Taltos

Seven

THE HILL WAS muddy and cold, but never had Marklin made this slippery climb, either in winter or summer, when he had not loved it-to stand on Wearyall Hill beside the Holy Thom and look down upon the quaint and picturesque town of Glastonbury. The country round was always green, even in winter, but now it had the new intense color of spring.

Marklin was twenty-three, and very fair, with blond hair and pale blue eyes, and thin clear skin that chilled easily. He wore a raincoat with a wool lining, and a pair of leather gloves, and a small wool cap on his head that fitted well and kept him warmer than one might expect from such a little article of clothing.

He’d been eighteen when Stuart had brought them here-he and Tommy both eager students, in love with Oxford, in love with Stuart and eager for every word that dropped from Stuart’s lips.

All during their Oxford days, they had honored this place with regular visitations. They’d taken small, cozy little rooms at the George and Pilgrims Hotel, and walked High Street together perusing the bookshops and the stores that sold crystals and the Tarot, whispering to each other of their secret research, their keen scientific approach to things which others held to be purely mythological. The local believers, called variously the hippies of yore or the New Age fanatics, or the bohemians and artists who always seek the charm and tranquillity of such a place, held no charm for them.

They were for decoding the past, rapidly, with all the tools at their command. And Stuart, their instructor in ancient tongues, had been their priest, their magical connection to a true sanctuary-the library and the archives of the Talamasca.

Last year, after the discovery of Tessa, it had been on Glastonbury Tor that Stuart had told them, “In you two, I have found everything I ever sought in a scholar, a pupil, or a novice. You are the first to whom I truly want to give all I know.”

That had seemed a supreme honor to Marklin-something finer than any honors awarded him at Eton or Oxford, or anywhere in the wide world where his studies had carried him later on.

It had been a greater moment even than being accepted into the Order. And now, in retrospect, he knew that that acceptance had meant something only because it had meant everything to Stuart, who had lived all his life as a member of the Talamasca, and would soon die, as he so often said, within its walls.

Stuart was now eighty-seven, and perhaps one of the oldest active men alive in the Talamasca, if one could call tutoring in language an activity of the Talamasca, for it was more the special passion of Stuart’s retirement. The talk of death was neither romantic nor melodramatic. And nothing really had changed Stuart’s matter-of-fact attitude to what lay ahead.

“A man of my age with his wits about him? If he isn’t brave in the face of death, if he isn’t curious, and rather eager to see what happens, well, then, he’s wasted his life. He’s a damned fool.”

Even the discovery of Tessa had not infected Stuart with any last-ditch desperation to lengthen the time remaining to him. His devotion to Tessa, his belief in her, encompassed nothing so petty. Marklin feared Stuart’s death far more than Stuart did. And Marklin knew now that he had overplayed his hand with Stuart, and that he must woo him back to the moment of commitment. To lose Stuart to death was inevitable; to lose Stuart before that time was unthinkable.

“You stand on the sacred ground of Glastonbury,” Stuart had told them that day, when it all began. “Who is buried within this tor? Arthur himself, or only the nameless Celts who left us their coins, their weapons, the boats with which they traveled the seas that once made of this the isle of Avalon? We’ll never know. But there are secrets which we can know, and the implications of these secrets are so vast, so revolutionary, and so unprecedented that they are worth our allegiance to the Order, they are worth any sacrifice we must make. If this is not so, then we are liars.”

That Stuart now threatened to abandon Marklin and Tommy, that he had turned against them in his anger and revulsion, was something Marklin could have avoided. It had not been necessary to reveal every part of their plan to Stuart. And Marklin realized this now, that his refusal to assume full leadership himself had caused the rift. Stuart had Tessa…. Stuart had made his wishes clear. But Stuart should never have been told what had really happened. That had been the error, and Marklin had only his own immaturity to blame, that he had loved Stuart so much he had felt compelled to tell Stuart everything.

He would get Stuart back. Stuart had agreed to come today. He was no doubt already here, visiting Chalice Well as he always did before coming to Wearyall Hill and leading them up on the tor itself. Marklin knew how much Stuart loved him. This breach would be repaired with an appeal from the soul, with poetry and with honest fervor.

That his own life would be long, that this was only the first of his dark adventures, Marklin had no doubt. His would be the keys to the tabernacle, the map to the treasure, the formula for the magic potion. He was utterly certain of it. But for this first plan to end in defeat would be a moral disaster. He would go on, of course, but his youth had been a chain of unbroken successes, and this too must succeed so that his ascent would lose no momentum.

I must win, I must always win. I must never attempt anything that I cannot do with utter success. This had always been Marklin’s personal vow. He had never failed to keep it.

As for Tommy, Tommy was faithful to the vows the three had taken, faithful to the concept and the person of Tessa. There was no worry with Tommy. Deeply involved in his computer research, his precise chronologies and charts, Tommy was in no danger of disaffection for the very reasons that made him valuable; he was not the one to see the whole scheme, or to question the validity of it.

In a very basic sense, Tommy never changed.

Tommy was the same now as the boy whom Marklin had come to love in childhood-collector, collator, an archive unto himself, an appreciator and an investigator. Tommy without Marklin had never existed, as far as Marklin knew. They had first laid eyes, upon each other at the age of twelve, in boarding school in America. Tommy’s room had been filled with fossils, maps, animal bones, computer equipment of the most esoteric sort, and a vast collection of paperback science fiction.

Marklin had often thought that he must have seemed to Tommy to be one of the characters in those fantastic novels-Marklin himself hated fiction-and that Tommy had gone from an outsider to a featured player in a science fiction drama upon meeting Marklin. Tommy’s loyalty had never, for even one moment, been in question. Indeed, during the years when Marklin had wanted his freedom, Tommy had been too close, always on hand, always at Marklin’s service. Marklin had invented tasks for his friend, simply to give himself space to breathe. Tommy had never been unhappy.

Marklin was getting cold, but he didn’t mind it.

Glastonbury would never be anything for him but a sacred place, though he believed almost nothing, literally, that was connected with it.

He would, each time he came to Wearyall Hill, with the private devotion of a monk, envision the noble Joseph of Arimathea planting his staff upon this spot. It did not matter to him that the present Holy Thorn had been grown from a scion of the ancient tree, now gone, any more than other specific detail mattered. He could in these places feel an excitement appropriate to his purpose, a religious renewal as it were, which strengthened him and sent him back into the world more ruthless than ever.

Ruthlessness. That was what was needed now, and Stuart had failed to see it.

Yes, things had gone dreadfully wrong, no doubt of it. Men had been sacrificed whose innocence and substance surely demanded a greater justice. But this was not entirely Marklin’s fault. And the lesson to learn was that ultimately none of it mattered.

The time has come for me to instruct my teacher, Marklin thought.

Miles from the Motherhouse, in this open place, our meeting safely explained by our own customs of so many years, we will come together again as one. Nothing has been lost. Stuart must be given moral permission to profit by what has happened.

Tommy had arrived.

Tommy was always the second. Marklin watched Tommy’s antique roadster slowing as it came down High Street. He watched as it found a parking place, and as Tommy shut the door, failing to lock it as always, and started his climb up the hill.

What if Stuart failed to show? What if he was nowhere near? What if he had truly abandoned his followers? Impossible.

Stuart was at the well. He drank from it when he came, he would drink from it before he left. His pilgrimages here were as rigid as those of an ancient Druid or Christian monk. From shrine to shrine to shrine traveled Stuart.

Such habits of his teacher had always aroused a tenderness in Marklin, as had Stuart’s words. Stuart had “consecrated” them to a dark life of penetrating “the mystique and the myth, in order to lay hands upon the horror and the beauty at the core.”

It seemed tolerable poetry both then and now. Only Stuart had to be reminded of it, Stuart had to be convinced in metaphors and lofty sentiments.

Tommy had almost reached the tree. He took his last steps carefully, for it was easy to lose one’s footing in the slippery mud, and fall. Marklin had done it once, years ago, when they’d first begun their pilgrimages. This had meant a night at the George and Pilgrims Hotel while his clothes were thoroughly cleaned.

Not bad that it had happened; it had been a marvelous evening. Stuart had stayed down with him. They’d spent the night talking together, even though Marklin had been confined to a borrowed robe and slippers and a small, charming bedchamber, and both had longed in vain to climb the tor in the midnight, and commune with the spirit of the sleeping king.

Of course, Marklin had never for a moment in his life believed that King Arthur slept beneath Glastonbury Tor. If he had believed it, he would have taken a shovel and started digging.

Stuart had come late in life to his conviction that myth was only interesting when a truth lay behind it, and that one could find that truth, and even the physical evidence of it.

Scholars, thought Marklin, theirs is an inevitable flaw; words and deeds become the same to them. That was at the very basis of the confusion now. Stuart, at eighty-seven years of age, had had perhaps his first excursion into reality.

Reality and blood were intermingled.

Tommy at last took his place at Marklin’s side. He blew on his cold fingers and then reached into his pockets for his gloves-a classic Tommy routine, to have walked up the hill without them, to have forgotten his gloves were even there until he saw Marklin’s leather gloves, the very ones he’d long ago given Marklin.

“Where is Stuart?” Tommy asked. “Yes, gloves.” He stared at Marklin, eyes enormous through his round, thick, rimless glasses, red hair clipped neatly short so that he might have been a lawyer or a banker. “Gloves, yes. Where is he?”

Marklin had been about to say that Stuart had not come, when in fact he saw Stuart beginning the very last leg of the ascent from his car, which he had brought as close as permissible up Wearyall Hill. Unlike Stuart to have done this.

But Stuart seemed otherwise unchanged-tall, narrow in his familiar greatcoat, with the cashmere scarf around his neck and streaming out behind him in the wind, his gaunt face looking as if it were carved out of wood. His gray hair resembled, as always, a jay’s crest. It seemed in this last decade he had scarcely changed at all.

He looked right at Marklin as he drew near. And Marklin realized that he himself was trembling. Tommy stepped aside. Stuart stopped some six feet from both of them, his hands clenched, his thin face anguished as he confronted the two young men.

“You killed Aaron!” Stuart cried. “You, both of you. You killed Aaron. How in the name of God could you have done such a thing?”

Marklin was speechless, all his confidence and plans deserting him suddenly. He tried to stop the tremor in his hands. He knew if he spoke his voice would be frail and without any authority. He could not bear for Stuart to be angry, or disappointed in any way.

“Dear God, what have you done, both of you!” Stuart ranted. “And what have I done that I set this scheme into motion? Dear God, the blame is mine!”

Marklin swallowed, but kept his silence.

“You, Tommy, how could you have been a party to this!” Stuart continued. “And Mark. Mark, you, the very author of all of it.”

“Stuart, you must hear me out!” Marklin declared before he could stop himself.

“Hear you out?” Stuart drew closer, his hands shoved into his coat pockets. “Hear you out, should I? Let me ask you a question, my brilliant young friend, my finest, my bravest hope! What’s to stop you now from killing me, as you’ve done with Aaron and Yuri Stefano?”

“Stuart, it was for you that I did it,” Marklin insisted. “If you would only listen, you’ll understand. These are but flowers of the seeds you planted when we began this together. Aaron had to be silenced. That he had not reported back, that he had not come home to the Motherhouse itself, was pure luck, Stuart! He might have any day, and Yuri Stefano would also have come. His visit to Donnelaith was a fluke. He might have come straight home from the airport.”

“You speak of circumstance, you speak of detail!” Stuart said, taking yet another step towards them.

Tommy stood quiet, seemingly emotionless, his red hair tousled by the wind, eyes squinting behind his glasses. He watched Stuart steadily, his shoulder very close to Marklin’s arm.

Stuart was beside himself.

“You speak of expediency, but you don’t speak of life and death, my pupil,” he insisted. “How could you do it! How could you bring an end to Aaron’s life!”

And here Stuart’s voice failed him, and the grief displayed itself, monstrous as the rage. “I would destroy you, Mark, if I could,” said Stuart. “But I cannot do such things, and that is perhaps why I did not think that you could! But you’ve amazed me, Mark.”

“Stuart, it was worth any sacrifice. What is sacrifice if it is not moral sacrifice!”

This horrified Stuart, but what else could Marklin do, other than take the plunge? Tommy really ought to say something, he thought, but he knew that when Tommy spoke, he would stand firm.

“I put an end to those who could have stopped us,” said Mark. “That is all there is to it, Stuart. You grieve for Aaron because you knew him.”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Stuart bitterly. “I grieve for innocent blood shed, I grieve for monstrous stupidity! Oh yes, that is what it was. Do you think the death of such a man will go unavenged within the Order? You think you know the Talamasca, you think with your shrewd young mind you could size it up in a matter of a few years. But all you’ve done is to learn its organizational weaknesses. You could live all your life in the Talamasca and not know the Talamasca. Aaron was my brother! It was my brother you killed! You have failed me, Mark. You have failed Tommy. You have failed yourself! You have failed Tessa.”

“No,” Mark said, “you don’t speak the truth, and you know it. Look at me, Stuart, look into my eyes. You left it to me to bring Lasher here, you left it to me to step out of the library and plot everything. And to Tommy as well. Do you think this could have been orchestrated without us?”

“You miss a crucial point, don’t you, Mark?” Stuart asked. “You failed. You did not rescue the Taltos and bring him here! Your soldiers were fools, and so it must be said of the general.”

“Stuart, have patience with us,” said Tommy. It was his usual matter-of-fact tone. “I knew the first day we spoke that this couldn’t be accomplished without someone paying for it with his life.”

“You never spoke such words to me, Tommy.”

“Let me remind you,” Tommy said in the same monotone manner, “you said that we were to render Yuri and Aaron powerless to interfere, and erase all evidence that the Taltos itself had been born into the Mayfair family. Now, how was this to be done except in the ways that we did it? Stuart, we have nothing to be ashamed of in our actions. What we seek makes these things utterly insignificant.”

Marklin tried desperately to conceal his sigh of relief.

Stuart looked from Tommy to Marklin and then back again, and then out over the pale landscape of gently rolling green hills, and then up to the peak of Glastonbury Tor. He turned his back on them to face the tor, and he hung his head as if communing with some personal deity.

Marklin drew close, and he placed his hands very tentatively on Stuart’s shoulders. He was far taller now than Stuart, and Stuart in old age had lost some of his earlier height. Marklin drew close to his ear.

“Stuart, the die was cast when we got rid of the scientist. There was no turning back. And the doctor …”

“No,” said Stuart, shaking his head with dramatic emphasis. His eyes were narrow and fixed on the tor. “These deaths could have been blamed on the Taltos himself, don’t you see? That was the beauty of it. The Taltos canceled the deaths of the two men who could have only misused the revelation granted to them!”

“Stuart,” said Mark, very aware that Stuart had not sought to free himself from his light embrace. “You must understand that Aaron became the enemy of us when he became the official enemy of the Talamasca.”

“Enemy? Aaron was never an enemy of the Talamasca! Your bogus excommunication broke his heart.”

“Stuart,” Marklin pleaded, “I can see now in retrospect that the excommunication was a mistake, but it has been our only mistake.”

“There was no choice in the matter of the excommunication,” said Tommy flatly. “It was either that or risk discovery at every turn. I did what I had to do, and I made it damned convincing. I could not have kept up a bogus correspondence between the Elders and Aaron. That would have been too much.”

“I admit,” said Marklin, “it was a mistake. Only loyalty to the Order might have kept Aaron quiet about the various things he’d seen and come to suspect. If we made an error, Stuart, the three of us made it together. We shouldn’t have alienated him and Yuri Stefano. We should have tightened our hold, played our game better.”

“The web was too intricate as it was,” said Stuart. “I warn you, both of you. Tommy, come here. I warn you both! Do not strike against the Mayfair family. You have done enough. You have destroyed a man who was finer than any other I ever knew, and you did it for so small a gain that heaven will take its vengeance on you. But do not, for whatever remains to us now, strike against the family!”

“I think we already have,” said Tommy in his usual practical voice. “Aaron Lightner had recently married Beatrice Mayfair. Besides, he had become so close to Michael Curry-indeed, to all of the clan-that the marriage was hardly required to cement the relationship. But there was a marriage, and to the Mayfairs marriage is a sacred bond, as we know. He had become one of them.”

“Pray you’re wrong,” said Stuart. “Pray to heaven you’re wrong. Risk the ire of the Mayfair witches, and God himself couldn’t help you.”

“Stuart, let us look at what must be done now,” said Marklin. “Let’s leave the hill and go down to the hotel.”

“Never. Where others can hear our words? Never.”

“Stuart, take us to Tessa. Let us discuss it there,” pressed Marklin.

It was the key moment. Marklin knew it. He wished now that he had not said Tessa’s name, not yet. He wished he had not played to this climax.

Stuart was eyeing both of them with the same deliberate condemnation and disgust. Tommy stood solidly, gloved hands clasped in front of him. The stiff collar of his coat rose to hide his mouth, and thereby leave nothing to scrutiny but his level, untroubled gaze.

Marklin himself was close to tears, or so he imagined. Marklin had actually never wept even once in his life that he could remember.

“Perhaps this is not the time to see her,” Marklin said, hastening to repair the damage.

“Perhaps you should never see her again,” said Stuart, voice small for the first time, eyes large and speculating.

“You don’t mean what you say,” said Mark.

“If I take you to Tessa, what’s to stop you from doing away with me?”

“Oh, Stuart, you hurt us both; how can you ask this of us? We aren’t without principle. We’re simply dedicated to a common goal. Aaron had to die. So did Yuri. Yuri was never really one of the Order. Yuri left so easily and so quickly!”

“Yes, and neither of you were ever members either, were you?” Stuart asked. His manner was changing, hardening.

“We are dedicated to you and always have been,” said Marklin. “Stuart, we waste our valuable time. Keep Tessa to yourself if you will. You will not shake my faith in her, or Tommy’s. And we will move towards our goal. We cannot do otherwise.”

“And what now is the goal?” Stuart demanded. “Lasher is gone now, as if he’d never existed! Or do you doubt the word of a man who would follow Yuri doggedly over land and sea only to finally shoot him?”

“Lasher is beyond destiny now,” said Tommy. “I think we are all in agreement on that. What Lanzing saw couldn’t be interpreted any other way. But Tessa is in your hands, as real as she was the day you discovered her.”

Stuart shook his head. “Tessa is real, and Tessa is alone as she has always been alone. And the union shall not take place, and my eyes will close without ever seeing the miracle.”

“Stuart, it is still possible,” said Marklin. “The family, the Mayfair witches.”

“Yes,” cried Stuart, his voice out of control, “and strike them and they will destroy you. You have forgotten the very first warning I ever gave you. The Mayfair witches win over those who would hurt them. They always have! If not as individuals, they win as a family!”

They stood quiet for a moment.

“Destroy you, Stuart?” Tommy asked. “Why not the three of us, Stuart?”

Stuart was in despair. His white hair, blown back and forth by the wind, resembled the unkempt hair of a drunkard. He looked down at the earth beneath his feet, his hooked nose glistening as though it were nothing now but polished cartilage. An eagle of a man, yes, but not an elderly one, never that.

Marklin feared for him in the wind. Stuart’s eyes were red and tearing. Marklin could see the map of blue veins spreading up from his temples. Stuart was trembling in every limb.

“Yes, you’re right, Tommy,” said Stuart. “The Mayfairs will destroy all of us. Why would they not?” He looked up and straight at Marklin. “And what is the greatest loss to me? Is it Aaron? Is it the marriage itself, of male and female Taltos? Is it the chain of memory we hoped to discover link by link to its earliest source? Or is it that you are damned now, both of you, for what you’ve done? And I have lost you. Let the Mayfairs come to destroy the three of us, yes, it will be justice.”

“No, I don’t want this justice,” said Tommy. “Stuart, you can’t turn on us.”

“No, that you can’t do,” said Marklin. “You cannot call a defeat for us. The witches can bear the Taltos again.”

“Three hundred years hence?” asked Stuart. “Or tomorrow?”

“Listen to me, sir, I beg you,” said Marklin. “The spirit of Lasher possessed knowledge of what he had been, and what he could be, and what happened to the genes of Rowan Mayfair and Michael Curry happened under the spirit’s knowing vigilance and to fulfill his purpose.

“But we have that knowledge now-of what a Taltos is, and perhaps was, and what can make it. And Stuart, so do the witches! For the first time, the witches know the destiny of the giant helix. And their knowing is as powerful as Lasher’s knowing.”

Stuart had no answer for this. Clearly he had not thought of it. He looked at Marklin a long time. Then he asked, “You believe this?”

“Their awareness is even more powerful, perhaps,” said Tommy. “The telekinetic assistance that can be rendered by the witches themselves in the event of a birth can’t be underestimated.”

“Ever the scientist,” said Marklin with a triumphant smile. The tide was changing. He could feel it, see it in Stuart’s eyes.

“And one must remember,” said Tommy, “that the spirit was addled and blundering. The witches are leagues from that, even at their most naive and ineffectual.”

“That is a guess, Tommy.”

“Stuart,” Marklin pleaded. “We have come too far!”

“To put it another way,” said Tommy, “our accomplishments here are by no means negligible. We verified the incarnation of the Taltos, and if we could get our hands on any notes written by Aaron before his death, we might verify what all suspect, that it was not incarnation but reincarnation.”

“I know what we’ve done,” said Stuart. “The good, the bad. You needn’t make your summation for me, Tommy.”

“Only to clarify,” said Tommy. “And we have witches who know not only the old secrets now in abstract, but who believe in the physical miracle itself. We could not possibly have more interesting opportunities.”

“Stuart, trust us again,” said Marklin.

Stuart looked at Tommy and then back at Marklin. Marklin saw the old spark, the love.

“Stuart,” he went on, “the killing is done. It’s finished. Our other unwitting assistants can be phased out without their ever knowing the grand design.”

“And Lanzing? He must know everything.”

“He was a hireling, Stuart,” said Marklin. “He never understood what he saw. Besides, he too is dead.”

“We didn’t kill him, Stuart,” said Tommy, in an almost casual manner. “They found part of his remains at the foot of Donnelaith Crag. His gun had been fired twice.”

“Part of his remains?” asked Stuart.

Tommy shrugged. “They said he’d been a meal for wild animals.”

“But you can’t be sure, then, that he killed Yuri.”

“Yuri has never returned to the hotel,” said Tommy. “His belongings are still unclaimed. Yuri is dead, Stuart. The two bullets were for Yuri. How Lanzing fell, or why, or if some animal attacked, those things we can’t know. But Yuri Stefano is, for our purposes, gone.”

“Don’t you see, Stuart?” said Marklin. “Except for the escape of the Taltos, everything has worked perfectly. And we can withdraw now, and focus upon the Mayfair witches. We don’t need anything further from the Order. If the interception is ever uncovered, no one will ever be able to trace it to us.”

“You don’t fear the Elders, do you?”

“There is no reason to fear the Elders,” said Tommy. “The intercept continues to work perfectly. It always has.”

“Stuart, we’ve learned from our errors,” said Marklin. “But perhaps things have happened for a purpose. I don’t mean in the sentimental sense. But look at the overall picture. All the right people are dead.”

“Don’t talk so crudely to me of your methods, either of you. What about our Superior General?”

Tommy shrugged. “Marcus knows nothing. Except that he will very soon be able to retire with a small fortune. He’ll never put all the pieces together afterwards. No one will be able to. That’s the beauty of the entire plan.”

“We need a few more weeks at most,” said Marklin. “Just to protect ourselves.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Tommy. “The smart thing may be to remove the intercepts now. We know everything the Talamasca knows about the Mayfair family.”

“Don’t be so hasty, so confident!” said Stuart. “What happens when your phony communications are finally discovered?”

“You mean our phony communications?” asked Tommy. “At the very worst, there’ll be a little confusion, perhaps even an investigation. But no one could trace the letters or the interception itself to us. That’s why it’s very important that we remain loyal novices, that we do nothing now to arouse suspicion.”

Tommy glanced at Marklin. It was working. Stuart’s manner had changed. Stuart was giving the orders again … almost.

“This is all electronic,” said Tommy. “There is no hard evidence of anything anywhere, except a few piles of paper in my flat in Regent’s Park. Only you and Mark and I know where those papers are.”

“Stuart, we need your guidance now!” said Marklin. “We go into the most exciting phase yet.”

“Silence,” said Stuart. “Let me look at you both, let me take your measure.”

“Please do it, Stuart,” said Marklin, “and find us brave and young, yes, young and stupid, perhaps, but brave and committed.”

“What Mark means,” said Tommy, “is that our position now is better than we could possibly have expected. Lanzing shot Yuri, then fell, fatally injuring himself. Stolov and Norgan are gone. They were never anything but a nuisance, and they knew too much. The men hired to kill the others don’t know us. And we are here, where we began, at Glastonbury.”

“And Tessa is in your hands, unknown to anyone but the three of us.”

“Eloquence,” said Stuart almost in a whisper. “That’s what you give me now, eloquence.”

“Poetry is truth, Stuart,” said Marklin. “It is the highest truth, and eloquence is its attribute.”

There was a pause. Marklin had to get Stuart down from this hill. Protectively, he put his arm around Stuart, and to his great relief, Stuart allowed this.

“Let’s go down, Stuart,” said Marklin. “Let’s have our supper now. We’re cold, we’re hungry.”

“If we had it to do over again,” said Tommy, “we’d do it better. We didn’t have to take those lives. It might have been more of a challenge, you know, to accomplish our purpose without really hurting anyone.”

Stuart seemed lost in thought, only glancing at Tommy absently. The wind rose again, cuttingly, and Marklin shivered. If he was this cold, what must Stuart be feeling? They must go down to the hotel. They must break bread together.

“We are not ourselves, you know, Stuart,” Marklin said. He was looking down at the town, and conscious that both of the others were staring at him. “When gathered together, we make a person whom none of us knows well enough, perhaps, a fourth entity which we should give a name, because he is more than our collective selves. Perhaps we must better learn to control him. But destroy him now? No, that we cannot do, Stuart. If we do, we all betray each other. It’s a hard truth to face, but the death of Aaron means nothing.”

He had played his final card. He had said the finest and the worst things that he’d had to say, here in the chill wind, and without real forethought, with only his instinct to guide him. Finally he looked at his teacher and at his friend, and saw that both had been impressed by these words, perhaps even more than he could have hoped.

“Yes, it was this fourth entity, as you call him, who killed my friend,” said Stuart quietly. “You are right about that. And we know that the power, the future of this fourth entity, is unimaginable.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Tommy in a flat murmur.

“But the death of Aaron is a terrible, terrible thing! You will never, either of you, ever speak to me of it again, and never, never will you speak of it lightly to anyone.”

“Agreed,” said Tommy.

“My innocent friend,” said Stuart, “who sought only to help the Mayfair family.”

“No one in the Talamasca is really innocent,” Tommy said.

Stuart appeared startled, at first enraged and then caught by this simple statement.

“What do you mean by this?”

“I mean that one cannot expect to possess knowledge which does not change one. Once one knows, then one is acting upon that knowledge, whether it is to withhold the knowledge from those who would also be changed, or to give it to them. Aaron knew this. The Talamasca is evil by nature; that’s the price it pays for its libraries and inventories and computer records. Rather like God, wouldn’t you say, who knows that some of his creatures will suffer and some will triumph, but does not tell his creatures what he knows? The Talamasca is more evil even than the Supreme Being, but the Talamasca creates nothing.”

So very right, thought Marklin, though he could not have said such a thing aloud to Stuart, for fear of what Stuart would say in return.

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Stuart under his breath. He sounded defeated, or desperate for some tolerable point of view.

“It’s a sterile priesthood,” said Tommy, the voice once again devoid of all feeling. He gave his heavy glasses a shove with one finger. “The altars are barren; the statues are stored away. The scholars study for study’s sake.”

“Don’t say any more.”

“Let me talk of us, then,” said Tommy, “that we are not sterile, and we will see the sacred union come about, and we will hear the voices of memory.”

“Yes,” said Marklin, unable to assume such a cold voice. “Yes, we are the real priests now! True mediators between the earth and the forces of the unknown. We possess the words and the power.”

Another silence had fallen.

Could Marklin ever get them off this hill? He had won. They were together again, and he longed for the warmth of the George and Pilgrims. He longed for the taste of hot soup and ale, and the light of the fire. He longed to celebrate. He was wildly excited again.

“And Tessa?” asked Tommy. “How is it with Tessa?”

“The same,” said Stuart.

“Does she know that the male Taltos is dead?”

“She never knew he was alive,” said Stuart.

“Ah.”

“Come on, teacher,” said Marklin. “Let’s go down now, to the hotel. Let’s dine together.”

“Yes,” said Tommy, “we’re all too cold now to speak anymore.”

They began the descent, both Tommy and Marklin steadying Stuart in the slippery mud. When they had reached Stuart’s car, they opted for the drive rather than the long walk.

“This is all very good,” said Stuart, giving over the car keys to Marklin. “But I will visit Chalice Well as always before we go.”

“What for?” asked Marklin, making his words quiet, and respectful, and seemingly expressive of the love he felt for Stuart. “Will you wash your hands in Chalice Well to cleanse the blood off them? The water is already bloody itself, teacher.”

Stuart gave a little bitter laugh.

“Ah, but that is the blood of Christ, isn’t it?” Stuart said.

“It’s the blood of conviction,” said Marklin. “We’ll go to the well after dinner, and just before dark. I promise you that.”

They drove down the hill together.