Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls

by Mark Teppo

  A giant, walking through the wreckage of man's greatest architectural achievement—a cathedral built to inspire us to contemplate the majesty and enormity of Heaven's work—and here was a creature who could touch the ceiling of that vaulted space. With one of his hands. The statue from the grotto hadn't grown proportionally. The legs were as thick as some of the pillars in the various chapels, and the torso reminded me of some of the redwoods in Northern California. But one of the arms was long and thin, as if the mass ratio was correct but length was more important than girth, while the other was a stump, ending in something that vaguely looked like an open sore with a short nail protruding from it like an inflamed ingrown hair. The head was small too. The long braids coming off the back of its skull were long and very mobile—more like snakes all the time—but the rest of the skull seemed unfinished. A face had been roughed in, but with very little detail. As if it were ornamental, and not meant to be functional.

  "Somehow," I offered, "I don't think it's going to be big on conversation."

  The giant fought its way free of the walls of the church, knocking the last part of the west wall down, and I caught sight of its feet. It had two central legs that ended in flat columns, like the feet of an elephant, and sprouting from the upper part of its calves were a number of smaller supports that worked in the same way that the flying buttresses on the church behind it held up the central vault of the nave. These buttresses moved, accordion-style, in concert with each ponderous step.

  Antoine and I remained still, hiding behind the staring eyes of the Chorus' peacock shield, as the giant turned its shadowy face toward the sun. The granite of the head flowed and rippled in the sunlight and the features became more prominent—a nose emerged, a slashing line opened into a mouth, and two sunken pits caught some of the sunlight and kept it. The jaw lengthened too, growing something that started as a beard and became more stalks like its hair.

  "Spiertz," Antoine muttered behind me, recognizing the face even with its tentacled chin.

  "So he's really in there." I couldn't help but be impressed. It was an incredible feat. Surviving without the flesh, Spiertz had bound his soul to the rock of the mount and forged it into a body. I wondered if the Chorus could even touch him. Could they even find him in the rock?

  "How do you kill stone?" Antoine wondered.

  "Wish I knew," I answered.

  Spiertz swung his head in our direction. It was bigger now, more correctly proportioned with the rest of his body, and the face bore a frozen expression. Caught somewhere between amusement and horror, his open mouth gaped. The stone of his chest rippled like water and we heard a rattling sound like sand in a pipe a second before a stream of tiny rocks shot from the giant's mouth. The peacock eyes of the Chorus flashed crimson with the impact of a thousand stones, and I groaned as the Chorus squeezed my spine.

  Behind me, Antoine whispered a string of words and the scattering spray of sand off my shield flashed white and fused into glass. He kept the spell active for a few seconds, letting the curve of glass build up as more sand scattered along the convex surface until we were almost enclosed in a protective bubble. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back, both of us ducking under the far edge of his barrier. A second later, the glass shattered as the giant brought a heavy foot down on the white dome.

  Antoine raised his left hand and slashed it down, and a blot of blue lightning cut through the air between his fingers and the giant. One of the flying buttresses sheared off, sparks erupting from the cut, and the giant wobbled momentarily as the other supports slammed down, adapting to the new configuration.

  I had a chance to get a better look at the stump, and I realized what was protruding from the center of the inflamed end. "The Spear," I Whispered to Antoine. "He's got the Spear already."

  The giant swung its long arm at us, a wide sweep that would take our heads off if we remained standing upright. At first I thought I had miscalculated the length of its arm, but when the Chorus translated all the energy patterns into vectors of force, I realized the arm was growing longer as it moved. I sprawled on my ass and Antoine leaped forward, tucking his head and rolling clumsily. The arm whistled over my head, but caught Antoine's heel, knocking him to the side and spoiling his roll.

  The giant tried to step on Antoine, and while it missed with its heavy leg, one of the buttresses hammered down on Antoine's leg. Lightning flashed again, and the buttress disintegrated into a spray of stone chips. The giant swept its arm down once more, striking the pavement of the terrace with a crack of thunder, and when it pulled the arm free, the long whip of stone was festooned with shards and splinters of concrete.

  The Chorus attached themselves like a limpet mine to one of the remaining buttresses on the nearby leg, and with an acknowledgement from me, they detonated—an explosion of silver light that shattered the support. The giant whirled its spike-encrusted arm at me, and one of the ragged shards of concrete tore a hole out of the shoulder of my jacket. Got a little bit of me too.

  Antoine blew off another leglet as the giant stepped away from us. That left four remaining on its left leg, and as it retreated, I thought for a second that we might actually bring it down before it managed to hit us with its spiked arm, and then I realized it wasn't making a defensive withdrawal so much as fleeing. It crashed into the building along the southern edge of the terrace, and its weight took it through the upper floor. It vanished into a cloud of debris, and we heard the crackling, shattering sound of falling rock as it tumbled down the side of the mount.

  "Where the hell is it going?" I asked Antoine.

  "Paris," he replied. He knocked some of the dust off his suit jacket, though it didn't much improve the condition of the garment. There were a number of tiny gashes on his face from rock chips. "You think he wants to be trapped in that body forever?"

  I watched the cloud of dust that rose in the wake of the giant. "It seems like it is working pretty well for him so far."

  Antoine limped toward the ruined edge of the terrace. His right pant leg was shiny with fresh blood. "The man is slipping away," he said. "Couldn't you feel it? Spiertz had moved his soul into the rock, but it's too foreign a substance. His soul can't be sustained; it is going to break up and become nothing more than an appetite."

  I stood next to Antoine and looked down the hill. The giant was in the village below, thrashing its way through the buildings. Heading for the wall surrounding the base of the mount. Beyond that lay the shallow water of the bay, and then the mainland. From there, straight toward the sun until it reached Paris.

  I remembered a bit of trivia that Lafoutain had offered. "Les Michelettes." I pointed them out to Antoine.

  "Medieval technology," he said. "It lasts forever, doesn't it?"

  "Let's hope so."

  Antoine did the heavy lifting while I prepped the projectile. A bombard was one of those medieval inventions that was simple in design, cumbersome in construction, and devastating in effect. The bombard was nothing more than a very heavy tube that, when filled with powder and a projectile, hurled a heavy object very far and very hard. They were very good at bringing walls down without the need of putting men within arrow range, and when engineers discovered that stone balls tended to shatter due to their velocity, they opted to make bigger guns. The supergun arms race went on—bigger is better!—until someone discovered how to mass produce iron balls, at which time the need for large-bore guns dropped.

  The downside of a big gun was that it was heavy, and not so easily transported, as the English realized during the fifteenth century when they were getting the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of French knights. The two guns left behind were hauled back to the walls of Mont-Saint-Michel and mounted there, like trophies, so everyone would know the English had not only been beaten, but they had left their cool toys behind. At some point, an officious bureaucrat had ordered the cannons filled, but as they had opted to use fairly cheap cement, it didn't take us long to clean out one of the cannons.

  Having positio
ned the re-bored cannon, Antoine sighted down the length of his good arm and took a distance reading on the retreating giant. It had started on the causeway, but by the time we reached the lower wall of the island, it had reached the first breach. The pavement had collapsed under its weight and it had fallen into the sea, where it had run afoul of an old law of alchemy: salt water and stone don't mix well. It had been slowed by the ocean's touch, and it had climbed back up to the road once more, but the next break had confounded it again, and the second time it had stayed in the water. Sluggish in the grip of the salty sea, it forged toward the shore, but it was moving slowly so there was little danger of it being out of range.

  I packed the throat of one of the Michelettes with glass, sand, a car battery and gasoline, a bunch of scrap metal torn from the same car that I had taken the battery and gas from, and a ragged block of rusted iron I had scavenged from the ornamental gate. Submerged in several inches of blood-tinged gasoline, the armament was a solidifying mass of Chorus-tinged intent, waiting for the trigger of my Will.

  "Make it count," Antoine said, squinting at the giant.

  I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood, and nodded.

  He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and raised his arm a few inches. His magick moved the cannon sympathetically, lifting the barrel off the shelf of the wall. Veins in his neck stood out as he held the cannon in place, and I gave him a few more seconds to dig his anchors in. Pointing the bombard in the right direction was only half the trick, the other half was making sure it stayed on target as the projectile fired. His forehead creased with exertion as his finger quivered for a second, and then he found his center. The jitter in his finger stopped and the skin of his forehead smoothed out.

  "Ignis," I whispered, and the cannon fired.

  For the brief seconds of the projectile's flight, my perception was bound to it. The wind burned my hard skin, and I screamed as I tore through the morning air. I knew where I was going; I saw my target, and my focus never wavered. The shape of the giant grew quickly in my field of vision, too quickly, and then there was nothing but the shuddering blankness of impact. I gasped, hurled back into my own frame of reference, and the Chorus melted from my skin.

  "You missed," Antoine pronounced. The cannon lay behind us, knocked askew by the force of the blast.

  Shading my eyes, I stared out at the foundering giant. It couldn't get up, the sea's poisonous touch was too great on it now, and it thrashed about in the surf like it was caught in quicksand. "I guess that depends on what I had been aiming for," I said, glancing over at Antoine.

  The giant's left shoulder and stump were gone, torn off by the impact of my improvised projectile. Somewhere near the water's edge was a piece of rock with the Spear imbedded in it.

  "We have to destroy him," I reminded Antoine. "The tide'll go out enough for him to crawl to shore, and then he's going to repair that shoulder and start marching on Paris again."

  Antoine nodded. "I suppose you have a plan?"

  I did. While gathering materials for the cannon shot, I had realized something about stone. Mountains weren't permanent. They lasted thousands of millennia, but eventually, through erosion by wind and water, they could be reduced to a flat spot on the terrain. Given time and temperament, a mountain could be worn done, one grain of sand at a time. The trick was speeding that process up. Spiertz's soul was in the rock, diffused so widely that the Chorus couldn't find him, but what if the area and mass of rock were reduced to a smaller amount? If the statue was hacked up into pieces, could I find the piece that held Spiertz and break him?

  "First," I said, "we're going to need the Spear. And then, well, you're going to have to trust me."

  "Can you do it without the ominous theatrics?"

  "I need a conduit."

  Antoine grimaced, understanding the nature of my plan. "No. That's not going to work."

  "You can ground yourself better than I can, and I know how to siphon energy from a living source. I'm going to need a lot of power, and your feeding it to me is the easiest way." I glanced at his shortened sleeve. "Besides, this plan requires two hands. You're missing one. It's like drawing the short straw."

  XXVII

  One of the skills taught young Watchers was how to channel energy. Building and executing a spell took a certain amount of concentration, as well as a source of ready fuel, and if the magus had to draw and convert power from the leys, then the effectiveness of his magick was diminished accordingly. Magi like Antoine strained that distinction with their ability to draw power almost effortlessly, but the rule still held: one part to feed, one to transform, and one to execute. The trinity of doing magick. Channeling meant you could offload two-thirds of the effort on to others, and depending on the number of conduits you could manage, it meant your available pool of energy could be much larger than you could draw on your own.

  This is how armies are built. Singular in focus, endless in power. The sum of the group is greater than the individual.

  We were two, and had to settle for a single stream. Antoine gathered the leys and bound their streams into a single point in his chest; I—very carefully—attached a Chorus leech, and opened the conduit between us. There was a little bleed, as much as Antoine kept himself hidden, the Chorus could still taste him in the flow.

  The tide had gone out another foot by the time we reached the shore. Invigorated by the heady flow of energy from Antoine, I swept through the mass of slippery rocks and wet sand along the water's edge with the Chorus. My senses were engorged with data: the hard light off the water, the laughing sound of the waves as they pulled at the giant, the smell of brine and decaying plant matter, the groaning thunder of stone under siege as Spiertz fought to overcome the cloying grip of the ocean, the stale scent of blood and sweat coming off Antoine and me. Somewhere in all that data was the cold hunger of the Spear.

  It lent invincibility to those its wielder commanded, but there was a cost. Nothing was free in this Universe. It was a closed system, after all, and energy could neither be created nor destroyed. We existed in a constant state of transformation, and rewards were given in exchange for tribute. The pound of flesh is always paid. Wounds made by the Spear would never heal.

  Unless they were healed by the Grail. This was the symbiotic relationship of the pair, and why they were required for the Coronation. One blooded the candidate, the other healed. Spiertz could be made human again if he could get to Paris.

  In his elemental state, he was vulnerable to water. It was too fluid and the touch of it against the giant's stone skin was corrosive. The gaping wound where the giant's left shoulder had been was a mass of slag, now that it had been fighting the ocean. Many of the buttress legs were gone, melted away by the salt water, and the right arm had been compressed. Less surface area to be touched by the sea.

  Near the edge of the sea, the water running up the beach and kissing the edge of my boots, I found the twisted remnants of the giant's stump. Sticking out of a mass of fused glass and steel was the sharp point of the Spear. The giant pounded the water, struggling to drag himself closer as I knelt beside the hunk of granite and iron and glass. The Chorus, fueled by the ready power streaming through my body via the conduit with Antoine, spat out of my clenched fist like an arc welder's hot torch, and the detritus around the Spear grew orange and red before it bubbled away. A cloud of white steam hissed around me as the liquefied materials hit the water.

  The giant's arm rose out of the water like an octopus' tentacle, cracking as it grew longer, and it cast a shadow on the sand as it slammed down. I stepped aside, and its impact splashed hot water all over me; as it writhed in the shallow water, I let the Chorus guide my hand through the warm mist surrounding the melted rock.

  The Spear fell into my hand naturally, and when the giant's hand whipped up again, I met its approach with the shining blade of the Spear. The Chorus covered the pitted and stained blade with a glaze of incandescence and the pair—Will and Spear—sliced through Spiertz's animated stone. The hand
fell into the surf, and the giant made its first human-sounding noise.

  The Chorus swirled around me, raising a storm of light, and I pointed the Spear at the giant, which had stopped fighting the surf. It was lying on its side, its head raised out of the water, and it stared at me. "That's right," I Whispered to the stone statue, on the off-chance that my magi-speak would get through to Spiertz. "You're going to have to get past me if you want a shot at the Crown."

  The giant's expression darkened, its mouth widening to a ragged pit, and for a moment, I thought it was going to vomit sand at me again, but it jerked its head back and then forward again. The long strands of its hair snapped forward and two of them broke off. The Chorus tagged them immediately, reading their intent, and they deflected one. The other one came directly at me, and I moved the tip of the Spear to intercept it, and reached deep into the conduit. Power flowed through my arms and legs, bracing me, and the Spear vibrated with energy, singing a harmonic overtone that climbed in pitch as the missile struck. The stone exploded in a shower of gray dust, coating me with grit.

  I flicked the Spear down, angled it flat, and then flicked it up, throwing a wave of energy in a wedge before me. The ocean receded, forced back by my command, and I strode out into the newly cleared beach. When the waves came back, I flicked them out again, and the giant recoiled from the edge of the psychic wedge I commanded. I sliced through two of the buttress legs, clearing my way to the central leg, and then I thrust the Spear deep into the stone.

  Spiertz was in there; I could feel him now. He howled at me, a psychic charge I felt in my arm, and I responded, releasing the Chorus through the metal blade. They shrieked as they devoured the giant's leg, eagerly snapping at the wisps of Spiertz's soul they could find in the rock. The giant pulled its leg back, trying to get away from the Spear, and the stone crumbled. It turned white, like water leaching out of mud, and then crumbled into ash. A wave crested the giant's leg, washing over my hand, and the Spear came free of the stone as all the rock around the wound was swept away.