Heartland

V

"Stay here." Antoine admonished me as he put on his coat.

"And do what?" I asked. "Meditate?"

"If it helps."

"Where are you going?"

"I am a Protector, Michael. I have responsibilities. The Hierarch is dead. The rank will react, especially this close to spring, and I must be visible. We need to know what the rest will do, how much they will panic." He looked at me, his eyes guarded. "A lot of them will be thinking about it."

The Crown.

Each spring the Hierarch underwent a ceremonial renewal, a Coronation that was part pomp and circumstance and part cosmological rebirth. With Philippe gone, the question was: Who was to fill that void?

Without a clearly designated heir-me notwithstanding-the rank was going to turn into a chaotic mess of egos and agendas. Antoine was right. We needed information. Who was going to make a play for the Crown? Who had the resources to take it? Who wanted it?

"How long?" I asked.

He shrugged, adjusting the cuffs of his coat. "I don't know."

An honest answer, but one that made the Chorus tighten against my spine. Too much uncertainty. Too much waiting. Too many things out of my control.

Antoine wasn't about to tie me down; he was, after all, leaving me on my own recognizance, which meant one of two things: a) he expected me to stay like a good house pet; or b) he expected me to bolt.

"I'll be here," I said as he walked toward the front of the narrow apartment.

He paused at the base of the stairs that led up to the street level and looked back, his eyes violet with light.

We both knew I was lying.

I remained in the single hallway of the apartment, listening to the sound of his boots against the stairs. The basement apartment wasn't much more than a trio of rooms off a central hallway, and it must have been in the center of the block as there were no windows. Not in the bedroom; not in the tiny kitchenette; not in the bathroom. It was a box, hidden away from the world. Good, if you wanted to be invisible; bad, if you were worried about someone coming after you.

A door at the top of stairs opened, spilling light down the wooden steps. For a second, the noisy sounds of Paris tumbled down into the basement, but then Antoine shut the door, and everything became quiet again. Muted and distant. Separated from the world. Isolated in this boxlike prison.

If he had wanted to kill me, he would have done so while I was unconscious, or he would have left me in the road near the train tracks. A gift for Henri. But he hadn't. He had ditched his ex-girlfriend, and spirited me away to this safe house. For which I was supposed to be grateful. I was supposed to sit tight and wait.

Didn't he know better by now?

He does, the Chorus whispered.

My head was starting to throb, a massive headache sneaking into the forebrain. I was wound tight, and the screws had only been tightening since I had gotten on the plane in Seattle.

I will not be your agent of vengeance.

That is all you will ever be, an echo of Philippe, twisting through the Chorus.

The images cycled through my head as I rubbed my face: Philippe, sitting in the chair; the flickering streamers of light caught in the fireplace; the suppurating blackness of his leg; the pale skin of the crown of his head; his pupils, dilating as the spike of the Chorus split his heart. These were my memories, and while my rank was no longer recognized by the society, these images were a True Record. I was the sole Witness to the Hierarch's death, and even though the rites of combat said I took the spoils, no one would believe me. Which meant that the body politic was headless, and like Antoine had said, who knew how stable that body was going to be.

The Coronation. Via the network of bound memory, I knew what happened after the death of the Hierarch. There was a resurrection, a ceremonial recognition where the new leader was Crowned. Recognized by both the rank and by some external agency. Some sort of institutional memory, a historical legacy that was passed on to each new Hierarch. The Spirit of the Land. The Secrets of the Ages. The Truth to the Inner Mystery. The combination to the safe in the back room where all the deadly occult paraphernalia was held. Or some such thing.

There were other secrets too, hidden by the noise of the Chorus. The Qliphoth had hidden in that confusion and darkness; after I had scoured them out, it was as if I had driven the rats out of the basement, but the room was still there. Dark, inviting, and who knew how far back it went. All I did know was that Philippe was in there, and he had locked the door shut from the inside. I didn't have the strength to force my way in, nor did I have a key.

That damn key. Did Antoine know what it was for?

I showered, discovered there was nothing edible in the refrigerator, and used that as a convenient excuse to walk away from the safe house. Pants, shoes, shirt, wallet, tarot deck, crawling paranoia about being in the heart of the enemy's empire: everything I needed. I left the passport-no point in carrying the false identity anymore; not when they knew I was here-and my jacket. The burn pattern on the front would draw too much attention. I could pick up another at a shop somewhere. I went up the stairs, out the front door, and found myself in a narrow alley.

Residential neighborhood. The surrounding buildings were gray concrete, the sort of invisible architecture thrown up during the bleaker part of the Cold War. Windows, placed in precise rows, were afterthoughts, squares cut out of the foreboding walls. The accreted history of the lower classes, packed tightly together in little boxes. The Chorus didn't sense any danger, nor any watchers behind the curtains of the numerous dull windows along the alley. I turned left and started walking.

Eventually, I'd spot a landmark. This was Paris, after all. You're never far from a picturesque monument or historical landmark.

In this case, the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. One of the world's largest cemeteries, Pere Lachaise was a nineteenth-century solution to the problem of overflowing churchyards, and had become a status symbol in the subsequent centuries. You weren't somebody until you were buried at Pere Lachaise.

I followed the old stone wall, tracing the rectangular shape of the city of the dead until I found the collection of shops clustered around one of the cemetery's entrances. I needed a few things. Coffee, coat, cell phone: Maslow mapped to the twenty-first century. Start at the bottom, work up.

After procuring the items on my list, I settled at a sidewalk table, outside the Brasserie du Pere Lachaise. The wind was light, from the north, and the sun was out, so it wasn't too cold. Winter was dying; spring was coming.

The Chorus reminded me of the field beyond Philippe's farmhouse. In the spring, it exploded with wild flowers.

In the spring. .

The cell phone I picked up at the shop was a pay-as-you-go type and I had put a couple hundred minutes on it while at the store. It included, among what seemed like a dozen other functions I'd never need, a calendar that informed my jet-lagged body that today was March 19. The spring equinox was tomorrow.

The Coronation.

Not much time.

Antoine hadn't taken Philippe's tarot deck, and I emptied the cards out of the velvet bag and shuffled them. The Marseille deck was the oldest design, light and precise with the symbolism as opposed to the flood of versions that came out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on some of the cards Philippe had written tiny marginalia. Marielle's phone number was written in an arc over the head of the High Priestess, and I transferred the number to my new phone.

I dialed, and while I was waiting for her to answer, I shuffled the cards together and cut the deck.

Nine of Swords.

I almost hung up the phone, not wanting to bridge a connection between this card and Marielle, but the call went to voice mail immediately. "It's me," I said. "I have a local number. Call me when you can."

The Nine was a piece of work. The swords, hanging behind the figure on the card. The imminent approach of doom. Pain and suffering, not just the physical kind. There was mental anguish associated with the Nine. Someone else's physical pain, resulting in your mental agony. As I tried to decipher Philippe's notes, scrawled along the left edge near the hilts of the swords, the letters twisted. The words lost their shape, bleeding and writhing into echoes of Philippe's history.

When I absorbed another soul, in addition to the raw energy of that light, I also took on various other aspects of that personality. A lot of it faded over time, mental detritus that I didn't have any way to anchor, but some of it stuck. Memory is extremely subjective, nothing more than a collection of biochemical impulses, and what keeps it vivid and intact for a person is how well it connects with other clusters. "Mental scaffolding" is the term a Boston-based psychologist I knew had told me once. Like the sort of thing you see on the side of a building that is being retrofitted. A jumble of ladders and metal pipes, somehow staying together while simultaneously affording easy access to every floor and every window of the building.

We are nothing more than the aggregate of our experiences, and if you tear the scaffolding down, the rest falls apart in rather short order. I was the dominant personality in my head, and everything ultimately found some place in my ego personality. Everything became part of my memory, but I had learned how to reconcile absorbed memory with my history.

The memory of Marielle playing in the field, for example, and others like it were memories that didn't match my personal history. They stemmed from a time before I was in Paris, before I knew her. Things from her childhood: picking at the seams of the school uniform from when she was a small girl, the one forced upon her by the rigors of private education; standing before the Nike of Samothrace and staring up in open-mouthed wonder at the headless, winged woman; laughing at the expressions on the gargoyles atop Notre-Dame, the wind blowing her hair-worn long and black during this period. These memories clumped in my head, attaching themselves to my history of her. In this way, the history of the Chorus became my own: I knew what they knew, learned what they learned, feared and loved what moved them as well. I became more than the individual parts.

However, this behavior with the cards was new, a vestige of Philippe's connection with the deck. When I put the card down, the writing slowed and became fixed; when I touched a hilt of one of the swords, the words started crawling again. Flowing into the hilts and up through the blades until each of the nine swords was awash with text. My fingertip started burning, but I didn't move it. The swords filled with black ink, more than there had been in the margins originally, as if it was being sucked out of my finger, a vampiric leech drawing out my blood.

The Chorus stormed, strands of white fog twisting into a tight nexus. The sound of their voices climbed in volume and pitch, growing louder until I was sure the sound was leaking out my ears. Without warning, the balloon of noise popped.

Splitting like a piece of rotten fruit, the Chorus vomited a flood of images. My headache increased, as if all of these memory shards had weight and presence. As if they were cutting and slicing their way through my gray matter. I ripped my finger off the card, and the external world went fluid on me, receding like a camera lens pulling back. Everything became distant and indistinct. Contrails like stretched taffy hung in the wake of all moving objects, as if I were slowly falling through time. In my mind's eye, I was under assault by a barrage of images, a viral download of sensations from Philippe's memory. Nothing visual; this was all emotional and tactile memory. In that burst of data, I learned the extent of his pain, and not only did my head ache, but my left leg did as well. It felt like I had been burned.

Philippe's cancer.

We all have a part to play in this. His voice drifted past me, like a satellite orbiting my head. Yesterday seemed like such a long time ago. Already the memory-bifurcated by his point of view overlapping my own-seemed distant, as if it were already crossing the horizon. Every point between now and then seemed to be both equidistant and part of the present. There are no Witnesses, he sighed. There are only participants. We are all part of the design.

I saw him holding up his hands, nine fingers raised. Like the Nine of Swords. We are all part of the same pain. We all pass through Yesod.

With a physical pop, I snapped out of this vision. The liquid in my coffee cup quivered, and a bus coughed as it crossed the nearby intersection. A bird flew in front of the sun, and I was dazzled by the flicker of shadow and light.

The Nine of Swords lay on the ground, face-down, and without turning it over, I picked it up and shuffled it back into the deck. The back of my neck was cool with sweat, and my hands shook slightly.

While in Seattle, I had become friends with Piotr Grieavik, an old Georgian seaman who had floated into the Puget Sound region a few decades ago. He did tarot readings out of his Airstream, and his silver trailer moved in concert with the flow of energy in the city. He was good, a True Seeing reader, and he saw the cards as a means to clarify our location and vector on the morphic fields. I wasn't sure if the fluidity of Philippe's cards would fascinate or terrify him. There was a difference, he had told me once, between interpreting the future and influencing the future.

When my hands stopped fluttering and my heart calmed down, I cut the deck and looked at the two cards. The Fool and the Magician. "You're funny, Old Man," I muttered, and the Chorus slithered through my brain like oil across water. I put these two on the table, face up, and then buried them beneath the rest of the deck, like a layer of fall leaves covering the seeds planted for spring.

I took a sip from my cup, and glanced at the traffic and people walking along the sidewalk. All so normal. All so mundane. A normal day, late in the season; life moving toward spring again, getting ready to bud and grow another year.

When I dug up the Fool and the Magician, they had changed into the Ten of Pentacles and Ace of Cups.

The Marseille Ten only shows the coins, and there is no background on it like the gate and magician that crops up in the Rider-Waite deck. Nor is there the re-arrangement of the coins into the positions of the Tree of the Sephiroth. The Marseille Ten is just a field of coins, but the meaning is the same. This is the realization of spiritual wealth in the death of the gross body. This is the breath of resurrection that is the reward for those who have prepared themselves for the next realm, the world of light and wind that lies just beyond the arch (or, in the case of the Marseille deck, that lies beyond this field of coins, round-headed disks covered with ornamentation so that they almost seem like flowers).

The Ace of Cups is the Grail, of course, but in the Marseille deck, it is a miniature castle resting on top of a golden base. A chapel perilously perched above the firmament.

When I touched both cards, they merged into a single image: a chapel with stained-glass windows. Not far, a voice in the Chorus whispered. Close enough to touch.

The image vanished when I took my hands off the cards, and they stayed quiescent as I re-assembled the deck and put it away. I sat in the sun, drinking my coffee, until the cup was empty and my bones were warm.

Close enough to touch. The same thing the Chorus had told me over and over again when I had gotten close to Kat in Seattle last fall.

Very funny indeed, Old Man.

He had been pushing me for a long time. How much longer was I going to let him manipulate me?

We all pass through Yesod, he had said. The Ninth Sephirotic globe, one step up from the fleshy death of Malkuth. Knowledge realized. Wisdom gained. One step closer to God.

Maybe I was asking the wrong question. How much longer was I going to let anyone manipulate me?