It was lonely and still in the room when Mother slept. Deeper and deeper Mother slept. Emaleth was frightened Mother would not wake. She rolled over and reached out to touch the edges of the world. She saw the light dying all around her. Ah, but it was only twilight again, and the buildings came on, full of light. Soon Emaleth would see light for what it really was, see it distinctly, Father had said. And it was glorious.
The dead don’t know light, Father had said. The dead know confusion.
Emaleth opened her mouth and tried to make words. She pressed on the roof of the world. She pushed and turned inside Mother. But Mother slept, tired and hungry and all alone. Maybe it was for the best that she dreamed now and knew no fear. Poor Mother.
Six
YURI HAD TO go to Aaron Lightner, it was as simple as that. He had to leave the Talamasca now, no matter what orders he had been given, and he had to seek out Aaron in the city of New Orleans and find out what had happened in recent months to so distress his beloved mentor and friend.
As the car pulled away from the gates of the Motherhouse, Yuri knew he might never be inside those walls again. The Talamasca was unforgiving to those who disobeyed orders. And Yuri could not plead ignorance of the Talamasca’s rules.
Yet it was so simple, this departure—driving away in the muffled gray solitude of the cold morning, leaving behind this blessed place outside London where Yuri had spent so much of his life.
Yuri pondered this and he pondered his remarkable lack of conflict or doubt. Indeed he tried to assume a responsible man’s uncertainty, and to review his actions from a moral and logical standpoint as a good man should do.
But Yuri had made his decision. Or rather the Elders had made it for him, when they had ordered him to cease all contact with Aaron, when they had told him that the File on the Mayfair Witches was now closed.
Something bad had happened with the Mayfair Witches, something bad that had hurt and discouraged Aaron. And Yuri was going to Aaron. In a way, it was the simplest thing Yuri had ever done.
Yuri was a Serbian gypsy, tall, dark-skinned, with very dark eyelashes and large jet-black eyes. His hair was slightly wavy, but cut too short for one to notice. Slender and spry in appearance, he presented a rather narrow figure in his usual careless wool jacket, soft-collared knit shirt and wrinkled khaki pants.
His eyes had a slight upward tilt to them at the outside edges, and his face was squarish with a pleasant, often smiling mouth. In many a country from India to Mexico, he passed for a native. Even in Cambodia and in Thailand, he went unnoticed. There was that bit of Asia in his features and his smooth golden complexion, and perhaps even in his quiet manner. His bosses in the Talamasca called him “The Invisible Man.”
Yuri was the premier investigator for the Talamasca. He had belonged to this secret order of “psychic detectives” since he was a child. Though he himself possessed no unusual mental powers, he worked unfailingly well with the Talamasca’s exorcists, mediums, seers, and sorcerers on their various cases worldwide. He was a most effective tracer of missing persons, a tireless and accurate gatherer of information, a spy in the normal world, a natural and infallible private eye. He loved the Talamasca. There was nothing he would not do for the Order, no risk that he would not take.
Seldom if ever did he ask questions about his assignments. He did not seek to understand the full scope of what he did. He worked only for Aaron Lightner, or David Talbot, very high placed in the Order, and it pleased him that they sometimes quarreled over Yuri, so well did he do his work.
In a smooth, unhurried voice Yuri spoke a score of languages with scarcely a trace of an accent. He’d learnt English, Russian and Italian with his mother—and her men—before he was eight years old.
When a child learns that much language very early he has a great advantage, not only in the realm of linguistics but in the realm of logic and imagistic thought. Yuri’s mind was inherently agile, and not secretive by nature, though much of his life he had repressed his natural talkativeness and only now and then let it come forth.