by Mark Teppo
The thread broke, vanishing in a mist of light and static. The phone line was dead too. He was no longer there. Gone, just another phantom haunting me.
XVIII
Am I interrupting?"
I turned from the window at the intrusion of Vivienne's voice. I hadn't heard her come in, nor had the Chorus warned me. "No," I said, closing the phone and dropping it back into my pocket. I didn't offer any more of an explanation, nor did she ask. She also noticed the scattered cards on the desk as she walked past, but didn't comment on them.
"It's a spectacular view, isn't it?" She was an inch taller than me, her mother's Nordic heritage making up for her father's gastronomic disposition. His face had been rounder, but his humor was clear in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and in the natural curve of her mouth. All of which only highlighted the fact that she had been crying.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't get much of a chance to know your father, but he seemed both kind and generous. A fortunate man, both in family and in affection."
"Thank you," Vivienne said. Her throat worked on more words, and they came out slowly. "You can never prepare yourself for this hole, can you? You could be with someone constantly, watching every minute twitch of their eyes or mouths, listening to every breath they take in, recording every moment of their lives so as to not forget anything, but . . . "
She approached the window with heavy steps, and with some effort, she looked down at the darker patch of ground to our right where there was few lights. Lamps along paths guide the living through the maze of headstones and mausoleums of the cemetery grounds. Much like Père Lachaise, the cemetery at Montparnasse was a remnant of Old Paris, a plot of cultural heritage made over into a tourist attraction. Pilgrimage sites for lovers and artists and obsessive idolizers.
"It doesn't matter when they're gone," she continued. Her voice was even softer now, and I had to quiet the Chorus in order to hear her. "All that remains is memory, and you don't understand how completely inadequate memory is until that is all you have. My father and I had our share of . . . differences, but he was still my father, the flesh and spirit that molded me. He—" Her voice faltered for a moment. "He was like the sun rising in the east—that one inviolate thing in my world—and I would always see him again. I could refresh that inadequate thing that is memory, but now . . . "
Lafoutain would be buried in the cemetery at Montparnasse, I thought. Close by where his daughter could keep an eye on him. Close enough to touch. Almost.
I cleared my throat. "I chased a memory of a woman for ten years. She wasn't dead; she didn't know I was still alive. I tracked her across half the world, and when I did find her, I discovered what I remembered wasn't the truth. I had invented a fiction to sustain me." I looked at Vivienne. "It's not the same sort of hole at all, but I think I know what you mean."
"Is your father still alive?"
"No. He died a few years ago. Cancer. It wasn't terribly—"
No, I pushed the Chorus away, that wasn't the way it had happened. My father had had a heart attack during a lecture. Philippe had the cancer. My father was the university professor, a second career after we had lost the farm in Idaho. His leg had never turned black. I had never—
"I'm sorry." She misunderstood the sudden violence of my silence. "Is that better or worse? Did it—" Her throat worked, but nothing came out.
"No," I ground out, fighting to keep the memories of my father separate from the bleed-through of Philippe's death. Stop confusing my past. I wanted to call a time-out and back the conversation up. Start over, and tell her the truth.
What truth? Philippe asked. That it took your sister a week to find you and tell you? That you went to the funeral and stared at the picture of the man who was being buried and realized you didn't know who he was? That you had been so consumed by the darkness in your soul that you didn't understand the pain your sister was feeling? That you have no idea what it feels like?
"You develop scar tissue," I said, finding something akin to honesty. Something I understood. "Which only means you feel the loss less, and in some ways, that means everything else is lessened too. Is it better? I don't know. I wish none of us had to find out . . . ."
The tiny lines around her eyes deepened as her face tightened. "Marielle is . . . well, let me be blunt: she is a cold-hearted bitch. And while it feels good to know she has lost someone as well, it's a hollow feeling. You know? It doesn't fill the void in my heart. Because I know she feels it less than I do. She knew her father was going to die. She's known ever since she was old enough to understand what it meant to be Hierarch. One day, he would be killed so that another could lead. She's had a long time to grow all the scar tissue she might need." Her eyes were bright as she fought to keep the tears away. "Better to feel something than nothing. Right?"
An old memory, poisonous in its clarity and single-mindedness, pushed through the Chorus. That old focus, dripping with pain and anger. Find Katarina; take back what she stole from you. How it had sustained me for so long. It had been something. "Right," I said softly. "Better than nothing."
Vivienne shivered, and hugged herself, rubbing her upper arms. "As smart as we are, we are still afraid of the dark. Afraid of what happens when the sun goes away, and the light dies. What do moths do when there is no bulb to gravitate to? Flutter aimlessly in the dark with no purpose—no desire—until they die? Is that better than being burned alive for trying to touch the light?"
"I don't know."
She wiped at the corner of one eye and offered me a sad smile that nearly broke my heart. Little chicken, Lafoutain cried from an impossible distance, I am so sorry to give you this pain. The rest of the Chorus was a veil of silence, ghosts of ghosts.
While I cleaned up the disarray of tarot cards, Vivienne discovered the pieces of paper I had taken from the apartment. The cards were cold to the touch, and none of the figures twitched or exploded into fragments. Philippe and the rest were keeping their distance.
"This is my father's handwriting," Vivienne said, pointing to a scrawl of marginalia on one of the pages. Realizing each page was a fragment, she spread them out on the desk. Putting the puzzle together. Making sense out of nonsense. Re-creating the world.
"It's the org chart they were working on. At the safe house." I glanced at the pages. I hadn't really paid attention to all the details when I had first seen them. There hadn't been any time. The majority of the notes were in the same precise block characters, but there was scattered notation done by someone else. Hubert Lafoutain, apparently. "They were trying to sort out who they could trust. I showed up late, and they were mostly done."
"Figuring out who the Architects were," she said, quickly divining the purpose of the pages. She spotted her father's name, and involuntarily looked up to see if I was paying attention.
"I know," I said. "He was the Scholar."
"There are nine," she said, nodding. "Just like Mnemosyne had nine daughters."
"Is Marielle one of your number?"
"No, she is the Daughter of the Hierarch. Though, like he is sometimes considered a peer of his Architects, she is often mistaken as one of us."
"The tenth Muse."
Her lips curled back from her teeth. "Everyone feels better when there are ten. Nine seems unfinished, especially in our metric world."
"Only if you start from one."
"So few think otherwise."
"We're all so concrete-sequential. Zero makes things complicated."
She gave me an odd look, a laugh rising in her throat. "Ah, Monsieur . . . " She caught herself, and let the rest of the sentence go unfinished, busying herself with lining up the pages. I didn't press her, and quietly finished ordering and putting the cards away.
When the chart was laid out again, she looked at it for some time, reading all the notes. "The Tulbriss," she said absently, as she traced her finger along an arc connecting the Crusader and the Navigator. "Do you know how many copies were actually made?"
"Fourteen, I hea
rd."
She nodded, still looking at the chart. "We have six of them. Three more were destroyed during the occult purges of World War II. One is buried in the archives of the British Museum—" She glanced up, a twinkle in her eye. "Misfiled in a crate catalogued as 'Miscellaneous Texts Damaged in the Great Fire.' And another is in a private collection in Massachusetts. That leaves three."
"It does."
"Forge has tried to buy one of ours. Many times. He's a sanctioned collector, and he's got far more dangerous things in his library, so why can't he have a copy of the Tulbriss edition of the Secretum Secretorum? This is his argument, you understand."
"Of course."
"I think my father liked saying no, frankly. There wasn't any strong reason Forge couldn't have one, other than the basic policy that things come into the Archives, they don't go out. But Father always said he liked listening to Forge rant: that English accent, those rigorously exotic Chinese curses, how he'd go on for minutes at a time.
"Though, more pragmatically, if we denied Forge what he wanted, he would obsess about it. He'd not stop until he found one, and in doing so, might actually scare up one of the remaining three copies. We'd probably have let him keep it, if a copy did surface, but that was dependent upon whether or not we got to it first."
I recalled the meeting in Bangkok where I had taken receipt of the book, and the ensuing fracas that had left my Thai contact dead and me on the run from several of my black market competitors. It hadn't been my first brush with the seedier side of underground occult artifact trafficking; just the first where I realized how difficult it was going to be to stay off the Watcher radar and continue doing what I had been doing.
"You were the Weatherstones' client," I said. Thomas and Rebecca Weatherstone. English antiques dealers who also moved occult artifacts. One of my main competitors, and over the years, we had had a reasonably friendly rivalry. Until Bangkok, where their field agents had killed Kraisingha and tried to do the same to me. I still had the scars—a couple of knots of hard flesh on my chest from the bullet holes.
Vivienne nodded. "We were."
Rebecca had been sleeping with the magus I had killed. Thomas hadn't known, and probably still didn't. Rebecca didn't know I knew, but that's only because she didn't know what I had done to her man. I knew a lot of things about Rebecca and Thomas, enough to have made it easy for me to avoid them ever since. They didn't need to know what I had in my head about them.
"What were you offering them?" I asked, professionally curious.
"Finder's fee of twenty-five percent."
"Twenty-five percent of what? There isn't an open market on these."
She shrugged as if that was a minor detail. "What did Forge pay you?"
"Two hundred thousand."
"Dollars? He got quite a deal."
He had paid me in Euros actually. At the time, I hadn't been too happy about it, but recently, the United States dollar had been taking a beating in the world market. But, even in Euros, she was right. He had gotten a deal.
He had also given me a few other things. Objects I had leveraged for other deals I had had in the works. The two hundred thousand had been for "operational expenses." The rest had been a much quieter—and less violent—transaction. Two men, exchanging briefcases during an intimate and private dinner at a very exclusive club in Hong Kong.
But I didn't see the point in bringing that up with Vivienne. I had probably already said too much. The rest was sure to cause me grief.
Especially if it got back to the Weatherstones.
I smiled at that thought. Worrying about next week, when tomorrow was the bigger problem. Classic sign of denial.
XIX
How much do you know?" I asked Vivienne, indicating the chart on the desk. "Did Marielle tell you what happened?" Who lived, who died, who was left. The litany of wounds sustained so far in this war.
"She did." Vivienne sighed, reluctant to engage on the present. "Most of the secret masters are dead. Are the remaining Architects working in concert to remove the rest, or are they still targeted? Is there some unknown party behind the whole affair?"
"The guys who hit the Chapel of Glass came with soul locks and whoever was running them put an oubliette around the chapel. And, when we were fleeing the apartment, they were doing some heavy-duty structural assault on the building. Trying to bring the whole thing down."
"Geomancy."
"Certainly a step up from reading the pattern of leaves and arrangement of stones, but that'd be my guess."
"So, the Mason. Is he working alone?" She sighed as she looked at the wealth of names on the page. "Impossible to know, isn't it? He could be any one of the remaining Preceptors. Any number of them could be working together too, removing opposition to their own advancement. And what of the other Architects who aren't accounted for?"
"The Mason is Jacob Spiertz," I pointed out, touching his name on the chart. "The Scryer is Ulrich Husserl, and he's still out there too. The Thaumaturge is . . . missing. The impression I got was that he was unaccounted for, but not dead. What that means I don't really know. And the Shepherd is . . . "
My gaze wandered along the lines connecting Spiertz to the other Watchers, and I spotted a pair I knew. The brothers Vaschax: Henri and Girard. Henri had a tiny symbol next to his name: a "v" in a tight box. Interesting. They had drifted apart in the last few years. No longer matching each other, step for step. Henri had made Viator; Girard hadn't.
Trying to recall the names of the two men who had been with Henri at the airport, I checked the desk drawer for a pen. Jerome Theirault and Charles Lentier, Cristobel reminded me. I found a black ballpoint in the top drawer and added their names under Henri's.
"You know Vaschax?" Vivienne asked.
"I'm the reason he limps."
"You do leave an impression on people, don't you?"
"Not intentionally," I argued. "It just . . . that's the way situations turn out. Sometimes."
"I'm sure they do."
I let that slide, and continued to make notes: labeling Husserl as the Scryer, drawing a line connecting Father Cristobel and Vivienne's father (if there wasn't a connection before, there certainly was now), and putting a thick box around Antoine's name. He was way out on the edge of the chart, as if they couldn't decide what to do about him. He'd like that placement.
Next to his name was a small lowercase "p" within a circle with tiny lines radiating from the circle like eyelashes. Protector-Witness. I started to cross the symbol out and write his new title, but a spasm in my arm sent the pen sliding away.
It's his secret; let him keep it awhile yet.
Vivienne misread my hesitation. "You and he have fought over Marielle, haven't you?"
"It was a long time ago," I said.
"But these things are never really forgotten, are they?"
"No," I admitted, thinking more about why the Chorus didn't want me to reveal Antoine's secret. There was the obvious reason: I didn't know Vivienne all that well, and she clearly had some history with both Antoine and Marielle. Who knew what she would do with the information should I give it to her.
I was starting to see some of the paranoia that Delacroix had disliked about Chieradeen. You started to not trust anyone whom you didn't know intimately. And even those people could have motives they weren't being clear about.
"He has the key."
"What?" I asked, jerked back to the present.
Vivienne tapped Antoine's name. "You said he has the key."
"Yes," I said, catching up with the conversation. "Well, I think he has it. I'm not entirely sure. Well, almost one hundred percent. But—" I glanced around the room. There was no one there but the two of us, yet the sensation was strong that we weren't alone. The spirits in the Chorus, notwithstanding.
Paranoia. Another symptom of schizophrenia.
"He had the opportunity—" The words slid out of me almost unconsciously, distracted as I was by the thoughts in my head.
"When was this?"<
br />
I blushed. "When I first arrived yesterday morning. Marielle met me at the airport and—"
"Just Marielle? Not her and Antoine?"
"No. Just her. Antoine showed up later, when we were in trouble."
Vivienne nodded. "The incident at the airport. Terrorists supposedly hijacked a train and tried to deliver a bomb to Gare du Nord."
"It wasn't a bomb. It was me and Henri. And . . . " I tapped the pen on the page. " . . . some friends of his."
"So you called in the big guns."
"No, she did."
Vivienne spread her hands. "She did. Okay. What happened next?"
"I . . . uh—" The Chorus sparked, and I felt the sharp spike of their energy down in my hips. "I told Marielle that her father was dead."
A smile that gave me goose bumps rose on Vivienne's lips. "Was it an accident?"
"Yes. I hadn't meant to tell her. Not then."
"No. The Hierarch's death."
I stared at Vivienne, trying to read the light in her eyes. "No," I said, finally.
"Did you kill him?"
I nodded. "At his request."
"Are you sure?"
I cast back to that final conversation with Philippe. I am beginning to forget things, he had said. I've Seen too many springs.
Is the organization supposed to die with you? I had asked, and he hadn't answered that question. Not then. But earlier, he equated himself with the organization, and the organization had become diseased. It could no longer support life, and it had to die. Vivienne's point was well taken. Philippe had never said it outright—kill me, Michael—but the inference had been clear, and he had let me touch him with the Chorus.
Though, in hindsight, I wasn't sure the Chorus had harvested him properly. In the past, they had been a voracious hunger, driven by the Qliphoth to harvest darkness so as to keep the lies intact. Philippe had been the first soul I had taken since that night, and it was like the new voices didn't know how to do it correctly. Thinking about it now, though, I wondered if the problem wasn't that the Chorus was doing it wrong—that I had somehow forgotten how to break a soul—but that the Hierarch had leveraged some loophole in my mind. Some trick by which he could remain a separate personality within my patchwork soul, and now that he had friends, they were building a separate community within my brain. Kind of like a rogue state inside your national boundaries.
