Heartland

XI

A barrel-chested man with a bushy beard answered the door of the apartment on the other side of the courtyard. His face lit up as he saw Marielle, but when he glanced at our hands and realized they were empty, the light faded. "I thought you were getting food."

"No," Marielle said. "I went to pick up my friend."

The bearded man examined me, and the Chorus held still, letting his magick wash over me. "Do I know you?" He moved behind the door, closing it slightly. Behind him, I could hear strident voices.

Hubert Lafoutain, the Chorus reminded me, tagging old memories with new details. Protector of the Archives. He Witnessed your trial.

I put out my hand. "M. Lafoutain," I said. "It has been some time. I never properly thanked you for putting your name on the Record on my behalf. My initiation to the rank."

The Bear, we called him. Gregarious, slow to anger, easily distracted when food was involved. An old friend of the family, Lafoutain had studied with Marielle's father. He had been an adjunct professor at the University of Paris in the late part of the twentieth century, before retiring to devote his attention to the Archives, though I wondered if he still taught a class here and there. Once a teacher, always a teacher.

"Ah, yes," Lafoutain said after a moment of searching his own memory. "I do recall an earnest student who didn't have the common sense God gave goats. The straddler. Caught between two worlds. What was it? 'Markham.' That's right. Landis Markham, yes?"

"That would be me, sir," I admitted. "Call me Michael." I hadn't been the most adept of adepts; my pre-Watcher education was full of holes. A flush crawled up into my hair, and I resisted the temptation to check the expression on Marielle's face.

"Michael it is." Lafoutain looked past us, his magick fading into the ambient etheric vibrations surrounding the doorway. "No one else with you?"

The courtyard was empty and quiet; there were no souls for the Chorus to mark.

"Damn their eyes," Lafoutain sighed as he stepped back from the door, opening it further. "I told them to just go down to the corner." He shut the door after we entered the apartment, and traced a finger between two lumps of silver stuck to the back of the door. Activation nodes for a magick circle, his touch completed the circuit again and the magick engaged. My ears popped with the sudden change in air pressure. "There's no food left," he explained. "There wasn't much to begin with, and they've had nothing to do but bitch and eat."

"No news, then?" Marielle asked, the tone of her voice suggesting she already knew the answer.

Lafoutain squeezed past me, shaking his head. "Nothing good."

This apartment was much bigger than the one across the courtyard. A central hall ran from the front door back to the long rectangular space of the kitchen. A large living room opened to our right, off the main hall, and from there another hallway led back to bedrooms. On our left was a narrow sitting room, filled with bookcases, and beyond that was a large dining room that had been turned into the war council chamber. The lights were bright in there, and men clustered around the central table, arguing.

Sitting in an overstuffed chair near the inner wall of the sitting room was a man with a face like a long knife. Propped against the wall was a Mossberg shotgun. His clothes were dark and he sat in half-shadow, almost blending into the fabric of the chair. His eyes were dots of violet light, and being subject to his magickal scrutiny was much more intense than Lafoutain's cursory examination. The Chorus played a short game of dodge and redirect with his magick for a moment. Just long enough for us both to know the score.

Robert Vraillet, the Chorus said, licking the taste of the man's magick off their claws. Lafoutain's man. A Viator.

Ignoring the dick-measuring moment between his bodyguard and me, Lafoutain led us back to the kitchen, sparing a single glance and a rueful shake of his head toward the dining room. "Still too much speculation," he said. "They don't know anything, and it makes them afraid."

The kitchen was filled with chrome-plated appliances. Dishes and the detritus from a serious pantry raid were scattered on the counter and center island, along with more than a few empty bottles of wine. Lafoutain picked up a cheese knife and attacked a quarter wheel of an aromatic hard cheese as he nodded toward the cupboards on the right-hand wall. "Get yourself a glass. There should be a few bottles of that Spanish excuse for a table wine still."

He flipped the knife over, sliding a piece of cheese into his mouth. "I sent Moreau and Tevvys out for more food, and they're backtracking to check for Watchers on their trail, or some other nonsense."

Marielle opened the cabinet behind us, and got down two glasses. I had just had tea, and wasn't all that thirsty, and I didn't think she was either, but this looked like a social nicety. After I took the offered glasses, she opened the cabinet below the stemware and revealed a temperature-controlled wine rack. "Nice setup," I observed. "Well, except for the sparse pantry, of course."

"Thank you," Lafoutain said. "But it's not mine." He pointed the knife at Marielle. "Friend of hers."

"Really?"

Marielle glanced back at me, hair falling across her face. She tried to read my expression, but I kept my face neutral.

Lafoutain was watching me, a half-smile sliding across his mouth. "She has a lot of friends," he teased.

I was thinking about the blonde woman's apartment, the one we ran off to on New Year's Day, and about the somewhat vacant apartment on the other side of the courtyard. Where are we? Somewhere safe; a friend's.

Marielle brought a bottle to the table, and Lafoutain fumbled through the mess on the counter for the bottle opener. "God help me, but I'm developing a taste for it," he said as she started to open the wine. "That's a sure sign of the Apocalypse."

"Or desperation," Marielle offered.

"Most assuredly," he said. He tapped the remnants of the cheese wheel. "Rioja and an Appenzeller." He shuddered. "That's the first sign, you know. When our standards start slipping. Next time, though, could you find a place with a decent liquor cabinet?"

"You wanted something defensible," she countered.

"True," he sighed. "See what I mean about standards?" He cut a slice of cheese and offered it to me.

It was softer than I expected, and had a fruity taste, like it had been soaked in apple cider. "This is good," I said.

Lafoutain snorted. "It's not even French," he said. "You are a philistine." His eyes flicked toward Marielle, who appeared to be concentrating on opening the bottle of wine. "In matters of food, of course," he amended.

My tongue was thick in my mouth. "Of course," I muttered. The Chorus chattered in my ear, the laughter of raucous birds. You can take the boy off the farm, but you can't take the farm out of the boy. The pretty things would always entrance the son of a potato farmer.

Marielle pulled the cork with a single, fluid motion, poured an inch in our glasses, and when Lafoutain nodded at the offered bottle without an ounce of irony in his expression, filled the empty glass next to him as well. She raised her glass, and we followed suit. "To fallen friends," she said quietly, reminding us why we were hiding out in an apartment that didn't belong to any of us. Lafoutain and I, for separate but not entirely unrelated reasons, leaped at the opportunity to change the topic, and we raised our glasses as well.

The wine was a little young, but not that bad. Good enough for the palette of a potato farmer.

Lafoutain set his glass down with a sigh that had nothing to do with the pairing of the wine and cheese. "Who?"

"Father Cristobel," I said.

"You are the Witness?"

I nodded. "At the Chapel of Glass. They cut us off from the ley and sent in a suicide squad."

"Guns and explosives? Against the priest? That seems ill-prepared on their part."

"Guns, yes; but they had locks on their souls with some sort of remote conduit. They blew the cage out from within and the subsequent implosion was. . partly an etheric quake. It brought the place down."

Lafoutain and Marielle exchanged a meaningful glance, and when she nodded, he continued the questions. "And you?" he asked. "How did you escape?"

"There's a tunnel beneath the chapel. Eventually it comes up in a maintenance shack in Pere Lachaise. Cristobel sacrificed himself so that. . " I trailed off with a wince as the Chorus pinned Cristobel's last memory into my mental scaffolding. A crushing sensation of an enormous weight. The cross and the glass. Bones shattering. The air being forced out of my lungs, along with what felt like every other organ in my body.

Lafoutain cut another slice of cheese and chewed it noisily while Marielle finished her first glass of wine and poured another. "That's ten," he said.

"Ten?" Marielle asked.

"We heard from Byatt in Amsterdam while you were out," Lafoutain said. "He says, on good authority, that Lysenski is gone. Rudolph Lysenski, Preceptor of the Northern Ice. Master of the temple up in Tromso, Norway," he added for my benefit.

"Are we sure he wasn't an Architect?"

Lafoutain shrugged. "Byatt won't Witness that fact, but he's pretty confident that Lysenski wasn't the Thaumaturge. He's too remote up there. . " Lafoutain's tongue touched the inside of his cheek as his voice drifted into silence. His expression was thoughtful, and he wasn't looking at me. He was looking through me, to an indistinct point beyond.

"I was one of the Witnesses at your trial for Journeyman," he said, as a different train of thought came to his attention.

"You were," I said.

"I was never called to Witness your trial for Traveler."

"No, sir."

"Why is that?"

I swallowed half of the rest of the wine in my glass. "I never took the trial."

Lafoutain raised an eyebrow, and cocked his head toward Marielle. "A Journeyman? Does your other boyfriend know?"

"He's not my boyfriend."

"Which one? Him, or the other?" A smile tugged at Lafoutain's mouth.

Marielle's answer was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a slender man with closely cropped brown hair. He stormed into the kitchen, arms raised in exasperation. Spotting us, he halted and realized he was in mid-gesture. "Ah, you've returned," he said to Marielle. Then his attention turned to me. "With a friend." We all heard the stress on the last word.

"Not a boyfriend," Lafoutain clarified.

"He's not-" Marielle started, and then stopped with a shake of her head. "Jean-Pierre Delacroix," she said, indicating the brown-haired guy. "Michael Markham."

Delacroix came forward, turning his awkward gesture into an outstretched hand. "M. Markham," he said. "A pleasure." His grip was firmer than I thought his frame could muster, and the Chorus chattered at the power humming in his palm. "Where have you come from?" he asked.

"Overseas," I said. "Just arrived."

"Oh, really?" Delacroix couldn't decide whose expression could tell him more, and he looked back and forth between Lafoutain and Marielle for a few moments. "Recently?"

"Yesterday," I said, aware that Lafoutain, for all his feigned indifference as he cut another slice of cheese, was paying close attention to my answer. His previous train of thought was still uppermost in his mind.

"Am I missing something?" Delacroix asked.

"I think we all are," Lafoutain said.

"Markham flew in from Seattle," Marielle supplied. "Where-"

"Portland, actually," I interjected.

That distinction went over like someone had just discovered a dead body in one of the cupboards.

"Interesting," Lafoutain said finally. He turned to Delacroix, as if that was all that needed to be said at this time. "What can we do for you, Jean-Pierre?" The dismissal was inherent in his words, a steely command given by a man who, for all his bluster and outward-facing gastronomical zeal, was still a high-ranking officer in the organization.

The younger man waved a hand toward the dining room. "They're chasing ghosts. They're actually listening to Chieradeen now. I needed a drink more than I needed to hear his theory about the Bavarian Conspiracy again." His tone was slightly petulant, as if he knew he was intruding on a private conversation, but wanted us to know that he didn't care much for the snubbing.

"We've lost Cristobel," Lafoutain said.

"Oh," Delacroix said. "Damn." His smooth face went through a gamut of emotions, and he suddenly looked much older than the thirty-odd years I guessed him to be. "If he was the Visionary, that's four."

Lafoutain nodded. "Yes. What about the other possibilities?"

"Nothing concrete." Delacroix shook his head, trying to hide his exhaustion. "All his paranoid bullshit aside, it's looking like Chieradeen's suggestion about the Mason might actually be solid. No one has been able to confirm contact with him for several weeks now. The scryers have all vanished along with their master, and the Thaumaturge is still. . " He stopped and shrugged.

Lafoutain tapped the newly opened bottle with the cheese knife. "Tell them the news about Cristobel. Assume he was the Visionary, and redo the charts. It'll distract the others from Chieradeen," he said. Delacroix nodded absently, and took the bottle with him as he went back to the dining room to relay the news.

Without a word, I went to the wine cabinet for another bottle. Mainly to give myself a chance to process these conversational scraps. They thought the Mason was out of the picture, and had been since before Philippe came to Seattle. Yet Cristobel had said they'd only lost one Architect previously. The Hermit. Not the Mason.

If he was the Visionary, that's four.

They didn't know Cristobel's secret, and for the time being, I was going to keep it to myself. Until I had a chance to figure out the field.

The Mason was a master at geomancy, the sort of art that could create the oubliette around the chapel. And the soulquake as well. That wasn't the sort of artificing done in a minute. The whole assault was meticulously planned, well in advance. Move quickly, neutralize your opponent's home base advantages, and deliver a killing blow that didn't deplete any of your own special assets. Contrary to Lafoutain's belief, it could be done with conventional weaponry. Quite handily.

It was a raid that gave its planner deniability, provided no one survived, and the fact that non-magi were used for the strike team implied a scorched-earth sort of end result. Everyone dies, the strike team included.

But such deniability wasn't all that useful to a man who wasn't there. If the Mason had been gone for some time, then who had called for the strike? And why make it look like he was involved?

Unless, the Chorus suggested with a sly whisper, he went underground. Before the killing started.

Pulling out a bottle of wine from the severely depleted rack, I returned to the counter, mulling over that option. The strike was pre-planned, and if it was set to go with a phone call, then it could have been triggered by a blind relay: someone who didn't know who or why they were calling.

But someone had been Watching through at least one of the assassins. A remote viewer. Someone who had triggered the spell when they were sure of maximum yield. Was it more than one Architect? Was the Mason supplying the tools and the men, and someone else was providing the insight into the remote locations?

That question suggested some organization to the Opposition, and with organization came some sort of planning. I may not know who the Opposition was entirely, but I did know they were operating-even in their own limited cells-under orders. And those orders had to come from some sort of hierarchical structure.

Intuitively, I knew I was on the right track with this line of thought, and while the presence of the Chorus increased my reliance on intuition and whispered suggestion, I felt there was a very definite hand working behind the scenes. Someone who could twist thread as easily as the Old Man could. Someone-or some cadre of like-minded peers-was making us dance to a tune of their making.

And we were. While I trusted Marielle, and her relationship with Lafoutain was relaxed enough that it seemed like we were with the good guys, this ad-hoc safe house seemed like an act of desperation, a plan that was thrown together at the last minute. The sort of decision made in the heat of the moment, without proper consideration for all the ways it could go wrong. There was something amiss in this place, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

Four Architects dead. How many left? The Chorus twisted around the question. Three, I thought. Delacroix had mentioned them a few minutes ago: the Mason, the Scryer, and the Thaumaturge. Was the Mason working alone, or was the conspiracy broader than that?

Who stood to gain the most?

La Societe Lumineuse had a pyramid-shaped hierarchical organization. One man at the top, hundreds at the bottom, and each layer fed into the one above it. One Hierarch, supported by seven Architects who were drawn from a field of twenty-one Preceptors. Each Preceptor sponsored a Protector-Witness-his eyes on the ground, so to speak-in addition to having a coterie of Viators-warriors well-versed in the way of magick. Below the Viators were the Travelers and Journeymen. Seven ranks, each of the lower rank having seven sub-degrees within it. Highly ordered, highly stratified, and everyone knew their place within the structure of the pyramid. Power flowed up, and the bottom rank was constantly jostling against their betters in an effort to make room for one of them to advance.

The way to force the issue was ritual combat. Properly declared and Witnessed, it was an acknowledged power grab, a calling out by juniors of their betters, and other than the standardized trials for rank and degree, it was the only way to advance in the organization. Ritus concursus. The right of might to declare itself.

However, this sort of willy-nilly leapfrogging wasn't the way the top of the pyramid was organized. The Architects, secretly chosen by the Hierarch, were his named successors. Cristobel's flip response to my jibe about the Secret Masters of the Illuminati aside, the identity of the Architects was protected so that they weren't targets for the overly eager and impetuous. If the Hierarch grew too ill to fulfill his duties as the Silent Guardian Who Waits, then he was replaced by one of his Architects. They, in turn, elevated a fellow Preceptor into the power vacuum of the empty Architect spot. And so on down the pyramid.

Cristobel had likened the assault on the chapel to the Blitzkrieg of Nazi Germany, that swift and decisive surgical strike into the enemy's heartland before they knew it was coming. If the Opposition had known who Cristobel was, then it followed that they knew the identity of the others as well. Send out synchronized strike teams, hit all your targets at one time, and you ended up with a situation much like the one we were currently in.

Lafoutain scratched his beard. "You're thinking awfully hard over there, M. Markham. I can smell the neurons burning."

If the Architects were supposed to fill in for the Hierarch, and were his chosen ones, then why had Philippe come to me? Why had the pyramid been shattered? Why me, Old Man?

The doorbell chimed, splintering the swirling mass of the Chorus. What had been forming in them-that niggling detail so frustratingly elusive-vanished. Gone, like a curl of cigarette smoke into the evening air.

Lafoutain wiped his hands on the nearest suitable cloth, which happened to be his shirt. "Finally." He strode into the hallway.

"Must be the food," I said.

Marielle nodded absently. She picked up the discarded knife and hacked off a corner of the shrinking block of cheese. "You know who attacked the chapel." It wasn't a question.

"Yes, Cristobel-" I caught myself. "The first thing they did was shut down access to the grid. Cristobel couldn't draw any power. Then, they sent in their goons. Redirecting energy flow like that is geomantic magick. There's only one Architect who specializes in that school of thought."

"And you think he's hiding himself to confuse us? If we can't reach him, we assume he's dead like the others."

"If you were taking on an opposing force that was probably-at least in raw numbers-larger than yours, yeah, I would. It'd be the tactically smart thing to do."

Lafoutain bustled back into the kitchen with a clutch of plastic bags in either hand. Two more men trailed behind him, carrying more of the same. They swarmed around us, clearing space on all available surfaces to lay out take-out containers. Marielle and I grabbed our wine glasses, the wine pull, and the unopened bottle, and got out of the way.

The newcomers were young-early twenties, wet-behind-the-ears Journeymen, still eager to do the menial tasks. They had been sent out on a quick food run, but it was clear they had over-compensated. The counters were filling fast with a variety of exotic choices. Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian: the mix of curries, spices, and sauces made my head spin and my mouth water.

Lafoutain didn't even bother with a plate. He dumped half of one container into another and then filled the space with vegetables and meat from the next two boxes. "Eat," he said, waving a pair of chopsticks at us. "Help us make some room. This may be the last hot meal any of us has for a long time."

"Fatalist," Marielle said, but she went to the cabinets and found a pair of plates.

"Pragmatist," he replied, shoving an egg roll in his mouth.

My stomach agreed with him.