Chapter 64
Eastern France
Duncan swerved around a slow-moving hay wagon and gunned the Citroen one more time so that it almost seemed to leap ahead on the road and soar over the small rises and dips in the pavement. Already he felt that he wasn't moving fast enough. That somehow... he would be too late... that he would fail in his task. Protect the clan! He could hear his father's teachings thundering in his ears above the pounding of his own heart. Protect the clan!
Amanda had given up begging him to slow down as it only seemed to inspire him to move faster. In the rear of the vehicle... Phillip likewise remained silent.
"So how did you finally stop him?" Duncan managed through gritted teeth. Phillip met his gaze in the rearview mirror but then looked away. "Phillip... out with it... What did you do?"
Phillip cleared his throat. "You likely have no concept of the time and the place... The world was not the world you have known in your paltry few hundred years. You cannot imagine..."
"I can imagine a lot. I have had some very interesting conversations with Methos."
"What could he know?" Amanda said lightly and then seeing the dark look in MacLeod's eyes... seemed to regret her words.
"Then you know what he was?" Phillip asked.
Duncan nodded.
"Nestor was worse."
"Enlighten me."
Phillip took a deep breath and let it slowly out. "In some parts of the world... scratch the surface of the legends of demons and you will find him. Under a thousand names he wandered the world. He taught men to take heads, to drink blood, to eat their enemies. He taught perversion and led entire tribes into a darkness of depravity from which they never recovered.
"He was never so much into taking our heads... though he did so... as in teaching mortals to take each other's heads... and ours. He would lead them down the paths of darkness and then sit back and laugh at what he'd done. He'd laugh while all around him... men and women murdered and tortured and maimed those they loved and those they hated.
"He was the source of the custom of parading heads on pikes... of tearing victims apart by means of wild horses... of pounding spikes into someone's flesh or eyes. He was rape... not just of the body... but rape of the mind and of the soul. He may well have been the inspiration for Lucifer."
"Lucifer was a fallen angel... the angel of the morning... the angel of light." Duncan's voice betrayed his confusion.
"Yes... one of us... capable of light... beautiful to behold... mesmerizing... tantalizing... charismatic when he wished to be. When he took the head of one of us... his followers worshipped the light that broke forth. He'd tell them that once they took enough... they too would be gods... they too would achieve the light."
"And you?"
"Ahh... MacLeod... He could twist a man's soul so that even if it were daylight and Nestor said it was night... it became night. I was very young... but I still should have known better. But like others of our kind... I believed him for a time... I followed where he led. When I became sickened at what we were doing... I left. But some part of him seemed to touch everything I did or tried to do for centuries. No matter how I tried to atone for my sins... no matter what good deed I ever did... Nestor or his minions followed and destroyed it all."
Duncan saw a line of traffic ahead and was forced to slow down. Impatiently he tried to snake in and out of the traffic and pull ahead of the slower moving vehicles. But there was no way out. Defeated for the moment, he asked again, "How did you finally stop him?"
This time... when Phillip's eyes glazed over... he was at last able to speak. "He may well have been like you once Duncan... a champion tempted and degraded and brought low by powers too strong for him to overcome. The more he fought them... the stronger they became."
"Ahriman."
Phillip nodded briefly. "Perhaps... I only know that for over a thousand years... barbarity ruled the known world... and there was little hope for mankind. At one point, he was in Rome and sat at Nero's right hand. Nero lit the fires... but it was Nestor who fanned the flames... as he had done at Troy. Even then he was ancient... the legends say. The wisest and best of all the captains of Greece. By the end... he was the pillager of Troy and the instigator of rape. Men did not just die by his command... they suffered. They watched as their wives were raped and their children's heads were dashed against stones. Many begged for death... but were maimed and sold into torment.
"Somewhere along the line... he began to torture immortals. He wanted to see how much he could do before they went mad... or killed themselves... or simply never came back. How much could he hack off... before they simply expired? Finally, at Pompeii, some of his immortal followers attempted to stop him."
"Let me guess... holy ground and Mt. Vesuvius erupted?" Duncan smirked.
"In a way. No holy ground involved... but the volcano did explode and Nestor and his people were scattered. Some of us thought him dead. The world began to recover. Oh... there were still atrocities in many cultures... but right-minded men began pulling the world out of darkness. Then... about a century later... Nestor resurfaced. No longer beautiful to the eye... no longer the honey-tongued beguiler... he was wrath incarnate.
"Some of us banded together to stop him from achieving influence once more. We were an unlikely group. What brought us together was never clear. Some of us did not much like some of the others... You must understand... immortals are solitary creatures. We don't do well in groups. What we were attempting was against all the rules... but Nestor had to be stopped. And only immortals could stop him."
"Why didn't someone just challenge him and take his head?" Amanda asked.
"I think I know," murmured Duncan. "That much evil... you feared a dark quickening."
Phillip nodded. "They are rare... but all the signs were there... and still are. There is a sickness about him that perverts even the best of us. We who went after him... were not the best... not the strongest... not even the wisest. But we were the ones who knew he had to be stopped... no matter what."
"And Rebecca was with you," whispered Amanda.
"The only female... yes. Methos, Darius, me, the immortal whom your kinsman Connor would one day know as Ramirez, the Trojan you once knew as Graham Ashe, even Marcus Constantine, and others. We set aside who and what we were... our petty quarrels... our nationalities... We became brothers... a family as it were... for a time... sworn to stop Nestor... or die trying. Some of us did die... some of us should have... and some of us might have been better off if we had." Phillip's voice trailed away as if his thoughts of those who had died in that long-ago campaign meant something more to him than what he was saying. He shuddered and continued.
"Dreams and portents drew us together. Visions born in the magic of the day. We came together for a single purpose and pursued Nestor to holy ground. We surrounded him. We could not pursue him further. On holy ground we could do no violence. The earth itself trembled and wrenched with our intent. Thus we laid siege to his encampment. He could not escape... but the longer we were there... the more insane he became. Trapped within his own lines... he turned his wrath on those he could reach.
"It was Nestor who supplied the means by which we finally defeated him. In his madness... he began killing his hostages and ordering the slaughter of the families of his followers. As the ground ran red with blood... our way opened. Nestor's sanctuary was no longer holy... the gods had forsaken it. Because he had so desecrated it with his slaughters... it ceased to be holy. We swarmed into his camp, killing those who tried to stand in our way. In the end we who survived stood about him. He challenged us all. Even if he died, he said... he would still win... he would become us!
"We dared not kill him... we feared to take his evil in to ourselves, we feared we would not survive." Phillip's voice faltered a moment... as if recalling something he was not yet ready to share. Then he continued, "Darius suggested our final solution. We bound Nestor in chains and buried him deep in a cleft in the earth... Then we rained down an avalanche upon him. We left him screaming his curses upon all of us. We left him alone... with no one to listen to him... no one who would feed or care for him. We left him alone to die in darkness again and again and again... We left him for what we hoped would be all time... but knowing that someday... someone would have to chance it... Someone would have to take his head... We knew that in the end... one of us would have to kill him."
"Evidently he got loose!" Duncan had finally passed the last of the slower moving vehicles. Once more he floored the accelerator attempting to make up for lost time. The engine of the Citroen roared and the landscape passed by at a blinding speed.
Within the car, Phillip nodded sadly. "Death was his way out... but whoever killed him... would become him. At the time, no of us was willing to chance that. In the end... we knew we would have fallen one upon another as we sought to end the dark quickening. We would all have fallen... and the world would have indeed been lost. Nestor would have triumphed... he would still exist while we were only memory... and he would have our skills."
"And afterwards?" Amanda asked. "What happened afterwards?"
"Some went back to their lives with no memory of what we'd done. In later years... if we met them... they vaguely remembered us... but their minds were clouded. Only a few of us remembered it all."
"Did Rebecca?"
"Yes... Amanda... and that may well be the reason she tried so hard in later centuries to save immortals from themselves... from their own dark impulses. She once told me that only an immortal of light could ever overcome the darkness in Nestor. Until we had such a champion... we had to endure."
"And you think you have that champion now?" smirked Duncan.
"I don't know MacLeod. Once I thought Darius might have been the one... but after he came to Paris... after he killed the Ancient... all thoughts of ever taking another head... another quickening left him. He would not consider it. He and Methos quarreled about it several times over the centuries. In the end... Methos tried to lure him out with..." Phillip smiled and winked at Duncan's reflection in the mirror, "but it never worked... Darius remained where he was... and unknown to us... Nestor evidently broke free."
Phillip's talk of Darius had made Duncan think of the boy Derrick... and of the research Ellie had gathered for Darius over the centuries. Was Derrick this warrior of light that would be needed someday? Did the research contain the answers of how they were to destroy Nestor? If so, why did Darius make it all so difficult? Why hide the answers in puzzle after puzzle? Or did any of this have anything to do with Nestor at all?
His mind in a whirl... Duncan swung about sharply into the other lane to pass a car and felt something give... The wheel spun helplessly in his hands and the world flashing by suddenly came sharply into focus as the Citroen plunged into an embankment, flipped twice and exploded on impact... Black smoke and flames shot into the sky... and all was darkness.
