Death of an Adept

He shivered as he moved forward instinctively to stir the fire. The clock was chiming half past ten, though it seemed it should be later. Rising, he set McFarlane's journal aside and went out to the kitchen, turning on lights in his wake, for faint reverberations of what he had seen continued to chill the edges of his soul. As Adam poured himself a glass of milk and sat down with the plate of sandwiches left by Mrs. Gilchrist, he set his mind to considering the images Kerr had given him.

It was a bit like trying to assemble a jigsaw without knowing what the finished picture was meant to look like. But by the time he had finished his second sandwich, he had succeeded in putting together a working hypothesis. Many of the details were still hazy, and would remain so until he could get Noel to establish a better link with Kerr. Elsewhere, however, the information supplied by Kerr added up to a disturbing prospect.

Raeburn, it appeared, was out to secure an alliance with the evil spirit of Kerr's former adversary. Adam was aware that the binding of such a spirit would require an appropriate blood-sacrifice - which explained only too well the reason behind lolo McFarlane's kidnapping. As Kerr's lineal descendant, the young Druid would make a pleasing oblation to his forefather's vanquished foe. A quick glance at the calendar on the kitchen wall pegged Imbolc Eve as the most likely immediate date for such a working - Imbolc Eve, the first of February, four days hence - scant margin for finding and stopping Raeburn, but at least Adam now knew what they must try to stop.

The next question concerned the identity of Kerr's ancient foe. Kerr apparently had tried over and over again to warn his distant kinsman of the impending danger. Though his attempts had failed, Adam reasoned that a further study of McFarlane's dreams might yet suggest a name to put to Raeburn's would-be ally. Returning to the library, he decided to begin with the cryptic brevity of McFarlane's final entry.

The young Druid's hand-lettering was no easier to decipher now than it had been in any of the earlier attempts. Taking Peregrine's rendering, soul's gstrig, as his starting point, Adam began mentally experimenting with alternate readings. Rearranging the letters produced only gibberish.

Going back to the original arrangement yet again, squinting at it in the light, Adam suddenly wondered if the short stroke Harry had previously interpreted as an apostrophe might actually be an ill-formed I.

"Soulis gstrig," he whispered aloud.

Frowning, he read the words aloud. As he did so, he realized with a sudden jolt that Soulis was, in fact a proper name: a name, moreover, with infamous historical associations.

Memory supplied the appellation in full, along with a sickly, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach: William de Soulis, reputedly the wickedest magician ever to walk abroad on Scottish soil.

Adam's hands balled themselves instinctively into fists as he confronted this discovery, for Soulis figured in the annals of Scottish folklore as a diabolically powerful black Adept, with a hideous catalogue of torture and murder to his credit. Virtually invincible, he had terrorized the countryside for many years before at last being captured and executed - wrapped in chains and lead and boiled in a cauldron of oil, just as Ken-had shown him.

But in reporting the manner of his death, legend spoke only part of the truth. For Adam's vision, facilitated by the spirit of Soulis' nemesis, another Master of the Hunt, had amply demonstrated that the destruction of Soulis' body had been only half the battle. Kerr and his Huntsmen had been charged with carrying out a higher Justice, which decreed that the spirit of William Lord Soulis should be cast into the Void between the Outer and Inner Planes. Only now it seemed that Francis Raeburn intended to commute Soulis' sentence for reasons of his own.

The banishment had required incredible focus and power, and would have entailed the weaving of a complex sequence of spells. To procure Soulis' release, Raeburn would have to pull apart and nullify the protocols involved - and fuel this labor with the blood-sacrifice of lolo McFarlane. In order to forestall both eventualities, Adam realized that he was going to require knowledge as specific as Raeburn's. And the only way he was likely to get it was to speak directly with Kerr.

And seemingly the only way he could hope to speak directly with Kerr was through the agency of a trained and powerful medium such as McLeod.

Adam glanced at his watch. It was approaching midnight, but he realized that the sooner he could speak with his Second, the better. Setting McFarlane's journal aside, he went to the desk and picked up the phone, punching up McLeod's home number. He got the answering machine instead of McLeod himself - which probably meant that the inspector either had been called out or had shut off the phone to get a rare few hours of uninterrupted sleep.