Heartland tcos-2

by Mark Teppo

  For an instant, the room vanished, sucked into that void, and I hung over the Abyss, staring down at the lack of black fire where Choronzon dwelled. Hands held me back, even though my feet were slipping over the edge. Hands around my waist pulled at me, pulling me away from Choronzon's magnetic attraction. More hands followed as the slumbering Master of the Abyss started to wake. Someone grabbed my right hand, and their touch seared the three wounds on my palm. I pulled my gaze away from the fiery halo of the monster below and looked over my shoulder.

  They were all there. Philippe, Cristobel, Lafoutain, and the rest. Pulling me back. John Nicols had my hand. Not like this, he said. His hand was burned black from where he had touched the theurgic mirror, black and so cold that his flesh burned against mine. I twisted around, grabbing his wrist with my other hand, and the Chorus cracked like a whip, pulling me free of the gravity well of the Abyss.

  I fell off the bed, banging my shoulder hard against the wood floor. Sunlight danced on the polished wood, dazzling me. A line of bloody circles led back to the door, and as I managed to focus, more crimson bubbles floated down and popped. There were tarot cards scattered across the floor, spread out in a widening arc from me as if I had been holding them in my hands when I fell. I glanced down at my torso and found a number of them stuck to me like a half-hearted attempt at a loincloth.

  On the bed, Marielle was still fucking me, though it was a younger man, an echo of a previous time. Laughing and shouting with delight, her legs wrapped around my waist, she was oblivious to the black shape riding my shoulders, its clawed feet digging into my back. It leered at her, panting with excitement, its one eye staring.

  She doesn't see it. None of us could.

  On the balcony, wearing a cloak of morning light, Antoine stood, watching. His silver hand was shaped like a bowl with a broken stem-a fragment of a cup-and he dipped a thin wand into the liquid it held. Missing a finger on his left hand, his motion was somewhat clumsy as he raised the wand to his lips and blew another stream of crimson bubbles. They floated into the room, and several popped against my chest, leaving red rings on the cards and my flesh.

  "My Qliphotic shadow," I said as I walked out of the apartment, as I left sanctuary and stood, exposed, on the balcony with him. A distant noise, like the roaring, gnawing sound of a conflagration, vibrated through me, making my bones and teeth ache.

  He nodded. It was your wound that never healed. The pain which you refused to let go.

  "I know. I needed an anchor. I needed some way to understand."

  Samael looked at me as if he could see me, his single eye squinting against the light; he knew we were talking about him. One of his long-fingered hands snaked under the chin of the man on the bed, squeezing his throat, and I swallowed heavily. I tried to remember that moment from five years ago; part of me wanted to think that was the way it had happened. As I had neared climax, I had started to choke, and because I hadn't been able to see him either-not then-my brain was already willing to believe it had been Marielle's hands on my throat. She had choked me as I came-

  "No," I said, and Samael hissed as I moved his hand away. "That's not true."

  In my revelation at the top of the tower in Portland, I had seen my initiation again, the night in the woods when I had first seen the Tree of the Sephiroth, when I had fallen through Daath and into the nightside. But I had seen that lost child from a different angle, from an external viewpoint where it was obvious that the hand choking him had been his own. It had been my fear that had suffocated me, that had led me to invite the Qliphoth in.

  That's what we're all afraid of, Antoine said. We're all wondering what part of our experiences are real and what are nothing more than panic or dread. He stared, unblinking, at the image of Marielle and me in bed. Or lust. Or jealousy.

  I peeled a card off the left side of my chest and showed it to him. The Magician. Antoine smiled and copied the pose: left arm up, holding the soap bubble wand; right arm down, the bloody water in his silver bowl sloshing over the rim. As above, he said, so be it below.

  On the hill behind him, the white shape of Sacre-C?ur flashed against the burning horizon. Black streaks, like the ashy remnants of burned clouds, smeared the sky. The crackling roar of the fire was louder now, as if it was chewing through timber and masonry a few blocks away.

  "So what do we do?" I asked.

  He shrugged. The best we can, my friend.

  "And if that isn't enough?"

  Don't fall into that trap, he said. He raised his wand and pointed it at the black shadow. That's what he wants you to think. That's what he told me when I started to listen to him.

  With a bloody, ripping noise, Antoine vanished and it was Philippe standing beside me on the balcony. His cancer had advanced and it covered his left side entirely. His blackened hand had all of its fingers, and his signet ring glowed with white fire; the bubble wand was now a short stick with a long blade attached. The Ace of Cups was clutched in his right hand.

  "I will not be your angel of vengeance," I told him.

  It's too late, he said. The final act is already in motion. What is done is done.

  "Why are you still here? Why are you and Cristobel and Lafoutain still in my head?"

  It's isn't time for us to go. Not yet.

  I looked back at my old self and Marielle-nearly invisible in the thick sea of the comforter-cuddling, their lust spent. The one-eyed shadow was gone. There was no longer anything for him to feed upon. "And when it is time," I asked, "then you'll go?"

  Perhaps.

  "Or I might be stuck with you for the rest of my life."

  Would that be so bad? David and Hubert are good companions. They have served me well over the years.

  "They knew they were going to die, didn't they? It takes an Architect to consecrate the Coronation, doesn't it? Either they take the Crown, or they recognize the one who does. That's why they're all being killed. So there's no competition."

  There is always competition. That is the secret at the heart of Free Will. The Will to want something.

  "If all the Architects are dead, then who gets the Crown?"

  Whoever wants it the most.

  "That's anarchy."

  No, it is the old way. The first way. The oldest ritual. As old as our ability to dream and want. It almost exists outside our belief in it. We are simple animals; we cover the earth with our desire lines just as we invent stories to validate our mental and emotional needs. We make it all happen, and we take solace when the cycle starts over in the way we think it should.

  "Fratricide."

  No, that is the version written by the West. That is the way we invented because some thought it would be easier.

  "Easier," I sighed. Brother against brother. Jealousy and rage allowed control of the flesh. That first sin, re-created time and time again through the ceremony of ritual combat. A justification codified by our elders as a rationale for our bloodthirsty instincts. As a shield for the lurking anarchy that lay deep in our hearts. "Is this what you meant when you told me to burn it all down? That I should come to Paris and bear witness to this annihilation of the rank."

  No, I meant what I said, quite literally. He pushed the tip of the Spear through the Grail card, and red drops welled up from the wound.

  "That's a metaphor," I pointed out.

  What I say and what I mean are never the same, he laughed.

  "I hate you, Old Man."

  Et te amo, mi fili. He pressed the bloody card to my forehead where it stuck. It is time to go back.

  The roaring sound of the world fire filled my ears and the blood running from the Grail obscured my vision. I reached for Philippe, but you can't grab a spirit. I reached for something, and as there was nothing there, I fell.

  XXIV

  Bad dream?"

  The stone floor was cold beneath me, and I sat up slowly, feeling like I had been beaten by a half-dozen men with sacks of rocks.

  The chapel wasn't completely dark. The stones of the exposed wal
l behind me gave off a slight glow, vibrant with the returned ley energy. The room stank of blood and my pant legs were stiff with it. There were huddled shapes on the floor. In the gloom at the back of the nave, catching and reflecting what light there was, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, watching me.

  I recognized his voice more than I knew his shape, and seeing that I was conscious, he came closer. Like Philippe, his bearing had that aristocratic aloofness that centuries of European breeding made instinctual, though the cut of his suit wasn't quite as traditional as the Hierarch's. He wore no tie, opting instead for a dark-colored shirt beneath the dark jacket. Disguising the male pattern baldness he had been suffering from for decades, his head was shaved, but the color of his pale eyebrows and the trimmed and oiled shape of his goatee gave away the fact that he was an older man. The rest of his face and neck were surprisingly smooth, but for a patch of blackness darker than the rest of the shadows in the chapel nestled at the base of his throat. He leaned on a metal-tipped walking stick.

  "Salve, Architect Husserl," I said, naming him. I know who you are. I know what you are.

  "Salve, Adversari," he replied. And I, say the same of you. "Were you having a bad dream?"

  The ward had closed, sealing the floor. I was sprawled beside the altar, my legs lying in the pool of blood from Henri's headless torso. My right hand hurt, and I could only move two fingers without a great deal of pain. Charles' body lay where it had fallen, also making quite a mess, and Antoine lay on his side, arm still caught in the floor. There was no sign of Marielle.

  My forehead was wet too, and when I reached up to wipe away the blood, I found a tarot card stuck there.

  "Yeah," I said. "I suppose I was."

  Black marks wiggled around the Grail like the lines in comic books drawn to indicate motion. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's the flying cup! I wiped my fingers across the card, smearing blood with the ink, and the surface became a blur of motion. A riot of symbolic suggestions.

  Reflections glittered off Husserl's glasses. "Ah, the Hierarch's cards. What do you see, blind little magus?" His voice still had that same mechanical precision, and I finally realized why. The thing on his throat was helping him speak. The trim throwback to the nineteenth-century fashion on his face was stuck there, like his eyebrows, with spirit gum. His skin was as smooth as a baby's because it was just as new.

  Someone had hurt him recently.

  "Blood and water," I said honestly.

  "Yes, the Grail. I see it too."

  I watched the motion on the card for a little while, and Husserl was patient. Why wouldn't he be? He knew the future.

  "Rene didn't have much luck with the future," I said, remembering the earlier encounter before the storm hit and I had been swept into that inchoate conflagration. That tsunami of etheric energy that had hurled me into an out-of-body experience-a cosmological dream. "I don't think he saw me coming."

  Husserl sighed. "No, he was too close. He was no longer in flux. He failed to look in the right direction."

  "You didn't warn him?"

  "It is difficult to change what you See. Dangerous, too, because one can become tangled in that Weave."

  "Ah, yes, that whole seeing is creating thing." I glanced around again, and there was a glint of metal in the floor nearby, a shard buried in the center of a ragged circle that looked like an imprint of my fist. The key-

  "You can't remove it," Husserl said.

  "Remove what?"

  "Even if you could," he said, "what would you do with it?"

  "I hadn't had a chance to think it through that far."

  "Trust me, then: it won't help you."

  You need the ring.

  I shrugged. "Okay, I suppose I can give you that one." I put the tarot card down, giving some thought to standing up. Not a lot. I examined Antoine, trying to find his left hand. In my dream, he had been missing his ring finger. He had taken the ring too, along with the key. Did he still-

  "He doesn't have the ring," Husserl said. "Nor does it matter," he repeated, his voice hardening. "Even if you could retrieve it." The thought of trying to take it from the Architect had barely entered my head. "The lock is broken."

  I relented, relaxing against the floor. "Okay, so no ring and no key. What are we doing here then?"

  "That depends on you, M. Markham," Husserl said.

  I spread my hands. "I suppose it does then, doesn't it?" The Chorus squeezed my neck, and I held them in check. As long as Husserl could play the Farseeing trick, he had the upper hand. I wasn't convinced that scrying would enable him to foresee every possibility-I had managed to trick Rene and the way I had touched Husserl's thread back at the Archives had seemed to surprise him-but he was anticipating everything readily enough at the moment that the best option might be to simply hear him out. The man had a propensity to talk. "What's on your mind?"

  "The same thing as yours," he said.

  I laughed. "I doubt that."

  "Don't be so sure of yourself. I may not have the advantage of carrying spirits, but I have been privy to the Hierarch's plans for a long time. I knew every thread he was going to twist before he did."

  "And you figured you'd let him do all the hard work, and then swoop in at the last minute."

  He inclined his head slightly. "Perhaps."

  "Don't you think Philippe might have anticipated that?" Husserl didn't seem inclined to answer that question, and a moment later, I found my own answer. The Chorus had uncovered a handful of memories and was feeding them to me. "Oh, wait, he did. At Chateau Neuf de Meudon."

  He gripped the head of his cane. "Yes, M. Markham. The Hierarch and I had a discussion there-"

  "A discussion?" I interrupted him with a snort of laughter. "That's not the way I remember it. Seems like someone got their face burned off." The memories weren't complete. They were stuttering loops like I was watching a short surrealist cut-up film. Fire, reflecting off the glass ceiling of the Grande Cupole. Husserl's cane with its knob of black glass. My hand on his throat, flames licking at the cuff of my shirt. His hair, burning.

  Husserl took a step forward. "Is that all you remember? You are a very poor Witness, M. Markham."

  There was more. Husserl had been smiling. Even as I crushed his throat and burned him, he had never stopped smiling at me.

  "But shouldn't you be asking yourself why he didn't kill me?" Husserl asked. "If he knew what I planned, why did he stop with my face?"

  Why hadn't I killed him?

  Husserl cocked his head to one side, and the weak light reflected off his glasses. "You're not sure. I don't have to See to tell that you don't know the answer to that question. Your head is filled with spirits, but you still don't know anything useful. You don't know why."

  If Philippe had known who the Opposition was, why hadn't he killed them? Why had he let them live?

  A really troubling point intruded on my thoughts: What if everyone had been lying to me? What if there was no Opposition. Perhaps they were all scrambling in the vacuum to be the last one standing. It is the first way.

  "Why don't you tell me?" I asked Husserl, shoving that possibility aside. That was too chaotic, too unstructured, and I couldn't believe that Philippe would have left so much to chance.

  He laughed. "Why should I? Why don't you ask him? You're his master now, aren't you? Or are you just a simple tool?"

  "You're trying to twist me," I said. "Just like he did. Everything you say is the same manipulative bullshit that Philippe used to pull on us. He read people very well, and he didn't have to know the future to know how they'd react in certain situations. You're doing the same thing."

  "Of course I am," Husserl said. "We all do, M. Markham. It's a facet of being human: all that lying, cheating, and conniving. It's what makes our meat so sticky sweet to the pure light of our souls. All that corruption. All that filthy sin. What else would the Divine Spark soil itself in but that which is the very opposite of its purified innocence?"

  "Don't make this metaphysical," I
said, realizing that sentiment applied to my line of thinking as well. Keep it concrete. "I'm talking about the very specific mechanics of shaping events and people to your ends. You're just like Philippe: whispering what we want to hear; suggesting what we already know, but can't bring ourselves to want. The only difference between you two is that he was better at it than you. Even with your special glasses."

  Husserl laughed. "Better than me? You think my actions are driven by jealousy, by some vague psychological need?"

  "Are they?"

  "Why do you think Philippe and I are at odds? How do you know this course of events isn't something that we planned together?"

  "You-" And I stopped. Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't that explain why Philippe hadn't killed him. What about the others? Cristobel had accepted his sacrifice eagerly; and Antoine, burned by my actions in Ravensdale, had suffered that pain in order to receive his reward. Why couldn't Husserl's actions be considered in the same light? Who was to say that they weren't all so aware of the big picture that a sacrifice of the flesh was but a minor token if it moved the plan forward. Hadn't Husserl done exactly that when he had called me at the Archives, ostensibly from Tevvys' phone? He had claimed to have done so at my request, but I didn't know that Moreau had delivered that message any more than I knew how Husserl had gotten my phone number. What had that conversation accomplished? He had told me I was a singularity, a point beyond which no future was certain, and that realization had unlocked an awareness of the Hierarch's grand plan. He had moved Philippe's design forward in a manner that suggested he was aware of some of the details of that vision.

  But this was the lie he wanted me to believe. A twist of logic that seemed so obvious and so natural, but when I looked at it more closely, it fell apart. So Husserl was privy to Philippe's plan, and Philippe knew that Husserl knew. But that didn't tell me who was ultimately playing whom. Husserl had as much opportunity-if not more-than any of the Architects. If he could read the future, then I would have been disappointed if he hadn't been able to anticipate what was coming. It would be easy to claim ownership of the plan now as I was the only one who could readily contradict him. Control didn't mean compliance or agreement. It simply meant knowledge.