Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01, page 33
Or maybe bravery consisted of going on even when you knew exactly what could happen.
She wasn't sure where Michael slept—or even if he'd come back yet. If she did enter his room by mistake, she'd just tell him she was lost. Let him call her a liar if he chose—it was a plausible enough story, given what they both knew about Shadow's Gate.
And perhaps . . . But no. She shook her head. She could expect no help from Michael Archangel, for whatever reason.
She started with Irene's room. She'd come to love Irene, and didn't believe Irene would steal from her, but a perverse need to be fair made Truth feel that everyone's room must be searched, likely candidates for thief or not.
She found nothing—only clothes and makeup and earrings, a handwritten herbal that looked nothing like the book she sought, personal things. A picture of Thorne with Katherine and Caroline Jourdemayne, kept lovingly in a little leather case. A silver pendant of the same symbol as the gold one on Thorne's amber necklace.
She did Light's room next, on the same principle, and found even less, though confirming once more that Light had an outrageous sweet tooth.
She came back to the second floor. She'd search the rooms that were occupied first, the empty ones last. Then the rest of the house. If she had time.
And hope she didn't run into Michael.
But she didn't. Perhaps he wasn't back, though Truth knew too little about him to speculate where he might have gone. The room she thought was his was empty, though often she wasn't sure whose room she was in until she found something to identify the occupant.
Fiona's was easily guessed. Fiona had wads of currency snuggled away in odd locations, and at the bottom of a drawer Truth found one of Julian's charge slips and a sheet of paper covered with Fiona's careful copies of his signature. But Fiona didn't have the book, much as Truth longed for her to.
Ellis's room was a sad clutter, liquor bottles neatly tucked out of sight in every possible place. What had he been trying to tell her, there at the end? Truth searched his room especially carefully, but there was nothing to find.
Four more rooms. Caradoc and Hereward and Donner and Gareth's, but it was hard to tell what belonged to whom. Whose was the suitcase full of books on magick, and whose the gun and box of ammunition? Was Gareth the one with the can of gasoline in his room? Or was his the stack of porno magazines, shocking in their rawness?
The room she thought was Michael's was nearly empty; at first Truth had thought it was empty. But there were Michael's dark suits hanging in the closet—and in the back of the closet, a narrow black leather case six feet long and two feet wide but only six or eight inches deep; a case of the sort that could contain nearly anything from an electric guitar to a high-powered rifle, heavy and locked. Venus Afflicted might be in there, but Truth doubted it.
Which meant none of them had the book.
Her head ached—with the tension, the stress, the glittering candle flame. The scent of incense was chokingly strong everywhere she went, and the entire house seemed to throb to the beat of the ritual being conducted at its heart. If she only closed her eyes she could see it: the ring of unwinking candles; the blaze of power around Light; Julian crowned with the sun and the moon, his flaring aura blunt testimony to his inheritance of Thome's power.
Power that was strong enough to do just what it promised. Power that could open the gate to the world beyond.
A spill of hot wax jarred her to consciousness. Truth's eyes flew open; she steadied the candle and realized that she'd been asleep on her feet.
It had been a dream.
Of course it had.
Unfortunately the headache was real. Truth rubbed her eyes with her free hand, and imagined that even now she could hear the chanting. She was standing in front of the door to Julian's suite. She'd saved him for last; perhaps unconsciously she did not want to uncover what she already suspected was true—that Julian had taken Venus Afflicted.
She opened the door gingerly, but of course there was no one there— Julian was in the Temple with the others. The nagging delusion that she could feel what was going on in the Temple was hard to push away; whenever she relaxed her concentration she could feel the power building like the current of the sounding sea. She could even smell the incense . . .
Truth brought herself back to reality with a start. That much at least was no hallucination; Julian's room reeked of incense—and why not? His clothes were probably saturated with it.
She pushed unreality from her mind and began to search.
The others were only visiting, but Shadow's Gate was Julian's home, this room held more of personal possessions than any of the other rooms had. But the file drawers of papers didn't interest her, nor did any other thing that was not Venus Afflicted.
In the drawer of Julian's nightstand she found a curl of paper torn from a photograph lying atop a manila envelope. She smoothed it out—a picture of a child, a thin, intense boy in a tie-dyed T-shirt, his long hair pulled back. It looked familiar; she knew she ought to recognize something about it, but there wasn't time. She picked up the envelope and shook out a clutch of photographs. They were old and yellowed and curled, and all of them were of the boy in the torn photo.
She leafed through them quickly by the light of the candle, and found one with Thorne in it. Pilgrim. The boy must be Thorne's son Pilgrim, the one who had run away.
Now she knew why the picture had looked familiar. The scrap had been torn from the edge of the group photo of Thorne's Circle in front of Shadow's Gate—as if someone had wanted to eliminate Pilgrim from the group.
But why were these pictures here instead of in the album downstairs?
There was no time to think of that. She had to hurry. She pulled the travel alarm out of her pocket and glanced at it. It still seemed to be working. Three A.M., and miles to go before she slept. She put the photos back in the drawer.
Venus Afflicted wasn't in Julian's rooms.
Truth went downstairs to his office, moving through the ritual's radiating current of power as if through a blood-hot ocean. There were unlit candles waiting in Julian's office; recklessly she lit them all. As the power hammered at her she tore through the files, the bookshelves, the drawers of Julian's desk with a reckless disregard for covering her tracks.
Nothing. Julian didn't have it.
Truth got slowly to her feet and stepped away from the desk.
No. No. Her hands trembled; she felt as if at any moment she might start screaming. She blew out all the candles but her own, quivering with exhaustion. She'd been positive Julian had it, she realized now; so damned certain that now she couldn't think of what to do next.
Her candle glittered off the decanter on the chinoiserie liquor cabinet in the corner; leaving the lone candle burning on the desk, she strode over to it, slopping the glass beside it full of a liquid that looked almost black in the dimness. She sniffed it before she drank—one of the sweet wines that Julian seemed to favor.
/ hope it's amontillado. For the love of God, Montresor? Yes, Fortunato; for the love of God. She slugged the drink back as if it were Kool-Aid and poured another. She drank it more slowly; the first one hit when she was halfway through it—the world gave a violent subjective wrench and her feeling of agonizing sensitivity to the ongoing ritual snapped. What was it Julian had said when he was feeding the brandy to Light? Something about alcohol blunting the chakras, whatever they were.
No wonder Ellis drinks—/ mean drank—if it was to shut this out. Julian would call it occult sensitivity, and Dylan the emergence of an hereditary psychic gift. Truth didn't care what they called it—she just wanted it to go away.
The wine made her flushed and lazy, but it didn't eliminate the need to do something.
But there was nothing she could do. Only go to Julian tomorrow and let him laugh at her or cry with her. Or say and do nothing, and let the book simply vanish. She sat down behind the desk again and stared at the candle mournfully.
Now that it was too late she saw all the things she should have done.
Why hadn't she told Dylan everything while he was here? She'd been willing enough for him to read her journals. She'd been going to send him a copy of Venus Afflicted—why had she been so unwilling to tell him it existed?
She'd been . . .
She wasn't sure now what she'd been. But it was four o'clock in the morning and she was out of choices. She sipped at her wine. After a long moment she picked up the phone.
The dial tone sounded reassuringly, and she dialed Dylan's home number from memory.
Nothing. She let it ring long enough that even the most determined sleeper would know it was an emergency. He wasn't there. She got the dial tone again and phoned the office. The voice mail picked up at Dylan's extension. Truth hung up.
She phoned the lab on the direct line. Someone answered there, but it wasn't Dylan and he wasn't there, and who else could she talk to? Who else could she tell—and tell what, exactly?
That I'm losing my mind? That the old rules don't apply? That I'm sitting here in the twentieth century trying to make up my mind not even if magick exists, but whether some particular magick is white or black? I haven't been trained for this!
She put down the phone, defeated. There was no point in looking any further. She'd been outmaneuvered even before she'd known the game had begun. She filled her glass one more time, and took her candle and went to bed.
"Maybe I'm wasting my breath—maybe you're suicidal. Or just hard of hearing. But I come all this way—and you have no idea what that took— out of simple family feeling; I show you enough signs and wonders to incite feelings of self-preservation in most people, and you're still here. Now why is that, do you suppose?"
The (by now) half-familiar scolding tones dragged Truth up out of a heavy sleep. She sat up, feeling queasy—she'd had far too much to drink and still didn't feel entirely sober. The room was filled with a faint, predawn grayness, through which a pacing Thorne Blackburn was clearly silhouetted.
"Thorne," Truth said with a sense of groggy unreality.
"Right," Thorne shot back, and the tranquillity with which she accepted this convinced Truth she must still be asleep and dreaming. "Now pack your bags and get your hat and you can be home by breakfast time."
Truth sat up. As the light grew stronger she could see Thorne more clearly—he was wearing his necklace once again, and the lapis scarab was a dark oval on his hand.
"You've got your jewelry," she pointed out.
"And you've been drinking. This is a fine time to embrace the rites of Bacchus, but you always did have a great sense of timing. Get up. Get dressed. Get out."
"I can't go without Light," Truth protested, feeling more confused by the moment. "And I can't—don't you want the Gate opened? If I take Light away now they can't do the ritual, and Julian's worked so hard— think of his feelings—I can't do that to—"
"Julian's feelings?" Thorne exploded. Truth winced. He stopped at the foot of the bed and glared at her, real beyond debate, and fear began to penetrate the alcohol-induced fu2ziness in Truth's mind.
"You're worried about hurting Julian's feelings?" Thorne roared. "Wake up and smell the brimstone, baby—there is nojulian! That's your half-brother Pilgrim down there in the Temple—and you're just not up to his weight, darling girl. You haven't got the guts to be a hero," Thorne sneered.
Blood will out. She must have suspected this truth from the first moment—why else her strange reluctance in the face of Julian's seductions? She felt a peculiar sensation—half revulsion, half attraction—at how nearly she'd succumbed to Julian's advances.
To her half-brother's advances.
"But he loves . . ." she faltered.
"Himself," Thorne finished. "Anything else is just an act."
"Like yours? Did you ever really care about anyone but yourself?" Truth demanded. But she was talking to empty air.
Truth blinked, and drew a long shuddering breath. No one there. Of course there wasn't— Thorne's presence had merely been a vivid dream brought on by nerves, exhaustion, and too much sherry.
No. She was tired of lying to herself, of denigrating Thorne's memory and the evidence of her senses. If it was a dream, it had been a true one.
There was no Julian Pilgrim, and that changed everything. Julian had told her that no one knew where Pilgrim really was. Thorne told her Julian was Pilgrim. Which man was lying—the living, or the dead?
Thorne would never lie to her.
But why would Julian?
So I haven't got the guts to be a hero? We'll see about that! Truth dressed quickly, stuffing her keys into her pocket as a sop to her conscience. She was going to get the truth out of Julian right now.
They were just leaving the Temple when she reached it. The door was open and the lights were on, making everything inside look false and garishly artificial. The members of the Circle of Truth looked like actors after a draining performance; moving like automatons, obviously interested only in reaching their beds. Truth stepped inside.
The sour smell of snuffed candles vied with the salt-sweet smell of the incense they used. Smoke still hung in a flat blue cloud halfway to the ceiling. There was an oblong altar in the center of the room; it was draped with animal skins, and Truth could see that it was on casters.
Some of the others looked up when they saw her, but most concentrated on their tasks—taking things from the tables around the edge of the room and packing them away. The men and Irene were in green robes, while Light's was red and Fiona was wearing a decidedly nonmagickal blue cotton kimono. She was sitting on one of the wooden stools, smoking a cigarette and staring at nothing, looking drained. Truth didn't see Julian anywhere.
Light's red robe made her look even more bloodless; her eyelids fluttered half-closed as she saw Truth, and Hereward, who was standing closest, put a steadying arm around her. His skin held the ash undertone of fatigue, and there were dark hollows under his eyes. He said something to Light, and she nodded, and Hereward began to lead her toward the door. He did not seem surprised to see Truth, only brushed past with a mutter of what might be apology, carrying Light with him.
The others followed in a ragged mass. She stood aside to let them pass her, and finally there was no one there.
"Julian?" Truth said hesitantly.
Julian came out through the curtains at the back of the Temple. Like Fiona he was not robed; he wore a black silk dressing gown and it was abundantly clear that he had nothing on underneath. Unlike the others, Julian showed no sign of fatigue; his cheeks were flushed and his eyes glittered with febrile vitality. A chokingly strong perfume radiated from his painted and glistening skin, and his hair was oiled until it fell in sharp black spikes. Sexuality radiated from him like a command, and Truth felt her body flush in automatic animal response to that. Yesterday she would have simply surrendered to this need that Julian woke in her—but she had come a long way in twenty-four hours, and other needs were stronger.
"I have to talk to you. Now," Truth said.
"Of course," Julian answered. A smile he could not quite repress tugged at the corner of his mouth—as if he knew something she did not. "I'll be with you in just a moment."
He turned away, leaving Truth standing in the open doorway feeling jittery and unsatisfied. The altar with its covering of furs was still in place in the center of the Temple. She saw Julian lift one of the furs and pull out a small bundle wrapped in embroidered violet silk.
"Here we are," Julian said. "Why don't we got up to my sitting room?"
"Julian . . ." Truth said, but he was already padding away, and she had no choice but to follow him.
"Now. Here we are, all comfy. My, I must say you're up early this morning." Julian sat on the gray velvet sofa in his parlor, a towel draped around his neck. He'd used it to wipe away the last of the ritual paint and oils, but even without them he looked like some glittering half-wild creature of sorcery. The silk-wrapped bundle lay on the table before him.
Now that she was here, the clear cold light of day made her imaginings and might-be dreams ridiculous. Her head still ached, and she wanted nothing more than to go back to bed.
"Maybe a glass of wine? It may be early for you, but it's late for me, darling, so we'll call this a nightcap of sorts." Julian got up and went over to the liquor cabinet, selected two tiny, slender-stemmed glasses, and poured them full of a deep ruby liquid that held the light as if it were crystal itself.
"Port wine—it feeds the blood, or so they used to believe, and it's still one of life's pleasures, whatever they suppose now." He brought both glasses back and set them down on the table beside the bundle. "Sit down," Julian urged, taking his own suggestion. Truth shook her head mutely.
"Well? I don't want to rush you, my darling girl, but tonight's our big night and my current plans are for a shower and bed. Of course, if you're planning to join me . . ." He smiled.
Say it, Truth told herself. Just say it.
"You are Thorne Blackburn's son Pilgrim," Truth said. Each word was a separate struggle that left her feeling sick.
Animation did not fade from Julian's face—it vanished as if someone had flipped a switch, and when it went it took all humanity with it. The turquoise eyes blazed at her mutely, and Julian's face was a still, inhuman mask.
After a long moment vitality returned, but it was as if that skin held some new inhabitant—as if Truth's naming had been not only that, but a summoning as well. Julian was gone as if he had never been.
"Quite true," Pilgrim said. His smile widened. "How did you guess?"
Even at the last she had hoped it wasn't true; that Thorne was an illusion—or lying. But now that she looked for it she could see the blurred echo of Thorne's features in Julian's—in Pilgrim's—face.
Her brother—who even now was flaunting himself before her as if their shared blood didn't matter. And to her shame, the desire she had felt for him before was still there.
"Thorne told me," Truth said dully. Pilgrim tilted his head back and regarded her through his lashes, unsurprised.
