Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (12 page)

 
          
"If
you know as much about me and my Order as you claim to," Colin retorted
with asperity, "you'll know that such an offer isn't even a joke."

 
          
"Join
us or die," Hasloch said simply, stretching out his hand as if in entreaty.
He studied his own long elegant fingers for a moment and then withdrew his
hand. "But if you will not, out of respect for your discipline and
attainments
—
however misguided
—
I shall leave you in peace
to become a footnote to history."

 
          
"Providing
I extend to you the same courtesy?" Colin shot back. For all his
formidable self-possession, Toller Hasloch was still a young man
—
hardly more than a boy
—
with all of youth's
overconfidence. His dark soul was a creation of this century, without
knowledge of previous lifetimes to bulwark it. No experienced member of the
Black Order would have wasted his time in telling Colin so much of his plans.

 
          
"Give
it up now, Mr. Hasloch. The Shadow doesn't reward its servants
—
it uses them up. If you know
anything of what you claim, you know that as well. The same history that you
say is on your side will bury you as it has so many others."

 
          
"I
really believe we have nothing more to say to each other," Hasloch said, but
this time the light tone in his voice was an audible effort. "But my offer
of a truce still stands. I give you good day, Professor."

 
          
He
got to his feet and walked away quickly. Colin watched him go, his whole being
torn between horror . . . and pity.

 
          
A
week passed. Colin sent a full report of the conversation to the Mother Lodge
in
Britain
, for no hint of a Thulist
renaissance was too slim to take lightly, and even a veneration of Nazi
"ideals" was a symptom that must be watched carefully. But though his
talk with Hasloch had chilled him to the bone, Colin needed proof of something
more than youthful dabbling before he was willing to act. Arrogance and
posturing were not enough to indict a man for, and beyond those, he had seen no
hard evidence to support Hasloch's claims of being a member of an occult entity
that had declared spiritual war upon the
United States of America
.

 
          
So
matters had stood, until Jonathan Ashwell had come into his office late this
afternoon.

 
          
"Jonathan,
come in. Sit down. How are you doing?"

 
          
The
lanky young student sidled into Colin's office, oddly ill at ease. Since the
night of his unorthodox introduction to the Unseen World, Colin had been
guiding his fledgling steps toward the Light. Jonathan was a voracious pupil,
reading all that Colin gave him and pushing for more. Colin had already
introduced him to the first of the simple exercises to ground and center, and
to focus, that would begin to teach Jonathan to perceive and to control the
Subtle Body. From this point, Jonathan's own Will would set the speed of his
advancement.

 
          
But
surely there was nothing in all Colin had taught him to occasion this level of
unease?

 
          
"He's
doing it again," Jonathan said. He held out a sheet of paper to Colin, as
if offering him a poisonous snake.

 
          
Colin
took the paper and spread it flat on his desk. It was professionally printed in
red and black, typeset in ornate Gothic letters.

 
          
Toller
Hasloch was throwing a birthday party for himself this evening
—
November ioth. A very
special party, the invitation said, but that was only the part of the flyer
that was printed in English. Sigils and talismans were scattered across the
page
—
nasty
ones, each the special summons of a prince or duke of Hell.

 
          
And
twined among the sigils and the mundane wording, as if it were only decoration,
was line upon line of blood-red runes. They were being used alphabetically,
and Colin translated them with ease.

 
          
Hasloch
invited his particular friends to come together on the anniversary of his birth
to attend the Black Mass which Hasloch would be enacting in his own honor.

 
          
"I
know it says it's just a birthday party, Professor
—
but it isn't. There's going
to be a Black Mass. I've been asking around, seeing what I could find out for
you, and Hasloch's got ..." Jonathan's voice faltered as his imagination failed
him. "He
—
They say he's a magician
—
that he does magickal rituals.
People don't really do things like that any more, do they, Professor?"

 
          
"Far
more than anyone believes, Jonathan. Which is unfortunate, in some cases."
Automatically, Colin felt in his pockets for his pipe and began to fiddle with
it.

 
          
To
most of the twentieth century, the Black Mass was the stuff of cheap
sensational novels, well larded with sex and blood. To the occult historian, it
was something rather different
—
a rare, complex form of anticlerical protest, a ritual
designed not to serve any worldly goal of enlightenment or enrichment, but to
attack the Catholic Church while snatching some of the power of the great
Adversary for itself.

 
          
Alison
said she had attended one in
Paris
during the 1920s, and Colin
was willing to bet that an actual Black Mass hadn't been performed since.

 
          
"But
a
Black Mass,
Professor? Satanism?" Jonathan said incredulously.

 
          
"Probably
not
—
at
least I hope not," Colin said, puffing his pipe alight. "Most of what
the popular press has labeled 'Black Masses' in this century have been the
workings of one of the more scandalous and public of the Magickal Lodges, like
Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, or one of the numerous offshoots of
the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn."

 
          
Or
the
Thule
Gesellschaft.

 
          
"Scandalous,
but not quite Satanic," Colin said, soothing Jonathan's fears if not his
own. "On the other hand, ritual magic, like prescription drugs, is much
better left in the hands of trained professionals."

 
          
"But
what are we going to do, Professor? He's invited me to the party
—
and I'd like to make sure
he gets a taste of his own medicine, for what he did to Claire. ..."

 
          
All
at once Colin remembered Hasloch's lazy threat to make Jonathan the scapegoat
if Colin attempted to have Hasloch's misdeeds punished.

 
          
"And
that's why you're not going to go," Colin said firmly. "I want you to
stay home tonight, safe inside your own dorm room. Don't go out for anything,
no matter how tempting the excuse."

 
          
"But
Professor
—
if I go, I could stop him." Jonathan looked confused.

 
          
"Believe
me, Jonathan. If you want to ruin Hasloch's plans, there's nothing more
damaging you can do than stay away."

 
          
It
had taken him the better part of an hour to convince Jonathan that what he'd
said was true
—
so much of magick was logical, but not plausible, operating
with the same rigorous unreason usually found in fairy tales
—
but when Jonathan left,
Colin was certain the boy would heed him and not go off half-cocked, his head
full of cheap heroics, to offer himself up to Hasloch's plans.

 
          
Not
that Colin thought that tonight's ceremony was being enacted for Jonathan's
sole benefit. One's own birthday had a particular occult power, the moment of
one's birth being also the moment in which all celestial influences were
momentarily withdrawn, to be resummoned or barred at the will of the magician
for the unfolding of another year.

 
          
And
Hasloch's birthday was a particular unholy day in the German calendar . . .
the date of
Germany
's capitulation in the First
World War; the birthdate of Baron von Sebottendorf, founder of the Thule
Gesellschaft. In 1939
—
the year Hasloch had been born
—
November 9 became the Night
of Broken Glass . . .
Krystallnacht.

 
          
In
the tiny second bedroom of his bungalow that he used as his workroom, Colin
MacLaren robed himself for battle. The winter rains had started right on
schedule; and the dampness seeped through the walls, making everything in the
room smell faintly musty. Rising above the smell of the wet were the biting
scents of cedar and frankincense
—
cedar from the chest he had opened, frankincense from the
folds of fabric packed inside.

 
          
The
gold of the breastplate
—
a heavy plaque eight inches square set with twelve precious
stones and inscribed with the Great Names
—
gleamed up at him from
within the white folds of an embroidered linen shift.

 
          
It
had been many years since he had donned the full vestments of his Order, but
they had been packed carefully away against future need, and now, with slow
reverence, he donned each element of the ritual robes.

 
          
What
he must do was laid out clearly in his mind: locate Hasloch's mag-ickal
presence in the Astral Realm and banish it from that place. What did not exist
in the Overworld had no force on the Plane of Being
—
once Colin had moved against
Hasloch's
Astral
Temple
, the boy's Black Mass would
become a nasty piece of play-acting, nothing more. Its poisonous force would
be gone.

 
          
An
Adept could expect to wear his vestments only a handful of times in his life,
only when he took part in one of the rare convocations of fellow Adepts that
his Order called in time of greatest need. Certainly Colin ought not to need
them simply to call the Light to mindfulness in the matter of Toller Hasloch's
callow profanity.

 
          
But
as a man might contemplate ascending a mountain which he lacked the power to
master in reality, so Colin MacLaren contemplated his night's plans and felt
only cold ashes where the flame of his Magician's Will had once burned. It was
almost as if what Hasloch did tonight did not matter.

 
          
Even
if the young magician were precisely what he claimed to be
—
the renaissance of the
occult Nazi ideology that had destroyed a generation
—
how could Colin bring
himself to care? He and his fellow soldiers of the Light had thought that they
had shackled that great Evil forever; if it could be reborn from the very ashes
of its defeat once, it could be reborn a hundred times, and no defeat could
matter.

 
          
He
knew that to go into battle bearing these feelings was treason against his
Higher Self, and an almost certain guarantee of failure. But what was he to do?
How could he command the certainty of Summer in the heart of Winter's ice
—
the ice that, for Hasloch,
would be the stuff of the Second Coming of the Shadow?

 
          
The
man that he had once been would not have had these doubts, these fears. But
that man was gone, burned to ash in the fires of
Berlin
. Time had healed Colin. It
had brought him wholeness of a sort, and peace. But all the time in the world
would not make Colin the same man he once had been. He had counted on the
strength of the man who had been the Sword of the Order, only to find that man
gone, and himself alone in the vast mansion of time.