Raeburn smiled thinly. "Have no fears on that account, Tao-iseach. With so much at stake, I would be foolish to let you lose yourself among the shadows of the past."
Taliere signified his acceptance with a nod. After further silent contemplation of the dagger, he struck a formal posture of invocation, feet braced apart and gnarled hands upraised above his head. When he opened his mouth to speak, it was in a long-dead tongue that Raeburn only belatedly recognized from rare encounters with its graven form.
At once adamant and oddly liquid, the words spilled from the old man's lips like angry waters rushing down a cataract, an ancient formula to set the stage. At the conclusion of his utterance, he abruptly dropped his arms and brought his hands together in an intricate sign of warding. Only then did he venture to pluck the dagger from its nest of silk, clasping both hands around its hilt and carrying it to his breast, its point toward the ceiling.
"I am ready to set out," he announced, as he closed his eyes in an attitude of stiff composure.
"And I am ready to guide and guard you," Raeburn said.
He rose smoothly and came around to stand next to Taliere, lifting his left hand to rest lightly on the older man's right shoulder. At once Taliere's rate of respiration quickened.
After a moment, the old man drew a deep breath, held it a moment, then released it in an explosive gust of expelled air. With his next deep intake of breath, his face went momentarily blank. Then he began to mutter to himself, stringing words together in a singsong, semi-metrical chant.
The chant trailed off and he began to sway, but Raeburn's hand on his shoulder steadied him.
"Tell me where you are now," Raeburn murmured, after a long pause.
Taliere's face took on a look of fierce exultancy.
"Home," he murmured. "Among the trees, before the Burning Time."
His voice lifted again in bardic song.
With these words he broke off, his hands tightening around the dagger's hilt while he cocked his head, as if listening for some approaching sound.
"Yes… Yes…" he murmured.
Raeburn stared more intently at the old man, his eyes pale and bright.
"Tell me what the iron is saying," he instructed softly.
A look of consternation passed over Taliere's lined face.
"The speech it employs is not that of the wood," he breathed. "The sense is there, but not the words…." He struggled a moment longer, as if trying to fix an elusive impression.
"The Thunderer speaks, but only in riddles," he muttered at last. "One must be found with the skill to interpret. The storm-wind waits to carry him aloft. Let him harness the tempest and make his ascent - "
A sudden seizure gripped Taliere, choking off anything more he might have said. As the dagger fell from his palsied fingers, a violent shudder sent him caroming against a lyre-backed chair, which overturned despite Raeburn's attempted intervention. As the old man collapsed twitching to the carpet, a white foam frothing at his mouth, Raeburn was only partially able to break his fall.
"Barclay, get in here!" Raeburn shouted.
Barclay answered the summons on the run, bursting through the library door to find his employer kneeling over the thrashing Taliere, forcing the spine of a paperback book between his teeth.
"Give me a hand here, damn it, before he does himself damage!" Raeburn barked.
Between them they managed to restrain the old Druid until the fit showed signs of subsiding. As the final paroxysms trailed off, Raeburn cautiously eased the tooth-marked paperback from Taliere's jaws and looked around him. The dagger was lying under the overturned chair. Drawing a deep breath, he retrieved the dagger, set the chair right-side up, and laid the artifact back in its casket. As he turned back to Barclay and the supine Taliere, he saw that his aide had one hand clasped to the Druid's scrawny wrist.
"His pulse is hammering like a freight train,'' Barclay said. "Is he going to be all right?"
"He'll need someplace dark and quiet to rest for a while," Raeburn replied, "but I doubt there's any harm done. The ancients sometimes called this the 'divine madness.' In this case, it's a sign that he probably made a genuine contact."
"Do you think Dr. Mallory should have a look at him?" Barclay asked.
"Aye. When Mallory arrives, send him up to check him over. Meanwhile, get Jorge to help you carry him up to one of the spare bedrooms. He can rest there until he feels sufficiently recovered to rejoin us."
Taliere was already showing signs of regaining consciousness by the time Jorge arrived. Once the old Druid had been safely installed in his room, Barclay returned to the library to report on his condition. Raeburn was seated behind his desk again, turning the dagger thoughtfully in long fingers.
"He's looking a bit better, but he still seems disoriented," Barclay told his employer. "When I left him, he was muttering to himself in some strange language of his own. If he doesn't manage to pull himself together, there won't be much point in going through with this afternoon's meeting. Do you think maybe you'd better put it off until tomorrow?"
Raeburn shook his head. "Don't underestimate Master Tal-iere's powers of recovery. I'm quite confident he will be back in full possession of his faculties by the time the rest of the party arrives."
"Guess you've been acquainted with him long enough to know, Mr. Raeburn," Barclay said with a philosophic shrug. "He sure doesn't waste much time trying to make himself easy to live with, though. Does he really have the authority he claims to have, or is it all just attitude?"
Raeburn permitted himself a tight smile and replaced the dagger in its casket.
"Taliere is a Druid of the old school," he told his aide. "He sees himself as one of the last bastions of Britain's ancient mysteries, charged with the responsibility of keeping those mysteries alive. If he seems a trifle fanatical, that's because he is. His inner life is rooted in the soil of Anglesey."
"Anglesey?"
"The holy island of Druid Britain," Raeburn explained. "Only a narrow strait separates it from Wales. It was the nerve center of the Druid religion, in much the same way that the Vatican represents the heart of Catholic Christendom. Following the Roman occupation, Anglesey became a pocket-of native resistance, and in A.D. 64, Agricola gave orders that the community there should be destroyed.
"Taliere's past memories stretch back to the days when the Roman legionnaires invaded the island, slaughtered its priestly inhabitants, and put the sacred groves to the torch. It would be safe to say that a part of him has never left that time and place."