Death of an Adept

Then, die, you miserable serf! he howled. And learn that there are worse things than oblivion! Redcap, he is yours!

From out of the shadows at the chapel's edge, a misshapen goblin figure made a sudden leap. Swinging his pistol in that direction, Raeburn was still firing as Redcap seized him and bore him to the ground behind the altar. The gunfire ceased abruptly, with a crunch of shattering bone and a bubbling cry. As Redcap popped back into view with a triumphant cackle, demon eyes blazing, the taloned fingers of one hand were clutched red and dripping around the still palpitating lump of flesh that had been the Lynx-Master's heart.

He thrust it upward in gory salute to Soulis as his flaming gaze shifted to the other humans present in hungry calculation. But in that instant, Kerr heaved McLeod's body to its feet and flung up both hands in orison, crying out the opening words of a powerful incantation.

Redcap shrieked defiance, but a stabbing gesture from Kerr shrank the demon to a spitting, bristling ball of blackness that imploded with a thunderclap, sent back whence it had come. Never missing a beat, Kerr returned his focus to Soulis himself. As his chant piled note upon note and syllable upon syllable, Adam let himself be drawn back on the astral to stand at Kerr's side with his Huntsmen as an oval iris of fluctuating light opened before them out of nowhere, like a window on some distant futurity.

The oval had length and width, but no depth that Adam could see. As it turned toward the shadow that was Soulis, its surface scintillated like a mirror, with flashes of changing imagery. Looking more closely, Adam saw that the images were all changing guises of the same individual: a dark, arrogant man with cruel lips and heavy-lidded eyes. When the shadow-Soulis turned toward the window in sudden, aching yearning, Adam realized that he was seeing reflections of Soulis' future lives as well as past ones.

But all those lives bore the same stamp of depravity, and a greater Wisdom than Adam's had decreed that these were not to be, now or ever. As Adam embraced that certainty, Kerr's incantation underwent a shift, its cadence changing as his voice altered in pitch and intensity.

As the shimmering pane of light continued to revolve just beyond Soulis' yearning reach, there appeared above and behind it a jagged line of darkness that gradually widened, pulling itself apart like a self-inflicted wound. Its presence seemed to tear the fabric of the physical world in two; and beyond the gap lay a black and bottomless eternity.

With a rending shriek, Soulis attempted to dodge away.

"Keep him penned where he is!" Kerr shouted across to Adam.

Sword in hand, Adam leaped to hem Soulis in on the astral. His fellow Huntsmen did the same, hedging him about with their blades. While they held Soulis thus at bay, Kerr approached the mirror-like window in the air, where it hovered just below the mouth of the Void. With a single Word of command, he drove his clenched fist into the window's scintillating center.

The pane of light shattered like glass. Soulis' howl of despair was accompanied by a dissonant clangor of chimes. The gap yawned wider still, like a giant, sucking wound. As the shards of his broken future were engulfed by the darkness, Soulis himself was drawn inexorably after them into the Void.

Screaming, he attempted to cling to the threshold, but his shadowy essence could find no purchase there. Still clawing at empty air, he slipped backwards into the gaping rift. His eyes blazed and died as he fell, his own darkness merging with the greater darkness of the abyss. Then abruptly the rift snapped shut, leaving Adam and his companions alone in an astral chapel filled with echoes that gradually died away.

The silence that followed was like a benison. One by one, giving weary salute to Kerr and Adam, the astral company withdrew across intervening space to rejoin physical bodies, wherever they might lie. Retiring likewise from the field, Adam found himself once again on the high plateau among the clouds, where he was joined a moment later by Kerr.

"We have done good work this night," Kerr said. "Your Huntsmen are brave."

"Without your help, we could not have prevailed," Adam said.

A smile crossed Kerr's face, though his essence was already reverting to light.

"I see that the sword I once bore is in good hands, and flames as bright as ever. Go back to your friends in good hope for the future. And take my thanks and commendations with you. The Light has been well served this night."

Epilogue

WHAT would have happened if Soulis had made good his escape?" Peregrine asked McLeod as they waited for the police and ambulances to arrive.

"Best not to speculate," McLeod grunted. "There was enough havoc wreaked tonight, as it was. What the headlines are going to say when the news hounds get a sniff of the story doesn't bear thinking about."