The man’s soft black hair reminded him all too much of Lasher; too silky, too fine, too much body to it, he didn’t know for certain. The white streaks added a kind of high luster to the whole figure. The face was far too big-boned to be feminine in any conventional sense, but it was delicate, the long nose redeemed perhaps by the fact that the eyes were so large and set so wide apart. The skin was mature skin and not baby-fine. But the real allure of the man was mixed up with his voice and his eyes. His voice could have talked you into anything, Michael thought, and the eyes were highly persuasive as well.
Both bordered on a childlike simplicity, but were not ultimately simple. The effect? The man seemed some sort of angelic being, infinitely wise and patient and yet resolved, without question, to murder Stuart Gordon exactly as he had said that he would.
Of course, Michael wasn’t assuming anything about the age of this creature. It was pretty hard not to think he was human, just different, unaccountably strange. Of course, Michael knew he wasn’t. He knew it by a hundred little details-the size of Ash’s knuckles, the curious way he widened his eyes now and then so that he looked awestruck, and above all perhaps by the absolute perfection of his mouth and teeth. The mouth was baby-soft, impossible for a man with that skin, really, or at least highly improbable, and the teeth were as white as some sort of flashing advertisement that had been shamelessly retouched.
Michael didn’t for a moment believe this creature was ancient, or that he was the great Saint Ashlar of the Donnelaith legends, the ancient king who had converted to Christianity in the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain, and allowed his pagan spouse, Janet, to be burnt at the stake.
But the grim tale he had believed when Julien had told it to him. And this was one of the many Ashlars, no doubt-one of the mighty Taltos from the glen-a being of the very same ilk as the one that Michael had slaughtered.
These things were not disputed by any part of his mind.
He had experienced too much for him to doubt, It was only that he couldn’t believe the tall, beautiful man was that old St. Ashlar himself. Perhaps he just didn’t want it to be so, for very good reasons that made sense within these elaborate frameworks which he’d now totally accepted.
Yes, you are living now with a whole series of completely new realities, he thought. Maybe this is why you’re taking it all calmly. You’ve seen a ghost; you’ve listened to him; you know he was there. He told you things you could have never manufactured or imagined. And you’ve seen Lasher and you’ve heard his long plea for sympathy, and that was also something completely unimaginable for you, something filled with new information and strange details that you can still remember with puzzlement, now that the misery you were feeling when Lasher told it is over, and Lasher lies buried under the tree.
Oh yeah, don’t forget, the burying of the body, dropping the head down in the hole beside it, and then finding the emerald, picking it up, and holding it in the dark while the decapitated body lay down there in the wet earth, ready to be covered up.
Perhaps you can become accustomed to anything, he figured. And he wondered if that was what had happened to Stuart Gordon. He had no doubt that Stuart Gordon was guilty, dreadfully and inexcusably guilty of everything. Yuri had no doubt. But how had the man managed to betray his values?
Michael had to admit he himself had always had a susceptibility to this very kind of Celtic darkness and mystery. His very love of Christmas had its roots in some irrational longing for rituals born in these isles, perhaps. And the tiny Christmas ornaments he had so lovingly collected over the years were all in some way emblematic of old Celtic gods, and a worship overlaid on pagan secrets.
His love of the houses he’d restored had brought him at times as close to this atmosphere of old secrets, old designs, and a dormant knowledge to be revealed as one could ever get in America.
He realized he understood Stuart Gordon in a way. And very soon the figure of Tessa would explain Gordon’s sacrifices and terrible mistakes, very clearly.
Whatever, Michael had been through so much that his calm now was only inevitable.
Yes, you’ve been through these things, and you’ve been used by them and battered by them, and now you stand here, by the village pub in this small, picture-postcard village, with its gently sloping stone street, and you think about all this without emotion-that you are with something that is not human, but is as intelligent as any human, and is soon to meet a female of its kind, an event of such enormous significance that no one really wants to touch upon it, perhaps only out of respect for the man who is supposed to die.
It’s hard to ride in a car for an hour with a man who is supposed to die.
He’d finished the cigarette. Yuri had just come out of the pub. They were ready to push off.
“You did reach the Motherhouse?” Michael asked quickly.
“Yes, and I reached more than one person. I made four different calls and reached four different individuals. If these four, my oldest and closest friends, are part of it, then I despair.”
Michael gave Yuri’s thin shoulder a squeeze. He followed Yuri to the car.
Another thought came to him, that he wasn’t going to think about Rowan and her reactions to the Taltos any more now than he had all the way down here, when a deep, instinctive possessiveness had almost caused him to demand that they stop the car, that Yuri climb in the front, so that he could sit by his wife.
No, he wasn’t going to give in to this. He couldn’t any way in the world know what Rowan was thinking or feeling as she looked at this strange creature. A witch he might be, by genetic profile, and perhaps by some peculiar heritage of which he knew nothing. But he wasn’t a mind reader. And he had been aware from the very first moments of their encounter with Ashlar that Rowan would probably not be harmed by making love to this strange creature, because now that she could not have children, she could not suffer the sort of terrible hemorrhage which had brought down Lasher’s Mayfair victims one by one.
As for Ash, if he was lusting after Rowan, he was keeping it a gentlemanly secret, but then the creature was driving towards a female of his species, who was perhaps one of the last female Taltos in the world.
And then there’s the immediate consideration, isn’t there, he thought as he slipped into the passenger seat and firmly shut the door. Are you going to stand by and let this giant of a man murder Stuart Gordon? You know perfectly well you can’t do that. You can’t watch somebody be murdered. That’s impossible. The only time you’ve ever done it, it happened so quick, with the crack of the gun, that you scarcely had time to breathe.
Of course, you have killed three people yourself. And this misguided bastard, this crazed man who claims to have a goddess under lock and key, has killed Aaron.
They were leaving the little village, which had all but disappeared into the gathering shadows. How tender, how manageable, how tame this landscape. At any other time he would have asked them to stop so that they could walk for a while along the road.
When he turned to the side, he was surprised to discover that Rowan had been watching him. That she was sitting to the side herself and had brought her leg up on the seat right behind him, apparently so that she could look at him. Of course her half-naked legs looked glorious, but so what? She had pulled her skirt down properly. It was no more than a fashionable flash of nylon-covered thigh.
He stretched out his arm along the old leather upholstery, and he laid his left hand on her shoulder, which she allowed, quietly looking at him with her immense and secretive gray eyes, and giving him something far more intimate than a smile.