Bradley Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 01 Read online

  "Over a decade ago, Marion Zimmer Bradley's bestselling The Mists of Avalon turned the Arthurian legend on its head. More than merely a feminist retelling, the novel added a new dimension to our mythic history. It was a breathtaking reimagining ot history."

  — Sun Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  Now Marion Zimmer Bradley brings to contemporary fiction the same powerful imagination, vcompelling characters, and dramatic storytelling in

  GHOSTLIGHT

  In the heady days of the sixties, many people sought solutions to mankind's troubles in ancient religions and found that old wisdom had its place in the modern world. Among them w ere the follow ers of Thome Blackburn, all seekers after Truth. The group settled at Shadow's Gate, a magnificent old house in upstate New York.

  During the climactic night of Blackburn's most powerful ceremony, chaos erupted. Thorne Blackburn had vanished. And Catherine, Thorne's life-partner and the mother of one of his children, was dead.

  All that was thirty years ago, but Truth Blackburn, daughter of Thorne and Catherine, is still seeking truths — the truth of what happened that night at Shadow's Gate, the truth about the magickal powers her father claimed to wield, the truth about her long-lost half-brother and -sister

  She may be about to get some answers. A legacy has summoned Truth back to Shadow's Gate. Fueled once again by a decade's search for meaning, and led by the mysterious, charismatic Julian Pilgrim, a new group of followers of Thorne Blackburn's Way is preparing to

  (continued on back flap)

  GHOSTLIGHT

  TOR BOOKS BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  Dark Satanic

  The Inheritor

  Witch Hill

  TOR®

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  GHOSTL1GHT Copyright © 1995 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World-Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Design by Fritz Metsch Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Ghostlight / Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  p. cm.

  "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-85881-7

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R228G48 1995

  813'.54—dc2O 95-20003

  CIP

  First edition: September 1995

  Printed in the United States of America

  098765432

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PROLOGUE

  April jo, 1969, Shadowkill, New York

  THE FREAK SPRING STORM BATTERED THE OLD HOUSE WITH unceasing ferocity, as if attempting to gain entry to that which went on within. Flashes of lightning burst upon the figures inside the room with staccato intensity, illuminating the scene as if for some demonic surgeon's scalpel.

  It was a circular room, its only windows those that ringed the cupola above. Below those windows a ritual as old as the land upon which the house stood was being enacted. Between the lightning flashes, the candles the observers held provided the only illumination, but it was enough.

  A naked woman reclined upon a draped wooden altar, her body glistening with oil. Her black hair was spread like a fan over the furs and velvets on which she lay. At her head a red-robed woman stood, her own head thrown back in ecstatic communion with the forces summoned here tonight. Her hands cupped the unclad woman's temples and she cried out words in an ancient tongue in counterpoint to the thunder.

  Seven men and one woman, robed all in dark forest green, stood at the quarter and cross-quarter points of a circle cut into the floor. Another robed figure stood just outside its barrier. Each held a beeswax candle in his hands; their chanting a sonorous antiphon to the red-robed woman's ecstatic cries. In the north and in the west, braziers filled with incense sent their perfumed smoke skyward in pearlescent columns; in the east and in the south, great crystal bowls filled with water and with flowers hummed faintly, resonating to the ecstatic chanting and the fury of the storm.

  Over the sound of wind and voices, a hammering could be heard at the chamber's one entrance.

  "He comes! He comes! He comes!" shrilled the red-robed woman.

  The chanting stopped. The doors flew open.

  A man stood in the doorway. His eyes were shadowed and his long blond hair flowed free. His head was crowned with silver antlers and on his brow was the golden disk of the sun. His skin gleamed with oil and shadowy painted designs. He wore nothing but an animal skin tied about his shoulders, and before him he bore, point raised, a great silver sword that gleamed in the light of the candles.

  "I am the key for every lock," he intoned in a voice that held the deep organ notes of the sea. "I am the Opener of the Way!"

  He paced slowly forward, sword upheld, until he reached the robed figure standing in the South and—lightly, lightly—touched the point of the sword to his chest. The man fell back, and the others all began to chant, their voices faster and somehow more urgent.

  "The sun! Comes the sun! By Oak and Ash and Thorn, the sun! Comes the sun!"

  "The sun is coming up from the South!" cried the red-robed woman. "I call thee: Abraxas, Metatron, Uranos . . ."

  Her litany went on unheeded. The horned man lay his great sword down at the foot of the altar and leaned over the naked woman. The smell of ambergris, civet, and opium rising from her skin was strong enough for him to smell even through all the other perfumes. The empty wine cup was still clasped loosely in her hand.

  "Katherine—are you all right?" he whispered under the sound of the chanting. He could feel the power building in him; the ritual was proceeding just as he had written it, but something here in his Temple this night was not right.

  At the sound of his voice her eyes opened. Even with only candlelight to see by he could tell that the pupils were enormous with drugs.

  "Come . . . the . . . Opener of the Way," she said, her voice slurred and husky.

  The robed ones at the perimeter of the circle chanted in unison, their voices blending into an uprush of power chat would not be denied.

  "By Abbadon! Meggido! Typhon! Set!" cried the red-robed woman. "Open now, open now the Way!"

  Her eyes rolled up in her head and she sank to her knees, and the horned man could feel the Powers congregate within the Temple like a rushing of wings. He drew a deep, chest-expanding breath and raised his hands to the heavens.

  "Hierodule and Hierolator! Hierophex and Hierophant—" he cried out.

  His voice was drowned in a crescendo of thunderclaps, blending with each other into the roar of an onrushing train. The doors, closed a moment before by one of the robed acolytes, burst open again with enough force to shatter their hinges, and an icy gale poured into the room.

  "No! Don't break the Circle!" the horned man shouted, but it was futile. Panic sp
read like a fire through oil-soaked rags; all was screaming and chaos.

  In a flash of lightning he saw the woman on the altar fall to the ground and begin vibrating spasmodically, like a puppet in the hands of a vengeful god. A crack of thunder louder than any before it seemed to split the room like an executioner's axe.

  Then darkness.

  Screams.

  And, somewhere, a child crying.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHAT IS TRUTH?

  Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.

  —JOHN MILTON

  NORTH OF NEW YORK CITY, ALONG THE EDGE OF THE HUDSON River, there is a small estate lying between the railroad tracks of Metro North and the broad expanse of the river. Its main building was once a cider mill, and the mill—as well as the descendants of the original orchard—still occupies the site. Brick walkways cross the gently-rolling lawns, and there is a yearly battle between the students and the deer for the produce of the trees.

  Later buildings in the exuberantly classical Federalist mode complete the campus, but there has been no new construction on the campus for nearly a century. Its architectural conservatism makes the place so much the perfect image of a nineteenth-century college that the Dean must very firmly discourage the advances of several movie companies every year who wish to film here, but Taghkanic College guards its privacy— and that of its students and faculty—in the same stern fashion it always has.

  In 1714 Taghkanic College was founded to provide education to the local Indians, mostly members of the Taghkanic and Lenape tribes, and to the free Blacks who had also settled in the area. Existing to this day on the terms of its original charter, Taghkanic College has never accepted one penny of government support to cover its operating costs, choosing to remain independent first from Crown and royal governor and later from the representatives of the fledgling United States.

  Adherence to this policy has led, over the years, to a liberalization of its admission policies: In 1762 Taghkanic College opened its doors to "alle younge gentillmen of goode familie," and in 1816 to women, making Taghkanic one of the first institutions of higher learning in the United States to do so.

  Even with such broad admission policies, Taghkanic College would not exist today save for two individuals: Margaret Beresford Bidney and Colin MacLaren.

  Miss Bidney graduated Taghkanic College in the same year that the Insurrection of the Southern States turned her father's comfortable fortune into a large one. She never married, and in the last years of her life she was a disciple of William Seabrook, noted occultist.

  It was perhaps inevitable that Miss Bidney's fortune should go to fund, at the college of her matriculation, what grew to become the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory at Taghkanic College.

  From its inception, the laboratory—or, as it came informally to be known, the Bidney Institute—was funded independently of the college through the endowment fund created by the Bidney Bequest. The trustees of the college had been attempting to claim the entire Bidney Bequest on behalf of Taghkanic College for more than fifty years and were on the verge of success when Colin MacLaren accepted an appointment as director of the Institute.

  Dr. MacLaren had been known in parapsychological circles since the early fifties, frequently operating under a cloud due to his willingness to accept at face value what were dismissed by others as the ravings of charlatans and kooks. MacLaren maintained that there should be no distinction made between the fields of occultism and parapsychology when studying the paranormal, that, if anything, the occultists should have the edge, since they had been studying the unseen world for centuries and attempting to distill a scientific method of dealing with its effects. MacLaren's particular field of study was trance psychism, or mediumship, and his aggressive leadership was precisely what the moribund Bidney Institute needed.

  Under his guidance, the Institute took the lead in the investigation both of psychic phenomena and its wicked stepsister, occult phenomena, and became an institution of international repute. The specter of its dissolution vanished like expended ectoplasm, and it became clear to the disappointed trustees of Taghkanic College that their rich but unwanted foster child would be around until the time when Hell froze over—an event that the staff of the Margaret Beresford Bidney Psychic Science Research Institute intended, in any event, to measure.

  Truth Jourdemayne sat brooding in her tiny cubicle at the Bidney Institute in a Monday-morning stupor unleavened, as yet, by the healing power of coffee. Her short dark hair in its sensible crop looked faintly rumpled, and her white lab coat, open over a sensible cotton sweater and jeans, looked less crisp than usual. A pile of computer printouts six inches thick lay under her right elbow: Truth's work for the immediate future.

  She glanced up at the clock on her wall, shoving her horn-rimmed reading glasses up on her brow as she did so. Eight forty-five, and when she'd gotten here fifteen minutes ago Meg had just been starting to fill the percolator. It was large, and old, and took its sweet time to boil; there wouldn't be coffee for a while yet. Truth sighed, and pulled the printouts over to her. Might as well get some work done while she waited.

  Davy had finished the last of the runs just yesterday. It was part of an experiment Truth had designed; nothing out of the ordinary, merely an attempt to establish once and for all a statistical baseline for incidents of clairsentient perception. It was necessary work, but collecting the data to validate the experiment was a mind-numbing labor: ten individuals aged twenty to twenty-five, in good physical health, who were willing to participate in 100 double-blind machine runs of 100 Rhine cards each— and at that Truth thought her findings might be challenged on the grounds of being based upon too small a statistical sample.

  But the experiment would have been impossibly unwieldy with more volunteers, even if she could have gotten them. It had taken over a year to amass the data as it was. And the preliminary work was sound enough. The experiment met all the International Society of Psychic Research guidelines: Responses were recorded electronically, symbols were chosen randomly by machine; there was no possibility that a human researcher could accidentally communicate the symbols to the subjects through body language.

  Or even telepathy. It was hard enough having to design an experiment that would generate baseline statistics by which clairvoyance could be measured without having to design one that excluded other psychic talents—such as telepathy or precognition—as well. Still, Truth thought she'd managed. Since the computer in some sense already "knew" the order of all the symbols it would choose, that event lay in the past by the time the subject entered the experiment, so that any ability to see the future—assuming any of their subjects possessed such, which Truth hoped for the sake of her experiment they did not—would not be involved in guessing the symbols on the cards.

  Welcome to the glamour world of statistical parapsychology, Truth thought wryly to herself, and picked up a pencil.

  She'd forgotten entirely about coffee when Meg came in an hour later.

  "Hello? Hibernating?"

  Meg Winslow was the Parapsychology Department's secretary, short, cheerful, round, and efficient. She entered with an armful of mail and a steaming coffee cup held perilously steady with three fingers.

  "I lost track of the time," Truth admitted sheepishly.

  "Lots of lovely mail," Meg announced decisively, "and Dyl brought in some currant shortbread he made over the weekend. I saved you a piece."

  Dumping the mail carefully on the desk, Meg set the cup down and dove into her jacket pocket to retrieve sugar and cream packets and a tile of shortbread wrapped in a paper napkin.

  "You're spoiling me," Truth protested laughingly. This service wasn't part of Meg's job description.

  "If I don't, you'll starve to death, and be buried in a pile of statistics," Meg said promptly. "I'd better get a move on—today's the start of classes, and we're sure to have a dozen lost freshmen wander in here bef
ore noon if I don't keep 'em out." Meg swept out again, carefully closing the door behind her, in obedience to Truth's preference.

  As one of the nonfaculty researchers at the Bidney Institute, Truth was entitled to an office with a door, just as if she were a full professor, and she kept it shut, whether she was in the office or not. The professors whose offices flanked hers kept their doors closed only, Truth suspected, as a vacuous show of status, especially since most of them popped up and peered out at the slightest footstep from outside.

  But when Truth closed her door, she meant it. Truth kept her door shut so she could keep people out. Especially now. Truth Jourdemayne hated September with a passion more often reserved for the holiday season; she hated the flocks of returning students, the bewildered new arrivals, the graduate students.

  It was not so much that she disliked any individual student, she told herself unconvincingly. It was just that taken all together they were too many—too noisy, and too energetic.

  Well, after all, they're just arriving, while you've been here all summer, toiling away in the vineyards of statistical analysis, Truth told herself mockingly. The Institute did not follow Taghkanic's academic year—a good thing, as they'd never get any work done—and so September was just another month for her, and not the end of a long vacation.

  She sighed, and reached for her coffee—Meg really shouldn't do things like this; if the professors notice they'll all want her to fetch and carry for them and she'll never get anything done—and only then realized how stiff and sore her muscles were.

  Tension. I really hate this place in September. A cross between a lunatic asylum and a three-ring circus—and at that, enrollment's down again. Everywhere but at good old Maggie B. There were not many places in either the United States or Europe that offered a degree program in parapsychology and the services of a first-rate research lab to boot. If not for the Bidney Institute, Taghkanic would probably have closed years ago, just another liberal-arts college caught in the money crunch.