What had happened here tonight should have made him feel good. The Ungodly had been routed; the soul of poor John Cannon had been put to rest. The power of the black coven had been decisively broken; it would never trouble anyone again.
But Toller Hasloch had not been there tonight, and Colin was betting that Martin Becket’s investigation would find nothing to connect Hasloch to Mansell and his crew. Hasloch would simply move on to new villainies. To the seduction of new innocents.
Colin tried to tell himself that if Hasloch had been spared, it was to a higher purpose. The Oaths he had sworn so eagerly once upon a time had made him no more than an obedient tool in the hands of the Lords of Karma. Those bonds had been eased briefly, many years before, but what he considered doing now was an unsanctioned and unlawful thing. Thy Will, not mine, he prayed, and for the first time, found the words hollow.
He had lost the detachment that allowed those who follow the Great Laws to walk among men and guide only, never compel. Perhaps he had lost it earlier tonight, when he killed Mansell. Perhaps he had lost it years ago, and had not truly known his loss until he had once more been confronted by Hasloch’s particular brand of evil.
And what good did such resignation do him, if it freed men like Hasloch to do more harm? He tried to tell himself that the evil that Hasloch did would overtake him in time; that it was not for Colin to judge or to sentence, but to be a mindful Instrument of the Light. But he could not keep himself from thinking that this was willful blindness, not resignation—and as great an abuse of his Oaths as active harm would be.
How could he live with himself when he uncovered the next evidence of Hasloch’s malicious spirit, and knew, gazing upon the pain and the devastation, that he might have prevented all that he saw? People had died tonight—people whose lives Hasloch had touched and twisted, making them into a profane work of art for his own idle amusement. Hasloch had boasted of the accomplishment … .
In vain Colin reminded himself that the urge to intervene for a Higher Good was the greatest temptation the Shadow could present men with. He reminded himself that to use the methods of the Serpent was to become its tool; that the purpose of the war he fought was not to win, but to endure. But the harm Hasloch would yet do in the world was an unendurable knowledge. And Colin had the power to end that harm … .
Let it be so. A great weight seemed to settle upon Colin’s shoulders; a weight almost too great to be borne. He had no choice; knowledge was the first corruption of innocence, and there had been no other choice for him but to embrace that corruption. He would take upon his own soul the weight of this disobedience, expiating in a future life the harm he chose freely to do here today … so that Toller Hasloch would do no more.
“Good morning, Toller,” Colin MacLaren said.
Cloaked in that invisibility which a warrior of the Light could summon in time of greatest need, Colin had walked into the building unnoticed, just as the sun was rising over the Park on Christmas morning. The locks of Hasloch’s Central Park South apartment were good, but Colin MacLaren had been given decades to hone his lockpicking skills.
Hasloch came out when he head the front door open; now he stood in the center of the living room, looking tousle-headed and sleepy in the bottom half of his pajamas. His expression sharpened when he saw Colin, however, and he made as if to retreat into the bedroom.
“Don’t move,” Colin said, and showed Hasloch the pistol in his hand.
Hasloch stared at it in unbelief, as if he did not understand what he was seeing. “You’re going to shoot me?” he said blankly.
“I’m going to do far worse to you,” Colin assured him honestly, “but I’ll shoot if I have to. Now be a good boy and come over here, or I will shoot you now.”
On some irrational level, Hasloch still counted on Colin’s goodness, or perhaps he realized that what Colin did here today might be a greater victory for the Shadow than any Hasloch could claim for himself. At any rate, he came docilely enough, and soon Colin had bound him to a heavy chair with the roll of duct tape he carried.
“And now you shoot, and I become just another casualty of city life, is that it? I expected better of you, Professor,” Hasloch said, a teasing note in his voice even in this most extreme of all circumstances.
“Did you?” said Colin. I expected better of myself. “You should have known better than to tweak my nose quite that openly, boyo. I’ve always had an appalling temper.”
“Yes. But when I saw you coming up the street that night I couldn’t resist. I did so want to see what would happen; you were so cross with me the last time we’d met. I had a call from Father Mansell last night, you know. He said he’d call again when he was finished with the current operation, but do you know, I expect that I’m not going to hear from him. You broke my toys, didn’t you, Professor?”
Colin did not answer. It was the greatest effort of his existence to simply stand there and not throttle the life out of Toller Hasloch where he sat, helpless and bound.
“Ah, well, I was nearly done with them anyway,” Hasloch continued easily. “I’d learned as much as they had to teach me, and what I’ve learned, I intend to put to good use.”
“No,” Colin said sadly. “You won’t.” He cut a short strip of tape and used it to gag Hasloch; he didn’t want him shouting out and attracting unwanted attention when he realized what was to come.
Staring down into the face of the bound man before him, Colin saw the moment when fear entered Hasloch’s eyes; the moment at which the boy—and even at thirty, Colin could not refrain from thinking of the younger man as a boy—realized that his attacker was insane, or serious, or both. That harm could actually befall him here in his own apartment, on this day dedicated to the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace.
Hasloch began to struggle wildly, but Colin had chosen a heavy chair and used most of the roll of tape to secure his prisoner. All Hasloch could do was fling his head from side to side, making frantic grunting noises through the gag. He began to sweat, his hair darkening as it dampened, spraying fine droplets of salt into the air as he thrashed.
Colin stepped behind him as he struggled, and stopped his head between both hands. Hasloch’s skin seemed to burn his palms, and all at once Colin could feel Hasloch’s fear and anger, more sharp and intimate than imagination could paint them. He could feel the metallic taste of the other man’s terror in his own mouth, and his own heart beat panickily fast with the sickening horror of a nightmare come true. But he would not allow even pity to deter him from what he meant to do here today.
The Astral Body was the part of his Self that each Adept sent into the Overworld to do his bidding, transferring his consciousness into it as he did so. Hasloch was proficient enough to have experience of sending his Astral Body forth—Colin knew this because he was able to detach it from his physical Self with ease, and pull Hasloch’s Astral Double with him into the Overworld..
Separating the physical body and its Double—sometimes called the Doppelgänger—was something comparatively easy for the trained Adept to master, but only the most advanced Adept could separate Soul and Double in the same manner that his less-advanced brethren could sunder the Astral and Physical forms. And Colin was betting that Hasloch wasn’t as advanced as that.
This close to the Prime Plane, their surroundings were shadows of the real world, weirdly radiant and stripped of color. This was the place where duration and cause were nullified; the realm to which ordinary people ascended, in ignorance, in their dreams. This was the place from which psychics drew their clairvoyant images of places far removed in space and time.
Hasloch staggered back out of Colin’s grasp, and then realized that he was free. His body had been bound to the chair in the world below, but Colin had not yet bound his Double.
Because he was a magician—no matter how tainted—in this place Hasloch wore the robes which were the outer manifestation of his magickal self. His robes were much as Colin had seen them years before, only here the Rune
was graven upon a silver disc over his heart, and it writhed and shifted oddly. Upon his forehead was bound the fylfot cross incised into a gold disk, and swept back along his temples were branching antlers carved of ivory and gold. And instead of a dagger at his belt, Hasloch carried the red-hilted Sword of Sacrifice, whose blade seemed to be metal and Darkness and the coiling Dragon which was the flaw that lived at the heart of Creation all at once.
Colin wore the robes and breastplate of his Order. Upon his brow was bound the ancient phylactery that sealed him to the Eternal Law and upon his finger was the ring that symbolized his knowledge. Here on the Astral he and Hasloch were equals, though Colin had perhaps a slight edge, through his longer training and experience.
It took Hasloch a moment to realize that he was free and armed; in that same instant, Colin reached toward him with the Sword that he had expected to find in his own hands, and found himself weaponless. He recovered quickly, snatching barehanded at the Runesword’s quillons, but by that time Hasloch had recouped slightly, wrenching the blade away and stumbling backward. The Sword of Sacrifice hissed as it moved, cutting through the congruent objects of the Lower Astral as though they were a tissue-paper backdrop.
He would not win his battle here; Colin retreated deeper into the Astral, to the place that occultists called the Realm of Intention—where thoughts and expectations took physical form, and the Will became a physical weapon. Permanent structures could be created here: the thought forms that most Lodges used to build their Astral Temples were fixed things in this place, objectively perceptible to any well-schooled traveler in these realms.
Likewise, the ruins of such Temples existed, crumbling away to nothingness when their acolytes no longer reinforced them with meditation and magick. How long these holy places endured once they were no longer tended depended on how much energy had been put into their original construction—and of course, some were revitalized by new Adepts who stumbled upon the wellspring of this tradition or that and traced it back to its primal source.
Distance was mutable here; Colin’s arrival bought him close to the outer precincts of the Temple of the Sun. Around it, the city of the Temple spread its ghostly facsimile. Though it was thousands of years dead, a few Adepts of the Temple had survived the drowning of their City, and in their longing for their lost homeland, those exiled Adepts had created a simulacrum of the City of the Temple that had endured to this day in the Realm of Intention.
Within that severe and beautiful space Colin could see the faint shapes of his brethren at their work and see their disturbance as they sensed his presence, unannounced and unhallowed.
Then Hasloch followed him, bringing with him his bond to his own unholy places. Colin caught a confused glimpse of a black cathedral whose pillars were pure Darkness, and for an instant, just as if he were any innocent ephemeral entity, his soul was swept by a pang of fervent and absolute terror.
It was the terror of the rational man faced with the madman; the bottomless horror of the victim when he realizes the scope of the evil which has marked him as its prey. It was hopelessness and despair and unreasoning panic, all the dark emotions distilled into one searing whiplash of agony that coursed across Colin’s nerves as if they had suddenly been laid bare.
Then the two Places, Light and Shadow, flew apart through the emblematic laws of the Astral, and Colin and Hasloch stood in a place equidistant from both and prepared for battle.
Today Colin acted without the Order’s sanction, and the Order’s weapons were denied to him—but even so, there were some weapons which Colin wielded in his own right. From the storehouse of memory he drew forth a shining golden chain, and flung it up, stretched between his two hands, to counter Hasloch’s first blow.
Hasloch did not speak—either unable to do so in this aspect or fearing the distraction it would bring. He attacked tirelessly, wielding the Sword of Sacrifice with fatal skill. If he struck Colin with that blade …
He would do to Colin what Colin intended to do to him, only for Colin, there would someday be another life, another incarnation.
And it was not Colin’s intention that Hasloch should ever live again.
At last the weighted chain in Colin’s hands did as he had intended it to—it tangled in the guards of the Runesword and jerked the weapon from Hasloch’s hands. Colin flung them both away—Sword and Chain together, Will and Discipline, and they disappeared into the misty Overlight.
Hasloch was weaker now—in stripping him of the Sword, Colin had divided him from much of his Will. Now Colin struck Hasloch about the head until the Black Adept’s knees buckled, and Colin threw him to the ground, placing his foot on the back of Hasloch’s neck to keep him from rising to his feet again. From his will he summoned fetters with which to bind Hasloch. Though the chains he invoked would not last beyond his departure from the Overlight, they would hold Hasloch for as long as required.
Victory. But a temporary thing, over one individual alone. Only Colin’s Will now kept their Astral Bodies here on the Astral Plane; and when they fell back into the Plane of Manifestation, Hasloch—with all his temporal power and inventive ability to harm—would be untouched, until that unknown day when the Lords of Karma should choose to act.
The battle had tired him; he could not remain much longer in the Overlight. Colin uttered a heartfelt prayer that he could somehow be spared what he was about to do. He could still walk away, leave Hasloch’s harmful potential unchecked, though if he did, he did not think he could live with himself any longer. But there was no mercy to be found anywhere in the vast Intention that surrounded them both.
So be it. Into Thy hands … Colin appealed again, and took the next step in his crime.
Hasloch was very weak—that, or he had simply stopped resisting, depending upon the fundamental charity of the Light to preserve him from extinction. In his dimished state, the silver cord that bound his wandering Double to its earthly host was obvious, leading away from his body and disappearing into the mists.
Sever it, and Hasloch would not be able to reunite the two parts of himself: Body and Double. Each would dwindle and die, cloven from the other—and if Colin also bound Hasloch’s Spirit here in the Overlight, it would never be reborn again on earth.
He took the cord of Hasloch’s life in his two hands.
Here Colin held all that Toller Hasloch was and all that he had been, life after life, back to the beginning of Time when the Wheel of their fates had first been set in motion. Held thus, his past lives should be visible to Colin like a string of pearls … but there was nothing there.
There was no sheaf of lives lying side by side like the pages of a book, waiting for any who had the understanding to read them out. There was only—
A darkness and a howling. He was borne upon a shadowy wind, drawn through Space and Time by the rite being worked here tonight—a ritual that would compel formless spirit into corporeal flesh, would give the incorporeality of the Dream a physical body.
Like a restless spirit Colin was drawn down through the Astral, to the edge of the Material Plane, but the sight he saw in the World of Form was one that had not been real for many years. In this moment of crisis, of inattention, he had been drawn back through Time to an oddly familiar place and moment: to the moment when the sorcerers of the Thule Gesellschaft worked to incarnate the spirit of the Reich itself; to fashion the leader who would follow Hitler and consolidate the Nazi victory … .
Or avenge its defeat.
Ingolstadt, Bavaria.
Colin watched, helpless and horrified, as the tiny spark of intention was shaped: the spirit of an age, a soul as young as the century, owing nothing to elder civilizations and older laws. It would be cruel, this child, and ruthless: the blond beast, the Superman that Nietzsche and his acolytes had prophesied, that Hitler had invoked and dreamed of.
Somewhere on the planet, a child conceived for this purpose was being born to house this inhuman spirit, and Colin MacLaren remembered the date exactly: it was November 9, 1938. T
he rite was timed to coincide with the SS demonstrations in Germany.
Krystallnacht.
The Magus raised his hands. The spirit flew to its destination, and Toller Hasloch was born in a country across the sea, a country that would not enter the war with Germany for three more years.
When the first staccato peal of machine-gun fire stuttered out, Colin remembered the rest of what had taken place here tonight. With doubled attention, he both watched and was his younger self—eighteen this year, nineteen next spring, if he lived—run into the Temple, a hooded mask pulled over his face.
He and his comrades wrecked the Temple, pulling over everything they could, flinging down pieces of the consecrated Host among the implements of magick in an attempt to wreck the ritual. They hadn’t even known what was being done here tonight, only that it was important to the infant Ahnenerße—and fortunately so secret an undertaking that there were only half a dozen SA guards here on the estate.
Colin watched his younger self set fire to the Temple draperies and flee in the confusion. A dozen of them had come on this raid, and after tonight only three had been left alive.
When he’d gotten back to the Lodge, Colin had demanded to take the oath that would make him the Sword of the Order. He had already taken his first oaths, but not his most binding ones; those he would take after tonight were nearly as terrible as the evil they sought to combat.
And look where that Oath has brought me, Colin thought bleakly. The past faded as suddenly as it had been summoned, and Colin realized that his hands were empty. The cord of Hasloch’s life that he had held between them was torn and severed.
Let it be so. With an instant’s thought he summoned up the Sign that would permit the chains that bound Hasloch to endure in the Overlight until the memory of Man had passed away, trapping Toller Hasloch’s spirit here forever, sealed away from the Wheel and the eternal cycle of rebirth.
Heartlight Page 31