by Mark Teppo
Strength.
I told Marielle how her father died and what happened to him afterward. To her credit, she took it really well.
But, then, I was pretty sure she already knew.
THE THIRD WORK
"As a first step towards the successful prosecution of an investigation into the true nature and character of the mysterious object we know as the Grail it will be well to ask ourselves whether any light may be thrown upon the subject by examining more closely the details of the Quest in its varying forms; i.e., what was the precise character of the task undertaken by, or imposed upon, the Grail hero, whether that hero were Gawain, Perceval, or Galahad, and what the results were to be expected from a successful achievement of the task."
– Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance
XVI
Light reflected off a mirror, a flash like a flare of flame from a newly woken fire. The Chorus exploded out of me, a flock of startled birds, and they rose overhead into a swarming mass. Near the gangway, a man stepped onto the walkway—leaving the boat—and the light off his glasses was lessened by the fact that he was turning away from us, but the flare was still there.
I was off the bench before Marielle could say anything, and by the time I reached the railing, the gangway was empty. The Chorus fell back into a defensive perimeter, their astral wings collapsing about me, but there was no threat. Just the queasy uneasiness of having been spotted.
Down on the dock, a figure separated himself from the crowd and approached a black car idling nearby. He looked back once more before he got in, and I saw the sunglasses again. He wasn't wearing the centurion uniform, but the glasses were the same.
"There." I pointed him out to Marielle, but by the time she looked, he was already in the car.
"Who was it?" she asked as the car drove away.
"I don't know." He seemed familiar, beyond being the man from before, but not so familiar that I could place him. What with the poison-inspired visions, the wealth of knowledge hidden within me by the Architects, and my own history with the Watchers, it was difficult to pinpoint why he had been familiar. Or, even, could he have been the man at the airport? "He was wearing sunglasses."
"At night?" She drew me away from the edge of the boat. "Were they polished? The kind that are like mirrors?"
"Yeah. They were."
"A scryer." Seeing my expression, she explained. "They see the future in reflective surfaces. They don't need water anymore. Mirrors work well too."
"The glasses are mirrored on both sides?"
"Yes. Mirroring the outside protects them. Makes it easier for them to be invisible."
"This is the second time I've seen him," I said. "Earlier, he was downstairs."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought he was a hallucination." I decided not to mention the illusion of having seen Antoine. "He wasn't dressed like all the others. He had this faux Roman centurion outfit on. With a big plumed headdress and a broken staff."
"Broken? Are you sure? Was it a spear without a point or a broken staff?"
I tried to remember. "It was just a stick with the top broken off. But, if it was part of his costume, then it might have been a spear, but it seemed wrong. Why would you go to all the effort with the rest of the costume and then not have a real spear?"
And the oil on the shaft too. What had that been about? I couldn't place the symbolism, even though I should have known. It kept slipping away from me.
"For the same reason you'd go to the trouble of imagining him wearing the costume in the first place," she said.
"And why would I do that?"
She stared at me. "You're kidding me, right?"
"No. I don't know what you're talking about." I should know.
"How can you have my father in your head and not know what you saw?"
"He's not sitting in his favorite chair by the fire, doling out arcane secrets on demand. He's this . . . sort of persistent sense of déjà vu that comes and goes. Sometimes, I know exactly what he knew, and other times—most of the time—there's only a nagging sense that I'm missing something. It's like when you forget where you put your car keys. You know they exist, and you know you had them, but you can't figure out where you left them. But, abstract it one layer up. I don't even know that it is the car keys that I'm looking for."
I realized I was still holding the tarot card, but it wasn't Strength anymore. The lines had twisted, changing the image from a woman holding open a lion's mouth to a pair of cherubic children on the back of a draft horse. A pair of apple-cheeked, blonde-haired babies basking in the glow of the sun. I handed Marielle the card while I dug for the bag in my pocket. "How did you do that magic trick?" I asked.
"With the card?" She glanced at it. "I was going to ask you. It was an eerie bit of sleight-of-hand."
"I didn't." I pulled open the strings of the bag and reached in for a handful of cards. They were slippery—mischievous and intent on getting away from me—but I grabbed them quick and held tight. "It's your father's deck, and it seems to miss him." I nodded toward the card in her hand. "What card is that?"
She held it up. "Strength."
I shook my head, and shuffled through the cards until I found the one I was looking for. "This is Strength." My fingers tingled when I named the card, and from the way the Chorus churned, I knew that it wasn't, even though my eyes told me otherwise.
"It's the Fool, Michael," Marielle said. "You're holding the Fool."
Of course I was.
"No, I'm holding Strength, and you're holding the Sun. What you see is the Fool and Strength," I said, pointing to each of the cards.
"I don't understand this game," she said.
I took the card from her, and as I touched it, the lines started to squirm and change. I shuffled it back into the deck, along with the card I had picked out. "They keep changing on me. Sometimes into other cards, sometimes into weird amalgamations of multiple cards. I cut the deck in half and showed her. "See? Strength and the Fool." I waited until she nodded in agreement and then I put my hands back together, and without changing their position, split the deck in the same place again. "Now what do you see?"
"The same thing."
I looked. "I see the Sun and the High Priestess."
"How is that possible?" she asked.
"I don't know if it has something to do with your father or if I'm just losing my mind from all the recent activity in my brain, but the lines don't stay in place. The cards keep shifting, as if he's using them to communicate. Not very clearly, mind you. But when he wants to tell me something, he manipulates the cards."
In spite of the implication of her father being un-dead, Marielle stepped closer and grabbed my arm. "What are they telling you?" Her grip was tighter than necessary, and her body was uncharacteristically rigid.
"The Sun and the High Priestess," I said, putting the deck back together and taking advantage of that motion to drag my arm out of her grasp. Shuffling the deck a few more times, I cut it, reversed the halves, and went to flip over the top card.
"Stop." Marielle covered the deck with her hand. "No, I believe you."
"It's just a card," I said. "It's all in my head."
"It isn't," she said. Her tongue touched her lip nervously. "Leave it alone. Don't invite anything in. Not with those cards. Let them be."
"You have a better idea?" I asked as the Chorus slid around my spine and squeezed. What was it about the Sun and the High Priestess that had her so agitated?
She hesitated, caught by some internal argument.
"We've been spotted. We need to go somewhere else."
Marielle's gravity well fluttered. For a second, she almost seemed to be a little girl again, and then the weight of her Will came down and the image vanished.
"What about Tevvys' phone?" I suggested, trying to jostle her out of her mental peregrinations. "We could try to crack his passcode."
"I don't have it."
"What? Moreau gave it to you."
&n
bsp; "He did, but I don't have it anymore. I left it back at the apartment."
"Why didn't you say so in the car?"
"I was—" She took a deep breath. "It doesn't matter."
"It does. I told Moreau—"
She cut me off. "It doesn't matter. It was a dumb idea."
"No, it wasn't."
"It was. For a number of reasons. Besides, if they wanted to call us, they'd call my phone. I'm sure someone has the number."
I wanted to argue the point, but before the words got all the way out of my throat, I realized she was right. If they wanted to talk, they'd be able to figure out how to reach us. No one knew my number but Marielle, but I'm sure a lot of the Watchers knew her number. The Chorus chattered, admonishing me too, and I bristled more at their umbrage than Marielle's comments. What was the other choice? I asked them. Killing Moreau?
I blocked their response, as the question had been rhetorical. It was so easy to find that path again, wasn't it? And what had I gained from going that route previously? Walking the dark path in the wood had only brought me and others pain. That wasn't the way. Regardless of what others wanted me to do.
"Don't worry about it," she said, filling my silence. "I'm sure Moreau took you seriously when you told him. And he might even have tried to follow your—"
"Don't," I said. "I get it. I fucked up."
She ran her hands through her hair, brushing it back from her face. "I'm sure the building collapsed on him," she said finally. "Squashed him flat."
"I'm sure he sold us out the first chance he got," I said, nearly at the same time.
We paused, waiting for the other to speak, and when neither of us leaped into the gap, she smiled. "What is done is done. Let's move on."
"Agreed." I waited for a second before asking. "The cards."
Her smile faded, but she nodded.
I turned over the top card of the deck. The Sun. The twins on horseback. Lafoutain moved in the cloud of the Chorus, and one word escaped from the vortex of their noise. Daughters.
Marielle eyed the card with some trepidation, and when I tapped it, she looked away somewhat nervously. The Chorus couldn't read her: her pulse was gone, and the swirling energy caught beneath the boat dispersed into the general stream of psychic force that ran through Paris.
"Daughters." When she appeared to not hear me, I said it again. "Tell me about the daughters, Marielle."
She searched my face for some sign that I knew what I was talking about, and the Chorus slapped away her subtle attempt to read my aura. I locked myself off as completely as she had—two can play this game—and stared back at her. Willing to wait her out.
When I had started to explain to her how her father moved in the cards, she had been nervous. Anxious, as if her father could tell me something she didn't want me to know. Like father, like daughter: the family couldn't help but keep secrets. Was that what Lafoutain was talking about? The age-old argument that men are transparent, unable to keep a secret to save their lives, but it is women who are impossible to read. If you want any secret to be truly kept confidential, you tell your daughter and not your son.
"All right," Marielle said. She nodded toward the quay. "Find us a cab. I'll call ahead and let them know we're coming. They can tell you themselves."
She seemed relieved that I hadn't asked about the High Priestess.
Tour Montparnasse stuck out of the glittering landscape of Paris like a bruised middle finger. The skyscraper was one of those concessions to modernity that was immediately regretted as soon as it was finished; shortly after the building was done, Paris outlawed any further skyscrapers within the central part of the city. One of those rare moments of humility from a civic government, and some believe the building remains so that no one ever forgets. You can kill the magic of a city by changing it too much.
It reminded me of the Eglanteria Terrace, the building in Portland where Bernard took the theurgic mirror and launched his assault on humanity. A spire to Heaven, drenched in darkness.
At the tower, Marielle typed a security code into the pad in the elevator, and we ascended to an unmarked floor. The doors opened onto a simple foyer, with a rose marble floor and pale green walls. There was no other exit, just a small marble plaque—the same sort of rose stone like the floor—with the letters "l F d M" engraved in it and another security keypad.
Mounted in each of the four corners of the room were tiny blisters of security monitors. Discrete enough to be easily missed, but not so invisible that you didn't see them if you were looking.
Marielle entered another passcode and the light on the pad flashed green, but nothing happened. In response to my raised eyebrow, she nodded toward one of the security cameras. "Entering the right code only announces you," she said. "You still have to be invited in."
"In where?" I touched the plaque, tracing the letters, hoping the Chorus would provide some clue as to what they meant.
"Les Filles de Mnémosyne," Marielle said.
The daughters of Mnemosyne, who, according to Greek legend, lived on Mount Parnassus. The nine Muses.
The Chorus registered the magickal release of a seal, and the walls of the anteroom flickered out of existence, leaving us standing at the edge of an immense room, filled with rows upon rows of tall bookcases. The marble floor around the elevator remained, as did the elevator column itself, and Marielle stepped across the line separating the marble from the warm polish of the library's wooden floors.
I followed, and the Chorus shivered as we crossed over, an animalistic twitch that ran through my veins. The seal activated as I crossed, binding the walls solid again, and on the inside, layers and layers of magickal script vibrated with activity. The wards of Les Filles de Mnémosyne.
"Welcome to the Archives," Marielle said. "Don't touch anything."
I snatched my hand back. The case next to me was devoted to books, and as I looked more closely at the nearby shelves, I noted that some of them held display cases of varying size. Most of them weren't lit with any sort of track lighting—this wasn't a public museum after all, and long-term exposure to artificial light could very well damage some of the artifacts held here. The ambient lighting of the grand chamber was purposefully restrained, leaving the contents of the cases in mysterious—and tantalizing—shadows.
"That's a copy of the Secretum Secretorum," I said, indicating the book I had almost touched. "One of the Tulbriss editions." Only fourteen were reputed to have been made, and they were a facsimile of the original translation done by John of Seville back in the twelfth century. There were English translations readily available—some of them even on the Internet—but they were very literal, and a great deal of the symbolic richness—the magick bound into the text—had been stripped out. This edition had been commissioned to re-create the arts lost in the mundane translations, and before I could stop myself, I found the catalog description on my lips, the words nearly falling out of my mouth like money out of the wallet of a drunken old bookseller: Roxburghe-style binding, lambskin leather, gold stamp lettering, Fabriano Ingres endpapers, an oyster paper interior—
"You know the Tulbriss?" The speaker was a robust woman, dressed in a charcoal suit that managed to be corporately stylish and haute couture at the same time. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her round face and plaited in a long strand down to her mid-back. Perched on the peak of her forehead was a pair of red-rimmed glasses. Definitely going for the sexy academic look, and succeeding very well, though the arch of her eyebrow at my expression suggested she had heard enough variants of "hot librarian!" over the years that for me to mention it out loud now would be as banal as pointing out that she was wearing shoes.
And they were pretty great shoes too.
"Yes," I said, with no small amount of clumsiness. My chest was tight, and it took me a minute to realize the sensation wasn't some schoolboy reaction (you never forget your first librarian crush), but a spirit sensation from the Chorus, an agonizing pang of loneliness. I knew why she looked familiar. "You
're—"
"Vivienne Lafoutain," Marielle said.
Lafoutain's daughter.
Stricken, I looked at Marielle for help. The pain in my chest increased, and my heart skipped. Once was enough. Don't make me do this again. "I can't," I whispered. Don't make me tell another daughter that her father is gone. That I've taken the soul of someone they love.
Marielle's face softened. "I'll tell her."
"Tell me what?" Vivienne asked.
"Your father is gone, Viv. I'm sorry."
Vivienne took her glasses off her head, glanced at the lenses for a second, and then settled them on her face. "The Tulbriss," she said, after clearing her throat, "how familiar are you with the edition? Have you actually handled one?" Behind her glasses, her eyes were shiny, the only outward sign that she had heard Marielle.
"Yes," I said, feeling incredibly awkward, even more than I had a moment before. Little chicken, a voice cried from the Chorus, don't hold it back. "I, uh, acquired a copy once. For a private collector."
"One in Hong Kong?" She touched the corner of an eye, wiping at something so faint neither Marielle or I could attest that it had ever been there.
"I can't say."
She favored me with a tiny curl of her lips, an expression so haunted with a different emotion entirely that the Chorus nearly exploded in my chest. "You don't have to. Aleister Forge is the only collector who knew there were copies still out there."
"Viv—" Marielle took a step forward.
Vivienne shook her head, and her face hardened. "No, sister." Her hands clenched into fists. "I won't share this with you." Her anger shook a tear loose and it slid down her cheek. Her hand still balled tight, she swiped the tear away. "So, you're the one."
"Yes," I said, knowing without knowing why that I was.
"Come with me," she said, turning and walking further into the stacks. She hadn't glanced at Marielle. "She said earlier that you two needed some guidance. An understanding of the process by which the Coronation is completed. Yes?"
"Yes," I said, sticking with the safe answer.
