Out of Chaos, Order
Out of Chaos, Order
THE CHAPTER OF MAKING THE TRANSFORMATION INTO THE SERPENT SATA...The Osiris Ani, whose word is truth, saith: I am the serpent Sata whose years are infinite. I lie down dead. I am born daily. I am the serpent Sa-en-ta, the dweller in the uttermost parts of the earth. I lie down in death. I am born, I become new, I renew my youth every day. (The Egyptian Book of the Dead) There are some instants in the many-threaded tapestry of what has been and what will be, when beings come together with the force of mountains, or stars, or the very Spheres of Creation. In this convergence, as if they were celestial bodies, their combined momentous density will pull the tides and turn the very course of Destiny Itself.
Duncan MacLeod, distaff son of the Clan Leod, Glenfinnan--as true a son in his mother Mary,s heart as would have been her own stillborn babe--was unconcerned with Spheres or Destinies as he strolled through Stanley Park, a cultured bit of wilderness in north Seacouver. He was rather more concerned with several immediate crises, all of which had developed during his brief absence, his excursion to the island and the holy land of the ancients.
He and his protégé had spent a glorious three weeks, far away from friend and foe alike, a luxurious escape from the very complex business of The Game, and The Watchers, and the herd- ward" duties Duncan had taken upon himself in his years of gathering mortal and Immortal acquaintances, the clan of his surprisingly tender heart...surprising because he had been born with no other purpose than to kill off the rest of his kind, to join again and again, in hand-to-hand combat with another Immortal...on and on, until he was either killed himself or there were no other Immortals left upon the face of the Earth.
Four hundred years, murder after murder, and still Duncan MacLeod owned a soul that was at once merciful and ruthless. Mary, bless her heart--four centuries still now--had endowed her wee bairn with a most amazing resilience, partly an exquisite sense for all things wondrous and partly raw, bawdy humor. This had armed the Highlander with more protection than his broad, etched shoulders, and his keen skills with his sword of choice, the katana with the smiling dragon on its hilt.
He had not only stayed alive these four centuries. He had continued to delight in his life, though this particular day, grey and cold, with just enough drizzle to be really unpleasant was doing its best to dampen that delight.
Down the mathematically laid out gardens of roses and tulips, Duncan strode blindly, worrying over in his mind how things could have gotten so out of hand in his brief absence. He wasn't even sure he understood what had happened exactly, even though first Dawson, and then Adam had explained... and explained. Seemed some scrawny, middle-aged secretary from the Paris Watchers, Headquarters had blown into town and set them all on their ears and then just as suddenly she had disappeared again.
That much he understood, the rest...well, he had the Joe Dawson version which went along the lines of: the woman was Methos, mother, not an Immortal, not a Mortal, but some other kind of being from a "shadow" group of "the people," sort of Watchers, Watchers supreme....
The Adam Piersen, aka Methos' version had more to do with a peculiar sword he'd discovered at the site of a quickening which seemed to indicate these "people" were standing silent witness to the Gathering, the Game. Duncan had seen the sword. It was no sword. It was an anvil on a hilt, some dreadfully awkward piece of obstinate steel more suited to hammering nails than making a parry.
She'd done something to foul the main computer, given Dawson a password to correct the problem, and Dawson had in turn made the Watchers turn from their assorted tasks and press a global search for this whatever-she-was. Duncan could not visualize the woman. Dawson said she was regal in appearance. Adam said she was ugly...though he hadn't exactly used that word, it was clear the elder Immortal thought she was homely as a pig thicket. Both men described her as slender, but the fact remained, she had killed Beckard, a giant of an Immortal with an impressive collection of heads. And she had done so with Adam's sword, a heavy piece, though a feather when compared with the anvil she had told Joe was her own weapon.
Now the whole world of Watchers was out beating the bushes for this enigmatic Not-an-Immortal. The most curious thing about her--what did they call her? Ram--was her affect on what were otherwise fairly sensible adults. Duncan had decided she must be some sort of witch, like Cassandra, with a mind-addling mesmer trick with which she had enchanted the lot of them, poor old Beckard as well.
Adam and Joe had left for New York almost immediately after Duncan returned. They'd been gone a full fortnight and no telling when they would give up the chase after this tedious cairnwyte. And what would they do with her if they found her? Even Joe had no answer to that one.
Duncan's musings brought him to the center of the park and the bucolic little lake which graced its heart. The weather was so miserable, the park so empty, he was surprised to see a woman, some street person, crouched by the pond, meticulously shredding pieces of bread and throwing them into the water. In the ways of a warrior, he automatically took in the measure of this person, pitifully underdressed for such a chilly day, small, painfully thin, and there...
There was the unmistakable flash of fuligin tattoo on the inside of her left wrist which marked her a Watcher. What a marvelous disguise. Here was at least one of their number not out on this wild mallard melee.
"Hello, there," Duncan strolled up to the woman.
"Hello, there, yourself, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan Leod," she didn't look around at the tall handsome Celt looming behind her like a storm. She didn't stop shredding the bread or tossing the pieces into the pond.
"You know they've made it illegal to feed the ducks. There's quite a fine involved," Duncan crossed his long legs and settled down beside her. "North Territories, Chief Dawson would be most upset to return from New York and find one of his field operatives in jail."
"Oh," the word escaped in an enlightening sigh. "I wondered why he wasn't at the bar. Since he seems to have left a fox in charge of the chick house, perhaps, Dear Fox, you might tell me why Watcher Dawson has gone to New York."
Duncan did not hear the question at first. He was staring at the tattoo on her wrist. It had been altered in a peculiar fashion with a dime size portion missing out of the ring where it abutted the line of the wrist. "What?" his mind replayed him the sounds he'd missed. "Oh, he's looking for the...for Ram."
She stopped throwing the bread in the water. "Well, he's hardly going to find me there when I am here." .......................
If Joe Dawson, Chief Watcher of the Northwest Territories, hadn't been sure how he felt about Pennsylvania, New York, and the entire east coast two weeks ago, he had no doubt now.
Definitely a "Been there. Hated it." situation. Of course, they'd lost their luggage at O'Hare and then had been held overnight at LaGuardia while Dr. Adam Piersen answered all sorts of difficult questions concerning the carrying of large, sharp, metal objects stowed in the overhead carrier compartments. Somehow Adam's affable ways and quick wits had got them and his sword out of the airport by dawn.And that was just the beginning of what had been a long, downhill descent into a place far past exhaustion and logic and anything sensible. The Watchers' Network had located Ram at the LaGuardia airport in the company of two other women. (Two of "the people" he had surmised.) They had lost the trail shortly thereafter and Joe and Adam had come the long way cross the continent to see if they could help in the search.
Seemed a good idea at the time. Joe sat down on a flat rock and gazed down the hill at the old abandoned farm set by a brook and a forest of maples and birch. In another life, this would have been a lovely landscape, idyllic. Dawson had seen too much New Jersey countryside, too many pick-your- own family farms, too much rustication, too much uneven walking for a man who bought his legs in an orthotics shop.
Far below him, almost to the barn already, Adam sauntered happily in the early morning sun, kicking rocks, his large hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans, looking for all the world like a child in his element and not at all like the oldest Immortal in the world.
Or the second oldest, if Ram was to be believed. Hopefully, they would find her soon and she would clear up the confusion, the Chaos which was her nature and her name.
But one lead after another had evaporated, or like a rainbow's end, moved just beyond the next horizon. They were packed and ready to return to Seacouver when this latest report reached them. Dawson put it down to too much whiskey on the part of the Watcher involved. Adam had been thoroughly delighted with the tale and insisted they stay and check it out.
Fraser, the Watcher who made the report, was installed in Trenton, and he'd been scouring this valley as part of the search, looking for a cult or an abandoned building that might house such. That was how they had framed their search. Ram had mentioned a trial. Shadow people or no, they would have to manifest some sort of presence, especially if they were gathering together in any numbers. Other field agents were canvassing New York, Pennsylvania, the entire eastern coast, trying to pick up anything unusual, any sign of such a gathering: tourists, new real estate acquisitions, and so on. They'd stumbled on some fairly ominous nests of the New Right, but nothing to suggest Ram's trial or her "people."
Until Fraser's report. He'd come to this farm at the end of the day, had just crested the hill on foot--the road was so overgrown that walking was the only ingress--when he saw the barn light up like a hellish conflagration, spicing the air with the smell of fire and brimstone. Being a prudent sort, Fraser skirted the barn to the east, dictating his observations into the miniature recording machine he'd bought himself for Christmas. The quickening, for surely it was that, damped down after a few minutes, and he moved closer to the barn, waiting for the victor to emerge.
Three hours later, he was still waiting, circling the barn at intervals, cursing himself for not having worn something warmer. He was just considering getting closer when the barn lit up again and his proximity to the blast burned out his recorder. What the hell? Was this the preliminary elimination round for the Gathering or what. His curiosity got the better of his judgment and he moved closer after the second quickening, approaching the split Dutch door that hung askew on one rusted hinge. As he got close enough to see through the crack...
That was it. That was the whole bloody report, except that Fraser saw something that made him pass out cold and hit his head on one of the masonry stones at the barn's old foundation. That, or someone had picked up one of those stones and bashed him on the head. It remained he could not remember what he had seen, but it made him sweat when they pressed him on the subject.
Adam was convinced there was something to the story. Joe had let the elder Immortal talk him into renting yet another car (how he was going to pay for this amount of debt didn't seem to bother Adam at all, but then it was Joe,s credit card doing the service.) and off they went to this godforsaken little acre of bucolic heaven.
Joe stood and stretched. Adam had disappeared into the barn a while ago. Ah, well, his physical therapist would be so proud of this latest jaunt, Joe thought, all those months in the parallel bars when he could hardly get from point A to point B, now he was doing cross-country like a pro.
He had a ready retort all primed when he rounded the charred tall door of the old red barn and entered the blackened interior, but Adam was nowhere to be seen, just a dog or something thrashing in the straw at the far corner ‘neath the mote-ridden rays which spilled through the decrepit slats of the old structure.
In the next instant, Joe's eyes accommodated to the eerie light and he moved into high gear making the intervening distance in a rush that put his trek down the hill to shame.
In the shadows, in the grip of a horrendous, full blown seizure lay the oldest Immortal, eyes rolling in a frightening parody of doll's eyes, his broad fists flailing at the wall behind him, bloodying their knuckles on the blackened, fire-strafed barn boards.
. Duncan drove Ram to Joe's--a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup for her, and for him a phone so he could try to contact the owner somewhere in outer New Jersey or other unknown parts east.She,d been silent for the most part, gazing off at some far distant point, lost deep within to her own thoughts. By the look of her, she'd not eaten for a while...or bathed, by the smell. He could not see either Adam's pig thicket or Joe's regal description of her. She seemed a little helpless, a little vague, but there was that about her which suggested this was only a recent reversal of fortune, that in a more ordinary time she'd be more than a match in a fight, verbal or otherwise.
And she did have some of the gallows humor tones which were pure Adam Piersen. She did not, however, drape herself on the furniture as the elder Immortal was prone to do, rather she sat balanced and ready to rise at all times as if she had always been at war, or at least in very treacherous surroundings.
"Well?" Ram looked up, her nearly empty bowl of soup cradled in both hands.
"I can get you some more of that," Duncan offered and seeing she wasn't going to let that one go he headed for the kitchen to get another.
"Thank you," she set down the first bowl and started on the second. Halfway through, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
Which, Duncan thought, was a waste of time given the filthy condition of the sleeve. "Maybe some bread?" he suggested, "a beer?"
Ram shook her head. "You will have to excuse me," she picked up the soup spoon and transformed into a matron at a dinner party. "I've had a difficult time lately...I..." She put the spoon down. "I haven't done anything worthwhile for the past fortnight. Well, I did get a job. I start tomorrow. And then in two weeks when I get paid, I'll look for a place to live, and then..." Ram halted and breathed deeply. She was clearly on the point of tears.
Duncan leaned forward across the table and placed both his hands on hers. Cold as ice they were. Hard as steel.
"Forgive me my cowardice," she said in even, if breathy, tones. "You have been a most gracious executioner. There is really little point to play out this game. Another time, I might enjoy such banter, but just now I am still too weary to defend myself, even in jest. I have not recovered enough to even care. Let us be done with this. Perhaps if you get me a piece of paper and a pen I could leave Watcher Dawson and Doctor Piersen a note....I will not implicate you," she added hastily. "I value your friendship with them both too highly to interfere and you cannot be faulted that it fell to your lot to do me in."
"What are you saying?" Duncan heard the words, they simply held no meaning.
Her hazel eyes fixed him in a disturbing light. "You are very clever, Duncan of the Clan Leod, but I knew it was only a matter of time when they would send someone to behead me. Despite the sentence that I should only be banished to The Project, I never believed they would let me live for any appreciable amount of time, and surely never long enough to recover and actually participate in the-- what do you call it?--the Gathering?"
"I am a little surprised that they chose you, though," she added.
Duncan began to understand what she was saying. She was staring at him, thinking she saw the face of her death, with all the unflinching stillness of a field general. "I have no intention of harming you in any way, Ram."
They needed a change of subject, he thought, something lighter. God, the quiet conversation at the duck pond, the long walk to the car, the drive here, and never did she give any outward sign that she thought she was going to her death. She was either very, very brave, despite the protestation of cowardice...or she was very unbalanced.
Or, more likely, a bit of both. "And just why were you feeding the ducks and waiting so calmly for your death to walk up and sit down beside you, Ram?" His curiosity got the better of his intention to lift the discussion out of the pit.
She smiled. It lit her face and changed her looks dramatically. Here was a devil in the flesh, a demon to be reckoned with. The edges of her smile twisted wickedly and Duncan was reminded of Old Adam's evil ways. "You know," she began, her voice colored ever so slightly with the edge of deep laughter, "for war meat you are surprisingly quick of wit and keen of perception..."
War meat? The hell! Duncan thought he might learn to feel much less protective about this irritating pit bull.
"...but," Ram continued as if his ire were of no consequence, "You sometimes miss the obvious."
"Meaning?" Duncan's voice had descended an octave and started reverberating with some very old broguish tones.
"You didn't notice there were no ducks?"
"What?"
"Zero Ducks, Duncan. They rounded them up and trucked them off to the vet center at the zoo because of an outbreak of Salmonella in the restaurant east of the park, although it was more likely a case of bad cheese. Anyway the ducks are nix until their cultures come back negative."
Duncan rubbed his eyes. She was giving him a headache. "Well, now, perceptions aside, I believe you were the one feeding the zero ducks, Ram."
"But that only made it the more perfect," Ram replied and finished off the last of the soup.
THE CHAPTER OF NOT LETTING THE HEAD OF A MAN BE CUT OFF FROM HIS BODY IN KHERT-NETER. The Osiris Ani saith:- I am a Great One, the son of a Great One. [I am] Fire, the son of Fire, to whom was given his head after it had been cut off. The head of Osiris was not removed from his body, and the head of Osiris Ani shall not be removed from his body. I have knitted myself together, I have made myself whole and complete. I shall renew my youth. I am Osiris Himself, the Lord of Eternity.(The Egyptian Book of the Dead) "Adam," Joe nudged his flying partner and held his hand up to the stew. "Two beers," he said and went back to waking up the lanky, snoring young man in the window seat.Adam woke with a jerk and batted down the window shade with a hand that had been skinned to the bone not eight hours earlier. No sign of his fit in the barn remained. No outward mark except that his usually youthful demeanor was haggard and drawn and he'd done nothing but sleep since...
Joe wondered exactly what had happened at the old burned-out barn, but Adam was not forth- coming, the brief times he was even awake. So Joe called upon one of his many talents, sympathetic bartender, to see if the Old Man would open up. It could be the one piece of information they needed to find Ram. "Beer?"
Adam pushed slowly up in his seat. "Hu--oh. Yeah, sure" He wrapped his long fingers round the can and flipped up the tab with his thumb. After several sips he lifted the window shade a crack and squinted. "Where are we?" He shifted in his seat and stretched his shoulders. Suddenly he looked up.
"Under the seat," Joe had seen to stowing the sword. After the trip out and its attendent difficulties, he'd gotten Paris HQ to send him the necessary papers for transporting an antique weapon of great value for purposes of sale or display. "And I think we're somewhere over Wyoming."
"Anything you want to talk about, buddy? We've got a coupla hours to kill." Joe took a sip of his own beer and gazed non-chalantly round the cabin.
"You want to tell me what happened?" Adam surprised him by voicing the very question Joe had thought to ask.
Joe stared at the elder Immortal.
"Like, how I got out of the barn, or perhaps how I ended up here, over... Wyoming?" Adam shrugged, finished off the beer, and reached up to hit the stew button with his knuckle. He immediately drew his hand back and rubbed it.
Joe had noticed this before. Despite their rapid regenerative capacities they still retained a flesh memory for injuries, like his own phantom pain, he supposed. "You had a seizure," he supplied.
Adam mulled this over, "Yes?"
"And you banged the shit out of your hands," Joe continued.
The stewardess leaned over and took Adam's dead beer can, trading it for a new one. He didn't open it. He rolled the ice cold metal across his forehead. If Joe didn't know better he'd bet his friend and fellow Watcher were hung over.
"Are you all right?" he asked solicitously.
Adam opened his eyes, but he appeared to be looking inward, taking stock. "No," he said finally, as if his own answer surprised him. "I don't--" Adam chewed his lip, "Did I--?"
"What?"
Adam shook his head and his breath escaped in a hiss. "There weren't any dead headless bodies lying round the barn when you found me?"
"No!" Joe replied too loudly. Several of the other passengers looked their way. "No," he repeated in a whisper. "Why you asking?"
"Because what I do remember--and it isn't much, I,ll grant," Adam struggled with the words, "Joe, I was Quickened, as violently as if I'd taken several heads, all at once."
The lady ahead of him turned around and peaked over the seat. Adam smiled widely and toasted her with the as-yet-unopened beer. She turned back quickly and checked for her purse, gathering it into her lap like a talisman.
Undaunted, Adam continued what was to be a six-beer story which floated them into Seacouver International, two, if not three, sheets to the wind, with the poor woman in the next row demanding to have her seat changed.
............(The Trial) ........................................ Adam had to admit he was more interested in the chase than the prize. As he strolled down the path to the three-story ancient edifice of a once-upon-a-time red barn, he had considered how much easier it was to focus on the intricacies of the hunt and not the quarry. His mind was still so unsettled about the curious woman whom he had worked beside for nearly a decade and taken so utterly for granted.This latest report from Fraser in the Trenton office had given Adam one more day's reprieve before he would be forced to decide whether to return to Seacouver with Joe Dawson and work through what had happened there or give up on it all and return to Paris HQ where his research was running into two months' overdue. He felt the beginnings of entanglements. He did not like that at all. He supposed that was the price he paid for staying close to the strongest Immortal on the planet. But the price had been escalating at a frightening rate. Yes, he would soon have to decide about a great many things--and this latest business with Ram merely served to bring all else into focus.
The barn loomed far above him blocking the warm morning sun and throwing a blanket of chill and darkness over him. It had taken on an ominous monolithic quality as he approached, quite out of sync with the gentle rolling countryside of autumn in the eastern farmlands. His skills as a warrior had gotten a tad rusty over the past two centuries, but it took no such skills to ken this place was malevolent, that something incredibly dire had moved this old barn out of the ordinary and into the profane.
Or so it seemed to Adam, every fiber of his being saying one thing only, and that was to flee with all haste. Which only made him the more stubborn about entering the decrepit building and discovering that his fears were groundless.
The stench was incredible. Soggy still-smoking hay, the incendiary remains of the years and years of manure laid down by the animals who had bedded here. Yucck! Chickens, he thought, the very worst smell in the entire world, wet and burned old feathers and eye-watering methane from their acrid droppings, now cremated. There was another smell here, almost missed beneath the broader assault, but Adam's warrior ways to the fore, he knew it immediately--blood.
Adam followed his ample and able nose to the back wall of the barn, stirring the dust motes and smoke in his wake. The entire back wall was drenched in the bright tinny odor of it and stained from the main cross beam high above his head to the straw and dirt of the floor as if they'd hung the carcass of a large steer there and slit its throat. Adam contemplated the scene and let several possible explanations run through his mind in no apparent order, letting the various elements dictate his thoughts. No coherent image formed. He reached forward to touch the blood on the wall...
And that had been the last he knew of anything until Joe offered him a beer on the plane over Wyoming half a day later. ..................
Ram shook her head. "To the right and half-way down that alley. I don't suppose you'd let me borrow that elegant dragon's head blade."
"You don't suppose exactly," Duncan was already out of the bird, said katana firmly gripped in his right hand, beneath his greatcoat. "And I don't suppose you know who it is."
"Carlisle," she answered getting out of the car. "I was wrong about you. I apologize. It does make sense that they would send Carlisle."
Duncan spat on his left palm and offered it to her over the roof of the car. Ram repeated the gesture laughing and they closed hands together.
"You know the meaning of this?" Duncan retrieved his hand and headed for the alley.
Ram followed. "That we stand each other's shield until death." She shrugged, "We used to do it with wine and blood and a long soliloquy about faithfulness and loyalty and..."
"And don't we all miss the good old days," Duncan snorted. "Stay back!"
"Aye, aye, Leod."
Duncan heeded only the motion before him, a slight swaying of the even, shadows in the gullet of the alley. "Carlisle," he called out.
"MacLeod," came back the answer. "I have not come for you."
So, Duncan thought, Ram isn't just paranoid. "If you leave now, there will be no consequences, Carlisle."
"And if you stand aside, I will be done with the bitch behind you," Carlisle was not known for his delicacy of speech, being a younger Immortal with less than a century of tempering in the finer skills. "I'll even let you have her Quickening if that's your desire, Highlander."
Duncan's left arm caught Ram across her shoulders as she came round. "I said, stay back! I'll deal with this insult. We'll let you get the next one. All right?!" he hissed.
Her impression of meek submission fell well wide of the mark, "As you wish, Lord Leod." She took one single step backward.
Carlisle stepped forward. "Hey, it's your choice, MacLeod. After your Quickening, she won't have a chance in hell of escaping me!"
Duncan took a deep breath, loosened his neck and dropped his coat. His katana whistled, bright and keen, a wooshing arc up behind his right shoulder. Carlisle advanced towards him. Should have stood his ground and made me come to him, Duncan thought idly, taking the measure of the scrappy young man with the golden hair and the war fever in his pale blue eyes. This one would defeat himself.
It would only be a matter of time, precision, and patience and the Highlander owned a wealth of each.
Adam Piersen and Joseph Dawson were more or less serving detention at the Seacouver International Airport. It wasn't so bad really, seeing that it only amounted to getting locked in the VIP lounge while the authorities figured out how to dispose of two such raucous gentlemen, neither of whom could even remember their correct address. They probably could have done, with only the half dozen beers between them when the plane reached Seacouver, but their plane was detoured into a lengthy holding pattern because of a sudden storm and their tastes had turned to the harder stuff, what with it all being served free to assuage the irritated and delayed passengers. They didn't so much land at Seacouver as float in on a tide of Jim Beam and overblown hilarity, two part harmony and all.
"Well?" Joe stared at several Adams draped across the way on a deep red couch.
"Well? Well, what?" Adam rolled over too quickly. The glow began to dissipate in a wave of nausea.
"I hope you're proud of yourself, old man."
"Me?" Adam sounded almost hurt at the accusation. "Oh, and it wasn't you who launched into the third verse of Bonny Heather on the Doon, or some such drek when the officer told us to be quiet."
Joe drew up to that dignified posture that only a man deep in his cups can obtain. "Granted," he said nobly.
"Well," Adam nodded, carefully, "just so we are clear on that."
Airport security appeared at the door with a tray of coffee and ice packs. The man set the lot on the coffee table near Joe. "We can't reach that party, MacLeod, you gave us...still busy, but we will keep on trying. And in the meantime, gentlemen," he said this last as if it were an epithet and indicated the coffee, "you might try to work on your...composure."
Joe poured himself a cup, "Tell me what happened after you touched the wall."
Adam crawled over to the table grabbed one of the ice packs for his forehead and lay back on the floor. "Let it go, Joe. I saw things, strange, unpleasant... nothing made sense."
"Coffee?" Joe offered.
"Oh, God, no," just the thought made Adam ill.
"Oh, look," Joe warbled. He was more used to being drunk than the oldest man in the world, probably not something he could be proud of, but it came in handy in this particular instant. "They've sent us a collection of petite fours and marzipan cookies, lovely little..."
"Mercy!" Adam howled and rolled over on his stomach, burying his face in the ice. "Damn you, Dawson."
"Visions," Joe was nothing if not persistent, "you were talking about visions."
"All right, you son of a jackal--"
"And are we reverting to old Egyptian curses now? Poor Adam."
Adam levered up to sitting and grabbed a second pack of ice for his belly. "I felt as if both my wrists were broken and disjointed, as if they were being pulled off my arms..."
It was Joe's turn to be nauseous.
"There was a sea of faces before me. I knew them. I felt as if I loved them, but I had never seen them before. And I was so incredibly angry and weary and sad...and then..." Adam put the ice packs down and gazed up at Joe.
Joe tried to focus. He was glad not to be more sober. This was not Methos, not Adam Piersen, this was a face entirely unfamiliar to him. He looks like a child who has just been slapped across the face suddenly and for no apparent reason.
"I have died before, Joe, countless times, but nothing like this. I came apart, I..." Adam shook his head. He searched for words that never existed. "The faces, it was as if the faces took me away from myself, piece-by-piece, as I hung dying, dead..."
"And I was one of the faces, taking, Quickening, with the force of the First Fire Itself...."
"And then the agony was gone. The faces, gone. The world, gone."
"And I was..." Adam idly picked up the ice and rolled it in his hands. Sweat had beaded on his forehead like blood, running down his nose, and his whole face had taken on the color of cave lichens. He bent forward and buried his face in the ice again. "I wasn't," Joe heard him mumble. "I just was not, not anymore, never again...nothing.".........................
He was entirely unprepared for what happened next, both better and, by far, worse, than he had expected.
"Listen to me, damnation!" very bony knuckles rapped down on the back of Duncan's head and he startled out of his trance.
"Hey!" he ducked reflexively. Oh, God, she was too near, she would...Oh the hell with it. If she didn't have the sense to stay back, then let Ram get what she deserved.
"Will you listen!" those husky tones of hers had surely gained a head-splitting stridency more painful than the knuckles. Didn't she know that they would both be howling soon enough?
"Relax, Duncan," she was kneeling or crouched behind him, her softened tones right at ear level. "Wait for it. Let this be the first head you take, not the several hundredth one you've wasted."
Duncan glanced behind him and he was sorry immediately that he had done so. The sight struck at one of his very few vulnerable places, one of his most, the blind spot of denial he shared with all of the Immortals. She was holding Carlisle's head in her arms like a baby. He would not think about this. This was not something he needed to know. This was nothing he wanted to know. God, save him from this truth.
But there was no such helpful Savior for Duncan this day. Carlisle was still alive and would continue to be so for several minutes more. His pale eyes opened widely, thick with tears, and his mouth worked savagely, trying to speak, making no sound. And the next permutation struck the Highlander, midgut, as surely as Beckard's blade had done Ram: I will die this way, disembodied, utterly helpless, voiceless, unable to breath or scream, able only to watch my life's ebb trigger the Quickening of another.
And everything I know or have known, all that I do or have done, everyone I love or have loved will be ripped from me and nothing, nothing will remain. An icy terror gripped him, tracked the veins of his arms up to his neck, and held him in an obscene paralysis of abject fear. Into the heart of this horror, Ram's tender voice washed over him like a benediction. Her words were for Carlisle, but he was no less blessed by them.
"You are not alone," she spoke the gentle littany as if it were a psalm. "I will be with you the entire journey. All that you are will be made known to you and will be given you, and forgiven you, and laid aside without regret..."
There was more, but Duncan found he had lost himself in the melody and the meaning, far from the words, far from the fear, able to look upon his inevitable demise with a calm sadness. Even if I am alone, he thought, as doubtless I will be, still I will have this moment and that will be comfort enough.
He felt her fingers graze lightly, cool as springtime, against the back of his neck.
And all that she said was, "Surrender."
"What do you mean 'good news' bad news?, Crane!"
Adam woke up and gingerly lifted his head from the floor of the VIP airport lounge. Apparently, Joe had gotten through to MacLeod.
"Slow down...What? Oh, alleluia!" Joe put the phone to his chest and addressed Adam. "They,ve found Ram!"
Good, Adam thought. Yes, that was a good thing. Wasn't it?
"Okay," Joe took a deep breath. "Tell me the rest."
The rest sent Joe Dawson bolt upright, sober as a judge.
ANOTHER CHAPTER OF TUAT AND OF COMING FORTH BY DAY...Open is the land of Unu. Shut is the head of Thoth. Perfect is the Eye of Horus. I have delivered the Eye of Horus, the shining one, the ornament of the Eye of Ra, the Father of the Gods. I am that same Osiris who dwelleth in Amentet. Osiris knoweth his day, which cometh to an end. I am Set, the Father of the Gods. I shall never come to an end. (The Egyptian Book of the Dead) The alley off Cambie Street had taken on the appearance of a parking lot. A dozen assorted cars were stacked in the narrow way behind Duncan,s dojo and the lights in the fifth floor window shone out like a shorelight warning of treacherous climes.All the long ride from northwest to southeast Seacouver, Joe could get nothing from Adam about their current predicament except that, yes, he knew what the problem was, no, he had no idea what to do about it, and no, it would take far too long to explain.
The problem? Ram was dead. Again. Laid out lifeless blooding Mac's new couch. Again. Adam was working up a lather. Again.
And the crisis? Ram had remained dead over four hours now. Joe knew of nothing in any of the Watcher chronicles--and they were extensive, due in part to Ram herself--which reported such a lengthy delay between death and revival, or Awakening, in an Immortal. Joe was sicker than he had been in a long while. They should never have gone looking for her. He should never have set the Watchers to the global search for the mysterious Ram simply for a whim of his old heart. One of his own men had killed her.
"What the hell happened!" Joe demanded as he departed Mac's lift, Adam following hesitantly behind. "Mac!" the howl was partly order, partly plaint aimed at the Highlander who sat on the floor of his loft next to the dead body of Ram. His right hand rested lightly on her side, waiting for heart or lung to give sign of life's returning.
"You're dismissed. The search is canceled. Get!" Joe growled at Crane and his minions.
"But MacLeod told me to shoot her. As God is my witness, Dawson," Crane nearly whined.
Dawson didn't care. "Just leave, Crane. We'll talk in the morning." He heard the lift descending but his attention, what he could muster, stayed on the body. The inebriation, the circle-upon-circle of events, the late hour, Adam shrunk back in the shadows of the kitchen area, all conspired to render the event supra-, if not super-, natural, or perhaps preternatural, like the eerie glow of a candle in a gothic novel.
It just wasn't any of it real. Joe never seemed to be both oars in the water when he was around this woman. He couldn't even picture her in a normal setting or situation.
And he sure as hell wasn't ever going to get used to seeing her dead. "What happened, Mac?"
Duncan looked up as if he had only that moment noticed there was anyone else in the room. God, Joe thought, I am not alone in the ether here. The Highlander's face was perfectly set in absolute peace, like a child sleeping, or a saint, or a patient at the end of a terminal illness. In the midst of this peculiar tragedy-in-the-making, his Immortal friend was shining in beatification.
The sight of him made Joe lower his voice, "Mac, please, tell me what happened."
"I had just killed Carlisle," Duncan began in a haunted voice. "She did something to alter the Quickening. She held it back and then she told me to surrender, and then..." his words drifted down to silence.
Joe collapsed in Mac's favorite chair. Poor Ram, such a damned incompetent trio of champions was never assembled on the face of the planet. Mac in some religious fever. Adam lost in left field and his grizzly visions. And myself, Joe thought, a cripple, and drunk as a deacon besides.
"...I felt his life, those things which gave him joy, the hurts he was dealt. She took me down the way of his death and I saw..." Duncan's eyes brimmed with bright, fevered tears, but he was not weeping.
Well, these were not the times for a subtle approach. Ram was dead. Time for the Great Philosophies later. Joe cracked Duncan across the back with his cane. "Tell me," he croaked, "How did Ram get shot?"
"The Watchers surrounded us after the Quickening. Crane told two of your men to bind Ram. She warned them. She said she could not be responsible if they tried to tie her up. Ram told them she would go with them, but she couldn,t tolerate being bound. Nobody listened. She had one of the Watchers by the neck quicker than anyone could react. I could see her eyes, I mean," he paused and turned back to the body on the couch. "There is a look a warrior gets...it's in the eyes, I can't ...anyway it's there when a warrior commits to the kill, and it was there in Ram's, clear as sunrise. There wasn't any time to think of a better plan. I was still on the ground. I couldn't have reached her in any case."
Joe waited.
"I told Crane to shoot her." Duncan swallowed and sighed, "and he did. And she won't wake up. I think I've gotten her killed, Joe."
"Well, that makes two of us," Adam joined them.
"Tell us what this is," Joe begged him for what must have been the tenth time in the past hour.
"She doesn't want to come back again," he said it as if it were obvious.
"Why?" Joe fingered his cane. It had worked well enough on Duncan and this wasn't the first time he'd wanted to crack Adam's very thick skull.
Adam settled down on the floor beside Duncan and leaned his back against the couch, facing away from the corpse of his late secretary and maybe mother. He folded his arms and wrestled with how to tell them.
"I'll keep this simple," he started. "She was in that barn. She was..." Adam rose nervously and shifted around behind the couch, hands in his back pockets, staring at the loft ceiling. "Ram's died a lot lately, or she's been made to do so as part of her sentencing. Each time, because of the way she dies," he looked down at Duncan. "You've been with her in death, you have some idea of what that is like."
"Yes," Duncan replied.
Joe thought he would scream if Adam didn't hurry up and get on with it. Ram was still dead, damn it! He couldn't shake the feeling that the longer they delayed the less likely they would ever get her back again.
"And wasn't it just a little hard to come back? Are you not in fact only partially returned by the look of you?" Adam continued.
Duncan nodded. Joe hit his head on the chair back. But what did he expect after all? A fast conversation between two Immortals?
"But you knew you were coming back to a life you enjoy, for the most part, to a familiar and comfortable..." Adam paused, "home."
"And---?" Joe barked. Damn them all!
Adam ducked his chin down and he began rubbing his wrists. "Ram thinks she will be returning to..." he chose the next word very carefully, so carefully in fact, that it wasn't quite true. "torment. She has lost the will to return. She has no reason to."
"Good God, do you mean she's killing herself?" Joe could not believe Adam's explanation.
"No," Duncan interjected, "I believe we've done that well enough for her."
"We can't let this happen!" Joe despised their complacency. What could he do? How could he put this right? What magic was there...? "Call her," he said. "Say her name, call her back."
Both Immortals stared at Dawson. Duncan leaned close to Ram.
"No," Adam pulled him away. "This is for me to do. And I'd be happier about this if you would both leave."
It was clear neither Duncan nor Dawson had any such intention.
"I have to call her by her real name. I don't want you to hear it." Adam repeated his plea.
"Why?" Dawson asked.
"History plods a curious course," Adam started critically, "One era's deity is the next era's demon, one..."
"Methos," Duncan exploded, "Just do it!"
Adam cleared his throat and took both her cold hands in his. "Lord Chaos," he began softly in English, then more strongly in Egyptian, "Setan,m, return. Set, you are the beginning of the gods, you are without end. Every night do you go down in death, Sata, and every dawn are you reborn."
He was quoting from the Book of the Dead, in English and Egyptian, speaking as if Ram were one of the gods therein.
Still as the pyramids she lay. None of Adam's incantations making any difference whatsoever.
Adam laid his forehead down on her hands and his shoulders drooped in a posture of utter hopelessness. Duncan moved forward to take him away from this. Joe sank down in the chair and tried to think of anything at all that might get them out of this. Just on the verge of finding her again he had gotten her killed. Damn him to hell! He almost wished she had died after her fight with Beckard. That would have been awful, but nothing like this.
Adam straightened up, put both his hands either side of her face, as she had done with him that first night, "Mother," he began again, reaching back across the eons to a childhood he could hardly believe let alone remember, "You taught me the three precepts of the King: Out of Darkness, Light."
His voice steadied and the volume rose, "Out of Sadness, Joy."
"Out of Chaos..." Adam set his jaw against the wave of mourning which cracked his throat, "Out of Chaos, Order."
And then he called her by her true name, the one he was loathe to use before anyone else lest they misunderstand. It used to be an honorable and holy name, sacred before the gods, but that was so long ago, there was no one left to remember. "Satan, return. I need you."
Such a slender and complicated thread was his faith, that he jolted back when the grey eyes opened.
And he ran from the room when she spoke his name...
