Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 29
"I can move it myself after breakfast," Truth said. "I have to get some things out of it anyway." And that way I'll know where it is—;// need it in a hurry.
"Fine." Julian's smile did not indicate that his will was being crossed in any way. "After breakfast, then. Gareth will show you where to put it."
Four hours' sleep was enough to give her at least the illusion of restedness for a few hours, and good food could offset some of the fatigue. Julian seemed to be a believer in hearty breakfasts in any case; he seated Truth at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and returned from the kitchen a few minutes later balancing two high-piled plates.
Though Caradoc had mentioned breakfast, he was nowhere to be seen, and Truth wondered where he'd gone.
And she wondered, in some small ungracious part of her mind, if Gareth would have a bruised cheek the next time she saw him.
"Here we are," Julian said, setting one of the plates in front of her. "Not everyone eats breakfast at Shadow's Gate, but Mr. Hoskins stands ready to abet those who do."
"Oh, Julian—I can't eat all this!" Truth protested, looking at ham, omelette, fresh fruit, and muffin. It appeared that in addition to supplying breads and coffee, Mr. Hoskins cooked breakfasts to order.
"Certainly you can," Julian said, forking up a bite from his own plate. "You're body's a machine; do you expect it to run without fuel?"
"You make it all sound so simple," Truth said protestingly.
"Just as I expect you'd make—what was it? Statistical parapsychology?—sound simple. It all depends on what you know."
What I know is that I don't know very much, Truth said to herself.
Caradoc and Gareth came in together. Gareth headed for the kitchen, returning a moment later with a plate piled high with ham and biscuit sandwiches dripping with butter and maple syrup. He proceeded to demolish the food with an easy efficiency that Truth admired.
There was no bruise.
"When everyone else gets up I can have them help you with getting the stuff set up—if that's what you call it," Gareth said between bites.
"Everyone being Hereward and Donner," Caradoc said, "as Ellis isn't likely to be any help. To put it mildly."
"Ellis is all right," Gareth said, in good-natured defense of his absent comrade. "And if you want to move your car into the back ..." he added to Truth, letting the sentence hang.
"I'm sure Truth will enjoy the chance to present parapsychology's case against the occult," Julian said, drawing Gareth into the conversation, "as well as explaining what all of those formidable engines actually do."
"I'm not the expert," Truth reminded them. "Where I come in is usually after the raw data has been generated—probabilities versus possibilities, that kind of thing. We've even gathered statistics on the spontaneous failure of random lots of infrared film, so we have a basis for positing that the pictures we have are a ghost, rather than a flaw on the film."
"Other than the testimony of the observers on the site," Julian said.
"But that just isn't reliable," Truth said, warming to the subject and the education of her small audience. "There are too many ways to fool the human mind and eye. Only the machine is objective."
"There is, of course, no way to fool a machine," Julian murmured, and Truth felt a flare of indignation.
"They're poor tools, but they're all we have. If you insist on waiting for perfection, you aren't going to get very far," she said sharply.
"True," Julian conceded, "and so perhaps you'd agree that some balance of trust between human and machine should be observed? I do wonder why no skeptic, noting what he would term the widespread delusional perception of ghosts and space visitors, has ever asked why people see what they see." He buttered his muffin and bit into it with relish.
It was a good point, and Truth acknowledged it as such.
"That's a question I'm not equipped to answer," Truth admitted. Under Julian's minatory gaze she took a bite of omelette, then another.
"Well, then, if we agree with Sir Isaac Newton that we are all standing at the edge of a vast ocean picking up bits of colored shell while the sea of absolute knowledge foams about our feet, that's enough," he said.
Maybe it is, Truth admitted. But I don't think we agree on—on why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings, Truth protested silently.
"Since you'll deny me the chance to run and play hooky," Julian said when breakfast was over, "I'll be in my study, catching up on some correspondence. Don't hesitate to interrupt me," he told her with a grin.
"I promise," Truth said. She abandoned her breakfast mostly unfinished and went upstairs to get her keys.
Coming down the steps, her car keys in her hand. Truth wondered where she could hide Venus Afflicted once she had it back in her possession. Fiona's unwelcome visit had shown her that her room was far from sacrosanct, and even though she didn't think Fiona would bother her again that left half-a-dozen other candidates.
Light.
The idea appealed through its very perversity. Why would anyone search Light's room when they were sure that the unworldly psychic had nothing to hide? And Truth had seen a number of nooks and crannies in that attic room into which she could insert the book. So long as Light didn't suspect it was there, it would be safe—there was no reason for Truth to believe that Light would not instantly hand Venus Afflicted over to Julian if she once suspected its existence. But if Thorne were real—and not merely her compelling delusion—surely his protective interest would extend to his other daughter as well?
She went outside, shivering in the morning chill.
Her car was just where she'd left it; she glanced around furtively to see if anyone was in sight, feeling ridiculous as she did so, before she opened the trunk. The necklace and ring were there, and so was Venus Afflicted. With another covert look around herself, Truth shoved the book and jewelry into her purse and closed it tight. Then she shut the trunk.
But where was she supposed to put the car? There was nothing beyond the pass-through and side entrance besides the back lawn and the boxwood maze. It appeared she needed Gareth's help after all.
Just like some fainting Gothic heroine? Forget it!
A little detective work solved the mystery; remembering where Julian had gone last night with his car, she simply followed the drive along its curve past the front of the house until she came to what looked like an old carriage house behind a stand of trees. The doors were open, and she saw Julian's immaculate BMW, parked next to the white Volvo station wagon that showed signs of hard use. A gleaming black motorcycle, its gas tank painted with silver stars, stood in a corner. She imagined it must be Hereward's—he looked the sort to have a dashing bike like that.
And when did you start to think that bikers were dashing? Truth asked herself. It was beginning to seem to her that she had sleepwalked through her entire life—suddenly, upon awakening, to be presented with an unknown self that had a great many positive likes and dislikes, none of which she recognized as her own.
Who was she turning into? What was she turning into?
She sighed. All she had to do was make it through to next Tuesday alive. Julian would do his ritual on Monday—Halloween—have no result, of course. . . .
Of course? It killed your mother.
Drugs killed my mother—not magick. And Thorne was innocent!
Are you sure? Really sure?
Thorne wouldn't have killed Katherine Jourdemayne. He loved her.
You're sure of that too, the snide inner voice commented. Has it ever occurred to you that the great Thorne Blackburn was just as surprised by what happened as everyone else was?
I'll have to ask him when I see him, Truth told herself grimly.
When I see him.
Now that she knew where to go, it was a matter of minutes to slide her Saturn into the empty space provided. The weighted-down Coach bag slung over one shoulder in what she hoped was a casual attitude, Truth walked back up to the house.
It was hard to believe, looking at Shadow's Gate, that it could really be the sinkhole of madness and doom that basic research and lurid imagination insisted. The Elijah Cheddow murders of 1872 were over a century ago; Katherine's death and Thorne's disappearance twenty-six years in the past. Standing here, it was hard to remember that she'd nearly frozen to death in the library just a few nights ago—or heard Light speaking in her father's voice.
As Truth came up the drive, she saw the front door open. Without conscious volition she stepped back off the gravel path into what shelter the bare trees provided.
Michael came out the door. His hair shone blue-black in the sunlight, and he was dressed as usual, in a dark three-piece suit with tie that echoed the formality of the canonical garb that he might or might not be entitled to.
He turned back, holding out his hand, and Light came through the door.
She was wearing clothes Truth didn't know she owned—a skirted suit with a dark blouse. Her hair was pinned up; the effect was severe and jarringly adult, as if the fey woman-child Truth knew was only a mask to be put off at will. But Truth had been willing to bet that the Light she had seen was genuine.
This must be the mask, then.
Why?
Michael put his arm around Light, leading her down the steps. In the white morning radiance, both of them seemed to glow. He smiled down at her; Light reached up to touch his face. Then, as Truth watched, the two of them began to walk toward town.
Oh, please, let him be taking her away . . .
Truth rubbed her forehead in confusion and the beginning of a headache: it wasn't noon yet, but the morning had been incredibly tense. But she didn't want Michael to take Light away from her—only away from here, and he wasn't going to do that, was he?
Then what was he doing?
"It doesn't matter so long as it means there's nobody in her room,"
Truth muttered with brutal practicality. She waited until the pair had vanished around the curve of the drive, heading for town, before she moved.
The house let Truth find Light's room easily. She listened to herself think that, and winced. It was all too easy to slide into anthropomorphism, imputing human reason to inanimate objects. Houses were not alive. They could not need or desire—or act.
But their inhabitants could. And what did the inhabitants of Shadow's Gate want?
Truth opened the door to Light's room and stepped inside, half her mind still on that problem. What did all of them want . . . and how far would they go to get it?
The window seat had a lid that opened; the storage was filled with sheets and blankets. They smelled musty, as if this storage space weren't one in common use. Truth slipped Venus Afflicted into a pillowcase and buried it at the very bottom of the chest. The hiding place was neither perfect nor foolproof, but it was better than nothing.
She weighed the amber necklace with its heavy pendant in her hand, measuring. It would be a good idea to hide the ring and the necklace somewhere outside her room too—and if she hid them here, anyone who stumbled across them might not look further.
Or finding them might motivate them to look hard enough to find the book.
'' ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice,' " Truth said aloud, quoting. After another moment, she slipped the necklace back into the drawer she had taken it from, a day or two ago.
"Do you want it back, Father? Come and get it."
She took the ring with her when she went.
Where to hide the ring—so she (and perhaps Thorne) could find it? Thus armed and motivated, the whole of Shadow's Gate took on something of the out-of-season air of a site for an Easter egg hunt. Most of the possibilities that presented themselves were too obvious—or too hard for her to get to in a hurry. At last she gave up and brought it back to her room with her—and with sudden inspiration concealed it at the bottom of the jar of bath salts she'd bought.
There. That was taken care of.
Now there was only the matter of six crates of delicate machinery to consider.
By four o'clock that afternoon Truth was seriously considering a career in some other profession. While she had been given the free use of four strong males—Caradoc, Hereward, Donner, and Gareth—to do most of the heavy lifting and uncrating of the apparatus, getting the equipment out of its crates was just the beginning.
At lunchtime, when her assistants were finished and the crates and padding stored away for later, Truth found that she had three cameras, which could be set to take pictures automatically at anything up to one-hour intervals. Two of them were loaded with superfast high-resolution film that should allow her to take recognizable photographs even in near total darkness. The third was loaded with infrared film, which was sensitive not to light, but temperature. Dylan hadn't sent any spare film, and Truth wondered why.
She had an industrial-model tape recorder, six reels of recording tape, and a number of mikes sensitive enough to pick up the sound of water in the plumbing from a floor away.
She had not one, but two polybarometers, specially built for the Institute, which would do their best to chart and record all fluctuations of temperature and air pressure, along with noting any stray earthquakes that happened to come their way.
She had battery packs for all six machines.
All she was lacking was a strategy.
Nearly everything was on casters, so Truth didn't think she'd have too much trouble moving it herself to where she wanted it—although carrying any of the objects except the tape recorder up a flight of stairs would have been impossible for her—so she released her willing servants and was left to wrestle with thirty pages of handwritten instructions from Dylan, plus the manuals that came with each machine.
Gareth brought her a sandwich, and only after he left did Truth realize that she'd missed a golden opportunity to question him about what had—or possibly hadn't—happened this morning. She sighed—so much bad luck was really bad planning, giving her a choice of thinking of herself as stupid or merely inept—and turned back to Dylan's notes.
The more she read, the more she was convinced that fieldwork was not for her.
By two in the afternoon she was even desperate enough to call Dylan. Today her newly-rented cellular phone worked just as it ought to.
"Truth! How are you?" Meg's voice came cheerfully through the handset.
"I'm fine, Meg." What else, after all, could she say? "Is Dylan around?"
But Dylan was not around, so all Truth could do was leave him, once again, the number of her new phone—though if she were not within earshot of it when it rang there would be little way for her to know if he had called—and returned to the equipment and instructions.
She had never felt so inadequate.
Now that she had the equipment she'd asked for, where was she going to put all of it? She should have thought of that long before.
The library was an obvious place, and one that had been the center of a previous event: It was reasonable for her to put one of the cameras and one of the polybarometers here to see what she caught.
But the obvious place for the other one, plus both cameras and the tape recorder, was her bedroom. Thorne had come there before—he would probably return there again.
And when he did, she could nail him.
But if she did that, she'd have to admit she was being haunted—and by whom. Sanctity of the scientific method or no, Truth was unwilling to expose herself to the attention she would receive from Julian's Circle of Truth if that particular truth came out. There must be some other way.
So she decided to put the other polybarometer in the Temple.
Julian poked his head in to see how she was doing around three. He had no objection to the polybarometer going into the Temple, although he would not permit either the camera or the tape recorder there.
"Our rituals are secret, Truth. And even though one day I hope you will be inside the Veil rather than outside, photographing or taping what we do—no," he said.
In the end—running out of both ideas and patience—Truth decided to set up the other two cameras to provide a parallax image in the library, and that gave her the perfect excuse to take the tape recorder upstairs with her. Let them think she only wanted to keep it out of the way. Maybe she could get proof without anyone knowing.
But what would she do with it when she had it?
By the time she'd wrestled the tape recorder upstairs it was after six, and while Truth had no idea by this time if any of the Institute's equipment would even work, she was pretty sure she hadn't broken any of it.
She glanced out through the windows. The sun had already set, leaving only a faint indigo line of light upon the horizon, but ornamental floodlights shone out over the garden and maze. After a day spent indoors, a walk in the fresh air seemed especially inviting.
Saint Martin's summer—that brief warm period after the first frost— was still ahead, and the evening air was cool and inviting on Truth's face as she walked out down the white pebble pathway. Glancing back over her shoulder, she could see that most of the rooms of the big old house were lit, including one high in the corner. Light's.
1 wonder where she and Michael went today? For a moment Truth let her mind run free to speculate upon the future. After everything here was over, she would take Light away with her. She had a two-bedroom apartment; it would be only a small inconvenience to move her office into her bedroom and give Light a room of her own. Light could wander the Taghkanic campus as easily as this, and Truth—
But there imagination foundered, because Truth could not see herself slipping comfortably back into her old life. And what if she took Julian up on last night's offer and went to Europe with him? What would happen to Light then?
We could take her with us, Truth thought, even as she realized that Light was utterly unequipped to deal with the crowded chaos of European travel.
But it isn't going to matter, Truth thought with a strange detachment. That won't be my decision to make.
The fey impulse faded, and Truth saw that her footsteps had brought her to the maze. She hesitated at the entrance. Going in was tempting, and if they hadn't changed it from the map she'd seen in one of the books, she'd be fine.
