As he gazed out across the field, toward the desert and the distant mountains beyond, he saw that a cowled figure stood waiting among the flowers. The maiden wore the simple white robe of the Scribe, that caste from which the Priests and Adepts of the City of the Sun took their disciples.
She was waiting for him.
For him.
Waiting for her master, for the Adept who would set her feet upon the Path. Waiting for the one who would entrust to her his deepest secrets, his power, who would trust her absolutely … .
A woman—! Colin felt a sense of profound shock, even as he recognized the penetrating peal of the Astral Bell And not just any woman, but one who was already known to him.
Rowan Moorcock.
Her? How could it be her? How could I have known of her for so many years and not known her at all? But it is said “when the student is ready, the Teacher will appear.” Have I been waiting all these years for her to be ready? HER? It was not, he told himself as he sternly mastered his shock and amazement, unheard of for a woman to become an Adept. The man who was in this life known as Colin MacLaren had known many such through his lives; there were women even in his own Order. But he had never thought that the disciple he had sought through all his own long years might be a woman. And Rowan, of all women, was the one he would least have sought: facile and frivolous, glib and superficial—
Blindness. And arrogance. My besetting sins, in more lives than this, the Adept remembered sadly. Here and now, in this moment of greatest peril, the Great Book of Life was open to him, the pages stark and clear for him to read.
“Choose now, Riveda.” The deep and awesome voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, its tone as deep and penetrating as that of a bell. “For this moment the Book is open for you to read, that you may know how the Black can become Grey, and the Grey become White at last.”
And Colin saw all the lives he had lived before this—the lives lived beneath the Adept’s great burden: of Knowledge dedicated to Service alone. And he saw the karmic burden that had bound him to the Wheel for a thousand lifetimes … .
In the Great Hall of the Temple of Light, a man stood in chains—a tall man, with grey hair and piercing rain-grey eyes. He had been condemned to death by those who had once been his peers, condemned for black transgressions against the Law. Healer and Priest he had been, but for him, that had not been enough. In his arrogance, he had done first good work—returning the Grey-robes to their rightful path as scholars and healers—but in his unwillingness to relinquish the completed task, Riveda had gone too far, had reached for the power of the very Gods, meddling in the blackest mysteries of blind Nature. He had bowed his head to no Law save that of his own devising, and now in punishment he must bow down to the greatest Law of all: Death.
Through the Mercy Cup he would go unrepentant into the Night, and the harm he had done in his life would continue on, until it had destroyed the very physical fabric of the Temple and the City beyond, scattering its priests into the young kingdoms that lay beyond the City’s gates.
Here in the Field of Stars, Colin came back to himself, shaken to the core of his being by what he had learned. Truly, the forgetfulness those on the Path brought with them into Life was a great mercy—how could he ever have lived with the intimate knowledge of that great crime? He had labored a thousand lifetimes since to atone for what he had done … his lives expended in Service and acceptance, but at that moment, Colin did not feel it was enough.
“Yet know this, Son of the Sun—that all Paths are spokes of the Wheel, leading but to one Center. And that the greatest of the Mysteries is that Life proceeds from the very hand of Death … .”
Was it all for this? The man who was known in this life as Colin MacLaren asked. Was it all for You—the betrayal and the rebirth—the pain, the shame, the lives wasted?
“All,” said the tolling voice within Colin’s own heart. “For this is the center of My Mystery: and all Life is Mine, I waste none … .”
And now it was for him to choose again, as he had chosen a thousand times in a thousand lives, so that Perfect Freedom and the Divine Will were as one force.
The man once called Riveda walked across the Field of Stars, and he could smell the perfume of the flowers he crushed beneath his sandaled feet. The young woman looked up as he approached, and as he looked into her eyes he saw the face of the daughter he had never seen—the child that ancient magician had died without knowing. And he knew by this sign that the vast debt was repaid at last, and he was to be free at last of the Great Wheel that bound souls into matter.
He reached out and took her hand. She startled as if awakening from a deep sleep, staring at him in surprise.
“Eilantha,” the once-Lord of the Grey-robes said “I call you to awaken into Life. Come with me.”
The feel of Rowan pulling her hand from his roused Colin to consciousness again. He opened his eyes.
Rowan was propped up on one elbow, regarding him warily, as if she were not quite certain who he was. “Dr. MacLaren,” she said blankly.
“Do you know who I am?” Colin asked her. He felt as if he had simply dozed, although he knew in his heart that what had transpired was much greater than that, though the memory of all but the glory of the Presence was fast fading. But he must know what she remembered-if anything—from her time in the Overlight.
“You’re—” She stopped. “You know, I had this completely bizarre dream, where …” Her voice trailed off as she got a good look at her surroundings. “It wasn’t a dream. I was there—on that hill where the Secret School meets. And so were you.”
The Secret School. The name given by many who visited it only in dream and spirit to the Temple of the Sun. It seemed his original instinct had played him false: if Rowan knew of that place, she was no superficial participant or dilettante of the obscure.
“No. It was no dream, Rowan,” Colin said, even while a part of him wondered: This woman? This girl? SHE is to be my chela? How could he teach her? What did he have to say to her?
What I must. What we have chosen together, she and I.
Her memory of the experience she’d had in the Overlight was fading quickly—Colin could see that in her eyes—to be replaced by the awareness of this place and its attendant horrors. She sat up, groaning with the stiffness of long-unused muscles.
“What happened? The door’s open—did Dylan get the message? I’ve been hiding out for months, trying to get somebody to just listen, but it sounds just too X-Files for anyone to take seriously—there’s a man named Toller Hasloch. He’s a big-shot Washington lawyer, and he’s murdered at least eight people that I know of. He’s got a whole Nazi temple down here, and there’s this presidential candidate … .”
“There isn’t much time,” Colin said, interrupting her. “We’ve got to get you out of here, but there’s one thing you must do first, for your protection. You must take the Oath on the physical plane that you have already taken on the Astral, and place yourself beyond Hasloch’s power to harm you in any way that matters. By the Power I bear, I seal and sign you to the Power, to Serve the Light until Time itself should end. Is this your True Will?” Colin asked as he raised his hand in the Sign. Irrelevant to Rowan or not, the question must be asked—and answered.
“Yeah, okay, right, I’m there,” Rowan said, waving her hands in agitation. “Skip all the Ancient Atlantis stuff, Dr. MacLaren. I’ve got it. I believe you. I’m in.”
Colin winced inwardly. This was going to be just as difficult as he’d imagined it would. Partadoxically, the thought made him smile.
“Where do we go from here?”
Rowan lurched to her feet and leaned against the mesh, reaching out a hand to help Colin up. He could tell she was weaker than she would have liked him to know—he did not know, and suspected that Rowan didn’t either, how many days she’d lain unconscious on the floor of that cell. Fortunately, she did not have to walk far—once they were back in the house upstairs, Colin would happily call the police himse
lf.
“We leave,” Colin said, steadying himself against the steel mesh of the cage. “Come on.” Rowan was safe. All the rest could wait.
Rowan drew breath to argue, and shook her head, giving in instead. She picked up her purse from where Colin had set it on the floor of the cell and slung it over her shoulder, staggering as it pulled her off balance. Colin could see the lines of pain and strain etch themselves into her face as she settled deeper into the awareness of her physical body.
“You’re the boss,” she said gamely.
Colin pushed through the half-open draperies. The figure on the cross gleamed in the dimness, its carven wounds seeming to shed fresh blood. Colin forced himself to take that first step forward, into the space before the altar.
“Sick,” Rowan commented from behind him, though whether it was an announcement or a judgment Colin wasn’t sure.
Glancing back, he saw her shake her head, as balked by the atmosphere of the temple as a non-Sensitive would be by a brick wall. He wondered if all those who so blithely claimed great psychic power would as happily embrace its dark side: the vulnerability to invisible forces to which the non-Sensitive was immune. It was this vulnerability and the misunderstandings it engendered which led to the persecution and madness of so many with the Gift. Colin heard her draw a shaky breath, gathering her strength to face that thing.
“Come on,” Colin said, encouragingly. He held out his hand. “It isn’t far.”
“But farther, I think, than you’re ever going to go.”
Toller Hasloch stepped through the door.
He was dressed for the office—one more note of incongruity in this peculiar place. A mate to the pendant Colin had found in Rowan’s kitchen gleamed against his silk tie, an archaicism that had no place in the modern world.
“Oh, Colin,” Hasloch said chidingly. “You’re far too predictable. As soon as I realized why you’d come to visit me, I also realized that of course you would try to rescue the fair maiden—and of course I would be right here to stop you. I even turned the alarm system off so we wouldn’t be interrupted—I would have left the doors unlocked if I’d known you were coming today, but I’m glad to see you didn’t have any trouble.”
There was a gun in his hand: in some sense, Colin would have been disappointed if there were not.
“The only thing I’m wondering now is whether you’d like to live a little longer, and see what’s going to happen to the girl, or if I should just indulge myself and shoot you now? What do you think? It might be worth it to you—a bit more life, and the hope I’ll make a mistake you can use?” Hasloch’s voice was genial. Playful.
Behind him, Colin heard Rowan’s whimper of disappointment and felt her begin to move away from him.
“You can’t shoot us both at the same time,” Rowan said gamely. She had edged away from Colin, inching toward the door.
“Don’t move, my little Mischling,” Hasloch snapped. “I’ll shoot you first, if I must—and I can’t miss at this distance.”
“Stay where you are, Rowan,” Colin told her, and once more, through the invisible current of their mutually binding Oath, he felt her reluctant obedience.
“What is it you want, Toller? You must want something, or you’d have shot us both by now,” Colin said. Every moment he kept Hasloch’s attention on him gave Rowan more chance to recover. If she could gather the strength to run, there was a slim chance she might make it—and even a slim chance was better than what she faced down here.
“While a bullet is an effective way of ending debate, I admit it lacks elegance,” Hasloch said graciously. “Just once before you die, you belligerent old fossil, I’d like you to admit that I’m right.”
Colin nearly laughed aloud, then his eyes narrowed. “The thing to remember about Fritz is that he wants to be loved. The Germans are notoriously sentimental and self-pitying for a bunch of murderers. If you’re caught, you might be able to play on that to buy yourself some time.”
The words of a long-ago trainer were as clear in Colin’s mind as if they had just been spoken. And though Hasloch had been born and bred an American, he, too, possessed that same fatal, self-indulgent flaw. He didn’t just want to win: he wanted everyone to recognize that he deserved to win.
“You’re holding us both here at gunpoint, intending to torture us to death at your convenience, and you want to hold a debate? Fine with me, sonny boy,” Colin said, manufacturing a sneer. Hasloch had always liked to make speeches. Perhaps he’d make one now.
“Oh, come now,” Hasloch said, coaxingly. “You’ve chosen our last two battlefields—let me choose this one. A last passage at arms with a worthy—or at least persistent—adversary. Admit your defeat—your failure—and I’ll even let you go: you’ll live out your days knowing that you gave your whole life to a lie, and served something that you ought, by your own code, to have loathed.”
“Maybe,” Colin said. “Why don’t you just give it your best shot and we’ll see?”
His back and chest ached with weariness, and the air seemed stifling, as if he could feel all the weight of the earth above pressing down on him. A few feet away, Rowan was swaying with sickness and fatigue, her face as white as scraped bone.
“Colin MacLaren, champion of Truth, Justice, and all the rest.” Hasloch bowed mockingly. The gun did not waver.
“In the name of the holy cause of Liberty you champion the American Eagle against overwhelming odds … but how can she be worthy of you, Warrior of the Light? America is a country built upon the principle of intolerance, whose Puritan settlers massacred the trusting aboriginals and their fellow settlers with equal abandon. She is a nation which has pried its great storehouses of wealth from the dead fingers of this land’s first inhabitants—whose citizens have slaughtered more animals than the coliseums of ancient Rome—whose founders enslaved a continent and exploited its labor for more than half a century after civilized men had declared slavery an abomination: upstanding American patriots who clutched this peculiar institution to its bosom because it made its wealthy landowners so very rich.”
He held up his hand as though Colin might be about to interrupt. Rowan was staring at Hasloch in frank disbelief, but Colin knew better than to think the situation was any less dangerous just because it now verged on the ludicrous. It might seem as if Hasloch’s speech was empty words, such as the nation’s enemies had flung at her for well over a century, but here, in this time and place, they were not mere words. The Great Book was open, recording all that was said, and what it recorded would have the compelling force of reality.
Hasloch continued.
“And then, when industry had allowed the North to supersede the South, the Northerners slaughtered their brethren using ignorant foreign mercenaries as cannon fodder. The Industrial North freed the slaves, and then attempted to starve them to death.
“This is the crucible in which your America, your eternal Champion of Liberty was forged, old man! She moved fast enough to betray her allies, though—you remember Hungary in ’56, don’t you, Colin? For seven days they begged the West to honor its treaties, until the Russians rolled in and shot them all. Where was the honor of the Eagle then?”
The gauntlet that Colin had taken up for no more reason than to give Rowan a chance to survive was suddenly a far more profound and eternal battle, and one that Colin dared not lose. If Hasloch’s arguments could not be refuted, he would have won a true and real victory.
This was a war waged at the heart of Colin’s own weakness: his faith. And if he failed—if he believed, even for a moment, in the truth of Hasloch’s words—then the Shadow could claim a terrible victory.
Hasloch smiled: gleeful, confident.
“Perhaps you’ve wondered why people seem so tired these days? Why there is such apathy about the wondrous process of democracy? Your beloved citizen-philosophers don’t want to take responsibility for this ‘political arena’ you’ve bequeathed to them: a responsibility they never asked for, and one they are unequipped to wie
ld. And you know why that is, as well.
“It’s interesting, I find, that you left the military so conveniently. You never got the opportunity to meet your former foes as they took their new U.S. government posts. The execrated butchers who built German’s V-2 program at Dora—who destroyed London—created America’s own National Air and Space Administration … space for purely peaceful uses, of course. The West’s so-called intelligence community, here and abroad, was populated with men who wore the double-lightning rune tattooed upon their bodies. Men in the pay of America, but in the service of she Reich … the true Reich: the invisible and undefeated Reich that has always existed—that was a dream in the hearts of men, that was the spirit of an age before ever Hitler was born to incarnate it
“It is these visionaries who have toiled patiently through the decades, discrediting the weary jejune ideals of the so-called Founding Fathers and replacing them with their own. Your blood-soaked eagle is tired, Professor—her citizens are tired even of bread and circuses. The American Dream is over, and the Racial Destiny of the Superman shall take its place.” Hasloch smiled, a predator secure in his ultimate victory.
“No,” Colin said. “You’re wrong.” Empty words would not serve him here, only Truth. His own truth, sought out and tested over a lifetime of doubt and despair—a truth stronger than that of Toller Hasloch.
“There were times when I used to think you might be right, Sunny Jim. It’s a persuasive argument But despair is a sin—and a lie, as well. I don’t have any more time for lies, including this one. So let me give you a bulletin fresh from the front lines: The dream is alive, Toller.”
He felt Rowan straighten, as if drawing new strength from an unexpected source. Hasloch watched him with glittering-eyed alertness.
“It lives in the hearts and minds of every man and woman across the world who believes in the ‘American Dream’—in everyone who fights and dies to reach a thing that they only know by faith. You say you’ve destroyed us, but a nation isn’t only flesh and stone and land—it’s built first in the heart and then in the mind. Take your own example—the slavery you’re so proud of. We made an end to that. Men and women, black and white, fought and died to free others they had never seen, and never would see. They laid down their lives for an ideal, for a dream. Look around. They still are-we put our lives on the line for our dream every day. When the world calls for help, who comes? Who sends food and medical aid? We do. And why? Because it’s the will of the people, Toller—not the politicians and the deal-makers, but the ordinary people, the good people. The people who believe in the Dream.
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