The Adept (16 page)

Adam sidled around behind Peregrine and stole a swift’ glance over his shoulder. A scene was beginning to take shape under the artist’s rapidly moving pencil: a small group of indistinct figures gathered around an open grave.

Adam realized what was happening and backed away, leaving the younger man to work on without interruption, he ducked back under the tapes and withdrew to the nave where Sergeant Kerr was waiting for them.

“I think I’ve seen all I need to see here,” he informed McLeod’s subordinate. “As soon as Mr. Lovat is finished, we’ll be on our way. You said I might find Inspector McLeod at the Angler Hotel?”

Kerr nodded. “Aye, sir. It’s just a wee walk from here.

“I’d leave the car, if I was you. Head straight up Abbey Street till ye get to the square. The Angler’s the big white place on yer right, just opposite the Merkat Cross.”

Out of the comer of his eye, Adam could see that Peregrine had put his pencil away and was now folding over the cover to his sketchbook.

“Thanks very much for showing us around,” he told the sergeant. “Mr. Lovat and I can find our own way out to the street.”

The Angler Hotel was easy to locate. It was a comfortable, prosperous-looking place that boasted a restaurant, dining room, and wine bar on the ground floor. A number of cars were drawn up in front of the building, Scanning the array of vehicles present, Adam recognized the big white Range Rover with police plates as the one McLeod regularly used on official business outside the city of Edinburgh.

They found McLeod himself in the hotel foyer, hemmed in between a delegation from the town council and a pair of local journalists armed with notebooks.

“Aye, it was a ghoulish prank,” McLeod was saying grimly, “and rest assured we’ll do our best to see that there aren’t any more incidents of this kind. That’s why I’ve come down from Edinburgh to assist with the investigation.”

He flashed a look in Adam’s direction and drew himself up. “We’re looking into the possibility that the perpetrators of last night’s act of vandalism may be members of an itinerant gang of some sort. But that’s all I’m prepared to say to anyone at this point. You’ll get more facts if and when we have them:”

He cut short any attempts to question him further with a curt wave of the hand, and stepped briskly between the two reporters to join Adam and Peregrine by the main entrance to the hotel.

“Adam, am I glad to see you!” McLeod said. “I hope no one’s had the brass neck to keep you waiting.”

Adam shook his head. “Not in the least. Noel, I’d like you to meet Peregrine Lovat, a young artist of considerable promise. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve brought him along.”

“I suspect that you have excellent reasons,” McLeod replied, subjecting Peregrine to a shrewd look as he extended a blunt-fingered hand to deliver a firm handshake.

“I remember you, Mr. Lovat. You were up in the visitor’s gallery at the High Court last week, while evidence was being presented in the Sherbourne case. We were supposed to have lunch.”

Peregrine looked a little surprised. “That’s right, sir.” He
cast an oblique glance at Adam, and added neutrally, “I was there to do some portrait studies.”

“Well, I hope you weren’t put off by what you must have overheard in the courtroom. Not if you’re here to help out in
this
case.”

Before Peregrine could respond to this ominous-sounding remark, Adam interposed.

“We’ve already been up to the abbey,” he said briskly.

“Is there any place around here where we can talk in privacy?”

“There’s the lounge,” McLeod said, indicating the indoor entrance with a jerk of his chin. “In view of what happened there last night, it’s been declared off limits to the rest of humanity until I say otherwise.”

In spite of himself, Adam almost smiled. “That’s sufficiently secure for me,” he told McLeod. “Lead the way.”

The lounge was a spacious, oblong room, with red-curtained windows and a stone fireplace at the far end. A few feet to the left of the threshold, some anonymous forensics officer had drawn the splayed outline of a human body in white chalk on the red carpet.

“That’s the place where the corpse decided to lie down,”

McLeod said. He favored Adam with a darkling look and scowled. “I told you it was only a matter of time before something happened that was going to be difficult to explain to the press. I’m having the devil’s own time convincing the locals that this whole incident wasn’t really as uncanny as it looked.”

Adam pulled out a wooden chair and sat down, his gesture inviting the others to do the same.

“What exactly
did
happen?” he asked.

“You’re not going to like this, any more than I did,”

McLeod snared himself a stool at the bar and set an elbow on the counter top.

“This place is licensed to stay open till two,” he explained.

“Round about half past one, according to the barman, he and his customers heard a scrabbling at the door. One of the late-night patrons went over to open it. The corpse was standing up on the threshold. As soon as the door swung wide, it tottered forward a couple of steps and collapsed on the spot indicated.”

His jaw tightened. “Needless to say, the witnesses in the bar were more than a wee bit upset by the incident. The barman called the hotel manager, and she called the police.

Fortunately, one of my own men got wind of it pretty early in the game, and he called me at home to tell me about it.

That was at about three. At that point, they still didn’t know where the body had come from.”

“So you came down to check it out,” Adam said.

McLeod nodded. “When my man was telling me about it, all kinds of alarm bells started going off inside my head. You know the feeling. Anyway, by the time I got here, one of the local constables had arranged for the cadaver to be removed to the morgue at Borders General, while the others on night duty went on a tour of the cemeteries in the area.

No one thought to look in the abbey at first, because there haven’t been any burials there for years—just in the churchyard outside. As soon as it got light, though, it didn’t take them long to discover the excavation left behind inside the abbey, where the body started out on its travels.”

As he paused for breath, Peregrine could contain himself no longer.

“Surely you’re not saying that the corpse really
did
walk here to the hotel under its own power!” he said incredulously.

McLeod glared at him from under grizzled eyebrows.

“You can bet your last copper we’re not! The official story is that the whole affair was engineered by a band of malicious punks, who made it out to
look
as though that’s what happened.” He shrugged. “That version
might
stick, if we repeat it often enough—especially since the only people in a position to gainsay us are a handful of late-night drinkers whose view of the whole situation is bound to have been at least somewhat affected by alcohol.”

“An account of a walking corpse is certainly too outlandish to win widespread public acceptance,” Adam agreed.

“Even though at least two of us in this room know that it could very well be true.”
Peregrine gasped. He opened his mouth, as though to speak, and then thought better of it.

“This business is far from finished,” Adam continued soberly. “I think I’d better see the body, as soon as possible.”

McLeod nodded in agreement, getting to his feet with a scraping of the legs of his bar stool.

“Right you are. We’ll take my car, to make it official.”

Chapter Eleven

TWENTY MINUTES
later, a pathologist at Borders General Hospital ushered Inspector Noel McLeod and his associates into the chilly confines of the hospital mortuary. Peregrine followed close behind Adam, still clutching his sketchbook. He had not dared to look closely at his latest drawings, so disturbing had they been, and Adam had grimly bade him close the book after only a cursory glance. The smells here in the morgue made him a little queasy, especially in light of how the case was developing.

“Inspector McLeod would like to see the body that was brought in from the Angler earlier this morning,” their escort told the attendant. “Sir Adam Sinclair and Mr. Lovat are his associates.”

The attendant raised an eyebrow and indicated one of the smaller autopsy rooms opening off the cold room.

“He’s in there, doc,” the man said, switching on the lights. “I don’t know what his story is, but I’d say he’s been dead a long time.”

The harsh overhead lights revealed a sheet-shrouded form lying on a stainless steel table. The attendant came with them into the room, starting to reach for the sheet, but McLeod tapped him on the shoulder and shook his head in dismissal.

“We’d like to view the body in private, if you don’t mind.

Sir Adam is a physician. It’s all right.”

The attendant exchanged glances with the pathologist, but neither made any objection. As soon as they were gone, Adam approached the table and carefully drew back the concealing drape. McLeod registered no surprise, for he had seen the body in the lounge, but Adam exhaled softly through pursed lips. Peregrine took one shrinking look, then hastily averted his gaze from what, lay revealed.

Mouldering shreds of a shroud and a monkish black robe hung in threadbare tatters about a form that was little more than a skeleton held together by a desiccated sheath of leathery skin. The bones protruded through the skin in places—the frame of a man near Peregrine’s height but heavier, suggesting that the living individual had been sturdy and muscular in his prime. Hands like fossilized claws lay curled in stiff knots over the jutting flange of the breastbone. Empty eye sockets gaped wide and dark above a lipless death’s-head grin full of yellowing teeth.

Adam studied the body for several minutes in somber concentration, unmoving, striving to read signs invisible to the naked eye. When, at last, he spoke, his voice was a low murmur of most bitter condemnation.

“It’s bad enough that the perpetrators of this crime had sufficient power at their command to conjure a dead man’s spirit back to the body’s resting place,” he said quietly. “It is infinitely worse that they were able to force that same spirit back into this wretched house of bones.”’ The force of his anger throbbed in the air like thunder, though his volume never went above normal conversational levels. McLeod remained impassive, but Peregrine shivered slightly, not daring to say a word.

“This is as sordid a piece of work as I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter in recent years,” Adam continued, in the same freezing tone. “It is the work, moreover, of dangerous neophytes. Only someone too arrogant to reckon with his own limitations would ever have attempted this rite of summoning, given the identity of the individual he was trying to bend to his will.”

Peregrine finally summoned enough courage to give the mummified body a more direct look, shuddering as a wave of chill shivered down his spine, like the touch of icy fingers.

“Who—” he managed to whisper—“who
was
he
,
then?”
Adam did not answer. The expression on his stern face was one of shuttered introspection, as though he were privately considering alternate solutions to a difficult problem. McLeod’s lip curled in a smile completely devoid of humor.

“You ought to go back to school, laddie. Melrose Abbey is traditionally the resting place of the wizard Michael Scot.”

Peregrine blinked. “Michael Scot?”

This time the question penetrated Adam’s reverie. “None other than Scotland’s most famous magician,” he informed Peregrine. “He was a man of many parts: scholar, alchemist, physician, and demonologist—not to mention sometime court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. In terms of the sheer breadth of his learning, he was arguably one of the most illustrious adepts of the twelfth century.”

“The twelfth century!” Peregrine’s eyes widened in disbelief. “But that’s—what?—seven or eight hundred years ago! Surely there should be nothing left of him but dust by now!”

“Not necessarily.” Adam’s dark eyes resumed their intense study of the object of discussion. “Quite apart from the possibility that conditions of burial sometimes lead to extraordinary preservation or even mummification of bodies, you should recall that in Christian tradition—to cite a single example—it’s by no means unusual for the bodies of saints and mystics to resist corruption. In fact, the phenomenon has long been accepted as a posthumous sign of an individual’s spiritual potency. Scot was a wizard of incredible potency—which could explain the survival of his corporeal remains.”

As Peregrine digested this bit of revelation, Adam’s gaze shifted to an unfocused spot somewhere off to his right.

“One thing does disturb me profoundly, however,” he went on quietly. “All my reading suggests that Michael Scot most assuredly was not a man lightly to be trifled with. Whoever summoned his spirit would have had to overcome massive resistance. I keep asking myself how the deuce they managed to do it!”

“They would’ve needed some kind of power focus,”

McLeod murmured. “Maybe a talisman of some sort—maybe even something that once belonged to Scot.”

Adam nodded thoughtfully. “A power focus—aye. That would certainly account for a lot. I can’t say I’ve ever heard that anyone has anything that Scot once owned, but—dear
Jesu,
that’s it. The Hepburn Sword. That’s why someone stole the Hepburn Sword.”

His gaze met McLeod’s.

“Oh, bloody hell,” the inspector said succinctly.

After a brief, stunned silence, Peregrine whispered, “The Hepburn Sword? Isn’t that the one you were reading about in the paper, just last week?”

“Yes.”

“But, that was a—a sixteenth-century weapon—a swept-hilt rapier.” He blinked owlishly at Adam. “You said Scot lived in the twelfth century.”

“So I did,” Adam replied. “However, I think you may have misconstrued what I said about the requirements for a power focus. It isn’t necessary that the connection with Scot be one of previous ownership. Think about the owner of the Hepburn Sword.”

“The Earl of Bothwell?” Peregrine said.

Adam nodded. “The same. In his day, Francis Hepburn—the earl of Bothwell—was notorious as a black adept. It was widely believed that he held regular intercourse with the dead. He was one of the foremost wizards of his day. Eventually, the combined forces of the Church and the Law gathered sufficient evidence against him to warrant his arrest. He only narrowly escaped to France, leaving behind everything he owned—including his sword.”

He cocked his head at the artist, his keen gaze sharpening. “Peregrine, something has just occurred to me. Let’s have a closer look at those sketches you made back at the abbey.

Mystified, Peregrine produced his sketchbook, shivering as Adam turned back the cover. The first sketch, finished now since Adam’s initial glimpse of it in the chapel, showed a group of men in short, hooded capelets ranged about the
excavated grave-slot. The leader stood at one side of the pit, where a triangle had been drawn on the ground. He wore a medallion about his neck and a ring on his right hand. With the same hand he grasped the hilt of a thin-bladed sword, its point directed toward the open grave.

Adam peered at the sword, trying for greater detail, then began leafing through the rest of the drawings—close-up studies drawn from the same scene. From among these, Adam singled out a detailed sketch of the sword itself: an elegant weapon with a swept hilt, crafted in ornate Florentine style. So far as Adam knew, Peregrine had never actually set eyes on the Hepburn Sword; yet he had drawn it to perfection. Just to be certain, Adam offered the sketch for McLeod’s perusal.

“What about it, Noel? Is this the blade that went missing from the museum?”

McLeod gave a brisk nod. “That’s it, right enough.” He transferred his gaze to Peregrine. “You’re good at your work, lad. I’m beginning to understand why Adam brought you along.”

Peregrine flushed slightly under the inspector’s sharp look.

“Maybe there’s something else, too, then,” he said, “if I was right about the sword. There was a symbol—an animal’s head of some kind—inscribed on both the medallion and the ring. Try as I would, I couldn’t quite make out what it was. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Adam said, looking again at the sketches. “The fact that you couldn’t see it clearly probably has nothing to do with you. They had very strong wards all around the working area. The sword they used was Francis Hepburn’s, though, beyond all doubt. And that is sufficient to confirm our theory.”

“Aye, you have to give them credit for ruthless invention, whoever they were,” McLeod agreed, glowering down at the master drawing and curling a lip; “What better way to control one dead wizard than with another dead wizard’s sword?”

Adam nodded. “My thought, precisely. Almost any object used in a magical connection will pick up a charge of residual power after a while—and Francis Hepburn’s sword would become a particularly potent weapon. Those who stole the sword must have tapped into that energy to bind Michael Scot to their will.”

“But,
why?”
Peregrine asked, repressing a shudder, “What do you suppose they were after?”

“Well, Scot spent a lifetime collecting rare and dangerous lore from all manner of sources,” Adam said. “Just offhand, I’d guess our intrepid grave-robbers were probably after Scot’s master book of spells. Many of the legends claim it was buried with him. Of course, some of the legends say he was buried at Glenluce Abbey rather than Melrose,” he added, “which goes to show that one can’t necessarily trust legends.”

McLeod nodded ponderously, “That’s true, in general.

However, I’m inclined to think it
was
the spell book they were after. The question is, did they get it?”

“I don’t think so,” Adam said. “If it had been buried with him, there would have been no need to bring him back.

They would have taken the book and been on their way. My guess is that when the book wasn’t to be found in the coffin, the grave-robbers used the sword to summon Scot back to his body, with the intention of forcing him to disclose the book’s present whereabouts.

“I think he must have been obliged to tell them, too,” he continued, his mouth tightening. “His interrogators left the graveside in a hurry—too eager to get on with the hunt to bother tying up loose ends.”

“Which explains why Scot’s corpse went walking,”

McLeod finished. He gave his head a wondering shake.

“Didn’t they realize that might happen?”

“I don’t think they much cared,” Adam said. The look in his dark eyes was steely. “That piece of criminal negligence is going to cost them, if I have anything to say about it.”

“W–what are you going to do?” Peregrine whispered.

“Well, first of all, we must finish what they failed to do, and set Scot’s spirit free.”

McLeod made a noise under his breath that might have masked a strong expletive.

“Good God, Adam,” he sputtered, “are you telling us
that Scot’s spirit is still bound to
that”—he
indicated the shriveled corpse on the table, “—even as we’re standing here?”

Adam shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, nodding soberly. “I didn’t come prepared for anything like this, I’ll confess,” he admitted. “We’ll just have to improvise, and hope we’ll be able to undo what’s been done. If we’re particularly lucky, Scot may be able to tell us who summoned him, and where they might have gone from here. If not . . .”

His voice trailed off as he considered how to approach the task set for him. Peregrine’s eyes were wide and frightened behind his spectacles, but Adam did not think the young artist would bolt. McLeod was his usual pillar of inscrutable support. After a moment, Adam squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height, a plan taking shape in his mind.

“All right,” he told his two companions. “I’m going to see what kind of a rapport I can establish with Scot.

Peregrine, I want you to stand by with your sketchbook.

You know enough now to recognize when your deep sight is about to key in. Draw whatever strong images come to mind—in as full detail as you can manage. It may very well be vitally important.”

When Peregrine had given him a nervous nod, Adam turned to McLeod. “Noel, I may need to call upon you later, but for now I’d be obliged if you would simply guard the door. This is going to be difficult enough, as it is, without risking interruptions.”

The inspector nodded. “Right you are, Adam. Short of a construction crew with a bulldozer,
no one
gets into this room!”

Adam accepted this assurance with a fleeting smile, waiting until his two aides had taken up their respective positions before drawing his sapphire signet ring from his trouser pocket. He fingered it absently for a moment before slipping it onto the third finger of his right hand. Then, with the first two fingers of that hand, he traced once around the edge of the stainless steel table, moving clockwise from the head, before laying both hands flat on the shiny metal surface, as if it were an altar. For a moment he remained thus, head erect, eyes closed, while he drew a succession” of long measured breaths, sinking past surface consciousness toward levels of deeper awareness. From the island of silence at the center of his being, he raised his brief prayer of invocation: