On the fourth floor the smell of frankincense and asafetida seeping out from around the door was all the evidence he needed. There was a sickly sweet tang to the smoke that made his head spin—there was hashish in that incense, the black magician's quick and dangerous method of opening the higher chakras.
"Give me that," he said to Claire, taking the wrapped parcel from her hands. He shook the sword free of its protection; the Seal of Solomon set into the quillons seemed to blaze like the sun in the dimness of the dingy loft.
Then he took one step back and kicked the door in.
The darkness seemed to roll out through the opening like ink diffusing through water. Colin heard Claire cry out with real revulsion in the moment before he ran forward into the gloomy haze. Jamie Melford was here somewhere, and their prisoner. God grant that he was still alive—and sane.
When Colin crossed the threshold, he could see that the coven was gathered in the next room, crouched about its altar and the naked bound form of Jamie Melford that lay before it. The room was filled with a cold damp mist that stank of the herbs burning on the brazier, but—weirdly—the smoke stopped at the perimeter of the circle marked out in charcoal on the floor in the center of the room.
The Satanists did not move. The lines of power were as visible in that room as if they had been drawn on the ground and the walls in chalk, and the force of the black coven's focused intention was a solid weight and reality.
Colin sweated and shook like a man in the grip of a malarial fever, but his Will, too, was unwavering as he forced himself forward, toward the edge of the circle. He could feel the Darkness and the Powers of Hell gathering around, summoned by pain, desperation, and fear, and it seemed as if dark and shadowy figures shifted slowly about the periphery of the circle, anxious for the climax of the rite enacted within. The weapon in his hands vibrated like a living thing; it was an act of determination to hold onto it.
"In the name of God! In the name of the Lords of Karma and the forces of Nature! In the name of the Fatherhood of God, the motherhood of Nature and the brotherhood of Man, I scatter your forces!" Gritting his teeth, he brought the sword down across the edge of the circle, calling upon those Forces by Whose leave he operated.
When his sword came down, there was a great soundless shout, and suddenly the swarming monkeylike shadows at the circle's edge turned toward Colin, crowding toward him. The coven members, shocked from their trance, screamed and thrashed like victims of electric shock, and suddenly the silent loft was filled with the sounds of gabbling voices.
The most important thing is to move fast once you've made up your mind. The voice of Colin's first teacher spoke quietly in the back of his mind. If you wait to see what effect you've had on the Darkness, it may be the last thing you see.
Colin strode through the screaming gasping bodies thrashing about the floor, and shoved over the double-cube altar. The black candles atop it—soft and misshapen because they were not made of honest wax—rolled stickily across the floor, and Colin grimaced with disgust as he stamped them out.
"I spit upon the uncleanliness of the Pit. I spit on those who make unclean those things that God has ordained to the use of man!" Colin roared.
He kicked over the brazier of incense, scuffing through the mess to extinguish the embers of charcoal. He heard a shriek behind him as Barbara ran forward looking for Jamie. He paused for an instant and watched, lightheaded, as she reached him.
"Colin! He's got a knife!" Claire shrieked.
Colin spun around. A big man came shambling toward him, his lank black hair falling into his eyes. There was an inverted cross branded into his chest—an old scar—and in his hand he held the double-edged knife from the altar.
The years between Colin's combat training and this moment melted away in an instant. Hardly thinking, Colin flung down the sword and plucked up the skirts of his robes like a dowager preparing to waltz.
The French called it la savatte; in Thailand it was known as kick-boxing. Americans, with a fine disregard for attribution, called it and every form of combat like it kung-fu. As the man charged, Colin pivoted on his other foot and lashed out.
His leg traveled through a short arc to connect with the black priest's chin. The shock of contact telegraphed through Colin's bones; he felt the crunch and the sudden sickening slackness as the man's lifeless body dropped to the floor. Suddenly the lights came on; Colin could hear the sound of the switches being flicked in another room.
"Barbara," Colin said, taking a deep breath. The sound of his own voice brought home to him how tired he was, and leftover adrenaline made his hands shake. "Run round to the firehouse and call the police—see if they can find Lieutenant Martin Becket; he works out of Manhattan South, and this is his case as much as it's anyone's. We'll need some police here—and an ambulance."
Colin hoped that self-defense would be explanation enough for what he'd done. The coven's priest—it was probably Walter Mansell—and God above knew how many more were dead here, and the survivors were in profound shock.
Barbara left, running. Colin heard her footsteps echoing down the stairs as he knelt beside the body of the man who had attacked him and gently closed his eyes, murmuring the words of absolution. One of Father Godwin's fallen angels had come home at last.
In the distance, he could hear the sound of a siren wailing.
It was a little after five, and the sky was beginning to lighten with Christmas dawn when Colin stopped the van outside the Melfords' apartment and went around to the back to open the door. Jamie and Barbara climbed out, looking tousled and exhausted, like sleepy children who had been lost in the woods.
"I don't know how we can ever thank you," Jamie Melford said awkwardly. "Not just for saving my life, but for everything."
"I think you know how you can repay me," Colin said.
"The Cannon manuscript," Jamie said, embarrassed. "I'll messenger it over to you first thing . . . uh, next year. I think that Bess will agree you can make any changes you want."
"There's that of course," Colin said. "But more to the point, I hope you'll stay in touch. Barbara's a Sensitive, you know, and we need people like both of you. Though this has been quite a battle, the war goes on."
The war goes on. The words resonated in Colin's mind as he drove southward. Claire was asleep in the seat beside him, and it took him several minutes of shaking before he could rouse her enough to get her to her feet and started in the direction of her apartment door. He waited outside until he saw the light go on in her window, then drove off toward home.
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 cou
ld 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. / 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 Over-world.
Separating the physical body and its Double—sometimes called the Dop-pelganger—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-hiked 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.
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