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

When Peregrine nodded, Adam drew his own chair closer to the rosewood table, reducing the distance
between himself and his subject.
"Thank you. I will not betray the trust you've given me. Now, I want you to go very, very deep - twice as deep
as you are now. Go so deep that nothing you may hear with your ears will register on any conscious level
until I touch your wrist like this and tell you to come back." He briefly pressed Peregrine's wrist between the
first two fingers of both hands.
"Only if real physical danger should threaten, such as a fire, will you counter this instruction and come out of
trance. Now lean your head back and sleep. Sleep deeply, hear nothing, and remember nothing. Deep
asleep."
When he was satisfied that Peregrine was, indeed, oblivious to his surroundings, Adam moved behind the
chair, reaching into his coat pocket to take out a heavy gold signet ring set with a handsome sapphire.
Slipping it onto the third finger of his right hand, he touched the stone briefly to his lips, then laid the backs of
his hands along the tops of the chair wings to either side of Peregrine's head, open palms turned upward.
Taking as a centering point the candle still burning on the table before Peregrine, he drew a deep, centering
breath and slowly exhaled, at the same time breathing the opening words of an almost silent invocation,
couched in the Hellenic Greek and Latin of third-century Alexandria:
"Ego prosphero epainon to photiтАж"
He offered the rest in the silence of his mind, lifting his heart and his hands in selfless oblation.
/ offer praise to the Light in the person ofRa: Pantocrator, Deus de deoтАж. ofHorus: Logos, Veritas veritatisтАж.
of Isis: Hagia Sophia, Regina CaeliтАж. and of Osiris: Nous, Lumen de lumineтАж. Thou, O Lord, an Light
Eternal, Alpha and Omega, Source and Ending. Preserve us unto everlasting day. Amen.
Briefly he brought his hands together, palm to palm, touching the fingertips to his lips reverently, in salute to
That which he served. Then, drawing a deep breath, he set his hands on the chair wings again, to either side
of Peregrine Lovat's bowed head, closing his eyes to the physical flame before him.
"As Above, so Below," he murmured. "As Without, so WithinтАж."
The brightness of the flame's after-image shimmered behind his eyelids, establishing a glowing point of
reference. He focused on that point to the exclusion of all other internal images. As it receded, twin threads of
brilliant silver unreeled in parallel against the expanding ground of his internal vision, fine as spider-silk. One
was the silver cord of his own life; the other, he knew, was Peregrine Lovat's. The threads began to spiral as
he plunged after them, not falling but flying.
In the still, pristine silence of his own mind, Adam made himself a part of that cosmic spiral. It gathered
momentum, whirling faster and faster through gauzy fields of lights like scattered stars. The star-points
elongated into other silver threads, all wheeling and spinning. The myriad filaments all converged toward a
single distant point, like the heart of a coalescing nebula.
Never relenting, Adam fixed on the unbroken spiral of Peregrine's silver cord and followed it into the
shimmering midst of the dance. Anticipated, but never quite expected - as usual - came an icy thrill of
disorientation that left him momentarily breathless and slightly dizzy. When the universe righted itself again,
he found himself standing in spirit before two immense doors of immeasurable height, robed in white, his feet
bared to tread on holy ground. It was familiar ground - the eye of the cyclone, the calm at the center of the
storm, the hub of the wheel - but the awe was always new.
Adam had the Word of an Adeptus Major. As he spoke it, the doors opened with ponderous majesty. Beyond
lay timeless vaults of silence: the unmapped and unmappable halls of the Akashic Records, the imperishable
archives of all lives for all time. Into the vaults of the future, he might not go; but guided by the silver cord that
was Peregrine's connection into the Sephiroth, Adam passed into the vaults of the past, threading a circular,
inward-tending course along corridors iridescent as mother-of-pearl. At the heart of the labyrinth lay a
convoluted chamber, whorled and curved like the walls of a nautilus shell. And at its center, on a canopied
altar, lay a great book. As Adam approached the altar, the book opened of its own accord.
Hands pressed palm to palm in respect, Adam bent his head over the book, framing his intent in wordless
query. As if conjured by some mystic wind, the pages began to turn and images to be presented for his gaze
- the strands of the thread that linked the many lives of the one now known as Peregrine Lovat.