Moonheart

by Charles de Lint

  “Well, what do you think I should do?”

  “The choice must be yours.”

  “Then at least tell me what you think’s going on. Why am I here? What is my choice?”

  “I remember,” Taliesin said, “asking Myrddin that same question once. He looked at me and told me I could do one of two things. Accept the challenge and fulfill my potential, or spend the rest of my days wondering what I had passed by.” He shook his head. “I have said too much, I think.”

  “No. You’ve said just enough. I’m going to . . . to take this road and see where it leads me.”

  “Don’t follow blindly,” the harper warned. “Fare with your eyes open and a willingness to learn.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  A kestrel cried overhead and Sara followed its flight with her gaze. When she looked back at Taliesin, she asked:

  “How old are you? You don’t look more than a young forty, but from all you’ve said you’ve done. . . . And then there’s that painting of you I have. You look a lot older in it.”

  Taliesin shrugged. “Time is a strange master and to those of us who walk the Middle Kingdoms‌—these Otherworlds‌—it has a tendency to turn in upon itself, twisting forward and backward until it becomes impossible to reckon. I was older when I planned to retire in Gwynedd than I am now. You speak of a painting, but I have never met the man that is in it with me. At least I do not recognize his description nor his garb from what you’ve told me.

  “I have long given up following the workings of time. Myrddin once told me that he lived backwards‌—that he knew much of what was to come, but little of what had been. At the time I thought it yet another of his riddles. But now I think I understand him better.”

  Myrddin‌—who must be Merlin. King Arthur. The Welsh bard Taliesin. Personages out of legend come to life, discussed as though they were flesh and bone, one of them sitting across the fire from her. If this wasn’t all just a dream. . . . Sara shook her head.

  “What instrument do you play?” Taliesin asked her suddenly. “The harp?”

  “No. I wish I did. I just fool around with the guitar some.”

  “Git-arr?”

  “It’s a . . .”

  Oh, boy. Here they were back to describing things that the language they were using had no words for.

  “You left it behind when you . . . journeyed here?”

  Sara nodded. “In my room. It’s shaped like this.” She made a figure eight using both her hands. “At least the body is. Then it has a neck that sticks out here.” She took a stick and drew a rough shape in the sand. “The strings‌—there are six of them‌—are attached to pegs up here and resonate across the soundhole.”

  “I would like to see it,” Taliesin said.

  “I’ll bring it the next time I come.” The next time. She had to smile.

  “No,” Taliesin said. “Think of it now and I will bring it to you.”

  “You can do that?”

  Taliesin nodded. He reached for his harp and set it on his knee. With a Y-shaped key that hung from his neck he tuned the strings. Trailing his fingers across them, he awoke a scatter of notes that seemed to sparkle in the air between them. Sara shivered with pleasure.

  “Picture the instrument,” Taliesin said. “Hold its image in your mind.”

  She drew up an image of her Laskin‌—the classical guitar with its slotted head, curly maple back and front and rosewood sides, the silver lengths of the three wound strings and the taut gut strings. . . . The more she thought of the instrument, the more she longed to have it in her hands. She always felt like that when she heard someone else playing. Her fingers would get all itchy and‌—

  Her eyes snapped open. There was a weight on her knees and, half fearfully, she looked down at her guitar case. She ran a hand along its smooth surface, then grinned at Taliesin, her eyes shining.

  “You did it!” she cried.

  Popping the clasps, she set the case down on the sand beside her and took out the guitar.

  “I don’t know if it’ll be in tune. . . .” she began, but it was.

  Taliesin set his harp aside and took the guitar in his hands, holding it awkwardly. He plucked a string or two, setting his fingers on the fretboard as he’d seen Sara do while she was testing its tuning, then shook his head and passed it back to her.

  “I’m too old to learn a new instrument,” he said. He took out a small six-holed bone whistle and laid it on the sand in front of him, then set his harp on his knee again. “The whistle and harp will have to do. But I would like to hear you play.”

  “I don’t really know anything that’s . . . you know . . . good.” Sara was suddenly shy again.

  “Try this,” Taliesin said. He began a simple air and Sara stumbled along behind him, trying to pick up the tune. Patiently he repeated it until she began to get the knack of it.

  “Now we will see,” the harper said, “what affinity you have for the bard’s Way. It’s little enough that I will show you this time, but enough to start you on your journey. This tune will be your key‌—composed now, this moment, between you and me on this beach, leagues from my homeland and years from yours.

  “We will call it ‘Lorcalon’‌—‘The Moon’s Heart’‌—for that is what you will be in time, Sara. A moonheart. A follower of the Way. Two things this air will bestow upon you. It will be your stepping-stone to your own silences within, your own taw, and it will be a protection against those who would bind you with their magic. For such is the method of mages‌—they bind you with their eyes, with their thoughts, and make your will theirs.

  “Against a strong spell, this will avail you little. But against a normal binding spell, you have but to call up this tune in your mind, and your will remains your own. Play it through. Again with me.”

  He put aside his harp and took up the tune on his whistle, playing across the turns of the air that Sara drew from her guitar. To Sara it seemed as if her fingers were doing a slow dance along her fretboard. The tune was simple, but its resonances stretched deeply inside her, awaking feelings she never knew were there. The tune became all. Her fingers played it, her ears heard it, her eyes saw dancing notes of gold and green that stepped in time to its rhythm. She smelled the scent of apple blossoms, strong and heady, and her pulse beat to its timing.

  “Farewell,” she heard Taliesin say as though from a great distance. Again the word seemed to drop into her mind without passing first through her ears. “Your own time calls you. Return to me, when and how you can. I will be waiting.”

  She wanted to cry: “No! I don’t want to go! Not yet!”

  But it was too late. She could feel the shore fading around her, heard only the sound of her own music. The sea and the sound of the bone whistle were gone. And then she opened her eyes‌—

  ‌—she was sitting in a glade with tall pines around her, playing Taliesin’s air on her guitar. She dropped her hands from the instrument and for a few moments echoes remained, then all was still. A deep surge of disappointment went through her, but then she pushed the ache away. She had things to do in this world.

  Humming the tune the harper had given her, she put her guitar back into its case and stood up. She looked around herself, then set off, certain, though she couldn’t have said how, of which way to go. Twenty minutes of walking brought her back to the glade where she’d left Kieran. He was sitting up against a tree, staring off into space. When he caught sight of her, his eyes widened and he reached out a hand.

  “Sara!” he called. “Before you take off again, I just want to say I’m sorry for the hard time I gave you earlier. I was being a prick. It’s just that everything’s been so weird lately and I‌—hey! Where did you get the guitar? And the cloak? Where did you go?”

  Because she was feeling in an expansive mood, Sara regarded him with some measure of affection. It was nice that he’d apologized. Maybe there was hope for the lug yet. Fingering her cloak, she sat down near him. She placed her guitar case beside her and wonder
ed where to begin. She didn’t want to tell him about Taliesin. That was going to be her secret. So what would she tell him? She decided to give him a taste of his own medicine and treat the whole thing mysteriously.

  “I was with a friend,” she said.

  “A friend? Lord dying Jesus! Where did you find a friend here?”

  But then he remembered the way he’d behaved to her earlier. He’d just taken what information he could from her and given her nothing in return. Nothing but a hard time.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can we start again?”

  “How so?” She wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

  “How about if I start with telling you where all this started for me?”

  Sara grinned. “That sounds more like it,” she said.

  “I should’ve done this right away,” Kieran said.

  Sara thought of how she’d spent her morning. She could still feel a tingle deep inside‌—a tingle that was an echo of the tune Taliesin had taught her. “You should have,” she said, “but I’m kind of glad that things turned out the way they did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sara shook her head, enjoying her secret.

  “Nom de tout!” Kieran muttered, then sighed. “Okay. I guess I deserve that.”

  He leaned his head back against the tree and stared up into the network of branches above. “I was serving two years in St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary when I first met Thomas Hengwr. That’s the other fellow that the horsemen are looking for, you see . . .”

  Chapter Two

  12:30, Thursday morning.

  Lawrence Hogue was in the kitchenette of his apartment making a last cup of tea before he went to bed when the rap came at his door. He shot an irritated glance down the hall, hoping whoever it was‌—probably Mrs. Simpson from two doors down, reeking of alcohol and looking for tonic water‌—would simply go away. But a moment later the rapping was repeated, more insistently. Sighing, Hogue set down the copy of this week’s MacLean’s and heaved his bulk from the chair.

  He didn’t care much to be disturbed at any time‌—whether he was working on a complicated calculation in the lab, or simply relaxing at home, it never failed to irritate him. So he wasn’t prepared to be intimidated when he reached the door.

  “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  “Gannon,” came the soft-spoken reply.

  Hogue’s fingers trembled as he unlocked the door. Phillip Gannon pushed past him into the apartment with the assurance of someone who was very rarely denied anything he wanted. He reminded Hogue of Tucker. Like the Inspector, Gannon was a big, self-confident man who knew how to intimidate without appearing overtly threatening. As such, he was the antithesis of Hogue, whose bullying was reserved for the few men in the lab who had to work under him and was based only on Hogue’s placement in the bureaucratic structure.

  Gannon was very much like Tucker, except that Gannon’s street origins were cloaked under a veneer of civilized behavior that was all the more disquieting when one was aware of his capability for sudden violence. Tonight he wore a light beige overcoat on top of a tailored three-piece suit, patent leather shoes, a Christian Dior shirt and a narrow black tie. He was the picture of an elegant businessman standing in Hogue’s hallway, leaning casually against the doorway as though he belonged there, his voice cultured and soft; but he had the body of a weight-lifter and the cold, dead eyes of a fish.

  “What are you doing here?” Hogue asked.

  He didn’t like the way he felt when confronted by men like Gannon and Tucker. It made him too aware of how his overweight and out-of-shape body betrayed the same softness within as was displayed without.

  “Mr. Walters would like to speak with you,” Gannon said. “Better get your coat.”

  “Tell him I’ll . . . I’ll call him in the morning.”

  Gannon shook his head. “Mr. Walters would like to see you in person. Tonight. No discussion.”

  As always, Hogue capitulated immediately. His sense of self was abysmally low. It had been like that for him in public school and carried over through college and medical school. By now it was so firmly entrenched in his mental make-up that he could not stand up for himself without a complete reversal of what thirty-four years of bowing and scraping and petty-minded unrealized dreams had turned him into. His only solace was his profession. He showed a certain brilliance amidst the straightforwardness of scientific logistics, and within the power structure of the bureaucracy‌—where he was amongst the upper echelons‌—he was one who “got things done.” Never mind that the greater part of such work was largely conceived and carried out by his understaff. In the lab he was an authority. A mover and a doer. Everything his life otherwise lacked. Outside those white-washed walls . . .

  “Let’s go, Dr. Hogue.”

  Gannon gave him a small push and Hogue stumbled to the closet to get his coat. The simple fear he felt in Gannon’s presence escalated and was replaced with a more chilling one. What did Walters want with him tonight?

  His hands were shaking as he put on his coat and he wished right then that he’d never gotten involved with this affair in the first place. Unfortunately, the time for such a decision was long past. And to be fair, given the way his life had been going, how could he have chosen otherwise? The additional financial considerations aside, Walters’ interest in his career was a stepping-stone to greater things. He’d been shocked and impressed with his own importance when J. Hugh Walters had first called to discuss some articles he’d had published. Hogue had been eager to help then.

  But in the months that followed, he’d become enmeshed in a nightmare from which there was no escape. It was then that he first learned about how much control one man could have over another. But by then it was too late to back out. There was no place for him in the world of men like Walters and Gannon.

  “There’s a car waiting downstairs,” Gannon said when Hogue finally had his coat on.

  He ushered Hogue out before him and closed the door to the apartment. The lock caught with a small click and Hogue shivered. The sound was an ominous reminder of how he’d closed the doors on all his options. He tried to remember what the turning point had been. When had a good student, and later a good researcher, become the man who could be taken from his own home in the middle of the night by some Gestapo-like goon?

  Sometimes Hogue thought that if he could figure that out, there might still be a way out for him. Mostly he knew that for the wishful thinking it was. Walters had too strong a hold on him. The RCMP were unforgiving when it came to one of their own leaking secrets‌—even if that one was only a CM, a Civilian Member. And Hogue didn’t even want to think about what Walters would do with him if Project Mindreach was closed down. He’d read enough spy novels to know how loose ends like himself were usually tied off.

  Tucker pulled his Buick up to the curb at the corner of Waverly and Elgin and shifted into neutral. Beside him, Collins took a final drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  “Thanks for the lift.”

  “S’okay. See you in the morning.”

  “Yeah.”

  Collins reached for the doorhandle, then turned to regard Tucker.

  “Everybody feels bad about what happened to Paul,” he said. “It was a piss-poor way to buy it. Not that there’s a good way, only . . .”

  Tucker stared straight ahead. “Only what?”

  “Maybe you should take it easy, you know? Get some sleep, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Until the next guy buys it.”

  Collins shrugged.

  “Look,” Tucker said as he was getting out. “I appreciate the concern, okay? But I can’t let it rest. Nobody gets away with wasting one of my team.”

  “Paul was my friend.”

  Tucker turned. “Then maybe you understand.”

  “Yeah. I guess I do.”

  Collins shut the door and watched the Buick pull away before heading for his apartment. He wasn’t going to sleep much himsel
f. But until they had something hard to go on, what could they do? But when they finally got hold of the guy that did it. Then . . . oh, yes. Then.

  In the foyer of his building he shook out another Pall Mall, lit it and checked his mailbox. As he went up the stairs with his phone bill in hand, he wondered how much he had left of that fifth of Scotch he’d picked up on the weekend. He hoped there was enough of it to put a haze across the knife-edged loss that was cutting up his gut.

  After dropping Collins off, Tucker headed up Elgin and took the Laurier Bridge across the Rideau Canal. He shot a glance over his shoulder at the big clock on the Peace Tower that was part of the Parliament Buildings, but they still hadn’t gotten it working. Hell of a way to run the capital of the country. The Peace Tower clock didn’t even work. It was about as much use as the bozos they’d voted into office that debated in the Commons below it.

  His wristwatch told him it was just going on one. Hell of a way to spend a Wednesday night. Hell of a way to spend any kind of a night. Not that he had a whole lot else to do‌—at least not since he’d broken up with Maggie again.

  Tucker sighed. He had neither family nor very many close friends. It was hard to get to know people when your job took you back and forth across country, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. He had about four months vacation leave piled up and double that again in sick leave. What he should do was just take the whole lot of it and go some place like Jamaica or Greece and let someone else deal with all of this for awhile. Christ, anything was better than this.

  He smiled bitterly. Well, Tucker, he told himself. You’ve got ‘em again. Them old mid-operation blues.

  On an impulse, he turned left on King Edward, drove the three blocks to Daly, and turned right, coming to a stop across from the house where Thomas Hengwr had kept a room. He switched off the ignition and stared at the darkened building, not bothering to check the windows in the building on his side of the street where one of his men was holding down the stakeout on Hengwr’s place.