The Adept by Katherine Kurtz & Deborah Turner Harris

Author:Katherine Kurtz & Deborah Turner Harris [Kurtz, Katherine & Harris, Deborah Turner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Event Horizon EBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

ADAM left instructions with Humphrey for breakfast at nine. He willed himself to wake at six. Fifteen minutes later, he had showered, shaved, and dressed with the brisk self-discipline of long habit. As he made his way quietly downstairs to the library, leaving his butler and young associate to enjoy a few more hours’ much-needed rest, the house was still and silent.

Peregrine had left his sketch pad on the table before the library fireplace. Adam opened it to the second sketch of Gillian Talbot as he carried it over to his desk and sat down. Rummaging in a desk drawer produced an ornately decorated jeweller’s loupe of antique design, which he set on the desk atop the sketch pad. Then he spun his chair around and propelled himself with a push to the nearest bookcase.

The lowest shelf housed an assortment of maps and atlases. Adam selected a large, fold-out road map of Britain and a world atlas. He hoped he would not need the latter. Pushing himself back to the desk, he set the atlas and jeweller’s loupe aside and opened the map. It covered most of the desk when he spread it out, and he pulled the sketch pad out from under it as he sat back in his chair, tapping it lightly against his hand in distracted speculation as he cast his gaze over the map. Then he drew a deep breath and shifted his gaze to the sketch of Gillian Talbot, fixing her image firmly in memory, before slipping the pad back under the map.

“All right, Gillian, my girl,” he murmured, setting his right hand on the map over the bulge of the sketch pad. “You’re going to have to help me a little on this. Let’s see if you’re anywhere in the British Isles . . .”

Closing his eyes, he set himself to settling into trance, focusing on the sketch pad under his hand, and the resonances echoed in the sketches Peregrine had made. He tried for the Michael Scot connection first, since his personal experience was of that identity; but that facet of the soul he sought was nowhere in evidence on the Inner Planes.

Temporarily stymied, he shifted his focus to the Gillian Talbot matrix. Here, he had less to go on from Firsthand experience, for he knew Gillian: only by the sketches Peregrine had made; but the Gillian identity had the advantage of being currently in incarnation, physically anchored somewhere on this planet. Her astral traces should be easier, than Scot’s to pick up—if he could identify them.

Patiently, eyes still closed, he began running his hand over the map of Britain, mind still and receptive, using a vast, overlapping figure-eight pattern that eventually would sweep across every square inch of the map. As he settled into the sweeping motion, he tried to put the physical appearance of the familiar map out of mind, focusing on the energies, as if they were eddies of current in some vast cauldron to be stirred with his hand.

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