Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04

by Heartlight (v2. 1)

  "Let's come to the point, young man. This isn't Berlin in the forties, and the Cold War is over. You haven't told me who you are, or why you're here, or given me a good reason why I should listen to anything you say. Undoubtedly you already know anything I could tell you about Toller Hasloch—"

  "If you keep up with your old students it won't surprise you to hear that Toller Hasloch is one of our inside-the-Beltway kingmakers," Farrar said, his tone as chatty as if he were doing nothing more than passing on gossip. "The Cincinnatus Group is an important power here on the Hill—a lot of people get their appointments in line with its recommendations. A number of people owe its chairman favors—and the type of people to whom Mr. Hasloch owes favors in turn tends to disturb some people. People who still remember who you used to be."

  Who I used to be. . . . Farrar spun a pretty story calculated to fan the embers of an old man's ego and convince him to go charging off into battle one last time—to use him, as ruthlessly as Colin had once used others, to win a battle, if not the war.

  "So your friends don't like Mr. Hasloch," Colin said. "Well, I don't like him much myself. But I've learned to live with things I don't like, Mr. Farrar. I'm here for another reason. If your intelligence is as good as you'd like to imply that it is, you'll know that I called at the Cincinnatus Group yesterday to speak to Caradoc Buckland, not Toller Hasloch."

  There was a flicker in Farrar's pale eyes. "Mr. Buckland's not a very nice man. A friend of his shot me once, so I'm in a position to judge. He's very good at doing what he's told, though. I'd forget about all this and go home, if I were you," he added seriously.

  "I'm afraid I can't do that," Colin said, and waited.

  The silence stretched for several moments, until finally Farrar broke it.

  "All right," Farrar admitted. "You've a right to be suspicious of me. For what it's worth, my name really is Hereward Farrar. Who'd make something like that up?" He smiled encouragingly, but Colin refused to be influenced. He continued to wait.

  "What can I tell you that will convince you I'm on the side of the angels? I could swear—"

  There was a candle on the table, burning deep inside a plastic-wrapped glass chimney. Farrar cupped his left hand around it. His voice became deeper and more solemn, and for a moment it seemed to Colin that the light filled his hand like a solid thing.

  "—I could swear by the Light that if I am other than what I seem, I am not heir to the Dragon. Would that help?" he added in his normal voice, and the momentary summoning of Power Colin had sensed was gone.

  "All right," Colin said. It was confirmation of a sort: Department 23's code name for the Thule Group had been the Dragon. And more important, no matter how good an actor he was, no matter how diminished Colin's own powers were, Colin knew that someone tainted by the Shadow could not summon Power in that fashion without revealing his true nature.

  Whoever Hereward Farrar was, he was of the Light.

  "If you're proposing to help me, Mr. Farrar, I have a small shopping list. . . ."

  TWENTY-SIX

  FAUQUIER COUNTY, VIRGINIA, MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1998

  /// do prove her haggard, Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings, I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind, To prey at fortune.

  — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello, III.III.260

  THE VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE WAS STILL BRIGHT WITH AUTUMN —THE RICHest colors were past, but the landscape had not yet softened into the dun-browns of winter. Tonight was All Hallows Eve, the night on which the Wild Hunt roamed the earth, free either from Hell itself or from some harsh Celtic underworld. All Hallows Eve wasn't truly a festival of Hasloch's cult—but Christian or pagan, the spirits that would roam this night brought only danger and death—someone would die tonight.

  And if the one who died were Colin, then ten days from now, on the anniversary of Krystallnacht, Rowan Moorcock would also die.

  Farrar had been true to his promise of help. Colin had told him little enough—not even Rowan's name—but Farrar was able to supply the information Colin needed: the location of Hasloch's temple.

  Or so Colin believed. Colin was gambling that Hasloch was important enough in the American branch of the Thule Gesellschaft to have its inevitable unholy place under his direct control. If he did, it would almost certainly be located somewhere in his house, just as it had been thirty years before. He glanced down at the dossier that lay on the car seat beside him.

  Toller Christian Hasloch, born November 9, 1938, in Baltimore, Maryland. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard. Traveled extensively through Europe. Law practice in New York 1966—1972. Served in an advisory capacity on a number of obscure committees. Attached to Berlin Embassy 1973-1975- Joined the Cincinnatus Group in 1975. Appointed chairman in 1986. Never married, never arrested, no children, pets, or longtime girlfriends.

  Residences: a permanent apartment at the Watergate Hotel, and a country house, The Hallows, somewhere off Route 66 between Manassas and Front Royal. That was where Colin was heading now, in an anonymous sedan that could be any of a hundred government cars. Farrar was driving. Cars with drivers were a common sight in this affluent Washington exurb. A driver could answer questions, divert suspicion, raise the alarm if needed. And Colin must husband all his strength for the battle ahead.

  The Hallows was a rambling brick house that dated back to the turn of the century. They cruised slowly past it and made a series of turns down winding country lanes.

  "It's through that hedge," Farrar said, as if he were announcing the weather. The sedan rolled to a stop at the side of the road. There was no other traffic. The area's inhabitants had already left for their public and private sector jobs—and Colin expected Hasloch to be safely at his Georgetown desk as well.

  "How long do you think you'll need?"

  "Not long."

  Colin suspected that it would not be hard to get into the house. He had not told Farrar about the crucifix, but even now it was a cold weight in the breast pocket of Colin's jacket. It must be some sort of key—there was no other reason for Rowan to have kept it, when keeping it was so dangerous in both the magickal and mundane worlds.

  "Good hunting, then," Farrar said, as if Colin had given him a definite answer. He picked up the newspaper that lay beside him on the bench seat of the sedan, seeming to become as engrossed in it as any hired driver awaiting his master's pleasure.

  Colin stepped out of the car. There was a break in the hedge, and he passed through it, walking through the yard and across the terrace of The Hallows.

  The house, like the house of any rich man, was safeguarded in a number of ways, from dead bolts and double-locked windows to an electronic link to a security company and the police station. A cleaning service came twice a week, and a cook—housekeeper and butler were here on weekends, but on a Monday morning Colin could expect The Hallows to be deserted. He did not worry about discovery in any event. An arrest would serve his purposes far better than it would Hasloch's, and if an embarrassing scene ensued, well, Colin no longer had anyone's honor to look to save his own.

  Though he would have liked to have a Sensitive with him, Colin could think of no one whose safety he would hazard by bringing them here. As he had told Dylan, people who pried into affairs of this nature had a way of simply . . . disappearing. At least he would make a more disagreeable mouthful than most.

  The attached garage had a door which opened easily to Colin's skeleton key—there was no alarm, and if necessary he could have broken a pane in its window and gotten through that way. It was a loophole that many homeowners left in their security, and apparently Hasloch was no exception.

  A moment later Colin was inside the garage, safe from prying eyes. It was a two-car garage, but both sides were empty. The back was piled with the usual mundane clutter that any homeowner accumulates: lawn mower, snow blower, bags of salt and mulch. Colin glanced at his watch. 9:45.

  The door that led through into the house itself was far more secure: stee
l-core, from the look of it, with both a key-bolt and an electronic touchpad. But the LEDs on the touchpad were dark, as were the lights on the alarm box mounted high on the wall beside the door.

  Farrar's doing? It was better not to stand around wondering about it, at any rate. The fifth skeleton key that Colin tried dragged back the dead bolt, and the door was open.

  Pantry . . . kitchen . . . dining room . . . each room he passed through was perfect and deserted, like a museum exhibit. Despite the fact that the sentry system was down, no one seemed to have come in answer to the alarm that must have been sent. Colin passed quickly through the ground-floor rooms. None of them, even the library, gave a hint of the person Hasloch truly was, the new-minted creature of Evil called out of the stuff of the Shadow by those who trusted their creation to see their plan through to its ultimate culmination.

  A wave of giddiness passed over Colin, so that he had to clutch at the doorframe to retain his balance. He felt lightheaded, disconnected by a combination of too much stress and adrenaline, and unequal to the task before him. It was as if there were something here he did not want to face, some darkness. Suddenly he was cold—cold as if he did not stand in a suburban living room but instead within a crypt, a dark shrine cut into the living stone hundreds of meters below the surface of the sun-kissed earth, before an idol that was the mask of a god as yet unrevealed. . . .

  He dragged a handkerchief from his pocket, and with a trembling hand wiped cold sweat from his face. In his chest he could feel his heart clenching and unclenching, its blows as hard and distinct as if it were a prisoner pounding against the wall of his chest for release.

  He fumbled in his jacket for his pillbox, placed a pill beneath his tongue, and felt the painful hammering slowly ease. It came to Colin that all it would take for Hasloch to win was for him to die, and that he might well die here, from nothing more malignant than the inevitable failure of that balky beast, the body.

  It was over half a century since he had last faced the united forces of the Shadow in pitched battle. He remembered the date exactly: October 31, 1945, and each Halloween thereafter had carried with it some threat, some echo of that eternal battle.

  Old ghosts surrounded him now: dead comrades, summoned once more into battle by the force of memory. Michael Jaeger—who had been reborn into Colin's life once more—Marian Shipton, David Fouquet, Dame Ellen, Alison Margrave, Father Godwin, Nigel St. Clare, and others he had known only by their codenames: Kestrel, Peregrine, Shrike. Lamplighter. The Roman. Fellow soldiers in the Light, each of whom, in a sense, had given his or her life so that Colin could stand here today and strike in their name.

  He would not fail them.

  Colin concentrated on his breathing, willing his senses to steady. After a few moments he took a deep breath and focused once more on his task, his hand clenched around the black talisman in his pocket. Hasloch's Temple was here, and Colin was gambling that Rowan was being held somewhere within it. Fortunately he had the advantage of being able to count on Hasloch's colossal ego: it was unlikely that he would leave the prize in anyone else's hands.

  Now all he had to do was find his way in. ...

  The cellar steps were behind a door in the back hall. No one would see a light from the road. Colin flipped the wall-switch and made his way down the stairs. He looked at his watch. 9:55. He wondered if Farrar were still waiting—and if so, how much longer he would wait. At the bottom of the stairs, he shone his light around the space, his mind straying to that other cellar, that other desperate search, so long ago. Somehow it seemed as if they were both one moment, and all the years between them an illusion.

  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.

  1 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 il
lumination 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.