Heartland

XXIX

Have you identified them?" Vivienne asked.

She was standing beside the stone urn. The glow from the basin gave her skin a Mediterranean warmth, making her look more like a true sister to the daughter who had escorted me than a spiritual one.

"I have, I think."

"Do you know what connects them all?" she asked.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the mystery man one more time. "Not entirely. Hildegard, Bernard, and Suger were all contemporaries, but I'm not sure who he is. Some noble, perhaps. A patron? I don't know my twelfth-century nobility that well." An image drifted up from the deep well of the Chorus. An empty boat, its oars missing. A single pole resting across its bench. Something that could have been a spear shaft. Or a fishing pole. "The Fisher King?"

Vivienne inclined her head an inch or so. "Perhaps. The Hierarch was more invisible in those days. Not many knew who he was." She indicated the others. "These are the first Architects. The original trinity. The Visionary. The Scryer. The Mason." She pointed at each as she named them. Bernard. Hildegard. Suger.

The trinity. I let that sink in. Was it an accident that I had been directed to the Visionary when I had first arrived? That the Mason had been holding-though, in some ways, it could be argued that he had been, in fact, guarding-the Spear? That the one Architect still manipulating me was the Scryer?

Too many coincidences. This was the key to Philippe's master plan. Re-creating the cosmology. Recasting the original players. Which meant-

"You're part of the plan," I said.

Vivienne inclined her head. "We are all part of a 'plan,' Michael."

"No, I mean, this one. Philippe's succession. You knew what he was planning." The wheels turned in my head. "And so did Marielle."

Vivienne looked away, gazing into the golden water, and the light reflected from her eyes. "We are daughters," she said. "It is not our place to participate in the games of our fathers. In the games of men."

"Bullshit," I said, recalling something Lafoutain had tried to tell me before the poison had taken him. "You're just as capable as any of them."

A faint smile creased her lips. "That's very flattering of you to say so, but you are-if I may remind you-Venefice. Your vote of confidence carries little weight with your brothers."

I indicated the picture of Hildegard. "But she was one of the original Architects. Doesn't that count for something?"

"Not for a few hundred years, it hasn't."

"But aren't the Archives run by women? Les Filles de Mnemosyne. You said as much to me earlier. You are as close to pure knowledge as I will ever find. How is that not recognition of your roles within the organization?"

"We are nuns, Michael. Cloistered here, with all the other treasures. We can't leave."

An involuntary shiver raced up my back. To be trapped inside this building for the rest of my life. It wouldn't take long before the Archives-seemingly infinite-shrunk down to a room like this one. Ever-present walls and ceiling. No natural light. Not being able to feel the wind or the rain. I wasn't claustrophobic; rather, I was accustomed to having a sky overhead.

I had been raised on a farm in rural Idaho. We could see the Grand Tetons from the back porch of my grandfather's ranch. Every summer, I had slept outside, under the stars, more often than in my own bed. As soon as I had been strong enough to lift my own weight, I had started climbing. The apple trees in my grandmother's tiny orchard. The outbuildings of the ranch. The rocky bluff on the other side of the river; and later, when I was in high school, any cliff I could drive to, climb, and return from by nightfall. It was part of my upbringing, a facet of who I was that was so integral that I assumed everyone had the same access, had the same desire to explore and participate in the natural world.

After we had lost the farm and Dad had moved us to Seattle, I discovered otherwise, but I always felt sorry for those people who let themselves be trapped by the rigors of the city. They had chosen to be part of a system, a construct bent on self-perpetuation that spent more of its energy and fuel on keeping itself alive than on improving its world.

Maybe that had been part of my fascination with Katarina in the beginning. She was a city girl who wasn't afraid of the woods. We had met at REI, and even though she later confessed that her main interest in learning about rock climbing had been to meet me, she still went camping. We had even climbed the East Ridge of Buck Mountain together. She had looked up at the night sky and not been afraid; she had lain down beneath a talk oak and listened to it creak in the wind; she had seen dawn transform a black horizon into a field of fire and light.

But all of that was forbidden to Vivienne and the other daughters. It wasn't that they had no interest in the world untarnished by our hand; that world was a world they could never touch. Cloistered. Kept. Caged. Locked away. I thought of the sensations that had assailed me when the Chapel of Glass had been cut off from the leys, or the panic and fearful claustrophobia inflicted upon Spiertz in his oubliette in Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. Were these even in the same class as a lifetime of being kept inside a glass tower?

All the knowledge in the world and she wasn't free.

"I'm sorry." I didn't know what else to say.

She nodded absently. Her eyes were unfocused, staring into the water of the basin. "We have never needed for anything. My father, and the others assigned by him, are-were-kind jailers, but they were still allowed to come and go. No matter how much we bent our wills and our minds to the tasks given to us, we could never forget that tiny fact: when they were done, they could leave. We never could.

"It has been argued that the outside world offers nothing that we don't already have. That it is a pit of perversion, and all of its influences are foul. By keeping us here, our jailers are, actually, protecting us from the sin and degradation of human existence. By remaining true to our studies, we are closer to the divine. This life isn't a punishment, but rather a gift."

"But a gift you didn't ask for," I said.

"Exactly." Vivienne raised her head. "As I'm sure you noticed, the Archives are larger than the building they are housed in, but there are still boundaries. You recall that office we met in originally? It's part of the outer ring, a facade we maintain to look like any other multinational corporation housed in this building. Those offices are as close to the outside world as I am allowed, and even then, the wards are so strong that all I want to do is flee back to the inner sanctum of the Archives."

The shiver ran through my back again. No wonder she had been so emotionally tense in that room, especially when I mentioned her father. I wondered if I was wrong about the cemetery. Would she want him that close? So near and yet so inaccessible? Would it be worse to see the plot of land where he was buried, and yet never be able to visit it?

She looked at the picture of Hildegard. "She was cloistered too. Did you know that? She was supposed to spend her life in a tiny chamber not much bigger than this, contemplating God. Her parents offered her up to the Church, and I'm sure the idea was completely palatable in the twelfth century, but-" She took her hands off the edge of the basin and her tone hardened. "-it's hard to swallow such malfeasance now.

"Luckily, Hildegard turned out to be a gifted child. She had visions, and perhaps that is why her parents got rid of her. A daughter filled with the weirding light of Satan. Hildegard managed to rise above such abandonment. She recognized the power of her gift."

Vivienne took a piece of paper out of her pocket and offered it to me. I unfolded the page and looked at the color photocopy of a medieval drawing. A figure meant to represent God sat on the top of a tall mountain, and the mountain was filled with tiny windows from which people looked out at the sparks and rays of light emanating from His being. At the base of the mountain stood two figures, a child whose head had become a stream of light rising up to the foot of the angelic being at the peak. The other was a figure made entirely of eyes-

The Chorus flinched, and I crumpled the page.

Vivienne nodded. "I thought you might recognize it."

I shoved it back at her. When I inhaled to speak, I felt like I was breathing glass splinters. "What is that?" I gasped.

"Hildegard's first vision. She wrote about it in her book, Scivias. She recorded twenty-six visions, and wrote commentary on them all. Her record of this one mentions much of what you see here, and of the individual at the base, she writes: '. . At the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in which, because of the eyes, I could discern no human form.' Does this sound familiar to you?"

Portland. The tower with the bloody eye. The shining light of the theurgic mirror. The darkness that followed, sweeping across downtown. The wave of cold hunger, rushing down to the river, wiping out all the lights. The Chorus, shrieking and burning as they were torn from me. An image full of eyes on all sides. What was I but a confusion of identities, a proliferation of desires and needs held together by a singular foul purpose. What was I but a being with no shape of its own. Only a Will.

Does this sound familiar to you?

How could she know?

I cleared my throat. "It depends," I said, equivocating. "On how you interpret the image."

"Well, that's the question I'm asking, isn't it?"

She still hadn't taken the page from me and I let it fall to the floor.

"I'll take that as a 'yes,' " she said.

"That was over eight hundred years ago. I don't believe in prophecy. I've seen too many of them twisted to suit the needs of the oppressor."

"The Watchers have been waiting for more than eight hundred years. You can imagine how, after a few hundred years, they started to get a little frustrated. No one really enjoys being a footnote to history. No one wants to be one of the innumerable generations who-stoically, of course-kept the faith." She bent and picked up the page. "You don't have to believe in prophecy. For the record, neither do I. But you do recognize the importance of symbolism and ritual, don't you? You have to concede that power is nothing more than the energy of those who are realizing their desires. There is always strength in numbers. What does it matter if it happens to be a picture drawn last week or eight hundred years ago?"

Goosebumps ran along my arms. "Is this the justification for what happened? It was ordained more than eight hundred years ago. We aren't responsible. We're just carrying out our destiny. Is that it?"

Vivienne smoothed out the page on the edge of the basin and looked at the picture. "Perhaps. Would you want that to be true?"

"I'd like-" I stopped. She was right. It was all a matter of interpretation and of rewriting history. Did it matter why Bernard and the Hollow Men attacked Portland? Did it matter why the Watchers had allowed it to happen?

No. Yes. Neither. Both.

If Hildegard had Seen that event, if she had Scried that night in Portland, then she had brought it into being. According to Husserl's argument for the power inherent in scrying. See the future; make the future. The rest of us were only fulfilling the world already visualized. Thinking that I failed to stop Bernard or that I had somehow triggered a series of events leading to this fight for the Crown was to take on guilt that didn't exist. There was no fault to assign, no blame to carry, because there was no free will involved. I walked on a predestined track-we all did-and what I thought about my actions and my desires was a subjective hallucination. Every decision I came to as a result of reason and logic were pieces in a puzzle that was already cut. Every hard choice I made was no choice at all.

If I wanted to believe this line of thought, then there was no tragedy. No crime committed against humanity. It was all part of a predestined course of action. We were but tiny players in God's cosmic drama, one He had written at the dawn of existence and was now watching play out.

"I don't want it to be true," I finished.

She held up the picture so that I could see it once more and then dropped it in the basin. "So, don't believe it," she said.

The paper darkened immediately as the ink ran, the lines blurring and smearing. The image of the angel went first, and then the tower with all its windows. The child with the long neck became even more distorted as the page floated toward the bottom of the basin, finally losing all semblance of human shape. Only the figure filled with eyes remained intact, and eventually it became invisible against the smear of ink. It looked, all too familiarly, like one of Philippe's tarot cards.

"Is it still there?" she asked, watching me.

I blinked and took a deep breath. Was it? I took a step closer to the basin and peered more closely at the page. The paper rested on the bottom, edges curling up along the slope of the bowl. The ink had run completely now, and some of it was bleeding off the page, tiny tendrils wisping into the water where they became bleached of their darkness. Fading strands of smoke that vanished as they became filled with light.

"No," I said. "There's nothing left."

"See? So easily dismissed. So easily turned into nothing more than a bad dream."

"You can't dismiss the vision as easily as that," I said. "You can't just throw it away and pretend it doesn't exist."

She leaned forward and looked at the nearly blank page. "I did, though. Besides, how do you know I was telling you the truth? Maybe that wasn't something Hildegard drew at all. Maybe it was something someone gave to me. 'Show this to him,' they said. 'See what he does.' " She shrugged. "Freaked you out, didn't it? How I got under your skin so quickly."

I took a step back from the basin. "No, now you're lying to me." The pictures on the walls seemed to flow, the faces changing into demonic visages wracked with laughter.

"Are you sure?" she asked. "Or is it more convenient for you to believe that I am?"

What do you Know, foolish magus? The faces all danced with mirth. What do you Know?

"I was there," I tried, my voice faint against the raucous laughter ringing in my head.

"Where?" Vivienne asked.

"Portland," I whimpered. "When Bernard activated the Key of Thoth and tried to talk to God."

"Were you?" she asked, pressing the point. Her words came hard and fast. "Not according to the Record you weren't. We had a Witness there. He didn't see you. Are you accusing a Watcher of falsifying a True Record?"

Antoine lied. He lied to protect himself and to elevate himself in the eyes of the Watchers. He hadn't done it to protect me; he had done it to take power for himself. His report gave him control of the situation. Whatever he claimed as the Record became permanent. I had been written out, like the shadow filled with eyes. Smeared into the background and then dissolved. What's gone is gone.

What was I doing now? Was I part of the cosmological rebirth that was coming? Was it my destiny to take up the Cup and drink from it at the Coronation ceremony? To be Crowned, thereby receiving the vision and wisdom of the Hierarch. Me-the untested, untrained, and uninformed magus-who had been given the keys of power by a madman. Or was that part of the lunacy of Husserl's interpretation: to twist me so much that I argued that I wasn't the Hierarch's tool, performed the tasks anyway, and when the end came, was pushed aside because, yes, I really wasn't his tool after all?

I didn't exist. I had died in the river, buried under all that water and flowing energy. There was no Record that I was still alive. Not if the Record was to be believed, and who was I to contradict the Record? To accuse a Protector-Witness of lying? I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, crying out to be heard, to be accepted, to be loved.

But why? Why did I want their affection? Their adulation? Hadn't I spent five years hiding from them, trying to get away from my past? Hadn't I tried so very hard to not be a Watcher? Yet, here I was: running errands for the Architects, killing the competition, and being twisted by the continued admonishment that I wasn't a real player, that I wasn't worthy of being initiated into the secret histories and occult mysteries of La Societe Lumineuse.

I took another step back and collided with the wall. My hand touched the painting and it felt warm and resilient, more like flesh than dried oil paint. A hand grabbed mine and I tried to pull free, the Chorus sparking down my arm and into my neck, but something sharp pierced the top of my skull and the lights went out.