"We should wait here for him," Rowan said, collapsing against the inside wall of the elevator. "Right?"
"I don't think so," Colin said. "We have to get you out of here and safe. You're the best witness if this mess ever goes to court. Toller wasn't working alone. We'll only have leverage if we have something to expose."
"Like an underground Satanist Temple in Virginia?" Rowan said with weary humor. She pushed herself away from the wall and pushed the button. "Geraldo Rivera, here I come."
The elevator doors opened into darkness. The door at the end of the short hallway was closed.
"Come on," Colin said to Rowan. His voice sounded hoarse and strange to him—like a parody of age. But the old man had won one for the home team. "Just a flight of stairs and we're home free."
Rowan was reaching for the knob when the door was jerked open from the outside. She yelped, jumping backward into Colin and nearly knocking them both over.
A Fauquier County sheriff's deputy stared back at her, gun drawn.
TWENTY-SEVEN
GLASTONBURY, NEW YORK, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1999
Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land; Ring in the Christ that is to be.
— ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
TOLLER HASLOCH HAD BOASTED OF THE FRIENDS HE'D HAD IN HIGH places, but apparently he'd had nearly as many enemies there. The deputies who had arrested Rowan and Colin took them to the nearest hospital, and while they waited for treatment—Rowan for dehydration and shock, Colin for the supposed frailty of his advanced age—the uniformed deputies had been replaced by sleek civilians who discouraged questions of any sort.
For a while Colin wondered if he had defeated Hasloch only to fall prey to the rest of Hasloch's monstrous network, but after the hospital released them, their keepers simply drove them to a Washington hotel just off the Mall, where the two of them spent three days locked incommunicado in a suite on the eighteenth floor before they were driven to the airport and released.
No one ever asked either of them any questions, and Colin was content to have it so. He had done what he had come to do. And more—he had found the last work of his life.
"I hope Claire and Daddy are having fun," Rowan said, looking into the fire.
"Probably they're having as much fun as it is possible to have in Rhine-beck," Colin assured her gravely.
Last spring, Claire had finally succumbed to Justin's persuasions and moved permanently to the old farm in Madison Corners. The countryside was much changed from the days when the Church of the Antique Rite had held sway there: though still suffering from the same economic depression that gripped other agriculturally-dependent parts of the U.S., it was a more wholesome sort of stagnation than before, if such a thing were possible. Claire had found a great deal of use for all the skills she'd acquired in the course of a long life, from nursing to crisis intervention, and from what Colin had seen when they came for Christmas, she and Justin were very happy.
It was his second winter in the old farmhouse on Greyangels Road. The house had welcomed him back last fall as if he had never left; Winter Greyson (nee Musgrave) was its current owner, and the Greysons had been pleased to find so congenial a tenant. Grey had taken a particular delight in shipping Colin's pack-rat collection of books and papers to him; though Rowan was not as capable a secretary as Grey had been, she had learned quickly. Much of Colin's collection would pass directly to her use in the years to come.
"They'll be staying until Monday," Colin reminded her. "But they do have a home of their own to go to. And an old house needs looking after, especially during a New England winter."
"Yes, but . . ." Rowan said, and let the sentence drop.
Colin knew what she was thinking. While Claire and Justin were here, Rowan was able to maintain the pretence of a normal life. The furnishings of the Sanctuary—which normally occupied the second upstairs bedroom— were tucked away, and the regime of meditation and spiritual exercises that occupied Rowan's time—outside of her mundane studies—was suspended.
"It's New Year's Eve," Colin said. "I've seen too many of them to care, but you ought to be out celebrating, not staying here keeping me company."
Rowan made a rude graphic noise. "And who am I supposed to go out with? Ninian? And do what? People—ordinary people—just seem so ... oblivious. I know it's wrong, but I don't have anything to say to them, and what could they say to me? I feel like we're on different planets."
The path of the disciple had not been—and still was not—an easy path for either of them. The passage to membership in Colin's Order was long and arduous, and many of its time-worn practices seemed meaninglessly archaic to Rowan, who rebelled strenuously against them. For all her manifest dedication to the Light, Colin still sometimes felt that Rowan took the Great Secrets of Initiation far too lightly.
But the past year had taught them much about each other. In the spring Rowan would be finished here at Taghkanic, and Colin would take Dr. Rowan Moorcock to visit Nathaniel, and then—with his permission—would take her on to London, for formal initiation into the Order.
"Well, just as you like," Colin said. "Next year is the real turning of the Millennium, anyway—not that it's anything but an arbitrary benchmark. Just as long as you don't feel you're missing anything."
Rowan shook her head, not looking at him. In some ways her path was harder than his own had been: it was far easier to endure secrecy and isolation than the knowledge that what you were doing would be a source of incredulous mockery if it was ever revealed. Colin was not sure he could have faced what Rowan faced every day with mindfulness and a still heart.
But she has been born for her own age, as I was born for mine. In each lifetime we are given the Tools we need to perform the Great Work, though in every century they are different.
At Midsummer the newest Daughter of the Sun would be received into the Temple of Light as it existed on the Outer Plane, and she would become heir to all of Colin's power and the wisdom of more lives than this. His heritage would pass safely into the hands of his disciple for safekeeping into the third millennium.
"Oh, that reminds me," Colin said. "I have a present for you." He'd meant to give it to her next June, but it seemed right that she should have it now.
"A New Year's present?" Rowan said, getting to her feet as Colin levered himself out of the chair in front of the fire.
"Of a sort. Wait here."
Colin went through the kitchen to his bedroom and took an object off his desk. Carrying it carefully in both hands, he came back into the living room and held it out to Rowan.
"Many years ago, a friend gave this to me. It's served me well all these years—as a sort of reminder, you might say. Now I'm passing it on to you. Call it a legacy."
"It's beautiful," Rowan said.
She held the paperweight up so that it caught the firelight: a sterling sword, its surface soft with the patina of age, pierced an anvil set into a block of white stone.
EPILOGUE
AND KING HEREAFTER
/ have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
IT WAS SOMETHING OF A SURPRISE TO FIND MYSELF LIVING AT MOORCOCK farm once more. When Uncle Clarence died, the farm passed to Justin, with the caveat that I should always be welcome to make my home there if I wished to. It took Justin some years to persuade me that I should really be happy there, but it is a good feeling to have family around me once more. Rowan can share something with Colin that I never could, for all the years of our friendship. It is strange what contentment I find in knowing that he has found it at last.
And so we pass from darkness to darkness, rejoicing at our little time in the Light. All is a sleep and a forgetting, save for those few walking among us who have chosen to shoulder the burden of awareness from Life to
Life. As the years pass, the darkness that someday claims each of us becomes more real to me, and more and more I think on what Colin said to me when he first set my feet upon the path I was to follow all my life:
"The great mass of humanity neither knows nor cares about magick and they have the right to keep things that way—to not be troubled by forces outside the scope of their daily lives, or manipulated by forces they have no way of resisting. When I find someone interfering in people's lives with magick in that fashion, it's my duty to stop them if I can—for their own sake, as well as for the sake of the lives they may harm."
It is as good a summation as any, for a life's work and a dear friend. Walk in the Light, Colin MacLaren. I know we will meet again.
Enough of science and of art;
Close up these barren leaves.
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
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