Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(91)
Author: Anne Rice

“And you would take it from me?” demanded Gordon with blazing eyes. He threw his anger in the face of Ash’s anger. “You would take it from me as you will take my life? Who are you to take it? Do you know what I know of your own people?”

“I wrote it!” declared Ashlar, his face now flushed with his rage. “It’s mine, this book!” he whispered, as if he didn’t dare to speak aloud. “I inscribed every word,” he said. “I painted every picture. It was for Columba that I did this, yes! And it is mine!” He stepped back, clutching the book against his chest. He trembled and blinked his eyes for a moment and then spoke again in his soft voice: “And all your talk,” he said, “of your research, of remembered lives, of … chains of memory!”

The silence quivered with his anger.

Gordon shook his head. “You’re an impostor,” he said.

No one spoke.

Gordon remained firm, his face almost comic in its insolence. “Taltos, yes,” he said, “St. Ashlar, never! Your age would be beyond calculation!”

No one spoke. No one moved. Rowan’s eyes were searching Ash’s face. Michael watched all, it seemed, as Yuri did.

Ash gave a deep sigh. He bowed his head slightly, still holding tight to the book. His fingers relaxed ever so slightly around the edges of it.

“And what do you think,” he asked sadly, “is the age of that pathetic creature who sits at her loom below?”

“But it was of the remembered life that she spoke, and other remembered lives related to her in her—”

“Oh, stop it, you miserable old fool!” Ash pleaded softly. His breath came haltingly, and then at last the fire started to drain from his face.

“And this you kept from Aaron Lightner,” he said. “This you kept from the greatest scholars of your Order, for you and your young friends to weave a filthy plot to steal the Taltos! You are no more than the peasants of the Highlands, the ignorant, brutish savages that lured the Taltos into the circle to kill him. It was the Sacred Hunt all over again.”

“No, never to kill!” cried Gordon. “Never to kill. To see the coupling! To bring Lasher and Tessa together on Glastonbury Tor!” He began to weep, choking, gasping, his voice half strangled as he went on. “To see the race rise again on the sacred mountain where Christ himself stood to propagate the religion that changed the whole world! It was not to kill, never to kill, but to bring back to life! It’s these witches who have killed, these here who destroyed the Taltos as if he were nothing but a freak of nature! Destroyed him, coldly and ruthlessly, and without a care for what he was, or might become! They did it, not I!”

Ash shook his head. He clutched the book ever more tightly.

“No, you did it,” said Ash. “If only you had told your tale to Aaron Lightner, if only you had given him your precious knowledge!”

“Aaron would never have cooperated!” Gordon cried. “I could never have made such a plan. We were too old, both of us. But those who had the youth, the courage, the vision—they sought to bring the Taltos safely together!”

Again Ash sighed. He waited, measuring his breaths. Then again he looked at Gordon.

“How did you learn of the Mayfair Taltos?” Ash demanded. “What was the final connection? I want to know. And answer me now or I will rip your head from your shoulders and place it in the lap of your beloved Tessa. Her stricken face will be the very last thing you see before the brain inside sputters and dies.”

“Aaron,” said Gordon. “It was Aaron himself.” He was trembling, perhaps on the verge of blacking out. He backed up, eyes darting from right to left. He stared at the cabinet from which he’d taken the book.

“His reports from America,” said Gordon, moving closer to the cabinet. “The Council was convened. The information was of critical importance. A monstrous child had been born to the Mayfair witch, Rowan. It had happened on Christmas Eve. A child that had grown within hours perhaps to the size of a man. Members throughout the world were given the description of this being. It was a Taltos, I knew it! And only I knew.”

“You evil man,” whispered Michael. “You evil little man.”

“You call me that! You, who destroyed Lasher! Who killed the mystery as if he were a pedestrian criminal to be dispatched by you to hell in a barroom brawl?”

“You and the others,” said Rowan quickly. “You did this on your own.”

“I’ve told you we did.” He took another step towards the cabinet. “Look, I won’t tell you who the others were, I told you.”

“I mean the Elders weren’t any part of it,” said Rowan.

“The excommunications,” said Gordon, “were bogus. We created an intercept. I didn’t do it. I don’t even understand. But it was created, and we let through only those letters to and from the Elders that did not pertain to this case. We substituted our own exchanges for those between Aaron or Yuri and the Elders, and those from the Elders to them. It wasn’t difficult—the Elders, with their penchant for secrecv and simplicity, had left themselves wide open for such a trick.”

“Thank you for telling us this,” said Rowan gravely. “Perhaps Aaron suspected it.”

Yuri could scarcely bear the kindness with which she was speaking to the villain, giving him comfort, when he should have been strangled then and there.

Then she said, “What else can we get out of him?” She looked at Ash. “I think we’re finished with him.”

Gordon understood what was happening. She was giving Ash permission to kill him. Yuri watched as, slowly, Ash set down the precious book again and turned to face Gordon, his hands free now to carry out the sentence which he himself had imposed.

“You know nothing,” Gordon declared suddenly. “Tessa’s words, her history, the tapes I made. Only I know where they are.”

Ash merely stared at him. His eyes had grown narrow, and his eyebrows came together now in a scowl.

Gordon turned, looking to the left and the right.

“Here!” he cried. “I have another important thing which I shall voluntarily show you.”

He dashed to the cabinet again, and when he spun around, he held a gun in both hands, pointing it at Ash, and then at Yuri, and then at Rowan and Michael.

“You can die by this,” said Gordon. “Witches, Taltos, all of you! One bullet from this through your heart, and you are as dead as any man!”