The Adept Book 2 The Lodge Of The Lynx

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Prologue

A BROODING STILLNESS
lay upon the chill night air. High above the tower’s conical roof, the old man could feel the energy beginning to gather—a faint electrical prickle that stirred the hackles at the back of the neck and crawled on the tiny hairs of bare arms like invisible insects. At first it seemed little more than a tense, ongoing flicker in the silence, skittish as a flight of hunting bats. Then the pulses gathered strength, growing more potent with each passing moment. Before long, the energy was beating about the roof slates like some huge, winged predator struggling to break free from the restraint of its jesses—held only by the strength of will of the one who had summoned it.

Even to undertake such a summoning was both difficult and dangerous. To direct the power thus summoned required exquisite control, acquired only through long years of study and unspeakable sacrifice. The merest wavering of will, the slightest distraction, might release the tight-leashed energy prematurely, to rebound with disastrous consequences upon the very tower where the summoner sat surrounded by his chosen Twelve. But the venerable Head-Master who ruled the tower was one well accustomed to taking calculated risks.

He had chosen both the venue and his acolytes with care. The chamber from which they worked occupied the entire topmost floor of the tower—a massive, twelve-sided structure that dominated the castellated manor house of which it was a part. Bleak and remote among the cataracts and crags of Scotland’s Cairngorm Mountains, the house had been built in Victorian times upon the foundations of an Iron Age
broch,
with the tower and even parts of the house incorporating undressed stones from the earlier structure.

Nowhere were these primitive origins more apparent than in the topmost tower chamber, whose thick, nearly windowless walls had been plastered starkly white, the ceiling above divided like a wheel by converging beams of black oak. Though the house and the floors below were wired for electricity, gaslight remained this room’s sole source of illumination. Gas jets hissed behind shades of crimson glass in brass sconces at the room’s four quarters, dispersing the fitful yellowish glow and casting only soft, vague shadows before the twelve white-robed figures seated cross-legged around the room’s perimeter.

No shadows at all intruded upon the center of the room, with its mound of scarlet cushions. From there the white-clad Master directed the Work, palms upturned upon splayed knees, hairless head bowed, eyes closed in a gaunt, wizened face that resembled a mummified skull.

Before him on a mat of black ram skin lay a stacked heap of parchment, the pages yellow and brittle with age. And weighting the stack of parchments, its arc as wide as the span of a man’s spread hand, was the object of the old man’s concentration—a Celtic torc wrought of black meteoric iron. Its crafting was of the same distant age as the
broch,
with geometric knots and flowing zoomorphs cunningly inlaid with fluid traceries of silver. Smoky cairngorms smouldered baleful as serpents’ eyes among the interlocking shapes and whorls.

Focusing upon its ancient energies, the old man extended his hands over the torc like a man warming his hands at a fire, feeling its potential danger prickling beneath his hands, only barely contained by the dark hallowing he had imposed upon it. Even with his eyes closed, he could sense its potent magnetic influence acting upon the elemental energies building outside the tower, straining to be away.

And soon would
be
away. The moment was nearly at hand. Hardening his intent for the ultimate exercise of his will, the old man lifted the torc in palsied hands and slipped it around his scrawny neck. The kiss of the cold metal against his throat plunged him even deeper into trance as he felt the ancient energies mesh with his own, and he flung back his head and raised blue-veined arms in a gesture both of invocation and command. Only then did he at last allow the image to form in his mind of the distant object of his intention.

* * *

Some forty miles away, the royal castle of Balmoral lay quiet under a clear, frosty sprinkling of November stars. With the Queen and Royal Family back in London for the winter, the Scots Guards in charge of grounds security went about their appointed late-night rounds with the relaxed efficiency of men who had no reason to expect any serious trouble but were nonetheless prepared for it—in battle dress and black berets for night patrol, and armed with the latest Enfield “Bull Pup” rifles.

Corporal Archie Buchannan had just completed his hourly circuit of the south lawn and was headed for his post by the south door, shifting the weight of his rifle on its shoulder sling, when a flicker of movement in the sky overhead made him glance up. He stopped short in his tracks, his brow furrowing sharply in surprise and astonishment.

A dense bank of black cloud was sweeping down on the castle out of the west, moving faster than any storm Archie had ever seen before. Its curdled vapors writhed and boiled like pitch in a cauldron, stirred by erratic pulses of sheet-lightning, so that within the span of only a few heartbeats, the clouds had blotted out half the stars in the sky.

“What the de’il?” Archie murmured under his breath.

A low growl of thunder rolled hollowly across the lawn, accompanied by a more defined crackle of lightning within the roiling clouds. The brief flare picked out two more figures in battle dress uniform as they hurried out onto the grass from the shadows of the building, eyes turned skyward under uniform berets.

“Oi! Archie! D’ye see that?” one of them yelled. “Where did all these clouds come from?”

Before Archie could venture a response, an eye-searing bolt of bright-white lightning ripped the sky above the castle roof, accompanied by a deafening crack of thunder. The lightning bolt struck the north turret of the great square tower with the force of a mortar round, hurling stones and roof slates up and outward in a blazing fountain of destruction.

The concussion flung Archie to the ground. As he frantically scrambled for cover underneath the nearest hedge, trying to protect his head from the debris already beginning to rain down, he could only think that it must have been a bomb, regardless of what his own senses told him. Above the ringing in his ears, he started to hear the intermittent clangor of security alarms going off. As the patter of falling debris subsided, an attendant clamor of shouts began to rise from other parts of the castle grounds, along with the thud of booted feet approaching.

Cautiously Archie raised his head to look around, squinting against the sudden glare of security lights fitfully coming on all around the castle and grounds.

“Archie? Are ye all right, man?” said a voice close beside him, as a hand roughly grasped his shoulder.

”Aye, just let me catch my breath,” Archie muttered, rolling over to see the smudged faces of two of his colleagues, both looking slightly wild-eyed and disheveled.

“Jesus, what happened?” demanded the one who had shaken him, as his larger partner shifted his grip on his rifle arid looked around uneasily. “It sounded like a bloody bomb!”

Archie shook his head and let the other man help him sit up, testing gingerly for injuries beyond the bruises he knew were inevitable. Ears still ringing, he pulled himself stiffly to his feet, then gaped as he gazed across the lawn in the direction of the baronial tower.

Where the north turret had stood but minutes earlier, the bomb—or lightning strike—had left only a burning stump of charred masonry.

* * *

Forty miles away, on the other side of the mountains, the old man in white exhaled with a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction and savored his moment of triumph. Outside confirmation would have to wait until morning, when the news services undoubtedly would be full of it, but he had no doubt that his aim had been successful.

Slowly he reached to his throat, removing the ancient torc with both hands and carefully laying it back atop the stack of parchments before him, Then he let his arms sink to his sides, bowing his head in deep obeisance as he acknowledged the Power that had delivered the lightning into his hands. His twelve acolytes bowed with him, their shadows blurring together as they touched their brows to the floor.

But it was only outwardly a gesture of humility. A silence born of dark exultation reigned in the room as the acolytes straightened and then bent again, this time in homage to
him.

Smiling primly, the old man acknowledged their deference with a nod and a hand gesture and dismissed them, waiting until they all had gone before lying back in his cushions to exult in private, and plan the further exercise of his art . . .ø