"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. Paradoxically, 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 himself.
"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 ludi-' crous. 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.
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 wield. 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 the 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. You haven't won. You've lost. Every Chinese dissident— every Hungarian freedom-fighter—is my countryman. You cannot defeat us all."
From the corner of his eye, Colin saw Rowan's head turn slowly toward him, as if she'd only just begun to listen. In a private chamber of his heart he mourned for all that she would lose if they died here.
But even her death would not be a lasting defeat. Colin realized that at last.
"Empty words, Colin; the fantasies of slaves. Your 'dream' is dead—and in fact, it never existed. Our victory parade is no farther away than the next election. A new Pax Americana will sweep across the globe—but I'm afraid you won't like it very much." The smile of triumph on Hasloch's face was fixed. The gun in his hand gleamed silvery in the dim light.
"America doesn't matter, Toller. Are you listening? It doesn't matter. That's what your kind has never gotten straight. We've been aiming toward this Celestial City—a City of the Light—for thousands of years. America is not the point—it's only the closest approach we have yet to an ideal. Smash it, subvert it, we will rebuild the dream from the ashes a thousand times, and each time we'll build it closer to the perfection that the Light has placed in our hearts."
A joy he had not realized that he possessed transfigured Colin. This was the answer he had prayed for, the refutation of the evil and despair he saw around him, the rebuttal to the fear he'd felt in a thousand sleepless nights that Hasloch had won.
"Two thousand years ago, the Church was incarnated as a vehicle of the Light, to make men free and happy—"
"A failure!" Toller sneered, back on secure ideological ground.
"Granted," Colin said easily. "It got bogged down in local customs and trying to legislate morality. The Church failed at what it was designed to do, but it passed the torch: to the Renaissance; to the Reformation; to the Industrial Revolution. None of them was perfect—each advance was bought at the price of blood and sorrow and injustice and thousands of lives—but each was a step closer to the dream we were made for. And that's the bottom line: things get better."
Hasloch sneered, but there was something halfhearted in the gesture. As if, deep within his withered soul, something that hungered to hear this was listening.
"We're smarter, we're healthier, we know better than any time since the Fall of Man who we are and where we're going," Colin said with fierce urgency. "There's one for you—the Fall of Man. It's one of our greatest triumphs—your Serpent won that round, and it took us ten thousand years to work our way back from the bottom of the Pit, but we did it. And we'll keep right on doing it. Until you've killed every last one of us, your Shadow cannot claim victory—and at that, your victory will last exactly until a new Champion of the Light is born."
The Shadow had not won, and it never would. No matter what happened. No matter how long and twisted and weary the road.
Rowan took a step toward him, smiling. There were tears in her eyes, but her face was radiant with an incandescent, impassioned Joy. She held out her hand to Colin, and he took it.
"Go ahead," Rowan urged Hasloch generously. "Kill both of us. But y'know, it isn't going to do you any good. We'll be back. We'll always be back." Her voice vibrated with that promise, bright as a sword blade.
"Give up, Hasloch. You haven't won. And you never will," Colin said quietly.
For the first time since he'd confronted them, real uncertainty crossed Hasloch's face. "You are defeated," he said plaintively. "You know you are. Why won't you lie down and die?"
"It's the American spirit," Colin said with a tight grin. "Never say die."
Rowan giggled, a shocking triumphant sound in this place of horror. "'Do you feel lucky, punk?'" she quoted softly. "'Well? Do ya?'"
"Then die anyway," Hasloch said, raising his pistol and taking aim. "Not elegant, but effective."
The roar of a shot filled the room.
In that confined space the sound was deafening. Rowan screamed at the shock of it. There was a flash, and the stink of burnt gunpowder; instinctively Colin flinched back and covered his eyes, pulling Rowan against him in a futile gesture of protection.
But he was not the target, and neither was Rowan.
Hereward Farrar stood in the doorway in a gunsmoke haze, a double-barreled shotgun cradled in one arm.
Toller Hasloch lay arched back across his own altar, clutching at it for support. For whatever reason, Hereward had aimed low, and most of the load of shot had missed Hasloch's heart and lungs; he was still alive.
His mouth worked, shaping parting words he would never get to say. His feet slipped in his own blood, and he slid wetly down into a sitting position on the floor. Colin imagined he could almost feel the moment that the spirit sprang free of its mortal vessel to return once more to the Wheel that turned for both Dark and Light.
"He's getting away," Rowan said, in a dull, disbelieving voice. "Shouldn't we …”
"No," Colin said. He squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "Let him go. He'll be back. But maybe, in time, he'll begin to learn. Remember that when you see him again."
And reverberating through the chamber, Colin heard the soft sound of a Book closing.
But not forever.
"Isn't it time for you two to get moving?" Farrar said. He held out his key ring toward Colin. "I called the sheriff's department before I came down here—I had to leave the car in the driveway, but it ought to be okay there for a few minutes at least. Just le
ave the keys in it when you're done with it. Park it anywhere."
"Who the hell are you?" Rowan demanded with dazed bemusement. She pushed herself away from Colin and glared at Farrar, holding herself upright now by sheer force of will.
"Nobody in particular," Farrar said, smiling faintly. "Just somebody who was in the right place at the right time—finally."
"What will you do?" Colin asked him.
"Oh, I imagine I'm probably going to jail," Farrar said. "I just killed a man. Hasloch certainly needed killing, but you don't evade the consequences afterward. You take the hit—you don't make things worse. That's the rule."
And then, someday, your atonement is complete. . . .
"You weren't sent by the department," Colin said.
"No," Farrar said simply. He stepped out of the doorway and carefully broke the shotgun open. "Go ahead. I've got a few things to do here before I go." He gestured. "Right down that hall."
"And straight on till morning," Rowan muttered, taking a hesitant step toward the door.
The return down that endless passageway was worse than the first journey had been. The secret door still stood open, and the two of them passed through it hand in hand.
Rowan was staggering blindly, exhausted by her ordeal and the psychic agony of the Temple, and Colin felt the full weight of every moment of his years. But both of them were moved by the same driving motivation: the desire not to spend a moment more than they had to in this unspeakable place.
For one horrible moment Colin thought that the Temple doors would not open without their key, but on this side all that was needed was the simple push of a button. The doors swung inward, and across the antechamber they could see the lights of the elevator, standing with its doors open.
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