Gravelight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Was that what had turned the fear of the locals first to anger, and, finally, to hate? That the Dellons no longer had the power to answer their pleas for help, though the sacrifices must go on? Sinah sat down on a fallen tree, for once indifferent to all the bugs that must be swarming beneath its rotting bark. It made so much sense. They hated the Dellons because the Wellspring had failed them. Since Athanais Dellon had died in 1917, the Wellspring only took, not gave—the sterile area around the sanatorium was proof of that. And the memories that clogged Sinah's mind were not true memories at all—only the echoes of all of the bloodline who had gone to the Gate in their turn: her mother, her grandmother , . . everyone that she could have loved.

  And Wycherly?

  No. He was far away from here by now. He'd gotten away. He was not going to be the bloodline's Great Sacrifice to the Wellspring.

  Are you sure? the voice of Athanais de Lyon asked with feline cruelty.

  And Sinah wasn't. All she was sure of was that she, Sinah Dellon, who'd had a charmed life and a charmed career, was going to be the last of the bloodline.

  The one who failed once and for all time.

  Despite the fact that in the world above it was still afternoon, by the time Wycherly made it to the bottom of the black staircase it was already night beside the Black Altar.

  Wycherly moved forward cautiously toward the altar stone. If he fell holding the parcel he'd probably merely kill himself without doing any other damage. The flashlight didn't give him quite enough light to see his way, but for wholly mundane reasons. The taint that Wycherly had expected to face here had gone.

  Disbelievingly, he put his left hand palm-flat on the altar top. He felt nothing—Quentin was gone.

  It didn't really matter. Whatever monstrousness had infected Quentin Blackburn and kept him pinned here for generations had passed to Wycherly now. Quentin's book and Quentin's evil, and Wycherly to expiate the corruption as best he could.

  Would blowing up the altar stone destroy . . . whatever it was? He wasn't sure, but it was the best he could do. Shrugging off his confusion, Wycherly knelt beside the altar and opened the package, working awk-

  wardly with only his left hand to rely on. The blasting caps lay in neat rows on their cardboard backing, and the fuse was an innocuous coil of string.

  As he worked, he became conscious of the sound of running water. It was an annoying sound, making him think of deep black rivers and drowned women swimming through their depths. It threaded its way into his thoughts, breaking his concentration and forcing him to go back over the same motions over and over again.

  Abruptly he was certain he knew where the sound came from. The cave, whose doorway he'd shied away from before, must lead down to an underground river, not to a spring as he'd first thought. It was the only explanation. And now the river was rising for some reason—hadn't there been a storm here a night or two ago?—and soon the water would come rushing out of the cave's mouth, sweeping him and all his work away.

  Wycherly got to his feet, thinking vaguely of sandbags. The sound was so clear that he was surprised to see that the floor of the chamber was still dry, so maybe the water wasn't rising.

  But why was it so loud?

  Cautiously Wycherly got to his feet and began to move toward the opening in the rock wall beyond the altar. Slowly. As if he were stalking something.

  She'd always been too impatient for her own good, Truth thought irritably, and today was the final proof. The bag over her shoulder was a dragging weight, and she wasn't entirely sure why she'd brought it with her. Habit, she supposed. The leftover toxins from her drugging weighed down her muscles, making every step an effort. Sweat trickled down her face and neck, making her clothing a soggy, chafing weight. She was probably going to fall on her face right here.

  The sensible course of action would have been to go with Dylan to drop Seth back at his mother's house and then go on up to the sanatorium—or even have Dylan drop her there first. But to be perfectly frank, she didn't trust Dylan not to come up with some new delaying action— all perfectly reasonable, of course . . .

  Stop it. Dylan isn't your enemy.

  And at least Seth hadn't been the Gate's latest victim. Her honor was still clear. There was still time.

  Truth gave up and stopped for a rest, pulling her shirttail out of her

  slacks to scrub her face dry. That was the trouble—there were no villains here, only victims. Even Sinah who'd all-but-poisoned her, even Michael. Even Wycherly . . . wherever he was.

  And I hope that wherever it is, ifs a long way from here. His sister's a psychic, and those things always run in families — always! Whether he thinks he has any trace of talent or not, just his showing up at the Gate could trigger an event.

  Truth tried to put those thoughts out of her mind. There was little she could do if he was there. He wasn't all that fond of her to begin with— Truth winced mentally as she recalled their last meeting—and it was unlikely he'd do anything she asked.

  But would Sinah?

  Oh, yes, Truth promised herself, a wolfish grin pulling her mouth back in a lupine smile. She fed me a Mickey Finn. I'm entitled to a hit of my own hack for that. This time, she'll do what I want.

  By the time she reached the turnoff to the sanatorium it was twilight. Truth checked her watch: half an hour since she and Dylan had parted. It would have been only a matter of minutes for him to reach the general store again; if he were coming back at all, he would be here at any time.

  She didn't know whether she wanted him to come back or not.

  She stopped to rest again, gazing absently at the sanatorium gates. Her reactions were slowed with exhaustion; it took her a long moment to recognize what she was seeing.

  Half of the sanatorium's iron gate had been ripped away.

  Truth blinked, but what she saw didn't change. The inward-sagging gates, rusted into immobility with the passing of eighty years, were no longer in the same position they had been the last time she'd seen them. One was knocked farther open—she saw the fresh parenthesis in the gravel where the gate had gouged a track—and the other had been moved several feet down the drive and was lying in the ditch. Fresh wheel ruts in the gravel—exposing the still-damp earth beneath—showed where the vehicle that had done the damage had stuck and strained. Slivers of broken headlight glittered like shards of ice among the stones.

  Who had been here since this morning?

  She tried to cast her mind back to when she had come up here with Michael, Sinah, and Dylan. It seemed a thousand years ago, but Truth was sure the gate hadn't been broken then.

  Had Dylan brought the camper up here for some reason afterward?

  Her fogged mind refused to present her with any opinions. This won't do, Truth thought. She had to snap out of this daze somehow. Keep moving. Maybe that will help.

  Up the drive, retracing the path she seemed to have walked a hundred times by now. She wished she'd never seen this place, she wished she'd never come to West Virginia. And slowly, as she walked, Truth became aware that she was being watched.

  It was a consciousness as elemental as the relationship between hunter and prey. There was something out there—something utterly tangible and real—and it was watching her.

  Truth stopped, looking around, but all she could see was the disorderly hedges of wild rose, brilliant in the late-afternoon light. She tried to drag her mind back to the mundane realm; what could it be? A bear? Someone searching for Seth?

  "Hello?" Truth said. A startled rustle of the bushes. Silence. Visions of rural marauders took unwelcome possession of her imagination.

  In the distance, faint as the buzzing of a dragonfly, Truth could hear the distant sound of a car engine. So Dylan had come back. The thought gave her spirits a faint but real lift, but habit propelled her to push onward without waiting for him.

  Now she could see the white marble bench again, serene in the middle of its shabby meadow. Whoever was watching her was in that direction.

 
Though she'd never wanted to see that bench again after her first visit here. Truth left the drive and walked toward it into the undergrowth. She could hear the car engine getting louder, and now she could see a shadowy shape crouching behind a stand of forsythia.

  "Hey!" Truth shouted hoarsely.

  There was a blur of movement as the figure bolted—a screech of brakes—and the automatic blare of a horn. Truth heard a woman scream.

  Sinah stood framed in Dylan's headlights like a jacklit doe. She stared at him, eyes wide, and Dylan fancied he could almost see the pulse fluttering in her throat. A moment later Truth floundered out of the brush behind Sinah and grabbed her arm.

  Dylan got out of the car and walked toward them.

  He was surprised by the pure, elemental fury that he felt. The dose of pills that Truth had ingested could easily have been fatal—and Sinah had

  given it to her, motivated by what madness or whim he did not know. He grabbed Sinah by the other arm.

  "What did you think you were doing?" he shouted, trying to yank her away from Truth.

  Sinah burst into tears and clung to Truth. Dylan stared at Sinah in angry confusion. Truth reached out her free hand and patted Dylan's arm.

  "It's all right now. Hush, Sinah, love, nobody's angry with you." Her voice was gentle and fond, but Dylan could see Truth's face—serene, remote . . . inhuman.

  Oh, stop trying to scare yourself! Dylan thought crossly. Truth was no more a member of the Fairy Race than Thorne was. There were no such things as—

  . . . ghosts? Dylan finished with wry self-mockery. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Words he'd always lived by.

  "Thanks for coming back," Truth said to Dylan.

  "I think I can be counted for that much support in a crisis," Dylan said raggedly. "I dropped Seth in front of the general store and came back as quickly as I could. I expected to find you passed out in the middle of the road, so I was going slow. Lucky for her. When she darted out in front of me I thought she was a deer; I almost didn't brake in time."

  "She was running away from me. Sinah— Sinah. Can you hear me? Nobody's going to hurt you. Can you tell me what's wrong?" Truth coaxed.

  After a moment Sinah answered. "I'm the last," she said in a ragged whisper. "I'm the last. I failed. They'll come, they'll find it. ..." Her head drooped with weariness and despair.

  "No, they won't." Truth spoke with compelling urgency. "Close it with me, and you protect it forever. You have to close it, Sinah—no one can find it then. I know it's hard, but you've always known it had to be done. The Wellspring doesn't belong in the modern world. People will only get hurt if it stays. You know what you have to do—"

  She went on, her voice lulling, until at last Sinah raised her head and answered, her voice as heavy and drugged as Truth's had been when Dylan had found her.

  "Yes. All right. I'll do what you want."

  Dylan would have protested—would at least have done something to

  rouse Sinah from this trance—but at that moment he saw something gleaming in the distance.

  "Look," he said, his voice low. "There's a light up at the sanatorium."

  Down to a sunless sea. The phrase circled around inside Wycherly's brain as if it were the answer to all Life's riddles. Down to a sunless sea . . . It was a line from a poem, but he no longer remembered which one.

  He hadn't brought the flashlight, but that didn't matter. His left hand trailed along the curving rock wall, and Wycherly moved slowly, inexorably, down the stairs. Down to a sunless sea.

  All he could hear was water: trickling, roaring, gushing, purling on from nowhere to nowhere, down here in the dark. Tickling scraps of spi-derwebs brushed his face, and he batted them away absently. Down to a sunless sea. He did not have to ask where he was going—he knew.

  He was going back. To the river edge, to that August night a dozen years ago. To where he should have died.

  He reached the last step. He was surrounded by a darkness more absolute than blindness, but it didn't matter. He knew where he was going.

  "That's my car," Sinah said, sounding faintly indignant.

  The Jeep Cherokee stood parked at the edge of the ruined foundations, its single, dimming headlight shining flitilely out across the hole.

  "There's a light down inside there," Dylan said. "But I don't see anyone."

  "Wycherly," Truth said. "He's Seth's witch-man."

  Dylan cupped his hands to shout, but Truth stopped him.

  "No. We'd better go down," she said. And pray that hes still there, that I can hold Sinah's will long enough to do what needs to he done, and that Dylan doesn't turn out to he my worst enemy.

  "I don't like this," Dylan Palmer said mildly.

  The tiny pencil flashlight in his hand flicked its thin beam back and forth over the piled bundles of slim cylinders wrapped in reddish paper that were stacked about the base of the smooth loaf of stone that had once been the carven Black Altar. They looked like parcels of emergency flares.

  "Isn't that dynamite?" Truth asked weakly.

  A fading flashlight resting atop the altar gave a faint amber light. The lozenge of sky above their heads was a deep indigo, and the normal heat

  of an August night was replaced, here, with a damp chill that seemed to well up out of the secret places of the earth.

  "Yes," Dylan said tightly. "It looks like somebody was getting ready to set that off. Look, Truth, can you and Sinah tune in to the locus from—"

  "Wycherly!" Sinah cried suddenly.

  She'd been standing quietly next to Truth. Now she went flying past, toward the darker shadow that was the gateway to the underground spring.

  "Sinah!" Truth shouted. She grabbed for Sinah—physically and psychically both—and missed. Sinah disappeared through the opening, vanished as surely as if she had teleported.

  "Damn . . . damn," Truth muttered. Adrenaline had finally washed the last of the sleeping pills from her system. She looked back at Dylan— helplessly, apologetically.

  "I've got to go down there," she said.

  "Wait a minute—wait!" Dylan grabbed Truth roughly and all but shook her. "Can you see in the dark? Wait until I get a flashlight—some flares—something."

  Truth opened her mouth to refuse, and Dylan shook her again. "What if they're hurt? What if there's more dynamite? Wait right here—and if you stir so much as one step I'll break your little neck!"

  "Yes, Dylan," Truth said meekly.

  But as soon as Dylan reached the surface and disappeared, she turned away, taking the flashlight from the deconsecrated altar stone and following Sinah down the worn and curving ancient stairs to the Well-spring.

  Truth turned off the flashlight as she entered the cleft—far better not to waste it. The darkness closed around her almost instantly, but she did not need to see to discern her surroundings. Cautiously she reached out: The untainted power of the Gate, familiar and soothing, beat against her sidhe perceptions.

  "Sinah?" she called, hesitantly. She could not find Sinah or Wycherly against the backwash of the Gate's power. Please, let her answer, let her still he alive. . . .

  "Here," Sinah said. "Truth? I've found him. Hurry, please!" Truth flicked on the flashlight again, and in its dim illumination she could see Sinah, standing beside a kneeling figure. Wycherly.

  "Is he . . . ?" Lords of the Wheel, don't let him be dead!

  "He's alive. But I can't wake him up—and I think there's someone else down here, too." Sinah's voice shook; she sounded scared and alone.

  Truth flicked the dying flashlight around the space. She was inside a cave carved from the same black stuff as the chamber above. It seemed to be about sixty feet across, and she could not see its roof when she turned the flashlight upward. In the center of the chamber was the Wellspring, welling up out of a natural caldera in the rock. Truth could feel the wintry chill emanating from the water even from where she stood; the cold of clear, fresh water from the heart of the Eart
h. From where she stood. Truth could see no outlet for the waters; the floor of the cavern was the same smooth, close-grained stone as the rest.

  She flicked the light quickly around the rest of the cavern. Toward its edges, the floor was covered with debris: colored bottles, wrapped bundles, baskets . . . and bones. Some were brown with age and decayed nearly to unrecognizability, some were fresh and new.

  Some very new.

  Sinah moaned at the sight of the scattered skulls, but at least she hadn't seen what Truth had. There was a body that lay face down at the very edge of the Wellspring, one arm trailing in the water. The body wore a yellow T-shirt and jeans, and Truth was afraid she knew who it was.

  "Stay there, Sinah, I'm going to take a look at something."

  Truth set the flashlight down, its beam pointing the other way, and went over to the body. She gingerly turned it over. Luned Starking.

  The arm that had been in the water was white and cold as ice cream. But Luned was not dead. Truth pulled her away from the lip of the Well-spring and hoped the action did not trigger retribution from the powers of this place.

  Sinah picked up the flashlight and turned it on Truth. By now its light was a faint red beam.

  "What—who—" Sinah sounded rattled, on the edge of hysterics.

  Truth only prayed that Sinah could hold herself together for a little while longer. She didn't want to find herself facing any of the previous Gatekeepers—or Athanais de Lyon.

  "It's Luned Starking. She's still alive."

  "Where?" Sinah sounded baffled and frightened. "Truth, I can't make him wake up. Wycherly!"

  Truth turned toward Sinah and couldn't see her. The flashlight lens was now a copper disk in the darkness—Truth could clearly see the filaments in the bulb as they faded into darkness.

  "Truth!"

  It was Dylan's voice this time, distorted almost to unrecognizability by the cave. Sinah squeaked and even Truth jumped when she saw the flicker of white light on the wall.

  "Dylan?" Truth said. "Point that somewhere else,will you?"

  "Are you all right?" he demanded. In the refracted glow of the powerful hand torch, Dylan appeared like a rather distraught ministering angel. When Truth spoke, he flicked the beam away from her, and Truth saw his face grow intent as he saw the accumulated bones.