Kerr, Katherine - Deverry 04 by Kerr Katherine

Author:Kerr, Katherine
Language: eng
Format: epub

No Hawkmaster would have either the power or the knowledge to exorcise a ritual chamber at all, much less from some great distance. In fact, the Old One had absolutely no idea of how Nevyn could have done such a thing, and with good reason, since the job was impossible for any human or elf, even one of Nevyn’s power and learning. For a long time the Old One paced back and forth and swore with the pettiest foul oaths of the marketplace and gutter until at last, shaking and out of breath, he stood before the altar and stared up at the banner of the reversed pentagram on the wall behind it. In the flickering lantern light the star seemed to swell and glimmer. All at once the Old One was afraid; he felt power gathering around him of a kind that he had never invoked. In the central pentagon of the evil star a point of light gleamed, spread itself into a thin glowing mist, and as he watched in horrified fascination, images appeared in that mist.

They were persons of some sort, but nothing so earthly as human beings or elves or as otherworldly as pure spirits, presences rather that had form and shape but no true bodies. Since he was, after all, a master of magic in his twisted way, he knew that he was seeing only reflections or perhaps projections of these beings from some plane as far removed from the astral as the astral is from us, and that trying to

communicate with them directly would be a waste of power and nothing more. At first he assumed that they must be beings of great evil, since they were appearing on a ground prepared for the working of evil, but then he remembered that his ritual room was dead and empty, and the goat-star banner nothing but a barren sign as well. In an electric stab of fear he gasped for breath.

At that precise moment three great knocks boomed out, rolling through the room and shaking the walls. The altar on which he was leaning cracked from side to side with a noise like the stroke of an enormous gong, and stone dust plumed in the trembling air. With a shriek the Old One pitched forward, but such was his presence of mind and true strength of concentration that he grabbed the lantern as he fell and blew out the flame, or the room would have caught and burnt with him in it. In the midst of the rolling thunder of the knocks, he heard or thought he heard a voice, a single word that was another crash of thunder in itself.

‘Unclean!’

Lying in the dark the Old One shrieked again, wallowing from side to side as he tried to rise, as trapped as a tortoise turned onto its back. He could feel his ancient heart pounding, the blood throbbing in his neck and temples, and for a moment he thought his death was bursting out from within him the way a plant bursts open its seed.

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