When Ash and his prisoner emerged from the pub, Gordon looked resentful and desperate. But obviously he’d been unable to solicit help, or had not dared to try.
Yuri hung up the phone. It was his turn to disappear into the pub now; he was still anxious, if not crazed. Rowan had been watching him attentively during the drive, that is, when she was not riveted to Ash.
Michael watched Ash as he returned Gordon to the backseat. He didn’t try to disguise the fact that he was staring. That seemed unnecessarily cumbersome. The thing about the tall man was this: he did not in any way appear hideous, as Yuri had averred. The beauty was there, and rather spectacular, but the hideousness? Michael couldn’t see it. He saw only a graceful frame, and easy, efficient movements that indicated both alertness and strength. The man’s reflexes were amazing. He’d proved that when Stuart Gordon had reached again for the lock of the door when they were stopped at a crossroads about a half hour back.
The man’s soft black hair reminded him all too much of Lasher; too silky, too fine, too much body to it, he didn’t know for certain. The white streaks added a kind of high luster to the whole figure. The face was far too big-boned to be feminine in any conventional sense, but it was delicate, the long nose redeemed perhaps by the fact that the eyes were so large and set so wide apart. The skin was mature skin and not baby-fine. But the real allure of the man was mixed up with his voice and his eyes. His voice could have talked you into anything, Michael thought, and the eyes were highly persuasive as well.
Both bordered on a childlike simplicity, but were not ultimately simple. The effect? The man seemed some sort of angelic being, infinitely wise and patient and yet resolved, without question, to murder Stuart Gordon exactly as he had said that he would.
Of course, Michael wasn’t assuming anything about the age of this creature. It was pretty hard not to think he was human, just different, unaccountably strange. Of course, Michael knew he wasn’t. He knew it by a hundred little details—the size of Ash’s knuckles, the curious way he widened his eyes now and then so that he looked awestruck, and above all perhaps by the absolute perfection of his mouth and teeth. The mouth was baby-soft, impossible for a man with that skin, really, or at least highly improbable, and the teeth were as white as some sort of flashing advertisement that had been shamelessly retouched.
Michael didn’t for a moment believe this creature was ancient, or that he was the great Saint Ashlar of the Donnelaith legends, the ancient king who had converted to Christianity in the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain, and allowed his pagan spouse, Janet, to be burnt at the stake.
But the grim tale he had believed when Julien had told it to him. And this was one of the many Ashlars, no doubt—one of the mighty Taltos from the glen—a being of the very same ilk as the one that Michael had slaughtered.
These things were not disputed by any part of his mind.
He had experienced too much for him to doubt, It was only that he couldn’t believe the tall, beautiful man was that old St. Ashlar himself. Perhaps he just didn’t want it to be so, for very good reasons that made sense within these elaborate frameworks which he’d now totally accepted.
Yes, you are living now with a whole series of completely new realities, he thought. Maybe this is why you’re taking it all calmly. You’ve seen a ghost; you’ve listened to him; you know he was there. He told you things you could have never manufactured or imagined. And you’ve seen Lasher and you’ve heard his long plea for sympathy, and that was also something completely unimaginable for you, something filled with new information and strange details that you can still remember with puzzlement, now that the misery you were feeling when Lasher told it is over, and Lasher lies buried under the tree.
Oh yeah, don’t forget, the burying of the body, dropping the head down in the hole beside it, and then finding the emerald, picking it up, and holding it in the dark while the decapitated body lay down there in the wet earth, ready to be covered up.
Perhaps you can become accustomed to anything, he figured. And