Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 04 (27 page)

 
          
Colin
picked up the phone and began to dial. Two days later, he was in
London
, the summons from the dead
forgotten.

 
          
They
met in a quiet, old-fashioned hotel nestled into a side street in Piccadilly.
They came from all over
Europe
and the
Far East
, these scattered men and women who were closer to Colin
than his own blood family had ever been. He had not seen many of them in
twenty-five years, and others whom he had hoped to see were sadly absent. There
were perhaps twenty people in the room, all of them exoteric Masters or Adepts
of the higher Grades
—
Master of the Inner Temple and above
—
and Colin was disturbed to
see that he was among the youngest there. Their membership had slowly dwindled
over the years.

 
          
The
postwar world moved too fast
—
few these days were drawn to a Path that required years of
study and dedication for little visible repayment. Those who sought such
enlightenment today were far more likely to seek it in hallucinogens, which
granted at least the illusion of power.

 
          
But
it was power without control and insight without wisdom; a path to
enlightenment that only led
—
for most
—
to confusion and disenchantment.

 
          
Though
his own life's work was toward enlightenment and an end to superstition, Colin
wondered
—
not for the first time
—
if he ought to actively
—
openly
—
teach the disciplines of the
Path. Certainly he had earned the right, yet there were so many pitfalls
involved in choosing to actively impart the teachings. The question was always
not what could he do, but what
should he
do? To teach meant to risk
much, especially in these troubled times. And if his parapsychological
investigations caused the university to censure him, only imagine what
recruiting a magickal Lodge would cause them to do.

 
          
A
familiar figure worked its way across the crowded room, seeking him out.

 
          
"Colin.
I'm glad you could make it," Nathaniel Atheling said, as if there had been
any doubt that Colin MacLaren would obey
this
summons.

 
          
The
psychiatrist was as correct and nondescript as ever in proper English tweeds;
the only unexpected note was the antique scarab of blue faience that hung
—
as always
—
about his neck.

 
          
"I
wish it could have been under happier circumstances," Colin responded,
shaking his old friend's hand in greeting. He glanced around the room. "Is
everyone here?"

 
          
"So
far as I know," Atheling responded gravely.

 
          
The
Order's members operated in the old tradition of secrecy and isolation less
from fear of persecution in these more liberal times than from the desire to be
free of distractions from listening to the still voice of the Light. It was a
rare event for the Order to communicate with its members, much less gather them
all together.

           
And together they were so few.

 
          
The
door to the inner room of the suite opened, and the last member of their
gathering entered.

 
          
The
present Visible Head of the Order was a grey-haired woman with piercing blue
eyes. Colin had met her once, what seemed a very long time ago. She was known
to the world as Dame Ellen Lindsey.

 
          
Dame
Ellen was in her early sixties, and walked only with great effort, using two
heavy black canes. She was dressed somberly in unrelieved black, with no mark
of rank or distinction about her.

 
          
"My
friends," she said, lowering herself heavily into a chair. "I greet
you all in the name of the Unconquered Sun, and apologize for taking you away
from your mundane lives. But there is a matter that I must place before you
all, and make it the Order's business, though I have waited
—
perhaps too long
—
to do so."

 
          
For
almost two hours then Dame Ellen spoke, giving them names and places, dates and
facts, and slowly, a chilling story began to emerge. Colin had known some of it
beforehand
—
he lived in
California
, where nut-cults
proliferated, and he'd been in the forefront of the fight against the Black Orders
—
but even so, the entire
picture was more disturbing than even he could have surmised.

 
          
The
occult forces that the Order had fought so desperately a quarter of a century
before had not been destroyed, as they had once thought. Like some hideous
destructive insect, the Black Orders, by whatever exoteric name they chose to
be known, had hidden themselves within the body of their most implacable
opponent, and now were emerging in strength once more.

 
          
From
the very first days of the Third Reich, a clique high within the American
government had sympathized with its goals, holding the country aloof from the
European war during its early months and refusing to bomb certain targets once
America
had been forced to fight.
And when it became apparent that the Axis Powers' fall was inevitable, those
same individuals stood ready with money, false passports, false identities, to
aid the Nazi executioners for their own political
—
and personal
—
enrichment.

 
          
"You
can't just assume the government is the good guys forever,"
Thorne
Blackburn had said to him. And now those words came back to haunt Colin as he
listened to Dame Ellen.

 
          
Thousands
of members of the SS were smuggled out of
Germany
and into new identities
elsewhere in the world by members of the
U.S.
government. Some of the
greatest human assets of the fallen Reich, such as Reinhard Gehlen and Wernher
von Braun, simply changed masters: Spymaster Gehlen to run the CIA operation
that provided Russian intelligence to his new American overlords
—
and to mastermind the
architecture of the Cold War itself under the auspices of new intelligence
chief Allen Dulles
—
and von Braun to oversee the space program that was created
as a challenge to perceived Soviet dominance of space.

 
          
Gehlen's
straw dog of an attack on the West by the Warsaw Pact nations effectively kept
Western political analysts from paying sufficient attention to defeated
Germany
. While postwar
America
's attention was elsewhere,
organizations such as
Odessa
,
the largest of the
underground Nazi escape organizations, had been busy rescuing and relocating
its members in safe havens worldwide . . . and regaining lost political and
economic power. Power that it was now preparing to exercise.

 
          
"Now
you know as much as I of the threat we face: the same threat as always, only
this time so cleverly disguised that I do not know if we can count on any help
at all from the mundane world. To convince them of the reality of this danger
could well do as much damage as the Shadow Orders themselves would, and we no
longer know who in any government is friend, and who is foe.

 
          
"I
cannot choose a specific course of action for you, or attempt to direct your
True Wills in this matter, but we must conclude," Dame Ellen said, in her
dry, practical way, "that neither the Third Reich nor the Thule Society
and its platform of genocide, racial superiority, and directed evolution has
been as conclusively defeated as we had once thought them to be. While their
members have scattered, we now have every reason to believe that the Shadow
Orders are nearly as strong as they were before the war. We believe that they
are recruiting and rebuilding a new organization worldwide, though under a variety
of new guises.

 
          
"We
do not expect this to lead to a conventional war any time in the near future:
we must grant our great enemy that it is smart enough to learn from its
mistakes. Those I have dared to consult believe that this time the Black Order's
grasp at power will take the form of subversion, a slow attempt to remold the
governments of the Great Powers in their ideological image."

 
          
"But
that isn't possible!" someone whose face Colin couldn't see protested. By
his accent he was American, as Colin was.

 
          
Dame
Ellen did not censure him. Instead, the lines that pain and weariness had
carved into her aristocratic features seemed to deepen, as if she contemplated
a grief too terrible to bear.

 
          
"Perhaps
not all at once; perhaps never if we are careful and vigilant and do what work
we can. But the enemy is capable of waging his war on every front at once, and
our resources are few. I will direct the members' attention to the founding of
an extremely public organization in
San Francisco
,
California
, in April of this year. It
calls itself the
Church
of
Satan
, and while it does not seem
to have any overt ties with the Shadow Orders, the fact that it exists at all
is a disturbing harbinger of things to come."

 
          
Colin
had heard of it
—
the press had given it extensive play at the time, and its
founder, Anton LaVey, was a master of self-promotion.
At
the time he'd
thought it merely silly; hearing it spoken of here, he wondered if his perceptions
had been so coarsened that Evil could seem amusing to him.

 
          
There
was complete silence in the room now, the silence of men and women who had
given their whole hearts and souls to a Herculean task that had been nearly
beyond their strength, only to see that now they must somehow find the will to
do it all again.

 
          
"I
thank you for your attention and commend you for your vigilance. And I pray
that each of you will win those battles the Light sends you, for the sake of
all humanity. Go with the Light."

 
          
As
she struggled up out of the chair, a woman whose name Colin did not know
—
a striking redhead with long
coltish legs and a runway model's slim-ness
—
was there to help Dame Ellen
to her feet. The younger woman helped the older through the inner door, and it
closed behind them with a firm click.

 
          
They
were dismissed back to their own lives.

 
          
But
lives in which their own subjective senses of threat and peril had now been
directed and magnified a thousandfold, for the temple that Colin had smashed
five years ago had not been an isolated nastiness, as Colin had prayed. Hasloch
had been right. Thorne had spoken the truth.

 
          
It
had been a harbinger of things to come.

 
          
His
return to the
United States
less than forty-eight hours
later left Colin MacLaren feeling exhausted and disoriented. Most of that time
had been spent in the air: the interminable Atlantic crossing to
JFK
Airport
in
New York
, then a brief layover and
almost eight hours more to San Francisco International. And once he reclaimed
his car he faced another two hours' drive home.

 
          
It
was October, and so it was raining; the veils of fog so dense over the headlands
that the Pan Am flight had almost been forced to divert to another airport.
When he'd come down the steps onto the rain-slick tarmac and headed for the
terminal, the damp chill of San Francisco had settled over his shoulders like a
heavy cloak, and in just that short walk his face was chill and numb.