Heartland

XVII

Vivienne left me in a room with a window while she and Marielle had it out. It might have been a conference room if someone had brought in a table and more chairs. There was a single desk, on which a fairly generic-looking computer and monitor sat, and a larger flat screen mounted on the wall opposite. The lack of other ephemera of occupancy made it hard to classify the room as an office either.

I stared out at the Parisian landscape and did some deep breathing techniques, calming and re-centering my spirit. In the distance lay the lights of the Louvre, the Ferris wheel near the Tuileries, and the gold spire of the Place de la Concorde. The Great Meridian that ran east to west through the center of Paris, all the way out to La Defense. To my left, the Eiffel Tower, glittering yellow diamonds lighting up the night. I couldn't see the blocky structure of La Defense as it was hidden by the Eiffel Tower; there was another meridian running from La Defense, through the Eiffel Tower, to Montparnasse.

The Chorus thrilled at such architecturally precise geometry; it appealed to their nature, all the monuments built to facilitate the flow of energy. The natural course of the leys in this region followed the Seine, but occultists from the Renaissance onward had consciously strived to bend the leys to their Wills. All of the great cities of Europe were built-to some degree or another-in a way to maximize the flow of energy through specific points. You didn't build a city without giving some thought and effort to making it both defensible and a conduit of power to a central seat. Paris had always been one of the greater achievements of civic planning from an occult perspective. Louis XIV's sobriquet of "Sun King" was well earned. A tad overreaching, much like Crowley's self-chosen title of "The Great Beast," but power has a tendency to dull one's sense of humility.

Like a worm wiggling back in the ground when you turn over a rock, a tiny thread twisted in the dark depths of the Chorus. They boiled over the memory of Bernard du Guyon, but I already noticed that tiny shard of him moving in my mind. I couldn't look out over the nocturnal glow of a city landscape and not think of him, standing at the top of that tower in Portland, incanting the culmination of his great work. He had tried so hard to unmake everything, a petulant child who believed destruction came from the same divine urge as creation. Every inhalation is but a prelude to a Hallelujah!; all life rushes back on itself so that it can be born again.

The only trouble with that theory is the assumption that the universe will eventually contract as God finishes exhaling. To believe that He mirrors us-inverting the supposition that we have been built in His image-is to conflate our ability to dream with His creativity.

Thus it always has been with power. With knowledge. With the truths we conceal. We harbor the keys to these occult secrets and think ourselves greater than the rest, scurrying about in these jeweled landscapes. We stand above them, in great towers raised by sweat and blood and sacrifice, and think we are closer to Heaven. We think we are closer to God from this height because we can See all the way to the edge of the world.

A phone rang somewhere and I turned, confused, as I hadn't remembered seeing one on the desk. When it rang again, it also vibrated. Against my side. Because it was my cell phone ringing. Making a mental note to change the ringtone to something other than the stock ring, I fumbled the phone out of the inside pocket of my coat.

My phone didn't recognize the number, which meant it wasn't Marielle.

"Hello?"

"Hello, M. Markham." The voice was clipped and precise. Each word afforded just enough breath to form all the letters, and each word was equally spaced from the others. It would have been easy to think it was computer-modified in some way so as to disguise the speaker, but there was more of that old analog warmth of a human throat behind it than the cold sterility of a vibrating speaker. "Enjoying the view?"

I glanced around, and didn't see any obvious cameras, and I was too high up to be clearly seen from the street. The windows were polarized too, so even if someone down on the street level was watching me with binoculars, they shouldn't be able to distinguish features enough to recognize me.

"I am," I said. "You?"

"It is a bit voyeuristic, I admit, but I like to See."

" 'Seeing.' Interesting word choice. Most voyeurs are 'Watchers.' " It was a cheap shot, but I might as well see what sort of man I was talking to.

His laugh had none of the characteristics of human warmth, though. Like a loop of sound that wasn't cut quite right, and there was a jagged hiccup at the end as it leaped back to the beginning again. I had mental images of steel jaws opening and closing in a parody of amusement. "Not tonight, M. Markham. I am not bearing witness. Not now."

I shivered involuntarily, and tried to pretend it was a reaction to the dry air of the office. I stopped trying to find the camera pinhole, because even if there was one, he wasn't watching me through it. Not bearing witness. Whoever he was, he was using remote viewing, astral magick to See me from afar.

"Do they know you can peer into the Archives?" I asked.

"Only the outer ring," he said. "They're fastidious with their security."

"I'm sure they are." I looked out at the flickering lights of Paris. "So, other than this demonstration of power, what else would you like me to Witness this evening?" It was an old distinction, one coded very specifically into the rules of La Societe Lumineuse. Remote viewing wasn't recognized as a means of Witnessing-the official manner in which history is marked and recorded by the Watchers-unless it was grounded first by another Watcher. Someone had to verify the remote viewer was, indeed, viewing the proper location and event before the Viewer could enter a True Record.

There were a couple of moments in history that needed a Witness but were problematic in the matter of the on-site witness surviving. Setting up a remote view prior and then extracting the Watcher on the ground was a concession to the alternative of losing the magus and the Record.

"You asked me to call," the voice said.

"I did?"

"Yes. You spared the Journeyman's life in hopes that he would carry a message for you."

I actually looked at the phone to make sure it was mine and not Tevvys'. "I believe I told him that we'd be reachable on Tevvys' phone."

"Ah, my apologies. I was under the impression you wanted me to call you from it. Why else would you have left it behind?"

"Why else?" I tried to be nonchalant in my response. Tevvys had never known my phone number, nor had there been any reason for Marielle-the only person who knew it-to give it to him. Before the others realized the food had been poisoned and had bashed his skull in. Don't let him rattle you, the Chorus murmured, it's a display of power. "We think we are closer to God. . " Remember?

I remembered that I had been thinking that thought just before the phone rang, which made it all even less of a coincidence. Pointing that out was supposed to make me feel better?

"Talking with the spirits?" the voice asked.

"Fuck." I hadn't meant to let it out, but what was the point of trying to keep it in? The guy was nearly in my head already. "Yes." I took a moment to control my breathing. "Okay, I get the point. . " I made an intuitive leap. "M. Husserl."

"Yes." He sibilated the "s." "Very good."

The Architect known as the Scryer. Remote viewing. Forward looking. Physiology scanning. The legacy of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly, scrying was a way of interpreting the Weave, though it wasn't the same inexact science as it had been in the sixteenth century. While tarot was a means by which one's part in the Weave could be comprehended, scrying was a tool by which the Weave itself was illuminated. Kelly hadn't been able to control his sight all that well, and he and Dr. Dee squabbled too much about the interpretation of what Kelly saw. But we had gotten better about understanding the Akashic Weave, and what lay there. We had become better readers. Scrying, unlike the sort of postulating and calculating that Father Cristobel did as Visionary, adhered more to the core principle of Witnessing. One could look ahead as a scryer; the trick was knowing what you were seeing, and Ulrich Husserl was, evidently, the best at Knowing and Seeing.

"Is this a social call? Just calling because you can," I asked, my voice no longer unsteady, "or is there a specific detail of my future you wish to impart?"

"The spirits will not be able to aid you forever. They will leave you."

"I'm sure they will. Probably when I'm dead."

"Assuredly."

"But I don't need you to tell me that."

"No, of course not. What you do need me for is to tell you when they abandon you. Prior to your death."

"And in return for this piece of trivia, I'll grant you. . "

"Nothing, M. Markham. Any promise you give me is hollow. We both know that."

"So this one is free."

"The first one always is." He laughed again, and my skin crawled even more this time. The Chorus swarmed like someone had just poked them with a hot stick, and the ripples of their unease went all the way down my spine.

I walked over to the desk and emptied out my pockets. I needed a way to get this guy out of my head. There had to be some way to shield myself or divert his astral eye. Wallet. Still had that pack of gum. Folded pages of the hand-drawn org chart. Cristobel's rosary. Philippe's deck of cards. Holding the phone between my cheek and shoulder, I upended the bag and spilled the cards out on the desk.

"What are you looking for, M. Markham?" Husserl asked. "Some sort of ward against me?"

"Something like that." For a moment, I considered Cristobel's rosary. It might protect me if I wrapped it around my head, but that's not what I needed right now. I needed something to cloud Husserl's vision.

"The first card you turn over will be the Four of Pentacles," he said.

I slid the rosary off the table and put it back in my pocket, and then I flipped over the closest card. The way the Chorus was churning in my stomach suggested that Husserl was going to be right.

Four of Pentacles.

My hand drifted toward the next closest card. "Eight of Swords." He was right again. "I could do this all night," he pointed out. "But we don't have that much time."

I stopped flipping cards over and glanced toward the door. Marielle and Vivienne. Neither of whom would be terribly pleased to know I was talking with the man who had ordered the death of Vivienne's father.

"What do you want?" I asked. We don't have much time. He wasn't toying with me; there was an underlying reason for this conversation.

"I want you to understand the power that I have. The power I have given to the men who believe, like I do, in the future we've Seen."

"Doesn't that kill the adventure?" I wondered. "Seeing the future? You know all the conversations you're going to have tomorrow. What you're going to eat. What you're going to wear. Doesn't it make the future somewhat. . dull?"

I was stalling, and we both knew it, but if he had already Seen this conversation, then he wouldn't mind. Or it wouldn't matter. Whatever he wanted to tell me would come out. Wouldn't it? The advanced practices of astral magick and accessing the whole time/space continuum were the sort of theoretical occultism I had never managed to wrap my head around. You had to sit down and sort out the Free Will/Determinism argument with yourself before you could even begin to consider bending light into a cone through which you could See a different time; and I had been too much of a proponent of Free Will to get far in that discussion.

"That isn't the sort of thing we tend to focus on," Husserl said.

"Yeah, I probably wouldn't either. Just the big picture, right? But once you See the future, doesn't that violate it? How can you Witness something and not have it be changed by the act of Witnessing."

"Is light a wave or a particle?" he asked. "It all depends on who is looking, doesn't it? The future is nothing more than a frozen collection of light, one of many million possible permutations that these particles can combine in." Husserl laughed. "But who's to say that my efforts to change them aren't the catalysts that bring them about? Witnessing the future is an act of creation."

"So the future is set when you look at it?"

"Yes. There. That wasn't as hard as you thought, was it?"

What I was thinking was how terrifying a concept that was. You look at the future and see yourself getting hit by a bus in the next fifteen minutes. Now that you've seen it, it is going to happen; whereas if you had kept your curiosity under control, that bus might have missed you. Piotr always referred to reading the cards as akin to listening to echoes of people moving in the next room. There was room for interpretation, and with that uncertainty, you were never sure.

No wonder fortune tellers were happy to be listening from the other side of a wall. The possibility of being wrong left us with the illusion of Free Will. Without that illusion, what were we?

"So each scryer fixes the future a little when he looks forward? What happens when a room full of scryers all look?" I didn't really want to know, but I had a feeling he needed to tell me. We were building an aspect of the future he had already Seen.

"We build the future, M. Markham."

"And if there were enough of you-?" I got it. "Oh." That's how the universe had been created. God looked forward. All the way to infinity, and thus was existence born.

And here we are. Right where he Saw us. Me, getting a sense of the big picture; him, giving me the nudge that made me See it.

"So what do you want with me?" I asked, more than a little shaken by the implications of what was coming.

"You are a singularity," he said.

The Chorus erupted into a frenzy of light, thrilled by the arrival of the moment they had been waiting for. The moment where I was allowed to understand why I had been chosen. Why Philippe had come to me, given me his soul, dumping this whole shitty mess in my lap.

His enemies couldn't See past me. They were blinded by the divergence of souls in my head. They couldn't anticipate or See what lay beyond me. Therefore he doesn't Know the future.

I felt more of the veil fall from my mind. Philippe could undo what Husserl and the other scryers Saw. That was the balance that Cristobel mentioned. There was a change coming. They all saw it in their own way, and none of them could be sure what happened beyond it. But they wanted to be the ones who were in charge when it passed. Just like Bernard had tried with the theurgic mirror in Portland. He had wanted to be the one talking to God when the world started anew. And now, with Philippe gone, the question of who was going to stand at the Coronation was completely. . unknown.

In a stroke, I understood the brutal genius of Philippe's grand plan. It was all about Free Will, in a world that had been atrophying into Determinism. They all thought they Knew enough, they thought they Saw the whole of human existence and could-and would-take a grander role in directing it. But that wasn't the mission of the Watchers. It never had been. It had been to Watch, and to keep safe the mysteries. In order to keep his mission safe, Philippe had hidden everything from them.

By giving it all to me.

Whether or not that was a wise move was still up for discussion.

"You'd like me to remove myself," I said to Husserl. "You want me to be your noble sacrifice, and clear the way so that you can look ahead again."

"Yes," Husserl said.

"What do the other Architects think about this plan? The ones still alive," I asked, shooting blind, but hoping to hit something. "The Mason, perhaps?"

Husserl didn't answer, and that was answer enough.

"I wonder what he'd think about this phone call, and what you've asked me to do."

"You aren't going to call him."

"No," I said. "I'm not." I wandered back to the window, and looked out at Paris. I looked beyond the frozen lights of the streets and buildings, down the energy layer and the flood of power moving there. The Chorus swirled, and like water clinging to a cobweb, they flung themselves into a mental gridwork of the etheric lines. I still wanted to call it the "Weave," but I was starting to see Cristobel's point, that the word failed to properly encapsulate what it really was.

"You're guessing," I told Husserl. My other hand slipped in my pocket and I felt the warm stones of Cristobel's rosary. I rubbed a bead between my fingers, becoming familiar with its smooth surface. Anchoring myself. "You haven't Seen whether or not I call Spiertz. You can't be sure."

"I am," he said. Was that a note of defiance in his voice?

I concentrated on the grid of lines, and my consciousness felt the scattered droplets of the upper layer, shooting down into the squirming mass of the luminous threads that ran along the surface of each drop. The Chorus hissed with white noise as I found the twisted mass of threads that corresponded to the tower where I stood. My light was a dot of swarming fury, too many lights collapsed into a single point, and around it were several luminous threads. One, more faint than the rest, twisted away at a strange angle from the others. I touched it, felt its tension, and plucked it like a harp string.

On the phone, I heard Husserl make an involuntary noise. It wasn't much more than a sudden intake of air, but it was enough.

"You can't See all of the future," I whispered. The Chorus plucked the astral thread of his remote viewer. "This I Know."

When he spoke, the mechanical precision of his voice was gone. There was nothing left but a guttural bark of anger. "I See enough."

The thread broke, vanishing in a mist of light and static. The phone line was dead too. He was no longer there. Gone, just another phantom haunting me.