Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  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 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 dis- i appearing 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 ha< 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. The 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 AhnenerBe—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.

  Toller Hasloch had been destroyed, for now and for Ever, as surely and completely as though he had never been born.

  The apartment seemed icy when Colin opened his eyes. Automatically he checked his watch. Less than ten minutes had passed since he'd opened the front door. Hasloch was still breathing, but Colin knew that now it was only an automatic reflex.

  He was shaken to the core of his being by what he had learned. Hasloch was not a mortal soul, a spark begotten of the Light, but a Zeitgeist given human form. Colin was not certain what effect his binding would have upon an artificial soul. Would the chains he had forged hold such a creature?

  Had they even been necessary at all?

  It is done past all undoing, Colin told himself brutally. Now all that remains is to see that no innocents are harmed by what I have done here.

  Working quickly, Colin unbound Hasloch from the chair and dragged him back into the bedroom, wadding the tape up in his pocket and replacing the chair in its place in the living room.

  It wasn't enough to fool an experienced police officer if foul play was suspected, but now the apartment wouldn't immediately scream "murder scene" when the body was discovered.

  The body.

  Colin suddenly felt every one of his fifty-two years and more. More than anything the outside world could bestow, he realized, he had always valued his good opinion of himself, and today he had lost it forever. He had perverted the teachings that had been entrusted to him. He had used them to ' kill.

  He did not question why he felt it so necessary to cover his tracks—to get away with murder when all his Order's training had been that an individual should accept full responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

  But half an hour's work had rendered the apartment once more much as he had found it, and at a little past six in the morning, Colin MacL
aren exited the building on Central Park South as silently and unnoticed as he had entered.

  He caught a cab at Columbus Circle—the van had been safely garaged hours ago—and rode downtown through the awakening city. He still felt numbed by what he had done, and his imagination painted for him the picture of Toller Hasloch, half-naked in his cold and lonely bed, as his heart slowed . . . slowed . . . stopped.

  And all because Colin MacLaren had set his own judgment above that of, the Law which he served, acting on his own Will instead of at the urging of the Lords of Karma. He felt soiled, unclean, and ill. He wanted nothing more than a drink and the comfort of his own bed, though no matter what he did, he could not elude his own condemnation.

  He was so wrapped up in his own bleak thoughts that Colin didn't even notice that the lights were on in his apartment until Claire opened the door.

  "Colin! Where have you been?" She flung herself into his arms, holding him tightly.

  He could not imagine what she was doing here, when he'd left her at the door to her own apartment less than two hours before.

  "I was so worried—I thought something had happened to you, too!" she said.

  It took a moment for the sense of her words to penetrate the fog that seemed to veil Colin's wits, and at first they only confused him. Something had happened to him. Something terrible.

  "Has Jamie . . . ?" he began.

  "No!" Claire said fiercely. "It's Simon—there's been an accident—he's been hurt.

  "He's dying," Claire added raggedly.

  FOURTEEN

  SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 1973

  Some random truths he can impart,—

  The harvest of a quiet eye,

  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

  — WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  THE HARSH, DRUGGED BREATHING OF THE MAN IN THE BED WAS THE loudest sound in the room. Colin sat in the uncomfortable chair beside the bed, watching Simon sleep.

  His face was swathed in bandages, both eyes covered. Just after the accident, the doctors had been sure he'd lose his sight. Now they thought they'd be able to save at least the right eye, but Simon Anstey would never again be cover-model handsome.

  Disfigurement was bad, and blindness would have been worse, but it was not the most terrible injury that Simon had sustained in the accident.

  Automatically, Colin's gaze strayed to Simon's left hand. It, too, was swathed in bandages, held immobile in a brace to keep him from flexing it.

  The doctors had wanted to amputate, but Simon would not give them permission. He'd been hysterical—Colin could well imagine the scene—refusing opiates, refusing to let the doctors touch him unless they would promise to leave his hand alone. If he had not been a fixture in the Bay Area community for so many years they might not have listened to him, but everyone in that emergency room had known Simon Anstey, who soloed with the San Francisco Symphony and taught at the conservatory.

  He'd held them off until Alison had gotten there, and only after he'd extracted her promise to help him did he allow the doctors to begin their work. And Alison had kept her promise, fighting the doctors until they had given in, refusing to consider the possibility of amputation.

  They had worked miracles, but though Simon's hand was intact, no one thought he would ever use it again. The bones of two fingers were crushed, the delicate nerves destroyed. Though someday he might lift a cup to his lips with his left hand, it was unthinkable that he would ever regain the fine control over it that a concert musician required. His career—his life—was over.

  He was twenty-nine years old.

  This is my fault. Though he knew it smacked of hubris, Colin could not shake that conviction. Somehow, he thought, if he had been stronger, if he had not surrendered to temptation to act without sanction . . .

  If that is so, then this, too, is part of your punishment, Colin had told himself inexorably.

  The door to the hospital room opened.

  "How is he?" Alison said in a whisper.

  "Still sleeping," Colin answered softly. Alison tiptoed into the room and seated herself in a chair on the other side of the bed. She was haggard and drawn, looking every day of her seventy-four years even in the soft January light.

  "If only I'd been with him," she said.

  "Then you'd be dead, too, just like the girl who was with him," Colin pointed out.

  "Damn all drunk drivers to hell," Alison said with quiet venom. The driver who had killed Simon's passenger and ended his performing life had walked away from the collision without a scratch, as drunk drivers almost always did. At least the culpability was clearly his—Simon had been sitting, stopped at a red light—but no legal judgment could repair what he'd destroyed.

  Simon began to stir restlessly, fighting his way up through the morphine. Automatically, Colin sketched a Blessing in the space between them, hoping to gain a few more moments of peace for Simon.

  "Alison?" Simon's voice was slurred. He plucked at the covers with his free hand.

  "I'm here, Simon." She took his right hand gently, lifting it to her cheek.

  "My hand. Don't let them take ..."

  "It's all right, Simon. I won't let them operate," Alison said soothingly.

  He began to thrash restlessly, obviously in terrible pain but unable to remember why. For one whose psychic centers had been opened by training, the loss of self-control that came with narcotics was equivalent to going to bed with all the doors and windows of the house unlocked and open. Anything might walk in—and wreak untold havoc while the house's true occupant lay helpless to prevent it.

  "I will play again!" he muttered. "No matter what. ... I will—I will—"

  "You'd better ring for the nurse," Alison said to Colin. "Simon. Hush, my darling. It's all right."

  Colin finally located the call button—it was pinned to the pillow on the right side, where Simon's good hand was—when the nurse came in, already holding a syringe. With brisk efficiency she pressed it through the intravenous tubing that led into Simon's arm, and almost instantly he subsided into a troubled sleep again.

  "Dr. Margrave," she said, once her patient had quieted. "How are you today?"

  Alison gave her a tired smile. "As well as can be expected, I suppose the saying is, Rhonda. Is there any news?"

  "Dr. Kiley is going to change the bandages on his face tomorrow; if everything looks good he's going to leave the left eye uncovered, which should help Simon stay awake." She smiled with professional encouragement. "I gave him some Valium just now; he's been insisting that he doesn't want anything at all, so he and Dr. Kiley compromised on a mild tranquilizer."

  No trained Adept, Colin knew, would willingly submit to the impairment of his faculties that drugs brought, preferring to trust to the disciplined Will to overcome the pain. And a hospital room was by its very nature a public space, nearly impossible to consecrate and Seal in any meaningful fashion, though both he and Alison had erected what Wards they could.

  "I know that everyone here is doing the best for him that they possibly can," Alison said raggedly.

  "He has a tremendous will to heal," Rhonda said encouragingly. "That's the most important thing."

  But when the damage to the physical body was so great; when the pain continued for so long . . .

  Claire arrived half an hour later to spell them, and Colin took Alison out to a nearby restaurant, making sure she ate and doing what he could to lighten her mood. Despite Colin's efforts, it was a melancholy meal, each of them lost in his own unspoken thoughts. The early winter dark was falling by the time Colin drove Alison back to Greenhaven.

  "Both of you look pretty whipped." Claire was there to greet them, having left the hospital at the end of visiting hours. She'd already made plans to stay out here for a while, both to keep Alison company, and to help Simon as much as she could.

  Alison gave her a tired smile, stepping inside. "It kills me to see him like this. Such a ... waste." Tears glittered in her grey eyes.

  "I suppose there's no ho
pe at all ... ?" Claire asked tentatively.

  She led them back to the parlor, where a cheery fire was adding light and color to the room. The drapes were drawn against the night, making the room seem intimate and cozy. Alison had redecorated it since the last time Colin had been here; it was now aggressively modern in burnt orange and plum, the stark Danish Modern replaced by a couple of sleek leather sofas.

  "They still want to amputate," Alison said, as if that were a full explanation. "I spoke to the staff neurologist a few days ago; he said there was no nerve function in the fingers, and that even if the nerves had been intact after the crash, the swelling of the tissues around them would probably have crushed them by now. And if blood poisoning sets in, Simon could lose a lot more than two fingers."

  "He does keep saying that he'll get the use of his hand back," Claire pointed out.

  "I don't think so," Alison said simply.

  "What a terrible loss," Claire said softly. "Poor Simon."

  "Don't let him hear you say that," Colin warned gently. "He'd rise up from his sickbed and smite you as Sampson smote the Philistines."

  "With the jawbone of an ass?" Claire grinned wanly and went over to fix them all drinks.

  Though Claire was two years older than Simon, Colin had once cherished vague hopes that the two of them might make a match, and had not wholly abandoned them. Certainly they could understand one another in the fashion those not touched by the Gift could never master.

  Alison stared into the fire, a haunted expression on her face. "I think—in a way—that this accident might have been a blessing in disguise for Simon," she said.

  Both of the others stared at her in shock. This was the last thing they'd expected to hear from the woman who had all-but-raised Simon.