"Katherine Kurtz - Adept 01 - The Adept" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

Peregrine nodded his assent, his closed eyelids fluttering as he drew a slow, deep breath. Quietly Adam
retreated to his chair, sitting back casually to watch, legs crossed. When the artist looked up, a few seconds
later, the dull, hazel eyes had taken on an inner luminance, like lamps newly kindled.
Adam neither moved nor spoke, only watching his subject's minute nuances of expression, feeling
Peregrine's eyes on his face. After a moment's searching scrutiny, the artist brought pencil and paper
together and began to sketch rapidly, his gaze rarely leaving his subject. After a moment he frowned and
scribbled vigorously over what he had drawn, and began on another. When he scribbled out the second
sketch and started again, looking more and more confused, Adam quietly rose and came to set one hand on
his shoulder in gentle restraint, the other pressing lightly to his forehead.
"Close your eyes and relax, Peregrine," he murmured. "Relax and let yourself drift. It seems I've set you a
more difficult task than I realized. Just relax and rest easy for a few minutes, while I see what you've drawn."
Peregrine surrendered the pad and pencil without resistance, eyes closing and hands fluttering to his lap with
a relieved sigh. Adam watched him for a few seconds, absently sticking the pencil through the spiral binding
at the top of the pad, then turned his attention to what Peregrine had drawn.
Fortunately, the scribbling had not entirely obliterated the work. The sketch at the top showed a lean,
bearded face with deep eyes and a patrician nose set above a stern, passionate mouth. A chain mail coif
surrounded the face, surmounted by a conical helmet in the style of the late thirteenth century. The device
delicately shaded on the left shoulder of the mantle was the distinctive, eight-pointed Maltese cross of,
among others, the Knights Templar.
Adam pursed his lips, nodding as he realized what Peregrine had glimpsed - echoes of a past life whose
details were only accessible to Adam himself when in a deeply altered trance state, and mostly elusive
during ordinary consciousness. As a psychiatrist, he preferred to believe that his "far memories" were
psychological constructs - tricks that the mind played, in order to deal with material more acceptably
couched in the fantasy of a past existence than in the cold, stark terms of reality. The mystical part of him
preferred to believe that it all was literally true, in some way he could not begin to explain.
As a compromise, he permitted himself to function as if it were true, simply accepting and using the insights
he sometimes received from his "previous selves," because they usually worked - even if the methods he
employed often did not square with his medical training or blunt logic, much less his affiliation with the
religious establishment to which he gave generous support.
Meanwhile, more tangible proofs confirmed that Sir Adam Sinclair, Baronet, did have ancestral ties, at least,
to the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem. The tower house awaiting restoration in the north field had been in
the Sinclair family for at least five hundred years - a former Templar site, as, indeed, were most places in
Scotland with "temple" in the name. It was Templemor, not Strath-mourne, from which the Sinclair family took
their baronial title. And it was said that Templar blood ran in the Sinclair line as well, from the dark times after
the Order had been suppressed nearly everywhere except Scotland.
At this remove, some of the historical "proofs" were hazy, of course - not that it really mattered. Some truths
simply were. And the ultimate truth about the Templars, which even history books tended to substantiate -
and which Adam's heart had never doubted - was that the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem had pursued a
course of single-minded devotion to the defense of hallowed ground and the guardianship of secret truths,
many suffering burning martyrdom rather than betray what the Order held sacred. And though a
fourteenth-century King of France had set out to destroy the Order, hoping to gain possession of their
legendary wealth, he was never to know that the greatest treasure of the Templars lay not in gold, but in
knowledgeтАж.
Knowledge. Peregrine Lovat seemed to have it - though it was clear that he did not know what he had.
Thoughtful, Adam returned his attention to the young man's work. Behind the scribbling, the second sketch
showed the same strength of determination as the first, but the face was clean-shaved and hawk-visaged,
framed in lappets of boldly striped linen. The tall headpiece Peregrine had sketched above the linen was the
double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, incorporating a solar disk set between tall ostrich plumes - the
adornment of an Egyptian high priest.
No longer really seeing the sketch, Adam turned slightly to gaze into the fire. The second drawing was far