Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Nobody would, after tonight.

  The hardest part of the whole affair had been locating what he wanted. After that, obtaining it had not really been any more difficult than obtaining a cash advance on his AmEx. But the crates were heavy, and his injured hand was still giving him trouble. He couldn't remember if he'd forgotten to fill the prescription for antibiotics that the doctor in the emergency room had given him, or if it had run out. All he knew was

  that he didn't have any, and that beneath the bandages his hand was red and sore and throbbed in time with his heartbeat.

  Not that anything Hke that would matter soon.

  He probably ought to at least return Sinah's car, Wycherly thought. She hadn't called it in as a stolen vehicle—they'd have snagged it one of the times he'd left it parked on the street if she had—and he ought to be grateful to her for that.

  But she'd find it eventually—or what was left of it.

  And he was running out of light. He'd come back to the Fork this morning, in search of the last thing he needed to carry out his plan. He'd thought he'd have to rely on stupidity and human greed, but instead he'd gotten lucky. He turned to his companion.

  "C'mon, Seth old buddy. Head 'em on up, move 'em on out."

  Seth Merryman, who had been born with Down's Syndrome and all the sweetness and trust that implied, smiled. He was happy to come and do a favor for the nice man who'd come up to him on the porch of his Ma's house and offered him a chance to earn a crisp twenty-dollar bill for a little hard work. Nothing to be afraid of in a little hard work. And he got to ride in a shiny new Jeep Cherokee, too, just like he'd seen in the movies.

  At first Truth was content to let someone else answer the door.

  But no one came, and the noise turned from an insistent ringing to a relentless pounding to a slower—but louder—thumping. Truth tried to sit up, to move, but nothing happened.

  That frightened her—enough to make her force her eyes open. She was lying on the floor in a dark room, and someone was pounding on the door.

  Dylan. She rolled onto her face, with every drugged and sleeping muscle protesting, and dragged herself on hands and knees to the door. She pressed her cheek against it. It was vibrating with the impact of the kicks.

  "Dylan?" she whispered. Why was he making all this fuss? What was wrong? Summoning all her strength, she reached up and twisted the knob.

  The door slammed inward with painful force, shoving her backward. The pain helped to clear her head; Truth struggled backward as Dylan squeezed through the gap.

  "Truth!"

  The lights came on with a painful intensity as he flipped the switch. While she was still trying to shield her eyes from the light Dylan knelt beside her and pulled her into a sitting position.

  "Truth! God in Heaven—what's happened to you?"

  Funny, Truth thought fuzzily, that's the first time I've ever heard Dylan really swear.

  "Drugged," Truth mumbled. "Sleeping pills."

  But it was starting to wear off—how long ago had she gotten the dose?—and she was able to get to her feet with Dylan's help. He mixed her a glass of strong salt water, and then held her head while she voided all that was left in her stomach. There probably wasn't much—if any— of the drug left there, but she wasn't willing to take any chances.

  Truth staggered to her feet again and washed her mouth out vigorously, then drank from the bathroom tap thirstily. Her mouth felt dry and swollen. Yogis and great adepts could control the machinery of their own bodies to such an extent that one of them could have flushed the toxins from his blood by the force of directed will alone, but Truth had a long way to go before she reached that level of competence.

  "Where's . . . Sinah?" Truth asked. Her speech was still slurred, and the light made her eyes ache. "What . . . time?"

  "Almost six. I don't think she's here, but I'll check. And make you some coffee. Will you be all right here alone?"

  "Yes," Truth said. She felt Dylan move away from her, and gripped the edge of the counter for support, breathing deeply. Think, dammit! She had to get moving, get her body and mind under control.

  Remembering her earliest lessons, Truth inhaled a deep breath of air, pushing it down deep into her lungs. Then she exhaled and pulled in more air, visualizing her body using the oxygen to speed her heart, her blood, flushing the toxins from her body. Slowly her head began to clear.

  "She isn't here," Dylan said. "Coffee's on its way."

  "I need some fresh air," Truth said slowly, and Dylan guided her as she moved on unsteady steps to the front door.

  He opened it, supporting her carefully, and Truth drew in healing lungfuls of warm fresh air. The sky was a deep blue, and the light was as thick and golden as buckwheat honey. Six o'clock, Dylan had said. She'd slept the day away.

  Because Sinah had drugged her. . . .

  "How did you find me?" Truth said groggily. She didn't think she was tracking lOO percent yet, but she had to be, and soon.

  "Oh, I just looked through a clear pane in one of the windows and there you were, lying on the floor. I thought you'd come down to the fork, but then I found out that nobody had seen you all day, and I thought there might have been some kind of accident, and then Mrs. Merryman showed up at the general store, so I came looking for you. I thought you were dead," he added, and hugged her fiercely. "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "I will be," Truth said. "Wycherly left his sleeping pills here, and I guess Sinah fed them to me. But why?"

  There was a silence from beside her.

  "Dylan?" Truth said.

  "I don't know," he said grimly. "But I'm willing to guess. The reason Mrs. Merryman was so upset was because her son has disappeared—a boy with Down's Syndrome. His name is Seth."

  Seth did most of the work, and soon the two crates in the back of the Jeep Cherokee had been opened and their contents carried to the deepest basement in the burnt sanatorium. Wycherly stayed on the surface, watching Seth work. He shivered in his leather jacket. It might be August, but he was damn cold—and there was no need to invoke the supernatural to come up with an explanation for that one.

  Fever.

  The infection in his hand was spreading. The three fingers of his right hand were pale and swollen where they poked out of the makeshift bandage. He'd just kept winding it with more and more gauze as it had gotten dirty—he hadn't dared look at it for longer than he could remember. He knew that the infection could become gangrene, and the route to a slow agonizing death.

  But that didn't matter now.

  Wycherly looked down into the depths. He didn't want to go down there at all. He was afraid of the place. But Seth apparently wasn't, working quickly and tirelessly until everything was finished.

  "All done. Mister Wych!" Seth said on his last trip up.

  Wycherly glanced at the sun. He didn't think he could spare the time to drive the boy back to where he'd found him and still have the light. And while the flashlight clipped to his belt would be of some help, he

  didn't think he could manage the stairs into the sub-basement one-handed in the dark.

  "I tell you what, Seth: I'll give you another twenty dollars—that's forty all together—if you can walk all the way back to the general store by yourself. What do you think of that?"

  "Forty dollars?" Seth sounded puzzled.

  Wycherly pulled out his wallet—awkward, doing everything left-handed—and removed two twenties. The boy held them—one in each hand—and stared at them, enchanted.

  "Come on," Wycherly said. "I'll walk you part way."

  He walked Seth back to where the Jeep was parked, its right headlight shattered from his collision with the front gate earlier in the day. He glanced at Seth, and then, surrendering to impulse, drove him out through the gates and a little way down the main road toward the general store.

  "There you are," Wycherly said. "Are you sure you can find your way?"

  "Stay on the road. That's what my daddy told me. He said, 'Seth, always stay on the road and you won't get l
ost.'"

  Better advice than my daddy ever gave me, Wycherly thought bleakly. "Go on, then," he said aloud.

  He watched Seth out of sight with an odd, vaguely paternal pain, as though there were some sort of answer here. There was a bottle in the glove compartment, but Wycherly didn't reach for it. He wouldn't need it to get through the next hour, and then he wouldn't need it ever again.

  When he turned back toward the sanatorium gates, it was dark enough that he almost missed them. He turned hastily, unable to control the Jeep properly with only one hand, and this time he hit the left half of the iron gates. It made a horrible grating sound as it slid along the side of the Jeep before settling to the ground. The Jeep wove forward at a crawl as Wycherly scrabbled for the headlights and finally got the remaining headlight turned on. He wished he could think of some way to shine it down into the pit, but even the four-by-four's designers hadn't figured out a way to drive it down stairs like these. He pulled up as close to the edge of the staircase as he dared and left the headlights on anyway, hoping they'd give some light.

  The blasting caps and pencil fuses were right where he'd left them. He picked them up in his good hand, hefting their weight experimentally.

  Everything you saw in Saturday morning cartoons about lighting the

  fuse on a stick of dynamite was wrong; all dynamite would do left to itself was burn. You needed blasting caps to explode it, and fuses to explode the caps.

  Wycherly had been involved in enough questionable deals in his career to know that the easiest way to get his hands on some explosives was to find someplace they were being used, go to the bar nearest to the site, and bide his time. The man who had stolen the dynamite for him—and for a lot of money—had explained how to use them very carefully to Wycherly—twice—to be sure he understood, and he did. He was confident of his ability to detonate sixty pounds of TNT and blow this hellhole in the ground sky-high. All he had to do was get down there and light the fuse.

  He didn't want to go down there. He didn't want to go down there in a really big way. But even less did he want to find himself cutting up girls—or more girls—girls with hot warm living flesh, whose sleeping weight had been a sweet presence next to his.

  Sinah. Or Luned, or Camilla. There were few things in life that Wycherly Musgrave had ever found so completely soul-shatteringly repugnant as the delight he had slowly come to take in thoughts of cruelty and torture. Whether Quentin had forced it on him, or whether it was something that sprung from within him, Wycherly abhorred it utterly. The drink kept it at bay, but it couldn't banish it entirely; he'd been damned from the moment he'd said "y^s" to Quentin Blackburn in this very place, from the moment he'd opened that book, and damnation was a patient thing.

  The white book and the Black Altar, like lock and key, and together they were poison. He'd wanted to destroy the book—he'd had that much health in him after all. But the bitch had made that impossible.

  That left him only one thing to destroy.

  And in the final analysis it didn't really matter whether the book could really make him do things like that, or if the Black Altar really had unnatural power. That was the beauty of his plan. As long as he followed it to the letter, nothing else mattered. For the first time in almost two decades, it didn't even matter whether he had been behind the wheel of that car back in 1984. Camilla Redford would be avenged, her murder expiated.

  Whether he'd committed it or not.

  He'd reached his destination; the pit gaped before him. His volatile

  package tucked under his arm, Wycherly began to make his way, swearing and cursing, down into the dark.

  It took Truth half an hour to shake off most of the effects of the sleeping pills, and she still couldn't really understand why Sinah had drugged her.

  You pushed too hard, that's all. You're lucky it wasn't rat poison in the jam instead of Seconal.

  "Where's my car, Dylan?" Her working tools were locked in the trunk—not the best place for them, but the best of the available alternatives. She'd have to get them out. She was going to need them.

  "Out in front. Mrs. Merryman was down at the general store when I left—she's saying some pretty wild things."

  "She's saying that Old Miss Dellon's come back and sacrificed Seth to the Gate," Truth said absently. "I'm afraid she did. And this time, it's my fault." Her mind was elsewhere: on finding Sinah and making her do what she wanted, whatever the cost.

  "You can't believe that," Dylan said automatically.

  Truth rounded on him in exasperation. "Of course I can—because it's true! Weren't you listening to Michael this morning? Or did you think what he did up there was all a dumbshow for the rubes? I wouldn't let him replace Quentin Blackburn's magick with his—so the place becomes my responsibility—and so does every death that happens there."

  Dylan tried to look sympathetic, but what came across was only frustration. "So what are you going to do now?"

  Truth suppressed another flare of anger. Dylan had rescued her. She owed him something for that. But oh, she grieved for what they could have been together!

  "I need to go back up to the sanatorium. If Seth's still alive, that's where he is, anyway. Will you drive me?"

  "Are you sure you're up for this? Truth, you're all in, and we know that place is dangerous." Dylan, the treacherous voice of reason.

  "It's dangerous," Truth agreed wearily. "That's why I have to go, Dylan. Because it's dangerous, and it's my job."

  "All right, then. Come on."

  "Stop! Dylan!" Truth croaked.

  "I see him." Dylan slowed the car to a stop and rolled down the window. "Seth? Seth Merryman?"

  The young man came to a stop, thrusting both hands behind him guiltily.

  "I'm Dylan Palmer. I met you and your mother last week, remember?"

  "I didn't break no dishes," Seth said hastily.

  Dylan forced a smile, though he wasn't as reassured by seeing Seth alive and well as he had expected to be.

  "I know you didn't break anything," Dylan told Seth soothingly. "But everyone's worried about you. Where've you been?"

  "With a man," Seth said evasively.

  Beside him on the seat, Dylan felt Truth stir impatiently.

  "What man, Seth?"

  Seth giggled. "With the conjureman. He said he'd give me a whole twenty dollar if I'd carry stuff for him. I'm strong—I can carry," he added proudly.

  "Where?" Dylan said.

  And Seth answered: "Up at the burned place."

  Dylan glanced at Truth. She opened the passenger door and got out, slinging her bag of working tools over her shoulder. "Come on, Seth— Dylan's going to drive you back to your family."

  "Truth!" Dylan said in an urgent under-voice.

  "Drive him back, Dylan; I'm going to keep going. You can join me afterward. Or . . . not," she added, with a faint sorrow in her voice. "But you know where I'll be."

  He wanted to argue with her—Hell, he wanted to throttle her. But what he did was smile at Seth as the boy got into the passenger seat.

  Up at the burned place with the conjureman, carrying things. Dylan couldn't even begin to decode that. Maybe Truth knew. He watched her determinedly walking up the road in the direction of the sanatorium for a long moment before he wrenched the wheel of the car savagely around, turning it back toward the general store.

  Driving—and trying not to think about what Truth was doing—gave Dylan plenty of time to brood. He'd been a fan of Thorne Blackburn back when Truth had still been engaged in her postmortem parental feud. Thorne had never made any secret of his belief in his nonhuman parentage—but then, most of Thome's statements had been, by his own admission, lies told to inoculate his followers against blind belief Dylan had never taken his claims seriously.

  But Truth did—which meant she'd received something which passed,

  at least in her own mind, for proof. And, if Dylan were willing to trust the evidence of his senses, he'd seen her perform enough miracles in the last two years to con
stitute proof— oisomething —for nearly anybody.

  The trouble was, Dylan didn't trust the evidence of his senses. Every ounce of training he had warned him not to do so. ''Your eyes can deceive you — dont trust them, " said the wizard in Star Wars, and even if it came out of a pop movie, it was still good advice. People trusting the evidence of their own eyes reported that Venus was a UFO and Elvis walked the earth today. There was nothing as untrustworthy as the human senses.

  But they're all we have, Dylan thought, wrenching his mind back to the present as he came in sight of the general store.

  It seemed as if she'd been walking forever. Like a sad ghost, Sinah wandered along trails that had become familiar over the months she'd spent here. She was not alone in her mind. She never had been, not from the day she'd been born, and even if the presences now weren't the minds of others, but only the scraps of ancestral memories and the more demanding presence of Athanais de Lyon, they were comforting in a weird way. Her own thoughts—her own mind—wavered in and out like a weak radio signal, and they held no more answers than the thoughts of others did.

  You should have killed her, Athanais whispered, serpent-soft, in her mind.

  "It wouldn't solve anything," Sinah answered aloud. But surely the act would be an end in itself—when she'd seen Truth finally pass out under the influence of the powdered pills she'd mixed with the jam, she'd felt a reflux of a purer joy than any she'd ever known, a pure delight in cruelty.

  "No," she said, this time answering unspoken urgings. That was not the person she wanted to be.

  But what could she do? Guard the Gate — Pay the teind— Guard the Gate . . . whispered the chorus of ancestral voices, but she could not guard it from the twentieth century, and in the quarter of a century since she'd been born, the twentieth century had finally arrived in Morton's Fork.

  Dr. Palmer and his team had come, for one thing, and now others would, too, just as Quentin Blackburn had eighty years before. Her great-great-grandmother Athanais had not stopped Quentin. She had only killed him, and with her own death, broken the bloodline so that her daughter received nothing but the obligation without knowledge.