Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "Oh, I suppose that generally he thinks I know what I'm talking about, which is more than he grants most of his professors. But as for blind obedience ..."

  "No," both of them agreed in chorus.

  "I'll just go up and take a look around myself," Colin said. "If I don't find anything, probably there isn't anything to find, and I can just forget the whole thing."

  He prayed he could forget the whole thing.

  Though the poets would have it otherwise, February, not April, was the crudest month in Amsterdam County. The day dedicated to the little God of Love—later a Catholic saint—was bitterly cold, and a sudden heavy snowfall a few days before had made travel a difficult proposition. The eight inches of snow that had fallen was powdery and dunelike due to the still-bitter cold, but where the plows had shifted it the snow had melted and refrozen itself into crusty knolls that formed impassable barriers to traffic. And on the un-plowed roads, a shifting coat of snow concealed an inch or two of pack ice.

  The weather was probably the reason that Colin had chosen today for his expedition to Nuclear Lake—that, and the fact that the weekend gave him a whole free day. It wasn't likely that he'd be disturbed. Only a fool would try these back roads in a car, but Colin had possessed the foresight to borrow a friend's Range Rover for his expedition, and the 4WD vehicle took the snowbound track in its stride.

  Soon the lake—its snow-covered, frozen surface only discernible by the cattail growth that rimmed it—was in sight, with the building beyond it. Colin pulled up in a place he guessed to have once been the parking lot and got out.

  The heavy snow deadened even the sounds that he would normally have heard this far out in the country, save for the faint tinkling of ice-bound tree branches and the occasional hiss as a snowmass slid to the ground. The wind off the river lifted veils of snow from the ground and carried them for a few feet before they dropped. The sky was a pale blue, and reflection from the snow washed out all the colors around him, giving the world an ethereality that contributed to the dreamlike quality of the moment.

  The front door of the building opened easily to one of Colin's skeleton keys, and a quick search of the building revealed nothing more nefarious than a few discarded wine bottles and a mattress someone had dragged into a corner of one of the offices for the obvious purpose.

  But Colin knew there was more than this to the place, and when he found the stairway leading down into the basement he wasn't surprised.

  There was enough light from the windows along the south wall to make the contents of the room dimly visible in the afternoon light, though Colin was glad enough that he'd thought to bring a flashlight. The basement was all one large room, thirty feet by about twice that. The sinks along the windowed wall and the complicated sockets drilled into the cinderblock above them were indication that this had once been some kind of laboratory, but all the original furniture had been long since removed. Its current tenants had put up a set of brick-and-board bookcases in the corner, and brought down a couple of footlockers, a table, and some folding chairs.

  In contrast to the rooms above, this space was painstakingly clean. The cement-slab floor had been scrubbed until it shone, then painted with a complex multicolored design that covered an area almost twenty feet across. Three tall jar-candles were set at the points of a triangle just inside the outer rim, which had nine candles spaced evenly around it. There was a thirteenth candle set between the inner and outer rings just at the foot of the stairs: cardinal North.

  Colin stared down at it, the hackles on the back of his neck rising. Somehow he wasn't surprised at what he found when he got there. On some level he'd been expecting it.

  The circle-within-a-circle was common to most of the forms of magick that he knew, but the elaborate asymmetrical figure within it was nothing he knew. Reflexively, he looked over his shoulder, knowing what he would find.

  On the wall behind him another symbol was painted. The black paint had run slightly, the drips giving the glyph the look of something in motion.

  In the north . . . the North Gate. The gate through which the members of the Circle send their spirits to the Overlight.

  Somehow Colin had hoped that the Aquarian Frontier would lose its fascination with Thorne Blackburn and his works, but it never had. In the thirteen years since Thome's death in 1969, those attracted to the tainted exploitive wellspring of the Blackburn Work had been a steady—and slowly increasing—number. More books had been written on the Work since his death than Thorne could have imagined in his wildest dreams, their writers enchanted by the black romance of a magickal system which permitted its practitioners to use people for their own ends as if they were cattle ... or fodder.

  But the end did not—could never—sanctify the means. That was why the Light proscribed such interference in the lives and destinies of the Unawakened. Colin wondered how many of Thorne's postmortem followers had paid the same price that Thorne and the Circle of Truth had for their reckless disregard of the ancient Laws—Laws as easy to disregard as those of the physical world, and just as unforgiving.

  Colin turned his back to the North Gate and took a step forward, until his feet nearly touched the edge of the outer ring. He studied the design beneath his feet—the crude attempt to duplicate, using color, what was described in the books as seven Gates, laid one on top of the next, first to last. The last time he'd seen these shapes they'd been silver, not paint. And two people were dead, and the rest irredeemably scarred. I will never forgive you for that, Thorne— never.

  "I knew you'd come," Hunter Greyson said at his back.

  "Why didn't you tell me what you were doing?" Colin asked, not turning around.

  "You wouldn't have liked it."

  Grey walked around from behind him, casually stepping into the painted sigil and across it. He lit the propane lantern sitting on the table, and the room was filled with a hissing and a blue-white light.

  "You're right. I wouldn't have. And you knew the reasons why, or you would never have taken such pains to conceal it." The strongest emotion Colin was aware of at that moment was outraged pride; that the student he'd invested so much time in had callously discounted his warnings. Paradoxically, it was the selfishness of the emotion that allowed him to transcend it.

  He'd fallen prey to this sensation of outrage before, but Colin knew now that it was misplaced pride. And he would not let pride blind him again.

  "I knew you'd find out. Five people can't keep a secret, and I figured you'd see our Circle on the Astral eventually, even if nothing else busted us."

  Though Grey was doing his best to act as if he didn't care, Colin could tell he was upset and fighting not to show it. The shoulders of his fringed leather jacket were dark with melted snow, and the legs of his jeans were wet. He must have hiked here from Taghkanic.

  "So you've gotten as far as that?" Colin asked, trying not to sound incredulous. The Astral Temple—the work of a group of Initiates concentrating together on a single image—was fairly advanced ritual work for a group of neophytes.

  "We've been working together for about a year. I really thought you'd find out before now." There was no triumph in Grey's voice, though his hair and his clothes gave him a casual resemblance to a haughty Elflands courtier.

  A year! This was no casual dabbling, then. Colin pushed his emotions away with a surgeon's discipline, working to keep his mind clear for the questions he must ask, for both their sakes.

  "I wasn't looking for something like this from you, Grey. I thought I'd given you a better basic grounding than this ..." dangerous trash, Colin's mind supplied, but he kept his mouth shut.

  "You gave me the background, but magick evolves. In the twentieth century, for the first time in thousands of years, it's possible to study and question what we do and why we do it. To develop new methods, to restore our knowledge of old ones. To bring back everything that was lost when Atlantis fell___ "

  "Some things should stay lost," Colin said unequivocally. "In the name of the Light, Grey,
who taught you this?"

  Grey shrugged, the mute adolescent resistance reminding Colin of how young the boy was.

  "I bought some books. I didn't start out to do this, but I liked what Blackburn was saying, and it made sense to me." He looked up at Colin, and the older man could see the hope plain on Grey's face. "If you could only see what I've seen . . . the Blackburn Work is about reconciliation—nobody's perfect, as the saying goes, but somewhere in the world there's always something to supply what we lack. And with enough iterations of Balance we obtain the leverage with which to act consciously, and not just in blind reaction to whether something is White or Black. And through that action, we obtain the power to open the Gate Between the Worlds, and reconcile the worlds of Men and Gods, supplying our ultimate lack."

  The honest idealism, the sincerity, in Grey's voice tempted Colin to agree with him that what he was doing was right. But the bright promises the Blackburn work made were only a gilded mask over the foulest of realities.

  "You're talking about hastening the action of entropy," Colin told him curtly.

  The ultimate goal of entropy—if a mindless force could be said to have a goal—was the redaction of all forces to homeostatic equity, reversing the separation of all things and their opposites that had transpired at the beginning of time.

  "I'm talking about supplying our lack and perfecting our Selves," Grey said. "It's the goal of the Great Work, isn't it?"

  "You know that it is. And you know as well that this is not the Great Work, but a treacherous shortcut leading to a dead end. Blackburn's rituals are Black Magick of the worst sort—the sort cloaked in good intentions. He believed that the tools of the Shadow could be used in the service of the Light, and he was wrong. Power always—ultimately—corrupts."

  "You're saying that the Light has no power," Grey pointed out. He looked down, fiddling with the fringe on his jacket in a way that betrayed his nervousness more than he would have wanted to admit.

  "That's Jesuitical logic and you know it," Colin answered. He could hear the anger in his own voice and wished it weren't there. "I'm saying that the Light has built-in safeguards against the misuse of power that the Shadow— and the Blackburn Work—does not. Thorne was the most arrogant man I ever knew—" saving present company, alas "—and he refused to believe that the Laws of the Path could ever apply to him."

  "You knew Thorne Blackburn?" Grey asked, looking up. The expression on his face and his tone of voice both suggested incredulity.

  "Yes," Colin said shortly. He refused to feed Grey's obvious hero-worship with any tales of the "great man." What Grey had managed already, without outside help, was bad enough. "And maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that this so-called Blackburn Work is flawed, dangerous, and ultimately useless."

  "You don't know that," Grey said stubbornly.

  "You must think that one of us is pretty stupid," Colin snapped. "How many ways do I have to say it? These rituals are dangerous."

  "We're being careful," Grey persisted.

  "You—yes, maybe. When things go wrong, you might notice before it's quite too late and get yourself out of harm's way. But what about your friends? Or do you just mean to sacrifice them to your ambitions?" His change of tactic had scored off the younger man—Grey looked visibly upset now.

  "It isn't like that! Why do you have to keep painting everything in terms of black and white?" Grey cried passionately.

  "Because they are," Colin heard himself say inexorably. The next words were on the tip of his tongue: to issue Grey an ultimatum—to threaten him with expulsion from the institute's program—to demand immediate compliance.

  But that wouldn't work. If Grey did not abandon the Shadow freely and in full knowledge, he would not have abandoned it at all, no matter what his actions were.

  "But we can talk about that somewhere else," Colin said, more gently. "Just don't tell me you rode your bike out here today; I don't think my heart can stand the strain."

  "I walked," Grey said, relief at the change of subject plain in his voice. "Well, I hitched a ride as far as the turnoff with Ramsey; he was going down into Rhinebeck."

  And how were you planning to get back? Colin found himself thinking with the unromantic sensibility of age. But youth never worried about "getting back" or any other form of retreat and retrenchment. Youth was immortal.

  "Well, let me give you a ride back to the college. Make no mistake, Grey—we are going to talk about this again. I disapprove very strongly, but you knew that when you decided to start down this road. There's no point in the two of us standing here shouting like action movie heroes and one of us walking home in the snow."

  It was an anticlimactic end to an emotional confrontation, and Grey's face showed a certain disappointment.

  "Aren't you going to deliver an ultimatum?" he demanded. "Wave a flaming sword? Banish me?"

  "What good would that do?" Colin answered.

  As much as Colin yearned to grab Hunter Greyson by the scruff of the neck and shake all the nonsense out of him in the weeks that followed, he restrained himself. Grey couldn't—or wouldn't—articulate to Colin just what drew him to the Blackburn Work, leaving Colin with the muddled sense of the Blackburnites as a self-appointed Occult Police, interfering in other people's lives in order to redress their subjective perceptions of a Balance that was out of whack.

  The other members of the Circle—Janelle Baker, Ramsey Miller, Grey's girlfriend Winter, and, much to Colin's dismay, Cassilda Chandler, the student for whom he'd had such high hopes—were probably only drawn into the Blackburn Work through friendship. None of them except Cassie was taking any of the parapsych courses, though Winter had audited a few of Colin's lectures after she'd begun to date Grey.

  Because the stakes were so high, Colin reviewed the material that Grey had followed but the picture he formed of the Blackburn Work didn't become much clearer than the one he'd held that day at Nuclear Lake.

  When Colin had known him, Thorne had stressed gnosis through ritual and enlightenment through direct communion with Outer Plane entities— about as safe for novices as sticking a wet finger into a light socket, and about as informative. But Thorne had never cared about safety and had stressed apotheosis through misinformation. The combination made the Blackburn rituals devastatingly perilous when they worked at all—which they often didn't. Much of Thome's writing, including the final rituals of the Opening of the Way, had been lost in the chaos following his death. Possibly the key to his philosophy had been lost there as well.

  But stop Grey's preoccupation with the Work, and Colin did not think that any of the others would continue with the Circle. Colin found himself with grounds for hoping that this infatuation with Blackburnism would burn itself out in the way of any puppy love. All he had to do was win Grey back to the Light, and the matter would end there.

  Colin was certain of it.

  As winter melted into spring, Grey began to relax and become more forthcoming again. He would be graduating this spring, but he was expecting to go on to his Master's for the teaching certificate he wanted. The scholarship money would stop when he took his BA, but there were a couple of TA positions he could fill to take up that slack, and Colin was expecting to have Grey in his summer lecture series as well.

  / can win him back for the Light. It was a thought that came to Colin more and more as the days lengthened. He was certain of his victory, given time.

  Spring break ran from the 12th to the 18th that April. On the 19th, Grey wasn't in class.

  Cassilda was. Colin stopped her as she was leaving.

  "Have you seen Grey today?" he asked without preamble.

  Cassie shrugged and did not meet his gaze. The white streak dyed into the front of her short dark hair gave her a more-than-passing resemblance to a Pekinese.

  "I guess he had some things to do?" she muttered unconvincingly. She glanced up at Colin with a stubborn blankness on her face. "Maybe you should ask him."

  Before Colin could say anything further,
Cassie slithered away and hurried off down the hall.

  Now what was that all about? Colin wondered to himself. He debated the wisdom of searching for his absent student—would it strain things between them further? Would Grey consider it meddling?—but set those thoughts aside. Even though they were only cautiously on terms lately, Grey would not miss one of Colin's lectures except for an emergency; not a scant six weeks before graduation.

  Several hours later he found Grey in an off-campus hangout, drinking coffee in a back booth.

  "Mind if I join you?" Colin said.

  Grey looked up at him hazily. His face was haggard with the effect of too little sleep and intense emotion.

  "Colin," he said, sounding surprised, as if they had not seen each other only last week. "Yeah. Sure."

  Colin sat down and ordered coffee for himself.

  "You look like hell. When did you eat last?" he demanded. Why do the old always say the same useless things to the young, despite our best intentions?

  "She didn't come back," Grey said bleakly.

  There had only been one "she" in Grey's life for many months: Winter Musgrave. They'd seemed like the perfect couple; the uncrowned king and queen of Taghkanic; the prankster troubadour and his high-spirited noble lady. The two of them were closer than many old married couples Colin knew, and it had been a surprise for Colin to learn, in casual conversation with Professor Rhys, that Winter had gone home for spring break rather than spend it in Glastonbury with Grey.

  "And?" Colin prompted gently.

  "She didn't come back!" Grey repeated impatiently. He picked up his coffee and stared into it as if he'd never seen it before.

  "There has to be more to it than that," Colin said. He refrained from the obvious question—whether she was hurt; whether she was sick. Reasonably or not, Grey had obviously already ruled out these possibilities.

  And Colin realized that—unconsciously—he had as well. Cassie's behavior earlier—as if she were in possession of a guilty secret—was part of the reason. That, and the way Grey was acting. Whether Colin liked it or not, Winter and Cassie and Grey had all been working magick together, and the ties that bound them were stronger than any ordinary ones of love or society.