The Colour of Death by Michael Cordy Page B

obscured face.  “And that?  What do we do about that?”
    Jordache frowned.  “I don’t know yet.  First, I want to find out all we can about the guy with the odor problem and the hat.”

 
    Part Two
     
     
    The Last Echo
     

 
    Chapter 16
     
    Hundreds of miles from the man-made sprawl of Portland a storm was building.  It was born in the Canadian Rockies and raced along the mighty Columbia River, through Washington State, toward a remote tract of privately owned land in the vast Oregon wilderness.  The storm whipped through its high canyons and dense forests before reaching a remote cluster of timber and stone buildings nestled in lush, rolling meadows, between a dense forest of giant sequoias and a rushing river.
    This isolated Eden was man’s only footprint for miles around.  The corral was so large that the horses within it appeared to be running free and wild.  But these were not wild horses.  They were neither the mixed breeds nor the dun-colored Kiger Mustangs that roamed the region but the purest breed of all:  thoroughbreds.  The highly strung animals flicked their manes, snorted at the moon and galloped in circles, unsettled by the gathering storm and the three exhausted horsemen arriving in their midst.  Perhaps they sensed the fury of the lead rider, the storm in his head a match for any raging in the night sky.  His thick silver hair flailed in the wind as wildly as the horse’s mane, and his intense green eyes seemed luminous in the night.  He was not young but his tall physique was as lean and muscular as that of a man half his age.  His followers called him the Seer but tonight he felt blind.  He and two of his most trusted Watchers had spent days scouring the thousands of acres that made up his land but still hadn’t found what he was looking for.  Only a trace of where the object of his quest might have gone.  He dismounted the exhausted mare, patted her wet flank, unhitched the saddlebag and draped it over his shoulder.  Without looking back, he left the other two riders to tend to his spent horse.  His muscles ached but as he walked among the panicked horses he breathed in their wild energy.  A stallion reared before him.  He gripped its mane in his strong hands, stroked its neck and breathed into its flared nostrils.  The horse calmed instantly and the Seer smiled through his rage.  He released the horse and opened the gate leading from the corral.
    As he strode through his dominion, past the slaughterhouse and the shed that housed the settlement’s main generator, expectant faces stared out from lit windows.  Some came out of their cabins to greet him, touching the center of their forehead and bowing low, but all remained silent when they saw he had returned alone, without his prize.  He strode on past the Great Hall, ignoring the figures painted on its large twin doors.  As he approached his private quarters, he glanced up at the round stone tower that dominated the settlement.  A flash of lightning illuminated its large blue eye, a glittering mosaic of embedded dumortierite crystals, which stared down from the top of the tower’s white walls.  The all-seeing eye seemed to taunt him.  For all its power it could not find what he was seeking.
    He pushed open the door to his quarters, and entered a timber-beamed chamber, one wall of which was lined with bookshelves crammed with reference volumes, academic texts and books on world religions.  On the far wall a six-foot-tall tapestry depicted two men, one a shadowy twin of the other.  Both had their legs and arms outstretched like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, and had seven wheel-like vortices running up their spines, from the pelvis to the crown of the head, each vortex a different color of the rainbow.
    The seer’s three beautiful Wives lay on a rug by the fire:  Maria, flame-haired and heavily pregnant; Deva, a brunette cradling a newborn in  her arms; and Zara, a much younger Nordic blonde.