The Adept Book 2 The Lodge Of The Lynx (47 page)

They seemed to be standing on the porch of a vast classical temple of white marble. Beyond the gateway, Peregrine could make out a shimmering pillar of light. The light emanated a sense of living Presence, even more authoritative than Adam’s. In wonder he gazed at it, glad of the company around him.

“Come,” Adam said quietly from his side. “Come and be presented to the Master.”

Awed but not afraid, Peregrine allowed himself to be shepherded forward up the steps leading to the temple gate, where Adam halted on the top-most step and inclined his head in respect:

Master,
he said, addressing the Presence,
I come on behalf of the Hunting Lodge to present this man, Peregrine Justyn Lovat, as a candidate for initiation. The fledgling hawk has found his wings and stands ready to assist in seeking healing for the soul now incarnate as Gillian Talbot. When this has been accomplished, I ask that he be received as a Huntsman, that our numbers may be strengthened against the threat that now hangs over the land given into our charge.

The Presence within the temple seemed to grow taller, its brightness more active. A voice spoke, lighter than Adam’s and carrying a crystalline ring of gentle humor.

Rest content, Master of the Hunt,
the Presence replied.
Thy petition on the latter point is known to us and to our Captain General. But understand that it is the healing of the child Gillian that must precede all else. Thou hast judged aright that thy fledgling hath the necessary talents. It remains for thee to bring him before that One whose province it is to quicken the sleeping skills yet required. The just exercise of his gifts shall be the fledgling’s rite of entry into full fellowship as an Initiate.

Adam bowed his head again.
I understand. It will be done as you have instructed.

The mandate was a powerful one. Only once before had Adam himself been called into that other Presence, to receive affirmation of his own healing vocation. Philippa had been his sponsor then; and recalling that long-ago time, he thought he now could understand something of the gladsome humility she must have felt on that occasion.

Drawing a steadying breath and shifting focus briefly to the earthly level, he reached down and took Peregrine physically by the right hand.

“Your star is rising,” he told the younger man softly. “Rise up and follow it, not in body but in spirit. Its light is like a beacon, drawing you out of your body toward the heavenly plane . . .”

Peregrine felt a sudden lightness in all his limbs, as if he had suddenly grown wings. Aware of the grip of Adam’s hand on his, he became conscious of McLeod clasping his other hand. Between them, they were lifting him up, helping him, like the fledgling Adam had called him, to take to the air. The sense of flying overwhelmed him. Closing his eyes even to astral sight, he gave himself unreservedly into the hands of his guides, until all at once his feet grounded and he found he was standing upright.

Timorously he looked around him and discovered that the rest of the company had accompanied him on his soul’s flight. Though all around him was starry night, he somehow knew that his physical and spiritual orientation was to the east. The company was assembled on a wide dais before a tall pair of burnished golden doors, each marked with a device which, in his heightened state, he somehow knew was the sigil of Air—a point-up equilateral triangle bisected by a transverse line.

McLeod released his grip on Peregrine’s hand and sank to one knee; the rest of the gathering save Adam did the same. Transferring his handclasp to Peregrine’s shoulder, Adam reached out to trace the symbol on the right-hand door with the first two fingers of his ring hand. The Word he then pronounced did not seem to Peregrine to register as any earthly language, but at its utterance the doors parted and swung slowly inward.

The space beyond was all pale light and moving air. As Adam guided Peregrine forward, leaving the others behind, the light and air took the visual form of diaphanous golden curtains billowing in a shimmering breeze. As they passed through the curtains, a fragrance like a breath of frankincense hung on the air. Beyond lay a vast, airy hall flooded with pale golden light and, in its center, a tall pillar of golden light which slowly resolved before Peregrine’s dazzled eyes into a gauzy image vaguely human in form, with a suggestion of sweeping wings that filled all the hall with the vital winds of their beating.

Eyes that were like deep lakes of living gold bent down upon him from a face neither male nor female but supremely beautiful in its androgynous delicacy. Points of golden fire were twined like a diadem through the floating tresses of golden hair flowing back from a high, noble brow.

Peregrine felt the pressure of Adam’s hand on his shoulder and sank obediently to his knees, vaguely aware that Adam had dropped back to kneel as well. Gazing up entranced into the golden eyes, the artist sensed rather than heard the invitation to open his heart and communicate his desire.

He found his response coming in images rather than words. Submissive to his questioner, he pictured Gillian Talbot in the mirror of his mind, together with the companion image of the withered corpse that had once housed the self-same spirit in another guise, and the more chaotic image of the shards that represented the dreadful damage done to the soul that once had encompassed both.

If there is any gift within me by which this wrong can be righted,
he tried to say,
show me how to use that gift. I ask nothing for myself. But if I may be found worthy in some small way, I will gladly pledge whatever I may have to the unswerving service of the Light.

The angelic fiery gaze seemed to burn its way into the depths of his soul. Powerless to turn away, even had he wanted to, Peregrine suddenly understood, as he had not comprehended before, what Adam had meant when he had spoken of the trial of the soul’s mettle. There was anguish in the awareness of his own imperfections. But without that knowledge, no higher vision was possible.

Humbly he acknowledged the angel’s authority to judge him, miserably bowing his head to signify his readiness to accept dismissal, if that was all of which he should be found worthy. But instead of being sent back, he found himself suddenly enfolded by a pair of dazzlingly bright wings, naught in his vision save light ineffable.

Towering over him in shimmering majesty, the angel seemed to bend to him, clasping his face lightly between two beautiful, tapering hands. He raised his face wonderingly to the glory, all resistance fled, and felt the bright brush of fiery lips grazing his eyelids, accompanied by a voice that was all melody.

May thine eyes see the way of healing . . .

Potent as an electric shock, the angel’s kiss set every fiber of Peregrine’s being reverberating like a bell. The sensation, beyond pain in its intensity, tempered to a warm ecstatic thrill that enwrapped body, mind, and soul to their very depths. An incandescence that was an extension of the angel’s own essence played over his eyelids, blinding him to everything else but its glory. His senses swooned before the onslaught of rapture unlike anything he had ever experienced in his present life.

For a timeless moment it seemed that he would lose consciousness. Reeling, physically and psychically dazed, he only gradually became aware of Adam and McLeod supporting him, still holding both his hands, anchoring him to the real world and his physical body, still sitting in its chair. He blinked his eyes and discovered that he now was seeing not an airy temple suspended in some distant, ethereal plane, but the comfortable confines of Gillian Talbot’s bedroom. When he shifted his gaze to Gillian herself, however, he found that his faculty of vision had been expanded so that he could see not only her physical presence, but also her astral image.

That image, thin and stressed as her physical body, was wavering amid a sea of fragments, like a child cast away amid a rack of broken mirrors. The fragments were all in motion, whirling and tossing about in utter chaos. And yet, as he looked more closely, he began to see pieces that matched up with one another, like separate parts of different jigsaw puzzles. As he tightened his focus, he could start to see the patterns more clearly, able to envision not only colors but affinities of shape.

It
was
possible to sort those pieces out and put them back together! Of that much he was sure. All he needed was the right tools.

“Adam,” he said aloud, “do you remember how I once described the effect of my vision as looking like a stack of transparencies?”

Adam cast a keen glance across at McLeod. “I remember,” he said quietly.

“That’s the key to putting things right with Gillian,” Peregrine said. “The sketches I’ve been doing were for practice, to identify the masks of her former incarnations. If I can draw those onto some kind of transparencies, we can use them as matrices to sort out the shards of the different personalities. Then we superimpose them to reintegrate her spirit as a unity.”

“I understand,” Adam said, nodding.

“What have you got that I can use?” Peregrine asked, his hand tightening on Adam’s. “Glass, maybe, or tracing paper.”

“I’ve got something better than that,” Adam replied. “There’s some clear acetate down in my desk, like you use for an overhead projector. Can you hang on, if I leave you to go and fetch them?”

Peregrine’s response was a tight nod. “I can manage,” he murmured breathlessly. “Just don’t be too long, will you?”

“I won’t,” Adam promised. “Noel will stay with you. He’ll help, if you need him.”

Philippa was already moving to erase the sigil over the door. As soon as the way was clear, Adam ducked past her and raced downstairs to the library. A swift rummage through the appropriate drawer brought the acetates to hand. Slamming the drawer shut with a flourish, he snatched a handful of felt-tipped pens out of the desktop hold-all and beat a hasty retreat to the room upstairs.

For the next hour and more, Peregrine sat drawing feverishly, while the others gave silent, strong support. When at last he laid his pens aside, he had made seven portrait sketches, among them a likeness of Michael Scot and one of Gillian herself, each representing one of the soul’s previous incarnations. Peregrine himself was pale and trembling with exhaustion when he had finished, his breath coming in shallow gasps.

“Easy,” Adam said quietly. “You’re doing brilliantly. Time for you to rest a bit now, while Noel and I shoulder some of the next part of the work.”

Carefully he laid the seven sketches across the foot of the bed in two rows, three and four. Standing before them then, he and McLeod together shifted focus back to the astral plane and, from this perspective, began to sort through the sea of psychic shards, fitting the individual segments to the various portraits like children playing with a set of wooden puzzles, each having the outline of a finished picture as a guide to show how and where the pieces fitted in.

The number of free-floating shards steadily diminished as the individual portraits built up. All the while they were working, Peregrine had the impression of fine spider-silk strands being pulled like candy floss from Gillian’s motionless body, joining it to the drawings themselves. The body was being vacated—but unlike that other time, when Gillian’s soul had been wrenched from her body to reanimate Michael Scot at Melrose, all the facets of that soul now were anchored close by, and soon would be restored. Philippa had come to monitor the body as they worked, and kept a close watch on the functions that kept it going while its owner was away.

At last all the shards were sorted and all the portraits complete. Each shimmered with a living energy, no longer a mere physical image of the personality it represented but a glyph of the mask worn by spirit during that incarnation. After pausing to draw breath, Adam turned back to Peregrine. The artist had regained some of his color while Adam and McLeod worked, and he looked up attentively at Adam’s look of inquiry.

“All right,” Adam said quietly. “What order?”

Frowning slightly in concentration, Peregrine rose and briefly studied the array of sketches before him, then began arranging them in a stack, ending with Gillian’s own portrait on the top. As Adam moved back the chair in which Peregrine had been sitting, Peregrine laid the completed stack on the floor at the foot of the bed, then stood back.

Gravely Adam betook himself to stand at the foot of the bed facing Gillian, the stack of drawings at his feet, McLeod at his left and Peregrine at his right. Bowing his head briefly over hands pressed together in prayer, he gathered the force of his will to draw on his authority as a healer.

To Peregrine, watching him, Adam suddenly seemed to grow several inches taller. And as he raised both hands slightly to either side of his head, lifting his chin in determination, he took on that aspect of an earlier mask of
his
incarnations that Peregrine had seen and drawn once before—lappets of boldly striped linen framing a lean, hawk-visaged face crowned with the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the solar disk set between twin ostrich plumes—the adornment of an Egyptian Priest-King.

“By the Sign of Osiris Arisen,”
Adam intoned, in a voice not quite his own, sketching a sigil of authority in the air over the portraits.
“Let the many become one, that wholeness may be restored.”

As he extended both palms over the stack of sketches, a deep violet light began to play over the surface of the top one. After a moment, the sketch itself seemed to melt into the light. As Peregrine watched, an indigo light washed over the surface of the second drawing, welling up then to merge with the violet as the second sketch dissolved in the wake of the first. The third sketch yielded a glow of shimmering blue, that was joined in turn with waves of color from the rest of the visible spectrum: green and yellow, orange and red.

Peregrine looked on in fascination as the sketches he had made melted away amid the corona of colors, each one adding several hands pans to the mounting column of changing light. What finally remained was a brilliant, seven-foot column of purest silvery white, hovering slightly above the floor where the transparencies had been.