Free The Adept by Katherine Kurtz, Deborah Turner Harris

Peregrine was, indeed, oblivious to his surroundings, Adam moved behind the chair, reaching into his coat pocket to take out a heavy gold signet ring set with a handsome sapphire. Slipping it onto the thud finger of his right hand, he touched the stone briefly to his lips, then laid the backs of his hands along the tops of the chair wings to either side of Peregrine’s head, open palms turned upward. Taking as a centering point the candle still burning on the table before Peregrine, he drew a deep, centering breath and slowly exhaled, at the same time breathing the opening words of an almost silent’ invocation, couched in the Hellenic Greek and Latin of third-century Alexandria:
    “Ego prosphero epainon to photi . . .”
    He offered the rest, in the silence of his mind, lifting his heart and his hands in selfless oblation.
    I offer praise to the Light in the person of Ra: Pantocrator, Deus de deo . . . of Horus: Logos, Veritas veritatis . . . of Isis: Hagia Sophia, Regina Caeli . . . and of Osiris: Nous, Lumen de lumine . . . Thou, O Lord, art Light Eternal, Alpha and Omega, Source and Ending. Preserve us unto everlasting day. Amen.
    Briefly he brought his hands together, palm to palm, touching the fingertips to his lips reverently, in salute to That which he served. Then, drawing a deep breath, he set his hands on the chair wings again, to either side of Peregrine Lovat’s bowed head, closing his eyes to the physical flame before him.
    “As Above, so Below,” he murmured. “As Without, so Within . . . ”
    The brightness of the flame’s after-image shimmered behind his eyelids, establishing a glowing point of reference. He focused on that point to the exclusion of all other internal images. As it receded, twin threads of brilliant silver unreeled in parallel against the expanding ground of his internal vision, fine as spider-silk. One was the silver cord of his own life; the other, he knew, was Peregrine Lovat’s. The threads began to spiral as he plunged after them, not falling but flying.
    In the still, pristine silence of his own mind, Adam made himself a part of that cosmic spiral. It gathered momentum, whirling faster and faster through gauzy fields of lights like scattered stars. The star-points elongated into other silver threads, all wheeling and spinning. The myriad filaments all converged toward a single distant point, like the heart of a coalescing nebula.
    Never relenting, Adam fixed on the unbroken spiral of Peregrine’s silver cord and followed it into the shimmering midst of the dance. Anticipated, but never quite expected—as usual—came an icy thrill of disorientation that left him momentarily breathless and slightly dizzy. When the universe righted itself again, he found himself standing in spirit before two immense doors of immeasurable height, robed in white, his feet bared to tread on holy ground. It was familiar ground—the eye of the cyclone, the calm at the center of the storm, the hub of the wheel—but the awe was always new.
    Adam had the Word of an Adeptus Major. As he spoke it, the doors opened with ponderous majesty. Beyond lay timeless vaults of silence: the unmapped and unmappable halls of the Akashic Records, the Imperishable archives of all lives for all time. Into the vaults of the future, he might not go; but guided by the silver cord that was Peregrine’s connection into the Sephiroth, Adam passed into the vaults of the past, threading a circular, inward-tending course along corridors iridescent as mother-of-pearl. At the heart of the labyrinth lay a convoluted chamber, whorled and curved like the walls of a nautilus shell. And at its center, on a canopied altar, lay a great book. As Adam approached the altar, the book opened of its own accord.
    Hands pressed palm to palm in respect, Adam bent his head over the book, framing his intent in wordless query. As if conjured by some mystic wind, the pages began to torn and images to be presented for his gaze—the strands of the