I entirely disclaim the usage of italics. Must have been possessed by something.

Warnings: if you can't take the X-files, please don't read this.

Sorcerer's Apprentice

For the point about Hell - as of Heaven - is this: when there, you are in your proper place, which, finally, is exactly where you want to be. Joseph Campbell

Let no man presume to kill another man's slave-woman or servant on the ground that she is a witch; for Christian minds refuse to believe it possible that a woman could eat a living man from inside him. Edict of Rothari (Lombard king of Italy) 643 AD

Act One

"Methos is in Seacouver," said Joe Dawson; he had barely stepped off the elevator, before the words came out of his mouth. He glanced around, seeing an extra coat on the coatrack, a sword propped against an armchair, and books--books strewn on tables, books on the couch, boxes of books on the floor and a vast leather-bound volume left open on the kitchen counter. There was also a muted sound of music: Springsteen? Yes. Bruce Springsteen. "Methos is here?"

MacLeod had been leaning against the counter. He nodded. "Got in late last night. And look what he brought along!"

"Hell, all you immortals lug your pasts around with you." Joe came forward, his cane thudding on the hardwood floor. "Like snail-shells. Can Methos help it if his past is all in writing?" He shoved a stack of books aside with the tip of the cane, and looked with especial interest at the one under Mac's hand.

Mac noticed. He closed the book and straightened.

". . . Is that what I think it is?"

"I don't know what you think it is," said Mac; the book was one of Methos' journals, and he had been reading it. He stepped back from the counter, taking Joe's elbow firmly and leading him away.

Joe craned his neck. "Well. Where is he? Taking a shower? Taking a lea--"

Just then, a voice floated toward them--a disembodied voice, hollow and spectral--a loud voice, speaking from the general vicinity of the spiral stair. ". . . The difference between us is, I don't go looking for fights."

MacLeod turned and spoke toward the far side of the loft. "Yes, yes. The difference is, you don't give a damn. What would you do, if you were faced with a choice between honor and death? . . . Don't tell me. You'd crawl and beg. Whatever it took, as long as you survived."

Methos' voice said, "Maybe. Well, what about you, Highlander? Are you going to tell me you've never looked shame in the eye and blinked first? That you've never . . . enjoyed a fate worse than death?"

Joe tilted his head back and saw: Methos was sitting near the top of the spiral staircase. He had a length of green darning thread between his teeth, several socks lying across his knee. He had a long needle in his hand, which he was threading; he had a grin on his face, and he was speaking around the thread as he mended his stockings.

"Accepted," MacLeod was saying, grimly. "Not 'enjoyed'. And never as less than shameful."

Methos licked the end of his thread, stuck it into the eye of the needle. "Okay! So at least you know what it feels like to swallow your pride. Let's get down to cases." He jumped down from his perch, walked straight up to MacLeod and pointed the darning needle at him. "Did you ever throw down your sword, so a woman you loved could live? Beg, so innocents would survive?" A jab of the needle, as Mac suddenly colored and looked aside. "Grovel--maybe to spare a child's skin--but it's still groveling, isn't it?" His voice rose, sharp as the needle. "Want to tell me why you'll crawl to save someone else--but not to save yourself?"

There was a pause.

Methos said, "Riddle me that, my friend. And when you come back with an answer that's doesn't include the words pride and honor, we'll talk a little more."

MacLeod suddenly stepped back, growling something under his breath. He shot a glance at Joe. Finally he shrugged.

"That's not fair, Methos. We have to protect mortals. Because when they die, it's all over for them."

Methos said more gently, "Well, I'll grant you that, because I don't believe in ghosts. But--"

Here Joe interrupted. He had been listening quietly, hands joined on his cane; now he spoke up. "What? You--an immortal--a five-thousand-year-old man who can't die--are gonna stand here with a straight face and say you don't believe in the supernatural?"

At that moment, the warning rang across Duncan's nerves.

He turned automatically, orienting himself toward his sword. There was no immortal visitor he expected at that hour. Across the room, Methos was doing the same. Mac's gaze met Methos: "Amanda?" he guessed. And Methos shook his head, saying, "No. Can't you feel it? There are two of them."

"Someone's in the dojo?" said Joe.

Mac said, "I'll go see."

As his hand fell upon his sword, Methos said, "And that, MacLeod, is the difference between us."

#

It was not a dark and stormy night. It was a crystal-clear night, a radiant night--the kind of night in which one could stand in a doorway in Seacouver, glance up, and see ten thousand stars. Even in the heart of the city, it was a night brilliant with starlight. MacLeod set one foot upon the dojo's wooden floor, and saw the street door standing open, the alley door wide open, and yet every detail of the unlit room was as plain as day. He blinked; he had an impression that someone stood behind him, halfway up the rickety staircase. He looked over his shoulder, abruptly wary . . . but of course no one was there.

There was a man at the other end of the dojo.

He was a painting in black and white. Spectral light glowed around him; his face was shadowed, but that barely mattered--not when his sword shone with glancing silvery lightnings. And MacLeod halted, there at the foot of the stair, wondering where he had seen this man before. There was no time to speculate. The other immortal moved toward him with long eager strides. His footfalls echoed oddly on the hardwood, he did not speak a single word. Mac had time to say, "Shall we dance?" and then the silver blade came twisting up, and the fight had begun.

As so many times before. How many fights had there been? MacLeod had lost count--it had been so many years--centuries of battle, and perhaps the Game was only just begun. He had seen little change in the four hundred years of his lifetime; maybe Methos had seen just as little, in his five thousand years. Immortals died, and young immortals appeared (in some mysterious way) to replace them. The total never seemed to diminish. Who could say? The Game could continue, challenge after challenge, for another five thousand years.

Every fight was the same. "Do I know you?" Mac demanded, his katana whirling in loop after loop as he gave ground, retreating, studying his foe's swordplay. The stranger did not answer. And yet-- The phrase occurred again to Mac: every fight was the same. Every fight was different. Who had said that to him, once? He could almost hear the voice. He attacked on autopilot, finding a connection between his opponent's style and the voice echoing out of his memory--and in the blink of time between thrust and parry, was lost in the past.

. . . It had been England.

. . . It had been London.

. . . It had been a house in South Lambeth, in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and thirty-eight, and young Duncan MacLeod had been kneeling in a very large garden, setting out plants. With mud up to his elbows, and his fine new kilt all smirched with peat and manure. Grousing. And Tradescant, who had promised to teach him a trick or two, stood over him--leaning on a rake, a stalk of grass between his bearded lips, and a sly grin creasing the corners of his eyes. Saying, "Every fight is the same, and every one is different."

"Fine way this is of learning swordplay," MacLeod had grumbled, sotto voce. "Three weeks I've been waiting to hear a word of wisdom, and what for? Three weeks in the muck, with weeds and trowel in my hand!"

"Those aren't weeds, tyke. That--" and Tradescant pointed with the rake, "is moon trefoil, cittissus maranthe, very rare. That, in your hand now, is sweet India storksbill. There is my Virginia snake-root, and my barba capri, and my impatient lady-smocke--nowhere else in England do they grow. My beloved wife Elizabeth Day used to call it the loveliest flower in the world. And there, beneath your great knobby knee, is my finest specimen of stinking bean trefoil."

"Stinking bean trefoil?" MacLeod shuffled aside.

But Tradescant uttered a cry, and swung the rake at his head. "My great rose daffodil! Get off!" The great rose daffodil, which had so many petals that it seemed a solid mass of lacy ruffles, was in dire peril; worse followed in a moment, for Mac ducked under the blow, lost his balance, and sat plump in the dirt with his legs splayed out. Tradescant kicked him bodily away, cursing--"You bloody boy, you've squashed it flat!"--while MacLeod, with a wry mouth, jumped to his feet and brushed off the back of his plaid.

"A boy, am I? I may look young, but I'll have you know I'm old enough to have boys my own age--"

"If our kind could father children." Tradescant knelt, smoothing the daffodil's mistreated foliage. "Patience, Highlander. In all England, you won't meet an immortal with more to teach you than I."

"You don't even own a sword!"

"I have an hundred swords, you've seen them in my cabinet."

"Aye, and dusted them," Mac muttered. "Dust an inch thick. And I don't take to being called boy."

"Peace. You're not even fifty years old. When you've put thirty centuries under your belt--as I have--then I'll look you in the eye and call you man."

But Mac's jaw had dropped. "Three thousand years?" he stammered.

"And even a few more," Tradescant agreed.

"Three thousand years?"

"Yes, yes," said Tradescant.

"Three thousand years? Three thousand years?"

Tired of agreeing, Tradescant merely bowed.

"Why, you must be even older than Juan Sanchos Ramirez--you must be the oldest immortal alive!"

"Ah, boy, there are a dozen names I could give you, and each of them was old when I was young. And there's one named Methos, who can match my three thousand years and give me two thousand more." Tradescant had thrown back his head and shouted with laughter, and the sunlight had blazed on his face, which was clever, craggy, seamed with time. His spade-shaped beard was white as snow, and the wrinkles round his eyes were beyond counting. A gaunt old man, with a young man's carefree laugh. "Imagine the secrets he knows, the fights he's fought! For every fight to the death is same, you see. And every fight is different."

. . . Three hundred and fifty years in the past. In the present day, MacLeod said, "Tradescant? John Tradescant?" in shock. He almost pulled his blow; Tradescant had been so much the better swordsman, this should not be happening. It was unbelievable. But it was too late. The beheading stroke swung hard and true; his opponent toppled, it was over. He had won.

The quickening came next.

In the instant before the fight ended, the elevator had come down from the loft. Methos had been in it, and Joe Dawson beside him. Mac saw as much; then it hit him. Something like lightning cracked from end to end of the long room; something like electricity exploded into fireworks behind his eyes. A window shattered. A door slammed. The frame of the old building shook. Something like pain burned along every nerve in Mac's body--like pain, and completely unlike.

Then the quickening's blue fire forked and divided, lashing straight at Methos too. Methos made a harsh sound as the lightning-bolt struck; he went up on his toes, arched his back, flung his head back and flung out his arms--ecstatic, as if fire was his element. It crackled through his every limb, settled around his eyes and flared wildly, leaped out of him and to MacLeod. And back again. And something like three thousand years of experience thundered through their souls.

It had happened before--with Kristin, with Kronos and Silas--but Mac had never heard of such a thing, before he met Methos. It went against every rule he understood about taking heads. He had yet to comprehend how two immortals could share a single quickening . . . It only happened when Methos was nearby.

As it was happening now. But there was no escaping it. He could only endure, while the dojo flashed with brilliant light . . . and Joe stood there with his jaw dropped so far, you could count every tooth.

#

"I didn't recognize him," MacLeod said, later; it was well past midnight, but he and Methos were still awake. Quickenings tended to do that for immortals. As for Dawson, he had put in a phone call to his Watcher friends and then sent the two immortals packing. The corpse would be disposed of, he had said. Just leave it to him. No problem at all. After all (with a ghoulish grin) he was a professional.

Now Methos lay flat on his back across MacLeod's bed, his sword to hand. He seemed nervous, had downed several shots of scotch while Mac showered off the taint of blood, and then he had delved in his bags and brought out a Mauser pistol. "How did you get that thing through customs?" Mac had demanded, intrigued.

"Watcher trick," said Methos. "Rented postal box. Mailed it to myself before I left Paris, collected it when I arrived." He loaded the gun, and made it disappear. He had the Mauser, his sword, and two other weapons (to MacLeod's knowledge) secreted upon his person, and all this was apparently just to go to bed with. To Mac's inquiring look, he said merely, "There's a time and a place for paranoia."

MacLeod toweled his hair dry, came to sit on the edge of the bed. "I thought it was a stranger," he repeated. "Hadn't seen him for centuries. And when I knew him, his hair was snow-white."

"Most of us die in youth," said Methos, "and dye our hair when we want to look old. But a few die old, and dye their hair to look younger. He was one of the latter kind."

"His name was John Tradescant."

"The hell it was," Methos said. "When I met him, it was Skylax of Caria, and after that it was Hanno the navigator, Hanno of Carthage."

"You knew him? Strange--the first time I heard about you, it was from him." Mac shrugged. "The legend of Methos, the world's oldest immortal. 'Imagine the secrets he knows!'--that's what he used to say."

After the quickening ended, there had been nothing left to do but mourn. Mac knew he had barely known Tradescant, they had parted in anger centuries before, they had never met again . . . and he had never wanted to see him again, either. Not after learning what he had learned-- But his mind shied away from the memories. Even after three hundred years they were too raw, too ugly. He had stood over the body, and then knelt down and gone through Tradescant's clothes. He had found a billfold and a key, discarded the first at once. And without thinking, he had put the key in his pocket.

"He never used to carry a sword. He said he didn't need one. I could never match him in a fight. Not on my very best day--"

"Things change," said Methos.

MacLeod picked up the shot-glass of scotch from the bedside table. He raised an eyebrow at Methos, drank a mouthful and wandered off to empty the rest in the sink. "Monomaniac," said Methos mildly. Mac gave his hair a final roughing with the towel, and went to put that away too. The elevator came up, and there was Joe Dawson. "I bet you wipe down the bathroom walls after you finish taking a shower," Methos went on, lying comfortably on his back. "Obsessive-compulsive." He turned his head. Then he sat up, peering at Dawson. "Something wrong, Joe?"

Joe fidgeted, avoiding MacLeod's eye. "Well," he said. He made a meaningless gesture in the direction of Methos. "Well, your little mess is all cleaned up downstairs. I've never seen anything like that quickening. It was--it looked--the best word I could come up with is erotic. But I just--"

"Spit it out, Joe," said MacLeod.

"It's just--well, I didn't think Methos was--I thought he was staying at a hotel--"

MacLeod looked blankly at Dawson. Then light dawned. There was Methos, making himself at home on Mac's bed; and there was Joe. Blushing, as if he hadn't grown up on the tough side of the Chicago streets, and on the verge of talking nonsense about quickening.

Memories occurred to Mac: lying in a puppy-heap with all his foster-cousins, a half-wild Highland boy. While hunting, sheltering from the cold under his father's warm arm. Sharing a straw tick with Connor, who claimed he snored like a lion. Sharing an English four-poster with Hugh Fitzkirk, who would throw an arm around his neck in the night, and call him Juliet, or Marjorie, or Isa. (Sharing a park bench with Amanda in full light of day and under the eye of a crowd, more risque than sleeping with any hundred men.) A soldier's billet with Darius in bitter-cold Russia. While fighting for Charlie, huddling in a peat-bog with a dozen fellow MacLeods-- back when a man's plaid was his only blanket, and underwear was a diabolical invention of the English. How could any of these things be anything but innocent?

But that had been an age of innocence. This century was one of decadence. Nevertheless Mac held his tongue, just because he was curious to see what Methos would say. And Methos, sitting bolt upright, wore a look of melting dismay. Which in turn became melting amusement, as the world's oldest immortal fell backward with a thump and burst out laughing. "Oh, how I love modern men! They all have the filthiest minds!"

#

"Still, he has a point, Methos. About the quickening."

"Oh, not you too! Mac, humor me. Don't start."

"And I've been meaning to ask you--"

"There are some things man is not meant to know," said Methos, intoning the words.

"Seriously, Methos--"

"Oh, I'm serious," said Methos.

"Well, if you won't talk about that," said Mac angrily, "at least let out why you're arming yourself to the teeth. What is it, quickening got to you?"

"You're a fine one to talk," Methos snapped back. "I'm going for a walk. Alone," he added.

He slammed the door on the way out.

#

MacLeod dreamed.

He had laid himself down on top of the bedclothes, fully clad, with his katana close to hand. (All this was because Methos was nervous; whatever Methos was nervous about, Mac didn't intend to be caught empty-handed.) Now he tossed and turned, and gripped the hilt of the sword convulsively. He dreamed of demons, laughter, horrors unseen in the shadowy concourse of a deserted racetrack. It was the old dream, a dream he had dreamed many times over the past two years. He was dreaming of the night when Richie died.

It began as most dreams did, in bits and pieces. A Japanese maxim: jakuniku-kyoshuku--the weak are meat; the strong eat. A stray sentence read in one of Methos' journals: Kronos was the Titan who devoured his own young. A fragment of vision: the red of a scarf wrapped around Horton's throat. Red and yellow streamers, scrap paper blowing like ticker-tape as he accepted a quickening. Not blue lightning this time, but boiling-red smoke. Smoke and mirrors.

He remembered searching the abandoned racecourse. There had been blue light, party streamers and demons. But the concession stands had been locked up and deserted, and the ribbons taped to the ceiling had hung limp. Bedraggled. Faded and colorless, forlorn as autumn leaves. And the enemy had come down out of glowing blue light, slumped over on the escalator as if already beheaded.

He had lifted his face to be seen; in his eyes was a red radiance. But who was he?

"You," he had said--mockingly. Jabbing out with his sword, gesturing and smirking. "Me. Me, you! Is that how you see me? You don't even understand your place in any of this, do you?"

How their laughter had echoed!

Horton had been there, the mortal he couldn't kill. And Kronos, the monster who devoured his own children. Strike down one, and another appeared. And lost in the logic of the dream, he had reeled through the darkened concourse, dazed by their malice--striking out at random, while they circled mockingly around him, and he distinctly remembered seeing six of them when there were only three. Trying to kill what could not be killed. Trying to kill what was already dead.

He had heard a gunshot, turned in confusion and hurried into the blue light that became red haze.

All their faces had seemed rotten, blurred out of shape. Worm-eaten. Unidentifiable. Why couldn't he put names to any of them? The sword in his hand had the wrong weight, the wrong balance. His mouth shaped a name--"Joe?"--but it was someone else he found. Not his friend, but an enemy. (In the real world, MacLeod tossed and turned, lifted his katana and groaned out loud.) But in the dream, a stray beam of light fell across the blade and guard of the sword--and it was not his katana.

It was Richie's sword he held.

It was his own face on the demon lunging at him.

He was Richie, and he stood there defenseless as the katana sliced off his head.

And MacLeod yelled and sat bolt upright, wide awake. Cold sweat covered him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement.

Four centuries of fighting for his life had sharpened his reflexes. He came off the bed rolling, and the katana left his hand as he did. As he threw the sword, his other hand snatched at the spare sword he kept under the bed. He straightened. He shouted. He froze--as did Methos, standing near the doorway, with the katana sunk quivering in the woodwork next to his throat.

Act Two

Sword of nothingness.

Clinging to a gourd.

Enveloping and striking without closing range.

The dance of the tengu.

MacLeod was doing kata, as was his habit when disturbed. For whatever reason, he had picked out a Japanese white-oak sword from his collection of wooden blades, and was practicing forms from the Kashima-Shinryu school: sword of nothingness, clinging to a gourd, the dance of the tengu . . . In that school, there were seven sets of kata for sword against sword, four sets of kata for sword against various other weapons, and a final set of thirty-two kata for dealing with those sneaky opponents who attack while one's blade is still sheathed. In total, one hundred and fifteen kata for the sword. MacLeod was working through them, one by one. He expected to be at it for some time.

Methos was scribbling in his journal . . . as was his habit, when disturbed. For whatever reason, he had elected to follow Mac downstairs to the dojo. There, he had made several critical comments about bloodstains on the floorboards, and then settled down in the little office behind its plate-glass divider. And opened his journal, and started to write. It looked as if he was going to be at it for some time.

"The way of the sword," MacLeod murmured to himself, in Japanese, as he swung the wooden sword in unending fluid spirals. He was chanting tanka poetry, to cheer himself. "The way of the sword / toil at technique / spontaneously be apart from technique / in this all the more is there technique . . ." The white-oak blade cut the air, whistling. "Vertical, horizontal, diagonal / thrust, collision of bodies and collision of swords / strike the core! In that sword / there is victory . . ." Mac bobbed and turned and ducked. "Beneath the confronted sword is hell / step in! There is also paradise . . ."

Finally he dropped the sword and knelt in seiza, his fingertips resting together against his lower stomach, left fingers folded around right and his thumbtips just barely meeting. In this posture, he appeared to be embracing an invisible disc. He breathed in sevens, his mind still, his heart at peace. He envisioned his ki sweeping in an endless circle, till the power hummed like electricity through his joined hands. He was meditating.

Fragments of the past. Snatches of vision. What was troubling him? If he shut his eyes, all he saw were flowers: saffron of autumn and Hungarian climber, candy-corn Marygold, spatling poppies, rest-harrow-without-pricks, and priest's-pintle. Nothing more dangerous than that. But why should the phrase, "the wolves of memory," make a thrill of cold run over his skin?

Flowery swordplay.

And his memories carried him straight back to 1638.

. . . It was one of Tradescant's idiosyncrasies (so he claimed) that parts of the house in South Lambeth were barred to all save himself--the attics and the cellars, for example--but as for the big solar, MacLeod knew it well. Most days, he spent all his waking hours there. As today. Sun showered through the southern windows, on that balmy day in June, and the scent of lilacs came in also. On every other wall, tall cabinets beckoned the eye. These held such curiosities as to afford hours of pleasure. There were specimens of borametz skin, cups of rhinocerode, a phoenix wing and a Roc's claw, a cherry-stone carved with human faces, and cunning pictures wrought entirely in feathers; there was the hand of a mermaid and the hand of a mummy, Roman coins and polyoptic drawings, and a gown lined with a unicorn's shaggy uncouth pelt. Hung from the ceiling were more curiosities: armadillos, branches of coral, dried birds (among them, the carcass of a dodo) and blown eggs which turned lazily in the breeze. Tacked up between the cabinets were hand-painted maps, and stacked beneath them were folios of watercolors, along with many sheets of vellum limned with the most delicate botanical drawings. All these last were Tradescant's work, for he called himself a man of science. Here and there too, in China vases, were fresh-cut flowers from Tradescant's garden. Prominent among them were outre poppies, many nodding sprays of them, exactly like the poppies of Wales but the most amazing sky-blue . . . and such marvels as these, were the reason that all the neighbors called Tradescant a magician.

In this chamber of treasures sat Duncan MacLeod, his eyes glazed over, manfully stifling his yawns. While his teacher's voice rolled over him and all but put him to sleep.

". . . not one but two, shaped like a pear, and male on one side yet womanly on the other. And some were like two males conjoined, some two females. But each double-being, being complete in his and herself, lived in such bliss that they neglected the gods. Then the gods in their jealousy struck them with lightning, dividing each in two, and scattering the halves across the face of the earth. Thus every human being wanders forlorn through his or her life, and only those who find their other halves can recapture the bliss of-- Are you listening?"

"I was, but my ears went numb," muttered MacLeod. Then, "Ow! What was that about?" For Tradescant had whacked him upside the head. "This is all drivel," he went on in a rebellious undertone, "I don't see what it has to do with fighting--"

"This is philosophy, dotard. It is Plato himself you spurn with such contumely. Unlettered wretch that you are!"

But Plato meant nothing to MacLeod. "Ach, I can learn my letters anytime. First I have to study my sword, survival's more important. And Connor says there's so much to learn in the world, that even if I lived forever I'd never be finished."

Tradescant regarded him with a lurking smile, a look not entirely friendly. "It's a pity. Because one day you would indeed have mastered your sword, and your letters, and all other mundane things--as we all do in time--and come to the end of your studies, young MacLeod. Despite what your friend Connor claims. I should have liked to see you on that day. For those things are only trivia, as you will see. And once you had learnt all life's trivia, what would you have gone on to next?"

"I don't see why you use the past tense," MacLeod mumbled. "Except that you're being mysterious on purpose . . . Well, if you don't want to teach me sword-fighting, then why not some magic?" His eye brightened. "I'd dearly like to see some magic. And everyone says you're a sorcerer, with more arts than Doctor Dee."

"As well they should." Tradescant held up one hand. A tiny sizzle of lightning leapt from finger to thumb. "For one doesn't live as long as I have," and he grinned at MacLeod's astonishment, "without learning a few tricks."

At that moment, the maid had appeared at the solar door. "Gentleman to see you, sir." She wondered why both men looked at her without surprise; how could she guess that the intruder was an immortal like them? She merely bobbed her head and scampered back to her work--while the man she had shown in sauntered forward, drawing his sword.

He stripped off his gloves, with a fine nonchalant air. "Septimus Fitzkirk," he introduced himself. "Am I in the presence of one John Tradescant?"

"I am Tradescant," said MacLeod's teacher, folding his arms.

Fitzkirk's glance passed over MacLeod and dismissed him. "An honor, sir." He sketched a salute with the sword. "I presume you can guess my business."

"I can," said Tradescant, cracking his knuckles. "Come into the garden. I have a fine covert alley there, where we can be private. I find it convenient to the coal-cellar hatch, for concealing dead bodies." After which blood-curdling statement, he bowed his challenger toward the door. MacLeod hurried forward to offer his claymore, but he shook his head in disdain, picked up his walking-stick instead. "My cane will do. Stay here, my boy. For it's another of my idiosyncrasies, that no witness ever sees me take a quickening. Not even my beloved wife, while she was still with me." And he strode through the door, singing a nursery rhyme:

"There stands a lady from over the sea

Who she is I do not know;

I'll go and court her for her beauty

Whether she answers yes or no.

Choose once, choose twice, choose three times over

The fairest one you'll ever see

Is pretty Lizzie Day, come home with me."

. . . And in the present day, Mac shrugged off the memory. He left his meditations, stalked into the office and sat on the edge of the old desk. There, he could read the journal open under Methos' hand. It was an old journal, for the contents were written in faded ink, upon fragments of papyri apparently then pasted over the book's pages. And even upside-down, in spidery Greek letters, what they said was troubling.

"You're looking up references to Tradescant? He was a madman."

"Was he? He seemed pretty lucid when I knew him--but then, that was over two thousand years ago."

"Mad, and evil." Mac turned the book around and regarded it. "But a great swordsman. Methos," he said suddenly, "wait. Come with me." Methos blinked up, bemused; Mac pulled him to his feet, marched him into the dojo and put a practice sword into his hand. "Just how much of that fight did you see? Let's go over it."

Tatami mats rustled under their circling feet; they moved around one other, wooden swords gently tapping. MacLeod snapped out instructions, his brow wrinkled with thought. He pushed Methos bodily into place, sometimes took hold of his sword-arm and adjusted it. His mind shuffled rapid memories, replaying the fight of the night before. "I'd never met a fighter as good as Tradescant before. I think he could even have taken Connor. He barely bothered to keep a sword at hand, claimed he didn't need one. But yesterday, he behaved--" Mac frowned.

"How?" Methos asked.

"He behaved as if he was struggling with something in his mind. Could he have been under some kind of psychic attack?"

"Maybe. Or maybe you've become better than you think."

"No. I never should have been able to take him so easily. Methos, it's strange. I used to think that he knew everything. And he hinted at something to me once--he said that after an older immortal thought he had learned everything, there might still be something else. What if . . . what if he meant some sort of psychic power?"

Methos had looked up sharply, scowling, at the mention of psychic powers. But Mac never noticed, and all Methos said was, "Maybe. Probably not, though. What were you dreaming about last night?"

They turned, moving from attack to attack. Mac's face darkened. "Nothing." His wooden sword whipped down, hit Methos', made a sound like a small explosion; Mac looked down and saw that the blade had cracked. Then he looked up, his eyes white-rimmed with sudden shock. "Methos? Whatever affected Tradescant--could it have been some kind of dark quickening?"

"Now that," said Methos, "I doubt. Concentrate, Mac. What were you thinking?"

. . . What had he been thinking of? He hadn't thought of Tradescant in years; now the old immortal's words kept returning to him. He was four hundred years old now, not a green student of fifty. And . . . he had mastered every martial art he had ever heard of. He had learned--how many languages? Dead languages, and living ones. He could be confident of handling himself in almost any conceivable situation. He had been to every corner of the globe, studied in a dozen universities, taken doctorates and read entire libraries . . . and though he was by no means through with learning, he could now see an end to that road. Someday, he would have had enough. Where would he go from there?

What arts . . . would he find to learn . . . ?

He froze. The fight was over. He was on one knee; Methos, equally frozen, stood over him with his sword-point well out of line. They stared into each others' eyes, their faces barely a foot apart. Mac realized that he wore a fierce victorious smile. As for his own blade, it pressed into Methos' throat so hard that the skin was white and scarlet.

Then, slowly, Methos smiled back. "Whew," he whispered, wiping his brow, "I'm glad I'm not your enemy."

It was then that Mac heard the voice.

Methos heard nothing; he only saw MacLeod stiffen. The younger immortal half-turned. His cheeks went scarlet, his pupils dilated. He said, almost in a whisper, "What was that?"

"What was what?"

"Can't you hear it?" But before Methos could answer, MacLeod said, "Wait right here--"

He snatched up his katana, strode out of the dojo.

Outside, it was a brilliant afternoon, sunny as a dream of childhood, painted in primary colors; even the pavement of the street outside, the walls of the neighboring buildings with their scribble of graffiti, seemed to shine brilliant browns and greys. The graffiti burned off the cinderblocks, incandescent. Windows positively blazed. Mac narrowed his eyes against the white glare of sunlight, walked slowly out onto the street. He held his katana concealed, upright behind his arm.

A car droned past. Butterflies fluttered over a window-box opposite, three stories up, full of scarlet geraniums. Pelargoniums. And those, with them: pointed glossy leaves, and furled petals like little roses, but the soft pink of apple-blossom. What were they? For an instant, his mind went blank. He was completely unable to call up the name.

The woman spoke from across the street. "You're in no danger from me, my friend."

She was immortal. He sensed it now--like a ringing of many tiny bells far away, mingled with the music of water, of wind, of leaves. This was an immortal woman, but one who had met her first death in the springtime of maidenhood; she still had the blushes of youth on her cheeks, and her mouth was redder than the geraniums. This was an immortal women with the appearance of girlhood, but century upon century looked forcefully out of her eyes. And she was one he had never met before.

This was no place for a challenge. They had witnesses, and besides, she appeared unarmed. MacLeod waited while she crossed the street. "Is that your sword," she inquired, amused, glancing down at his concealed weapon, "or are you just glad to see me? . . . My name is Elizabeth Day."

A voice out of memory spoke in his mind: my beloved wife Elizabeth Day. "John Tradescant's wife," Mac said, surprised. "He mentioned you many times. But by the time I knew him, you had already left him."

"No," she said. Then she looked into his eyes. "Yes, I was his woman, he found me among the Slavs and I followed him home to England for love . . . but there is no quarrel between us, Duncan MacLeod. Yes, I know who you are. You took his head."

"Yes."

"You drank his soul." The words were so strange that Mac looked up, astonished; however, she held up a finger and went on, "Oh, there are more ways of explaining the quickening than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Highlander. And he was the aggressor, wasn't he? Yes, I thought so. He hated you because you thwarted him long ago. No, I have no quarrel with you, Duncan MacLeod. Come walk with me."

They strolled down the sidewalk, along a block and another block, toward the waterfront and the parks there. Mortals passed them by without looking, never knowing what supernatural creatures were among them. No one even noticed MacLeod's sword. And no one gave Tradescant's wife as much as a second glance . . . though she was unearthly in her poise, polished after the manner of very old immortals; Methos had that characteristic too, MacLeod thought suddenly. He himself sometimes felt like a member of another species--well, Methos and this woman both seemed sprung from a species alien even to other immortals.

But she cast a shadow like every other living thing. Her sandaled feet whispered across the grass like any other woman's feet. Her brief sun-dress was thoroughly modern, printed with a pattern of little sprigs of greenery, and the sunlight kissed her as if it loved her. She stopped at a hot-dog stand, smiled at Mac over her shoulder as she leaned in and helped herself, heaping relish and sauerkraut on the bun. The concession-owner made no protest, looked right through her.

"But you have something I want," she said. She licked one fingertip daintily. Then she slid the whole finger between her lips, and sucked it. "Put away the sword," she added. "Want a bite?"

The smell of the sauerkraut made Mac's stomach turn. He swallowed, felt his mouth fill with hot liquid. A trickle, wet and coppery, escaped the corner of his lips and ran across his chin. Surprised, Mac swiped at it with the back of one hand; his fingers came away sticky, dripping. Bright red.

Covered with blood.

His lips parted and a great gout of fresh blood gushed over his chin. It was brilliant red, arterial blood. His throat was filled with it, and now he could taste it--blood splattering across the white cotton of his shirt, staining it scarlet. He was choking on his own blood. Another thick gout of it poured out, splashed the pavement at his feet. There was an appalling jab of pain in his belly. Revolted, he tried to cover his mouth with his hands; then he doubled up, clutching his stomach and groaning. Halfway through, another rush of liquid filled his throat. Mac coughed, opened his jaws wide, and saw what seemed like a gallon of blood--red blood, his blood, impossible blood--spurt out of his mouth and cascade across the pavement.

In pain and shame, he looked up. The woman was watching several children at the nearby teeter-totter. There were tiny droplets of blood marking her perfect fingers, spotting the hot-dog bun in her hands. Red blood, on the pale sauerkraut. She took an enormous bite, glanced down and saw Mac.

Her eyes widened with horror. "You can't do it that way!" she said.

He groped helplessly at his belly, looked where she was pointing, and found his katana standing out from below his belt. It had been sheathed in his own flesh, thrust through his stomach and intestines till only a handspan of hilt and blade remained visible.

It was only then that the pain struck home.

Then it was all gone, even the woman. The blood was gone. Elizabeth Day was gone. MacLeod crouched on the old-fashioned cobblestones of the little park, on hands and knees, the sunshine warm on the back of his neck. His katana lay on the ground, half-hidden by his knee. The blade was completely innocent of blood. He bent over and vomited helplessly on the grass.

His whole body was shaking. He heard a footstep. He heard someone speak. Fear shot into his mind, he grabbed for his weapon--and then he heard a woman's disapproving voice, "Johnny! Stay away from that man, he's sick!" and a little boy ran headlong past, back to his mother, who snatched him up in fright and hurried off.

The hot-dog salesman was peering over the rim of his cart. "Hey, mister. You having some kind of a fit?"

#

Methos was pacing back and forth in the dojo, when MacLeod returned. He halted, his brow creased . . . and Mac walked straight past him. Stumbling on the threshold, like a bridegroom stricken by unmentionable horror. His features seemed blurred--smeared with pain and fatigue--and his steps did not go straight. He went into the office, unsteadily, and there came to a halt. Bent over, leaning heavily on the desk. He said faintly, "It was a woman's voice."

"Mac?" Methos followed him. "What the hell--?"

"There was a woman, and she--she wanted--"

"What woman," asked Methos cautiously, "and what did she want?"

"It was--my sword--this little boy, and, and the sunlight." Again, Mac came to a stop. He held one hand pressed to his stomach, wrapped in the memory of a phantom pain. Very clearly, he began, "She told me to sheath my katana. And I did it. Jesus and Mary, the blood--"

Methos stared, eyes narrowed. Then his hand lashed out.

MacLeod roared. He wheeled, the katana out in a flash; through a blur of fury and shock and remembered pain, dimly, he heard a voice. Shouting. "--why do you bother to guard your neck, if you won't use the brain that comes with it! Stand straight, Highlander, and think for yourself!"

The katana came around in a great circle, blazing light. And halted. Mac said in disbelief, "You hit me. I could have-- It's my mind that's under attack now. Isn't it?"

"You show all the signs of it," Methos said crisply. His voice had a nasty bite to it, like that of a man who had been Death in his time; all this, despite Mac's katana still hovering inches from his throat. "Stand up straight and stop talking nonsense, we haven't time for it." Mac found himself straightening, eyes wide. "Take a few deep breaths, and calm down. Duncan, you know what's in your own soul. Is it Tradescant attacking from within, or someone else from without?"

"I-- Someone from without." He had felt this before: a dark coiling haze in his heart, a strangling presence. Not like a bad quickening at all. "I recognize it now. How can I fight it? I have no skill against things that can't be cut with swords--" But Methos put a hand on his forehead; his very calmness was soothing, and his matter-of-fact expression reassured. Already, MacLeod felt better. "And I thought you didn't believe in demons," he muttered.

"I don't," said Methos. "But in other immortals? Yes. We can do some funny tricks, you know. Now, you said it was a woman? What did she say to you?"

"She said I had something she wanted."

Mac turned. He slid open the bottom door of the desk, lifted out an object wrapped in dark cloth, and laid it down. The cloth folded back; the blade within--it was well-used, the steel marred by long scratches, antique--slanted gleaming across the pages of Methos' journal. It was the sword he had taken from Tradescant. "This is what she wanted," said MacLeod, and touched it. Almost always, when he won a challenge, he kept his opponent's weapon. "Or is it?" He delved in his pocket and brought out a key.

It was a storage-locker key, with a metal tag numbered 89. "I took this off Tradescant's body. Not an airport locker key, not the train station, not the bus station--I'd recognize those. Some private warehouse . . . Methos. Get the phone-book, will you?"

#

So they spent the rest of the day visiting self-storage concerns. Armed with the Seacouver Yellow Pages, they drove from business to business. And drove. And drove. And drove . . .

At AAA Security Inc ("24 Hour Security--Guard Dog On Patrol") the proprietress was a scrawny female of indeterminate age, with thin orange hair. She glared. "Look here," said Methos, leaning forward and fixing a pleasant smile on his face, "I'm in a predicament. My wife's gone and put all my guitars in storage, and now she's flown off home to Llanweddhyn and left me nothing but the key." The proprietress glared. "Can't get in touch with her by the phone till Wednesday week, got to have my acoustic guitar for a jazz session tonight." She glared. "Joe's Bar," said Methos rather desperately. "Ever been there? Yes, well, say you've got my acoustic guitar, and it's free tickets for you, love."

She fixed him with what could only be called an evil eye. "We lock with swipe cards here, mister," she said.

At Containerz-R-Us ("No-Questions-Asked Storage") they found an anemic young man with a pierced eyebrow and a hangover. He looked blearily at the key in Mac's hand and said, "Three peezes of identification, pleeze."

As Methos opened his mouth, MacLeod elbowed him firmly in the ribs and answered: "Well, I know this sounds strange, but we don't have--"

The young man shrugged. "Three peezes of ID," he repeated. "We gotta protect ourselzes. Sawry."

MacLeod pulled out his wallet and extracted a wad of bills.

The young man's eyes brightened. Then they dimmed. "Vinnie'd kill me," he muttered, bitterly. Mac held up a bill. "Course, Vinnie ain't here . . ." Another bill. "But he'll be back soon!" A third bill. The young man was leaning forward, twitching. "Lemme see that key again, mister?" Mac showed him the key--and a fourth bill, too. This appeared to be the clincher. The young man was reaching out, about to pluck the bribe out of Mac's hand . . . and someone who had to be Vinnie strode into the office.

He was six foot six and brawny, with shoulders like a football player. He looked at the anemic young man (caught with Mac's bills almost in his grasp) and sighed. "Lorenzo," he said reproachfully. Lorenzo wilted, and Vinnie shook a finger under his nose, scowled at MacLeod and Methos, and said, "What's it all about, then?"

Wordlessly, Mac held up the key. Vinnie looked blankly at it, and said, "What the hell?" Then he clipped Lorenzo across the ear, and explained: "Sorry, guys. My kid brother here was pulling your leg. We use electronic access codes only."

At Jody's Self-Storage ("You Lock It--You Keep The Key") Methos sailed in ahead of Mac, and strode up to the desk. "My name," he said firmly, "is Vincento, and this is my friend Lorenzo. Now, I have this key. Lorenzo, show him the key. Miss, if this key belongs to your establishment, I advise you to speak up promptly. You don't want to make Lorenzo angry. He's in a bad mood today anyway, and his fuse is short. What? Speak up--don't make me turn Lorenzo loose--" Then, hastily: "Um, wait. Put down that phone. Don't call the police. Don't cry, miss--really, my friend's a pussycat and I haven't raised a hand in anger since the forties--no, really, nothing is going to happen--we didn't mean it!"

At the Sentinel Warehouse: "Hello there, I'm Vinnie Lombardo, this is my kid brother Lorenzo, and we got a problem. See, Lorenzo's girlfriend decided to break up with him, so she put all his furniture in storage, mailed him the key, sublet the condo, sold the Corvette, pocketed the proceeds and left town for Cascade. The letter said she was gonna look up an old flame. Now, we don't know where she stashed Lorenzo's stuff, all we have is this key here, and all day long we've been going round asking-- What? You use swipe cards now too? You're the fifth place in a row that does!"

At AmeriSecure: "Hallo, missus. This is Lon, and I'm Vinnie. Now, our mate John had to fly to Berlin to catch the soccer semi-finals, but he left us this key, and when we was on the phone with him this morning he said we should get his baseball bat and as many balaclavas as we could scarf up, and his bullet-proof vest, and ship them all to-- No? This isn't an AmeriSecure key? No? But I was sure he said AmeriSecure-- No? Well, do you know what company this key-- No? Oh. No."

At Lock-Em-And-Leave-Em, they drew a blank. At Containers For You, they drew a blank. At every warehouse they visited, they came away frustrated. Finally, just as the afternoon shadows grew long and business hours were drawing to a close, they pulled up at the last name on their list. Zanzibar Security. "Lockers In Seven Sizes--Heated Premises--No Safer Place in Seacouver--We Guard Your Goods." As they got out of Mac's convertible, Methos said, "Tell me. Do you feel better now?"

Mac blinked. "Yes," he said, surprised. "Was that why--"

"Why what?" growled Methos, and MacLeod almost grinned.

"All right," he said. "But enough with the comedy routine, it's time to be serious."

They opened the office door, stepped through, and a flashbulb went off in their faces.

There was a Kodak, held by a little girl with a mouth full of bubblegum. It was mauve bubblegum, and she was leaning back with her bare feet propped on the office desk, lowering the camera. She was maybe eleven, and very ugly, with freckles and carroty hair. She had a smirk on her face such as only an eleven-year-old could wear. And she took one look at the key in Methos' hand and said, "Hey! Locker eighty-nine!"

"At last," said MacLeod wearily.

"I gotta protect myself," said the little girl. She raised the camera swiftly, and pop went the flashbulb again. She was taking their pictures. Her voice was a mosquito-shrill preadolescent whine, a perfect match for the grin it went with. "Mom left me in charge. She says there's lots of nasty men around."

"I suppose you need ID?" said Methos.

"Nope. Eighty-nine, lemme see." Down went the camera. She was twisting around, looking at the sheet of corkboard that covered the office wall. The corkboard itself was almost completely covered with photographs--dozens and dozens of photographs--and every photograph had a number on it. Blowing bubbles, she scanned the wall. "Eighty-nine . . . eighty-nine . . . nope." She pointed. There was the evidence: the photo of a man, scrawled across with the number 89. It was Tradescant, of course. "Doesn't look like you," said the child. "Sorry."

She didn't sound sorry at all; she sounded indecently pleased.

"We can explain," Methos began.

She was now shuffling through a ledger on the desk. The Kodak had disappeared. There was a cell phone in her hand. And her bubblegum had popped.

"That's our friend John," Mac started, simultaneously, "he had to leave town suddenly, and--"

But she had found the correct entry in the ledger. "His name wasn't John!" She raised the cell phone, gripping it like a weapon. "Mommy told me to call 911!" she said. "I can do it before you stop me!"

"It's all right," Mac said, reaching out, "we don't mean any harm, we just--"

"You're scaring me, mister!"

Both Mac and Methos stepped automatically back.

She grinned up at them. "Give me fifty bucks and I'll open the locker for you."

"I don't think so," MacLeod growled. He had lost his patience. "I think we'll wait here till your mother comes back, and then have a talk with her."

Her face screwed itself shut, savage as a monkey's. "We have closed-circuit surveillance cameras!" she shrilled, jumping to her feet. "We got both you on tape!" She brandished the cell phone. "And I got your photographs too, so don't try anything. We're closed now. You get out. Both of you. Come back tomorrow!"

"Will your mother be here tomorrow?" asked Mac.

"We'll come see her then," Methos confirmed. He pocketed the key, raised an eyebrow at Mac, and the two of them retreated with alacrity . . . helpless, before the power of an eleven-year-old shrew.

Left alone, the little girl patted her camera and giggled. Then she popped a fresh stick of bubblegum into her mouth. She went around the office, closing it up for the night; her mother liked her to keep things straight. Her mother was back at the trailer park, with one of her migraines. Once she finished locking up, she would stop by the 7-Eleven and buy some subs and Coca-cola for supper. And maybe some Cheetos? Yes, Cheetos. Twinkies. A chocolate bar or two. And she would rent 'Night of the Living Dead' and 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre II'.

She really liked the days when her mom had a migraine, because then she could pig out on junk food, rent horror videos and watch them, and mom would be too tired to stop her.

Last thing before walking home, she checked the safe and stacked old papers in front of it. Picking up the camera again from the desk, she went into the small bathroom at the back of the office. Locking the door carefully behind her, she peered up at the tiny window. No. No. No, nobody was looking in at her. Then, her suspicions mollified, she wriggled out of her too-small shorts, and sat down on the toilet.

She was still there--lost in a daydream of junk food, the camera held possessively on her lap--when the door opened in the outer office.

The loose floorboard near the door squeaked. Rattled. Footsteps went across the floor, heavy footsteps, slow footsteps. The little girl's eyes flew open. There in the mirror was her own face goggling at itself; then she hunkered down, hunching her shoulders as if trying to sink out of sight. A terrible suspicion went through her mind. Was the bathroom door locked?

In the mirror, it was. She stared at its reflection; still, the suspicion remained. Was it really locked? Really? If she turned around now--right now--and looked straight at the door, would it still be locked?

She knew every sound those floorboards could make. The footsteps were circling the office now, but the man--whoever he was--had not called out. What kind of visitor didn't call to see if anyone was there? Ever so slowly, she turned her head . . . and there . . .

Yes, the door was still locked.

Yes, the footsteps were going slowly away across the office floor.

The outer door slammed shut. Her whole body slumped in superstitious relief. She felt so silly! She sagged where she sat, even snickered a little, glanced up automatically at the window--it was high above her eye-level-and saw what was looking in at her from outside.

She took one look and screamed. There was--it was--all she could think of were images from horror movies, of a human eye sewn together like a patchwork quilt, the irises three different colors and clumsy sutures stitching across them. Of a face beneath a hood of sacking, bits and pieces showing through rips in the cloth. Thud. Something hit the wall outside, and the whole room shook. She tumbled off the toilet, fell in the corner of the tiny bathroom and hit her head against the wall. Thud. Thud. Crash. The window shattered. Bits of glass showered down, stuck sparkling in her hair. She screamed. Another crash. The wall--it was old clapboard, framed on dry-rotted two-by-fours--rocked and shuddered.

A hand came groping through the broken window, clumsy fingers prying at the window-frame. To her eyes that hand seemed as big as a gorilla's. More glass fell. There were shards of jagged glass still stuck to the putty of the frame, and when the hand turned and grasped at the woodwork, a dagger of glass sliced straight through the palm and stood out bloody from the back of the hand.

A shrill whine came from the little girl's mouth. She scuttled backward and wedged herself in the corner behind the toilet.

Blood splattered down, made her face wet. She whimpered. The shard of glass snapped off as the hand moved. Flesh formed instantly around the wound, and with the knife-edges of the glass still projecting out of it, the hand gripped the window-frame and ripped it free from the wall.

Crash. The beams of the wall bent inward. Then the cheap clapboard cracked from top to bottom. Crash. A whole arm came through the window, the hand groping blindly. It passed within inches of her face, and she had an instant's sickening close-up of the glass shard. Electricity danced at the edges of the wound, where the skin had grown into the glass. She swallowed vomit. With one hand, in dead silence, she was trying to hike up her shorts; she knew she had only a few seconds to get them up, before the thing came through the wall.

If she snapped the flashbulb in its eyes (she told herself, frantically retreating into fantasy) it would hurt it. Maybe make it freeze for a few seconds. Delay it. Drive it away? Yes! Trembling all over, she raised the camera.

The wall ripped open. She managed to pop the flashbulb several times, before an enormous arm clubbed down and smashed her head open.

#

It hit Mac on the highway, and he almost wrecked the car.

By the time Methos got his hand on the wheel, the Highlander had doubled over, incoherent. Lost, from the looks of it, in a fugue state: a waking dream. "The coal cellar," he said, half-strangling on the words. "The covert alley in Tradescant's garden. I looked up and she was staring through the solar window at me, I forgot it all these years--how could I forget it--that's impossible--and she--she--she--"

The car screamed to a stop by the side of the road, and then Mac grabbed the wheel again.

"We have to go back," he said.

They drove back to Zanzibar. They walked into the empty office. They stood there, glancing suspiciously around. Both men had their swords drawn, ready for anything. But no one was there.

"Duncan," said Methos softly, almost crooning the words. "Where next?"

MacLeod's eyes went vague. "That door," he whispered, "through there-- Stay here." Cautiously as if treading on knives, he stepped through the bathroom door. Methos remained in the office, turning in slow circles, watching every side. His skin was crawling. To him, it seemed that every corner of the cheap office held its own creeping terrors. And not for any amount of money would he have gone through that door.

After a long time, Mac reappeared. The only thing he held, now, was a Kodak camera with a smashed lens.

"Teach me how to fight this," was all he said.

"Yes," was all Methos replied.

Act Three

Long afterward, Elizabeth Day arrived on the scene.

The forensic officers were still busy about their labors, and the whole area was cordoned off. She walked between two police cruisers, passed through the yellow warning tape without a pause. No one stopped her. She stood out like a surreal beacon, in her brief ruffled sundress and sandals, her hair crowned with a chaplet of wild bluebells. But no one noticed her. Once she stooped and gathered several golden dandelions, growing weedy beside the office stoop. Holding them to her chin and smiling, she stepped daintily into the office; she trod through the wreckage, glanced about, paused to gaze at Tradescant's photo still on the wall. All this, and yet not a single policeman challenged her. She passed among them unseen as a ghost.

Once she had read the number scrawled across Tradescant's picture, it was a simple matter to find locker eighty-nine. Here, too, the police were busy. Evidently the locker had been smashed open, and not by a subtle hand; they were dusting for fingerprints on the inner walls, exclaiming over several muddy tracks, and taking samples of blood-spots here and there. Blood on the locker floor, blood around the shattered lock. Bloody smears at random on the walls. There were also some shards of broken glass.

But that was all. Whatever had been stored inside locker eighty-nine was gone.

She knew who was responsible.

Thinking of the carnage in the office, she spoke aloud. No one heard her. They would have found it meaningless if they had, for it was only an Arabic proverb: "He will read sentences of torments and the book of thunderbolts."

#

Mac and Methos too had visited the locker. And found it empty. Then they had beaten a hasty retreat, taking the Kodak with them. "Its lens is shattered," MacLeod said, examining it, "and the casing is beyond repair. But the film cartridge seems to be intact." There was Mac's grey Thunderbird, parked conspicuously on the grass verge before the Zanzibar entrance . . . but if they were lucky, they would leave unobserved. "We'll stop at the nearest gas station, I'll phone the police."

"Don't give them your name."

"If I wanted them to have my name, I'd call them on my cell." Mac dug out his keys. He closed his fist around them. He eyed Methos. "All right. What can you teach me, Methos?"

"In a moving car? Nothing," said Methos. "And give me those--I'll drive." He held out his hand, and Mac scowled and gave up the keys. "We can't take that film to a lab. Do you sometimes take pictures of antiques and develop them?"

"Yes. I have what we need at home," said Mac.

So when Joe Dawson arrived, it was to find MacLeod's loft apartment enshrouded in darkness, and a dim red glow emanating from the bathroom which had been turned into a miniature photographic lab. Methos was sitting on one of the tall stools in the kitchen, eating Scotch eggs dipped in mustard, and drinking light ale. He looked meditative. MacLeod ducked his head out of the bathroom and said, "What did you do with that tray of hypo? Hello, Joe." He looked disgruntled.

"Hi, guys. What's up?"

"You came at just the right time, actually. You can check something for us. Was there an immortal involved in a murder tonight? At Zanzibar Security, over on the east side near the highway."

Joe sighed and pulled out his phone. "Good boy," said Methos lightly, and set a can of beer in front of him.

It took three calls and a little cross-talk to get the information required. While he was busy, Joe kept an eye on the two immortals, who were conferring over several photographic prints. Yes. Something bad was up; he could tell just by looking at Mac. (He flattered himself that he could read his immortal like a book.) MacLeod looked worse than disgruntled; he looked ready to bite off nails and spit out steel. There was an unusually sharp ring to his voice, a frown-line clenched between his brows. Whatever was on the prints, it was disturbing news.

What was he saying to Methos now? Joe eavesdropped with shameless Watcher acumen. MacLeod was demanding something, in an urgent undertone, but Methos was flippant; he shrugged, replied distinctly, "What, with Joe here? Mac, I'm shocked." And MacLeod gave him a look as black as Auld Nick flying over the Hebrides. Fascinated, Joe strung his last call out in the hopes of hearing more. But then they both shut up, and he knew he was out of luck.

"Okay," he announced, shutting his phone with a loud click, "I checked every immortal in greater Seacouver, but we drew a blank. Nobody did anything out of the ordinary tonight. Hell, half of them are snuggled down in their beds like good little boys and girls." He waited. "Well? What happened?"

"You tell him," said Methos.

MacLeod did. As he explained, he kept checking on his prints. He clucked over them, fussed with them, but at last seemed satisfied and turned on the kitchen lights. "Here," he said. "These are the last few exposures in the roll."

"There's a good shot of me, with you," Methos remarked, looking. "And an unflattering shot of you, with me. That, however, is a fine clear picture of a young lady crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue. That girl had too much time on her hands."

"She's dead now," Mac snapped, "so have some respect." Yes, he was on edge, all right. He held up the next print. "Now, this one is mostly blank."

"That's a ceiling," said Methos, "or at least, that smudge in the corner of the shot seems to be a ceiling fan. The lighting is very bad. And what's that, there?"

"A blur," said Joe.

"Someone's arm and shoulder," Mac guessed, "and that could be part of his head. But it's mostly out of the frame."

Joe took the enlarged print and examined it. "Hey, look here--what's this? A tattoo that looks like a railroad track?" Whatever the tattoo was, it wandered across the blurry arm and shoulder, changing direction several times. "By the way, I looked up John Tradescant's chronicle. One of our older immortals. Date of first death unknown, always on the move--he traveled a lot, never stayed in one place long. Especially during the last hundred years." It was more like Frankenstein stitches than railway tracks, he decided in amusement. He took the next print and tilted it several ways, trying to make sense of the images.

"How about his wife, Elizabeth Day?" Mac asked.

"He was married to an Elizabeth Day in the early seventeenth century--just before you met him--but we have no record of what became of her. No record of her being immortal at all . . . Very nasty customer, Tradescant. During World War II, we have him heavily involved in Nazi medical experiments. He was working in Munich then, but the records show several train-cars of Jewish and Gypsy prisoners were sent from Auschwich for his special use . . ." Joe turned the photo sideways. Were those more tattoos?

"Let me guess," said Methos. "His speciality was organ transplants and limb replacement?" He handed Joe the next photo in the series.

"How'd you know? Yes, he--" Then Joe made sense of the photo in his hands.

His jaw dropped.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up.

"Is this some kind of a joke?" he whispered.

"No," said MacLeod. "This is what we think killed the little girl."

In the photograph, Joe could make out a face, an arm and hand, what appeared to be another person's hand, and perhaps a third person standing just behind the first . . . at least, there was the edge of one head behind another, a distinct second ear and hair of a different color. The face he could see was tracked across, nose and cheek and temple, with the Frankenstein stitches he had mistaken for tattooing. The hand in clearest focus appeared to be blood-streaked, with something jagged standing straight up from the palm. The thumb and first finger were ivory-pale. The remaining fingers were very dark, large-jointed and gnarled and hairy--distinctly foreign to their neighbors.

Joe swallowed and looked away abruptly, his stomach turning. The face--what he could see of it--was twisted into the grimace of a madman, sheer concentrated emotion etched into every line. Its teeth were clenched, lips drawn back. Was that pain in those dilated eyes? Or insane rage? Or grief?

"Is this . . . one person?"

"I think it is," said Mac. He poured out Glenlivet all round, put a glass into Joe's hand. "Sit down, Joe. My story's not over yet."

His friends sat down and continued to pore over the pictures, while he told them about the year 1638, about Tradescant's house, about Tradescant himself. "I should never have stayed with him," he mused, tilting his glass so the light shone through, "I knew he wasn't a good man, but he had all the charm of a Faustus, the glamor of the damned. These days, we would have called him mesmeric. Anyway, I was certainly under his spell--well and truly entranced by him--and yet . . . a few suspicions still crept in . . ."

And he stared at the scotch in his glass, till you would think the amber liquor through cut crystal showed him the past like a magic ball.

. . . He remembered how it was during that summer in England, when the rumor of fever in the city drove all the gentry to their country estates, but the poor folk chirruped like starveling sparrows in the streets. Tradescant, naturally, had laughed at the threat of sickness. His housemaids, his cook, the three gardeners who scuttled like mice at his least command--all these whispered that he was indeed a magician, and knew an hundred potions to cure any ailment. Potions from Egypt and the Orient, from the New World over the sea. For didn't he get shipments of plants all the way from Virginia, packed in kegs of moss? Everything grew in his garden--and wasn't he always picking, drying, tasting, experimenting? He drew likenesses of every kind of herb, and kept them all in a vast Morocco-leather folio. His servants had the blindest faith in him. Nevertheless, not for faith nor gold would they have ventured into his cellars.

All this, the MacLeod of the present day described to Methos and Joe.

Which brought him to one dark and stormy night, on the back stair of Tradescant's house. And young Duncan MacLeod, barefoot in his nightshirt, holding a candlestick. On his face, a look of pale and romantic determination. There before him, the cellar door . . . stout oak barred and locked with ironmongery. There in his hand, a big brass key. The door, the key, the lock would admit him to Tradescant's sanctum sanctorum. He meant to use them that night.

Thunder had rolled and boomed through the big quiet house as he fitted the key to the lock. Then a thrill like doom had made him stiffen, the doorknob had rattled, the key turned on its own as Duncan MacLeod recoiled in near-panic. Creeak went the rusty hinges as the door was opened from inside. Thunder cracked. A floorboard squeaked. John Tradescant, a bloody knife in his hand, stood framed in the doorway.

He wore an apron besplattered with nameless stains, better suited to a butcher's shambles than a gentleman's country house. The knife he carried was dull steel, honed thin as a fishbone, and polished to a lethal gleam. It was not as bright as the gleam in Tradescant's eye, though. In one step, he was next to MacLeod, shutting the door firmly behind him. "Come, come!" He grasped the candlestick, raising it between them. The little flame, wildly flickering, underlit his craggy face. And MacLeod stood very still, as Tradescant's knife stroked his Adam's apple.

"A Damascus blade, perfumed in the casting," said Tradescant in a near-whisper. "Why, what a close shave this is for you, my Scottish adventurer."

MacLeod said nothing.

"Now, what have we here?" The words were menacing; the tone was caressing--a father's reproof to a beloved wayward child. "Thirteen stone of milk-fed veal, topped by a prime gammon of bacon. Out after dark, where he shouldn't be. What are you doing on my back stair, Duncan lad?"

"I thought I heard a noise--"

"--a scream in the night?" Tradescant chuckled. "You must have been dreaming. Perhaps it was the pigeons cooing in the thatch, the bats streaming over, owls hunting in the field--"

"'Twas none of these," MacLeod muttered. "Think I don't know what an owl-hoot sounds like?"

"What I think and what you know--ah, there's the kernel of the matter, my boy. There's many a long year's experience between the two. Perhaps you fancied a damsel was in distress somewhere?"

MacLeod's mouth set stubbornly--though when Tradescant prodded him with the knife, his eyes showed their whites all round. Still, he said, "And what about that Septimus Fitzkirk, then? Perhaps it was him I heard."

". . . Well, well." Tradescant made the Damascus knife vanish. His expression was shrewd, gaging; he lifted the candle. "The Fitzkirk upstart? Does he still live, then? I thought I fought and defeated him."

"Aye. And did you take his head?"

"Why wouldn't I take his head?" Tradescant threw back his own head and laughed suddenly. "Oh, Duncan, my suspicious Duncan! Perhaps I ought to take you through that door and show you my lair. Then you could learn all my arts and ponder my secret treasures." He pulled something out of a pocket, raised it into the eye of the candlelight; it was a conker, a hard chestnut such as boys played with, but drilled and strung on a piece of string. "Like this piece of nutshell. Isn't it polished to a pretty grain? Watch it rotate in the flame, and you shall see past and future together . . ."

The conker spun, gleaming. MacLeod leaned closer and closer, his eyes going crossed as Tradescant crooned in his ear. ". . . you don't know where you came from, what you're here for, what powers lie sleeping in that hard Scottish conker of a head . . ." MacLeod's eyelids grew heavier. Suddenly, convulsively, he yawned. "Go to sleep, go to sleep, what do you care about my researches? You understand only folly, horses and swords, a warm bed for the night and a woman to share it . . ." Mac yawned again. He scarcely heard the words. "For as we grow ancient, we old ones," Tradescant murmured, "we change, our shells crack open, but if we survive--if we survive--we grow as mighty as the chestnut tree . . . someday you too will fall out of love with mundane things, and then see how you'll discover whole worlds of passion in your heart . . ."

MacLeod imagined he was engulfed in the bright brown spin of the polished conker. Tradescant's voice purred, "You show promise, boy. You have curiosity, the dawnings of intellect. Perhaps I ought to take you downstairs after all, see what you make of my experiments . . . But no, your will is still tainted with romantic ideals. Now meet the wolves of memory."

Mac's eyelids slid shut, and he knew no more.

"He hypnotized you?" said Methos, in the modern world.

"He certainly did," Mac agreed. Slamming his glass down, he stood up and took a turn around the room, stewing. "It's all a blank afterward, till it was dawn and I was wandering through Tradescant's garden barefoot in a daze . . . That by itself is disturbing enough, isn't it? The whole night gone." He broke off, lifted a hand toward his head. He felt himself break into a cold sweat. "Wait. Something else happened."

"You forgot something?" said Joe. "I thought that was impossible."

"Not impossible," Methos said. "Just doesn't happen very often."

"You told me when we met, that you'd forgotten most of your own early life," said MacLeod coldly. Joe perked up his ears, but Methos merely shrugged. Mac came back and tossed down the last swallow of his Glenlivet. "There are some memories I don't lose, but mislay. I just don't think about them. Set them aside. Sometimes till centuries later." He thought of Cassandra, of other things. "This--all this time, I thought it was just a dream. I was in Tradescant's garden. It was a little after dawn--there was dew on my feet--I had just stepped out of the covert alley. I looked toward the house, and there was a woman looking out at me, through the solar windows--"

She had hung in the air, behind the rippled imperfect glass of the windows. The lead between the panes had framed her image in fragments, making her look like an angel in a cathedral window. With one hand pressed to the glass. With great solemn eyes all starry with the night. And oh, how her dress had glowed, all linen and lace! How white her face had been, luminous as the full moon; how slender her body, curving as gracefully as a silver sickle moon. A living angel. Shining, like a ghost. Like the moon pent in a woven willow basket.

Her eyes had been level with MacLeod's. She had been floating in the air, her feet plainly visible.

It was then that she had come straight through the thick glass window, and at MacLeod.

"Worse than any nightmare," he concluded, telling the story three centuries later. "Right at me, with her hands fluttering. And her mouth was moving, I remember it clearly. But there was no sound." Shame-faced, he looked into his empty glass. "I ran away like a craven coward, of course. And afterward--in the light of day--what could I think, except that it was a dream? But she was the woman I spoke with in the park. Tradescant's wife. Elizabeth Day."

He picked up the photographic print, glanced at the monstrosity captured in the dead girl's snapshot. He remembered that night in Tradescant's garden, and the events afterward, and shivered slightly; he did not want to speak about those things to anyone. All he said, in the end, was: "I recognize this immortal too. It's Septimus Fitzkirk."

#

He was such stuff as nightmares are made of.

He had been handsome once, an arrogant immortal with the world at his feet; he had been one of the princes of the universe. That had been four hundred years ago. Today, he was hunkered down in the garbage bin of a MacDonald's on the outskirts of Seacouver, scavenging for food. And he was a monster. The bogeyman from a thousand horror stories. A ghoul, one of the walking dead.

Splinters of glass were still in him still, and long wicked splints and pieces of wood, from the beams of the Zanzibar office bathroom. They stuck out at random angles, and quickening writhed over them like strange electric worms. They were growing into his flesh. He moaned softly as he moved, from the pain of it. He wolfed down day-old french fries, stone cold and stuck together in gluey pallid clumps, and stale hamburger buns as hard as wood; he ate Egg McMuffins soggy with coffee, and then the coffee grounds they came with. Tonight, he would sleep in the garbage.

For centuries, he had lived like this. Hunting Tradescant. There was no home for such as him. He had taken shelter in leper colonies, and seen the lepers themselves flinch from him; he had been stoned to death by terrified mortals; he had become Quasimodo. Throughout the long horrible decades, only one thought had sustained him. He would find John Tradescant again, and defeat him. Then he would take Tradescant's head. Eventually.

Fitzkirk fed upon the thought, imagining his vengeance. Such things as he would do! And he was closer to Tradescant than he had been in years. He had tracked down his enemy's secret cache, stolen away what was hidden there. When Tradescant learned of it, he would be betrayed into Fitzkirk's hands. Trapped between Circe and the cyclops. What wouldn't he do, to get his treasure back?

Septimus, said a voice.

Septimus Fitzkirk lifted his misshapen head, peered blearily around. Then he was enveloped in the torments of Hell.

#

"All right," said MacLeod, later, "teach me."

He had been working out in the dojo, as he did nearly every morning. Working out, and stewing. Out of the corner of his eye, he had watched Methos . . . who sat placidly on the bottom step of the old wooden stair, legs sprawling and heels propped just so, with his journal in his lap. He had his Walkman on, and was listening to Queen--rock music so vapid, it could rot the brain--but that wasn't important. Mac had been waiting for Methos to make the first move; however, one might as well try to outlast the very sands of time. At last he had given up. He strode over and crouched down, hands on knees, at eye-level with the older immortal. "Joe's not around anymore, and time's short. When do we start?"

Methos closed his journal, slipped the headphones off his ears. The faint tinkle of music ceased. "It won't be easy, Mac."

"I can do it," said Mac. "No putting it off anymore, Methos."

"Well. That breathing thing you were doing yesterday--"

"The Kashima-Shinryu tanden breathing?"

"Yeah. Let's see you doing that again."

Obediently, Mac folded himself into seiza, placed his hands in the correct position, breathed from his abdomen, stilled his mind. He concentrated on his ki. Methos moved around him, touched the side of his head and altered his posture slightly; MacLeod shivered slightly at the light brush of his fingers. Then his breathing checked, as Methos slid the Walkman headphones over his head. "Listen. Wait. Empty your mind," Methos instructed, and soft music whispered into Mac's ears. "The song," Methos said, almost as softly, "is 'My Fairy King'. One of my favorites." His voice was gentle, a teacher's voice, coaxing and calm. "Listen to the medley of voices, you can play it a thousand times and still catch a different phrase every time. Concentrate on the song. This goes over best if you listen to the first part at very low volume, but then when they start to scream--"

He twisted the Walkman's dial to full volume the instant they started to scream.

MacLeod yelled with pain. He jerked out of his serene pose, ripped the headphones off and hurled them across the room; on his feet, still shivering with shock and rage, he glared at Methos. Methos had not even moved. He dangled the Walkman with its snapped cord, made a comical face. "You don't like Freddie Mercury?" he said.

"What was that about?" Mac shouted. "My ears are numb!"

"And your point is?" asked Methos.

With a visible effort, Mac calmed himself. He knelt down again, rested his hands on his knees, said an inward mantra several times. "Methos, was that necessary?"

"Yes," said Methos.

Patience, Mac told himself. Patience. Whatever unorthodox teaching methods Methos used, the end was worth the means. He breathed in deeply, repeated his mantra: Remember he's the oldest living immortal, remember he's the oldest living immortal . . . Meanwhile Methos was rummaging in his bag. It was a backpack--Mac realized that Methos had brought it down to the dojo with him. There were several books stuffed into it, and doubtless other arcane objects. Remember he's the oldest living immortal. He knows what he's doing. Methos' expression was troubled, yet confident; if there had been even the hint of a smile on his face, Mac would have turned around then and there, and walked right out of the room.

Better try again. "What now, Methos?"

Methos' eyes were clear, his gaze was steady, his voice was serious. "It might work better away from here. Do you suppose there are a lot of people on the street outside?"

"At this hour? Probably."

"Hm. Are you familiar with the poems of Edward Lear?"

"Why--yes."

"Good. I want you to go outside. Walk to the corner." Clearly, steadily, seriously. "Take off all your clothes. Then recite 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose'--"

"For God's sake!" Mac exploded.

"Yes, deshi?"

The two immortals stared at each other.

There is a tradition in martial-arts teaching that the student is never to question the master, nor is the sensei to explain himself to his deshi. His student. Instead, the student is directed through exercises designed to instill skills. These kata-exercises must be followed faithfully, till they become second nature. Words cannot demonstrate what is beyond words; explanations can show the humble beginner how to explain, but never how to act. One learns to act through action alone. As the student masters his kata, he begins to see the underlying rules, to glimpse the meaning within the pattern. Only then does true learning occur. Enlightenment can come only from within.

MacLeod had trained in more than one martial-arts ryu in his time. Now, recognizing at last an appeal to tradition, he collected himself (a difficult task) and bent forward in a bow. He spoke in Japanese. "Forgive me, sensei. I would do what you asked. But what would that accomplish, except to make me spend an afternoon in jail?"

"Are you questioning me, deshi?"

"I--no. But . . ." Mac looked away. "Cassandra said she couldn't teach me," he muttered.

"Cassandra's a witch. Of course she couldn't teach you to attack other minds, you have to be born with power to learn that. She was. So she did. I, on the other hand," said Methos, "wasn't born with power, any more than you were. So I had to learn to defend myself. Just as you will."

"That's what I want. But there isn't much time--"

"Time," said Methos, "is important only to the man who has no patience. If he is waiting for a loved one, ten minutes is a long time. If he is training for perfection, fifty years is just a beginning."

"Yes, sensei."

"Omedeto gozaimasu!" said Methos.

"Yes, sensei."

Methos studied him. "All right," he said quietly. "Let's tackle this from a more traditional angle. Mac, you've studied the Matsumura patsai kata?" MacLeod nodded; this particular kata, originating from the early nineteenth century, was a cornerstone of Okinawan karate lore. Naturally he was familiar with it. Methos was rummaging in his backpack again. (Was that an aerosol can Mac saw in there? And why?) "You can do the patsai kata. Do it eight times, and do it perfectly. Use these."

He tossed them at Mac: a blindfold, and earplugs.

"What if . . . ?"

"If an immortal attacks while you're blindfolded? You'll still know if they're coming, won't you." Mac nodded grudgingly. "Wear your katana, if you like." Methos sat down on the stairs again, opened his journal. "Work, Mac. We'll talk when you've finished." Sotto voce: "And from now on, I want to be addressed as 'Little Father'."

MacLeod felt himself relax as he went through the first movements of the kata. The blindfold was an impediment, but he trusted himself not to blunder into the walls. And the earplugs--the absence of distracting noise--lent an eerie concentration to his efforts. Also, he liked the Matsumura patsai. Patsai was the art of splitting defenses, breaching an opponent's fortifications. He liked aggressive kata. It was in his nature. Bushi Matsumura's kata was the greatest of all patsai kata, and before you could claimed to have truly mastered the art of patsai, you had to have mastered the Matsumura kata.

Training was eighty percent of winning fights. That was MacLeod's personal credo: the immortal who trained well, fought well. Oh, diet was also important--simple food, fresh fruit, and lots of orange juice was what worked for Mac--but training was paramount. He liked to put in a solid four or five hours a day, training. First stretches and rolls, then some kind of footwork. Sometimes he went out and ran ten or fifteen miles--always on a grass surface; running on pavement ruined the feet and arches--and sometimes he stayed in the dojo and ran in place. Or skipped ropes, a good all-around exercise provided you could hit and keep a brisk rhythm, maybe a hundred and fifty turns per minute; like running, this made a good workout for the lower body and legs. The swordfighter who tried to get by on speed of hand and upper-body strength alone was a dead man.

He lifted weights. He swam, at the university's Olympic-sized pool. He trained with the sword too, of course. He trained with knives, bo staves, quarterstaves, and various obscure Oriental weapons; with a two-hundred-year-old claymore that had been a gift from Connor, with the rapier and rapier-and-dagger, and with a modern replica of a Roman gladius, solid iron and tremendously heavy. He trained bare-handed. Last summer, he had spent three months straight brushing up on his archery. Every four or five years, he enrolled in a police-sponsored course in small-arms firing. Training was the best habit any immortal could develop.

Sometimes he shadow-boxed, an art he had learned in Canada in the thirties. What had he been doing then? One day in Toronto, he had wandered into an athletic club and met a boxing promoter named Charlie Ring--another immortal, but more importantly, a fanatic who ate, drank, and breathed boxing. Mac had liked him. Mac had ended up taking lessons from him . . . though he had always resisted Ring's offers to manage his career. Even today, Mac could still hear his gravelly voice urging: "You got it in ya to go pro, Dunk. You got long smooth muscles, just what a boxer wants. Put on a few pounds, climb into the ring--I'll set ya up with Mike Marty and Baby Yack, and then putchu against Patsy Brandino, a knockout in five sweet rounds, it'll make ya famous. Before ya know it, you'll be the pride of Palookaville. Any normal guy'd die for it. Whaddaya say? Whaddaya say?"

Poor Ring. Years ago, he had met the Kurgan, and died for it.

Now that Mac thought of it, dealing with Methos was a lot like shadow-boxing.

What was Methos doing now, while he danced spinning in the dark? Reading, no doubt. Writing. Joe would give his life savings for an afternoon with Methos' journals, but could you trust him not to sneak in a mini-camera and photograph the pages for posterity? He was already keeping a Methos Chronicle, Mac knew this for a fact. Anyway it wasn't Mac's business. If Methos wanted Joe to read his journals, he'd give them to him.

. . . It was too long since he had brushed up on his karate. But how would this strengthen his mind's defenses? Perhaps Zen held the answer. MacLeod concentrated, driving thought from his mind till all he knew was emptiness--emptiness, and action. Eight flawless repetitions. Sweat dripped from his forehead, his limbs ached, his heart soared; it was the Zen satisfaction of perfect movement. At last, smiling inwardly, he finished. "Was it enough, Methos?" he said aloud. Then he pulled off the blindfold, and his jaw dropped.

Methos had been writing, all right. The instant Mac had blindfolded himself, he must have pulled out his aerosol and gone to work, because there was no surface in Mac's beloved dojo that was not now covered with spray-paint. Black, dripping, smudged, smeared spray-paint. The walls were decorated. The floor was desecrated. Every window had been smirched, and even the ceiling was defaced. The dojo looked like the site of a gang war with artistic pretensions.

Methos himself, naturally, was long gone.

#

The thing that had been Septimus Fitzkirk lumbered through the warehouse district of Seacouver. He had wrapped himself in a billowing coat, there on that hot summer day, jammed a hat onto his head and covered his hands and feet with rags. He kept to the empty back streets, and even so he attracted some curious looks.

Her voice sang in his head: where is it where is it where is it where is it . . .

He staggered, walked like a drunkard. He caroomed off walls. He shook his head in pain, as if tormented by buzzing bees. His vision of the world around him came and went, replaced by images of horror no mortal had ever lived through. The witch was in his mind, driving him with the wolves of memory.

Her voice rang in his head: where is it where is it where is it WHERE IS IT!!

She was making him relive the past.

Tell me where it is, said the voice in his inner ear. Septimus you are a monster! We were allies once, but no longer. Repent of your crimes. Or . . .

His mouth worked. He was trying to grin, to speak with a cloven tongue and teeth no two of which belonged together. What came out was a fine spray of saliva and mangled words: ". . . won't . . . be your . . . puppet, bitch!"

Then suffer, said her voice.

And then, once more and evermore, he was plunged into the acid bath of his own memory--tied down, screaming, while John Tradescant bent close, a fine ironic smile in his eyes, cutting and slicing and stitching. In the primitive laboratory beneath the Lambeth house, behind stout oaken doors locked and barred. Suffering the torments of the damned . . . just like all the others. Fitzkirk was merely the last of his victims.

The incisions. The transplants. The experiments. Worst of all, when Tradescant tilted a mirror to catch the lamplight, and Fitzkirk caught a glimpse of what had been done to him. "Come, come, my friend," Tradescant said, smiling gently down at him, "remember that this is all done for science. You are a modern Prometheus." Fitzkirk spat in his eye, cursed him in a dozen languages. The cellar walls were fieldstone and mortar, the beams of the ceiling immense; no sound escaped. "I give thanks to nature," said Tradescant, essaying a joke, as he readied his note-book and inkwell, "that I was born a human being and not a dumb animal, a man and not a woman, an immortal rather than of mortal years, and lastly--but not least, my friend--that I am myself, and not you. For you are my choice tonight." He laid one big hand on Fitzkirk's chest, pressing him flat. The first slash of the knife was swift and sure; Fitzkirk heaved and subsided, his shriek ebbing away to a wet gurgle. Then once more and evermore, Tradescant stooped avidly over him, dipping both red-stained hands in the open wound and raising them--on fire with Fitzkirk's quickening--toward his face. It was the very gesture of a man drinking from a fountain.

Always, after the agony ended, Fitzkirk's memories tilted toward a time of healing, peace in the darkness, with Tradescant gone. A glimmer of light had wakened him, he had blinked and lifted his head. And there was a young immortal just letting himself into the cellar, sword in hand. He wore the MacLeod plaid. Looking about, he raised a lantern high, and as he caught sight of Fitzkirk his eyes showed white all round the rims and his face went goose-pale. Fitzkirk knew him, Tradescant's student, and obviously an innocent. In the face of his shock, it seemed there was nothing to do save croak a lame jest: "Good sir, welcome. I'm a sad sorry . . . damsel in distress, but damn me, end this torture and I'd almost yield you . . . a head, if not a maidenhead . . ."

Fitzkirk groaned, reliving it. Even as he did, the hated voice whispered in his ear: If you will not lead me to my treasure, at least I can push you to your doom.

Somewhere ahead, he sensed another immortal.

#

Methos was sitting on the corner, watching pretty girls go by. He was also armed to the teeth.

Tucked away in various hiding places were his gun, his poniard, a stiletto, a can of spray-paint, and of course his sword--the big heavy blade, so large that the first few swings with it always made his arm ache straight to the shoulder. So weighty, that Methos could almost use it to bludgeon his opponents into submission. It was a good old sword--not like MacLeod's magnificent katana, which had killed so often that it could almost take a head on its own, but still a good sword. It had come to Methos second-hand, two hundred years before; he had hardly ever used it, before meeting Duncan MacLeod.

A sword was a sword was a sword. He knew how to care for them, of course, but they were only tools. Killing tools. Methos was not really interested in weapons; a good sword was vital, in his viewpoint, but so was a good pair of boots, and of the two, he would get more wear out of the boots. Now, Mac could probably tell him all about his sword's antecedents, but Methos had more important things to think about. He had his little black book on his knee, and was busy scribbling.

Out of the back corner of his mind, he had plucked a memory: of the agora of Athens, over two thousand years before. Of strolling between wine-shops, talking with one's gentleman friends, among whom were Aristokles and Alcibiades and Methos' special crony the playwright Aristophanes. Women passing by in silent shrouded groups of four or five, faces averted even beneath their veils. Sitting on the rocky hillside in the lee of the temple of Dionysus, eating onions and fresh parsley and bread dipped in olive oil. All through one long summer evening, listening to a stonecutter named Socrates hold forth on the subject of friendship. Long ago. Aeschines had written the whole thing down afterward, but Methos hadn't seen a copy of that particular dialogue since the library-fire tragedy in Alexandria, also very long ago. He was rewriting the entire text from memory, as a gift for MacLeod, who was more important than any sword ever would be.

He was also keeping an eye out for Elizabeth Day; he didn't want her meddling with Mac while Mac was still vulnerable. Finally, he had a weather ear cocked in the direction of the dojo. Any moment now, Mac himself might come storming out, mad as a wet hen and looking for trouble. Brawling on the street was not in Methos' plans today.

Hence the Socratic dialogue. He was prepared to start quoting fast. If MacLeod looked dangerous, Methos would start in on Socrates; if on the other hand he looked too calm, Methos would switch to something guaranteed to embarrass. Preferably 'The Myrmidons'. In English. As loudly as possible. He remembered that 'The Myrmidons' had a number of lines which ought to make MacLeod see red. It was all in a good cause anyway.

What was that? But it was only a taxi pulling up in front of the dojo, and Joe Dawson getting out. Methos tucked away his notebook, made a megaphone of his hands and called, "Hey, Joe!" and Joe saw him, swung his canes around, and began to make his way slowly over. Methos strolled forward to meet him. "Don't go up there, Mac's in a bad mood just now."

They met halfway down the street. "And why aren't I surprised?" asked Joe. He grimaced. "So what's happening to Mac today?"

"The necessary confusion of Socrates and Edward Lear," said Methos, "which not even a Scots barbarian could contemplate unmoved--that's what's happening to Mac today."

"Huh?" said Joe.

Methos was about to answer, when something caught his attention. Another immortal was coming. He swung around, laid a hand on his sword-hilt. "Wait here, Joe."

"What the hell is that?" Joe blurted out, following his gaze.

That stood in the mouth of the nearby alley, an ungainly bulk swathed in rags. Methos was already moving toward it. "Septimus Fitzkirk, I presume," he said. "Well, well." That came as he caught a clearer look at what he faced. "And I thought nothing could surprise me anymore."

Everything happened very quickly then.

Methos drew his sword. Joe hobbled after him, following despite his own better judgement; the newcomer was moving forward too, drawing his own sword. Joe was frightened, intrigued, already taking mental notes for his private Methos Chronicle. In his view, he had a professional obligation to witness everything.

The world narrowed down to fragments, slices. Joe heard swords clash together, an animal growl. Methos, incredibly, was laughing. The two immortals were suddenly coming at him, neither one seeing him, moving too quickly to dodge. Joe raised one cane in self-defense. Fitzkirk's hat fell at his feet. "Fall down, Joe," said Methos' cool voice, and then Methos himself had kicked Joe's feet out from under him and Joe fell heavily to the hard sidewalk.

Methos sprang right across his prone body. The thing looming over Joe roared. Methos glanced down with narrowed eyes, kicked Joe in the legs again. Joe (of course) felt nothing; but his prosthetic legs clattered, and then the monster stumbled over them, and Methos lunged and sank his sword to the hilt in Fitzkirk's chest.

Before he could withdraw the blade and retreat, the monster had hold of him.

No Watcher ever had a closer view of a fight. They grappled right over him, swaying. Electricity crawled over Fitzkirk's chest, around the wound, up the hilt of Methos' sword; the spectacle was terrifying and unnatural. Blood splattered down. Joe swallowed, as red drops wetted his face, his beard. He blinked away faintness. And gasped aloud.

Fitzkirk's coat had fallen open, revealing a nightmare. Tiny crackles of quickening writhed across the maimed immortal's entire body. Here and there, embedded glass shards peeked through rips in his ragged shirt. The tracks of massive clumsy sutures marked him, and quickening bled through them. In huge patches, the flesh had mortified with necrosis, blackening as it rotted--but because Fitzkirk was immortal, the parts grafted onto him could not die, even though the skin had sloughed off and maggots wriggled in them, too tiny for Fitzkirk's huge fingers to pick out. And he had two faces. Joe bit back vomit as he realized that Fitzkirk's entire head must have been split open, and another immortal's face and skull had been sewn onto the original. A dead face. Its eyes sagged open, and its features had run like melted wax. How many other immortals had been butchered, that bits and pieces of them could go into his making?

Septimus Fitzkirk roared again. He jerked Methos closer, swung a club of an arm, and Methos was thrown backward and lost his footing. He landed twisting. Fitzkirk stepped forward, stabbing down with his sword once, twice, thrice. Each time, Methos twisted aside. There was a stiletto in his hand; he hurled it, and Fitzkirk halted and pawed at his belly, from which the small blade's hilt now stood out.

Methos' sword still impaled his chest, but the flesh had closed around it and sealed it in the wound.

Methos' stiletto too was fast becoming sealed to Fitzkirk's flesh.

Joe turned his face away, said an inner prayer, and saw Duncan MacLeod coming with his sword drawn.

He also saw Elizabeth Day. There was no one else it could be. She was stepping through the dojo doorway, just behind MacLeod; her face was stark white and her eyes and mouth were like burnt holes in parchment. But when Mac glanced over his shoulder at her, she smiled and all her features melted into soft radiant beauty. Fitzkirk also saw. He jerked like a puppet whose strings have been yanked; he forgot Methos; he turned right around, and lurched toward Mac and the woman. A garbled word came from his throat: "Mac . . . eeed?"

Joe realized that the sound in his voice was happiness.

Duncan MacLeod's face was utterly blank. He walked up to Fitzkirk, and took off his head with one stroke.

The head fell in the gutter and rolled gruesomely away. For this, too, Joe had a ringside seat. A woman's lovely voice rang out: "Well done, my champion!"

Something blue and electric sizzled out of Fitzkirk's headless corpse, ran along the pavement of the sidewalk, sank into the earth. "The course of justice," said the woman's voice, "is strait and short; no virtuous man need fear it. You slew my monster--" The surface of the street was steaming, bubbling, melting in black puddles. Every crack in the sidewalk suddenly blazed blue light. Fog curled out of the sewer-gratings. Dimly, Joe saw MacLeod turning toward the woman, his expression lifeless as a wooden doll's. "--now only one task remains-- What?" The concrete pavement shuddered and heaved, breaking into gravel in a hundred places . . . and quickening ran over Joe, over the sidewalk, over the road, into MacLeod and Methos. Lightning crackled and arced between the two immortal men. The woman cried out. "No, come with me, Duncan MacLeod!" Mac staggered a step toward the woman.

And Methos, now on his feet, shouted, "MacLeod!"

There was something in his hand: a can of spray-paint? Joe couldn't believe his eyes. But it was. Methos said, "Wake up, Mac," and tossed the can.

For an instant, sheet lightning blazed in the air between them. From the crowns of their heads to their heels, quickening coursed. The can of spray-paint was caught in it. It exploded. Roughly six inches from Mac's nose.

Well, Joe found himself thinking, his face isn't blank anymore.

Was it over?

It was.

The quickening had ended. MacLeod was on his knees in rubble and smoking pavement, gasping and pawing at his eyes. Methos bent over him, one hand on his shoulder. "Highlander? Are you there?"

Mac said, clearly, "Not a monster. Tradescant was the monster." He dabbed at his cheeks with his fingertips, looked at the result, said, "What the hell--?"

"Baby steps," said Methos, insanely. Then he put his arms around Mac, and Joe coughed and looked away.

Elizabeth Day had vanished.

Act Four

Duncan MacLeod had always liked his dignity. As a young immortal, he had been prickly and quick to take offense, filled with an immense self-importance though in fact he had very little importance whatsoever. Later, he had become what he wanted to seem. Other immortals respected him; mortals looked up to him. He was Darius' friend, Methos' friend. He had gravitas. And this was something he prized; it was as much part of him as was his sense of honor. Now, though . . .

Why did it seem as though Methos was bent on stripping him of every particle of dignity?

Look at his dojo--covered with graffiti.

Look at the mess on his face!

He had been splattered with spray-paint from Adam's apple to eyebrows. Black spots and black smears and fine black dapples, along with dead-black marks like tear-tracks where the paint had pooled and run down. He looked like an evil mime. And now he stood brooding darkly in the center of the defaced dojo, regarding his own reflection in the office windows. Listening to Joe Dawson choke back a helpless guffaw at the devastation around him. Joe caught Mac's eye, wiped the grin off his face, and then took one look at Methos and began to laugh all over again. Methos too was dappled with paint, but mostly across his shirt and shoulder; he had ducked in time. "I suppose I'm lucky," MacLeod growled, "you didn't write Horsemen Rule all over the exercise mats."

Methos only patted him on the back.

Upstairs, Mac stalked to the window and glared down at the stain on the sidewalk. Then he came back just as suddenly, moved a stool over for Joe and brought him a damp cloth to blot his face and beard. "I'm sorry. I should have asked. Fitzkirk didn't hurt you? You're all right?" Meanwhile Methos was rummaging around in the kitchen. He rattled through the contents of a cupboard, and unearthed a mortar and pestle; he pulled out a drawer noisily, and found a cast-iron skillet. Mac glared at him. Methos thumped the skillet down on the stove, set the mortar and pestle on the kitchen island, and plugged in the kettle. He then began to bang more cupboard-doors.

"Whatever you're after," Mac snapped, "we can send out to a specialty shop for it."

"Well. I don't suppose you have any coffee beans? Not that pre-roasted crap either--real coffee beans, uncooked ones."

"Back freezer," said MacLeod, "in the big red tin, with the picture of the camel on the cover."

Methos looked in the freezer. He emerged with the tin, opened the lid and sniffed the contents. "Straight from the Yemen," he said contentedly. Then he carried the tin over to the stove, and turned on the heat under his skillet.

He was making coffee in the traditional manner, from scratch. As soon as the pan was hot, he poured in a handful of coffee beans, with a little oil and a sprinkle of cardamon. He roasted them, he turned them out into a paper towel, he let them cool. (Meanwhile Mac was in the bathroom, scrubbing spray-paint off his face.) Methos ground the beans in Mac's old mortar, making the pestle ring round; every few moments he rapped the sides of the mortar with a brisk noise, shaking grains of coffee down to the bottom.

By the time this was finished, the kettle had boiled. Methos poured the water into the skillet, tossed in the grounds with no regard to a filter, and let the whole mess boil till brown foam threatened to overflow the rim of the skillet. He picked up the skillet and shook it to bring the foam down, brought it to the boil a final time, and then--at last--broke into a smile of satisfaction. The coffee was extremely hot, extremely thick, extremely strong and full of grounds. Methos poured out three cups, returned the skillet to the stove so the remainder would stay piping-hot, and handed around. "Here y'go, Joe." Mac, morose and with the skin of his cheeks rubbed raw, appeared and took his. There were still black smears on his face. Methos clicked cups with him, and sat down on the couch.

"Okay, Mac," he said. "Tell us what happened."

Mac sat, as suddenly as if the air had been punched out of him. His shoulders slumped. "I had just seen what--what you did to my dojo. All that Latin, everywhere I looked--"

"There's no better language to be rude in," Methos agreed, unruffled, "in my experience."

"--I was furious. Hopping mad. I was in the utility closet hunting for cleaning solvents, when I turned around and she was there."

Methos leaned forward, suddenly intent. (Joe, fascinated, was taking all this in.) "Wait. Did you find the solvents? Seriously."

"Why the-- Yes. There's a bucket of industrial cleanser big enough to wash the whole building with." For the first time, Mac relaxed; he even smiled slightly. "As you'll find out as soon as I can get you in rubber gloves and a scrub-brush. Sensei."

"Go on."

"I was between her and the door, I didn't know how she got so close--I should have noticed her." His hands clenched on his cup. "I only saw her for a split second. Then everything changed. She said something--I don't know what--and I drew my katana and went straight out onto the street. I saw Fitzkirk, looked right at him and didn't know who he was. I knew--I was convinced--that he was the worst enemy I had in the world. Kalas and Kronos and Xavier and Horton combined." Mac shrugged a little, but it looked forced; there were grim lines on his forehead. He looked down into the cup, where the coffee-grounds lay thick enough to be read like tea-leaves. "Ahriman incarnate, in fact. And he had you down, Methos. So I stepped forward and took his head."

There seemed nothing more to be said. Mac was brooding. Silence fell, broken only by Methos remarking, "I can't believe he attacked me right in the street like that. In front of Joe too." Joe was quiet; he had just caught sight of one of Methos' journals, open on the counter barely eighteen inches from his elbow. Just as it had been two days before, when he had walked into the apartment and discovered that Methos was visiting. The very same volume, probably. It distracted him. He was quite able to keep from leaning over and taking a peek--it was only a passing temptation--but it distracted him.

Unfortunately, Mac saw it too. His expression altered, and he stiffened.

It was the final straw. "Hell," said Joe. He grabbed his canes and heaved himself to his feet. "I'm not so low that I'd snoop through a friend's papers. No matter my profession. I'll see myself out, Mac. Till tomorrow."

"Joe--" said Mac.

Joe glared at him as he made his way to the elevator.

Down went the elevator, rattling. Mac turned his face aside. Methos got up and strolled over to the stove to refill his coffee cup. His expression was neutral, but MacLeod still took exception to it. "What the hell are you looking at?"

"Not much," said Methos. "Want more coffee?"

Mac held out his cup. Methos poured coffee into it, sat down next to him and sipped. They both sipped coffee. "I won't sleep a wink tonight," Mac said after a little while. Then: "Damn Fitzkirk--he was a murderer, who knows how many times over? A cold-blooded killer. Why did taking his head feel wrong?"

"Because you were someone else's puppet when you did it," said Methos.

". . . I had no defenses against her. None. Methos, I don't even know what you were trying to teach me . . . I don't even know what she wants from me." He looked into his coffee, made a face suddenly and thrust the half-full cup at Methos. "Here, take it. I can't finish it. Go ahead."

Methos sighed. Where he was sitting--almost close enough to rub elbows--he was in three-quarters profile to Mac. He was looking at the carpet, or perhaps at the coffee cup loosely held between his long fingers. His legs sprawled every which way, his shoulders were bowed. He looked pensive.

Then he glanced up and his expression was simple and affectionate. He said, "Remember the day we met?"

"Of course. I asked you--"

"--whether I knew the meaning of it all. The Game, our lives, immortality--everything. And I said no."

"I was almost certain you were lying," said MacLeod. "Then I was almost certain you were telling the complete truth."

"There's no such thing as a complete truth," Methos said.

Through the window, they heard a car stop and start on the street below: Joe's ride arriving, no doubt.

"Anger," said Methos.

"What?"

"I saw that woman for a moment, you know. Down on the street. She walked out of the dojo behind you, and she looked as if there was nothing left in her but anger. Anger, and the lust for revenge." Methos poked Mac, prodded him with a long finger. "Anger is your weapon."

"I'm not like her!"

"No, because your whole training sets you against it. Katate ni sente nashi," Methos quoted. "The true warrior must never strike first, and never strike in emotion. But this is a different kind of battle. You achieve the proper Zen state of emptiness, and she'll move right into your mind and set up house there. You need to focus. So you do it with emotion, and you start with the emotions that come easiest. Anger. Lay aside the lessons of experience, they're useless to you now--all your previous challenges have been no more than kata. Playing with bamboo practice staves. Kaha kenpo." And he shrugged, while MacLeod bristled. "Flowery swordplay, my friend. But whatever is not combat, cannot teach the arts of combat. And to defeat this woman, you'll have to fight with the passions of a child."

"That kaha kenpo has kept me alive for centuries," said MacLeod sharply. ". . . Is that what Tradescant talked about? One of the things I might do, once I finished concerning myself with academic pursuits."

"Yes." A pause. "So I made you angry. That was easy, all I had to do was push your buttons. When you calmed down, I made you angry again. Strong emotion is a focus, and anger is one of the strongest." A long pause. "It's something that comes more easily as you age. But it takes time. Several centuries at least. Or if you take the heads of a few older immortals," said Methos (and not till long after, did Mac realize how carefully he said it), "that helps. Taking heads makes us stronger, did anyone ever tell you that? Well, that's one of the ways it makes us stronger."

"No one ever told me that part."

"Most young immortals don't know it. Hell, most old immortals don't know much about it. It's just one of those things."

Suspiciously: "Like double quickenings."

"Like those," said Methos blandly.

"Hm. Don't worry," said Mac, "I won't take your head and hope that solves all my problems." He was distracted, his voice casual; he was making a joke, that was all. Then he jumped to his feet. "It's late. We ought to get some rest. Here, let me put those cups in the sink and then I'll take a look around downstairs. And lock up for the night."

He walked out, taking his katana with him. Methos sat unmoving on the sofa. He thought of the things he had yet to tell Mac: that as old immortals grew older, they learned all that they wanted to learn, and then turned their minds to other things. Information became knowledge, knowledge gave way to wisdom; wisdom too eventually grew into something stranger, stronger, more vital. Something that could barely be described in mortal terms. Then, nine times out of ten, old immortals found their capacity for emotion deepening . . . till at last they became driven by incredible passions. What they knew seemed unimportant to them, easy as breathing and as trivial. What they thought and did became paramount. The small obsessions of mortals seemed futile, flimsy by comparison--tuneless, like the chirping of cicadas.

In the end, old immortals went naked to the world, because all that mattered to them was what was in their own souls. Then, they could become entirely consumed with hatred. Like the Kurgan. Or savagery and blood-lust . . . like Kronos. Or love.

Or love.

#

Earlier, Joe had stood waiting as the elevator rattled down; he leaned heavily on his canes, his face was dark. The elevator halted at last. He swung the door up, hobbled out into the defaced dojo. The sight was like balm to his injured sensibilities. All that spray-paint, saying he knew not what--his Latin was extremely meager--but whatever it said, it had riled Mac good and proper. Joe pulled out his phone, punched in a number. "Charlie? Yeah, it's me. Come pick me up, will you? . . . Thanks." With the toe of one shoe, he nudged at a line of script on the hardwood floor. "See ya soon."

He smiled a little, calming down at last. All that graffiti! Even with the lights out, the place was a mess. He ought to note some of it down, get it translated through Watcher channels. Record it for posterity. But maybe it was personal. Whatever went on between Mac and Methos these days was highly-charged--intriguing--enigmatic, even . . . and that business with the quickening was like nothing Joe had ever seen. Or heard tell of. He needed to put out a few feelers, send an email to the theoretical boys in the European division; there were some research Watchers at the University of Hamburg who claimed to know more about the quickening than even immortals did.

He remembered Mac's story, his description of John Tradescant sparking quickening between finger and thumb like a Bic lighter. And Fitzkirk, bleeding electricity from ancient wounds. Deep in thought, he made his slow way through to the alley. And there was Charlie's beaten-up old roadster, just turning the corner. It pulled up, and Charlie reached over to swing the passenger door open.

"Hey." Joe climbed in, arranged his legs. "You're a sight for sore eyes. Did the body cleanup go alright?"

"You have got to be kidding," said Charlie. "I mean, we had hardened field agents puking over that one. What was that thing, anyway--Frankenstein's revenge?"

"A very long story," said Joe.

It was almost night; how had the day passed so quickly? They chugged round the corner, onto the street. Till they turned the next corner, Mac's building would loom over them. Its windows caught and reflected fire in a blaze of sunset glory--and there was the decrepit and peeling sign still proclaiming DeSalvo's Dojo. Mac had never bothered to have it changed. Joe glanced up, admired the light on the windows. Even as he did, the brilliant glow passed and died.

"Buckle up," said Charlie comfortably. "I'll get you home in jiffy time, I can't wait to hear this one."

The last light faded. Joe stiffened, grunted as if kicked in the pit of the belly; his hand on the seat-belt buckle suddenly gripped till the metal edges cut like knives. His skin crawled with disbelief.

From every window above, pale faces looked out, mouths opening and closing. Crowds of faces. Sewn-together faces, ripped-apart faces, eyeless faces. Screaming silently, mouthing threats, weeping in fear. With cut throats--quickening blazing out of their jaws, lightning sizzling from their necks--with severed heads-- More than all MacLeod's victims put together. Impossible. Impossible. Joe lurched in his seat, almost vomiting. "What's wrong?" said Charlie beside him; Charlie leaned over, glanced up, shrugged incomprehendingly. "What is it, Joe?"

Wordlessly, Joe pointed. There was Elizabeth Day, looking down from Mac's apartment window--but like all the others, she had been torn in pieces and knitted back together all wrong, as maimed as dead Fitzkirk. In the same world as seat-belt buckles, noisy car-mufflers and Charlie's B.O., she was an obscenity. She smiled, and her face unraveled from the yawning black mouth outward, and dissolved into a mass of writhing carrion worms.

"Whatever it was, I missed it," said Charlie, looking back at the road. "Too bad. Joe? You okay, there?"

The car rounded the corner.

#

Mac finished latching and locking the windows and doors, shutting up the old building. Quite slowly, he walked back upstairs. All the lights were out, the dojo was empty and quiet. But Methos was not upstairs, which meant he had gone down in the elevator and was occupied in his own stint of checking the perimeters. The two of them, Mac thought, were becoming as unnerved as soldiers in wartime. It wasn't like Methos. And the things Methos had said--!

All right, it was an argument hundreds of years old. Mac had heard it in Japan in the seventeenth century, he had heard it in Okinawan in the nineteen-hundreds, he had heard it in martial-arts schools across the modern world. In peacetime, the arts of war declined into kata--pattern practice, rather than fighting--dancing, rather than battle. Kaho kenpo. Flowery swordplay. And flowery swordplay was no preparation for war. Oh, one could stage competitions in the dojo, one could set the students sparring against each other . . . but that taught them only to pull their blows, to fight at less than their best. To hold back. Neither kata nor sparring could foster the courage, the decisiveness, the steadfastness, the aggression of a true warrior. Whatever was not combat, could not teach the arts of combat.

The phone rang. Once, twice. Mac picked it up, put it to his ear. "Hello?" But the line was dead.

He shrugged, put the phone down, eyed it. Then he growled, stalked into the bathroom and started readying himself for bed. It was late, he was tired. No matter what, Methos had no call to mock at kata. Kaho kenpo indeed!

Fight her with the passions of a child. Methos still wasn't back. What he had to say was all wrong, anyway. Lay aside your training. And yet . . . and yet Methos spoke from experience, an experience MacLeod lacked. If he said that all Mac's previous challenges had been so much useless kata, how was Mac to argue with him?

All right. If it was time to stop playing with bamboo practice blades and take up a different sort of live steel, Mac would do it.

In the end it all came down to one thing. He trusted Methos.

He stepped out of the bathroom, shrugging on his dressing-gown. As he did, the elevator came up. There was Methos. He looked at Mac, seemed to wrinkle his nose. "Khalatny," he remarked.

"Fine words," Mac retorted, stung, "from the man who dumped books all over the top of my building, and then sprayed the entire first floor with graffiti."

Methos merely picked up the nearest book--it was the journal that Joe had been eyeing--and vanished into the bathroom with it. Mac made a rude gesture at the bathroom door.

. . . Anyway, he had always enjoyed tackling a new discipline. He would master this one too. And someday he would get back to purity of Zen. It was the same whatever new weapon a man took up--like archery. You might spend years stringing the bow, drawing it, setting the arrow on the string, blundering through a thousand shots; till the moment came when hitting the mark became instinctive, effortless. Simple as breathing. There would come a time when he would use this new weapon with just that ease.

He felt more cheerful. The sounds from the bathroom were the taps running, then the shower: comforting, familiar noises. In his long dressing-gown, Mac puttered around the kitchen, washed up the chaos left from Methos' coffee-making; he tidied dishes and cups away. He even hummed a little.

"There stands a lady from over the sea

Who she is I do not know;

I'll go and court her for her beauty

Whether she answers yes or no.

Choose once, choose twice, choose three times over

The fairest one you'll ever see

Is pretty Lizzie Day, come home with me."

Methos was still showering. "I'm turning in!" Mac yelled at the bathroom door. He turned down the lights. One final look out of the windows; the street below was empty. MacLeod ran a hand over his hair, standing it all on end. He settled himself into bed.

The bathroom door opened. Methos stepped out, in a cloud of steam. His bare feet whispered on the floorboards, the big book was cradled in his arms. His face was a living riddle. Having hung around with him for several years now, Mac knew his every feature by heart, and Heaven knew they were distinctive--that mouth, that chin, that nose . . . absurd! And yet (Mac thought, surprising himself) Methos' face was all emotion, animated as a child's; it was mesmerizing, to watch the play of feeling across his features. He could convey more within a single breath than other men could in half a year.

What was that in his face now? One finger was tucked into the journal, marking a page. He had been reading, evidently. His eyes were wide and candid, his short dark hair was ruffled like a cat's; there were spots of color high on his cheeks, the aftereffect of quickening. His lips were slightly parted. He looked like an excited girl.

No, he didn't.

Still hugging the journal, he perched on the edge of the bed. Mac was strangely aware of his closeness; for some reason, it made the hair on the back of his neck prickle. Methos spoke almost in a whisper: "What are you thinking of?"

"Elizabeth Day," said MacLeod. "And the hatred that consumes her."

Methos seemed lost in thought; he said, still hushed, "I knew--I know--a little about her kind. There were always rumors . . . about immortals who could do things that seemed--well, supernatural. Things with the quickening that seemed supernatural. They could take quickening without taking the head--drink it from one another--other things. And they lived in secret even from other immortals. But mortals too heard the rumors, created legends of--"

"Vampires?"

"And werewolves," Methos agreed. "And sorcerers, ghosts and incubi. All supernatural things. I--I wanted to tell you--" MacLeod sat up, curious. Then Methos did a strange thing: he bent and laid the book down, open, next to MacLeod in bed. As he straightened, he picked up MacLeod's katana. He held it at a slant, the tip resting on the floor. He said, "These are things that happen to those who lead very long lives. Some seem entirely consumed by hatred. Yes. Others know that love is more important, love is everything. But even love can be perverted by evil intent." He paused. "Your friends, those who love you--they protect you well--"

"I don't need anyone's protection," said Mac; the very idea annoyed him.

"But so many love you--"

Mac lay back, shrugged. He smiled a little. "Are you calling me some kind of a seducer? Well, what about you, then?"

Methos leaned far over--right across MacLeod--and ran his fingers across the pages of the book. "You've read this, haven't you? It's the record of a very long life . . ." There was an odd wistful look in his eyes. He looked straight at Mac; they were so close that Mac could feel the heat of his body. "Our years are lonely, hard. A wise immortal learns soon enough to open his arms to whoever will come."

"Methos . . ." Mac began, and stopped.

He was looking at the journal. The writing visible was in Sanscrit, a language Methos often employed because, as he said, he had been used to it since way back when; MacLeod too was now becoming fluent in it. The script was faded, the ink pale brown. But (as was his custom) Methos had also jotted notes in the margin, in modern ballpoint, in English. As usual, he had added the date and location: Kathmandu '95--I have got to stop obsessing over DM and below that, Why does he remind me of the smell of musk?

Mac felt himself blush red, all over his face.

Then: "I could seduce anyone," said Methos. He moved sharply backward, began to walk toward the door. He still carried Mac's sword.

Behind him, Mac came out of bed. "What are you doing with my katana? Methos--where's your own sword?"

Methos glanced backward over his shoulder as MacLeod strode toward him; his pale face seemed to glow, the eyes immense, the soft dim light painting his cheek. "Methos?" It seemed to Mac he caught hold of a flurry of shadows. Sudden movement. Air and darkness, an indrawn breath. A dreamlike unreality--something elusive as an armful of fluttering feathers. The katana fell to the floor with a clatter, and Methos kicked it away, under the bed. "Methos!"

Methos was turning in his grasp, turning, turning, till he stood with his back to Mac. He held one of Mac's hands enfolded in both his own hands, against his heart. His head was turned; over and over, he rubbed his cheek against MacLeod's shoulder. MacLeod felt himself gasping, unable to understand. Then Methos twisted, pulling Mac sideways. Mac let go. What he held in his arms toppled, tumbling across the bed.

The woman lay next to the book, on her back, her arms outflung. Her gaze burned up at MacLeod's. Her eyes were wide and candid; there were spots of color high on her cheeks, like the aftereffects of a quickening. Her lips were parted. She looked like an excited girl.

She said, "I can seduce anyone."

MacLeod grabbed for his sword. "What kind of thing are you?!" he blurted out.

"I am in you--"

"What do you want?"

"--what is in you--"

MacLeod crossed himself. "Herodias," he said, half under his breath; the lessons learned in childhood came back, his clan's priest preaching against witchcraft. In all the sermons, the priestesses of the pagans were named Herodias.

"Yes," said Elizabeth Day. "In pagan Gaul, I was Sequana--in Germany, I was Waluburg the sibyl--in Sweden, they called me a vargamor--and among the Vikings, I was a shield-maiden and rune-mistress. I was a deireoil of Maelrubha too. I was in Rumania--there they called me Ileana Sanziana, the queen of flowers. I practiced witchcraft in Novgorod. I lived in Slavic Kiev of the Rus. I was known as 'Slata Baba's little grandmother' . . . Then I met John Tradescant. I loved him. I gave him white strawberry plants and roots of rhubarb, I followed him willingly home. I taught him all our secret arts, and he betrayed me. But you know how that ended, Duncan MacLeod. You were there."

He turned his wrist and the sword swung, halting poised above her throat. But he remembered facing another foe who changed shapes, striking to take the head, and finding himself standing over Richie's dead body-- ("You? Me," Richie had said. "Me, you! Is that how you see me? You don't even understand your place in any of this, do you?") He had a sudden horrible vision of finding Methos' corpse sprawled headless across his bed. ("Go ahead, kill me," the woman had said, looking up with Ahriman's eyes. "But you have to make love to me afterward.")

She lay gazing up at him, a smile upon her mouth. "What am I? I am like you, Highlander." Her hand lifted, beckoned. "We are not mortals, you and I. Our kind was old when mankind was young. We live unafraid in the dead woods, beyond the echo of the cock-crow--we are mankind's werewolves and vampires, yes, the ghosts that haunt their darkest fears. We are the magicians. Their legends. You and I, Highlander--we are the dead."

". . . what do you want from me?"

"You know what I want. I want John Tradescant. I want Septimus Fitzkirk."

"But I killed them already," Mac whispered.

"You devoured them and they are in you. Looking out of your eyes at me. I thought," she said, still smiling, "I thought you were a good man, MacLeod. I thought you were my friend." But her gaze was hardening, her voice becoming steely. Her lovely body, lying so relaxed upon his bed-sheets, was suddenly stiff. "This wretched half-life," she said. What was that glitter in her eyes--fury, or tears? "I'm lost, I'm lost and have been for centuries--all I want is to live again, how can you deny me that?" And she screamed up at him: "Highlander can you feel your years!!"

Mac imagined old age. Then he felt it. Time struck him, as if he was mortal. His strength deserting him--pangs striking every bone of his hands, twisting the fingers, gnarling the joints--the withering of his skin, the thinning of his hair. His teeth rotting in his head. His sight dimmed. The katana was heavier than it ever had been. In one of the windows, a reflection upon the black of falling night, he caught sight of himself and was horrified. He barely recognized his own face. He raised a shaking hand, and found liver spots upon it. The stair-door opened, and Methos strolled in.

Mac turned toward him, tottering. Even as he did, pain stabbed him in the throat, the chest, the lungs. Something like a sledgehammer hit over his heart. His breath strangled him, words were impossible. Why wasn't Methos reacting? But Methos only grinned at him in the old familiar way--wry, half affectionate, half mocking--swung off his long coat and propped his big sword against the coat-stand. "Hey, Mac," he said. "What's up? Did I hear the phone ringing, just a minute ago?"

Mac gasped, "I--"

The woman on the bed let out a gusty sigh, and collapsed. Her skin fell inward, her bones dissolved. Dust puffed out of her mouth.

Methos was in the kitchen, sticking his head into the refrigerator. "Was it Joe?" He turned on one heel, a jar of strawberry jam in his hand; he was licking jam off his fingers, and as the fridge door fell shut, he stood there sucking a finger and smiling. His eyes were half-closed, lazily gleaming, and there was a smear of strawberry on the very tip of his nose. He looked like an errant schoolboy.

He stopped smiling. "MacLeod? Is something wrong?"

MacLeod could only gesture fruitlessly. On the bed, Elizabeth Day was a rotting trunk, cloven open and eviscerated; a wooden stake had been driven through her breastbone. Unidentifiable organs and scraps of flesh lay reeking on the sheets, and the pillow was splattered with black. Flies swarmed over her. There were flies circling around Methos too, buzzing in slow black orbits. Flies crawling over his face.

"Help me," MacLeod managed to say.

And it was as it had been long ago--on that horrible night three hundred years past, when he had finally ventured into John Tradescant's cellar. A shape of shining light stood up, rising out of the corpse on the bed. It was the vision he had seen in Tradescant's solar, the angel ghost: a dream-woman made entirely from light, with a blazing sword in her hand. A creature of quickening, holding a blade of blue lightning. With her feet floating a clean eighteen inches above the floor. She was utterly lovely, transparent, irresistible, and she moved weightlessly, like an eddy of the unquiet air. Straight through Mac's sword she went. Past Mac, through his outstretched arm. Toward Methos. As she did, she turned her head and looked right at Mac, and he thought he saw red sparks lit in the sockets of her eyes. He imagined he heard her voice: "If you are not with me, you are my enemy . . . Those you love, will all meet me." Then again, chillingly: "I can seduce anyone."

Instantly, fury filled MacLeod. He growled and started forward a step--and in the blink of an eye, the ghostly woman had vanished. Mac staggered. The thing on the bed was no longer there, the buzzing flies had disappeared. He lifted a shaking hand and saw it young and unwrinkled, as it had always been.

The phone began to ring again--stridently, monotonously.

Methos collapsed where Elizabeth Day had laid: he toppled over backward and threw out both arms, singing out, "Ohhhh," in a great sigh of relief. Mac sat next to Methos with a thump, coming down hard and letting the katana drop. Methos bounced on the bed, and began to laugh. "Oh, Highlander. You got her that time--you really got her."

"I sent her away," said Mac, marveling.

"She was never really here," said Methos. "Mac, is that my book? If you read my journals in bed, you'll crease the pages--"

"Just as long as you don't say I remind you of the smell of musk," Mac said.

"But you've always reminded me of the smell of musk," said Methos, surprised. (Mac sat bolt upright.) Methos went on, lying flat on his back, "Yeah, I used to be a middleman in the musk trade, used to smuggle it into Goa for this Dutch sea-captain I knew . . . Little egg-shaped sacs of stuff, straight off some poor musk-deer's belly. Stank to high heaven. We used to say, you could tell it was the real thing if you took a sniff and it gave you instant migraine. Then your nose would start to gush blood." He glanced slyly at MacLeod. "Took some getting used to. Worth its weight in gold, though."

MacLeod looked at him and realized that the false Methos and the real Methos were completely different, that there was no mistaking one for the other. He relaxed. Then he straightened again with a jolt. "Methos. I think I know what to do."

Act Five

"Dawson? Is that you?"

"MacLeod. Thank goodness, I've been trying to call you for an hour now--what happened? Are you guys okay? I saw--I thought I saw--"

"Whatever you thought you saw," said MacLeod over the telephone, "you probably saw it."

". . . It was--eerie. You sure you're all right? . . . What happened."

"That's a long story. It's over, though. Where are you?"

"At my house. Look, I need to know what happened. I'll come right over now--"

"No! You stay put, Joe. I want you to just stay at home. If anything happens, I'll call you."

He hung up.

"Screw that," said Joe, into the dead line.

#

When he got back to MacLeod's building, the apartment upstairs was dark but the dojo itself was lit.

Charlie had sat by, patiently waiting, while Joe punched in Mac's number, let the phone ring, hit the redial button, let the phone ring, hit the redial and let it ring, hit the redial . . . Continually, for almost an hour. When at last Mac picked up the call, Joe had slumped in his chair; he had been close to fainting from relief. Then, without asking for an explanation, Charlie had volunteered to drive Joe back.

Now, once the car was parked, he actually came around and opened Dawson's door for him. "Joe? You gonna be okay?"

"Yes," said Joe, "that is, after the Queen of Darkness finishes seizing my soul and makes me projectile-vomit pea-soup while my head spins round and round."

"Riiight," said Charlie.

Joe gave him a pat on the shoulder in passing, and said gruffly, "Wish me luck."

Some impulse made him reluctant to knock at the dojo door. Anyway, he had a key. (Mac didn't know about that, but Joe had felt obligated to get copies of his subject's keys. It was standard Watcher practice.) And he could hear voices from inside. Loud voices. It sounded like Mac and Methos having an argument. Nevertheless Joe felt a split second of irrational panic: was that a woman's voice he also heard? Yelling at Mac, as if angry enough to kill.

No. It wasn't. Joe halted unobserved on the threshold, cocked his head, and raised an eyebrow. There was the dojo, all over graffiti. Lurid as a construction site, and with all the lights out . . . but not dark. Not at all. There were candles burning, tall and short, squat stubs of candles and high wands of 'em; there were elegant tapers and wide three-wicked numbers on every side. MacLeod (surrounded by a zillion candles) knelt in the exact center of the long room. His elbows were out, his hands joined, his back straight and his chin lifted. And there was Methos, standing over Mac, his voice splitting from sheer exasperation.

"Are you out of your mind?!"

Joe didn't dare move.

"--no, I'm not out of my mind." That was MacLeod, answering. "I know what I'm doing."

"You don't know anything!" Methos yelled. "You'll bring her down on you so fast--"

"Then I'd better hope I have a friend standing by," said MacLeod. "So I won't be alone. Out here--" he was looking straight at Methos, "--or in here." And he tapped his chest.

Methos merely stared at him. He was apparently floored by this speech. He was also--Joe noticed suddenly--carrying his sword.

But Mac, satisfied, shut his eyes and began to meditate.

Center, he thought. Breath. Center. Find the center, seek out the jewel in the lotus of the human heart--the lightning that lay just underneath immortal flesh. He breathed deeply, felt his pulse slow. What lay at his center? Raw quickening, and the power of dozens of defeated challengers; they lurked in his soul like . . . like ghosts. Like quiet ghosts. With a little effort, his immortal memory could summon up every face. Every event of his long life. That evil summer three hundred years back, under John Tradescant's thumb. Center. Breath. Center. Methos had better not interrupt him this time. He had been the sorcerer's apprentice, and like the apprentice in the story, he had meddled with his master's secrets. And he had been punished for it. Center. Breath. Center. Tiptoeing down the back stair, more determined than sensible. This time, he had picked a night when his master had gone out. He remembered unlocking the door, and stepping into Tradescant's cellar.

He remembered how, with that first step, the closeness of other immortals had struck him like a hammer-blow to the head.

There was a circle of lamplight illuminating a few rude tables, and on the tables-- A plate and beer-mug lying abandoned, next to a pair of pruning shears. An astrolabe. A gull's egg. Commonplace things, innocent things. Sheets of paper weighed down with flowerpots, covered with the most delicate botanical drawings--peonies and columbines and dog-roses sweetly tinted; what could be more disarming than that? But on the very next table--he had walked blithely up to it, raised his lantern high--he found a human finger lying curled, and strands of wavy auburn hair, glued to the tabletop with blood. The strands of hair were so long that they hung almost to the floor.

He recoiled. And on the table past that, a hideous monster stirred. It croaked out painful human words: "Good sir, welcome. I'm a sad sorry . . . damsel in distress, but damn me, end this torture and I'd almost yield you . . . a head, if not a maidenhead . . ."

He almost retreated; the sight of maimed Fitzkirk outdid every horror-story of his childhood. And it was then that he really looked around him, felt the shock hit home. There were dozens of tables, stretching away in the gloom. On almost every table, a vaguely moving shape. Dozens of shapes. Dozens of immortals, in Tradescant's chamber of horrors.

His vision blurred, he leaned heavily on Fitzkirk's table. The reek of blood made him gag. Then he dragged out the knife he used to eat with, and began hacking at the leather straps that bound Fitzkirk down.

Distantly, MacLeod was aware of cold. The temperature in the dojo had plunged, a chill breeze blew through the street door; was that Dawson standing there, his mouth agape with fright?

The woman in white came out of the dark, up behind him while he was unawares. She put one hand on his shoulder, and he almost leaped out of his skin. "Don't slice off your thumb for my sake!" she said. "But cut swiftly, swiftly--for soon, he comes--"

"Who--?" he said, wildly.

"My husband." She clung to his arm, casting a quick glance toward the door--the woman in white, the angel ghost. But she was warm and alive, an immortal woman who had appeared like a miracle in this hideous place. Where had she come from? "Set us free. I beg you. Set us free, whoever you are--but hurry about it!" And he had rushed wildly from table to table, cutting the captives free, the woman urging him on with the wildest promises. Till (of course) just as he reached the last table, the door slammed open and Tradescant strode in.

In the present day, MacLeod rose to his feet. Facing Methos, in the radiance of countless candles, he drew his katana and spoke: "I'm Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod . . . Face me, Elizabeth Day!"

She did.

It was eerie, supernatural. To Joe, it seemed as if the room was plunged into darkness. The street sounds floating through the doorway cut off abruptly. All the candles flickered at once. Midway between MacLeod and Methos, something like a flurry of dust-motes climbed the air, . . . or was it just a trick of the shadows? A voice spoke . . . or was it a sigh of the wind? ". . . you don't know how to fight me . . ."

"Maybe not," growled MacLeod. He stepped forward. Up came the katana, gleaming. He sliced right through the shadowy shape, cutting it in two. "But I know how to try!"

The shape wavered. For a split-second, Joe thought he caught sight of a woman, her head floating on nothing, inches above her cloven neck; it was obscene. Then it was gone. A waver seemed to pass over the dojo, the substance of the building as immaterial as that of the vanished woman. The walls were suddenly transparent, like shivering veils. The air was colder yet. And--the walls shuddered. Rapping sounds rang across them. The acoustic panels of the ceiling began to jump and bounce, jarring out of their aluminum frames. A candle near Joe fell over, spilling hot wax across the floor. The flame went out.

Boom.

A profound crash shook the old building. "She's dead," Methos said.

Boom.

Quickening sheeted upward like quicksilver. It exploded around MacLeod, and MacLeod roared. It arced from MacLeod into Methos, and Methos shouted. Badoom. The woman, solid and intact, stood in the center of the conflagration; she was smiling. Across the length of the room, she looked into Joe's eyes, and Joe staggered and had to hold onto the doorframe to stay upright. He remembered her in the upper-storey window, dissolving into charnel worms and ichor. "Come into my parlor," she said. Boom. A ceiling panel crashed to the floor next to Joe's feet; it smashed in two, and Joe looked down involuntarily and saw Elizabeth Day's eyes gazing up into his. Her luminous face seemed to be hanging in the darkness between the cracks. Then a finger of quickening lashed straight at him, and he knew no more.

"This isn't right," said MacLeod.

Wonderingly, he raised the lantern he held, and realized that the floor beneath his feet was soft and damp, not exercise mats but tamped-down clay. His katana? Gone, like a figment of the imagination. Methos and Dawson? Gone. Furthermore the dojo, too, was gone . . . gone . . . all gone, and he stood in a dank cellar, walled with stout stones well-laid, roofed with pine. The pine beams were so newly-planed that they still gleamed with drops of resin. You could almost smell the scent of carpentry. Except that the stench of the vivisection room was more immediate. The shadows fell close, flickering like spider-legs; lantern-light crawled along the rafters with an eerie illusion of movement. Barely a dozen feet, that was as far as the light reached . . . and everything beyond that--though the cellar extended beneath the full length of the house--was blackness. Blackness close as velvet on the eye. Blackness full of movement. It was Tradescant's cellar.

"Are you okay, Joe?" said Methos. "Here. Up you come. What's wrong with Mac?"

"You drew against him," said Elizabeth Day, slipping her hand into MacLeod's, "outraged to your soul--you thought, when you looked on his handiwork, that nothing more evil could exist in the world. You poor innocent lamb."

She stood next to him. Mac ripped his hand free and turned on her, raising his lantern like a weapon. But she only laughed--a little rippling laugh, as free as sunshine--pressed herself against him and threw her arms around his waist. "It was the bravest thing I had ever seen. But of course, you didn't have a chance. Do you remember, my dear?

He did. He did.

He remembered John Tradescant's amused voice: "--object to my experiments in natural philosophy? I protest I defeated them all in fair hazard. Shall I not dispose of their carcasses as I will?" As the blundering monsters he had created lurched out of the darkness--blinded, crippled immortals, some lacking feet or hands--trying desperately to get away. By morning's light, Tradescant's house would have burned to the ground and all his experiments escaped, and Tradescant himself would be buried beneath the wreckage of his laboratory. As for young Duncan MacLeod, he would flee the scene as if he had seen hell's gates gape open . . . and he would turn aside from the memories of that night for well-nigh four hundred years.

Joe Dawson, in a scattering of overturned candles, bent over MacLeod. "I think the quickening knocked him right out." Around them, the dojo was like a wrecking site: graffiti and smashed windows vied with buckled floorboards and split ceiling tiles. Methos circled the room, methodically stamping out small fires lit from spilled candle-wax. "Well, it was a strange quickening," he began to reply, "maybe--"

MacLeod's eyes snapped open. A woman's voice said, "You fools. He is with me." Joe recoiled as Mac's hands shot up and closed on his throat.

The cellar whirled around him. Past blurred into present, and he was both the older MacLeod and his younger self, in one. "MacLeod--no!!" said Methos. "Shall I not dispose of their carcasses as I please?" said Tradescant, evading his charge; he knocked the claymore right out of Mac's hand. MacLeod slashed wildly with his knife, and the older immortal twisted his wrist and wrenched the blade away from him. Then, laughing, he stepped aside. And as Mac lunged past, he stabbed him in the back.

Slicing pain. Cold shock. Agony that set his back on fire. Then, oblivion. Methos, drawing his blade from MacLeod's lower back, straightened and peered at Joe. "He's dead--for now. You okay, Joe?"

"Yes," said Joe thickly, feeling his throat, "but--" He stopped, grimacing. Methos patted his arm, and then sheathed his sword and picked up MacLeod's katana. He remarked, "I'd better put this out of reach."

MacLeod's eyes snapped open.

He found himself staring into a woman's dead face; he lay next to her on her table, in the darkest corner of the long cellar. Her blank eyes were as dry as painted marble, flies clustered at the corners of her mouth. Flies buzzed over all of her. Her torso had been opened from breasts to crotch, her internal organs removed and arranged methodically at the head of the table. A wooden stake had been driven through the gap which had held her heart. And between her slightly parted wax-white lips, something else showed--something hard, pale, pointed, thrusting out of her mouth; that, and a bit of withered twig culminating in a tattered flower-bud. Her mouth had been . . . stuffed with dried roses and cloves of garlic? She was the last of Tradescant's prisoners. She was Elizabeth Day.

He rose, jerkily as a wooden marionette. Dead. Dead. Dead. His face was livid and his eyes had dried, staring and empty. Without awareness. He was as dead as a corpse three-days buried.

There was Tradescant, Mac's stolen claymore in his hand. MacLeod knew his enemy. He growled deep in his chest, rolled off the table and attacked.

There was his enemy, Mac's stolen katana in his hand. MacLeod knew him: Tradescant. He growled deep in his chest, and attacked.

The world spun around him. Past blurred into present, identity into identity.

And it was as it had been, in dream and nightmare, so many times before. Out of the mutilated corpse of the immortal woman--staked like a vampire, her mouth filled with garlic and wild roses--rose the angel ghost, the vision made of purest light. Even as Tradescant raised MacLeod's sword to strike, she stepped between them. The sword-stroke went awry, the wily old immortal snarled like a wolf; the woman spoke--but poor hapless young MacLeod did not speak Russian then, and he heard nothing but gibberish. He had stumbled back, frightened half out of his wits. He had seen the same atavistic fear reflected in Tradescant's eyes. It was then that the angel had glanced at Mac, said in clear English: "Run, my champion. This is my fight."

He had cowered before her like a child; ever afterward the shame of it had rankled. And she had turned upon Tradescant. As their swords met, a firestorm of quickening lashed through the dark cellar. Electric blue. Blinding blue. Fingers of lightning went from wall to wall, tables overturned and began to burn. In a dozen parts of the long room, fires leaped up. Again, their blades struck--flint to steel. This time, the stolen claymore flew from Tradescant's hand, spun the entire length of the cellar. Near the door, MacLeod had stooped and reclaimed his sword; he had looked back, with hideous monsters shambling around him as they hurried past to freedom, and there was Tradescant grappling with the shape of brilliant light. They had fought amidst sheets of flame and boiling smoke. Then--as Duncan MacLeod was forced back by the conflagration--there had come one final despairing shout. In a firestorm of quickening, the ceiling had crashed down, and John Tradescant and Elizabeth Day alike were lost to view.

But now--

The world spun. Identities blurred. Past and present joined hands, merged into one. And now a shape with a sword faced him, an ancient immortal, saying in Russian: "I loved you and you betrayed me. This is my vengeance." Amidst fire, quickening and horrific demons. And now a shape with a sword faced him, an ancient immortal, shouting at him: "Mac, Mac, Mac--don't make me do this, MacLeod!!" Amidst wreckage, graffiti and confusion. He lunged, and as their swords meet, a firestorm of quickening was unleashed around them. And he was no longer Duncan MacLeod, old or young. He had betrayed the angel ghost, and this was her vengeance. He was John Tradescant.

All he could see was her shining face. So beautiful that a man could dream of her for four hundred years. The burning sword sliced toward his throat. With an effort that almost destroyed him, he flung his own sword away, opened his arms. The surge of love that went through him then could have moved mountains. Duncan MacLeod said, "Strike if you must. I am not your enemy," and closed his eyes.

Silence fell.

He opened his eyes. He stood in the dojo, in the present day. Methos, panting, lowered his blade and stumbled to one knee; nearby, Joe Dawson watched with eyes like saucers. But all was at peace, all was quiet, all was calm. The ghost was vanquished.

"It's over," he said.

Postscript

". . . they met in Russia," said MacLeod, "and married, and he brought her back to England. She taught him everything she knew. Then--at some point--he perverted her teachings, began to use them to experiment on other immortals. She challenged him on it, and they fought. After he defeated her, he dragged into his cellar, made her just one more experimental subject."

He was driving; Joe Dawson sat next to him. In the back seat of the big car, Methos scribbled industriously, using one of his big journals as a writing surface; he seemed consumed with whatever he was writing.

"He must have hated her," Mac concluded. "Four hundred years later, he was still torturing her, and she was still hunting him . . . He was a madman. Fitzkirk too. They were both utterly insane."

Joe glanced at him. "Sounds like you know them from the inside."

"I . . . it's very strange, but I can almost remember being them. Their memories. . . But then, that's how I know where we're going now."

He turned a corner; they passed a MacDonald's with an overflowing garbage bin.

"The seediest district in Seacouver," Joe remarked.

"Yes, well, it's where Fitzkirk felt safest." They turned another corner, past derelict storefronts. Mac took up the story again: "Fitzkirk was hunting Tradescant too. Fitzkirk beat Elizabeth Day to Tradescant's storage locker, removed what was hidden there. In his turn, he hid it too. She tried to get him to lead her to it, but like Tradescant, he could fight her off. Through experience, maybe. Right, Methos?"

"Right," said Methos.

Joe rubbed his nose. "This thing with the memories and the quickening," he said. "Seems like the rankest make-believe. Black magic. Um . . . can you remember being any of the other immortals whose quickenings you've taken? Like Xavier or Kalas. Or Kronos."

In the back seat, Methos stiffened. "I don't want to," said MacLeod sharply; he never thought to look in the mirror, to see Methos relax again. "I only want to know what Elizabeth wanted from me." They pulled into an alley and parked. Mac switched the ignition off. "And here we are. Coming, Methos?"

"Just a sec," Methos said. He stowed his pen away. Then he tossed something right over the seat-back, into MacLeod's lap. "This is for you."

"What on earth . . . ?"

"It's a Socratic dialogue," said Methos. His expression was exceptionally smug. He tossed something else over, at Joe; it was his journal. "And this," he said, "is for you." As Joe laid wondering hands on the journal, Methos climbed out of the car and grinned at Mac. "Well? Lead on, Macduff."

Mac led them (and Joe clutched the journal awkwardly the whole way) into an abandoned warehouse whose back entrance, broken open long ago, gaped upon concrete floors littered with garbage. Many street people must have wintered here; Fitzkirk had been only the last in a very long line, no doubt. With no hesitation, Mac went to the furthermost back corner of the old building. There was a jumble of old plastic and concrete-rubble, piled high. Mac dug into it. He shifted a broken girder, yanked away sheets of styrofoam and old pink fibreglass insulation.

There, hidden like buried treasure, was a locked box perhaps four feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep.

For an instant, Mac looked at his friends. "Tradescant carted it around with him for centuries," he said. "Till he died, and then Fitzkirk stole it and stashed it here."

Mac had brought a crowbar. Two blows broke the padlock open; Mac inserted the pry under the steel box's lid, heaved. There was a screech of protesting hinges, and then the lid jerked off.

The mummified immortal woman lay curled in a nest of century-old newspaper. Her skin was as black as ancient leather, but the scent of herbs and dried flower-petals still clung to her. Like a vampire, she had been staked through the heart, her mouth filled with roses and garlic-cloves. The stake which had kept her dead for centuries, still projected from her breast.

MacLeod pulled it out. Then he bent and kissed her withered face. "Heal," he said, and watched Elizabeth Day come back to life.

Note: the real John Tradescant was not (I presume) a villain, nor was he a mad scientist married to a ghost. Nor was he immortal. He was an English gardener and naturalist, and died in 1638; in his time he traveled widely, sailing both to Russia and to the New World, and he was famous as the collector of Tradescant's Ark, a public show of natural curiosities. His son, also named John Tradescant and also a gardener and naturalist, inherited Tradescant's botanical collection and Tradescant's Ark. Records of both have survived: the botanical collection was formidable, the Ark more so. Therein were perennials from around the world, along with coins and antiquities, arms (a Damascus blade, perfum'd in the casting) and armor, dyes and stuffed animals and fish and birds (the carcass of a dodo, among others) . . . and the hands of mermaids and mummies, a phoenix's wing and a Roc's claw, specimens of borametz skin and cups of rhinocerode, a cherry-stone carved with human faces, and cunning pictures wrought entirely in feathers. And a gown lined with a unicorn's shaggy uncouth pelt.

The elder Tradescant's marriage to Elizabeth Day is a matter of public document. Where she came from and what became of her are not. Her origin is unknown, and she was not listed among her husband's survivors. No record of her death exists.

After the younger Tradescant's death, the Ark passed into the hands of one Elias Ashmole, who left the collection to Oxford University. It became the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, England's first large museum of natural history.

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Last Updated October 15th, 2001