Heartlight

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  There was a locked door in the back wall of the cellar. Once he would have kicked it down. Now he spent precious moments trying passkeys, infuriated by the tremor in his hands, until he found one that would fit.

  Beyond the open door, darkness—and then slow illumination as the lights came up. There was a faint smell of burnt charcoal, a whiff of incense. And beyond the door, another door. An elevator, its door open, waiting.

  It made a certain ironic sense. The rich and powerful—and venerable—who were Hasloch’s clients and patrons would expect the most modern conveniences in their debaucheries. But still, Colin hesitated to enter the elevator. It seemed too much like a killing box.

  There was no choice. There might be another way in to what lay beneath the house, but Colin did not have the time to find it. Steeling his resolve, he stepped inside the cabin of the elevator and pressed the single button.

  The doors closed. The elevator began to descend. The drop seemed to go on for a very long time; guessing, Colin would estimate the descent at as much as thirty feet, implying a substantial underground structure tunneled out of the raw earth by some unknown feat of clandestine engineering.

  The doors opened. He was in a broad antechamber, with paneled walls and indirect lighting. The carpet beneath his feet was the same deep scarlet as the one at the Cincinnatus Group, with the addition of a heraldic phoenix woven into its center in vermilion and gold. Directly ahead were a set of massive metal doors, their brushed bronze surfaces gleaming in the soft light.

  The doors were ornate and cyclopean, in such mad contrast to the house above that for a moment Colin’s senses reeled. On their surface, armed and armored knights stood facing each other in alert ranks beneath a swastika sun, raising their arms in stiff salute to the dawning of a new day. The rays of the sun spread from it like the wings of an eagle, and the bird-shape was visible behind the burning disk of the sun.

  The money it must have cost to do all this. And all in secret, Colin found himself marveling. It’s like something out of a James Bond film. The thought had a certain dreadful wonder to it. How many people besides Colin had ever seen these doors?

  How many had passed through them never to return again?

  With something approaching reluctance, Colin pushed at one of the doors. It did not move.

  Colin looked around. There was no place else to go: at one end of the room was the elevator, at the other, the doors. Forward or back.

  He felt over the whole surface of the doors, looking for something that would show him the way in. He found it at last in the shield of one of the knights: its shape was raised higher from the surface than any other shape on either door, and its edge was sharp. Colin tugged at it, and the shield swung up like a box lid.

  I don’t see why I ought to be surprised. Our german friends were great ones for silly gadgets.

  Beneath the shield lay a smooth black circle, obviously a lock. In the center was a hole in the shape of a cross. Colin took out his pocket flashlight and shone it into the opening. Tiny pin-shapes gleamed in the depths—the mechanism of a lock that could not be picked.

  He took the crucifix from his pocket, holding it by the chain. He looked again at the pattern of holes on the back, the reason for them suddenly plain. This was why Rowan had kept it—because it, too, was a key.

  The cross fitted perfectly into the cavity, as if they had been made for each other. He pushed, and felt the whole mechanism sink into the door a fraction of an inch. There was an audible click. Beneath his fingers, Colin could feel the door mechanism waken into life. The doors swung inward. The pendant pulled free, swinging like a pendulum at the end of its chain. He put it back into his pocket, wrapping it fastidiously in his handkerchief first.

  There was darkness beyond. And suddenly, with a hiss and an uprush of interrupted sound, the lights went on. Colin caught his breath, staring out into something he had never expected to see again in this life.

  A round chamber, its size impossible to calculate, its domed ceiling echoing the groined vaulting of gothic cathedrals. In the center, a circular firepit, dug deep into the rock. Surrounding the firepit were twelve High Seats, each with the device of a medieval hero carved into its back, and hanging over each, its battle banner.

  But the devices were the wrong ones—not the ones he’d been taught—and the illusion of Wewelsburg, of Wolf’s Lair, faded. The illumination here came from hidden lightbulbs, false as a stage-set. This was not one of the Nazi Order Castles, where the mad religion that Hitler and Himmler had fostered between them had been forced to malignant flower. This was some inexact recreation, built by men who had never seen the original. Whatever crimes had been done here, Black Magick was not among them. Feeling vaguely cheated, Colin stepped inside and walked down the steps.

  The room was not as big as it first appeared—its grand dimensions were a trick of lighting and forced perspective. His gaze swept over the glittering suits of armor that lined the walls of the room. Behind a drapery depicting more racially-pure rural glories, Colin found a door marked PRIVATE in consciously-quaint gothic lettering. It was locked, but yielded quickly to one of Colin’s skeleton keys. He opened it and went inside.

  It was a den, an obvious retreat for Hasloch and his particular cronies. The walls were lined with books of a far less benign sort than had graced the library upstairs. A door led out of the library off to the left; this one was not locked. Colin opened it and found himself in a small office containing a desk and file cabinet. There was a woman’s purse on the desk.

  Colin opened it, searching quickly through it to find the wallet. He opened it.

  Rowan’s. Here was hard proof at last that Rowan was here—or had been here, alive, recently enough for whoever had taken her purse to have left it lying here on the desk. But where was she? This office was a dead end.

  Conscientiously, Colin searched through the desk—the file cabinet was locked and would take him too long to force. The desk contained a number of interesting items: a .45 automatic, a block of hashish, several thousand dollars in cash, and a manila folder filled with glossy professional pornographic photos that contained certain famous faces.

  By now Colin had a certain idea of what went on here at The Hallows. The old soul-sickness of the Armanenschaft, certainly, but something more cynical and modern as well. This was a safe house for the indulgence of terrible appetites of all sorts, all carefully recorded and noted by its master, Toller Hasloch.

  And that would explain the curiously theatrical look of the Temple: it was, as its appearance had suggested to him at first, a stage-set. Nothing real at all.

  But no matter what else Hasloch was, in his own monstrous fashion he was sincerely devout. There was—there must be—a second Temple.

  He went back to the study, still carrying Rowan’s purse. A little experimentation located the secret panel that let a section of the bookcase swing out. Boys and their toys, Colin thought sourly. He dragged a chair over to prop the bookcase open and went down the short narrow caught halfway between hope and dread of what he would find.

  Another room, this one very modern but a dead end all the same. It contained a console with a bank of screens showing the elevator, the Temple through which Colin had entered, the driveway—empty, not that he had expected anything else—and what looked like a couple of opulent party rooms. There was a slot beneath each screen for a videotape; it wasn’t hard to guess what they were used for, nor what use was made of the tapes of the activities there.

  Exhaustion pulled at him like a subtle poison, telling him he was reaching the end of his strength. If it had been at all possible, he would have left and returned another day, but there was no prospect of that. His entrance had probably been recorded on one of the cameras that Hasloch seemed so fond of; alerted to Colin’s presence, Hasloch would easily guess his purpose and move Rowan.

  Or kill her.

  Colin was not certain where the conviction that Rowan was still alive came from: stubborn perversity, perhaps. But he
knew as well as he knew the Light Itself that to abandon the search without absolute certainty—to leave a fellow soldier in enemy hands—would be a treason he could not live with. Better to die here, today, than to survive on those terms.

  Die on your feet or live on your knees? There’s only one true answer to that, unpopular though it’s become … .

  The entrance to the second Temple was in the show-temple itself, behind a sliding panel opened by a mechanism hidden in the back of Hasloch’s marble throne. Colin hammered the golden crucifix between the door and its track to jam the mechanism open, then started on his way into the dark.

  The passageway went from finished stone, to brick, to raw bedrock with wires and pipes running along its surface. The corridor narrowed, and the roof sloped until it was only scant inches above Colin’s head. When he opened the plain wooden door at the end of it and saw the Rune-Christ hanging on a floating panel suspended before the wall, he was overcome with a feeling of nausea and relief combined. His intuition had not failed him.

  Unwilling to enter the room unless he must, Colin glanced around from the doorway. Indirect lighting washed over the ceiling from some concealed source. The twisted tortured figure—perhaps the same one that had hung in the basement in Berkeley all those years ago—hung upon its ashwood cross above a black stone altar, surrounded by the paraphernalia of High Magick. The walls and floor were simple slabs of concrete, not gilded marble, but the chamber had a power that the finished, theatrical stage-set Colin had left behind lacked. The stench of what was done here was almost palpable, as much an assault upon the senses as the discovery of a mass grave.

  There were rings—iron rings, cast in the shapes of serpents—set into the head and foot of the black altar, and its surface was marred as though something had spilled there and then dried. Three walls were solid. The fourth was covered by a long red velvet curtain. Up to his old tricks, Colin thought to himself. Gritting his teeth, he walked across the chamber to the curtain and yanked it back.

  Open, the curtain nearly doubled the size of the room. Colin saw a light switch set into the wall just beyond the curtain, looking strangely prosaic and homely in this unnatural place. Colin flicked the light on, and stepped back, wincing at the sudden dazzle of illumination as overhead fluorescents stuttered into life.

  In the center of the room stood a long surgical table with thick leather straps, with a cart of gleaming instruments beside it. There was a drain set in the middle of the floor, its bright metal discolored just as the altar had been. This was a clinic where only the blackest medicine was performed.

  Everything on this side of the curtain was bright and clinical, with racks of metal shelving ranged along the concrete walls, yet it was also a seamless continuation of the medieval cruelty of the altar with its tortured image. The walls were lined with shelving that held the tools of the trade: there was a battery with cables, lengths of rubber hose; incense and oils shelved beside syringes and bottles of drugs. In the unforgiving light Colin could see everything here clearly: the implements of sorcery racked beside those of destruction.

  There were knives of gold and silver and stone—whips braided of a curious fragile leather with small triangles of lead tied into the thongs—a refrigerator and sink—a small alcohol lamp, waiting ready for use beside boxes filled with hand-cast candles—an acetylene torch—a cabinet that looked mundane enough to hold vestments, and probably did. Bile rose up in the back of Colin’s throat. The enormity of what he saw crushed the breath from his lungs. Everyone talks, Colin had told Dylan, and it was true. Once someone entered this room, all choice would be gone. You would talk, and then you would die, for the greater glory of Hasloch’s Luciferian dream. A dream that was stronger than any one man’s ability to oppose it.

  The faint flicker of movement—the gentle movement of breath—finally caught his attention. In one corner of the room there was a cell, perhaps four feet deep. It was made of heavy diamond-paned steel mesh, painted institutional green. Colin had nearly missed it; the room was so full of things he did not wish to see clearly. Even the slenderest prisoner could not fit more than a fingertip through its holes; there was no lock, only a simple drop-latch on the outside to keep the door shut. Whoever was held here would have nothing to do except contemplate the equipment in that room and think about its purpose. The ghastly refinement of cruelty was like the signature of a familiar artist.

  Numbly, exhausted by the strength of his revulsion, Colin walked over to see who—or what—was inside. He swung the simple latch up and slid the door back on its tracks.

  Rowan Moorcock lay on the floor of the cell, one arm flung up to cover her face. She was wearing a long-sleeved white turtleneck and jeans. If not for that, Colin might not have seen her at all, might have mistaken the mesh for the door of another storage cabinet. Stiffly, he knelt beside her, dreading what he would find, and pulled her arm away from her face.

  But she had not been harmed—at least not in any physical fashion that Colin would see: Her long red hair was still neatly braided. The white shirt was grey now with dust along the cuffs and elbows, but she was still fully dressed, down to her scuffed white sneakers. There was no blood on anything.

  But Colin could not wake her.

  She did not have the reflexes even the sick or the drugged would possess. Her pupils did not contract when Colin shone his pocket flash into them, and when he took her pulse he could feel her heart beat with the slow, measured regularity of one in deep trance. She breathed as if she were asleep—or as if her body, alone, were present.

  Colin knew already that Rowan was a strong Sensitive, and that made her vulnerable in ways that an ordinary person, or even a trained Adept, was not. If she had unwarily opened herself to the taint of this shrine, the shock might have blasted her spirit free from her body and doomed it to wander the Overlight until her body died—the same fate Colin had once attempted to engineer for Hasloch.

  But if this were indeed merely the insensate animal shell left behind after an accident—or deliberate destruction—of that sort, Colin did not think Hasloch would have bothered to keep it. If Colin knew his old enemy at all, Hasloch still had plans for Rowan, and that meant that Rowan was here.

  Somewhere.

  If it had been possible, Colin would simply have carried her out of here and worried about trying to summon back her wandering spirit later. But he could not lift her, much less carry her down that long shaft to the elevator and the surface. And there was no help he could summon—Farrar would certainly be gone by now, even if Colin were willing to risk retracing his steps to go in search of him.

  The police? It was all-too-possible that if he called them, Colin would be merely summoning Hasloch’s allies. His only real chance to get Rowan out of here was if she could move under her own power.

  There was a way.

  The powers for which Colin’s Order stood guardian were the secrets of Life Itself—those powers that welled up from the dark heart of Nature, carrying such risk to their user. Colin MacLaren was both Magician and Priest, and none knew better than he of the dark temptation of Power unfettered by Duty. Here in the enemy’s stronghold, tempted to despair and hatred, there was an immense temptation to use the forces he could summon to blast the Evil out of existence—but to do such a thing was to invite the corruption of those Secrets entrusted to him, which would mean ultimate ruin in a future Colin must take on trust.

  Could he take up the Power—and then set it aside, even in the face of defeat, death, and ruin?

  Was he as strong as that?

  Colin drew a deep breath. Not my will, he prayed. Not my will. I resign all my will, in perfect love and perfect trust. No matter how absolute defeat looks, I will not doubt Your ultimate and unknowable goodness … .

  He took Rowan’s hand in his, his long fingers closing over her wrist, measuring the slow pulse. With his free hand he sketched a Sign upon her forehead—a Sign of such Power that it would summon back the soul to the body that was dead, not merely t
o one that slept. He felt her pulse flutter as her heart began to beat to a faster rhythm.

  But she still resisted, unwilling to be called back to that excruciating reality from which she must have tried so desperately to escape. What he had dared so far had not been enough.

  There were stronger magicks in his arsenal, but to wield them would be to incur a debt that not he, but Rowan, must repay. To force her into such an unbreakable obligation without her will or consent would be Black Magick indeed, leading to nothing but evil. As he had promised, he must be willing to fail.

  Or he must have her consent … .

  “Rowan,” Colin said aloud. “Rowan Moorcock. Do you hear me?”

  Hear me, Child of the Light, by the Light that is in you … Colin said silently. He closed his eyes—

  And he was home, once more.

  The Field. of Stars lay outside the City of the Sun, outside the Temple precinct that a thousand generations of exiled Adepts had recreated in the Overlight in memory of their lost homeland. The soft swell of its hillside was covered with the tiny blue flowers that gave the place its name.

  Why was he here? This was not the place he had expected to find Rowan. Hurt, in shock, she would have retreated to whatever place her deepest mind considered safe: a childhood playground, perhaps, or some image gleaned from movies or TV.

  Had the magicks of Hasloch’s temple led Colin astray—or was this a summoning from a Higher Power, bidding him to attend?

  Colin looked around himself carefully, trying to gather the meaning of what he saw. Where was the one who had summoned him? Why—if he had been called—did he not now stand without the great gate of the Temple of the Sun?