Zenobie (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  ZÉNOBIE

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Copyright 2015 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

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  Table of Contents

  Zénobie

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  ZÉNOBIE

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  “And what do you do?” asked Joanna’s mother, when the waiter had jotted their order and departed into the bright-lit clamor of Jerry’s Famous Delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard. “Oh, look, dearest,” she added, with a gasp of delight, “there’s Larry Hagman! Do you really think they’re going to kill off Pamela Ewing? In Dallas,” she explained breathlessly, to Joanna’s look of blank enquiry, and frowned in the direction of the actor. “They always look so much smaller in real life. Do you think it’s true that he smokes marijuana? And what do you do?”

  Her attention returned to Antryg, whose hand Joanna had squeezed, to prevent him from asking who was murdering whom in the Texas capital and why such a deed would not be forestalled if everybody seemed to know about it beforehand. She gave him a glance that said, I’ll explain later, though it would be difficult, Joanna guessed, to explain the long-running so-called drama to anyone, much less why anyone would watch it for ten years.

  Antryg propped his round-lensed spectacles more firmly onto his beaky nose, and replied, “Well, I tend bar four nights a week at Enyart’s – although the reasoning behind some of the beverage nomenclature escapes me – and on weekends I read tarot cards at Madame Pittman’s on Saticoy Boulevard. I’m afraid I’m not nearly as accurate at it as I am in my own universe,” he added, as if worried that the mother of his partner might question his prognostications. “Magic doesn’t operate in this world, so the energies don’t align properly – in my own universe I’m a wizard, you know.”

  Joanna lowered her forehead to her knuckles, and sighed. At least he didn’t go into the fact that he’s the Archmage of the Council of Wizards…

  “I’m in exile – well, in hiding, really – and there aren’t a great many jobs that a wizard can do in a universe where magic doesn’t exist. I do pay my share of the bills, but it’s extremely difficult to get a credit card.”

  “Do you know—” Starshine Worlds-Daughter (whose name had been Susan Sheraton twenty-seven years previously when she had birthed Joanna into the world) leaned across the table and laid one extensively-manicured hand on the wizard’s wrist, “—when I was taken through Past-life Regression Visualization Training I learned that I was a White Witch during the Dark Ages, which explains why I have this strong spiritual connection to the energies of the Universe. I always travel with my incense kit and vials of pure Heaven-Water – rain or glacier melt from snow-caps.” She dug them from her purse to display. “Iceland or Thibet are the best, but my blood-type will work well with Antarctic water also. Our Teacher – he’s really an ancient Indian guru named Lal Siva, but he channels through Dr. Conyer – says the Tarot is a manifestation of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness, but he also says my aura is one of the most brilliant he has ever seen. It’s mostly green, you kow, with traces of yellow – or was it blue? A few months ago I did a reading for Melinda Moonwillow – You remember Lindy Sorenson, darling? She and I are Water-Sisters now…”

  The sixties, reflected Joanna resignedly, had hit her mother hard. Now – 1988 – she still sported the beaded headband, Indian-braids, and embroidered Cossak-shirt (worn as a mini-dress: Joanna would have bet her next three checks from computer consulting that she hadn’t done that embroidery herself) popularized during the last third of that eventful decade. Next to Antryg’s graying curls, Jefferson Starship t-shirt, gaudy love-beads and rhinestone earrings, they looked like two refugees from a time-warp.

  Except of course, Antryg Windrose really was an exiled wizard from another universe.

  And the Archmage of the Council of Wizards.

  It was usually easier to let everyone think he was crazy.

  He listened with fascinated absorbtion to Starshine Worlds-Daughter’s scattershot monologue about meditation under a fig tree in the botanical garden at the University of Arizona campus near her current home (“Our Teacher says it HAS to be an actual fig-tree because its inner vibration is so much more valid…”) and how it had improved her intuitive understanding of her dreams (“I’ve kept a journal of them since I was in my twenties…” Joanna well remembered making her own school lunch, at the age of seven, combing her own hair and letting herself out to go to school, because her mother would spend several hours every morning reading her dream-journal entries to other members of her Consciousness Raising group over the telephone; “Oh, have a good day, honey…”). “Just as soon as our Teacher—” (Dr. Norman Conyer in his human incarnation, who taught seminars in The Cosmic Connection for U of A College Extension – “You really MUST buy his books, dear, I guarantee they will change your life…”) “— puts together the financing he’s going to set up his own Institute, where all of us in his Inner Circle can dwell together…”

  Joanna refrained from inquiring about the previous Institutes and Life Coaches of one ilk or another that her mother had embraced and discarded over the years, not to speak of instructors in Kama Sutra exercises, vegan juicing (her mother was currently consuming a hamburger), cake decorating, Universal Energizer system seminars, color-ology, blood-type diets, and Dressing for Success, not that she could have wedged a word into her mother’s discourse had she wished to do so. And it was better on the whole than being lectured on her eating habits (“Have you put on a couple of pounds, dearest? It’s not surprising, if you have meat in your diet…”) or the way she wore her mane of blonde curls: “SO ‘seventies, dear – At your age it doesn’t pay to date yourself…” But on the way back to Granada Hills after the lunch was over (Joanna, as usual, paid) and her mother went on her way to her Life-Enhancement Workshop, she felt called upon to explain to Antryg that her mother’s current re-birth into a New Dimension of Cosmic Reality was probably not really the life-altering cataclysm she’d spent two and a half hours claiming it was.

  “With my mom it’s always something.” She edged her worse-for-wear blue Mustang into the always-heinous traffic on the 101 Freeway – as usual, the account of her mother’s latest life-altering cataclysm had elongated lunch into Rush Hour, a time at which no sane person, except under threat of filial disrespect and Being a Selfish Person (and Just Like Your Father), would attempt to drive from Studio City to Granada Hills. “She got into macramé when I was in Junior High – got all the books, and the special hooks and tools and beads and pots and feathers, and turned my bedroom into a studio for herself so I had to sleep on the couch, and took three classes a week in it and workshops every weekend – and then she decided she was going to do hand weaving instead, and bought three looms and her own spinning-wheel and bales of wool, before a friend of hers introduced her to Pathways to Clarity seminars. I was stepping over industrial spools of hemp cord and bales of merino wool in the living-room til I left for college. She’s always going to find The Answer in whatever it is – the year before last she re-modelled her kitchen into a greenhouse so she could raise orchids – and six months later it’s like it never existed.”

  “At least she’s still looking for The Answer,” pointed out Antryg in his brown-velvet voice. “And she�
�s looking outside of herself, and not at the bottom of a bottle. There are worse ways to spend huge amounts of money.”

  “There is that,” agreed Joanna with a sigh. “But I did miss having a bedroom.”

  “Also a mother, I expect. Your mother reminds me of a number of people in the village where I grew up – in any village in the Sykerst, really…”

  Joanna felt a curious combination of nostalgia and dread at the mention of the Sykerst, what little she had seen of those empty lands when she had journeyed through the Void to Antryg’s home universe. Endless miles of steppe, taiga forest like an ocean: strange trackways of standing-stones that led nowhere, villages huddled in soul-crushing isolation. Stillness, beauty, magic, wind. And mosquitoes. Lots of them.

  “Wandering Teachers came through the villages all the time, and no two of them ever preached anything remotely resembling each others’ doctrines. It was all the worst sort of heresy, and the local priest would be tearing his tonsure out and threatening to call the Inquisition – not that there was any way for him to do so in under a month – and the villagers would flock to them, and everyone would study their words in secret for about six weeks and argue about nothing else, and then the next Teacher would come along. Or it was shamans from out of the forest, or dog-wizards peddling love-spells, or medicine-men offering to teach one the secrets of the Universe…” He ticked the examples off on his long, crooked fingers.

  “Sometimes one or another of them did understand some of the secrets of the Universe. But the Universe has a lot of secrets, you see, and they’re concealed in some very odd places. And this Teacher your mother speaks of is quite right about the fig-trees. They do have an aura totally different from any other species. What is macramé?”

  So for the forty minutes that it took to cover twelve miles at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, Joanna enlightened her roommate on the manufacture of elaborate pot-hangers, owl-shaped wall-hangings, ceiling-suspended furniture and counterculture garments, with digressions into the wonders of growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. Antryg listened gravely, his graying brown curls tangled by the smoggy Valley wind, and Joanna reflected on what her world must sound like to him, who had grown up alienated even from his own alien world: a mageborn child whose powers had been co-opted at puberty by the deadliest Teacher of them all.

  No wonder nothing bothers him.

  But beyond that reflection – and she doubted that Dr. Norman Conyer, a.k.a. Lal Siva, Teacher of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness for all who were willing to pay for his seminars, could be half as malign as the yellow-eyed soul-stealer Suraklin – the subject of her mother did not arise again until two months later. Then on the first of August she received a phone call begging her to bring “your wizard friend” to the brand-new Institute of Cosmic Inter-Connectedness in Bayou Chien Mort, Louisiana, and save the world from psychic annihilation.

  *

  Rather to Joanna’s surprise, the overnight letter which followed the phone call contained two first-class tickets to New Orleans rather than a request that she put the transportation costs on her own AmEx card, the more usual pattern of transactions involving her mother. This was explained by the young man who met them at Moissant Field two evenings later in a servicible Land Rover: “Ben paid for them,” he explained brightly, carrying Joanna’s two suitcases across the paved chute of roadway that separated the terminal from the parking structure. “Ben’s our guardian spirit.”

  “Ben Hallard,” amplified Starshine Worlds-Daughter, trotting at Joanna’s side, with just the faintest hint of smugness in her voice.

  “Ben Hallard?” Joanna stopped dead in her tracks. “As in, the lead singer in Drybone, Ben Hallard?” Visions of a leonine black Afro, rhinestoned denim vests, way too much eye-makeup and amps the size of Stonehenge blazed like touchwood in her memory.

  “He’s the one who made it possible for our Teacher to purchase Zénobie Plantation. A truly inspired man! He’s having his name changed legally to Universe, you know, in honor of the great Source of all energy. You really must take Lal Siva’s seminars, dearest – I mean, Dr. Conyer… I just know they’ll break you out of that dull, unimaginative limbo your life has been trapped in all these years. It goes without saying—” She turned to beam at Antryg, “—that you’ll both be admitted to our Teacher’s beginner seminars, to compensate you for your time…”

  “We’re very honored.” The wizard, still bemused from his first journey by airplane, stopped gazing around at the dank and mould-smelling twilight and gave her a grin like a daft jack-o-lantern. “I look forward to it.”

  The damn thing was, Joanna was certain he was telling the truth.

  “But in the meantime, Starshine, tell me about the danger that threatens the world.”

  *

  Zénobie Plantation – a.k.a. The Institute of Cosmic Inter-Connection – was haunted.

  “Well, of course Lal Siva – being an ageless spirit himself – knew it was the moment he set foot inside,” explained Starshine, as the handsome Chad Rainforest guided the Land-Rover out of the airport and west on Highway 90 and into the dark-green monotony of the bayous. “I think even you will be conscious of them, dearest.”

  “None of us minded,” put in Chad, with a glance over his shoulder. “The real estate agent didn’t try to conceal it or anything.”

  Probably charged you extra, reflected Joanna.

  “Lal Siva teaches us that the spirits of those who have passed Beyond bear the living no ill-will.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Having lived with a wizard from another universe for two years, and crossed through the Void with him to deal with such abominations as occasionally leaked through that shocking emptiness, Joanna didn’t exactly disbelieve in ghosts. But a childhood of ghost-walk tours and séances, not to speak of her mother’s numerous supernatural encounters which had included an alien abduction and a number of post-mortem conversations (paid for by credit-card at $60 a minute) with John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, among others, had left her skeptical, at least where her mother was concerned. Her mother’s friend Lindy Sorenson – now apparently re-christened (“re-BORN, darling…”) as Melinda Moonwillow – had been abducted by aliens three times, once to have invisible (and scientifically undetectable) nano-recorders implanted in her bone-marrow and twice to have the data extracted, though Joanna was hard put to imagine that a civilization which had developed hyper-light drive and scientifically undetectable nano-recorders had not yet perfected wireless transmission.

  “The problem is that we need to have the Center open by the first of September.” Chad took the turnoff marked “Chien Mort,” onto a two-lane country road that rapidly turned into a one-lane strip of crumbling blacktop through dark-green fields of shoulder-high sugar cane. White egrets picked their way along the sides of ditches velvety with duckweed. The steady drone of cicadas, which had begun shortly after they’d left the airport, grew louder in the humid darkness. “If we weren’t having our first Convocation of Light then, it really wouldn’t be an issue. Even angry or discontented spirits usually respond to Cosmic Energy very quickly.”

  “And I take it,” said Antryg, “the inhabitants of Zénobie remain malevolent despite all you can do?”

  The remainder of the drive – and Chien Mort lay a good twenty miles off Highway 90, in a rural wilderness of bayou, cypress swamp, isolated houses and mobile-homes balanced precariously on stilts (“Flood insurance kicks in at fourteen feet,” explained Chad) – was devoted to an account of The Teacher’s efforts to come to terms with those who dwelt in the old plantation’s darkness.

  “The house is haunted by Zénobie, you see,” explained Starshine. “She was a beautiful slave-woman whose master put her aside to marry a white wife. But he kept Zénobie’s daughter – Alys, her name was – and made the new wife adopt her. The story is that Zénobie murdered them both – the new white wife and the little girl – and then hanged herself in the tower room where the murders
took place. Her master killed himself with grief – and served him right! – and his son, or maybe it was his grandson, was killed in the Civil War, and the whole place had to be sold for debts.”

  “Charlie Trasher – the contractor who’s doing the air conditioning for the guest-houses – is related to the family,” added Chad, with another glance back over his shoulder. Joanna wondered how that waist-length hair and androgynous handsomeness went over with the local labor-force. “He told us the whole story.”

  When visualizations and repeated affirmations didn’t work (“We hereby claim and affirm that Zénobie, Alys, and Rowena Trasher are children of the Cosmic Energy, that they are flooded with the Light of Goodness and filled with the spirit of forgiveness…”), various members of the Institute – with Lal Siva’s benign blessing – went on to perform salt-water cleanses, smoke aspersions, prayer vigils, and exercises in psychic channeling, all without apparent effect.

  “Monday night – the night I called you – we found ROWENA written in blood just outside Ben’s room – horrible! And a week before that, Lindy – Melinda —” she corrected herself, “—was wakened in the night by whispering, words she couldn’t make out. Other people have heard footsteps, and there was blood found in Brightsky’s room also, sprinkled all over her clothing and bed. Whatever it is, it seems… I won’t say stronger, but resistant to all our Teacher’s spiritual resources.”

  *

  “My chief concern isn’t the financial loss, even if we’re not able to open in September.” Dr. Norman Conyer stroked his mustache as he spoke, a habit he had, Joanna noticed, as if it were a beloved pet. He was barrel-chested, of medium height, fifty-ish, and though not particularly handsome, was extremely sexy: the kind of man that all eyes went to the moment he stepped into any room. The female members of the Inner Circle – and Joanna had to work at not thinking of them as the Coven – were certainly watching him under their eyelashes, from the various pieces of wicker porch-furniture where they sat. Eight of the Teacher’s ten disciples were women, ranging in age from their early twenties to a little white-haired lady in safari shirt and shorts, with five-carat pink diamond earrings and at least a ten-carat pink diamond ring: Mrs. Durham, she’d been introduced as.