The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure (28 page)

Peregrine gulped and subsided. Peering over Adam’s shoulder through the windscreen, he scanned the lay of the land ahead of them as they slowed to nose along the narrow, twisting road into Temple. Not far past an old, ruined church standing stark and silent in the moonlight on their right, Adam spotted a break in the rows of interconnected cottages that lined both sides of the main street, opening off to the left.

“Donald, cut the engine and the lights, and park just beyond that lane,” he said softly, laying a hand on Cochrane’s sleeve.

The young detective complied, letting the Passat coast for another thirty yards before bringing it to a halt where Adam had indicated. Catching McLeod’s eye in the rearview mirror, he said, “Do I get to come along this time, sir?”

Adam and McLeod traded swift glances, and Adam shook his head minutely.

“Not this time, old son,” McLeod murmured, clapping his subordinate briefly on the shoulder. “You’re to wait with the car and keep your eyes and ears open—nothing more.” He took the Browning Hi-Power out of his waistband and handed it up to Cochrane. “If Henri Gerard should come running out that lane, do whatever you need to do to take him into custody, but otherwise, do
not,
under
any
circumstances, come down that lane until I give you leave. Do I make myself clear? Disobey that last order and you’ll find yourself tending parking meters for the rest of your professional life!”

Adam and Peregrine had gotten out of the car while McLeod briefed his young assistant, Peregrine taking out the swords. Now the artist handed one to the inspector.

“We’re to take on demons with
these?”
he murmured.

McLeod gave him a sly grin.

“Don’t sell them short, laddie. Unless I miss my guess, these weapons have more virtues to them than a sharp cutting edge.”

Peregrine took his own weapon in hand and hefted it. For all its length and weight, the sword seemed less unwieldy than he would have expected. And he knew, from prior experience, that however much his current body might lack skill with such weapons, his spirit appeared to know them well.

Adam had gone on ahead, and was already waiting for them at the mouth of the lane, keeping to the grassy verge so his footsteps could not be heard. He had secreted Solomon’s Crown in the capacious inner pocket of his waxed jacket, close to his body, but he was holding his
skean dubh
in his right hand, the naked blade close along the side of his leg, the blue stone in its hilt a close match for the one in his ring. His left hand held an unlit pocket torch.

Leading them quietly a few yards farther along the lane, so they were no longer directly between the cottages flanking the opening to the lane, Adam drew them close to sign himself and each of them with a sign of warding, the flat of the
skean dubh’s
blade touched momentarily to each forehead.

“Though the darkness come upon me in the valley of the shadow,”
he whispered,
“my feet shall never falter. For the Daystar goes before me to enlighten all my ways.
”

With a final salute to the Light, flourishing the
skean dubh’s
blade in the moonlight, he led them farther along the lane. Off to the left, a school playground occupied a large, rectangular depression, and beyond it, gleaming in the moonlight, stood the rounded curve of the arch that was all still remaining of the old Templar preceptory.

Skirting the corner of the playground, they struck out through tall, wet grass toward the arch. As they drew nearer, Peregrine saw that its weathered grey stones were underlit by a pale, eldritch glow discernible even in the moonlight. The source of that glow was a gaping hole at the base of the grassy mound just before the arch’s shadow.

Even as that fact registered, a thin, long-drawn scream came echoing up out of the womb of the mound, almost more felt than heard. As Adam and his companions started forward, the voice screamed again on a shriller note of mindless terror.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

HOLDING HIS
skean dubh
uplifted before him, Adam circled round the arch and went through it, plunging down the steps. Torch in one hand, sword in the other, McLeod followed hard on his heels, Peregrine bringing up the rear with his own sword brandished two-handed. At the bottom of the stair, a stone-walled corridor stretched off to the right, with a ghastly radiance leaking out into the passageway at the far end through a jagged hole in the left-hand wall.

The air reeked of rampant corruption. From inside the lighted chamber came obscene noises of gobbling and slavering, punctuated by a wet, tearing sound and a grinding crack like the snap of bone between carnivore teeth. Amidst the noise of frenzied feeding, Adam could hear halting whimpers that might have been human.

Steeling himself for the worst, he sprinted forward to the gap in the wall. As he reached the threshold, a hot gust of air raked his face like a set of talons, harsh as a blast of volcanic wind, stinking of brimstone and carrion. Eyes narrowed to smarting chinks, Adam beat the fumes away with a wave of his
skean dubh
and found himself confronted by a scene from an inferno.

The chamber beyond was dominated by the roiling presence of two nightmare shapes, half-fog, half-fire. Crooning and chuckling, they were hunched down over a grisly pile of tom flesh and broken bones that Adam realized must once have been a human body. At the center of the room stood a golden casket, its lid gaping wide. On the floor on the farther side of the casket cowered the trembling figure of Henri Gerard.

The Seal was lying on the floor beside him. Tightly clutched in his right hand was a slender rod of burnished gold that Adam recognized at a single glance as Solomon’s Sceptre. Oblivious to Adam’s arrival, Gerard was brandishing it weakly in the direction of the two demon-shapes while he haltingly mouthed a warding incantation through chattering teeth. So far, the influence of the Sceptre seemed to be holding, but Adam knew that its protection would last only as long as Gerard could maintain his faltering self-control.

At least the Frenchman had had sufficient forethought to draw a magic circle on the floor before opening the casket. The spidery black wheel of lines and symbols gleamed like wet tar in the phosphorescent demon-glow. Preoccupied with feeding for the first time in three millennia, the demons apparently had not yet tested the strength—or weakness—of that fragile-looking boundary. But Adam doubted that the existing circle would prove potent enough to contain them for more than a matter of minutes once they had disposed of their present victim—or the next.

A clatter of footsteps announced the arrival of McLeod, with Peregrine following close behind. Craning past Adam’s shoulder to see into the room, the inspector managed to murmur, “Sweet Jesus.” Peregrine gasped and went white, all but gagging as he half turned away.

The energy generated by the magic circle was like an invisible curtain wall. By narrowing his eyes and calling up his deep sight, Peregrine could See it as an opalescent screen of shimmering filaments. Inside the circle, Gog and Magog were gleefully continuing to pick over the reeking remnants of their kill, their drooling tentacle-mouths smeared with blood and venomous saliva. Visibly denser than they had been only a moment before, the two demons appeared to be taking on added strength and substance from their feast on human flesh.

“The more they eat, the stronger they’re going to get,” Adam whispered, as he realized what was happening. “We’ve got to contain them here and now, whatever the cost. If these creatures get loose to carry on feeding, there may be no stopping them.”

McLeod braced himself resolutely, shifting his grip on the hilt of his sword.

“What do you want us to do?”

Before Adam could respond, the nearer of the two creatures appeared to notice Gerard for the first time. Slewing its featureless head around, it hissed at him with its Medusa-like cluster of mouths. Gerard cowered farther backwards, only to overbalance and sit hard, stopped by the barrier of his own making. His eyes suddenly went wild as he realized he was trapped.

Slavering over a last gobbet of flesh, the other demon turned on its haunches. Eyes like gouts of balefire blazed in the gloom with sudden and renewed appetite as it regarded Gerard. Gaping back at them in stricken horror, the Frenchman gave an incoherent shriek of denial. The Sceptre faltered in his trembling grasp.

“Can’t we do something?” Peregrine whispered urgently.

“I’m thinking,” Adam murmured back.

Merciless as basilisks, the two demons separated and began to converge on Gerard from either side around the casket. The Frenchman made a feeble attempt to wave them back with the Sceptre, but his quaking arm and will lacked the strength to give the gesture any real authority. With throaty gurgles of anticipation, the demons edged closer.

“You’d better think fast,” McLeod muttered.

“I know.”

Glancing around the chamber, Adam finally noticed the long-dead Templar guardians seated around the perimeter of the chamber. The sight brought a single desperate recourse to mind.

“Try to create a diversion,” he whispered to his two fellow Huntsmen. “I’ll see what I can do.”

So saying, he faded swiftly away from them to the left, into the murky dark along the edge of the wall, skirting the seated sentinels. Behind him, McLeod and Peregrine began shouting and clashing their swords together in the doorway. Sharp and bright despite their antiquity, the Templar blades rang out in the demon-gloom with almost supernatural clarity. Like the peal of cathedral bells, the blade-music echoed and reechoed in that confined space in soaring counterpoint to Gerard’s terrified whimpering.

Arrested by the chime of consecrated steel, both demons halted in their tracks. Cringing and snarling as if stung by the sound, they seemed briefly to lose sight of their intended victim. Fiery eyes swiveled around, probing in the direction of the two gesticulating figures in the doorway. Still writhing, they whipped about and surged forward as if to hurl themselves at their tormentors.

The magic circle absorbed the impact of their charge, but only just. Adam could sense that the containment field would not hold against too many such assaults. While the two demons were still foundering about in dismay, he made his way around to Gerard’s side of the circle and dropped to a crouch at the feet of one of the sentinels, deep in shadow. Determined to maintain his calm, he slipped his left hand into the inner pocket where Solomon’s Crown lay secreted and took two deep breaths in succession, retreating inward to seek a vantage point among the Inner Planes. As he hovered briefly between waking and trance, a prayer of petition rose spontaneously to his lips in the words of an ancient King of Israel, son to the great King whose Crown lay beneath his hand:

O send out Thy light and Thy truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto Thy holy hill, and to Thy tabernacles. Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy: yea, upon the harp will I praise Thee, O God my God . . .

The words resonated throughout his inner being, filling his spirit with strength and certainty. Convinced now that he was acting in accordance with a Will higher than his own, he stood up in the shadows and pulled the Crown from his pocket. Right hand to his breast, closed around the hilt of the
skean dubh,
he closed his eyes and put on the Crown of Solomon.

The circlet seemed to adjust of its own accord, settling gently but firmly about his temples. In the selfsame instant, he experienced a sudden dizziness, as if he were being plucked out of his corporeal body. Set free from the confines of normal time and space, all at once he was flying, soaring upward on wings of air and fire like an eagle seeking union with the sun. Above him blazed an ever—unfolding glory that burned his sublunary sight away and gave it back to him as vision purified.

With new eyes, he saw before him the image of a great city built upon a mountaintop. Rising tier upon jewelled tier, the city shimmered like an opal against a firmament of stars, all towers, gates, and crystal-welling fountains. Adam alighted before the city’s eastern wall, facing three lofty gates of topaz, emerald, and sardonyx. As he paused there in spirit, the central gate swung open to allow a great company in armor to begin pouring out.

At the forefront of the company was a regal silver-haired figure whose flowing crimson robes and imperial bearing proclaimed him, even at a distance, as King Solomon. The host at his back was made up of warriors from every age, Israelite swordsmen marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Templar knights. Prominent among them was a tall figure wearing a buff cavalry jacket under a white-plumed chapeau. The handsome, firm-lipped face above the lace jabot belonged to John Grahame of Claverhouse, Bonnie Dundee. Smiling as he met Adam’s gaze, the viscount gave a nod in salute.

The company came to a halt at a sign from the King, who beckoned Adam to approach. Awed but unafraid, Adam obeyed, sinking down on one knee to bow his head before the wisdom and power the King represented.

“Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile,”
he seemed to hear the great King say, as strong hands were laid on his shoulders.
“Receive the blessings of Wisdom in the name of the Most High, knowing that the might and authority of the King and all this company go with thee.”

The Crown on Adam’s head came to life in a burst of white light. Impressions flooded in upon him from all sides, honed to a cosmic acuity he had never known before. For a fleeting instant, he was minutely aware of the sidereal dance of atoms and elements, building like a symphony into larger patterns of shape and form.

Then the dimensions of the created universe folded round him like a box, and he found himself back in the confines of the underground vault of a former Templar preceptory without passage of time, with King Solomon’s Crown upon his head and holding his
skean dubh
clenched tightly to his breast.

Reduced to human proportions, his senses retained their heightened sensitivity. Willing himself to filter out the noise and stench generated by the presence of the two demons, he threw a glance around the room in search of inspiration for his own next move. Like a magnet, the golden Sceptre waving feebly in Gerard’s hand drew his gaze, and he realized that, if he hoped to dictate terms to the demons, he would first have to wrest control of the Sceptre from the terrified Frenchman.

Fortunately, he had the means to do that. The steel of the
skean dubh’s
blade was forged from meteoric iron, star-born, like the toothstone he had used at Rosslyn. Advancing boldly to within an arm’s length of the circle’s barrier, just behind Gerard, Adam made the
skean dubh
the focus of all his own accumulated will and wisdom, feeling the power blaze up within the compass of his right hand like a flaming sword. Then, like lancing a boil with a needle, he made a quick stabbing motion with the
skean dubh
just above Gerard’s head, puncturing the circle.

The barrier imploded with a psionic concussion that shivered the surrounding stonework. Already in motion, Adam reached forward and plucked the Sceptre from Gerard’s nerveless fingers. Narrowly avoiding a lashing blow from a demon tentacle, he stepped astride the Frenchman’s half-fainting form and drew himself up to his full height, shifting the
skean dubh
and Sceptre so that he held the Sceptre aloft in his right hand.

“Gog and Magog of the children of Lucifer!”
he called out sharply.
“I command you in the name of Adonai and of Solomon the Wise to listen and attend to my words!”

Poised to strike again, the demon nearest him hissed and recoiled. The other mantled like a cobra and spat a jet of venom that scored the floor at Adam’s feet. Gerard gave a thin, mewling cry and tried to squirm away. Regally oblivious to both the Frenchman’s whimpering and the rising reek of acid smoke, Adam brought the
skean dubh
and the Sceptre together across his chest and fixed the two demons with a steely stare of absolute and unwinking authority.

“You cannot harm me,” he stated coldly. “Behold the Crown and Sceptre of Solomon the King, whom the Lord of Hosts invested with power over all unclean spirits. By virtue of that selfsame power, and in the great Name of the Lord Jehovah, I order you to return to your prison-house. And by His authority,
I will be
obeyed!
”

His voice cracked like a whip. The demons’ response was a bull-throated roar of rage and defiance. Over by the doorway, Peregrine winced and clapped a hand to one ringing ear. Half-choked by the noisome fumes wafting outward from the center of the room, he peered over at Adam through stinging eyes, then caught his breath in sudden wonder.