The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure (23 page)

“Mr. Lauder—”

“What is it this time?” Lauder demanded. “No, wait, don’t tell me—I’ll come and see for myself.”

He turned apologetically to Adam and his companions, but before he could speak, Peregrine moved in to seize the initiative.

“Mr. Lauder, would it help if I went ahead and took them around?” he asked. “I’m already feeling guilty, to be imposing on you at such short notice on a night when you’re obviously busy. I remember my way around. We’ll be fine, honestly. And we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

The hubbub from the kitchen quarters was mounting. Lauder cast a harried glance over his shoulder, then capitulated.

“Och, it’s this mob that’ll be the death of me tonight,” he muttered. ‘ ‘I doubt they’ll be out of here till well after midnight, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I do ask that you come in and see me again before you leave, let me know how you’ve gotten on.”

After receiving assurances from both Peregrine and Adam, the castle administrator hurried off to take charge of events in the kitchen. McLeod watched him go, then heaved a sigh of guarded relief.

“That was very well done, laddie,” he told Peregrine under his breath. “Thank God there’s this diversion of the dinner-dance. Otherwise, I think he would have been in our back pockets all night, and we couldn’t get anything done. We made ourselves too interesting. Where to now?” he asked Adam. “The Douglas Room?”

“Not immediately,” Adam said. “Before we do anything else, I want to have a look around the Charter Room.”

“What are you expecting to find there?” McLeod asked, frowning.

“If we’re lucky, nothing worse than some unpleasant resonances from the secret room beneath it,” Adam said. “But since we’re here, I want to check it out. It will also give Lauder’s party a chance to get fully under way. Which way, Peregrine?”

“Down this corridor and up the stairs in the Meldrum Tower,” Peregrine said, leading them out. “Just follow me and I’ll cut in the lights as we go.”

The Meldrum Stair was a tight turnpike spiral of steps, narrow enough that the three of them were obliged to ascend in single file. The door to the Charter Room opened directly off the stairwell into a small vestibule. It was not locked. Pushing the door open, Peregrine boldly set his foot across the darkened threshold, then stopped dead in his tracks.

“It’s bloody freezing in there!” he whispered.

“All right, come back,” Adam said quietly. He spoke calmly, but there was a steely undertone in his voice that had not been there a moment before.

Peregrine did not wait to be told twice. Retreating onto the little landing, he flattened himself to the wall to let Adam take his place on the threshold. McLeod pressed past him as well but stopped at Adam’s elbow, shining his pocket torch into a blackness that almost seemed to drink up the light.

“I don’t like the feel of this,” the inspector murmured.

“Nor do I,” Adam replied.

Cautiously he extended his right hand palm-down and slid it forward until it made contact with the shadows. It was like dipping his fingers into an icy pool of dirty water, and the signet on his finger became colder still. Drawing his hand back, he took a silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his blazer and gave his fingertips a careful wipe.

“Is
there something there?” Peregrine asked in a hushed voice.

Adam was still gazing into the darkness, his mouth drawn tight in a scowl of concentration.

“Something,
yes. I’m getting some very chaotic impressions,” he muttered. “Very turbulent. Very black. But I can’t tell if what I’m sensing is past, present, or future. The resonances themselves seem out of phase with linear time.”

McLeod’s blue eyes narrowed sharply behind his spectacles, but he said nothing.

“Want me to try and have a look?” Peregrine suggested, starting to press forward.

“On no account!” Adam’s voice, though low, was vehement. He stood at the doorway a moment longer, then drew back with a deep breath.

“We’ll check it out, since we’re here, but no one is going in without taking a few basic precautions,” he said.

Reaching into the right-hand pocket of his blazer, he brought out his
skean dubh
held by the sheath. The blue stone set in its pommel seemed to glow slightly with a light of its own, and he touched it reverently to his lips as he bowed his head.

“Blessed be the Name of the Most High, for that Name shall be exalted above all others,”
he intoned softly.
“Blessed is he who dwells in the Light of the Most High, for the darkness shall not encompass him.”

With the faintly glowing blue stone, he signed himself with a symbol of warding, then beckoned his two companions to step forward. McLeod was first, slipping on his own sapphire ring before bowing his head to be signed in his turn with Adam’s symbol of protection, traced in the air above his head with the pommel of the
skean dubh.
Taking his cue from the inspector, Peregrine likewise put on his ring, lowering his head as he presented himself to Adam with hands folded together at his breast in an attitude of trusting submission. As he sensed Adam’s hand moving above his head, the air around him seemed all at once to quicken. A subtle warmth that was charged with power enfolded him like a mantle, and he clasped its protection round him and squared his shoulders as he looked up, prepared to brave whatever might lie ahead.

“Now,
don’t
open, either of you,” Adam ordered, preparing to move into the room. “Just back me. I don’t want to stir up whatever it is; I just want to get a general impression of
what
it is.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

SO FORTIFIED,
Adam led the way past the threshold into the Charter Room, McLeod and Peregrine at his back, the pommel of his
skean dubh
held slightly aloft before him like a torch. The uncanny chill in the air gave back before him, as if deflected by an invisible shield. Glancing around him, following the questing beam of McLeod’s electric torch, he spotted a light switch on the right-hand wall and nodded to him to turn it on. The visible blackness dissolved in the wink of an eye, showing him a square chamber lined with stout, deeply carved panels of dark polished wood. Plasterwork shields and heraldic crests were let into the cream-colored walls above the panelling, and more heraldic carving embellished much of the wood

Adam shifted his attention back to the panelling itself. Many of the panels would be movable, cunningly interlocked to conceal the presence of strong vaults he knew were built into the fabric of the masonry and stonework behind. The window bays looked to be at least nine feet deep, the corresponding walls easily thick enough to conceal a hidden closet or a secret passage.

Or the hidden entrance to a prison cell to contain something too dangerous ever to be let loose on the outside world.

Cautiously he advanced farther into the room. McLeod and Peregrine followed close behind him, both of them wary, guarded, ready at need to join their strength to his. The atmosphere seemed preternaturally thick and heavy. Undiminished by mere physical light, a subtler darkness that was not of the material world hung about the room like an invisible miasma.

Adam brought the group to a halt at a small, round table in the middle of the floor. Here he paused to take a deep breath, poised on the edge of trance. The floor beneath his feet gave him a solid sense of grounding. Aware that he might be opening himself to no small risk, he turned his attention on the dark.

It was only the briefest of brushes beyond the wardings he had erected around himself and his allies, but impressions assaulted him like blows—impressions of something huge, dark, and brooding, something pent up in some congruent dimension to which the material precincts of the Charter Room were only an antechamber. The air was suddenly full of gusting psychic winds, buffeting up at him out of great chasms of darkness under the floor. Somewhere down in those depths, far, far beneath the physical confines of the house, a dark presence tossed and turned in restless cyclopaean sleep . . .

He snapped himself out of trance to find his hands and face beaded with cold sweat, his hand clenching the
skean dubh
in a warding-off gesture to dispel the encroaching darkness. In the pounding silences between his own heartbeats he could almost still hear the blackness breathing. He gulped air, and became aware of Peregrine and McLeod staring at him in mute inquiry, bordering on alarm.

“Out!” he whispered, his voice reduced to a breath. “This isn’t what we’re after. Let’s leave well enough alone, before we risk rousing something better left to lie!”

He gestured vehemently toward the doorway, and both Peregrine and McLeod backed out with alacrity. Only when back in the closer confines of the stairwell did Adam allow himself a careful sigh of relief.

“What did you see?” McLeod demanded.

“I didn’t
see
anything,” Adam said. “What I
felt
is . . . something probably better left undefined.”

“Some kind of entity?”

“That—would be granting it too much,” Adam said, pocketing the
skean dubh.
“The impressions were only barely comprehensible. Whatever is sleeping under this part of the castle, it seems to be flickering in and out of existence—neither in this world nor out of it, but somewhere adjacent to both.”

“What are we going to do about it?” Peregrine asked, glancing around him a shade wildly.

“We aren’t going to
do
anything,” Adam said, reaching back into the room long enough to turn off the light. “Whatever the ‘devil’ of Fyvie may be, that question is no concern of ours at this moment. It has nothing to do with the casket or the Crown. Suffice it to say that it is confined and dormant, at least for the time being, and best let it stay that way. This means, too, that what we’re after is almost certainly in the Douglas Room. We’d better press on before our Mr. Lauder finds an excuse to come and be congenial.”

The Douglas Room lay at the opposite end of the castle, directly above where the party was going on. With Peregrine leading the way, they headed back down the Meldrum Stair to the floor below, then made their way quietly along a long straight corridor to the lighted well of Fyvie’s great Wheel Stair.

“These treads must be ten feet wide,” Peregrine said, as they started up the sweeping stone steps. “When I was working here before, I was told that some Gordons once rode their horses up these stairs for a wager. Can you imagine?”

“I’m trying to imagine how they got back
down
without breaking legs,” Adam murmured.

As they climbed, music drifted down from the Drawing Room and Gallery above, and warmth and the rich fragrance of roast pheasant wafted up from the kitchens below, harking back to the days when Fyvie had been an earl’s residence and played host to royalty. But after what Adam had sensed in the Charter Room, neither he nor his two fellow-Huntsmen were likely to forget the more sinister aspects of Fyvie’s long history.

The stairwell was well lit, enabling them to inspect some of the exquisite heraldic decoration adorning the newel post and the supporting arches that sprang periodically across the staircase. Peregrine further illuminated some of them with the beam of his pocket torch as they climbed, and paused to allow more thorough inspection of an oak panel set into one wall near the top, which read:

Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie

Dame Gressel Leslie, Ladie Fyvie

1603

Crescents and cinquefoils separated the four words of the earl’s name, representing his paternal and maternal descent, and Leslie buckles adorned his lady’s name.

“There’s where your Grizel Seton probably got her name,” Peregrine whispered, continuing on and pointing out more coats of arms, most surmounted by the Seton red crescent crest.

The murmur of voices and the clink of cutlery and glass grew louder as they approached the second-floor landing, its curtained doorway leading into the Drawing Room, where Lauder’s dinner was taking place in the Gallery beyond. They slipped past it quickly, hoping no one would come out until they were out of sight beyond the turn of the stair. Half
a floor up, just at the top of the stairwell, heavy doors faced onto either side of the final landing.

“That’s the entrance to Lauder’s apartments,” Peregrine whispered, pointing out the left—hand one with the beam of his torch. “It’s a good thing he’s otherwise occupied. This other one is the Douglas Room.”

His torch picked out the red crescent crest on the door just before he opened it, and Adam paused a moment to trace the curve of the crescent with his fingertips before following Peregrine across the threshold. As he did so, he experienced once again the moth-like flutter of Jean Seton’s presence deep below the surface of his conscious mind.

No threatening atmosphere greeted their entrance here. The air was cold but quiescent, redolent of nothing more menacing than wood polish and potpourri.

“Now, where’ s that light?” Peregrine murmured, casting to the right with his torch and then leaning down to turn on a small table lamp directly beside an archaic-looking telephone. “Here we are.”

The subdued light showed them a snug, neatly panelled chamber not much more than eight or ten feet square, with a curtained window bay in the left-hand wall containing a wooden armchair. The wall opposite the door featured two smallish portraits, one above a drop-leaf desk with another lamp and the other above a small fireplace, its hearth cavity filled in with panelling above an ornamental plaque. The right-hand wall was dominated by a handsome eighteenth-century pine chest, tall and with many numbered drawers. A straight-backed chair was set between the fireplace and the chest of drawers, and another against the wall immediately to the right of the door, just beyond the table with the lamp and telephone.

Last to enter, McLeod scanned the room from the doorway, running his gaze around the walls and across the figured Persian rugs on the wooden floor.

“What are you looking for?” Peregrine asked, moving on into the room to bend and turn back several corners of the rugs.

“I’m just looking,” McLeod grunted. “Policeman’s force of habit.”

“Well, you can look at this,” Peregrine said, pointing out a dark stain he had uncovered on the floor boards just before the drop-leaf desk. “It’s supposed to be blood. They say it won’t scrub out. Do you think it
is
blood?”

McLeod knelt to inspect the stain, briefly running his fingertips across it, then got to his feet, still looking around.

“If it is, it’s been here a long time,” he said. “Adam, are you sure about this location? If your Green Lady is here, she’s keeping very quiet about it.”

“She’s here.” Adam sounded certain. “Just close the door and let me ward us. I don’t like what I touched before, and with all those people making merry downstairs, I wouldn’t want any hint of what we’re doing here to cause reverberations elsewhere in the building.”

The sound of distant music receded as McLeod wordlessly swung the door shut and stepped farther into the center of the room, drawing Peregrine with him. Glancing around him, Adam took out his
skean dubh
again, unsheathing it this time but grasping it lightly by the blade, with the pommel stone held before him, as he turned to face the wall with the chest of drawers, which was in the east. To perform the Banishing Ritual of the Lesser Pentagram as he now proposed to do was to invoke divine protection of a most potent sort; but with the blade in his hand, pointed toward himself, it was also a pledge on his part to accept the fullest measure of divine retribution, should he misuse the protection so invoked.

Briefly he clasped the blade between his two hands, the pommel stone pressed to his lips as he bowed his head over it, knowing that for this invocation and intent, he must use the Hebrew words rather than the English translation. Then, lightly clasping the blade in his right hand again, his left hand pressed to his breast, he raised the pommel stone to his forehead in salute and began to trace the Qabalistic Cross with it over his body.

“Ateh,”
he whispered, as the stone touched his forehead. Unto Thee, O God . . .

“Malkuth.”
The Kingdom. The stone moved to touch his solar plexus.

“Ve Geburah,”
to the right shoulder.
“Ve Gedulah,”
to the left shoulder. The Power and the Glory . . .

“Le Olahm.”
Forever and ever . . .

The hands came together again to clasp the blade between them, the head bowing once more as he whispered, “Amen.”

“Amen,” McLeod and Peregrine murmured in response. Extending his arms wide to either side then, the
skean dubh
now lying in his upturned right hand with the blade pointed toward him, Adam closed his eyes and let his head tilt back slightly, strongly visualizing the images he now called forth: mighty archangels facing inward, spreading the protection of their pinioned wings out and over the room and all it contained.

“Before me, Raphael,” he whispered. “Behind me, Gabriel. At my right hand, Michael. At my left hand, Uriel.”

Opening his eyes, he closed his hand around the blade of the
skean dubh
and brought the weapon to center in salute, then extended its pommel upward and before him, toward the east, as he silently traced a pentagram with the blue stone—down toward the left, up and to the right, across, down and to the right, back to the starting point.

He could just see the vague after-image of a blue trail hanging on the air as he turned by the right, to face the door, and repeated the process, again tracing a pentagram before moving on to do the same in the west and the north. Returning then to the east, he extended his arms to either side again, aware both of the blade pointed at him and of the circle of protection hanging on the air where the
skean dubh’s
stone had traced, like a crown surmounted by four stars—apt imagery for what he hoped to accomplish before he left this room.

“In the name of Adonai, may we be protected from all evil approaching from the East, West, South, and North,” he murmured. “And may my powers turn against me if I misuse the trust reposing in me. About me flame the Pentagrams. Behind me shines the six-rayed star. And above my head is the Glory of God, in Whose hands is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

His second recitation of the divine attributes was accompanied by a repetition of the Qabalistic Cross, echoed solemnly by his two companions. After Adam had bowed his head over the
skean dubh
once more, he resheathed it and handed it to McLeod.

“I’ll let you hold onto this,” he said quietly. “What I just did may have confused our Green Lady, but I needed to do it because of what we sensed down there.” He pointed at the floor. “Hopefully, any local entities will realize that our intentions are defensive but not hostile. As for would-be physical intruders,” he went on, as McLeod slipped the
skean dubh
into a pocket. “Peregrine, I’d be obliged if you’d stand guard at the threshold and make sure we’re not interrupted.”