Heartland

VIII

We've come to call it the Upheaval." Cristobel brought the conversation back on track. "Once the challenges started, the trickle became a flood. More duels were fought over the next twelve months than had been-cumulatively-over the last decade. There were two immediate results of this conflict: the rank was thinned, and those who survived were more inclined to be a fighting force than a group of scholars. The upwardly mobile brought with them a skewed morality. They didn't have any issue with using magick for personal gain; that was the underlying conceit in their intent. The theorists and the philosophers were cast aside, and what was left had a taste for blood. A taste that ran counter to Philippe's leadership."

"They'd lost their taste for Watching, hadn't they?"

The body must die. No wonder the Old Man had considered a scorched-earth solution. It was like God throwing up His hands and crying "Do over!" with the Flood.

"Precisely. A new direction that could come to fruition under new leadership." Father Cristobel's lips twisted downward. "I Saw the shape of it in the Weave, but thought it would only be a passing ripple. I didn't realize how much of an endemic change it would be until Philippe admitted he was ill."

"The cancer," I said. "I saw his leg."

Cristobel shook his head. "That came later, when he wasn't strong enough to repel it."

The black sores on his spirit, the darkness eating his brain.

"He was losing his mind," I said. I had felt it in my head, that cold touch, and I had mistaken it for a resurgence of the old Qliphotic hunger that had lain in my soul for so long. That ugly, gnawing hunger. I pushed the Chorus aside, and took a long hard look down there and considered the blackness.

No, this wasn't the same. Philippe's hurt was more of a void, an emptiness so much more terrifying for its alien silence. "Alzheimer's," I realized. "I thought there were therapies now. Stem cell treatments."

"They slow, but they don't cure," Cristobel said. "The decay is, ultimately, inevitable, an untenable condition for the Hierarch. He has to renew his Promise each spring, and if he isn't healthy, then he is. . rejected. . he is-"

"What?"

The priest was looking at me, Seeing through my skin. "You don't understand this, do you? You don't know."

"Know what?"

"Certain details of Philippe's history are clear to you-facts only he would know-and yet other aspects of being Hierarch are hidden."

"Maybe because I'm not the Hierarch."

"But you-" His brow furrowed, and I felt a tension in his energy field. A narrowing of focus as his magick intensified. As his Vision deepened. "You and he overlap. Your threads are intertwined to a point of being one, but you are still distinct souls. How-" Cristobel didn't finish his question.

Not that I had an answer to it anyway. The Chorus used to be echoes of the old souls I had taken, nothing more, but since Portland, they had changed. They were still bound to me, snared by Reija's white braid, but they weren't a collective mass of unconscious desires any longer. Could Philippe still be "alive" in some spiritual sense, riding me like a psychic leech? I had broken him, and absorbed his essence, and in the past, that would have been spirit death. His personality-his spark-would have been torn apart.

Yet, Cristobel thought he could still See Philippe's thread.

"Is it like Frobai-Cantouard's thread?" I asked.

"No. This is almost an optical illusion, the sort of glimmer on a mirage that becomes less visible the more you examine it. Philippe vanishes when I really look at your thread, but when I pull back and try to see the surrounding Weave, his touch becomes evident."

"His touch? You mean the fact that he has twisted me into this design of his?"

"No. Your thread shows definite signs of having been twisted. But this is deeper. Intertwined." Putting his hands together, he tried to demonstrate with his fingers. "This is your thread," he said, holding up his right index finger. "This is Philippe's." The matching finger on his left hand. He tried to wind his left finger around his right. "This is still your thread," he said, wiggling the pair of entwined fingers. "This is clumsy, I know, but you can see there is another thread wrapped around your thread. Like a-"

I swallowed past the braid of white hair around my throat. "I know how a braid works," I said hoarsely.

"Ah, okay," he said, dropping his hands.

"So what does that make me? Some sort of hybrid soul?"

Cristobel looked past me, toward the church, and appeared to be Seeing somewhere else entirely. His eyes tracked back and forth. "This is it, isn't it?" he mused. "This death that isn't Death. Are you testing me, old friend? Is this what you meant with those cards?"

"What cards?" I interjected.

His blind eyes tracked back to me and the Chorus reacted to his magick again. "You aren't him, even though, on a certain level, you are. You and I can tell the difference, but other. . entities may not."

"What sort of entities?" I asked, trying to keep his focus. Trying to keep Cristobel from losing himself to an old conversation with a man who wasn't here. Philippe had obviously pushed me toward the priest, but I had to keep him focused on talking to me and not to the spirit he saw in my head.

"Every year, the Hierarch renews the Promise extracted from him at his Crowning. Every year, he is vetted as being suitable for the role."

"By whom?" I prompted.

"By the Land."

"Which land?"

"All of it."

"Gaia? What? Some sort of earth spirit?"

Cristobel shook his head. "No, the Land itself. The Hierarch is bonded to the leys. What they feel, he feels; he becomes one with the energy patterns of the morphic fields."

I was going to argue the point, but then I flashed on the cancerous decay of Philippe's leg. The sympathetic destruction wrought on his flesh by the event in Portland. "Their fall-back plan," I breathed. "Even if the Ascension failed in Portland, they knew the devastation would reflect on him. They couldn't touch him, but they could touch the Land."

Cristobel nodded soberly as he picked up the bottle of whisky. I pushed my glass toward his open hand.

The old vegetable rituals: the Corn King slain in winter, resurrected in spring. Like all pervasive mythological structures, they were reflections of old sympathetic, magico-religious rites. What happens down here is reflected up above.

Dumbly, I watched as Cristobel, having poured an inch in my glass, guided the mouth of the bottle to his own glass with a finger, and then poured. And missed, the whisky splashing on the tabletop.

The flashing display on the microwave went dark. I may have blinked, or perhaps time simply started again, but the green numbers came back, blinking "12:00" as they always had.

The Chorus prickled up my spine, like ice crystals forming on an exposed rib of stone. Something had just happened, a subtle twist to the ley grid, but it had been enough to trigger their defensive reflexes.

Father Cristobel ignored the spill of whisky. "The chapel grid has been compromised," he said as he stood and moved toward the cupboard.

The Chorus poured out of my fingers, streaking for the ley energy surrounding us. They had to go far, as they only found a thin trickle running beneath us. When I squeezed them, sending them deeper, they found no sign of a natural etheric stream. Nothing but blank space, a void that reminded me of the yawning darkness in Philippe's head.

"We've been caged," Father Cristobel said, sensitive to the radiating confusion in the Chorus. "This is a nexus, but you can't See that now, can you? We've been placed in an oubliette."

He returned to the table with a small mahogany box. It had no hinges or visible lock, and his fingers danced across the tight pattern of raised dots on the surface. A latch clicked, and the top twisted to the right, revealing a hidden cavity inside. He lifted out a long strand of dark beads, a strand longer than the space available within the box. They were black glass-obsidian, perhaps-and of two sizes. "My rosary," he explained as he slipped the chain of beads over his wrist. It was meant to go around his waist, a loop of glass with a long tail. A silver disk, inscribed with a magick circle, terminated the loop and the tail, and when he put it on his palm, the wide chain of beads slid around his arm like a serpent. The loop tightened, and the tail became longer. At the end of the dangling strand was a metal sphere, inlaid with black and white script.

"Why did they cut us off?" I asked, reeling the Chorus back in just as they were starting to read bright spots beyond the walls of the church. Oubliette. A prison within a prison, cut off from the rest of the world in every way possible. Like being cast out into the void before creation.

"This is holy ground," Father Cristobel said. "The circles and sigils are mine. But without access to the energy grid, they're just writing on the wall."

I nodded. The Chorus sizzled in my fingertips as I touched the puddle of spilled whisky. The alcohol reacted to the energy beneath my skin, bursting into a blue flame that crawled up to my knuckles. "They're taking away your advantage."

"Yes, it is not an unexpected move on their part."

Visionary. He was the one who had made the stained-glass panels, who Philippe used to track missing magi in the fields. Regardless of their secret names, the Architects were still thread winders, long-term plotters and manipulators. "You played war games, didn't you?" I asked. "Contingency planning. 'What if?' scenarios, disaster planning, tactical mapping-"

Thread winding, the Chorus supplied. Our oldest art. They had a secret in their mouths, like a grouse brought back from the field by an eager retriever. Each thread had a unique tension, a special vibration that, if you knew how to read it, made it stand out against the noise and chaos of the Weave. When a thread was tightened-pulled, plucked, wound-it reacted, generating a sub-psychic pulse through the surrounding threads. Reading this vibration was how the Architects built their machinations. They considered the possibilities and permutations, winding threads until they had the right tension. Until they twisted and bent in the direction of their choosing.

"Which one?" I asked. "Which winding is this?"

"A variant of the Blitzkrieg, most likely."

Germany's rapid assault of Eastern European targets in World War II. An overnight deployment and seizure of targets, effectively immobilizing the enemy before they know the fight has begun. So soon after the news of the Hierarch's death. Yes, this is the way I'd do it. Quickly, while everyone is still in shock.

"Multiple targets?"

"I would assume so. We don't know who leads the Opposition. But they know their targets, and will move swiftly against us. I have some suspicions as to who they are, but it is a Vision only truly realized in hindsight." He picked up his cup and hesitated for a second, as if mentally preparing himself for this last sip. "If my Vision is True," he whispered, and then he drank the rest of the whisky in his cup.

The Chorus registered the presence of souls in the church, spirit lights moving within the empty confines of our prison. They weren't radiating magick, but they were still brighter than the surroundings. Raised heart rates, elevated adrenaline levels. Men with guns. I counted six, and said as much to Cristobel.

He nodded. "As I suspected."

"How does this gambit play out?" The alcoholic fire danced along the ridges of my knuckles, spreading to my other hand as I bumped my fists. Manus ignis, manus animi. I felt the circuit connect through my chest, and the air popped and sizzled over my hands.

"Statistically, the odds favor them. Especially with six."

"There isn't a way to improve these odds?"

He cocked his head, listening to an echo I couldn't hear. "That depends."

"On what?"

He smiled, an old motion of his lips that spoke of a different time, of a different life. "On you, Lightbreaker. You are a blind man, stumbling through the fields. You do not know where the path is. I can help you."

"How?"

"Anamnesis," he said. "Remembering what you have forgotten. I can guide you. But we need to escape this trap."

"Yes," I said, the Chorus singing in my voice. "We need to find a way out." And then, a phrase I knew was right, that I Knew was required of me. "Duc me, Pater."

He clenched his fist and his Will activated the sphere at the end of his rosary. The sphere became a heavy, four-bladed cross. "I will, my son."

Father Cristobel disabled the power in the church with a thought as we came through the door with no knob. The church was dim, lit by flickering fingers of light from the tall candles in the sanctuary and from the sea of votive candles in the transepts. Shadows clung to the columns along the outer edge of the church, shadows deep enough for us to play hide-and-seek with our attackers.

The strike squad had split into two teams of three, and they moved in tight triangular formations. They were dressed in nondescript clothes: muted colors, some jackets, some sweaters-nothing that would seem like a shared uniform among them, but the sort of outfits that afforded places to hide guns. On that front, they were unified: compact machine guns. Heckler amp; Koch MP5s. I recognized the weapon's distinctive rattling burp as one of the assassins opened fire. Chips of stone cracked off the pillar I was hiding behind.

The Chorus filled my eyes, and I saw silver motes dancing over a glowing outline of the church's layout. The first team was in the central aisle, scattering for cover among the wooden pews; the second trio was in the rear of the church, sheltered by the pillars at the back. They were going to flank us along the outer wall. Father Cristobel was on my left, closer to the main altar.

I heard the whirling sound of his rosary, and he grunted as he cast the heavy end. Lit by his magick, it curved in a long arc from behind his hidden position. The glass beads separated, an elastic line of fire stretching across the church, and the spiked ball clipped the edge of a pew. Someone cried out and the snake of glassine fire whipped back.

First blood for us. The Chorus marked the cut on the man's shoulder with a glittering line, and they vibrated in my fingers. While they weren't the same group of souls I had before Portland, there was emotional memory there. A resonance of their predecessors. Angels of vengeance, singing a song of violence.

I moved toward the back of the church, leaping between pillars in random hops. When I was close to the narrow shrines with the glass and the candles, I lifted one of the stubs of wax with the Chorus, infused it with my Will, and flipped it toward the center of the church. The candle, a squat block of wax with a tiny flame, morphed into a ball of fire as the energized Chorus realized my spell. The makeshift fireball bounced across the pews, scattering a trail of fire, and exploded with a dull pop a few rows over from the assassins. I threw two more in quick succession, giving little thought to where they landed. Just as long as they were noisy and bright.

Tiny noisemakers, distractions meant to afford me some cover as I sprinted for the back.

The trio at the rear heard me coming, as I wasn't making any effort to be silent, and the point man thought he was going to surprise me. He was stationed on the far side of the last pillar, waiting for me to run right into him. He thought I would hesitate when I saw him, that little moment of surprise that would make me freeze. He was the one who froze though, transfixed by the sight of the Chorus rising off my head and shoulders like a rampant phoenix, by the fire burning on my knuckles. I grabbed the barrel of his gun with one hand, and his throat with the other. I squeezed, and when he opened his mouth to scream, I could see the light of my fire at the back of his throat.

The other two started firing as the first gunman and I wrestled with his gun. Getting close and twisting him around, I felt him twitch and jerk as he took the brunt of their fusillade. Something raked my left shoulder and side, leaving tracks that burned. My hand shifted on his weapon as his grip loosened, forcing his arm away from his body, and I got a finger inside the trigger guard. I squeezed, firing the gun. The shots were wild, but the others scattered anyway, seeking cover behind the pillars.

The gunman leaned against me, gasping like an asphyxiating fish. Smoke leaked from his mouth and nostrils, and when he coughed, blood spattered my coat. He should be dead, Nicols whispered, his homicide experience providing commentary. Multiple hits at close range from 9mm ammunition. The Chorus was already in the gunman's throat, but they refused to go any deeper. There was something wrong, something buried in him that the Chorus didn't want to touch.

I had read the assassins wrong, assuming the light coming from them was being thrown off by their overly active Wills. But the glow wasn't the concentrated gleam of actualized Will, it was stemming from a hard knot in their chests.

I fired a couple more bursts from the pistol to keep the others at bay while I struggled to hold the wounded gunman upright. His eyes were glazing over, and each time his mouth flopped open, blood ran out, streaming down his chin. Definitely mortal wounds, so why wasn't he dead? Why wasn't his soul disassociating from his flesh?

Slightly more worryingly, why didn't the Chorus want it?

My finger brushed something hard on his chest. Some sort of raised shape, and as I was trying to discern what it was, a metal canister rattled across the floor at our feet.

Flashbang, Nicols noted, the only one in my head with the requisite experience.

I ducked, pulling the gasping gunman with me. The inner wall of the church bumped against my back and I buried my face against his bloody chest. Even with my eyes shut, the world went white as the flash grenade went off. Sound vanished in an imploding thump, and the ground moved sideways as my internal gyroscope was beaten back and forth by each successive burst of the grenade. Sound and fury, leaving me with nothing. The chapel wall kept me from completely falling, and I slid to the ground, the dying gunman sprawling across me. My head and neck were splashed with hot blood, and I couldn't see or hear anything.

The Chorus wasn't affected by the flash grenade, and they tracked the other two assassins. They also spotted the thin strands of etheric energy rising off each man. Anchors. The filaments, like spider silk fluttering in the wind, trailed behind them, back through the wall of the church to their magi controller outside.

The Chorus roared down my arm, through the metal of the pistol, and kissed the remaining bullets in the gun. Linguae ignis, was the thought I had, but I couldn't recall the conscious decision to use that spell. The Chorus moved anyway, following a definite course of action. Popping across the tips of the bullets, they laid their trap. Seven, they reported.

More than enough, I thought. My wrist moved, and the gun left my hand. It was like throwing a coin into a bottomless well: I let go, and it vanished; I never heard it hit bottom.

The Chorus swirled down into my chest, building a thunderhead of energy. Lightning streaked off their cloud, and the charge rejuvenated my stunned flesh. Like getting zapped with a car battery. Everything felt a little more alive. Everything became a little sharper.

I could hear a little now, and some of the flashes of light in my vision weren't retinal burns.

The other two gunmen approached. Keeping their distance, their weapons raised and ready. While they weren't magi-they didn't have any magick of their own-they were familiar with the occult practices, a familiarity that kept their fear mostly in check. Still, the sight of their buddy, who was vomiting more and more blood as he tried to get up, was starting to fracture their resolve. An animalistic thread of terror twisted in the gut of one, a familiar taste the Chorus read easily, and the other was a dense mass of chaotic thought. Some of it concerned the thread connecting him and his master.

The pair got close enough, and the Chorus darted out-a tongue of flame-and touched the pistol I had thrown. Their fire ignited the magick on the bullets, and the gun exploded.

When the gunmen reacted, I shoved the not-dead man off me and rolled forward, grabbing the foot of the thinking assassin. The Chorus found a nerve cluster in his ankle, and unleashed a furious lightning bolt from their energy cloud. The psychic energy pulse went up his leg, found his spine, raced up his back like a rocket launching, and exploded out the top of his head. His nervous system short-circuited, he dropped like a sack of rocks.

The other gunman reacted poorly, immobilized by the fear bubbling in his gut. The Chorus unleashed the rest of their storm, and the shockwave lifted him off his feet and hurled him across the width of the church. The psychic backlash from the spell upgraded my headache into migraine territory. Add to that the confusion from the flashbang and the Chorus' instinctive defense, and my circulatory system took up this internal pulse and echoed it all the way down to my toes. Pain, pain, pain.

Moving like a myopic sloth, I pulled the nerve-stunned gunman closer, pawing at his coat and shirt. He had the same hard ring on his chest, right over his heart. It was a ring of gray stone, cold to the touch, and my Chorus-bruised fingers traced the markings running along its surface. I couldn't make any sense of the script. Arcane shorthand, more symbolic than actualized.

What the hell was it? Not a protection sigil. My fiery hands had touched the first man easily enough. Yet the Chorus refused to get any closer, balking at my command to investigate the knot of energy held beneath the ring. The stone was filled with magick.

I started to reach for the silver strand rising off him, but stopped shy of actually touching it on the etheric layer. It was a conduit. I had seen them before. Magi used them to channel power to each other. To do remote viewing. In some extreme cases, they were used as a leash, a means of animating and controlling an otherwise reluctant host. In theory, it could be used to keep them alive. Energy flowed to them instead of the other direction.

But that didn't make much sense. To effectively transform that incoming energy, they had to know how to use it. They couldn't be passive receptors. They had to have some training. Otherwise it was just an open line, an unattended hose flooding the garden.

The Chorus boiled in frustration. There wasn't any energy flowing through the line, at least not an appreciable amount. A single pulse, rhythmic and steady, almost like a. . heartbeat.

Dead man switch. The Chorus finally spelled it out for me.

The strand was more than a conduit; it also monitored his body and soul. There was enough Will burned into the sigil that the conduit superseded the psychic link between flesh and spirit. As long as the conduit persisted, the soul couldn't leave the body. He couldn't die. Not until his master said so. Soul lock.

And when the signal came, the knot of power lodged in the gunman's chest would be released. In all of them. The assassination squad was on a suicide mission. They were a massive bomb, with linked detonators.

The mortally wounded gunman had rolled onto his back, and though my vision was still blurry, I could see that he was looking at me. He coughed, and his mouth moved into a smile. His eyes glittered with silver light, and I knew someone else was Watching.

The gunman coughed once more, and the breath that came out was his last one. His face spasmed once as all the pain he'd been carrying the last few minutes suddenly lit up his brain, and then the muscles in his face went slack. The silver light in his eyes intensified.

I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the pain in my shoulder and hip. My feet slid on the blood-slick floor as I tried to get as far away as possible from the downed gunmen before they died. Before the sigils on their stone rings activated.

The air in the church was thick, and I felt like I was swimming in water. My ears, still ringing and throbbing from the flash grenade, popped as the pressure in the room changed. The Chorus flexed, hardening against the explosion of the soul locks.

The psychic detonation hammered the room on multiple levels. My flesh frayed as flechettes of etheric energy sprayed from the nexus point of the explosion. The Chorus howled as the shards cut through them, tearing out slivers of their history.

Knocked sprawling against the pews, I held on as the ground rolled and undulated. Several of the nearby pillars cracked, disgorging clouds of granite dust from their peaks. In the transepts, stained-glass panels exploded, flinging shards of glass across the central nave like flights of frightened birds. The glass Christ swayed on his wooden cross, the psychic light of the explosion lighting up his painted skin.

Beneath him, braced against the altar, Father Cristobel struggled to stay upright. There was blood on his face, and his right arm flapped loosely at his side. His rosary beads were wrapped around his left arm, and they bounced off the side of the altar, sparks dancing off the magicked beads.

In the wake of the explosion, my stomach continued to flip back and forth, caught on a rollercoaster of muscle spasms. There was blood in my mouth-most of it mine this time-and the stains on my clothes were a combination of my wounds and blood from the gunshot assassin. I pried my clawed hands off the pew and staggered, drunkenly, toward the front of the church.

The Chorus still howled, their noise cutting through the blasting percussion of the headache. They were shouting something about the Abyss and I didn't understand what they were talking about for a second, and then I felt it too. Rather, I felt the void.

All of the gunmen had detonated, and the concussion of those souls going off had created a void in the church. Suddenly I realized why we had been cut off from the ley grid, why an oubliette had been erected around us: nature abhors a vacuum. The walls of the prison were gone, and all the channels that met in this church, all the natural confluence of energies that had been directed here to give Cristobel a nexus of power, were suddenly open again.

The soul locks were only meant to loosen everything, what came after was the etheric quake meant to tear us apart, like a thresher separating the grain from the chaff.

"We need shelter," I Whispered to Father Cristobel.

"Here," he Whispered back, and I realized he wasn't trying to support himself against the altar. He was trying to move it.

I stumbled toward the front of the church, moving as quickly as I could in my vertiginous state. I half-fell, half-knelt next to the altar and put my good shoulder against the marble stand. It moved, slowly, turning on some hidden pivot. A hinge that hadn't been used in a very long time.

The Chorus started keening, a rising crescendo of psychic terror. I couldn't tune them out. They were down there in my soul, their screams vibrating me like a tuning fork.

The altar moved aside, revealing a black hole down into the subbasement of the church. Father Cristobel's hand fell upon my back, and he pushed me forward. "Go," he Whispered. "I will follow you." With nothing to brace myself against but the side of the altar, I slipped and pitched forward into the hole.

The ley flood hit, and the etheric implosion lit up the inside of the church. Father Cristobel looked back at the burst of psychic light, and it must have been like looking at the sun going supernova. His Vision couldn't protect him from this psychic detonation; if anything, it would only magnify the spiritual impact of what he saw.

Tears streaming from his right eye, he smiled.

Unafraid. Without pain. Do not be afraid; this is your reward.

I fell, the world bleaching to empty whiteness in my wake. The wave of the quake hurled me away from the church, and my vertebrae started to separate. Like a leaf in a hurricane, I was blown away, falling further and farther than the ground beneath the church.