Heartland

XX

While Vivienne and I had been talking, Marielle had been arranging transportation, anticipating the need for a vehicle of our own. Too keyed up by my conversation with Vivienne, I offered to drive, and the dashboard GPS directed me to the A13, heading toward Mont-Saint-Michel. Traffic was light at this time of night, and within a half-hour, I was far enough from Paris that the flow was barely a trickle, and most of it was heading back toward Paris.

Marielle was curled up in the back seat, my bunched up jacket a pillow beneath her head. I resisted the temptation to tilt the rear-view mirror enough so that I could keep an eye on her. I had enough on my mind already; I didn't need the extra distraction of watching her sleep. Of wondering what she was dreaming about.

One of two.

Vivienne said there were two artifacts necessary for the Coronation ceremony. While I had managed to eke out the identity of one-the Spear of Longinus-my gut told me the other one was the Grail. The Grail was stored at the Archives-it had to be-and, for no reason other than perhaps the danger of having two such artifacts in constant proximity to each other, the Watchers didn't store the Spear in the same location.

My brain couldn't stop repeating the words: the Holy Grail; the Cup of Christ.

Every child knows at least one version of the Grail story-the Roman Catholic version, at the least. The Grail was the cup Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper, and, in all probability, was the one he offered to his Disciples when he asked them to drink the wine that was his blood. Other Christian versions say that the cup was received by Joseph of Arimathea when he interred Jesus' body in the tomb-kind of a party gift from a ghost of the Messiah.

Pagan mythology claimed the Grail was Celtic in origin, maybe even Bran the Blessed's cauldron of mighty resurrections; or that it was a curved plate used to carry the head of a king through the phantasmal halls of the Chapel Perilous. Chretrien de Troyes' final romantic poem of the twelfth century was all about the Grail, and though never finished, it was the symbol by which the questing knight was to be recognized. When the seeker was pure enough, the Grail would come to him, and he would be able to heal the king, thereby restoring the land.

It was the holy fucking grail-literally-of Western esoteric artifacts. The thing that every occult relic hunter and alchemy-obsessed magus spent their lives searching for. The Nazis had come close to finding it during WWII; at least, that was the persistent myth that refused to be easily debunked. Where had the Archives been before Tour Montparnasse had been built? Was that part of the reason Hitler occupied Paris? To find the Grail?

The Nazis had the Spear of Longinus, but hadn't known how to use it. The Gospel of John reports that Romans wanted to break Jesus' legs in order to quicken his death-nothing makes an occupying army more nervous than a martyr who refuses to die quickly. Before they could do so, an unnamed soldier stuck Jesus in the side with his lance. Whatever came out-blood, water, or both-convinced the soldiers that the Messiah was dead, and they went away to conquer the rest of Europe, thinking they had squashed the local groundswell of mysticism.

The point of the lance, covered with the blood of Christ, passed into legend as an artifact of mystical power. Along with nearly every other trinket from that day on Golgotha. What made the lance valuable to any earnest megalomaniac was that it was supposed to grant invincibility to any army that you lead. As a mechanism for propping up one's psychoses, the Spear was hard to beat. Though, having the Spear didn't work out all that well for Hitler.

There was another version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, one where he already had the cup-before Christ died-and when the soldier stabbed the Messiah, Joseph held up the cup and caught the falling blood. Was that the story that bound these two artifacts together? Could you only work the Spear if you had the Grail? Was that the trick?

There are no tricks, Father Cristobel pointed out. There is only belief.

"Belief in what?" I muttered, glancing back at Marielle. She didn't seem to hear me; I could probably have a conversation with the spirits and not disturb her. "That Christ was more than a magus with a flair for dramatic presentation?"

Maybe they are symbols. Representations that bind the mind. Is the Coronation a reenactment of the Crucifixion and Ascension of Christ? And if so, what is accomplished with this Passion play of death and resurrection?

"You tell me. Is that what the ceremony is all about?"

What are you willing to believe?

"No," I said. "It is what I Know that matters. Not what I believe."

Is it? Faith gave me back my sight. It gave Lafoutain the strength to face his destiny. It gave Philippe the insight necessary to wield his power. Why do you believe it has failed you?

"I don't-" I struggled to find an answer that wasn't an hour-long diatribe. An answer that was also honest, to both him and me. When I had been at the top of the tower, facing Bernard and his Key, I had been sustained by faith. I didn't Know what would happen after I gave up the Chorus and faced the Key. I didn't know what my sacrifice would give me.

I still didn't know. I could remember what happened after the Key detonated, but it was like someone else's dream. I had enough of those sorts of things in my head to know the difference between my own memories and those I collected. My memory of the palace of wind had two perspectives, and I wasn't sure which one was true. Or if they both were. Or if they were both nothing more than a dream.

But what isn't a dream? Life is nothing more than a series of wakeful and dreaming states. States that, in retrospect, the mind transforms into some allegorical and mythological justification for existence. Descartes said "Cogito, ergo sum," but that only provides for a singular point of existence. What makes us human is the order offered by sequential history. Thinking and learning and thinking again.

But that was still a linear, nearly mechanistic existence. Simple computation. The type that we can replicate with a computer. Computers could, with extensive enough programming, argue that they, too, could pass the cogito, ergo sum test, but that only meant they were highly functional.

How do we become nonlinear? How do we learn to consider the possibility of consciousness and knowledge beyond what our brains currently hold? With the act of dreaming; the act of faith. Free Will was the ultimate expression of faith, wasn't it?

That was the crux of Cristobel's question, really. Did I Know the Cup of Christ and the Spear of Longinus existed, or was I willing to believe in them? If they existed, they were incredibly valuable historical commodities, so valuable as to be worthless on the open market. Considering them as religious artifacts, they would validate several thousand years of Church doctrine, and probably cause all manner of self-fulfilling prophetic apocalyptic reactions. As objects with mystical powers? Well, that was a bit trickier.

Prior to two months ago, I would have doubted the last. I would have acknowledged the first two and that would have been enough. But, having experienced the power of The Book of Thoth, I suddenly wasn't so able to dismiss the possibility anymore.

That was the trouble with questions of faith.

Perhaps, Cristobel offered as he faded back into the phantasmal body of the Chorus, the Cup and the Spear aren't important. Perhaps they are simply tools for a ritual. His voice faded into a crackling storm of noise, a tempest of memory and emotion stirred up by the Chorus. Rituals are the chains that bind us together.

And through the storm of the Chorus, there came a bolt of clarity, like sunlight piercing a dense layer of rain clouds. I almost slammed on the brakes and stopped the car as I lost track of what was real and what was in my head. The vision passed in a second, but in its wake, there was a lingering strand of light, a flickering series of loops that I could follow back through the noise. Like a chain, or the stones of a rosary.

Anamnesis. Remembering what you have forgotten.

All the memories in my head, all those echoes of other men and other times, they were a chain. I hadn't been able to make sense of them because I hadn't any sense of context. But there was a way to understand them, to see how they all fit together. I had been confused by their overlap, by how they seemed to be variations of the same event, and in many ways they were. They were all celebrations of the same event: the same classic cosmological rebirth sequence. You celebrate the beginning of the world by re-creating that moment of Divine Birth. Each Hierarch came into power through this same ritual. Over and over again. Across several centuries. That was the chain that bound them all together.

When I grabbed the chain of light, the storm of the Chorus broke, splitting open like an enormous sunflower blooming, and its petals stretched all the way to the edge of my vision. I fell into the sunlit embrace of the petals, tumbling through a haze of light and dust, and I passed through a veil and out the other side where I saw the living pattern of the Weave. And I Knew what it was.

The Weave was a tapestry, a mass of threads woven together into a complex pattern too vast to comprehend. It was the Akashic Record of our souls, the threads that bind us to each other and to the world. We are who we are because of the passage of our threads through the Weave. It is. It was. It will be. Everything. All laid out in an infinite tapestry of existence. This was the body of God.

As I floated over the infinite canvas, I realized it was three-dimensional as well, having a depth that I could now perceive. This was how the Hierarch saw it; this was why Cristobel insisted that it wasn't a weave at all. Beneath the surface, the threads were tangled and knotted in unceremonious clusters and clumps; they were folds and ripples across time and space. I felt a whisper, a silent exhalation of agreement. Yes, these were the loops created by each Hierarch during his reign. The visible record of their manipulation of the threads-the cutting, the splicing, the severing: all the marks of their secret touch upon the world. And there, a clustered knot larger than any others. That was the knot through which all the Hierarchs passed. That was the knot where they were born and died.

The Cup and the Spear were, like all things man creates, nothing more than symbols. Tools by which the world can be re-created. But there is a difference between normal rituals, like the ones we do every day or even once a week in the sanctity of our churches, and sacred rites. That difference is magick. And magick comes from Will. And Presence.

I carried Philippe Emonet's presence in my head. Parts of his soul were still here, trapped in the web of the Chorus.

It didn't matter if I believed that the Watchers had the Grail and the Spear, there were others in the organization who did, and they believed in their ritual. They Knew of the power behind the rite. They knew someone got to be Crowned, and in doing so, would become the Hierarch. They wanted to Know the future, because it would be the one they imagined. The one they could manipulate into existence.

They wanted to Know the secret of the Body of God, and they would spill blood in order to achieve that vision because that was the way the ritual worked. This is my body. This is my blood.

That was the way they knew how to transfer the spirit from one body to another, and the spirit they wanted was Philippe's because he knew the secrets. He Knew.

I blinked, snapping back to the car and the road, and the image of the Akashic Weave vanished. With the reduction back to the microcosm of my own head, I found some clarity as well, a focus consumed by one question.

"Who does Philippe want to be King?" I said it out loud, thereby anchoring myself in the flesh again. Anchoring myself with the basic question that simplified all of the confusion of histories in my brain.

Not only could he See all the threads, but he could twist them as well, and he had been. But to what end?

Why had Philippe given me the key and the ring, and his soul? While Vivienne had posed the question that was bothering her in those words, that wasn't what she really wanted to know. It wasn't the why that troubled her, but to what end?

My history of Paris-the unfinished business between myself and Antoine, between Marielle and me-had been blinding me. I hadn't been thinking about the bigger picture. About the real reasons why Philippe came to Seattle. It wasn't to look me in the eye and try to justify Bernard's actions-or even the actions of the other Watchers. He knew what my reaction was going to be to his justification for their massacre. He knew I would be angry, prone to the violent nature which haunted me. He knew he could goad me into killing him.

I told myself it was doing him a favor, just as I told him I wasn't going to be his agent of vengeance upon the others. I told these lies, and then acted differently. Just as he knew I would. Because that was the way my thread was wound. A thread he had been twisting for a long time.

Was I his candidate for the Coronation? No. Vivienne was right: I was the wrong guy for that thankless job. However, was I his stand-in, his psychic avatar in the twilight of this era? Was this my penance to be paid for my flight five years ago: to die in the service of the organization that I had abandoned?

That question aside, if it wasn't me, then who was it? Like the slow collapse of a lengthy chain of dominos, a carefully constructed plan was coming to fruition. But, was this still his game, or had it been co-opted by someone else? Had things gotten out of hand, moved far beyond even his undead reach, or were we still beholden to his vision?

Who was it, then? Who had he envisioned as standing at the nexus of this coming era? Who was supposed to be Crowned?

I twisted around in the seat and looked in the back. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw shadows squirm across Marielle's face. As if she had just closed her eyes.

Sometime after 4:00 a.m., when I had switched over to the A84 and put Caen behind me, the road vanished. The headlights still worked, but they revealed nothing. I glanced further afield and saw no lights either. In the distance, on either side of the road, there had been an irregular stream of lights from farms and tiny clusters of houses, but those were gone as well. Everything was gone; it was like the light of the world had been extinguished.

In the back seat, Marielle whimpered in her sleep. A sublimated cry of suffering that couldn't be held back.

I stopped the car, and twisted around in my seat to touch her. She was shivering, curled up into a fetal position-as much as the seat belt would allow-and when I touched her leg, she spasmed. Her head snapped back, bouncing off the headrest, and her eyes shot open. Wide and staring. Not seeing me. I grabbed at her knee as she started to thrash like she was having an epileptic fit, and when my touch didn't calm her, I bore down harder on her knee.

Her hands shot forward, her fingers wrapping around my wrist, and the Chorus shrieked. The psychic whirlpool was there, but it was a ravenous void now, a sucking hunger greedily pulling at them.

Vis, I told them. Be strong. They held on to the anchor I offered them, and we became like a turtle caught in the path of a tornado: armor up, make as small a target as possible, and ride it out. All storms pass, eventually, and this one did too. Gradually, Marielle's eyes changed: no longer staring unseeingly, filled with stormy fury and blind panic; she came back to herself and knew me again.

"Goddess," she whispered. The white band of teeth marks on her ring finger were bright and visible, as were the bones of her knuckles, stark beneath her skin. She finally realized how tight she was squeezing me and let go. "What was that?"

"I don't know." I rubbed the skin of my wrist, trying to get the blood moving again through the mottled flesh. Part of me was wondering what I had seen in that naked terror in her eyes. We are all bound to something, be it darkness or light, the Chorus whispered, recalling the New Year's Day morning and the promises offered and taken between us. Sometimes we choose which, and sometimes it is chosen for us.

She fumbled with her seat belt suddenly, struggling to get out of the confines of the car. She was halfway out when she threw up. I rooted around in the bag of processed food I had gotten at an all-night stop a few hours ago for something resembling a clean napkin, and when I got out of the car and offered it to her, she had finished heaving up the contents of her stomach. She accepted the cheap napkin and wiped her mouth.

There were stars in the sky. Orion looked down on us, and I felt less frightened knowing the heavens were still there. Whatever had happened could be more mundane than the terrifying cosmological possibilities of the onset of darkness if the stars were still in the sky. I knew their light was an echo, a stream of electrons that had been traveling for years and years, but my tiny human brain clung to them. Let us choose this.

"Can you feel it?" Marielle asked, and when I shook my head, she grabbed my arm. The Chorus flowed down and leaped across the connection of our flesh, and I felt the sucking emptiness again. We were standing on the lip of the Abyss, its yawning need a persistent whisper in our heads. Give of yourself. Give everything. Feed us; we are so hungry.

Like the circadian buzz of the soul-dead in Portland, their psychic chatter burrowing into my head as I had walked back to the tower and the unholy theurgic mirror.

"The leys are gone."

My eyes grew accustomed to the low gleam of starlight. The road was there, under our feet and the wheels of the car; a thin breeze, barely a whisper of breath, touched my face when I looked around; but, other than the hum of the car engine and the repeating warning bell of an open door, there was no other sound. The world was still there; it was just a dead zone.

"Look," she said, pointing. Instinctively, I tried to orient myself on the compass points, but without the ley energies, I couldn't tell what direction she was pointing. Over there was the best I could do.

A nearly invisible scatter of light clung to the horizon, like a dying searchlight that wasn't strong enough to penetrate a damp coastal fog. Too many shadows. Too many echoes.

"How close are we to Mont-Saint-Michel?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. Fifty kilometers maybe. We passed Caen a while back."

I looked toward the other horizon as if I could see the invisible wall of force that had blown through the leys and scattered them. They hadn't been consumed; they had been driven away, and in the absence of that force, they would come back. All things return to fill a vacuum.

"We need to go," I said.

The oubliette at the Chapel of Glass. When the spell holding the grid at bay came down, the psychic energy came back, rushing to fill the void.

I realized how Marielle had been able to pinpoint the light on the horizon. The sucking vacuum wasn't coming from her; she was too attuned to the leys not to feel the hunger of a land bereft of its natural energies, and it was hungriest at the epicenter of the blast.

Beneath Mont-Saint-Michel.