Read Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 Online
Authors: Heartlight (v2.1)
Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04
From
the Author of
The Mists of Avalon
O-312-865OS-2
$25.95
($35.95 CAN)
Marion Zimmer Bradley is one of the most
beloved writers of the age. Her bestselling
The Mists of Avalon
spent
three months on
The New York Times
bestseller list and has sold more
than one million copies in trade paperback. Her contemporary fantasies draw the
same enthusiastic response as her historical novels and feature the same powerful
imagination, compelling characters, and larger-than-life storytelling.
HEARTLIGHT
Marion
Zimmer Bradley
THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF THE SECOND HALF
OF THE twentieth century in America
—
from the enchanted days of Kennedy's Camelot and Johnson's
Great Society to the paranoia of Nixon's White House and Reagan's obsession
with the Soviet Union
—
are, in
Heartlight,
shown to be pivotal episodes in
the great war between Light and Darkness.
Heartlight
is also the story
of Bradley's greatest champion of good, Colin MacLaren. Ghostbuster, exorcist,
psychic investigator par excellence, student and teacher of the mystic arts,
Colin began his fight against Darkness during the grim days of World War II.
Heartlight
opens just after the end of the war, with Colin's return to
America
.
In
the early days of what will become the Summer of Love, Colin meets Claire
Moffat, the great psychic sensitive who will be his dearest friend and closest
companion for decades to come, when he rescues her from a cult bent on human
sacrifice. The leader of that cult, Toller Hasloch, becomes one of Colin's
greatest enemies. Working behind the scenes for the next thirty years, Hasloch
manipulates politics and the economy to turn
America
away from the Light.
(continued
on back flap)
TOR
BOOKS BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
Dark
Satanic
The Inheritor
Witch
Hill
Ghostlight
Witchlight
Gravelight
Heartlight
A
TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
This
is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are
either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
HEARTLIGHT
Copyright © 1998 by Marion Zimmer Bradley
All
rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions
thereof, in any form.
"Killing for Killers"
copyright © 1998 by Rosemary Edghill. Used by permission.
"Unholy
Alliance
" used by permission of
Scovil Chichak Galen
Literaiy Agency, Inc.
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. Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley,
Marion Zimmer.
Heartlight
/ Marion Zimmer Bradley.
—
1st ed.
p.
cm.
"A
Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-86508-2 (acid-free paper) I.
Title.
PS3552.R228H39
1998
8i3'.54
—
dc2i
98-23557
CIP
First Edition: September 1998
Printed in the
United States of America
0987654321
The
author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Sandy Ellison, Office of the
Chancellor,
University
of
California
at
Berkeley
, for information about the
campus and campus activities in the 1960s. Any inaccuracies which appear in
the manuscript are, of course, my own.
I
would also like to thank Rosemary Edghill, who has been instrumental in
preparing this manuscript (as well as those of the three previous books in this
series) for publication.
"Thus,
this single most inflammatory and crucial document of the Third Reich had its
origins in that strange twilight world where occultism and espionage meet, a
world we will visit again and again in the course of this study."
—
PETER LEVENDA,
UNHOLY
ALLIANCE
Contents
AVALON OF THE HEART
Move along these shades In gentleness of heart; with gentle
hand-Touch
—
—
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
DID
I LOVE COLIN MACLAREN? IT'S AN ODD QUESTION, BUT I SUPPOSE IT IS one that the
world would have to ask, assuming it knew anything about either of us
—
or, for that matter, cared.
Certainly he has been the one constant in my life, outlasting jobs, residences,
and even my beloved Peter.
I
first met Colin when I was barely out of my teens, a young woman on her own for
the first time in a world that has so changed over the last forty years that to
a modern the 1960s might as well be a foreign country. It was a world where
women knew their place, and kept to it for the most part
—
a world in which progress
was inevitable and all change was for the best.
We
—
America
, the Allies
—
had won, so we believed
then, the war against evil not so very long ago. It was that war that shaped
the lives of the boom generation, though the conflict I and my sisters grew up
hearing about was not World War II, but
Korea
. At the time both of them
seemed honorable wars and decisive victories for what in those days we called
"our way of life," though as the years have passed, there have been
arguments against both the justice and the finality, not only of those wars,
but of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the hundreds of smaller conflicts that have
sprung up in every corner of the globe since.
I
do not think we shall ever truly know what "the last good war" meant
to us until the last soldier of that conflict is buried and the last of the
unquiet dead exhumed from their graves.
Colin
would say that knowing that you didn't know was the beginning of wisdom . . .
Colin MacLaren, my teacher and my friend. He was one of those who had been
tempered in that great conflict
—
changed as so many of those who were to become the parents
of my own stormy generation were, but in Colin the war and its aftermath had
bred a terrible, fierce, and demanding love, a love too vast to hold any one
woman
—
or
man either
—
as its focus.
Did
I love Colin MacLaren? I truly no longer remember what I felt when I first saw
him. But I do know that Colin MacLaren loved all mankind far too much ever to
love me alone.