The Adept Book 3 The Templar Treasure (13 page)

“You’re ready to go deeper now. On my signal . . .”

As if in slow motion, the hand that had touched his wrist lifted now to press lightly across his forehead. Eyes closing, Peregrine knew a brief, swooping sensation in the pit of his stomach, and a fleeting psychic sensation as of walls falling away from him on all sides. Liberated, his astral self took flight like a hawk springing airborne off the fist of its falconer. Adam’s voice was in his ears as he spiralled aloft and hovered, seeking a grounding point below.

“Open your eyes and focus on the ring now,” Adam urged quietly. “Let the ring be your beacon in time.”

He could not but obey. A circle limned by burnished gold swam slightly out of focus before his entranced gaze. Like the peregrine breed for which he was named, he homed in on it. The circle seemed to expand until it filled his field of vision, so that he found himself looking through it, as through a porthole. Gradually the roiling shapes beyond took form and held their focus.

It was dark night under a canopy of trees. A tall man in a riding cloak stood at the crossing of two woodland paths, an un shuttered lantern glimmering on trampled ground at his feet. The dim glow of the lamp underlit the man’s face beneath a broad-brimmed chapeau with a sweeping white plume. Peregrine knew him even before he lifted his head, half turning so that the light fell full upon his features—the patrician nose, the firm, sensitively modelled lips above a strong chin—and upon a Templar cross against the froth of lace at his throat.

Bonnie Dundee!

Even as the Cavalier general turned his noble head in query at a sound, he was joined at the crossroads by two women so heavily cloaked that nothing could be seen of their faces until they shook back their hoods. Both of them were young and slender, with heavy dark hair and darker eyes in their pale, finely drawn faces. Even by the dim light of the lantern, Peregrine judged them to be sisters, so close was the resemblance between them.

Dundee greeted the elder of the two with a kiss, his expression so solemn that it was clear that the gesture had little or nothing to do with mere courtly convention. As the younger girl stepped forward and lifted her face to receive the viscount’s salute, Peregrine was struck by a sudden, potent conviction that she was someone he knew. The pang of recognition, sharp as a knife thrust, was enough to make him catch his breath. But before he could frame any clearer impression of her aspect and identity, she was drawing back into the shadows, leaving Peregrine to focus on Dundee. It was only then that he realized that the viscount was holding something concealed beneath his cloak.

Dundee crouched down beside the lantern, the girls kneeling with him, and Peregrine’s gaze was drawn to the viscount’s gloved hands as he drew out a lightweight bundle wrapped in white silk. With a care approaching reverence, he presented it to the sister who had been first to greet him. She allowed him to place the bundle in her hands, then lifted her eyes to meet his, her expression one of wondering inquiry. When he nodded unspoken encouragement, she folded back the wrappings, revealing something that shone with warm, metallic luster in the lantern light.

It seemed to be a crown of some kind—a diadem whose broad, textured circlet was surmounted by six tall, upturned points of beaten gold. The simplicity of the design and the quality of the metal together bespoke immense antiquity.

Fascinated, Peregrine attempted to get a closer look at it. As he narrowed his focus, the diadem all at once seemed to come to life, shimmering as if infused with an inner heat of its own.

The shimmer brightened to a molten glow. Haloed in that glow, the gold itself seemed to liquefy, racing and flowing without losing its shape. Each point seemed to dance like a tongue of fire, spreading outward, molten light tracing two interlocking triangles that pulsed with a rhythm that echoed Peregrine’s own heartbeat. Dazzled by the orient blaze of fiery metal, he lost himself in ardent contemplation of its refined and fluid symmetry . . . until a voice recalled him sharply by name.

“Peregrine.” The authority of the voice sufficed to pull back a tenuous link with the world beyond his vision. “Peregrine, whatever you’re seeing, try to let your perceptions channel through your hand. Don’t try to analyze. Just let the images flow through your hand, and draw what you see.”

Obedient to his guide, Peregrine drew a deep breath and made the conscious shift, feeling the faint twitch in his right hand as the transition became complete, hardly blinking lest he lose the images of what his hand began to sketch. It felt vaguely different from what it usually did when he attempted to capture resonances from a
place
of psychic import. This was more compelling, less under his control. Having embarked, he was not certain he could have pulled back, even had he wished. The crown held him in its thrall—urgent, potent . . .

And Adam, leaning forward to observe as images now began to appear under Peregrine’s quick pencil strokes, found his own attention increasingly caught and held by the same compulsion that drove his young colleague.

Chapter Thirteen

THE FIRST FEW
strokes of the pencil established the general setting—the bold impression of three kneeling figures, one of them Dundee, by the suggestion of strong profile and the unmistakable shape of a Templar cross amid the lace at his throat. But it was what Dundee and his two companions regarded that quickly caught and held Adam’s attention as Peregrine’s efforts focused in on it, more confident now, smoother and more sure, taking on the deliberate fluidity of automatic writing.

The picture that eventually took shape under Peregrine’s pencil might almost have been a detail from a heroic painting by Rembrandt: an oriental diadem clasped firmly, almost protectively, by two outstretched hands. They were definitely a woman’s hands—and that seemed like it should mean something to Adam—but it was the design of the diadem that drew his gaze like a magnet. The six upturned points of the Crown were like the half-furled petals of the wildflower known as Solomon’s Seal.

The realization catapulted Adam briefly back into the dream of Solomon, the night after Nathan’s death. Surely the crown of Peregrine’s sketch was not the crown of his dream. What had John Grahame of Claverhouse to do with King Solomon’s Crown? And yet, before his stunned and captive gaze, a ghost-image of the crown in his dream seemed to superimpose itself above the drawing of the crown—two interlocking triangles forming a six-pointed star as the points of the crown flattened out.

The crown in the sketch
was
Solomon’s Crown. Suddenly Adam knew that with the same certainty by which he knew himself bound to find Nathan’s Seal before those who had stolen it could unleash the terrible secret it guarded. Somehow the Seal and the Crown were linked—and the revelation of the link had been invoked by the ring containing Dundee’s hair, which meant that Dundee himself was somehow linked with the Crown or the Seal or both. The Crown now became a possible factor in recovering the Seal—or possibly in protecting what it guarded, if the Solomonic imagery held true.

He was pondering this possibility, in light trance himself, when Peregrine suddenly gave a heavy sigh and surfaced spontaneously, giving his head a shake as if to clear his vision and setting down his pencil to flex his drawing hand.

“Well,
that
was certainly different,” he said, as Adam also blinked himself back to normal consciousness and glanced at him. “I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t that.”

He cast a look down at the drawing in his lap, squinting and peering like someone trying to compensate for an eyesight deficiency.

“That’s interesting,” he went on. “I wasn’t sure what the Crown looked like.”

The remark made Adam wonder whether Peregrine’s inner vision might have matched his own.

“You didn’t draw what you saw?” he asked.

“Well, yes and no,” Peregrine replied with a frown. “I—think this is what it looked like physically, but there was another reality to it. It was as if—as if there were another crown inside the one I drew. A bit like something from an Egyptian tomb, I thought at first—Middle Eastern, at least. Very ancient, almost primitive in its simplicity: a circlet of pure gold with six triangular points.

“Then it—
changed.
The gold—came to life, I suppose is the only way to describe it. It seemed almost to catch fire, but the fire held its shape . . .”

His frown deepened. “Somehow it reminded me of biblical accounts of Pentecost—something to do with a visitation of Divine Wisdom.”

This halting observation served to confirm the conviction that had formed in Adam’s own mind.

“Solomon’s Crown,” he stated flatly.

Peregrine lifted his gaze and stared, openmouthed. “Good Lord.”

“Good Lord, indeed,” Adam agreed. “I dreamed about King Solomon and his Crown the night after Nathan died. I didn’t think to mention it before, because it just as easily could have been an ordinary embellishment of images connected with recent events. I wasn’t sure it had any direct bearing.

“But he was wearing
that Crown.”
He tapped the drawing with a forefinger. “And he was holding what appeared to be the Seal in one hand and a sceptre of some sort in the other. There’s the cross again too,” he pointed out. “A pattern is starting to emerge, and Dundee is a part of it.”

“Maybe so. I think you’re right,” Peregrine agreed. “But why would he have given the Crown to these two women?”

At Adam’s look of sharp inquiry, the artist went on to relate what had transpired in the introductory phase of his vision.

“I can’t tell you how I know this, but I’m certain Dundee was the keeper of the Crown, up to that point,” he said. “When he handed it over to the elder of the two sisters, I had the distinct impression that he was entrusting it to them for safekeeping. I’m afraid I don’t know what happened after that,” he finished apologetically. “I got so wrapped up in looking at the Crown itself that I had no attention to spare for anything else. In away, I’m amazed that I drew as much as I did.”

“Well, I don’t suppose that’s surprising, under the circumstances,” Adam said. “I would venture to guess that what you were Seeing was the aura associated with the Crown—the psychic image of its essential nature, if you will. The fact that your vision of it made such a profound impression suggests that the Crown is probably an object of considerable power—which it certainly could be if it is, indeed, the Crown of Solomon.”

“But what does that have to do with the Seal?” Peregrine asked.

Adam shook his head. “I can’t tell you that exactly, but given what we’ve put together about Dundee, I would say that it’s highly probable that he and the Crown are directly linked, historically and metaphysically, with the Seal we’ve been looking for.”

Peregrine’s lips made an awed little
O
as he whistled low under his breath.

“Then, since we haven’t yet got either the Seal or the Crown, it sounds like Dundee is still our best hope of finding out more. I don’t understand about the ring, though,” he went on, glancing toward where it lay glinting softly at the foot of the silver candlestick on the little rosewood table. “From the fact that I Saw him on the Astral, I’d guess that the lock of hair embedded in the bezel must be his. But if so, why didn’t he manifest himself more directly? I thought hair and blood were supposed to be the most potent sorts of links.”

“There are two possible explanations”, Adam said thoughtfully. “First of all, your principal receptive talents aren’t those of a medium. Noel might have had an entirely different reaction—and we’ll see about that when we have him work with the Templar cross down in Kent. It could also be that the associations of the ring itself are more strongly attuned to someone else who later owned the ring. Perhaps one of the women you mentioned.”

“Now,
that’s
certainly a possibility,” Peregrine said. “It would account for their images being so strong.”

“But you have no idea at all who they might have been?” Adam asked.

“None,” Peregrine said frankly. “That bothers me, too, because the younger one seemed intensely familiar to me. I remember thinking that I must have met her before, but I just couldn’t pin down where or when. I don’t suppose there’s any way to follow up on that?”

“Not without something more concrete than you’ve given me to go on,” Adam said regretfully, for he had just been considering that same question himself. “I’ll confess, this business of another identity impinging on the ring has me stymied. I’ve never encountered it before. Given time to think this through and do some research, I might be able to come up with an explanation, but the ‘why’ isn’t really at issue here. Far more useful would be ‘who’ or ‘what.’ Realistically, though, I think we’re going to have to hold off on those questions until we’ve got access to the cross-and Noel, to work with both artifacts and see if he can sort out anything.”

“But that isn’t until Monday!” Peregrine observed in some frustration. “Anything could happen between now and then!”

“I’m well aware of that,” Adam said. “But I don’t see how it can be helped.”

“Neither do I,” Peregrine admitted, but his expression remained dogged. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Consider this: We’ve surmised that Dundee gave a crown—possibly King Solomon’s Crown—into the keeping of the two sisters I saw. We’ve agreed that this crown may have been a Templar relic, possibly connected with the Seal. Is there any chance at all that Dundee might have passed on his knowledge to a successor before he died?”

“I would guess it highly unlikely,” Adam said. “It was both Dundee’s glory and his folly that he paid little heed to any suggestion that he might be killed in action at Killiecrankie. Before the battle, his men begged him to hold back and not risk himself, fearing that if he was killed, the whole campaign would be lost—which, in fact, happened, even though they won the day. It was the beginning of the end for the Stuart cause. His only concession for the day was to change his customary red coat for a buff cavalry jacket under his breastplate—the one you drew up at Blair Castle.

“As for confiding his secrets to another Templar, we don’t even have any evidence of who other Templars might have been at the time—or I don’t know, at any rate—and certainly no evidence to indicate that he ever took the precaution of sharing any of the knowledge he held in trust. Perhaps he preferred the risk that his knowledge might be lost, to the risk of its surviving to fall into the wrong hands. Or maybe he had confided something to your two sisters when he handed over the Crown.”

Peregrine sighed and began leafing idly through the other entries in his sketchbook from earlier that day. “I can see that I’m going to have to try to draw them,” he said. “It’s more and more clear that they’re key figures in the puzzle. You know, though, given the continuity of Templar tradition itself, it’s a pity there isn’t some way to arrange things so that some present-day Templar could communicate with Dundee on our behalf, on the strength of their communal bond within the Ord—”

He paused as his hand turned up the drawing he had made of Adam in the semblance of a Templar knight.

“I say, Adam,” he murmured. “Something’s just occurred to me. Take a look at this.”

He passed over his sketchbook so that his mentor could see what he had drawn earlier that afternoon, and Adam scanned the quick study Peregrine had done of him as a Templar knight.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve Seen you as a Templar knight, you know,” he said, as Adam looked the drawing over. “We both know that you have historical connections of your own with the Order, both spiritual and hereditary. Might there not be some way to make use of those connections? After all, Dundee was only one of a long line of Templar Grand Priors. Even if he took his knowledge with him to his grave, what about all those who came before him? Is it possible that you yourself could have been one of them?”

“I very much doubt it,” Adam said. “If I had been, and it had any bearing on our present situation, it’s highly likely that such knowledge would have surfaced spontaneously by now.”

“All the same, you apparently
were
once a knight,” Peregrine persisted. “If you were to reveal yourself as such on the Astral, might not the Grand Master of your day and age be willing to communicate to you whatever he might have known about Solomon’s treasures and their powers?”

“You assume that I would have been important enough to be entrusted with such information,” Adam said with a smile. “Besides that, I think my Templar persona’s demise somewhat predates the arrival of Solomon’s treasures in Scotland—or at least
he
had no part in their relocation. Jauffre de St. Clair died in Paris, shortly before the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. That was in 1314. We know that the Seal was in Perth by 1381, to be pawned to Nathan’s ancestor, and presumably whatever it guards was also somewhere in Scotland by then. But neither Jauffre nor his Grand Master would have had any knowledge of that.”

“Then, what about your actual blood ancestor who took back Templemor after the suppression?” Peregrine asked. “That’s later. He might have known something—maybe even just a rumor of whatever secret the Order was guarding. And maybe he’d tell it to a descendant, who’d also been a Templar himself.”

Adam nodded thoughtfully. “It’s a long shot, but it might be worth a try,” he agreed. “With Noel away, we’re really at loose ends until we head down to Kent on Monday.”

“Shall we go up to the castle, then?” Peregrine asked. “I’d think that would be the natural place to make contact, if it’s going to happen.”

Adam nodded. “I agree. Several times, out at the ruins, I’ve thought I caught sight of a Templar knight standing in the doorway. I’ve always dismissed it as romantic fantasy, but maybe there’s something to it. If I were to focus on a particular intent, it’s just possible that something useful might surface. Are you free tomorrow?”

“I can be,” Peregrine said. “When did you have in mind? Some friends of Julia’s family have invited us to come for lunch after church, but I daresay I could beg off, if you want to make it a morning excursion.”