The Adept Book 2 The Lodge Of The Lynx (8 page)

“If he can’t, no one can,” Adam said. “The youth himself is probably no more than a novice. But it’s just barely possible that he might be able to tell us something useful concerning the older man in the background.”

“The man with the medallion?” Christopher paused to give his long nose a rub. “Are you thinking this fellow might have been mixed up with the events at Loch Ness?”

Adam frowned. “I wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility.”

Victoria gave her head a thoughtful shake. “Whatever was in Michael Scot’s spell book, they wanted it badly enough to risk lives for it. What do you suppose they’re up to?”

“I only wish we knew,” Adam said. “Whatever it may be, they obviously intend to stop at nothing to achieve it.”

“What about the wee lassie?” asked Christopher. “Scot’s current persona—what’s the name, Talbot?”

“Gillian Talbot,” Adam said with a nod. “It’s still too soon to tell. When I saw her in the hospital, she was in a bad way—her entire personality disrupted,
at every level.
I was able to leave one of my cards with the mother, but so far there’s been no follow-up. If I don’t hear anything by the end of next week, I’ll give some thought to finding a way to renew the contact.”

“Couldn’t you just telephone?” Victoria asked.

Adam grimaced. “That could be a bit awkward, explaining my interest. Besides, there may well be a better way. I’ve got to go down to London toward the end of the month Mother’s coming over for the holidays. If her schedule permits, I may arrange to call in at the hospital again. We’ll just have to see.”

A fresh gust of wind rattled the windows at his back. Christopher squinted down at his watch and clucked his tongue.

“Lawks, is that really the time? Sorry, Adam, but I’m going to have to think about leaving. I’ve got a christening in half an hour.”

“We’ve got to be going as well,” Adam said, with a glance that included Peregrine. “Thank you, Victoria, for an excellent lunch. I hope I can count on seeing both of you tomorrow night?”

“Wouldn’t think of missing it, old fellow, even if there’s a blizzard,” Christopher said with a grin. “To paraphrase what the postmen say where your mother comes from, ‘
Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail shall stay these dinner guests from their appointed feast . . .’
”

Chapter Five

THE THICKLY FORESTED
hills to the north of Blairgowrie were blanketed with newly-fallen snow. Thinking back over his twenty-seven years’ service as a gamekeeper, Jimmy McArdle could recall only a handful of times when there had been snow on the ground so early in the season, with the first of December still nearly a fortnight away. It would bring the deer down early this year. He must see about having extra bales of hay set out at the usual places-and keep an even closer watch than usual for the poachers, who would be drawn by the deer’s easier accessibility.

Pausing briefly on the whitened footpath, Jimmy inhaled deeply of the clean tang of pine resin and turned his face to the dark sweep of starlight overhead, then eased the weight of his rifle to his shoulder and put his eye to the scope to sight in briefly on the splendor of Sirius, flashing red and green and white like a beacon. With no moon, even with the snow but newly fallen, the night was tailor-made for poachers. His breath made a filmy plume of steam against the far-flung scattering of winter stars as he lowered his weapon and drank in the sounds of the night, savoring the stillness and the solitude.

Jimmy loved these woods, and he loved these rugged hills, especially in winter. But now that the weather was clearing, the cold was beginning to bite deep. In another few years he would be too old to do this. Lately, he noticed that he seemed to mind the cold more.

Aware of an aching touch of frost in his bones, Jimmy set down the red-filtered woodsman’s torch he always carried but rarely used and delved beneath his parka for the hip-flask of brandy that was a welcome anodyne to creeping winter chills. Fingers clumsy in their heavy gloves, he unscrewed the cap and lifted the flask to his lips. Even as the brandy hit his tongue, the stillness of the surrounding woods was broken by a muffled noise that sounded not unlike a cry.

The noise came from uphill, somewhere off to his right. It had not sounded like a deer. Instantly suspicious, Jimmy cocked his head to listen, gradually picking up a more muted scuffle of movement among the trees beyond. An unpaved forestry access road skirted the other side of the hill, but it was a private one, and no one should be using it at this hour, much less without Jimmy’s knowledge.

Hastily stowing his flask away, Jimmy shifted his rifle into the crook of his arm and picked up his torch. He had been told not to tangle with poachers personally, for there had been some nasty incidents in the Highlands of late, and even a few killings, but if he could get close enough without being seen, he might at least get a better look at tonight’s culprits through the rifle’s scope.

The snow underfoot was ankle-deep and powdery. Scuffling through it rather than on it, so as not to give himself away, Jimmy began to work his way toward the origin of the sound, taking advantage of the cover of the snow-laden trees. He was halfway up the slope when a low, sing-song wail rang out through the surrounding woods, bringing him abruptly to a standstill. As the echoes died away, a thin chorus of whispering began.

Sibilant in the dark, the whispers rose and fell with the eerie cadence of a chant. The sound of it made Jimmy’s flesh creep. For a moment he stood rooted to the spot, unable to bring himself to move. Then he took a firmer grip on his rifle and forced himself to push on.

A dim red glow began to show through the trees ahead. Creeping forward almost against his will, Jimmy arrived at the hill crest and found himself gazing down into a hollow dell turned suddenly strange, though he had known it all his life. About a dozen figures in hooded white robes stood ranged in a circle around a central clearing. Alone at the center, on the flat grey stone that often had served as a picnic site in Jimmy’s youth, stood another white-robed figure, cowled head thrown back and arms raised, facing another kneeling figure at the edge of the stone, whose bowed grey head was bare.

Sullen pockets of fire burned red at each of the four quarters of the circle, sending up heavy spirals of evil-looking black smoke. The moving flicker of the flames cast eerie shadows on the kneeling man. Looking more closely, Jimmy realized that his hands were bound behind his back.

Even as Jimmy stared in mesmerized horror, the chanting abruptly ceased.

* * *

The old man had offered no resistance as his captors dragged him uphill through the new-fallen snow, nor could offer any. His captors had seen to that. From the moment they had seized him—from behind, with a chloroform-soaked pad clamped over mouth and nose—their mastery had been complete. He did not even know how long they had been holding him, for they had never allowed him to recover fully from the effects of the chloroform. A succession of injections kept him drifting in and out of consciousness. He remembered being shaken awake enough to use the toilet once or twice, and a meal of sorts a few hours before—a stale, oatmealy sort of scone and a glass of harsh red wine—but little else.

Shortly after the meal there had been another injection, just before they bundled him into the back of a large, closed car; and then a long ride lying on the floor, loosely covered by a tartan rug. Despite his efforts to stay awake and try to see where they were taking him, he had nodded off most of the time, his fleeting dreams peopled by nightmares.

He had roused as they hauled him out of the car, groggy and half-sick, his head throbbing from the drugs and the fear. They were parked beneath some trees—a bewildering maze of tangled evergreens, the scent of them sharp and pungent on the frosty night air. He had no idea where he was or what they intended. All he knew was that his life was in mortal danger, and he was powerless to put up a fight.

Once they left the car—he thought there was a second one, parked close behind it—the only illumination came from the electric torches of the two men going ahead and behind to light the way for the rest of the party. The old man guessed there might be as many as a dozen of them, but he could not be sure. They moved too quickly, and all were dressed alike, anonymous in long white robes like the vestments of some strange priesthood, cowled hoods pulled low over their faces. He had never seen his kidnappers clearly—and his keepers had worn Balaclava helmets—so he had yet to see the faces of any of his captors. That gave him some hope that they might eventually release him, for he certainly could not identify any of them.

What began to worry him most was that they had put one of the white robes on him, too. They must have done it during the long car ride, while he faded in and out of drugged sleep. He was bundled in an overcoat over the robe just now, his bare feet jammed into rubber Wellington boots several sizes too large, but he could sense that they had left him wearing nothing underneath the robe. Even drug-blurred logic told him that this did not bode well for whatever future he might have, even if he
hadn’t
seen their faces.

They had taken away his glasses, and his eyes wouldn’t focus properly anyway because of the drugs, but peering blearily ahead, he could see that they were approaching the crown of a hill. The iron hands at his elbows propelled him forward, up and over the crest, to descend toward a tree-ringed dell. Open to the sky from above, the clearing was blanketed in white except for a flat grey stone in the center, nearly the size of a car. The air was icy, silent as a tomb, and his ghostly escorts spoke not a word.

Fear gripped him like a vise, and he cried out once as he tried to balk. His keepers did not seem to care, and easily overcame his feeble struggles, shoving him bodily between the trees and into the center of the clearing. There rough fingers stripped off the overcoat and forced his bare, half-frozen hands behind his back, securing them with a length of thin cord while others pulled off the boots, first one and then the other. The icy shock of the snow beneath bare feet elicited a gasp, and the cord bit cruelly into his wrists. He bit back a sob of pain and bewilderment as they forced him to his knees in the snow, just at the edge of the huge, smooth stone, and stood over him to make sure he remained there.

The snow was numbing his legs from the knees down, soaking through the thin robe, chilling his blood, threatening to numb what little sense he still had left to him. Dull-eyed, increasingly sluggish, he watched his captors trace a wide ring of ashes on the whitened ground around the clearing.

Flames flared red and golden in the darkness as small fires were set to burning at the four quarters of the circle, each tended by one of the white-robed men. At a signal from another, who seemed to be their leader, each of the four cast a handful of powder upon his fire. The powder flared up like gunpowder, then gave off dark, noxious tendrils of smoke that snaked slowly upward in serpentine spirals.

The smell of the smoke was sickly-sweet, heavy as opium, biting at the nostrils. The old man shivered, dread supplanting cold, for his captors’ likely intentions suddenly acquired new menace. As his two keepers stood back from him a little, and their leader stepped imperiously onto the flat stone, the old man made a final, valiant attempt to get to his feet; but frozen legs refused to respond.

The effort nearly made him overbalance and fall over, and he teetered precariously on numb knees until one of his keepers leaned forward to steady him for a moment. As the man drew back again, the leader raised both arms above his head and began to recite a deep-throated invocation, in a language full of trills and liquid vowels, teasing at the edge of familiarity but not quite recognizable.

The other members of the circle joined in, their voices low and full of menace in the freezing night. The invocation yielded to a guttural chant, harsh as stone on stone. The odorous smoke from the firepits was thick in the old man’s nostrils. Paralyzed in mind and body, he wavered on the edge of fainting.

The chant rose to a sudden, sharp crescendo, then ceased. The, leader crossed his arms on his chest and bowed low from the waist, then pulled something dark and metallic from underneath his robe and came to kneel gracefully before the old man, offering the object on both extended palms for the old man’s inspection.

It was a torc of blackened metal, overlaid in silver with primitive designs and set with tawny gems. The old man stared at it in blank incomprehension, cringing then as hands seized his upper arms from either side and more hands clasped his head, one cupping over his nose and mouth so that a sharp whiff of ammonia suddenly cleared his head and all at once he knew
exactly
what was about to happen.

Another moved in the darkness then, swooping down on the old man from behind. Pain exploded at the back of his skull, but heightened consciousness lingered a few heartbeats longer-just until the breath suddenly caught in his throat and hot fire seared below his right ear.

And the trembling Jimmy, watching by now through the scope on his rifle, stifled a horrified gasp as metal flashed and bright blood suddenly spurted from the old man’s neck, gushing in great, steaming jets onto the object that the other kneeling man held in his outstretched hands. The old man’s body convulsed, mouth agape in a rictus of silent agony, back arching against the restraint of his captors, but none showed him any mercy.

Within seconds, his blood had drenched his robe, his nearest captors, and the snow around him, dark crimson in the firelight, his struggles gradually diminishing, strength draining away with his blood. No more able to move than the victim still held upright by his unrelenting captors, Jimmy continued to stare in horror as blood overflowed the suppliant’s cupped hands and ran down his arms, streaming from the dark, metallic object that he finally raised in triumph as his minions at last allowed the old man’s lifeless body to crumple on the blood-drenched snow.

The stark-heartlessness of it finally broke the spell and released Jimmy from his frozen horror. Outraged now, as well as appalled, he made a fumbling attempt to chamber a bullet. To his dismay, the mechanism jammed with a crunch in his quaking hands.

The sound carried almost like a gunshot. Down in the hollow, the white-robed figures stiffened, hidden faces turning to scan the surrounding trees. At a curt gesture from their leader, three of the hooded figures broke away from the circle and began heading in Jimmy’s direction, fanning out as they came.

Terrified, Jimmy dropped flat and began wriggling backwards as swiftly as stealth would allow, dragging his rifle with him, praying they would not spot him. And when he reached the game trail below, he sprang upright and took to his heels like a man running for his life.