Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls

by Mark Teppo

  "There," Nicols said. "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

  I looked back at the body sitting in the chair. "It looks pretty bad."

  "Well, you were never easy on it. That's for sure. Time heals; chicks dig scars. That sort of bullshit."

  "I had to be brave, John."

  "I know, Michael. We all have to find our own way."

  He led my spirit over to the bed, moving one of the screens aside, and as we stood at its foot, the bound woman visibly relaxed. There was blood on her face, in her hair, and on the mattress beneath her. There were old marks on her legs—this wasn't the first time she had been bound. A stick had been forced in her mouth, tied in place with strips of cloth around her head. Her hair, much longer than I had ever seen it, was in a wild disarray about her face.

  It wasn't the woman from the painting. It wasn't Hildegard. It was Marielle.

  The three priests looked up, their heads moving in such unison that it seemed like they were all working off the same marionette string. Cristobel. Philippe. Lafoutain. My three wise men. All looking very somber and stoic.

  Their mouths were all stitched shut.

  Nicols shrugged as I looked to him for an explanation. "You shouldn't listen to them. You know how they are. Schemers. The whole lot of them. I'll be glad when they're gone."

  "Are they crowding you, John?" I found the idea funny, even in these circumstances.

  "No," he said. "But you're still fragile. You still don't trust yourself. You'll listen to them because you think you need that reassurance."

  "And I should listen to you instead?"

  He waved a finger at me. "I hear sarcasm. That's good."

  "Is this a pep talk, John?" I glanced around the tiny room. "Is all of this an elaborate excuse to cheer me up?"

  He snorted. "You remember my last pep talk?"

  I did. He had held a gun to his head and threatened to shoot himself if I hadn't shown him that I could care about someone other than myself. It hadn't been a hollow gesture. He would have done it. The fact that I was instrumental in driving him to the brink of suicide hadn't been lost on me, either.

  "What am I supposed to do, John?" I sighed. "I couldn't stop Bernard. He wiped out more than fifty thousand souls. The Watchers let him. Even if Philippe hadn't known the others were plotting against him, he should have Seen Bernard's plan. How could he have been so aware of the little details but have missed the big picture?"

  "He pushed you there, and because you were there, only fifty thousand died." He raised his shoulders and wouldn't meet my gaze. "It could have been worse."

  "But that's no comfort," I said. "It's still too many."

  "I know." His voice was almost a whisper.

  Cristobel's glass eye was weeping, and Lafoutain was looking down at his hands. Only Philippe was still looking at me. He didn't look away. Burn it all down.

  I shook my head and when I looked away, my gaze fell on Marielle, tied to the bed. She was staring at me too, her expression filled with as much focused anger as her father's.

  He was still there in my head, even though Nicols had gagged him. Part of him was still welded to my being. Part of me still knew why the Key of Thoth had been built. Why it had been activated. Because Philippe had failed. Because he had become too proud to accept that he was too old to lead them anymore. Too infirm. He had held on too long, and paid the price of that hubris.

  "And what was I supposed to have done? Finish the job for you? Tear everything down because you failed. Was that it? I was supposed to wipe the slate clean? Kill all your friends because they betrayed you too. Was it all that petty?

  "And you," I said to Marielle, my voice rising now. "What about your role? You used all of us. You preyed upon Antoine's jealousy. Upon Husserl's greed. Upon my naiveté. You used me, so that your fucking boyfriend could have it all. You threw me away."

  I surged toward the bed as if I was going to throw myself on her, and Nicols forced himself between us. I raged against him for a minute, which was like throwing myself at a giant redwood, hoping to knock it down with the force of my frustration. When I ran out of steam, I realized there was another voice in the room, a whisper of sound that ran without pause, without breath.

  Laughter.

  I looked around for the source and realized the shadows on the wall weren't thrown there by the figures in the room.

  "Samael," I hissed.

  The black streams flowed together into a coherent shape, and the laughter from many throats became a single voice. "Still so bright, my pretty one. Still so eager to believe me. Are you ready for my help? Are you willing to accept my love?"

  "Never," I said. "Never again."

  He laughed once more, and more than anything else, I wanted to never hear that sound again.

  "Don't listen to him," Nicols said. "That's all it takes. Just stop listening."

  I pushed against Nicols slightly, more to make him give me some space than to try to shove past him. "Then who should I listen to, John?"

  His eyes were bright, shining with a wet light that reminded me of the Grail. "I can't tell you, Michael."

  "Because I'm not supposed to listen to you either, is that right?"

  He nodded, and when I brushed against him again, he broke into smoke. Wisps of white light that streaked around me, that moved through me. He was both gone and everywhere. All at the same time.

  On the wall, the shadow of Samael was frozen, a smear of black ink that begged for interpretation. A demonic Rorschach blot, waiting to be given shape and definition by an unknowing witness.

  The woman on the bed wasn't Marielle any longer. She was younger, her face unblemished and unlined as if she had never felt any lasting pain. The wooden gag was gone from her mouth, and as she stared—unblinkingly—at me, her lips began to move. Her voice was so low and her words so quick, I couldn't follow what she was saying.

  I wasn't sure I wanted to hear what she had to say anyway.

  The three priests approached, and before I could pull away from them, they circled me. Cristobel took my shortened arm in his hands and pressed the rosary-wrapped stump against his lips. Philippe stood behind me, his hands resting on my shoulders so that his fingers touched in the hollow of my throat. Lafoutain took my other hand and placed it over his heart.

  Listen, the Chorus said.

  "No." I struggled in their grip. "I'm done listening. Not to you. Not to your proxies. I'm done. Let me go."

  Be still, the Chorus echoed.

  "Tranquilla tuum animum," he said, and I looked over my shoulder at the chair in which I had been sitting. Just like the picture in the Grail chapel: one hand across his knee, palm open, fingers pointing at the ground; the other raised toward the dark ceiling, a tiny sliver of frozen light laid against his stiff fingers.

  "Omne imaginum meae cordis sunt."

  Everything is an echo, the Chorus said, the whisper of their voices overlapping the magician's. But their voices trailed his by a split second. Echoing. Everything is an echo of my heart.

  Philippe's hand tightened about my throat, directing my attention back to the bed. I let him guide me, and the flash of light from behind me wiped the black stain off the wall over the bed. The light went through me too, through the woman on the bed as well. Through all of us.

  Phantoms. Every last one of us.

  The light took my anger with it, and my pain and fear. All the shadows in my heart fled, and all that was left was the placid stillness of an untroubled pond.

  Hildegard's lips moved again, and her words—in a language I didn't understand—fell upon me like a gentle rain falls upon water. Tiny drops that barely left any trace on the surface. They fell into the water, and vanished.

  You can't see a raindrop as it falls, and you can't find it after it hits a pool of water. The only part of a raindrop's existence that you can participate in is the moment it hits the water. Even then you don't see it, you only see the reaction of the water to its impact. The raindrop, for all you know, may not have exist
ed at all. But something went from above, down to below, and when it passed across the threshold between the two spaces, you were witness to its transformation.

  It's a cycle. Water flows down to the sea, evaporates into the sky, becomes a rain shower, falls back to the ground, and runs down to the sea again. The only part of the cycle that we can perceive is the echo of its passage.

  I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft.

  I know, my son.

  What is left? I've been betrayed by everyone I ever loved.

  Not everyone. I have never forsaken you.

  XXXII

  I hurt all over, a persistent reminder from my abused flesh that I was still attached to it. Hermes Trismegistus, in his discussions with his son, liked to remind him of the nature and purpose of the flesh. The flesh is the anchor of the soul; it is the stone, water, earth, and fire that give the spirit shape. As long as you could feel something, you were still bound into this world.

  The pain in my side. The wound from the Spear. It wasn't fatal. Not yet, at least, and the Chorus had—during my visionary blackout—staunched the flow of blood. This I could feel, and gradually, I remembered the way the world was.

  On my back, resting at an angle on an uneven surface, I tried not to twitch as my spirit filled my flesh once more. The vision faded, falling away from me much like my spirit had risen free of the flesh at Nicols' suggestion. As above, so below: all things move in concert.

  While my nerve endings all lined up to tell me how much pain I had recently suffered, I tried to recall the details of my fall, but after the first few seconds of despair and panic, there was nothing. Just the memory of waking up in a twelfth-century penitent's chamber with all my spirits.

  The Chorus had carried me, obviously, while I had been off in Never Never Land, talking with John and witnessing the distorted history the ghosts wanted me to see. The world was filled with cycles, and the history of the Hierarch and the Watchers was no different. Too many iterations, too many loops: they all started to blur after a few generations. Minor differences cropped up, but the cosmological revolution always followed the same path. Like the leys—what was it that Philippe had called them?—the desire lines laid down by our persistent repetitions. Over and over again.

  When my muscles seemed to be under my control again, I sat up slowly, and the change in position lessened some of the internal complaints, while giving voice to others. Tuning them out—the body was going to make that sort of noise for a while yet, I expected—I turned my attention outward, to the space around me.

  Underground, the Chorus whispered as they slithered along the ground, tasting the soil. There was a ribbon of etheric force nearby and they tapped it, digging into the rich source of energy and information. North was just off my left shoulder, and I was near—I sniffed the air, recognizing that faint, but distinct, dry odor—an ossuary somewhere. One of the lost passages beneath Paris. With the cemetery close to Tour Montparnasse, I wasn't surprised there were tunnels similar to what led me from the Chapel of Glass to Père Lachaise

  Invigorated by the trickle of energy from the ley, I summoned a spark and let it drift overhead. The room was roughly square, with niches in the wall that seemed too short for coffins, and the floor was a jumble of stone and timber. I was draped across one of the larger pieces. Laid out on a slab. The spark drifted higher, but the ceiling didn't materialize, and I was reminded of the ceiling in Hildegard's room. Was I still under Tour Montparnasse? Some subbasement of the elevator shaft? The walls looked too old, like hand tools had carved out this space, and none of the junk under me looked like it was a remnant from modern construction.

  More importantly, I didn't see a door.

  Of course not, Lafoutain noted. No one has been down here for more than sixty years.

  "Lucky me," I muttered.

  There is an access shaft, the spirit of the Scholar said. My tiny spark leaped upward, torn from my control, and it went so high that it seemed to vanish.

  "That's a long way," I said.

  It's not as far as it looks, especially for a climber like you.

  I lifted my stump. "It's pretty hard to climb when you're missing one hand."

  I guess you'd better get started then, shouldn't you?

  "I'm really beginning to not like you guys."

  His laughter echoed in my head until I started climbing. It gave me strength, as I think he knew that it would.

  "Your turn," I told Lafoutain when I reached the access shaft. I rested on the edge of the hole, my legs dangling. My chest ached, and my stump had started to ooze blood from all the exertion. The Chorus had activated Cristobel's magick circle and used that energy to bind off most of the stump—the one thing that transferred from the vision to reality was the presence of the Visionary's rosary around my severed arm—but the seal was dependent upon my Will, and I was tired.

  More tired than I had been in a long time.

  My turn for what? the Scholar's spirit inquired.

  Cristobel's argument was that I needed him so that I could understand the mystery of Philippe's plan, and as a spirit, he has managed to tease helpful hints here and there from the grip of the Old Man. Husserl probably should be in my head too, but he managed to dodge that trap. As had Spiertz, in his own way. I understood that part of Philippe's plan now. The Chorus, via the mechanism of the Lightbreaker, was to have swept clean the attitudes and personal histories of the Architects, leaving only their knowledge. The Hierarch wanted new leadership that wasn't tainted by all the petty bullshit and in-fighting that had gone on in the last decade.

  The easiest way to accomplish this goal was to kill everyone, but that would mean that all the institutional knowledge they carried would be lost. That was where I came in. I wasn't his courier, or his candidate for succession. I wasn't even the spark that started the conflagration that was going to wipe it all away. I was just the guy who came through later and swept up the useful relics.

  "Is that why you were selected to join the others?" I asked the Chorus. "You were his Scholar, Lafoutain. Is this your reward for a lifetime of service? To be turned into a schizophrenic figment of my psychosis?"

  Lafoutain didn't answer, and the Chorus' only response was to vanish into the drain of my memory.

  "I thought so," I said.

  The whole situation was a mess. Everyone was trying to fuck everyone else. The Crown was the prize, and with it came the rest of the Watcher organization. And Marielle as well. That's all that mattered. Keep your eyes on the prize, and be the last man standing. As primal as it came. There is always competition, Philippe had told me in one of those lucid moments when he deigned to speak to me. The secret that lay in the heart of Free Will. The Will to desire. Whoever wants it the most.

  Anarchy. Will untamed. Will unrestrained. The World as a billion points of light, all fighting to be the center of the universe.

  Was this what he wanted? Was this how it was all supposed to end? In a chaotic squabble over the leftovers? After a lifetime of being a Witness, was that all he thought of us? Petty little animals, fighting over scraps.

  One of the arguments Lt. Pender had articulated before Antoine had killed him had been that the souls of Portland had been better off as a combined unity focused on the realization of a single goal. It was a better use of their energy and their existence than they could have ever hoped to attain with their own small lives. Was such a unification not a better use of their lives?

  I had disagreed with him—rather vehemently—based on the position that no one had asked them. Not that his argument was wrong, but that the methods were morally repugnant. And after I had killed Bernard and scattered all those souls to their final destinations, I had had a lot of time to think about that argument.

  There is a place not far from the Portland Airport called the Grotto, one of the few active Franciscan monasteries in the United States. The main portion of the sanctuary sits on top of the bluff, looking north toward the river and the airport. You can't see do
wntown at all, the bluff hides most of the central core of the city from view, and when the wind blows east to west, the dry scent of the ruined city drifts out toward the coast. You could almost pretend the Ascension Event had never happened. The only indicator left is the psychic pain radiating through every ley line crossing the valley.

  I had stayed at the Grotto for a few days, watching and reading the city as it tried to understand what had happened. Trying to understand what had happened to me between the first light of dawn and the moment Antoine had Seen me walking back across the water.

  I had been given another chance. The black stain on my soul had been purged, and I had been given new guides. New angels to fill the hole in my chest. What was I supposed to do with this knowledge? With this experience?

  More importantly, why had Philippe twisted the threads in a way that had forced me to be the one facing Bernard. What was I to have gained from that experience that would then be useful to him? Originally, I had thought he would have called upon me to serve him, and I had waited patiently for a sign that I was to come to his side. I had never anticipated that he'd come to me, especially to die.

  Was that all I was supposed to be: his dumb pack animal? The transformation of the Chorus had afforded him a way to postpone Death. He had willingly become part of the voices in my head, and in doing so, had managed to retain his own identity. Was it a low-rent resurrection, a life beyond life? Or was it truly a means by which the knowledge of the Architects could be saved? If it was the latter, and I was inclined to think that was the case, then there had to be a way for me to transfer this knowledge. A way that wasn't the same as the manner in which I took souls.

  A memory stirred. A fragment that unfolded into a blur of steel and shadow. Her hands on me. The cold kiss of the bulkhead against my skin. Her legs wrapped around me, pulling me close to her. So very close. Beneath all the pleasure of the flesh, that other sensation: that sucking, pulsating whirlpool. Trying to draw something out. Trying to take a part of me.