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MARION ZIMMER BRADLEYHOLLY LISLEIn the RiftThis is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.Copyright © 1998 by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly LisleAll rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.A Baen Books OriginalBaen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471ISBN: 0-671-57791-3Cover art by Clyde CaldwellFirst paperback printing, February 1999Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-49668Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH Printed in the United States of AmericaTo Matt who knows the price of happinessEvery dream achieved someday demands a reckoning, just as every choice comes at a price. This is life: that nothing worth having can ever come easily,that nothing loved can last forever without care, attention, and sacrifice.The last of the search parties had given up looking for her months earlier. When the American woman pedaled her bicycle out of a Hide-traveled mountain pass in the heart of the Italian Alps, her husband had already received the notice that she was missing and presumed dead, her home town had already mourned, her friends had already paid their last respects. She had lived through a month of days in her absence; the world she'd left behind and finally rejoined had, in that same time, lived through half a year.She and her guide rode into the town of Bardonecchia, where they caused a sensation. The guide brought with him a mangled corpse which he had strapped to a makeshift travois attached to the frame of his bicycle. The woman carried in her pocket a book. Neither the corpse nor the book were what they appeared to be.The corpse looked like the body of the woman's best friend, also reported missing, but it was in fact a magical construct created to give the woman on the bicycle an alibi, while her real best friend remained behind in Glenraven, serving as the new Watchmistress for that be-leaguered magical realm.The book appeared to be a common guidebook. The woman knew it had once been the key that permitted her and her friend to enter the realm of Glenraven, but she believed that its magical qualities had died when she left. She kept it with her only because it had sentimental value—it would serve, she thought, as a remembrance of her friend and of the adventure they had experienced in a world of magic and wonder. She knew she would never return to Glenraven and her best friend would never leave, but she knew also that this was the best and happiest outcome either of them could have imagined.In the center of a brief storm of publicity—a storm that would have been longer had anyone suspected the truth—the woman returned to America, to the little town of Peters in southeastern North Carolina, where she resumed her life and her marriage, had a child, and was happy. She forgot about the book, but in that she had help from the book.Had it actually lost its magical properties, the book would have ceasedto exist in any form. But it had not. It was changed, but it remained a powerful, complex artifact.Further, it had a desperate mission, but the woman who had served it so well before would not serve again. The book needed to belong to someone else, someone it hadn't found yet.It altered its appearance so that outwardly it became a copy of a techno-thriller written by an aging actor who had in the writing proven himself incompetent in two professions. Then the book sat on a shelf in the woman's house for nearly two years, until finally she put it into a large box of full of other books she didn't intend to read and took it to a used bookstore. There she traded it in, never suspecting what she had just done.The dead horse lay across Kate Beacham's pinestraw path, hid­den from the road out front by the mooncast shadows of the loblolly pines and the heavy overgrowth of the azaleas, rhodo­dendrons, and camellias. The sharp, hard scent of impending frost and the hotmetal stink of blood clogged the air. Kate leaned against the trunk of a pine and clenched her fists, digging her nails into the palms of her hands, fighting back tears. Her breath plumed out in front of her, frozen by the cold night air, the plumes as ragged as her breathing.Her tongue slid along the backs of her teeth, tasting blood,Someone had cut letters from magazines and pasted them to a sheet of college-ruled notebook paper and had nailed the note to her horse's forehead. From where she was standing, she could read it clearly.feeling the new wobbliness in the front incisors. Her fingers touched her right cheek, probing at fresh swelling over the bone and beneath the eye, feeling the stickiness of scrapes that were beginning to scab over, setting off sharp needles of pain to coun­terpoint the dull throbbing in her back and ribs and thighs.She looked at her torn shirt, at the dirt and the blood, at the gaps where the buttons had come off in the fight. She looked down further to her bloodied, scraped right knee that glowed in the moonlight through the new hole in her jeans. Further, to her feet. She still wore one Nike Air cross-trainer. The other had come off when she kicked at one of the attackers; he grabbed her foot, she pulled away, the shoe had stayed with him.That attack hadn't been random.She shivered and stared at the black, unwelcoming windows of the tiny house she'd bought, wondering if she dared to go in long enough to pack. Were they waiting in there for her? Were they standing on the other side of the glass, watching her find her horse? Were they laughing?They'd been waiting in the alley. She owned a saddle shop on the corner of Main Street and Tadweiller, a block from the police department and the county courthouse in one direction and right next to the used bookstore that had once been Baldwell's in the other. Like the other shop owners on the block, she parked in the service alley behind her store. She was working late. The saddle business she did in Peters wouldn't keep a mouse in scraps, much less rent a store and buy a house and feed her and her horse. But like a lot of other successful small business owners, she'd learned how to market to specialty buyers. She had a thriving catalog busi­ness and her reputation for high-end custom-made English and Western saddles and tack earned her visits from riders all over the United States and Canada. She even had a customer in Australia.She'd been doing the finishing touches on a matching west­ern show saddle, bridle, martingale and crupper for a client who barrel-raced: oak leaves and acorns and lots of engraved silver on black leather. It was going to set off the client's dapple-gray half-Arab, half-Quarter-horse; Kate could picture the completed saddle as she worked. She wanted to finish tooling the seat before the leather dried and she'd gotten involved in pebbling between the oak leaves and doing some extra detailing she hadn't actu­ally planned until it started to be beautiful and suddenly it was ten o'clock and Lisa and Paul, her two assistants, had been gone for hours.Weary but pleased, she let herself out the back way, locked up, and found her car key while she was still standing on the top step. She noticed only peripherally that the light by her back door was burned out and so was the one at the end of the alley. It didn't seem to matter. She lived in Peters, North Carolina, population ten thousand and a few, and though she and every­one else she knew locked their doors and took precautions, it was more because Interstate 95 ran right by the town than because anyone expected trouble from neighbors. Besides, the full moon lit most of the alley and the sky was full of cold-brightened stars, and everything was as quiet as it should have been.Deep shadows swallowed her car, but she hadn't really thought about that. How many hundreds of times had she left work late? Alone?How many?One too many.Three of them had been waiting for her. They wore pantyhose over their heads, and one of them had a roll of duct tape. They grabbed her, the one with the duct tape wrapped it twice around her head, covering her mouth. "You're going to like this," they kept saying. "You're going to like us, witch." She'd fought, kicking and punching and head-butting, trying as hard as she could to hurt the three of them.They didn't have weapons with them. No knives. No guns. They'd evidently figured they were three big men and she was one average-sized woman, and they hadn't anticipated the amount of fight she would be able to put up in her own defense. They should have. They certainly would the next time. Not all the blood on her shirt was hers. She'd kicked one in the nose when the three of them tried to pick her up to carry her somewhere. That one had dropped her and when her feet hit the ground she'd launched herself head first into the face of the one who had his arms locked under her armpits and around her chest. She'd heard the crunch of bone and he screamed and swore. She wasn't winning, though. For every blow she got in, they hit her with three, and the more she fought, the madder and meaner they became.Then, from the shadows where she was fighting for her life, she saw the gray backside of the store at the end of the alley light up. Headlights were coming down the service road from the opposite direction."Shit," one of her attackers said, and his friend said, "Later, witch."They ran, and she stepped out into the light of the headlights, hoping for help.The car had been a prowl car, and the officer in the black-and-white had put her in his front seat, driven her around while she trie... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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