The Adept (18 page)

“Do you want to try standing?”

“Aye.”

With Adam’s help, McLeod got his feet under him and climbed to his feet, bracing himself on the edge of the table again, apparently unperturbed that the body was now but a narrow mound of dust. Adam, when he was satisfied that the other man had his legs firmly under him again, stood back and banished the protective warding on the table with a swift sequence of gestures. Only then did he seem to remember that Peregrine was there.

“I hope all this didn’t frighten you,” he said. “What did you get?”

The artist was clutching his sketchbook to his chest like a life-preserver, his owl-eyed concern for McLeod only gradually fading as he realized the inspector was safe and that Adam was speaking to him. In response to Adam’s look of inquiry, he blinked and hazarded a wan grin.

“Well, I got
something,
from
somewhere,”
he said, looking from one to the other of them uncertainly. “Inspector, when you started staring at me, pictures came into my head, and I couldn’t make them stop. And then my—hand started drawing, and I couldn’t make
it
stop, either.”

McLeod chuckled mirthlessly. “It wasn’t we, laddie,” he murmured.

“You’re implying that it
was
Michael Scot, then,”

Peregrine said uneasily. “I suppose that’s a relief, because—well, I certainly didn’t dream this up by myself.”

He shifted his grip to the side edges of the sketchbook’s cover, his hands shaking.

“Anyway, whatever it was, and wherever it came from, it’s all here,” he said, raising his chin defiantly. “Do you want to take a look?”

At this declaration of acceptance of what had occurred, Adam permitted himself a faint sigh of relief.

“Well done,” he said approvingly. “You’ve gone far beyond the
how
and
why
and focused on the
what.
But I think we’d better, wait until we’ve finished up at the abbey.

There are still a few loose ends that we wouldn’t want innocent folk tripping over, just because we didn’t do our clean-up properly.”

He turned to McLeod. “Are you up to moving yet?”

The inspector looked up from adjusting his tie and putting his glasses back on.

“Aye, I’m fine now, thank you. All I needed was a bit of a breather.” He surveyed the dusty outline on the table and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I suppose that was bound to happen, once the body was exposed for a time to the air—as any archaeologist will tell you.”

He and Adam traded knowing glances.

“I’ll be happy to certify that explanation,” Adam said.

“In the meantime, we’d better be getting back to the abbey.”

“Right,” said McLeod. “Once you and I are finished there, I’ll arrange for Scot’s dust to be returned to its resting place.”

Chapter Twelve

BACK AT
the abbey, Peregrine was left to play the role of fascinated observer while Adam and McLeod systematically went back over Scot’s disturbed grave site, this time countering the residues left behind by the grave robbers with banishing signs of their own. Most of their movements were too deft and subtle for Peregrine’s eye to catch, but he became gradually aware of a lightening in the atmosphere within the confines of the violated chapel. By the time the two older men had finished, all lingering traces of their adversaries’ work had been effectively nullified. As Peregrine wordlessly followed Adam back to the car park, he sensed that a delicate balance had been restored.

By then it was well past one. At Adam’s suggestion, the three of them convoyed to the Waverly Hotel for a much-needed meal. McLeod commandeered a small room off the main dining room for their private use; and once their order had been taken, Adam finally allowed Peregrine to bring out his sketchbook.

“Keeping in mind that waitresses will be intruding from time to time, I think it’s safe enough to talk here,” he said, opening the book. “Now, let’s see what we’ve got.”

Peregrine had made five sketches in all. The castle in the first drawing was a simple structure, more fort than fortress, consisting of a squat central bailey enclosed within a dry stone motte. The second presented the same castle from a higher angle, so that they could see that it occupied a high point of ground on a fist-shaped peninsula overlooking a broad expanse of dark water. The third sketch showed the same bluff from the waterside, where a crescent moon of stony beach yielded to burgeoning undergrowth below a beetling outcrop of boulders. The fourth was a more detailed view of the boulders themselves, while the fifth was an interior view of a cave hollowed out in the shape of a horseshoe. It was this fifth drawing that held Adam’s gaze the longest.

“This is no ordinary cave,” he said, leaving the pad open to that page and tapping the sketch with a fingernail. “Now I understand the full import of what Scot meant, when he said that his book and his gold were protected. Look there.”

He pointed to a spot at the entrance of the cave in the picture, where Peregrine’s pencil-strokes had come together, apparently at random, to form a curious glyph, like a quatrefoil knot of spidery lines. McLeod adjusted his aviator glasses and subjected the design to closer scrutiny.

After a moment, he shook his head.

“If that’s a symbol of some sort, I can’t say it means anything to me,” he said to Adam. “What is it, then?”

Adam’s dark eyes had taken on their familiar inner luminance.

“It’s a
seamrag—the
sign of the Sidhe,” he said, a thin smile plucking at the corners of his mouth. “It would appear, gentlemen, that Scot’s spellbook and gold are in the keeping of the ‘people of the hills’—the ‘Unseelie Court’ of the fairies.”

“Fairies?” Startled, Peregrine regarded Adam with a wary eye, uncertain whether or not this was meant as a joke.

He glanced aside at McLeod, but the inspector merely looked intent. Returning his gaze to Adam, the young artist said flatly, “Surely you’re not serious.”

“On the contrary, I’m completely serious.” The light in Adam’s eyes hardened to a cool gleam. “However, if you’re harboring sentimental visions of pretty little flower-sprites with gauzy wings, I strongly suggest that you dismiss them once and for all. The Sidhe—to give them the ancient Gaelic name—are beings belonging to the elemental order of creation. They wield powers all out of proportion to their manifest size. All of them are capricious. Most of them are
dangerous. And some have a lively appetite for human flesh and blood.”

Peregrine shifted uncomfortably in his chair, no longer disposed to laugh.

“They would make formidable guardians for any valuable object,” Adam continued, “all the more so because they are fiercely—in some cases, murderously—territorial.

And they are not to be bought off; one might as well attempt to bribe a brush fire.” He sighed.

“It
is,
however, possible to divert them, or even to fight them, provided that one has the appropriate knowledge and sufficient power. Given what our grave robbers were able to accomplish here at Melrose, their leader may well have the necessary resources at his command. Certainly, that’s what Scot himself feared. And we have no choice but to proceed on that assumption.”

“I’ll be happy to proceed however and whenever you say the word,” McLeod muttered, “provided that you can tell me
where.”

“This castle is
where,”
said Adam, flipping back to the earlier drawings. “The hard part is going to be determining its location in this time period.”

McLeod did not seem surprised at this declaration, but Peregrine suddenly looked crestfallen.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I locked in on past-time resonances, rather than the present.”

Adam shrugged wistfully. “It isn’t your fault. The images that you received were drawn from Scot’s own living memories of the place—memories nearly eight hundred years old. The castle that Scot knew almost certainly has changed over the years—if it even still stands. Finding it, or even its former site, is going to present something of a challenge.”

Peregrine scowled down at the sketches he had made.

“It’s a pity Scot couldn’t simply have given us the name of the place.”

“You’re assuming that it
had
a name, or that it had the same name then that it has now,” Adam replied. “Locally, it may have been quite sufficient merely to call it ‘the fort,’ or ‘the castle.’” He paused to let this point sink in before continuing.

“At any rate, we
haven’t
got a name—and we mustn’t blame Scot for that. He did the best he could, given his condition at the time. If the situation had been any less critical—if he himself had been in any fit state to sustain further verbal communication—he might conceivably have been able to tell us more, in fuller detail. As it was, he was summoned and bound under torture, and was suffering acutely by the time we got to him. If we’d detained him longer, however worthy our intentions, it would have unjustly prolonged his torment and aggravated the injuries he had already sustained. I was honor-bound to release him when I did,”

Peregrine lapsed into thoughtful silence. McLeod picked up the sketch pad and leafed through the drawings again.

“Looks as if we do this the hard way, then, with a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb,” he said with a sigh. “At least we can eliminate any and all medieval sites that aren’t situated near water. I wonder if there’d be any point in my checking these drawings against aerial survey photos of Scottish archaeological sites.”

“If all else fails, we’ll certainly try that,” Adam agreed, as McLeod tossed the pad back on the table between them.

“However, there may be a better way.”

His two companions eyed him expectantly.

“Fortunately, we do know that Scot’s spirit has been reborn in this present time, and is presently a child,” Adam said. “If we can locate that child, it’s possible I may be able to retrieve sufficient information from his subconscious mind to put us on the right track.”

“It’s a little girl,” Peregrine said, before he could keep the unbidden words from popping out of his mouth.

Both men turned startled glances on him, and Peregrine shrank before their scrutiny in confusion, trying to recapture the image that had flitted in—and out of—his mind, unremembered until just that instant.

“I—before Scot had me start drawing”—he stammered, shaking his head as he tried unsuccessfully to pin down the elusive image. “I had this—this brief flash of—of—a little girl, I think . . .”

As he looked at Adam in appeal, shaking his head in frustration at not being able to recapture it, Adam glanced beyond him, to see if anyone was coming, then reached over to lay his hand across Peregrine’s forehead.

“Close your eyes and relax, Peregrine. Take a deep breath and let it out.” He removed his hand as Peregrine obeyed, turning the sketch pad to a fresh page and pushing it across the table top to nudge at the slack hands resting on the table.

“Now, let your mind go back to that room at the hospital, and see the image again that Scot showed you—the image of a little girl who is Scot’s present incarnation. Nod when you’ve got it.”

Grim determination played behind the closed eyelids, but then the bronzed head nodded.

“Good.” Not taking his eyes from his subject, Adam held out a hand to McLeod for a pen, and put it into Peregrine’s hand. “Now, open your eyes and draw what you see.

Nothing will distract you until you’ve finished the drawing.”

Dreamily Peregrine opened his eyes, the pen already moving on the blank page before him. Hardly blinking, he bent to his task with single-minded concentration, not looking up even when a waitress brought them water and retreated. As he finished and laid the pen aside, Adam lightly touched his hand, “Excellent. Now rejoin us, in your normal waking state.”

As Peregrine breathed out with a sigh, blinking several times, Adam turned the sketch pad so he and McLeod could look at it. The inspector only shook his head as Peregrine, too, bent to see what he had drawn.

Surrounded by the stark whiteness of a hospital bed, a young girl lay with her eyes closed. She looked to be anything from ten to about fourteen or fifteen, light curls cropped short around her face, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose giving her a slightly gamine look, except for the taut pallor around the mouth, and an impression of tension in the slender body vaguely outlined beneath the sheets. To either side, a few pen strokes suggested the presence of several people keeping watch beside her bed—whether anxious parents or medical staff was hard to determine, for the ball-point had not allowed of the fine detail Peregrine usually captured with pencil.

“This is very interesting, Peregrine,” Adam said, glancing up at him. “This is what you saw, back in the morgue?”

Peregrine nodded. “I’d forgotten, until this very minute.

I guess the images of the castle overwhelmed me. Is it useful?”

“Hmmm, it could be. Noel, does this mean anything to you?”

The inspector regretfully shook his head. “Afraid not. It could be any hospital, and any young girl.”

“Yes, but it’s a
modern
hospital, and it isn’t just any young girl,” Adam pointed out. “She appears to be Caucasian, perhaps twelve or so, these may be parents to either side, and—what’s this at the end of the bed, Peregrine? Is it a chart?”

Startled, Peregrine bent his head to turn the sketch pad and stare. He
had
begun sketching a chart—there, just jutting above the foot of the bed. He
almost,
if he held his head just—so—could bring the chart into focus.

“Adam, put me under again,” he whispered, fumbling for a pencil in his pocket.

McLeod raised an eyebrow, and Adam gave the doorway behind Peregrine a surreptitious glance, but then he cupped a restraining hand over Peregrine’s wrist.

“Peregrine, what do you see?”

“I can’t see it yet,” Peregrine whispered. “Just put me under again,
now! Deep!”

McLeod had to work at controlling a smile, for no one ordered Adam Sinclair to do anything, but Adam, after another glance behind his subject, lifted his hand to brush Peregrine’s forehead again. The hazel eyes closed immediately, tension draining out of him as if the string had been cut on a puppet.

“That’s fine,” Adam murmured. “Settle back into trance.

You can do this yourself, you know, but for now, I’ll talk you through it. Relax and take a deep breath, and feel yourself go twice as deep as you were before. You see something that you didn’t notice before. Something that’s very important.

“Take another deep breath and go deeper. It’s starting to come into focus. Keep taking yourself deeper, refining the image, and when you can see it clearly—draw it.”

For several long seconds, nothing outward happened.

Eyes closed, Peregrine lowered his forehead to rest on his left hand, that elbow propped on the table. For a full minute and more, by McLeod’s watch, as the two older men exchanged speculative glances, all Peregrine did was breathe. Movement behind the closed eyelids suggested intense internal activity, but it was not reflected in any movement of the pencil in his hand.