She lifted the Terma and presented it to Peregrine. He received it gingerly, keenly aware of the text's antiquity. Though smaller, the characters on the uppermost page were as much a work of art as any of the hangings on the walls around them.
After lifting several more pages covered with the graceful script, Peregrine passed the Terma to Christopher, who handed it on to McLeod. The inspector paid it but a cursory examination before giving it into Adam's hands.
A faint tingling set up in Adam's left hand as he received the text, as if the rosary looped around his wrist were emanating a mild electrical charge. One winged eyebrow rose as he hefted the text in his hands.
The tingling intensified, spreading swiftly up his arm, reminding him of the sensation he had experienced back in St. Molaise's Cave, when Tseten first had taken hold of his hand. Even as the comparison sprang to mind, the Terma before him seemed suddenly to come alive, pages lifting and sighing as if with the passage of a breeze otherwise beyond perception. In that same instant, Adam felt an urgent tugging at his senses, like the pull of invisible fingers.
The room around him seemed to blur and fade, except for the Terma, objects and even the people in the room wavering on the brink of transparency. Even as Adam blinked his eyes, trying to clarify the vision, there reappeared before him, superimposed upon the image of the room, the shimmering Lotus Wheel of heavenly lights he had envisioned during his trance on Holy Island. Slowly the lotus began to unfold, revealing at its heart a light-shrouded human form.
Chapter Twenty-Five
DIRECTLY across from Adam, Peregrine heard his chief draw a sharp breath and saw him recoil slightly, dark head flung back, his surprised gaze focused - or perhaps unfocused - somewhere beyond Peregrine, perhaps even beyond the confines of the room. No one else seemed to see anything except Adam's reaction, but Peregrine, glancing over his shoulder, caught just a glimpse of a ghostly shimmer in the air, like gossamer in moonlight. When he himself tried to capture it, however, the impression dissolved as if written on water.
"Does - anyone else see him?" Adam murmured huskily. "Dear God, the goodness that accompanies him… But too bright…"
As one hand lifted to shade his bedazzled eyes, the other brought the Terma to his breast in an awed embrace. The mala wrapped around his left wrist dangled free, its black beads clicking against the tabletop, and McLeod leaned in tentatively, his blue gaze flitting between Adam's face and the empty space beyond Peregrine, then shifting to Julian in question.
"Shall I offer myself as a vessel?" he asked her. "I'm willing, if the sage needs a voice."
Lady Julian shook her hand gently, her gaze not shifting from Adam and the Terma.
"Thank you, Noel, but I think not. This is a test - and Adam must prove for himself the measure of Tseten's teaching. What we can do is provide a bit of support. Christopher, please bring me an incense-stick and that holder, from over by the jade Buddha."
McLeod looked none too convinced, for he was well aware that Adam's psychic gifts ordinarily did not run to mediumship, but he made no objection as Christopher rose to comply, instead lending a hand with Peregrine to clear the empty cups from the table. When the priest returned, handing Julian a box of matches and then inserting the incense-stick in its holder, Julian bade him position it directly in front of Adam on the map-spread tabletop.
Their chief ceased shading his eyes as she bade McLeod switch off the gooseneck lamp, but his gaze remained unfocused, abstractedly intense, still squinting against a glare that only he could see. He did not seem to notice as she struck a match and touched fire to the incense-stick.
"Adam, look at this light," Julian said with calm authority.
He complied, his gaze tracking immediately to the flame, but even in the diminished light of her match and the candles around the room, his pupils were contracted to mere pinpoints. He blinked as she extinguished the match and then blew out the incense-stick, his gaze now fixing on the ruby-like glow that remained at the tip, flitting briefly to the tendril of spicy smoke that began to curl upward.
"Look at the light," Julian repeated softly. "Let nothing else intrude upon your field of vision. Let that single point of light represent to you the totality of all that is. It is the om, the beginning and the ending, the seed of all diversity and the sum of its reunification. It is the inexpressible Absolute, infinitely many and primordially One. In beholding it, you behold all things."
Her voice lulled and urged calm and detachment, a silvery net of sound inexorably drawing Adam out of himself and into profound trance. He could feel his body relaxing visibly, eyelids drooping, yet his soul was still tinglingly aware of that other Presence waiting beyond any physical dimension, entreating his attention. Only vaguely was he conscious of Julian's touch, gently drawing his hands down, bidding him lay the Terma on the table, letting his fingertips still rest lightly upon it.
His respiration slowed, growing more and more shallow until he seemed scarcely to be breathing at all, though still he stared at and through the point of light. After a moment, her own expression one of complete absorption, Lady Julian leaned over and touched him lightly on the heart, throat, and forehead, letting her fingertips linger just above the bridge of his nose, between his eyebrows. Each touch seemed to release a faint chime of distant temple bells deep at the core of his being, rousing distant memories almost to conscious levels.
"Answer me this now, Adam." Julian's voice was at once a caress and an anchor to the here and now. "Where is the physical seat of your consciousness?''
His chest rose on a slow intake of breath, and his answer only barely whispered past his lips.
"In the head, behind the eyes?"
"Then you must move it to a new locus of perception," she said. "Be aware of your left arm - the arm that bears the mala. Imagine how it would be to see through the tips of those ringers, to hear with the palm of that hand. Let what you see draw your mind to another location."
Adam's physical gaze was still focused on the jewel of fire tipping the incense-stick. Sunk deep in trance, he had bade his own volition recede into drifting quiescence, malleable to Julian's direction. He drew a deep breath, imagining that he and the fire were being drawn together in a single unified point localized just between his eyebrows. The fusion was sensible as a tingling feeling in his forehead, anchored by the feather-touch of Julian's fingertips. With it came the fleeting recollection that Tseten also had touched him thus.
As Julian took her hand away, the tingling sensation began to spread toward the back of Adam's head, creeping down his neck and out along the length of his left arm toward the center of his left hand. It seemed to intensify as it passed through the coils of black beads wound around his wrist. A companion image rose up from the Terma beneath his hands, spiralling up like a whirlwind and resolving into the clearly discernible shape of an elderly Tibetan ascetic with a refined face and graceful, expressive hands, who might have been Jigme in old age.
The figure beckoned with grave urgency. Joyfully Adam's spirit rose up to meet him. His arm with the mala lifted in entreaty, the hand snapping shut as if attempting to grasp something not easy to hold.
"A pen," Adam murmured breathlessly. "I need a pen and paper…."
Peregrine was already delving into his sketchbox, turning one of his sketch pads to a blank page, pushing it across the table to Adam and then rummaging for a pencil. Before he could find one, Christopher produced a ballpoint from an inner pocket and set it in Adam's left hand. Adam blinked once, deeply, then set the pen to the blank page in front of him and began to write, his gaze never wavering from the glowing point of light atip the incense-stick, his pupils now gone wide and dilated.