Margaret Ball - The Shadow Gate

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 452.3KB 170 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PROLOGUE

Thirtieth year of Queen Alianora—In this year the harvests failed, so that many poor folk, both mortals

and elvenkind, had suffered but for die Queen's charity in giving of grain from the royal stores.

One hundredth year of Queen Alianora—The harvests having been poor these three years due to the

inclement conditions, and the royal stores of grain being exhausted, the queen of her mercy remitted the

third part of the tax due from every household within the royal demesne.

One hundred twenty-third year of the reign of Alianora called Queen of the Elvenkind—In this year

departed the elven-loving Order of Saint Francis from these lands, the monastery, outbuildings, and serfs

being now under the gentle and merciful rule of our own Order of Saint Durand, and may God blast with

His fires all heretics and ill-disposed who resist the change.

One hundred fiftieth year of the reign of Alianora called Queen of the Elvenkind—In this year departed

many of the lords of Elvenkind to join their cursed brothers the Jinni in Outremer, they saying that the

land was too poor to sup- port them, and now by the mercy of God may we pray for better harvests that

these soulless ones are gone from the land, and may the rest of their detestable sort follow them that the

curse on the land may be withdrawn!

—Extiacts from the Chronicle of Remigius Monastery

Alianora, Countess of Poitiers, Duchess of Aquitaine, Regent of the Garronais and Queen of the Middle

Realm, held court in her palace at Poitiers.

In the hushed blue evening the stains and crumbling cracks in the palace walls were barely evident; the

flaws of age were softened, hidden in the hazy sweet-scented air, swirled away by mists and illusion until

the casual observer saw only a vision of perfection rising above the encircling ring of the gardens: white

walls and slender white columns, spiral stairways rising as sharply and sweetly as an aubade, high pointed

roofs shimmering with the iridescence of seastone brought all the way from the sandy shores of the

Garronais.

A garden of sweet herbs and flowering trees encircled the palace, and beyond that, a wall of silence and

invisible forces warded it against the hubbub of the dense-packed medieval city. In the streets of Poitiers

a carter swore at his oxen and lashed them until they lurched forward and all but overturned his stuck

cart, a mason defying guild regulations by working past sunset swore even more vehemently when the

carter's load of quarried stone tumbled against the back of the cart with danger of cracks and flaws, a

wine-shop keeper shouted the virtues of his wares to calm the men's tempers and an impudent girl

threatened to report them both to the burgesses of the city if they didn't give her a sip from their cups.

Within the palace garden, a scant hundred feet away, the Lords of Elfhame watched in appreciative

silence and listened to the slow reluctant rustling of a rose unfurling its petals, brought from bud to full

bloom in the course of one evening by the Lady Vielle's magic. Upstairs, those who were disinclined for

such frivolous amusements paced a hall whose floors of pink-veined marble were worn smooth from

many hundreds of years of such pacings, and discussed the future of the realm in low worried voices.

"Roses and moonlight!" burst out a thin golden-haired man when he heard the murmur of applause from

the gardens. 'Time was when the Lady Vielle's grandsire would have raised the winds and the waves to

be his horses, and the court would have ridden from Poitiers to Outremer in one night's joyous adventure,

with the water-horses foaming white beneath us and their haunches surging with the power of the tide.

That was the High Magic! And now we toy with flowers while the Mortal Realms press in upon us daily."

His voice carried to the gardens below. "If you have the power to raise the water-horses, Lord Yrthan,

be sure I shall ride one," Lady Vielle called up, "Until then… perhaps you would care to demonstrate

your strength by turning my rose into a green growing tree?" Her sharp mocking laughter was echoed by

the dancing notes of a lute played by the mortal jongleur who stood behind her.

Yrthan's right hand clenched and he made a quick casting gesture over the balcony. A shower of gray

sparks flitted down upon the elvenltind assembled in the garden, sparkling and stinging where they

landed. The petals of the rose turned gray, then black, and it drooped in Vielle's hand and gave off a

stench of something long dead and rotting in stagnant water. With a little cry of dismay Vielle withdrew

her hand, shaking the last of the gray sparks off her long fingers. She and her friends retreated to the

shelter of the lower terrace, trailed after by the mortal jongleur with his lute.

Yrthan's companions wrinkled their noses at the foul smell that arose from the dead iwe.

"I meant only to let it age, to make her see the petals felling," Yrthan murmured in apology, shaking his

head. "The simplest magics go awry these days."

"And we're no more use than those children."

The High Lords of Elvenkind moved inside. In the garden, now that none of the elvenkind were watching,

the walls of silence shook a little under the pressure of all the human noise outside, and a trace of a girl's

tipsy song came through the rift. The rose was a bud on its bush as it had always been, freed of the

illusions cast by Vielle and Yrthan, and with its inmost nature untouched by their weak magics.

And in die innermost chamber of the palace, a windowless room shrouded by silks woven by the Jinn of

Outremer, Aüanora d'Aquitaine wove her plans to restore the strength of Elmame to its former glory.

In her three-hundredth year the Lady of the Middle Realm appeared untouched and smooth as a young

girl. She was not as fair as most of the elvenkind; honey-brown hair streaked with gold fell loosely

around a face gilded with the touch of the desert sun. That coloring was a memento of her first mortal

marriage; riding on crusade to Outremer, barely tolerated by the good mortal clerics of the party for her

friendship with the Jinn who guided them, she had been amused and delighted to discover that with

enough sun, eiven skin could change color just as that of mortals did. Pleased with the effect of this

golden skin setting off her elven-pale eyes, she had maintained the tint for decades with only a little effort.

It was not solely a matter of vanity; she liked to keep the conservative elder lords tike Yrthan a little

worried, to remind them that their liege lady was an unpredictable person with a strange taste for

marrying mortals.

The man who attended her was one of the youngest in her realm; Berengar, Count of the Garronais,

subject to the regency of Aüanora until he attained his majority in some fifty years. In mortal years he was

old enough to have ruled his own lands for two decades; as the Lords of Elvenkind counted time, a man

of thirty-five was an impetuous youth, barely out of leading-strings and hardly to be trusted with control

of any lands more extensive than his nursery garden.

Aüanora, who had married two mortal kings, had a slightly different view of time and maturity. Her

second husband had been no older than Berengar when they married, and a year later he had won the

English crown. Of course, mortals were hastened towards maturity by their tragically short life-spans, like

a flower forced to bud and bloom in a night by a trivial forcing-spell; still, there were circumstances in

which a man like Berengar might be of more use to her than the counselors who usually surrounded her.

Yrthan and his friends would have known that what she proposed was impossible, unwise, a defiance of

die basic tenets of Elfliame and far too dangerous to be contemplated for a moment, lest what remained

of their failing powers be destroyed in a moment. Berengar was young enough to attempt the impossible.

And besides, he was rich in the wealth that meant more to the elvenkind than any lands or gold. While

Berengar still knelt, head bowed, before her, Alianora's glance strayed to the boy who knelt beside him.

Kieran of Gwyneth, Berengar's fosterling.

It was part of the natural balance of things that the elvenkind, who lived for hundreds of years, should

rarely bear children and should prize them above all things. Every elfin child grew up petted and

cherished, surrounded by grave lords and great ladies who accounted it a rare honor to have their braids

pulled or their backs commandeered for games of knights on horseback, loved and petted and brought

gently into the way of the people. As they grew into their powers they were taught control of those

powers and of their own emotions; people who could raise a storm or flatten a hayfield with an angry

gesture had to learn very early not to make any gesture without thought for the consequences. And so the

children were doubly cherished, once for their rarity and again for the freedom that their ignorance and

relative weakness gave them. Alone among the elvenkind, the children cried and laughed, sang and raced

and fought and gave way to the demands of the moment. Every elven child, before he began to reach the

age at which his powers would become manifest, was a spoiled and petted darling, indulged in a way the

mortalkind would judge sheer foolishness.

Every child but one. Kieran was the last child to be born to an elven couple in twenty years, and he had

not been spoiled as was the birttu-ight of every elven child. His parents had died untimely and he had

been raised by a mortal couple, fishers on the Welsh coast. They brought him up overstrictly, fearing his

elven powers and not knowing when or how they might become manifest. At ten, angry, confused by his

developing powers, knowing that his mortal parents feared him and not understanding why, he had

stowed away on a fishing boat to find his elvenkind in Brittany. Berengar had discovered him by chance,

a boy of ten raging at the sea that would not obey him, desperate and angry and lost and starving, and

had promptly claimed the boy as his fosterling.

Now, at twelve, Kieran was as steady and controlled as any elven child approaching his time of power,

but without the legacy of love and laughter that should have been his. And the need for that control was

debatable. Once we raised the waves for our steeds and rode the air, Alianora thought, unconsciously

mirroring Yrthan's complaints. Now most of our arts are illusion, and we know not what rides the clouds.

Even in this interior chamber, protected by walls and hangings and halls and gardens, from time to time

she could hear the mortal clamor of her city of Poitiers breaking through the wards of silence that should

have kept the High Queen's palace inviolate. Those noises raised echoes in her mind of the troubling

rumors that had begun in the Middle Realm, and of some troubles that were more than rumor. It was said

that those bound to darkness were free again; true, the Wild Hunt fed on mortal souls and not on the

elvenkind, but the binding that held them had been of elven making, and it was a poor omen for the future

should that centuries-old spell fail now.

It was also said that the lands of the Middle Realm shrank year by year, passing into the hands of mortal

lords as the elvenkind lost their old power to control the tides and the seasons and the growing things in

the land; and this Alianora knew was no rumor. And her best hope for renewing the strength of the

Realm was in this impetuous elf-lad who knelt before her, a child raising a child, and both of them

centuries too young to know anything about the catastrophe that had befallen their people before they

were born.

"My lord Berengar." At the sound of Alianora's voice the young man looked up. "How much do you

know about the Catastrophe?" Before he could speak, she waved him to his feet with an imperious

gesture. "Oh, stand up, man. I did not have you brought here to play at games of court rituals. I apologize

for having let you kneel so long—I was thinking, but that is no excuse."

"The Queen of Elfhame needs no excuse."

Fleetingly Alianora allowed herself to remember her second mortal husband. Henry Plantagenet would

never have knelt so long in reverent silence; no, in the time she'd sat thinking here, he'd have tumbled her

into bed between a quip and a jest, gotten another of their strange half-blood sons on her body and

ridden away to conquer some place or set some new laws in force. The elvenkind paid a high price in

silence and control for their powers and their long life. Could this grave young man, so proper, so

restrained, really serve her need?

If not, their case was hopeless. 'The Catastrophe, Berengar?" she prompted sharply.

The young man looked up at the pattern of intertwined knots carved around the ceiling. Fists on hips, his

short cloak thrown hack, he seemed, to be searching for the answer in another world. "The Stones of

Jura were once the seat of all power in Elmame. Their magic flowed into die land, and we took it from

the land. Lord Joflroi of Brittany thought to take their power into himself by the help of a wizard's

apprentice who had stolen the secrets of mortal magecraft. The Lady Sybille, who was then the Queen of

the Middle Realm, learned of his intention and confronted him within the circle of the Stones. No one

knows what happened then, but that they both died—the apprentice, too, I suppose, but our accounts

don't say what happened to the boy—and the power of the Stones was lost to Elfhame."

"No one knows even that much," Alianora corrected him, more sharply than she had intended. "What

makes you think they both died there?"

Berengar looked confused, and more elven than before, when he'd seemed like a perfectly correct

statue. "Why—why, so I had it from my tutor, and it is written so in the scrolls of the great library at Ys."

"Yes. So it is written," Alianora agreed. Too impatient to remain still longer, she rose and paced the

length of the small chamber. "My lord Berengar, would you request your page to bring us some wine?"

"Kieran?" Berengar's hand ruffled the page's thick hair.

"At once, my lord."

"You are fortunate," Alianora said as the curtains closed behind the boy.

"I have had him for only two years, and next year he will go to the schools at Ys to learn the ways of his

power."

"Even two years is more time to be a parent than most of our people are given now. Before the

Catastrophe our children were born infrequently, but there were always enough to replenish the race.

Now—" Alianora raised her empty hands before her. "You were the last child born before Kieran. And

bringing his spirit into the world must have weakened his parents fatally, else they'd have warded

themselves better against the storm that took them. The Realm is dying, Berengar. We must reverse the

Catastrophe."

She turned away from Berengar and traced the image on a silken hanging with one long finger. As the

cloth shivered and swayed beneath the pressure of her fingertip, the heavy folds moved and different

parts of the large tapestry gleamed in the white light that emanated from the knot-carved stone: a lioness

licking her cubs into shape, a gerfalcon stooping to his prey, a dragon breathing down cleansing fire upon

a leprous knight. "I have spent many months in Ys, consulting with the far-seers and the memory-chanters

there, and reading the scrolls of the Catastrophe. Where do you think the power of the Stones went,

Berengar? Don't you remember the First Law?"

** 'Power is neither destroyed nor created. It flows and is guided; it is used and it is renewed,' "

Berengar recited from memory. "But the Stones are different."

"Why?"

He made a helpless gesture. "Well—their power was destroyed."

"No. I have studied the Catastrophe longer, per- haps, than any save the sages of Ys, and I myself have

more power to see beyond the Three Realms than any elven sage in the schools." Alianora paused,

fingering the tapestry. "Berengar, I believe that the power of the Stones was not destroyed, but sent into

another world. We know that such worlds exist; before the Catastrophe, our folk made Gates in the

places of power, and we visited back and forth freely. Since then we have not dared to dissipate our

remaining powers, for a Gate draws power more than any illusion. And after all, most other worlds are

hardly places one would take any pleasure in visiting. They have no society worthy of the name—only

mortals, and perhaps a uisge or kelpie here and there. The one to which I have traced Sybille's spirit is

worse than most."

"You have traced her?"

Alianora frowned and glanced where the silken tapestries trembled. "Kieran is tactful," Berengar assured

her. "He knew he was being sent away; he will remain in the outer hall until I call him back. And no one

else will pass my page's guard."

"The power of the Stones, Berengar, is like a trail of stars to those who know how to see. That

star-track leads through the paths of air and outside this realm. I have followed it and I have seen the

world, even the place on that world where our power goes and is wasted upon mortals with no strength

to use it" Alianora shuddered delicately. "It is a terrible world, Berengar. Pray that we are not called upon

to follow Sybille's flight. My worst fear is that she will have been driven mad by her sufferings there,

surrounded by mortals and iron-demons and—"

"Iron-demons?"

"You will see." Alianora regarded him thoughtfully. "Even in that world, there have been some mortals

who sensed the existence of other realms. One of them dreamed us, and painted his dreams. I

can use his dream-picture to open a Gate, and I can send dreams and callings to bring Sybille back, but I

must have your permission."

"Mine? But, Lady—Of course," Berengar caught himself up in midsentence. "The Stonemaids of die

Garronais?"

"We have lost so many of the places of power, as mortals infringed upon our lands and as we lost the

strength to use them aright. The Stone Circle of Fontevrault is now within the grounds of a Durandine

monastery, and there is a mill belonging to the Count of the Vexin over the Falls of Mathilde. The Jinn

have reclaimed their own places in Spain and Outremer, and I would rather ask a Durandine brother for

help than confess to a jinni how weak we are grown here in EHhame; besides, they are inconveniently far

away."

"There are two circles of standing stones upon the lands of Lord Yrthan."

"Who has his own ideas about the way to save Elfhame." An expression of distaste crossed Alianora's

face, "I do not plan to marry again."

"N-no, my Lady. I mean, yes, my Lady." Berengar bent his knee briefly and remained with head bowed

while Alianora outlined her plan to bring back Sybille and the power that had leaked out of the Middle

Realm with her disappearance.

Some leagues away, in the Durandine monastery at Fontevrault, a circle of robed and hooded figures

kept watch over a brass bowl filled with milky fluid. On the surface of the white liquid, shaken and

trembling like figures in a dream, Alianora and Berengar appeared; the white fluid around them took on

the semblance of silken tapestries, and their voices sounded like the tinny far-away calls of midnight

demons. Behind the bowl, a monk skilled in mortal spells murmured ceaselessly and passed his hands

over and above the milky potion, keeping the image faintly within view of the others assembled there.

All wore the anonymous gray robes of the order, with hoods pulled low over their faces to maintain the

mask of anonymity and equality commanded by the Rule of Saint Durand; but only one man dared speak

and interrupt the chanting magic that kept the image in place.

"Enough, I think," he said. "We know their plans. It remains only to keep our own watch and ward over

the Gate, and to make sure that we, and not this elfling child-Lord, receive the Lady Sybille when she

passes into this realm again."

"If only we could pass through ourselves, and take the lady in this strange world to which she has fled!"

exclaimed another.

The first speaker swung towards him. Face and hands and feet were covered in the hooded robe of the

Order, but the lines of his body expressed impatience enough. "And how should we know her there? She

has doubtless changed her shape a dozen times by now. The spells we craft here may not work there, or

may work differently; it is surer and safer to let the elven lords call her back, if we can but catch her on

the moment of return."

He gestured back towards the image, wavering for a minute with his interruption, but now taking on new

clarity as the brother who changed the spells warmed again to his task. "And even if we could know the

lady by sight—would you really want to go there? No, my brother. Trust those older and wiser than you

in the evil ways of the elvenkind. They do not risk themselves in that world; neither need we. We as well

as they can send dreams and imaginations; we as well as they can find those in the other world who are

close to us in spirit. I have found such a one, and with his help we will draw the lady

Sybille to us while this young effling is easily distracted elsewhere."

As he spoke, Alianora was showing Berengar the starry trail of power leaking out of the elven realms,

and the world at the other side of the Void to which that trail led. The assembled Durandine monks

peered at the milky reflection of that image and shuddered with distaste—just as did Berengar, looking

into the spellcast mirror behind the tapestries of Alianora's council chamber. Opposed as they might be in

most matters, the elvenkind and the Durandine monks were agreed on one thing: for, far better to call

Sybille back by spells and charms than to enter this terrible world in their own bodies! Demons with

bodies of iron rushed about narrow tracks, screaming threats at one another and every so often colliding

with cries of agony. Stone towers as high as the sky entrapped mortals who did not even know the

purpose of their servitude in these monstrous keeps. And other mortals, careless of their weak fleshy

bodies, actually descended to the narrow tracks ruled by the iron-demons and hurled themselves before

them…

CHAPTER ONE

"I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of failing sparks which

with the star followed southward. And they examined him upon his throne almost as something hostile,

and turning from him,, they sought rather the north. And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned

into black coals… and cast into the abyss that I could see them no more."

—Hildegard of Bingen

Lisa could have sworn she'd looked before crossing the street; but the car seemed to come out of

nowhere, burning rubber as the wheels screeched around the corner. A horn blared in her ear and the

driver of the convertible yelled something as she threw herself out of the way. Her foot slipped on the wet

asphalt and she skated forwards. The papers in her hands shot upwards and out, dancing in a vagrant

breeze and mixing with a flock of the green and silver butterflies that frequented the garden across the

street. Lisa swore quietly and viciously, recovered her balance with one hand inches from the asphalt,

and snatched at the papers whirling above the street. Somehow she retrieved them; the butterflies danced

on their way; the blaring music from the car radio receded into the distance and Lisa made it across the

street with her morning's work, if not her dignity, precariously salvaged.

"What are you doing, Lisa? Don't you know there's a bounty on pedestrians in Texas?" Judith Templeton

called from the front steps of die New Age Psychic Research Center. Dressed for work in faded jeans

and a Hot Tuna T-shirt, with her long blonde hair tied back with a shoestring, she looked like a time

traveler on the deep, shady porch of the old house. "I knew the neighborhood would go to hell when they

sold the Pennyfeather place to a fraternity. How did you manage to retrieve everything?"

"Just lucky, I guess." Lisa handed over her stack of Xeroxed papers and kept the originals to return to

her own files. "Here you are, Dr. Templeton: copies of all Miss Penny's classes, contracts, and

miscellaneous paperwork. Do you really think that's going to help you put the Center's business affairs

onto a computer?"

"Probably not," Judith grinned. "The more I know about how my great-aunt has been running this place,

the more confused I get. But the southern extended family is a wonderful and terrible thing. Dad would

never forgive me if I didn't make one more try to rescue the Center before the creditors and the IRS

descend on her."

"The what?"

"IRS. Internal Revenue Service." Judith glanced at Lisa and shook her head. "Come on, even you New

Age types must occasionally have to interact with the real world. You do pay taxes on whatever

Margaret Batt minuscule salary Aunt Penny gives you, don't you, Lisa? I mean—oh, no. She does pay

you? You're not kept here in peonage, or in enchanted servitude, or whatever?" „,n- ji "I think," Lisa

said, "you're trying to put off dealing with those papers. Let's go inside."

As always, when the heavy front door with its leaded-glass panels swung shut behind her, Lisa Celt

relieved to be insulated from the blaring world outside. The New Age Psychic Research Center, formerly

the Harry James Templeton House, was located less than a block from the last street of windowless

black office buildings and empty bank towers that had taken over Austin's downtown; but in mental and

spiritual space it was a hundred years away from that world. Thick walls and overhanging eaves and

good solid doors, built to keep out the Texas heat and sunlight, now toned down the roar of downtown

traffic to a nearly inaudible murmur. The original hanging lamps with their stained-glass shades cast a

gentle, multicolored light over the entrance hallway; soothing sounds of wind chimes and ocean waves

came from the Harmonic Counseling Center in what had once been a formal dining room, and incense

from the Afro-Jamaican Spiritual Fantasy Bookstore in the old library gave the cool air a hint of rose and

jasmine.

For once there was no one waiting with a crisis demanding Lisa's attention, and the cabriole-legged

mahogany table that she had commandeered for her desk was empty of messages. She hung her purse

over the back of the chair, dropped Miss Penny's files in the top drawer of the table and wandered into

the incense-scented darkness of the Spiritual Fantasy Bookstore. The curtain of hanging beads and bells

tinkled pleasantly as she passed through it, and Mahluli arose from his armchair by the window.

"Can I help you—oh, it's you, Lisa. Come to look at the Nielsen pictures again? Be my guest."

^ITI be careful," Lisa promised.

"I know. I wish I could give you the book, but—"

Lisa shook her head. "Don't even think about it. I don't know how much you had to pay for a first edition

with tipped-in plates of Kay Nielsen's illustrations, and if you teU me I'll just start worrying about your

finances as well as Miss Penny's. Some day you'll sell the book to a wealthy collector."

"Who will put it behind glass, in a dimate-controUed environment, and nobody will ever enjoy it again."

Mahluli James Robertson O'Connor sighed and shook his beaded dreadlocks over his own prediction. "I

ought to donate it to the Center—you wouldn't believe how many people have been dropping in to look

at the pictures lately."

"I would," said Lisa. She picked up the old book and gently opened it to her favorite illustration. "They're

very…" But the right word wouldn't come. "Soothing? Inspiring?"

Mahluli grinned. "Yeah. They sure are. Me, if I had to pick a word, I'd say addictive, the way you keep

coming back to them—and the others, too. Go on, girl. Get a fix. Ill just tend to my business."

Lisa barely heard M ah lull's last gentle jab; her eyes were already fixed on the picture, and she was

drinking in the feeling of strength and serenity it always gave her.

Compared with some of Nielsen's better-known illustrations, it was deceptively simple: a peaceful forest

scene, a small creek running over boulders and shaded by tall trees, with a central grassy clearing framed

by an arch of weathered gray stone. But the longer Lisa looked, the more enchanting detail and variety

she saw in the picture. The arch of stone was freestanding, and around it the artist had painted a misty

gray sky in which vague cloud-shapes seemed to dance; but beyond the arch, the forest floor was

dappled with sunlight, and the green leaves of the trees formed a complex interlocking mosaic against a

sky too brilliantly blue to be real. If she stared long enough, Lisa began to feel that she could actually see

the sunlight dancing on the surface of the stream, and that the leaves overhead were stirring in an illusory

breeze. With just a little more concentration, she would be able to hear the musical rippling of the water

as it tumbled over those white boulders; somehow she knew that would be the sweetest sound in the

world, one she had been longing to hear for untold ages…

"Lisa! Where are you?"

"Doesn't anybody know what's going on around this place?"

Lisa closed the book quickly and hurried back through the bead curtain. The tinkling of Mahluli's beads

and bells was like an echo of the stream; the illusion of the picture clung to her, so strong that she found

herself shaking her fingertips free of imaginary droplets of water. J really must stop daydreaming during

working hours. She was almost relieved to turn back to the everyday crises and conflicts that were

normal working conditions at the New Age Center.

"Lisa, you've let the storeroom run out of sea salt again," complained Ginevra of Ginevra's Crystal

Healing and Meditation Room. "How am I supposed to cleanse my new crystals of their previous

owners' karma?"

"Lisa, I need $4.59 out of petty cash immediately, and you've gone and left the box locked again!" That

was johnny Z., last name unknown, who sold T-shirts with inspirational messages out of what had once

been the butler's pantry. "How do you expect me to give this lady her change if you keep the cash box

locked?"

"I have an appointment with Miss Templeton," announced a heavyset man in a business suit. His dark hair

was combed back with too much oil, and his black eyes looked over what he could see of the front

rooms with an acquisitive gleam that made Lisa uncomfortable. Real estate, she thought automatically.

Developer. "Doesn't anybody tend to business around here?"

Lisa unlocked the top drawer of her desk and took out a spiral-bound notebook. "Mr. Simmons?"

The dark man nodded. "Clifford J. Worthington Simmons III. Well, where is the old lady? I don't have

time to waste."

"It is now ten minutes to eleven," Lisa said. "Your appointment is at eleven. If you'll please take a seat,

Miss Templeton will be with you shortly." She stared at Clifford J. Worthington Simmons III, fighting

down the desire to drop her eyes as she usually did when strangers looked so hard at her, until he

backed away and took one of the striped Regency chairs against the wall.

"Hey, nice notebook," said Mahluli, who had come out of his bookstore room to see what all the fuss

was about. He took the spiral-bound book out of Lisa's hand and looked closely at the cover design of

unicorns dancing on a rainbow. "I don't stock anything like that. Where'd you get it? Whole Foods?

Grok Books? How come you don't keep it on the desk?"

"I bought it at the stationery counter at Safeway, and I keep it locked away because otherwise someone

like you would wander away with it and I wouldn't be able to keep track of Miss Penny's schedule," Lisa

answered, twitching the notebook out of Mahluli's hand and dropping it back in the desk drawer. "And

that's why the cash box is locked, too, Johnny—

Margaret Batt because too many people have been taking money for change and not leaving me a note

of what they took when. Here's your $4.59." Johnny reached for the money and Lisa held her hand

back. "Uh-uh. You write a note first, remember?"

While Johnny Z. was scribbling his receipt, Lisa turned to Ginevra. "I'm sorry about the sea salt; we seem

to have been using more than usual this month, and Whole Foods was closed this morning."

"It just cakes up so fast," Ginevra agreed. "There must be a lot of bad karma in the air these days."

"Mmm," Lisa agreed. "That does seem to happen whenever the humidity is over 90 percent, have you

noticed? Anyway, I bought you a box of Morton's Kosher Coarse at Safeway. You can use that today,

or wait till tomorrow and I'll pick up some more authentic salt at Whole Foods."

"Yes, but—"

Lisa glanced at her notebook again. "Don't you have a client waiting for consultation now? Amy Du-val.

Crystal healing and meditation to strengthen her spirit against a bad situation at the office, 10:45."

"Oh!" All at once the reception hall emptied. Ginevra disappeared in a flutter of hand-painted silk chiffon

to placate her waiting client. At almost the same time Miss Penelope Templeton appeared at the door to

the back hall, a small white-haired figure enveloped in voluminous white Indian cotton garments, and

beckoned to the mysterious Clifford Sim-mons. Johnny Z. had taken his customer back to examine the

T-shirt selection and Mahluli had returned to his reading in the Spiritual Fantasy Bookstore. Judith

Templeton, leaning against the front door, raised her hands and applauded with great silent mimed claps.

"I don't know how you do it," she said, "but you begin to give me hope of reducing Aunt Penny's affairs

to some sort of order. How do you cope with this mob? Are all the secrets of the universe in that

notebook of yours?"

Lisa closed the unicorn notebook and slid it back into the top desk drawer. "Oh, well, it's not as bad as it

seems," she said. "I was trained to be precise—to keep good records…"

"Must have been one hell of a good secretarial school if it prepared you to deal with the likes of this

crew," Judith said. "Where did you say you went to school?"

"Oh, here and there. UTs a pretty good school, isn't it? Do you teach there?"

Judith shook her head. "One year. Never again. If you think these people are nuts, you wouldn't believe

what goes on in faculty meetings! I prefer working for myself. No pressure to publish, and I get an

interesting variety of jobs. Mostly I help people to computerize their businesses—like this—only usually,

of course, I get paid for it. And usually the level of chaos isn't quite this bad. It's a nuisance, though,

having to straighten out all the records and business details before I can get down to playing with the

computer." She eyed Lisa's immaculate desk. "I could do twice as many jobs if I had a good secretary. I

don't suppose you—?"

"The family," Lisa pointed out, "would never forgive you if you stole Miss Penny's secretary-receptionist."

"No, I suppose not. But frankly, Lisa, after looking at the records you've brought me, I really don't think

any amount of computer wizardry will shore up this business for long. You may be looking for a job

sooner than you realize. Half her tenants are months behind on the rent—or I think they are; she doesn't

give receipts most of the time, and she throws away cancelled checks because things that have passed

Margaret BaU

through the bank give off bad vibrations. She's got unpaid bills all over town, threatening letters from all

the utilities and an appointment in two days with an IRS agent who thinks he wants to take over the

business in lieu of unpaid taxes."

"I know about the bills. We were hoping you could persuade some of the creditors to wait for their

money. Now that you're going to make the Center so much more efficient—"

"I am not," said Judith, "a magician. You'd better get some of your crystal healers and spiritual fantasists

working on Aunt Penny's case."

Lisa smiled faintly. "I expect they are already doing all they can. Unfortunately, none of it works."

Judith gave her a sharp glance. "No—of course not—but I didn't expect to hear you say that."

"Belief," Lisa said, "is not part of the job description. I answer the telephone, keep track of appointments,

make copies of lost keys, keep the supply cabinet stocked—when I can—with sea salt and other

necessities, and try to keep Johnny Z. and Miss Penny from taking small change out of the cash box

without a receipt. I do not do windows, crystal healings, or bookkeeping."

"Just as well," Judith murmured. "That last task would break your heart. Here I am trying to set Aunt

Penny up with a computer system to run her business, and I still haven't figured out whether all these

people are tenants or business partners."

"Don't worry," Lisa said, "I don't think they know either. It all works somehow, though—"

"They are tenants," announced a deep and unpleasantly familiar voice from the door to the back hall. "I

choose my own business partners."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PROLOGUEThirtiethyearofQueenAlianora—Inthisyeartheharvestsfailed,sothatmanypoorfolk,bothmortalsandelvenkind,hadsufferedbutfordieQueen'scharityingivingofgrainfromtheroyalstores.OnehundredthyearofQueenAlianora—Theharvestshavingbeenpoorthesethreeyearsduetotheinclementconditions,andtheroyalstoresofgrain...

展开>> 收起<<

Margaret Ball - The Shadow Gate.pdf

共170页,预览34页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Margaret Ball - The Shadow Gate

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: