been sitting, stopped at a red light—but no legal judgment could repair what he’d destroyed.

  Simon began to stir restlessly, fighting his way up through the morphine. Automatically, Colin sketched a Blessing in the space between them, hoping to gain a few more moments of peace for Simon.

  “Alison?” Simon’s voice was slurred. He plucked at the covers with his free hand.

  “I’m here, Simon.” She took his right hand gently, lifting it to her cheek.

  “My hand. Don’t let them take …”

  “It’s all right, Simon. I won’t let them operate,” Alison said soothingly.

  He began to thrash restlessly, obviously in terrible pain but unable to remember why. For one whose psychic centers had been opened by training, the loss of self-control that came with narcotics was equivalent to going to bed with all the doors and windows of the house unlocked and open. Anything might walk in—and wreak untold havoc while the house’s true occupant lay helpless to prevent it.

  “I will play again!” he muttered. “No matter what … . I will—I will—”

  “You’d better ring for the nurse,” Alison said to Colin. “Simon. Hush, my darling. It’s all right.”

  Colin finally located the call button—it was pinned to the pillow on the right side, where Simon’s good hand was—when the nurse came in, already holding a syringe. With brisk efficiency she pressed it through the intravenous tubing that led into Simon’s arm, and almost insta
ntly he subsided into a troubled sleep again.

  “Dr. Margrave,” she said, once her patient had quieted. “How are you today?”

  Alison gave her a tired smile. “As well as can be expected, I suppose the saying is, Rhonda. Is there any news?”

  “Dr. Kiley is going to change the bandages on his face tomorrow; if everything looks good he’s going to leave the left eye uncovered, which should help Simon stay awake.” She smiled with professional encouragement. “I gave him some Valium just now; he’s been insisting that he doesn’t want anything at all, so he and Dr. Kiley compromised on a mild tranquilizer.”

  No trained Adept, Colin knew, would willingly submit to the impairment of his faculties that drugs brought, preferring to trust to the disciplined Will to overcome the pain. And a hospital room was by its very nature a public space, nearly impossible to consecrate and Seal in any meaningful fashion, though both he and Alison had erected what Wards they could.

  “I know that everyone here is doing the best for him that they possibly can,” Alison said raggedly.

  “He has a tremendous will to heal,” Rhonda said encouragingly. “That’s the most important thing.”

  But when the damage to the physical body was so great; when the pain continued for so long …

  Claire arrived half an hour later to spell them, and Colin took Alison out to a nearby restaurant, making sure she ate and doing what he could to lighten her mood. Despite Colin’s efforts, it was a melancholy meal, each of them lost in his own unspoken thoughts. The early winter dark was falling by the time Colin drove Alison back to Greenhaven.

  “Both of you look pretty whipped.” Claire was there to greet them, having left the hospital at the end of visiting hours. She’d already made plans to stay out here for a while, both to keep Alison company, and to help Simon as much as she could.

  Alison gave her a tired smile, stepping inside. “It kills me to see him like this. Such a … waste.” Tears glittered in her grey eyes.

  “I suppose there’s no hope at all … ?” Claire asked tentatively.

  She led them back to the parlor, where a cheery fire was adding light and color to the room. The drapes were drawn against the night, making the room seem intimate and cozy. Alison had redecorated it since the last time Colin had been here; it was now aggressively modern in burnt orange and plum, the stark Danish Modern replaced by a couple of sleek leather sofas.

  “They still want to amputate,” Alison said, as if that were a full explanation. “I spoke to the staff neurologist a few days ago; he said there was no nerve function in the fingers, and that even if the nerves had been intact after the crash, the swelling of the tissues around them would probably have crushed them by now. And if blood poisoning sets in, Simon could lose a lot more than two fingers.”

  “He does keep saying that he’ll get the use of his hand back,” Claire pointed out.

  “I don’t think so,” Alison said simply.

  “What a terrible loss,” Claire said softly. “Poor Simon.”

  “Don’t let him hear you say that,” Colin warned gently. “He’d rise up from his sickbed and smite you as Sampson smote the Philistines.”

  “With the jawbone of an ass?” Claire grinned wanly and went over to fix them all drinks.

  Though Claire was two years older than Simon, Colin had once cherished vague hopes that the two of them might make a match, and had not wholly abandoned them. Certainly they could understand one another in the fashion those not touched by the Gift could never master.

  Alison stared into the fire, a haunted expression on her face. “I think—in a way—that this accident might have been a blessing in disguise for Simon,” she said.

  Both of the others stared at her in shock. This was the last thing they’d expected to hear from the woman who had all-but-raised Simon.

  Alison sighed harshly. She turned away from the fire and reached for a malachite box on the coffee table. She took out a cigarette, and Colin lit it for her. Claire handed Alison her drink.

  “For the last couple of years …” Alison began, and stopped, shaking her head. “Well, actually, it goes back further than that. Simon has always been … adventurous.”

  “Adventurous?” Claire said blankly.

  From her expression it seemed an inadequate condemnation, but Colin understood exactly what Alison meant. “Adventurous” meant that Simon had turned aside from the practices and exercises his teacher had set him and had gone exploring the paths of power by himself.

  “He … oh, hell, Claire, you know what Black Magick is. Simon played around with it a bit as a boy, before I caught him at it and gave him merry hell. I thought I’d set him right; the stuff’s as bad as hard drugs, and just as seductive. But somewhere—” Alison broke off to sip at her drink, wincing as if it were medicine. Her cigarette made lazy blue spirals up toward the ceiling.

  “You know how easy everything’s ever been for Simon. Not that he hasn’t had to work at his music, but his work’s always paid off. There’s never been anything he wanted that he didn’t—eventually—get.” She ran a hand through her hair. “You might say he’s never lived in an irrational universe.

  “So when I wasn’t looking, he came up with this theory that while the practices of the Left-Hand Path were dangerous, they could be performed safely, so long as it was by a trained Adept taking proper precautions.”

  Colin stared at her in horror. “You know that’s not true.”

  “Oh, yes. But it sounds so plausible, doesn’t it? And look at the rewards: absolute power over the Material Plane, the resolution of all obstacles, the destruction of old age—the ability to heal the sick, to raise the dead … .” Alison smiled bitterly. “Only we aren’t meant to have that power. We’re not gods—we don’t have access to the Formless Uncreated from which all Manifestation flows. The power to perform all these lovely parlor tricks has to come from somewhere, and for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve it comes from blood—from stealing the life energy of others.”

  “From murder,” Claire said flatly.

  “Animal sacrifice, usually, but yes. And from torture before the sacrifice, to raise the power to its ultimate expression.”

  “And Simon was doing this?” Colin asked, incredulous. “Really doing it?”

  “He did it once,” Alison said. “Years ago. One of my cats. When I caught him, I told him that if he ever did that again, I’d—” She broke off and laughed bitterly. “I told him I’d cut off his left hand.”

  Claire flinched, as if trying to ward off the image. “But that was years ago, Alison,” she said hopefully. “And you didn’t mean it.”

  “I did mean it, Claire, and he knew it, so—as I thought—he dropped the stuff. And then a couple of years ago he brought it all up again, just hypothetically this time, thank god. I could see what was happening, where he was going with this, but there was nothing I could do to talk him out of it. He kept saying that the Left-Hand practices had been barred from our use through nothing more than superstitious ignorance, and the time for that was over. I only hope that this tragedy, well, makes him take stock of his life and look inward. But you know, I’ve wondered sometimes lately if he might not be right? The world seems like such a dark place these days … .” She sighed.

  “To turn to the Dark is never right,” Colin said firmly. He felt like a hypocrite as he said it, even though he knew he was telling only the truth. He simply hadn’t known, when he was first taught this Rule that he must live by, how hard it was, and how overwhelming the temptations to surrender could be.

  He wondered what Simon’s temptations had been, and which of his friends and mentors had failed him most. We are all each other’s caretakers, Colin reflected. He did not think he had been a good one, so far.

  Looking back at his life, all Colin could see were halfhearted attempts at stewardship, as though it were something he had been only playing at until he could return to his rightful work. But stewardship was his rightful work. The sanguine glamour tha
t had been cast over his early life had been meant to fade and leave him as he had been before. Only when he had renounced the power, he had not been able to set aside the memories. To go on, to do what he had been meant to do, he must renounce the memories as well, and set that part of himself to slumber, for the sake of those whose lives he touched.

  “Alison, you know there are things we are forbidden to do. It’s the Code we live by, and no one ever said it was easy. All of Simon’s arguments sound reasonable, but that’s hardly the point at issue here. We already know that appropriating the Shadow’s methods can only lead to disaster—you and I both have absolute proof of that. The means creates the end—to reach an impeccable goal we can only use the most impeccable tools.”

  “And so we diddle around with peashooters while the Enemy has the heavy artillery,” Alison said bitterly. “And we lose people like Simon every day.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “It isn’t fair, is it?”

  “No,” Colin agreed. “But that’s the way it is.”

  Toller Hasloch hovered, an unshared secret, over the conversation. Now Colin had seen the full extent of what damage those ghosts of the past could do, but right now the important thing was not to salve his own wounds, but to lend strength where he could, so that others did not suffer the same pain of separation from the Light that he had brought on himself.

  Two weeks later Simon was transferred to a long-term care facility. He was walking—with help—and the long process of reconstructing the left side of his face had begun. Though the eye itself was intact, the sight in his left eye was badly compromised, and he suffered blinding headaches unless the damaged eye was kept covered. But his determination to be what he had been before the accident was unwavering, and almost frightening in its intensity.