Heartland

XXIV

Bad dream?"

The stone floor was cold beneath me, and I sat up slowly, feeling like I had been beaten by a half-dozen men with sacks of rocks.

The chapel wasn't completely dark. The stones of the exposed wall behind me gave off a slight glow, vibrant with the returned ley energy. The room stank of blood and my pant legs were stiff with it. There were huddled shapes on the floor. In the gloom at the back of the nave, catching and reflecting what light there was, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, watching me.

I recognized his voice more than I knew his shape, and seeing that I was conscious, he came closer. Like Philippe, his bearing had that aristocratic aloofness that centuries of European breeding made instinctual, though the cut of his suit wasn't quite as traditional as the Hierarch's. He wore no tie, opting instead for a dark-colored shirt beneath the dark jacket. Disguising the male pattern baldness he had been suffering from for decades, his head was shaved, but the color of his pale eyebrows and the trimmed and oiled shape of his goatee gave away the fact that he was an older man. The rest of his face and neck were surprisingly smooth, but for a patch of blackness darker than the rest of the shadows in the chapel nestled at the base of his throat. He leaned on a metal-tipped walking stick.

"Salve, Architect Husserl," I said, naming him. I know who you are. I know what you are.

"Salve, Adversari," he replied. And I, say the same of you. "Were you having a bad dream?"

The ward had closed, sealing the floor. I was sprawled beside the altar, my legs lying in the pool of blood from Henri's headless torso. My right hand hurt, and I could only move two fingers without a great deal of pain. Charles' body lay where it had fallen, also making quite a mess, and Antoine lay on his side, arm still caught in the floor. There was no sign of Marielle.

My forehead was wet too, and when I reached up to wipe away the blood, I found a tarot card stuck there.

"Yeah," I said. "I suppose I was."

Black marks wiggled around the Grail like the lines in comic books drawn to indicate motion. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's the flying cup! I wiped my fingers across the card, smearing blood with the ink, and the surface became a blur of motion. A riot of symbolic suggestions.

Reflections glittered off Husserl's glasses. "Ah, the Hierarch's cards. What do you see, blind little magus?" His voice still had that same mechanical precision, and I finally realized why. The thing on his throat was helping him speak. The trim throwback to the nineteenth-century fashion on his face was stuck there, like his eyebrows, with spirit gum. His skin was as smooth as a baby's because it was just as new.

Someone had hurt him recently.

"Blood and water," I said honestly.

"Yes, the Grail. I see it too."

I watched the motion on the card for a little while, and Husserl was patient. Why wouldn't he be? He knew the future.

"Rene didn't have much luck with the future," I said, remembering the earlier encounter before the storm hit and I had been swept into that inchoate conflagration. That tsunami of etheric energy that had hurled me into an out-of-body experience-a cosmological dream. "I don't think he saw me coming."

Husserl sighed. "No, he was too close. He was no longer in flux. He failed to look in the right direction."

"You didn't warn him?"

"It is difficult to change what you See. Dangerous, too, because one can become tangled in that Weave."

"Ah, yes, that whole seeing is creating thing." I glanced around again, and there was a glint of metal in the floor nearby, a shard buried in the center of a ragged circle that looked like an imprint of my fist. The key-

"You can't remove it," Husserl said.

"Remove what?"

"Even if you could," he said, "what would you do with it?"

"I hadn't had a chance to think it through that far."

"Trust me, then: it won't help you."

You need the ring.

I shrugged. "Okay, I suppose I can give you that one." I put the tarot card down, giving some thought to standing up. Not a lot. I examined Antoine, trying to find his left hand. In my dream, he had been missing his ring finger. He had taken the ring too, along with the key. Did he still-

"He doesn't have the ring," Husserl said. "Nor does it matter," he repeated, his voice hardening. "Even if you could retrieve it." The thought of trying to take it from the Architect had barely entered my head. "The lock is broken."

I relented, relaxing against the floor. "Okay, so no ring and no key. What are we doing here then?"

"That depends on you, M. Markham," Husserl said.

I spread my hands. "I suppose it does then, doesn't it?" The Chorus squeezed my neck, and I held them in check. As long as Husserl could play the Farseeing trick, he had the upper hand. I wasn't convinced that scrying would enable him to foresee every possibility-I had managed to trick Rene and the way I had touched Husserl's thread back at the Archives had seemed to surprise him-but he was anticipating everything readily enough at the moment that the best option might be to simply hear him out. The man had a propensity to talk. "What's on your mind?"

"The same thing as yours," he said.

I laughed. "I doubt that."

"Don't be so sure of yourself. I may not have the advantage of carrying spirits, but I have been privy to the Hierarch's plans for a long time. I knew every thread he was going to twist before he did."

"And you figured you'd let him do all the hard work, and then swoop in at the last minute."

He inclined his head slightly. "Perhaps."

"Don't you think Philippe might have anticipated that?" Husserl didn't seem inclined to answer that question, and a moment later, I found my own answer. The Chorus had uncovered a handful of memories and was feeding them to me. "Oh, wait, he did. At Chateau Neuf de Meudon."

He gripped the head of his cane. "Yes, M. Markham. The Hierarch and I had a discussion there-"

"A discussion?" I interrupted him with a snort of laughter. "That's not the way I remember it. Seems like someone got their face burned off." The memories weren't complete. They were stuttering loops like I was watching a short surrealist cut-up film. Fire, reflecting off the glass ceiling of the Grande Cupole. Husserl's cane with its knob of black glass. My hand on his throat, flames licking at the cuff of my shirt. His hair, burning.

Husserl took a step forward. "Is that all you remember? You are a very poor Witness, M. Markham."

There was more. Husserl had been smiling. Even as I crushed his throat and burned him, he had never stopped smiling at me.

"But shouldn't you be asking yourself why he didn't kill me?" Husserl asked. "If he knew what I planned, why did he stop with my face?"

Why hadn't I killed him?

Husserl cocked his head to one side, and the weak light reflected off his glasses. "You're not sure. I don't have to See to tell that you don't know the answer to that question. Your head is filled with spirits, but you still don't know anything useful. You don't know why."

If Philippe had known who the Opposition was, why hadn't he killed them? Why had he let them live?

A really troubling point intruded on my thoughts: What if everyone had been lying to me? What if there was no Opposition. Perhaps they were all scrambling in the vacuum to be the last one standing. It is the first way.

"Why don't you tell me?" I asked Husserl, shoving that possibility aside. That was too chaotic, too unstructured, and I couldn't believe that Philippe would have left so much to chance.

He laughed. "Why should I? Why don't you ask him? You're his master now, aren't you? Or are you just a simple tool?"

"You're trying to twist me," I said. "Just like he did. Everything you say is the same manipulative bullshit that Philippe used to pull on us. He read people very well, and he didn't have to know the future to know how they'd react in certain situations. You're doing the same thing."

"Of course I am," Husserl said. "We all do, M. Markham. It's a facet of being human: all that lying, cheating, and conniving. It's what makes our meat so sticky sweet to the pure light of our souls. All that corruption. All that filthy sin. What else would the Divine Spark soil itself in but that which is the very opposite of its purified innocence?"

"Don't make this metaphysical," I said, realizing that sentiment applied to my line of thinking as well. Keep it concrete. "I'm talking about the very specific mechanics of shaping events and people to your ends. You're just like Philippe: whispering what we want to hear; suggesting what we already know, but can't bring ourselves to want. The only difference between you two is that he was better at it than you. Even with your special glasses."

Husserl laughed. "Better than me? You think my actions are driven by jealousy, by some vague psychological need?"

"Are they?"

"Why do you think Philippe and I are at odds? How do you know this course of events isn't something that we planned together?"

"You-" And I stopped. Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't that explain why Philippe hadn't killed him. What about the others? Cristobel had accepted his sacrifice eagerly; and Antoine, burned by my actions in Ravensdale, had suffered that pain in order to receive his reward. Why couldn't Husserl's actions be considered in the same light? Who was to say that they weren't all so aware of the big picture that a sacrifice of the flesh was but a minor token if it moved the plan forward. Hadn't Husserl done exactly that when he had called me at the Archives, ostensibly from Tevvys' phone? He had claimed to have done so at my request, but I didn't know that Moreau had delivered that message any more than I knew how Husserl had gotten my phone number. What had that conversation accomplished? He had told me I was a singularity, a point beyond which no future was certain, and that realization had unlocked an awareness of the Hierarch's grand plan. He had moved Philippe's design forward in a manner that suggested he was aware of some of the details of that vision.

But this was the lie he wanted me to believe. A twist of logic that seemed so obvious and so natural, but when I looked at it more closely, it fell apart. So Husserl was privy to Philippe's plan, and Philippe knew that Husserl knew. But that didn't tell me who was ultimately playing whom. Husserl had as much opportunity-if not more-than any of the Architects. If he could read the future, then I would have been disappointed if he hadn't been able to anticipate what was coming. It would be easy to claim ownership of the plan now as I was the only one who could readily contradict him. Control didn't mean compliance or agreement. It simply meant knowledge.

Those who understand the big picture get to fine-tune the small details. One of the truisms of the Watchers. If you Know, you can act. If Husserl Knew, then why couldn't this all be an act? A misdirection for my benefit?

Which circled us back to the basic question: Why?

I put my hands flat against the floor, and the Chorus remarked on the rhythm of ley energy storming beneath me. Like the vibrations from the DJ's record, back at Batofar. A subsonic vibration, a confusion of echoes. In my own head, the same sort of mixture-too many histories, too many divergent desires. It became difficult to parse the "why?" out of the noise.

"Why did you call me when I was at the Archives?"

Stalling. Trying to think. Trying to put more of the pieces together.

"I've already told you."

"I don't believe it was just to tell me that I was the axis around which all of this turned. I would have figured that out eventually. You forced the issue, and you revealed yourself. I didn't know your involvement prior to that call. Why did you give away that advantage?"

"It confuses you, doesn't it? That we might not be enemies. That we might be working toward the same goal."

"What goal? Coronation?"

"It is the inevitable outcome of this course. A new Hierarch will be Crowned."

"And you think I should be showing more enthusiasm about giving you that opportunity."

"I know you will."

I shifted my weight forward and Husserl didn't seem bothered by the shift in my position. I considered the distance between us, and the obstacles: Antoine, Henri, the blood, Charles. .

"Where's Marielle?" I realized.

He smiled, a motion made all the more sinister by the fact that no lines developed on his face. He really did have the skin of an infant. "That's a better question."

I repeated it.

Husserl inhaled deeply, like a hound scenting the approach of rain. "I won't try to convince you that she came willingly, because you won't believe me, so I will say that she is in my care, and will remain so until Coronation. At which time, I will put a knife into her chest and cut her heart out."

Her heart.

On the floor beside me, the tarot card twitched, the wet smear of ink and blood solidifying into a concrete picture. Hearing some echo in Husserl's words, I listened to the Chorus for a moment as I watched the picture on the card become clear. A woman holding up a cup, and rising out of the frame, only his crossed feet and the wide pole upon which he was crucified visible, was the Martyr. It was identical to the watercolor I had seen at the Chapel of Glass, though a close-up detail. The crucified man's flaming heart wasn't visible. But the cup was.

Philippe's spirit giving me a nudge, trying to bridge a gap and make a connection. Drink from this vessel. The Ace of Cups; I had drawn it on the chart of the Architects, an unconscious doodle while Vivienne had been mesmerizing me. Words and tongues; tell me what ails you? Earlier, at Batofar, I had sipped from a cup Marielle had given me containing a concoction that had driven out the poison in my system. But was that all it had done? Had it created some other connection?

Her hips moving, inviting me to try again. In the alcove on Batofar, the physical connection. I had been caught up in the moment, in the sensation of being alive and whole again, and I hadn't been paying close enough attention. Keys and locks. Opening doors and crossing thresholds; connections made across disparate spaces. Marielle hadn't been fucking me. She had been trying to extract something from me during the sex. She had tried to break open some mystery hidden within my heart. What I say and what I mean are never the same.

What had she tried to take?

"You won't harm her," I said.

His smile remained. "You are guessing, calling my bluff."

"No, I know you're lying."

"And how do you know that?"

"Because if you wanted to kill her, you'd have done so already."

He nodded. "Yes, in much the same way I would have cut your throat while you were busy dreaming that petty little dream of yours if that is what I had wanted."

"Yes."

"Very good. You are learning to think." He leaned on his cane, the light flashing on his glasses. "If I haven't killed you, then I must want something."

"I'm guessing you do. Why don't you tell me?"

"The Spear, M. Markham. It and the Holy Grail are required for the Coronation ceremony."

I glanced at the solid floor, and then at the circular indentation left by my fist. "Ah," I said, getting it. "And I suppose she is the carrot by which you will entice me to retrieve the Spear for you."

"Precisely. The sisters of the Archives will only release the Grail when the Spear has been retrieved."

The ground trembled. It felt almost like an aftershock of an earthquake, the faint vibration that seemed like nothing more than the sort of rumble caused by a heavy truck downshifting on the road outside, but as we were far from any major roadway, that was hardly the case. Something else had shifted.

"The Coronation was supposed to have taken place at dawn this morning," Husserl said, seemingly indifferent to the tremor. "The first day of spring. But that was not to be, it would seem. The sun is already in the sky, and the Land is troubled by the lack of a Hierarch. We will have one more chance tomorrow to greet the sun."

The ground trembled again, more obviously this time, and I scrambled to my feet.

"What's going on?" I demanded.

"The Architect Spiertz." Husserl tapped his cane against the floor. "He, too, wants the Spear."

The Chorus tried to get a reading, but couldn't sense anything through the crawling web of etheric energy in the rock. "Where is he?" I asked, even though I had a bad feeling about the answer.

"Underground," Husserl said. "Though I believe he is trying to break out."