Heartland

XXI

There was a warehouse fire raging in the industrial district of Avranches. The rest of the city was dark but for isolated pockets of generator-powered illumination, and the fire was a vibrant spectacle of orange and yellow. Beyond the fire, we could see the psychic glow surrounding Mont-Saint-Michel.

Still a ways off, floating in a sea of darkness, the fortified island and cathedral were covered in a haze of sparkling motes. The void at the island was nearly palpable, and the ambient glitter of distressed energy was a pervasive cloud surrounding the rocky spire. Somewhere between ash and snow, the bleak cloud made Mont-Saint-Michel seem like it was caught in a localized snow storm. Fog and ice, filled with glittering reflections of moonlight. A storm made visible only because of the pure darkness beneath it.

Marielle hadn't said a word ever since we had first spotted the island, but I knew what she was thinking. Antoine. He had the ring and the key, and Vivienne had been certain that he knew what to do with them. He had come to fetch the Spear before us, and had triggered some sort of psychic trap.

Though to call it a "trap" was to categorize it as the same sort of thing one used to catch rabbits or squirrels or even a bear; this was on a different scale entirely. But the principle was the same: put your hand in for the prize, trigger the snare, and it all comes down on you. In this case, it was like yanking a lever and having a small-yield nuclear warhead drop on you.

Every kilometer we drove got us closer to the island, but it wasn't fast enough for Marielle. The Chorus was turning in an ever-tightening gyre, feeding off her tension. It wasn't just concern for Antoine, there was another, deeper, panic surging in her chest as well. A paralyzing fear, the sort you never thought possible, but which was caught in your chest now as if it had always been there, as if it had been lurking for a long time, waiting to squeeze your heart. The Chorus knew that sensation, and we circled each other, memory and instinct spinning in frenzied orbits.

The GPS guided me to the frontage road that ran along the tide flats, and I ignored the water on the road as best I could, drifting and praying through each turn that the wheels would find dry pavement again. This close, there was physical damage, evidence that the leys had been scattered from their regular paths. The pavement was cracked in places, jarring edges that slammed against the wheels as I drove over them. The tide was in too, further than it had been in years, and sections of the road were under black water. Fortunately, none of it deep enough to swamp the car engine. Yet. I fully expected each puddle to be the big one that would drown the car, but our luck held.

Until we reached the causeway out to the island. Here the ash was thicker, and my lower spine started to ache.

An SUV with its emergency lights flashing blocked the road, and though Marielle wanted me to drive around it, I slowed to a stop. The gendarme who had been waving us off ran over to my side of the car.

"What the hell are you doing?" he shouted at us as I rolled down the window. "There's no road ahead. Where are you going?" His voice was high and strained. However long he had been positioned here had been too long for his nervous system. His face was white with stress, and his eyeballs twitched back and forth like a meth addict going into withdrawal. The ash fell on his cap and melted, white going dark.

Lights going out. .

Marielle was out of the car before I could shake off the memory, and the gendarme straightened up to admonish her. She got in close, grappling for his keys, and for a moment, he didn't understand why. It was enough of a pause for her to find what she was looking for and to get her other hand on his face. A small star flared in the palm of her hand and he went down, his fingers digging at his eyes.

"Marielle." I tried to not hit the gendarme with the car door, and by the time I got to the SUV, she was already behind the wheel. I banged on the driver's window as she started the car. "Where are you going to go?" I shouted. "The tide is in too far, and the road is out. You heard him. You can't get there by car."

She slammed her foot down on the accelerator, and the SUV's tires screamed on the pavement. The car fishtailed, nearly clipping me as I leaped back, and shot off down the empty causeway. I had no idea how much of the road was gone, or how far away the break was, and even though I had no hope of catching the car on foot, I ran after her.

Winded, my side burning, I reached the first break in the road. Chorus-sight showed the other side, and it wasn't far-probably not more than fifteen feet-but it was far enough. Chest heaving, I glanced about for some sign of Marielle or the SUV. There were no marks on the pavement as if she had tried to stop, no sign of the car in the partially submerged wreckage of the road in the bay. Even with all the residual etheric dust in the air, the Chorus could still read a faint glimmer trail, almost an afterimage of a heat disturbance, and I wondered what it had cost her to hold the vehicle up across the gap.

Too bad I hadn't taken better notes when Delacroix had been building the flight circle back at the apartment. Solomon's Pentacles of the Sun were devoted to binding angels to the magi's Will, and the one Delacroix had been working from was specifically tuned to flight. There was a spell we learned as Journeymen, most likely some sort of sub-invocation of the Pentacles drawing, that was useful for making long jumps. Marielle had probably wrapped her magick around the car and hauled it along with her.

I was carrying less weight and the Chorus readily followed my instruction. Resuscita me. The etheric net of my spirits unfolded and smashed down like a giant bat wing against the pavement. I popped across the gap, flying clumsily from lack of practice and general lack of aerodynamics, stumbled a few steps on the other side, and caught my footing.

More tracks on the road, a shine of violet light like a slug track across a black streak on the pavement. Where the SUV had landed. Further than my puny leap. Wasteful, the Chorus chided with the voice of her father, such a poor use of resources.

With him and the other Architects watching over me, I tried not to embarrass myself. I leaped over a few more gaps in the road, and I was starting to think that the first had been the worse, when I came to the big one. The one that killed any question of whether or not we could get a car out to Mont-Saint-Michel. The Chorus flared, extending my visible range, but I couldn't see any sign on the other side that Marielle had even tried this huge jump. It had to be more than double the first one. There was no way she could have hurled both herself and the car that distance.

The Chorus spotted the SUV in the water. It was stuck in the mud, nose-first, and the water barely covered its back bumper. The residual magick on it from Marielle's spells was a thin slick of luminescence in the water. There was no sign of Marielle.

I leaned over, catching my breath. The running and jumping was wearing me out, and I could only imagine how exhausted Marielle must be. She didn't have the luxury of pulling energy from the leys, and so she was running on sheer willpower alone. How long would that last?

Not long enough, the Chorus whispered. And for what? The car in the bay aggravated my spirits. She had dragged it out this far, and then ditched it. So why bother hauling it along in the first place if it was going to be discarded?

How about some help with my predicament? The gap was too far. I couldn't jump it. Not now, not on my own. Anyone want to offer a suggestion?

A phantom-Lafoutain's-intruded into my consciousness, and the Chorus snapped into a spark at my fingertip. The flight circle Delacroix had drawn was suddenly there in my head, and somewhat unconsciously, I started drawing on the ground. Automatic writing, my Will leaving luminous tracks on the pavement. With the leys gone, the circle would lack a proper power source, but it would give me focus. Like the difference between a trampoline and a cannon. The cannon doesn't need the input of your kinetic energy to function; whereas the trampoline is a rubber matt on springs and it only serves its purpose when you jump on it.

A grating noise echoed along the road as I finished the circle, and as intent as I was on the drawing, I hadn't realized this wasn't the first echo. Glancing up, I saw the headlights coming toward me. Two pair. They rose up from ground height and came back down, and the crunching sound of the impact of rubber and metal against concrete rang again.

Someone else was brute forcing cars across the gaps.

I know a trick, I thought, shuffling off the spectral touch of Lafoutain. I snapped fingers of both hands now, raising the Chorus to the tips of every finger. They whined, straining at my control, wanting to trigger the flight circle. I knew I shouldn't wait around-there was almost no chance the approaching cars held friends-but I wanted to see who it was. I wanted to know who was hot on our tail. Following my directive, the Chorus crackled out in spider lines of violet energy, carving lines and script in the pavement. There wasn't time to go all the way to the edges of the road, so I settled for carving deep with my intent, hoping that gravity would do the rest.

I probably couldn't stop them here, but I could make them work harder to cross this final gap. Wear them down a little more, so that when they did catch up with us, they'd be more tired. A little slower. The Chorus chewed across the pavement, writing out the spell, and when I snapped them back, they bound my incantation to the circle. One little hop would set off both.

The first sedan hit its brakes and slid to a stop as I stepped into the circle. Bending my knees slightly, I prepared to jump. The Chorus stroked the car, waiting for the chance to read the astral auras of the men inside.

The second sedan came to a halt too, and a figure quickly tumbled out of the driver side. "No, wait," he shouted as the doors of the lead car opened. I caught a glint of light from polished mirrors.

Henri Vaschax stepped out of the lead car, a nimbus of furious magick flickering about his head.

I threw him a salute-middle finger extended-and lit the circle, leaping away from the blast like a quail startling from the brush. Violet light coruscated behind me, breaking the pavement across the bridge, burning down through the man-made causeway. There was a clap of thunder, followed by a rolling avalanche of concrete falling.

The Archives had a series of maps of Mont-Saint-Michel, plastic overlays charting the centuries of construction and deconstruction of the island. The nineteenth-century modifications when the island was used as a prison. The fortifications erected during the fourteenth century which successfully held the English at bay during the Hundred Years' War. The gothic cathedral, rebuilt after the fire in the early thirteenth century which took most of the village surrounding the peak. The Carolingian chapel built by the Benedictines upon the very spot where St. Aubert supposedly was visited by the Archangel and told to build a church. It was in this crypt, the Chapelle Notre-Dame-sous-Terre, that Vivienne believed I would find the lock which Philippe's key would open.

My magick-fueled jump carried me far, and when I landed on the causeway again, I was within sight of the outer battlements. A pair of old bombards, huge cannons that threw immense slugs of stone or metal, still sat atop the wall. Les Michelettes, Lafoutain provided, left behind by the English when they were driven off from their final siege at the end of the Hundred Years' War.

This close to the island, the spectral haze made my skin itch. It was like inhaling fine dust, silica that scratched and crackled in my lungs. There were no lights on the island, and Chorus-sight made the etheric snowfall glitter violently. The shadows I saw weren't natural. Too many echoes of death and pain. The island, for all of its quaint tourism, was the site of a great deal of violence over the centuries. The sort of death that didn't fade quickly. Too many souls smeared across the stones.

There was no quick way to the top, not without expending a lot of energy and Will to leap buildings, and as the streets were empty, there was no impediment to the tried and true method of walking. Henri and the others would be on foot too, when they arrived, so as long as I kept moving, I could hang on to the lead I had gained by bombing the bridge.

I jogged up the road, listening to the grating sound of magick and granite dust in my lungs, to the sound of my feet slapping against the cold pavement, to the distant hiss of the ocean beating against the rocky edges of the shoreline; listening for some indication that there was someone else on the island. The desolate silence wasn't the same as that emptiness in Portland following the implosion of the theurgic mirror, but it was close enough that the Chorus moved uneasily in my spine as I ran. If there were still people in the buildings around me, they wouldn't be soul-dead, but they would be on the edge of the void, sliding toward that maddening hunger for light. They would be hiding in their beds, the covers pulled up over their heads, reduced to being children again, afraid of the darkness.

The ground felt sterile and cold beneath my feet. You don't realize how vibrant-how warm-the earth is with all the energy constantly flowing through it. You live with it for so long that you take it for granted. Like the sun. It has always been there, ever since our birth and the birth of all our ancestors. We know-with the certainty afforded us by the rigors of scientific faith-that our planet rotates about its axis, and the presence of the sun is an irrefutable fact of existence. We don't wonder-not anymore, at least-about whether or not the sun will come back.

For a magus, an awareness of the natural flow of energy is the same sort of instinctual belief. It is always there-nourishing us, guiding us, giving us extra-physical aid. When it is gone, when there is no power to draw on beyond your own reservoirs, you realize how tenuous and infinitesimal your Will is compared to the enormity of the Akashic Weave. The land and sea and sky around Mont-Saint-Michel had been stripped of their natural resources, and all that remained was etheric decay. This land was dead, and would remain so until enough light came back. When the light of the sun gave the world its psychic charge again.

The Universe operated as a closed system-and there was no reason to think otherwise-and this void wouldn't last. All vacuums are filled-the first law of Qliphotic possession-and having been in the Chapel of Glass when the oubliette fell, I had a pretty good idea of the cataclysmic repercussions the sudden return of the ley energies would bring.

At the top of the road, I reached the base of the Merveille, the three-story structure that ringed the top of the mount. The main cathedral of Mont-Saint-Michel was built across the top of the island, and the surrounding buildings were nothing more than the exposed sub-structure that held the long cross of the church in place. Vivienne's quick history lesson of the buildings flashed through my head. Once past the first gate and the Almonry, I wound around the rock to the first of two staircases that would lead me to the top-the External Grand Degre. The stone steps led to the Chatelet, the narrow spire of stone that was like the long finger of a giant, blocking access to the Abbey proper. Past the defensible cut of the Chatelet, it was the Interior Grand Degre and a maze of vaulted chapels, leading me-eventually-to the open air again with the Cloister and the main cathedral. But Vivienne hadn't thought I needed to go that far. I was looking for the Chapelle Notre-Dame-sous-Terre, one of the oldest chapels.

Every door was already open, a sure sign of Marielle's passage, and I followed the obvious trail: around the rock and up the stairs. Philippe's memories-and the memories of Hierarchs before him-caught up with my feet and the rough stone of the interior passages took on familiar character. The arches and vaulted ceilings were a honeycomb where angels lived.

The wide-eyed look on Marielle's face when Philippe first told her that explanation for church ceilings nearly broke my heart. We had been so innocent once. All of us.

The Chapelle Notre-Dame-sous-Terre had all the unfinished aspects of the original Carolingian architecture: rough blocks of stone held together more by gravity than mortar, window niches cut whenever someone remembered that the human heart needed light, rough arches with none of the ornate finery that would become such de rigueur during the Gothic era. The chapel had two sanctuaries, and the northern one was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Vivienne had noted that during the reconstruction effort of the 1960s, workers had discovered an older wall behind the sanctuary, a wall that was most likely the original wall of St. Aubert's oratory. As I stood in the narrow chapel, I realized they had uncovered more than the first wall.

There was a hole in the middle of the sanctuary floor, and the rim of it crawled with sigils of old ward magick. On the other side of the hole was the mandala and starburst of magick I had picked up from Philippe's memory, filling the space between the hole and the niche where the wall was cut to show St. Aubert's original wall. In the heart of the squirming magick was the flickering knob of the key.

I edged close to the hole and peered down. The script on the walls of the well went down a long way, deep into old rock of Mont Tombe, like veins running through marble, and I cautiously reached out and touched the cold stone. The Chorus skipped off the spell holding the rock back; it was like touching hot glass. There was a breeze coming up from the hole, carrying a whiff of that familiar salty smell.

The Chorus couldn't penetrate the surrounding rock, and all they told me about the hole was that it was deep. There was no sign of Marielle, and while she could have kept on going up to the top level of the Merveille, I had no doubt she was down in the hole.

I kept my arms close to my sides and stepped off the edge of the pit. The Chorus ballooned out in a teardrop shape around me, a long strand running in my wake as if they were reluctant to let go of the surface world. I didn't blame them, but there wasn't any other way down. Descende. Gravity pulled my teardrop down and my skin erupted with goose bumps as I passed the rim of the hole. My vision went white with the warding magick for an instant, an overwhelming rush of the legacy of Philippe's memory and the active magick of his wards, and as my ears popped, the white went away.

The well opened up. It was nothing more than a narrow throat through the massive stone block of Mont Tombe that led to a large grotto. The bottom was further away than I had expected, and at first, I thought the warding magick was written on the walls down here too, but when the Chorus tightened my focus, I realized the flickering motion on the walls wasn't thousands of lines of script, but worms of ambient energy boiling through the stone of the grotto. The effect of the energy glow was to fill the chamber with a sourceless luminescence. There were still shadows, but they were out-of-focus shapes that capered madly at the periphery of my vision.

The leys might be gone, but down here, something else was filling that void. The squirming energy was an optical illusion, sort of a heat mirage, and it was more of an echo of history than an actual presence. But something had been here once upon a time, something big enough to fill this space, and it had left an impression upon the stone of this chamber.

The Chorus felt like a very tiny light in my head, and I flashed on a memory of cupping my hands around a flickering heart. Shivering on a cold stone that floated in an infinite emptiness, trying to preserve the infinitesimal spark of their heat. It was cold in the grotto; the constant fluctuation of energy greedily fed on any available source and our lights were not spared.

A tiny stream ran across the floor of the cavern, a rut carved in the rock by centuries of slow, steady flow. The smell of blood was stronger as I floated closer to the flow of water and it wasn't clear if there was something in the water or if it was the water itself that was the source of the smell. The stream came out of the wall below the hole to the chapel and flowed in a looping, curving path across the slope of the floor until it reached a pool at the farthest, lowest corner of the chamber. Standing in the pool, the water halfway up its chest, was a statue.

The most disconcerting thing about the statue wasn't the elongated shape of its head or the vaguely serpentine cords coming off its skull; no, what made me shiver when I looked at the statue was its lack of a face. There was nothing there. Just a ragged blankness, as if someone had come along after the sculptor had finished and had taken a chisel to its features. Stripping it down to a blank slate. But there was still a hint of a face, a patina of shadows that-like the rest of the fluid darkness in the grotto-refused to stay still. It reminded me of Samael and the Qliphoth. There was a hole in the statue's chest, right at the water line of the pool. A narrow incision that looked suspiciously like the sort of wound a spear blade would leave.

Marielle crouched on the floor near the edge of the pool, bent over a sprawled figure. Reluctantly, the Chorus let me touch the ground, and the soles of my feet tingled at the contact with the energized stone.

"Is he dead?" I asked, half-hoping.

She shook her head.

Caught in Antoine's metal fist, seemingly fused to the silver, was the long blade of the Spear of Longinus.