The Adept (7 page)

“Take a deep breath and concentrate on your heartbeat,” he continued. “Feel the pulse and rhythm of your life gently taking you even deeper and more relaxed as we count down from ten—nine—eight—seven—”

He could see Peregrine’s lips moving, continuing the counting, and he could feel him slipping deeper, hardly even whispering the final “One.”

“Good,” Adam replied, half-breathing the word himself. “Very relaxed . . . very deeply relaxed. And now, as my hand touches your forehead, I want you to sink into an even deeper—sleep.”

At the word “sleep,” he shifted upward to touch his subject lightly between the eyes. A quiver of eye movement registered briefly beneath the lowered lids, but then Peregrine drew a long, even breath and exhaled on a shallow sigh, his head lolling forward slightly, nodding.

The response was precisely what Adam was looking for. Leaning down to take one of the slack hands, he lifted his subject’s arm to shoulder level and stretched it out straight, running his free hand down it several times from shoulder to wrist.

“Now imagine that your arm is becoming as stiff and rigid as an iron bar,” Adam said, testing at the lock of the elbow for emphasis. “It’s becoming so rigid that neither you nor I can bend it, and you cannot lower it. Try if you wish, but you cannot bend your arm.”

Peregrine did seem to try. Adam could see the consternation on the younger man’s face, but the arm did not budge. Quickly, before Peregrine alarmed himself or did move the arm, Adam stroked along its length again.

“That’s fine, Peregrine. Your arm is going back to normal now it’s no longer stiff. You can stop trying to move it, and relax. Let your arm return to your side. It’s perfectly normal now, and you will have no aftereffects. Sleep now. Deep sleep.”

Silently Adam considered what to do next. He
could
simply try to regress Peregrine to a past life, hoping to find some clue to his problems in the present; but there was a quicker way, and one far more certain. It was hardly a usual psychiatric procedure—most of his medical colleagues would be scandalized—but then, there did not seem to be much that was usual about Peregrine Lovat.

“Now, Peregrine,” he finally said, “you’re doing very well indeed. You’ve achieved a very useful level of deep trance, and in a moment I’m going to ask you to go deeper still.

“For now, however, I have further instructions for you. For reasons I’ll eventually explain, you’re to remember nothing of what is about to happen, when you wake up later on. But if and when I ask you to recall it at some later date, it will come back to you in full detail. I have my reasons for asking this, but it isn’t appropriate for you to know them just now. So you will retain no conscious memory of anything you might hear or experience in the next little while, for your own well being. Nod if you understand and accept this.”

When Peregrine nodded, Adam drew his own chair closer to the rosewood table, reducing the distance between himself and his subject.

“Thank you. I will not betray the trust you’ve given me. Now, I want you to go very, very deep—twice as deep as you are now. Go so deep that nothing you may hear with your ears will register on any conscious level until I touch your wrist like this and tell you to come back.” He briefly
pressed Peregrine’s wrist between the first two fingers of both hands.

“Only if real physical danger should threaten, such as a fire, will you counter this instruction and come out of trance. Now lean your head back and sleep. Sleep deeply, hear nothing, and remember nothing. Deep sleep.”

When he was satisfied that Peregrine was, indeed, oblivious to his surroundings, Adam moved behind the chair, reaching into his coat pocket to take out a heavy gold signet ring set with a handsome sapphire. Slipping it onto the thud finger of his right hand, he touched the stone briefly to his lips, then laid the backs of his hands along the tops of the chair wings to either side of Peregrine’s head, open palms turned upward. Taking as a centering point the candle still burning on the table before Peregrine, he drew a deep, centering breath and slowly exhaled, at the same time breathing the opening words of an almost silent’ invocation, couched in the Hellenic Greek and Latin of third-century Alexandria:

“Ego prosphero epainon to photi . . .”

He offered the rest, in the silence of his mind, lifting his heart and his hands in selfless oblation.

I offer praise to the Light in the person of Ra: Pantocrator, Deus de deo . . . of Horus: Logos, Veritas veritatis . . . of Isis: Hagia Sophia, Regina Caeli . . . and of Osiris: Nous, Lumen de lumine . . . Thou, O Lord, art Light Eternal, Alpha and Omega, Source and Ending. Preserve us unto everlasting day. Amen.

Briefly he brought his hands together, palm to palm, touching the fingertips to his lips reverently, in salute to That which he served. Then, drawing a deep breath, he set his hands on the chair wings again, to either side of Peregrine Lovat’s bowed head, closing his eyes to the physical flame before him.

“As Above, so Below,” he murmured. “As Without, so Within . . . ”

The brightness of the flame’s after-image shimmered behind his eyelids, establishing a glowing point of reference. He focused on that point to the exclusion of all other internal images. As it receded, twin threads of brilliant
silver unreeled in parallel against the expanding ground of his internal vision, fine as spider-silk. One was the silver cord of his own life; the other, he knew, was Peregrine Lovat’s. The threads began to spiral as he plunged after them, not falling but flying.

In the still, pristine silence of his own mind, Adam made himself a part of that cosmic spiral. It gathered momentum, whirling faster and faster through gauzy fields of lights like scattered stars. The star-points elongated into other silver threads, all wheeling and spinning. The myriad filaments all converged toward a single distant point, like the heart of a coalescing nebula.

Never relenting, Adam fixed on the unbroken spiral of Peregrine’s silver cord and followed it into the shimmering midst of the dance. Anticipated, but never quite expected—as usual—came an icy thrill of disorientation that left him momentarily breathless and slightly dizzy. When the universe righted itself again, he found himself standing in spirit before two immense doors of immeasurable height, robed in white, his feet bared to tread on holy ground. It was familiar ground—the eye of the cyclone, the calm at the center of the storm, the hub of the wheel—but the awe was always new.

Adam had the Word of an Adeptus Major. As he spoke it, the doors opened with ponderous majesty. Beyond lay timeless vaults of silence: the unmapped and unmappable halls of the Akashic Records, the Imperishable archives of all lives for all time. Into the vaults of the future, he might not go; but guided by the silver cord that was Peregrine’s connection into the Sephiroth, Adam passed into the vaults of the past, threading a circular, inward-tending course along corridors iridescent as mother-of-pearl. At the heart of the labyrinth lay a convoluted chamber, whorled and curved like the walls of a nautilus shell. And at its center, on a canopied altar, lay a great book. As Adam approached the altar, the book opened of its own accord.

Hands pressed palm to palm in respect, Adam bent his head over the book, framing his intent in wordless query. As if conjured by some mystic wind, the pages began to torn and images to be presented for his gaze—the strands of
the thread that linked the many lives of the one now known as Peregrine Lovat.

He skimmed over the early material, searching for the key—that initial moment of awakening, the point at which the soul first encountered its own spiritual likeness minored in the greater soul of the Divine Light. For Peregrine Lovat, that epiphany had taken place at Delphi in the age of Pericles. The oracular gift bestowed at that instant of enlightenment was what made itself known now, as the gift of seeing. Not to many was such vision given; and to endure the gift, its use—and disuse—must be mastered. Such would be the task of Peregrine Lovat—and of Adam, to teach him.

So. The soul that now was Adam Sinclair bore witness to the mandate: to make of a potential curse a gift, a tool for his own further spiritual advancement and in the service of the Light—for Peregrine had made that unreserved dedication to service before. It remained but to reawaken him in this life—a task which Adam, as a healer of souls as well as of minds, had performed before.

But as he closed the book, preparing to go, light darted from roof to floor to roof again in quicksilver flashes too swift for the eye to follow, lively as summer lightning. The signature was unique, portending the imminent arrival of one of those to whom Adam answered on the Inner Planes.

Stilling his curiosity, for he had not asked for audience, Adam acknowledged the authority of One who had long ago progressed beyond the need to manifest in physical form, bowing his head and opening his hands at his sides in a posture of receptivity. The other manifested in a beam of pure white light that pooled momentarily on the floor of the dais beneath Adam’s feet and then surged up and around to envelope him in a shimmering pillar of opalescent fire.

Restive forces brood at the edge of the Abyss, Master of the Hunt,
came the unexpected warning
. Do you seek our help?

The question startled Adam, for he had perceived no threat requiring his attention. He had been functioning in his capacity as a physician of souls tonight, not as a cosmic keeper of the peace.

No, Master. I have come on an errand of mercy, as a healer of souls.

Explain.

It is written that all pilgrim souls must enter the world as children, and that so long as the personality is immature, the intellect untrained, even an Adept may be kept from achieving his full potential. There is such a one come to me—an Adept, I find, of rare gifts—who has been crippled, half-broken in childhood, before mind and intellect had sufficiently matured to protect the indwelling spirit, I believe his destiny may lie within, the mandate of my mission, but the fledgling hawk must be re-pinioned, before he is ready to rejoin the Hunt. I would help him learn to fly again, that the potential of his gifts may be regained.

The desire is worthy,
came the response,
but you should know that opposition threatens, and a risk is involved.

What opposition, and what risk?

The Veil obscures details, even from us, but a threat exists. You will be a focus, though even the opposition will not know it for some time.

I am not afraid to face this threat,
Adam replied.
But, is the fledgling to become an ally, then? How, if I can neutralize the self-doubt that cripples him, so that his potential is released? May he take his rightful place before the Light?

He may. If the fledgling proves steadfast, you have authority to receive him; but this is by no means fore ordained. Do you accept the commission to rehabilitate this soul?

The question bore of no answer but one.

My office as physician in the Outer was not lightly undertaken, Master. Nor do I take lightly my vows on the Inner, as a sentinel of the Light. I see the spark in Peregrine Lovat—a spark too bright to be wasted in aimless wandering, when it could be directed to Service. I accept the commission.

So be it, then, Master of the Hunt. But tread softly, lest he and you should plummet into the Abyss.

It shall be so,
Adam replied, with a deep
bow
.

Between one heartbeat and the next, the enfolding
presence simply was not there any longer. The Chamber of Records wavered around Adam and then disappeared, and he arrowed back toward the material world. The slight disorientation of soul-flight ended with the faint psychic jolt that signaled the spirit’s reunion with matter. When Adam opened his eyes, swaying a little on his feet, he was standing once again in the familiar library at Strathmourne, hands resting on the back of the chair where Peregrine Lovat slept. Details of what had just transpired grew more hazy by the second, but a clear plan of action lay before him now.

Almost perfunctorily, he brought his palms together in salute to the Light, the touch of his fingertips to his lips closing and sealing the rite he had just performed. Then he came around in front of Peregrine’s chair, settling fully back into his role as physician and teacher.

The younger man was as Adam had left him, head tilted back in the angle of the wing-backed chair, eyes closed, After blowing out the candle, Adam bent to touch Peregrine’s wrist lightly in pre-arranged signal.

“Peregrine, listen to my voice,” he said firmly, no longer uncertain of his way, “Can you hear what I am saying?”

The younger man’s lips parted slightly, in a scarcely breathed, “Yes.”

“Excellent,” Adam said. “In a moment, I am going to ask you to return to waking consciousness. Before I do that, however, there is something you should know, even though it may be some time before you arrive at a full understanding of what I am about to tell you.”

He settled carefully back into his chair, watching the other man closely.

“It is a fact, though I cannot prove it to you in any rational, scientific manner, that an individual’s personal history often goes back beyond the boundaries of his present lifetime. I have reason to believe that the vision which you have been at pains to suppress since childhood is actually a valuable legacy from earlier stages of your development. And there is no doubt that you can control it—provided that you acknowledge the gift for what it is.”