Heartland

IV

The ceiling was rough, unpainted stone mottled with age. A heavy blanket held me down, and as I moved my arms to push it back, the bed frame creaked. Lifting my head, I examined the room. The air was dry, with a hint of mold. I was in a basement somewhere, in a room made up as a guest room. Bed, dresser, floor lamp, chair.

Man in chair.

Antoine was reading The Wall Street Journal. The light from the lamp spilled out in a cone of yellow illumination, and it reflected from the silver fingers of his right hand. His blond hair was shaggy, a different style than I had seen on him a few months ago. He was still growing it back from when it had all been burned away. His face was smooth and unblemished, making him seem all the more like a teen pop star with his delicate cheekbones and narrow mouth, and there was no hint of bruising from when Marielle had tagged him. A wool jacket was carefully folded over the back of the chair, and his clothes were tailored and expensive. Dark colors: charcoal and black. His tie had a hint of red, threads that seemed wet in this light.

He deigned to notice that I was awake, and his lip curled in a hint of a smile.

"You look-" My voice broke, and I sat up to clear my throat. "-you look. . well."

"A couple of months at a private spa in Sardinia," he said, lowering the paper. "Thalassotherapy. Very invigorating. All that seawater. For a little while, I thought I was going to grow gills along with all my new skin." He released the paper, and it floated in midair, shivering like a lover as he stroked it lightly with his silver fingers. With a gleam of violet light, it folded itself up and fell to the floor in a neat rectangle.

The Chorus backed up in my throat, making my mouth twitch with the acrid taste of ozone.

"You, on the other hand," he said. "You look a little haunted."

"I wonder why."

He smiled as he leaned back in the chair. He watched me for a minute, and I stared back, unwilling to give him anything else. You two will always mirror each other. The voice I heard in my head wasn't one of the Chorus; this was one of my own memories. Marielle, on the morning of the duel, acknowledging the eternal dichotomy of my relationship with Antoine.

"We've heard," he said finally. "A little over an hour ago. A call came in from the Consulate in Seattle. Our man there."

"I see," I said. An hour ago. I looked around for a clock. "How long have I been out?" The skin of my face still ached where Marielle had slugged me. A few times, if I remembered correctly. Somehow my arrival had gone horribly awry.

Par for the course these days. Things had certainly been easier when I had been hiding in my self-dug hole.

Had they? asked a familiar voice in the Chorus.

Denial is always easier, John, I told the spirit of Detective Nicols.

Antoine's mouth twitched, fighting to hide another smile. "You forgot her temper, didn't you?" He touched his cheek gently, and I knew I was supposed to notice his lack of bruising. "That was quite a punch," he said. "I felt it, and it wasn't even meant for me."

"Yeah," I said, gingerly touching my face and exploring the warm skin. I'm sure there was some nice color developing. Antoine would enjoy that. "She's gotten stronger."

The gravity well she carried with her was new. She certainly hadn't exhibited that sort of psychic pull the last time I had been here, and it felt. . primal, for lack of a better world. Some sort of arcane magick that I didn't have any experience with.

"She's going to need it," Antoine said. "They're all going to be watching her now. Waiting to See."

"Where is she?"

He lifted his shoulders.

"Seriously."

"I don't know. She didn't come with us."

"What? You left her there?"

"She refused to get in the car, and I didn't want to deal with Henri. He was lost in his magick. He never would have listened."

"So you just-what? Threw me in the car and drove off?"

"Henri is not that stupid. He didn't want her."

I shook my head. "This wasn't what I planned. Not like this."

He laughed, and the Chorus slithered in my gut, feeding on the bubbling magma of my guilt and anger. He was goading me, hoping I would try to wipe that smug grin off his face.

He wants the excuse to hurt you, the snakes in my belly reminded me. There is an imbalance of pain, a debt owed.

I shook them off. "Yeah, well, okay. I guess it isn't my planning that brings us here anyway," I said. "Rough and tumble as it may be, we're still caught in the Hierarch's Weave."

Antoine leaned forward. "Are we?" His eyes glittered with violet light. "Did he tell you as much?"

I threw back the comforter and swung my legs out of bed so that I had something to do. Something other than lying there, looking at him. "Plainly? Of course not," I said. "It was like every other conversation with him. Soothsayer or Devil's Advocate: it changes with every sentence that comes out of his mouth."

"How could you expect anything less? But after you talked, what did he give you?" He paused, waiting for my answer, and when none was quick in forthcoming, he prodded me a bit more. "Other than his soul, of course."

I considered denying it, but realized there was no point. Antoine knew how the Chorus worked. He had killed Lt. Pender-the Hollow Man contact in the Seattle Police Department-so that I could have enough energy to face Bernard. He had offered me another man's soul. I had refused, because it wasn't so much an offering as a yoke. It would have made us complicit in the willful thievery of another person's light, and while I didn't have any illusions about being a lightbreaker, I wasn't a soul eater. Not like that.

"He gave me a lot of heartache," I said. "Philippe gave me nothing but pain, Antoine. His, and yours, and Marielle's."

His lips curled back from his teeth, a feral motion I had never seen on him before. More than a crack in his armor. This was Antoine, naked before me; before I could read him further, he disappeared, slipping beneath the ever-present layer of magickal distortion that wreathed him. Like a shark, always just under the surface.

"That's not completely true," I said, as if the thought had just occurred to me. "He did say you took credit for stopping Bernard. In your True Record, you were the one who destroyed the Key."

His gaze was hooded, the glint of magick in his eyes nearly invisible. That inscrutable exterior. That marble facade. I was starting to realize how much it revealed about him.

"I take it you're not going to disagree with him?" I asked as I stood up. I wasn't wearing socks or shoes. They were neatly piled on the dresser, along with my ruined coat and the contents of my pockets.

He shook his head. "I was protecting your anonymity," he said. "We had to discern the Hierarch's vision of the Weave. A global manhunt for you wasn't going to help us figure out what was going on."

"Of course not," I said, wandering toward the dresser. I was a little unsteady. Some lingering muscle twinges from Charles' magick wand. "That would have been distracting. And who knows how long it would have taken for them to track me down?"

"Yes," he said. "Exactly." A little too eager to agree with me.

"Though, with you being the True Witness to the event, and reaping the reward of being the badass who stopped their plan, you certainly got back in the Old Man's favor. All sins forgiven, perhaps?"

"Perhaps."

I tried to be casual about my inventory of the items on the dresser. New passport for Michael Dupont, my ready-made alias for this trip. Nearly empty wallet with one credit card, some business cards, and a couple hundred Euros. Velvet bag of tarot cards. A pack of spearmint gum I had bought in Heathrow, along with a page torn out of a magazine: a mention of the Archimedes Palimpsest. The conservation team had finished disbinding the manuscript a while back, and the news was finally getting out in the journals. I had a client who'd be disappointed; he had wanted access to it before they tore it apart.

What was missing from my personal effects was the key and the ring.

The key was old and made of iron. The ornamental bow had been smashed into an ugly lump, and the teeth had been slippery, wavering in and out of focus. A piece of paper had been previously attached with a loop of thin string, the word "Abbadon" written on the scrap, but I had ditched both the paper and the envelope the key had come in during my layover in England.

The ring was a platinum band, set with three opals. On the inside of the ring were fine lines of arcane script, old magick I hadn't had a chance to decipher. The ring of a king, the circular seal of a thousand-plus years of history. It had gone on my finger quite easily and I had only taken it off and put it in my coat so as to not get comfortable wearing it.

"We had a deal," I said, picking up my coat and checking the pockets. Just in case. "We were going to work together."

"We are," Antoine said. There was nothing in his face but that placid serenity that challenged me to be the one to say otherwise.

Could I trust him? I wondered. All history between us aside, did we really have enough of a common enemy to work together? Or was everything he said on the riverbank in Portland just what I had wanted to hear? Was he manipulating me to his own end?

Ask him, the Chorus challenged. Ask him for the ring and key back. Ask him as his liege. Ask him as is your right.

"Is there something else?" Antoine asked, prodding me in my hesitation.

I wanted to know why. From Antoine as well as the Chorus. Why was it important that I force this issue? If he had the missing items-and I didn't see any reason why he hadn't taken them; they had been in my pocket when we had left the train-why would he give them back because I asked? He knew I couldn't take them from him. So why wouldn't he just deny having them?

"You're not telling me everything," I said, and I wasn't sure if I was talking exclusively to Antoine.

"Neither are you." He smiled. "But at least we're being honest about it. I'd call that progress."

Antoine and I have, at best, a tempestuous relationship. We were brothers in the Weave, fellow Watchers who came up through the ranks at the same time, a few years back. Though Antoine's family-like Philippe's-had been part of the organization for several generations. I was a recent recruit, a promising mutt found scrounging for scraps in the gutters of Paris. He and I and a few others made a little coterie of young turks.

Hermes Trismegistus, in one of the dialogues recorded with his son, Tat, spoke of a great basin lowered down from Heaven. It was filled with Mind-a word rife with many connotations that had occultists and philosophers arguing for centuries-and it was only through man's focus and will that he could achieve a purified state. One that allowed him to bathe in the basin and be covered with the luminous dew of God's Will. Or some such thing.

Metaphor aside (or not, depending on what you believed in), we sought the basin, whether the archaic artifact or some modern facsimile. That was our reason for seeking initiation into the inner mysteries of La Societe Lumineuse: to be worthy of illumination. We had purpose and direction-for a little while-and then emotions got in the way.

Those basal desires that forever infect the flesh: lust, jealously, fear, greed. Always fighting those demons that haunt our bodies, aren't we?

It was a combination of lust and jealously that did us in. Assisted by the vibrant presence of Marielle Emonet. Daughter of the Old Man. Which wasn't to say that there weren't others who were interested in Marielle. Her proximity to the Hierarch alone made her desirable. In an unenlightened throwback to our medieval roots, there was an unspoken belief that she was the prize. She would be given to whomever the Old Man selected as his successor, which failed to bring into consideration a number of things. Not the least of which were her temper and her willful independence.

I hesitate to say she enjoyed playing Antoine and me off one another, but it was such an ingrained response that it happened almost involuntarily. Clarity on the tangled trinity of our relationship came grudgingly in the years after I left Paris, and I realized I was a means to get under Antoine's skin. She liked me well enough, but in the end, I was a message sent to the other man: Marielle would make her own choice, and Antoine needed to respect her opinion if he ever hoped to have a future with her.

But outside the contest for Marielle's affection, Antoine and I had been friends. I seemed oblivious to the aristocratic heritage that the others deferred to, and the respect I had for him was that of a peer, of a fellow student of magick. He frightened me because of what he knew and what he could do, not because of the rich stock of his bloodline.

Who knows what he saw in me; maybe it was as simple as the fact that I didn't cater to him, that I asked him to earn the right of my respect. Once or twice, I had cracked that armor of his and Seen inside, and that I could-and had-may have been part of the reason he had adopted me into his little clan of magi. I was a wild card, and Antoine-like the Old Man-knew the best place for wild cards was at one's side. Who knew what mischief they could cause if they weren't Watched?

Well, sleeping with the girlfriend, for one.

Shortly after my Journeyman trial, Antoine and the others had tried to embarrass me. We took a little extra-curricular excursion to a tiny village near the Swiss border where the locals still believed in werewolves; I had thought it was to celebrate our initiation into the first circle of the society, but that wasn't the case. They had tried to frame me for the death of a local, setting me up to be a target of local superstitions. I went off-script, and left them with a mess to clean up, and during the course of that engagement, I stripped Antoine's shields and showed the rest of the gang that he was twisting all of us. All our threads.

No one was too happy about that.

Antoine and I were wary of each other for several months after that, finding excuses to dodge the other, but such denial didn't last. We had already eclipsed the other's orbit once, and it was just a matter of time before we came into conflict again. New Year's Eve, in fact, at a club near the Eiffel Tower. Tempers had run hot, and Antoine had ended up laying down the challenge.

Ritus concursus. The primal way of settling differences, man to man. Usually reserved for upstart magi who sought to get ahead on the rank ladder, ritual combat wasn't normally engaged between brethren of the same rank. But there wasn't any other way for Antoine to call me out without consequences. The rite of combat was recognized as a way of settling affairs that didn't require the same weight of evidence and prosecution that more modern methods had. Old school rules.

In our case: swords; under the Pont Alexandre bridge; at dawn, on New Year's Day.

It hadn't gone well. Antoine lost a hand. I got run through with his sword, after which I fell into the Seine. By the time I dragged myself out of the river, I was out of Paris. And staying out was the best solution to our problem. I went underground, and let them think the river had claimed me. Antoine was only too happy to consider me dead, and under the rules of combat, he was cleared of any transgression. It had been a fair fight, as far as those sorts of fights go.

And the status quo had been maintained for a few years. I went about my business: buying and selling black-market occult paraphernalia, sneaking into libraries and reading illegal texts, and looking for Kat. Five years later, I finally tracked her down in Seattle, where I found a group of magi involved in psycho-animism-the art of releasing the soul from the body. They were working on a secret project, one that had Watcher backing.

And the man sent to oversee the project was Protector Antoine Briande.

There are only twenty-one Protector-Witnesses at any time, and typically when one dies the election process is a long drawn-out affair. The same was true for Preceptor, the final electable rank beyond Protector, which was about as complicated and contentious as electing a new Pope. Mainly a series of political machinations and some ethically shaky tweaks to the Weave until a clear candidate could be identified. As for the Architects? They were Preceptors who were further elevated in ultra-secret ceremonies. We knew their titles, but none of us knew who they were. Part of the mystique of the inner Inner Circle. Even when you were on the inside, you were still outside: another one of those little reminders that each of us, regardless of our gained wisdom and knowledge, didn't know everything.

The rank was changing. Too many generations removed from their beginnings, the children forget the origin of a tradition; they forget the reasons for the old ways. Eager to get ahead, we eager youngsters think a title is a fancy word to impress the docile starfuckers, and we forget that it recognizes a body of experience and knowledge. We used to venerate our elders because they knew the secrets, because they'd taken the time to understand the inner workings of the universe.

Antoine defied history. He ran counter to the argument that, with age and experience, came understanding and mastery. He was, as far as I knew, the youngest man to ever hold the rank of Protector-Witness. Upstart, headstrong, and brilliant in his execution of magick and spellcraft, the man lived and breathed power. His connection to the leys-the energy lines, both natural and unnatural, that gave a magus access to power-was fundamentally instinctive. He didn't have to consciously think about connecting to the grid and drawing power. It was just there for him.

While the others were somewhat mystified by my lack of ability to tap the lines like other Journeymen and yet still do enough magick to pass the trials, Antoine suspected something like the Chorus. He knew why I couldn't ground myself well enough to draw power, just as he knew why that lack of egocentrism was also my ace. I took power from other souls, and I could even reach through them to the leys if they were connected. My soul was broken enough that I couldn't ground myself, but I could draw power from a radiant conduit more readily than anyone else.

Pluses and minuses. These are the crosses we bear. The damage done, and the way we survive. The knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill. John Milton, talking about the price of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The price of what we became when we touched the other side and learned the magick arts.

Two months ago, Antoine and I had faced off over the experimental device built by the Hollow Men, who had been working off an ancient design, cobbled together from a variety of medieval-era sources-both European and Islamic. The Key of Thoth harvested souls, storing them in a reservoir that a schooled magus could then tap as an energy source. Bernard du Guyon, the grubby-fingered alchemist who had figured out the lost Key, had tried to breach the Veil and do something unsavory with the Divine. If there even was a Divine Presence waiting for us, on the other side. All in all, there had been a lot of theory and not a lot of practical knowledge at the basis of their plan.

I got ahead of Antoine by catapulting him across a parking lot, trying my best to remove him from the field. The only way I got the drop on him was that I had had a reservoir of power, a mass of energy taken from others earlier that day. I slowed him down enough that I could throw a wrench in Bernard's plan. I couldn't stop the harvest, but I did mitigate the scale. And, while waiting for dawn and the opportunity to stop the remainder of Bernard's experiment, Antoine and I realized we had both been played.

The Hierarch had been shaping a grander pattern. Antoine had thought he had been manipulating the Hollow Men to his design, but his actions were still within the parameters of a larger plan. And it went back further than that: our duel under the bridge in Paris five years earlier had been part of that design as well, as had my subsequent exile. It hadn't been chance that we had found each other again in the Pacific Northwest. There, on the river's edge, Antoine had glimpsed the larger Weave and realized it wasn't his place to stop Bernard. It was mine. As a Qliphotic-damaged soul eater, I knew better than he did what the device was and how to destroy it.

And if I died in the attempt? Well, that would have solved the other nagging problem for Antoine.

Seeing the Weave isn't the same as scrying the future. It's more like seeing the complex combinations and permutations of possibilities. Manipulating the threads of the Weave is like using your hip to influence the ball on a pinball table. Just the right amount of force at the right time will cause a ripple in the fabric. You can't always control how the ripple spreads, but as you get better at it, you learn how much influence-how much pressure-you should bring to bear.

But there are always spots where there is too much interference. There are too many possibilities to consider, or the outcome of a situation is so radical and catastrophic that seeing behind the knot is too difficult. Maybe it was easier for the Old Man. Maybe he could see further than any of us.

But Antoine and I couldn't see beyond dawn. We didn't know what was going to happen when I returned to face Bernard in the tower.

And Antoine had been a little disappointed when I came back. It would have been easier if I had fallen-I didn't necessarily disagree with that assessment-but in the end, I hadn't been ready to be unraveled. When I returned from the tower, having broken the Key and liberated the captive souls, he and I had talked about the problem we had in common. A rebellion was forming in the rank, a schism that was going to have far-reaching repercussions, and based on what we had Seen of the Hierarch's hand in the Weave, he wasn't entirely unaware of the mutiny that was coming.

The rebellion would have a contingency plan in place, a secondary course of action to depose the Old Man, and the question we had wrestled with that morning was where would we be in the coming war. Which side would we support? Antoine had argued for signing up with the New Guard, and I had sided with the Old Man. Why? To be contrary to Antoine, partially, and partially because I still believed in the Hierarch, even though he had played us both. Somewhere in the discussion, Antoine changed his mind and, grudgingly, agreed that the Old Man's camp was the better place to be.

Or, at least, that had been the plan. But Antoine had come back to Paris and taken full responsibility for throwing Bernard's plan into disarray. While his argument that he did so to keep me hidden was sound, it wasn't the truth. It was a smoke screen, a subtle twist to the Weave that could draw my thread out of the pattern. If I didn't exist to the rest-if they didn't know about me enough to care that I was a wild card-then I wasn't necessary for this pattern. I had stopped Bernard, and taken away his toy. I had done the job I had been set up to do, and there was nothing else I could offer to the Hierarch. I could safely be removed from the pattern. That had been Antoine's take on my place in the Weave. I was a piece used, now useless, and easily discarded, and even though we had decided to wait for the Old Man's call, Antoine had been hoping that it would never come. That the Old Man would have no more use for me.

Philippe's visit to Seattle must have been a surprise to those around him. So close to the spring equinox. I had been wondering how he had managed to slip away from Paris without the entire rank knowing that he was gone, but then, he was the Hierarch. Misdirection and obfuscation were so ingrained in his psyche that he was probably incapable of not contorting and complicating everything.

But there was indeed more to his visit-again, part and parcel of his methodology-and I hadn't understood why he had come all the way out to Seattle to activate me for his final solution. I had had no idea how integral I was to be in his final hours.

The Hierarch had come to show me his cancer. He had come as close as he could to the place where his wounds had been inflicted upon him. The deaths in Portland had wounded him. Deeply. His power was fading, and his mind was starting to go too. He wouldn't survive long, especially if the Opposition discovered the extent of the blight laid upon him by the Key's detonation. He hadn't called me to his side. He had come to me instead, not to pass judgment on past transgressions against the family, but to ask a favor.

Ritus concursus. To the victor go the spoils.

His ring, and his mind.

There were a couple of other party gifts which he hadn't explained, and the Chorus had been maddeningly unable to discern any concrete details about them. The key, an old twisted thing that was half-melted but resonant with magick. The tag, which read "Abbadon," I had long discarded. His deck of tarot cards-the Marseille pattern-and more than one card had notes scrawled in the margins. They were his private journal of occult knowledge. The High Priestess had Marielle's name written on it, and a cell phone number I assumed was hers.

What was I supposed to do with all this? Go to Paris. That was clear. Get under Antoine's skin. That was a happy by-product. Stay alive? Obviously.

The Hierarch had wanted me to be his harbinger, his angel of vengeance, and I had politely refused. But I hadn't walked away from him when he asked me to take his soul. I hadn't said no, which made me complicit in his design.

But I already was. That was the trap into which I had been forced. I was the outsider, the quintessential village idiot who had undertaken the great quest into the world of sacred darkness and who had returned. I was Campbell's Monomyth Hero: chosen against my will, imbued with the knowledge that would save or damn the kingdom, and destined to be cast out again in the end when the cycle spun to its inevitable conclusion.

Hurray for me. Last time I had thought this was the part I was playing too, and that hadn't turned out to be the case. Misguided and befuddled like the tarot's Fool, I had danced my way off the cliff.

I wasn't going to be that guy this time.

But Philippe knew that, which is why he offered me everything. He knew this was a carrot that would entice me.

There were two carrots, actually. And the combination of both would make me overlook the danger of returning to Paris. We make our own traps. Philippe was well aware of how readily we would walk into disasters we knew we should avoid. He knew, better than any of us, how little effort it took to sway us onto a different path than the one we meant to follow.

Here, little one, take my hand. I will show you the way.

He knew. He knew, beneath all my bluster and outrage, I had wanted this. I had wanted a focus. That was the way my thread was wound. It wouldn't take much to twist me to his plan, and it hadn't.