Heartland tcos-2

by Mark Teppo

  There's a memory I have of Portland, and I don't know if it was a dream or a vision, but it burns in my head. Antoine standing on the bank of the Willamette River, watching the water wash away the ash of Portland. "It is done," he says. The morning sun has burned away all the black, and none of the soul-dead have survived the dawn.

  None but me.

  "I am standing on the precipice of the Abyss," he says, "staring into the face of nothingness, and what do I see but the glitter of many lights. So many threads-undone, unbound, twisted free of the Weave." He turns his ruined face away from the ravaged cityscape and looks at the man standing next to him. "Where do they go?"

  Philippe Emonet leans on his cane; his left leg, bent and twisted, pains him. His hair is in a disarray, and his face is slack and loose. He shrugs.

  Antoine raises his silver hand and touches his face. The fingers come away wet, dappled with a pink smear of blood and water. "I am the Witness," he says. "I have Seen what has been done-what we have done-and I will carry this terrible knowledge with me for the rest of my days."

  Philippe nods slowly.

  "We're all responsible, aren't we?" Antoine says. He lowers his hand and the fingers dissolve back into the smooth shape of the silver cap. "But you are the lucky one, aren't you? You only have to carry this weight a little while longer."

  Philippe's lips curl into something like a smile. Long enough, he says, his words clear to both Antoine and me, though his voice doesn't work. There are others who will carry it longer than you and I.

  "Of course there are." A bark of laughter rips out of Antoine, a stab of noise that appears to be painful. "You still need me, don't you, Old Man? You've taken everything from me so that I am pure in my purpose, so that my desire is focused on one thing only. Markham may have been your salvation, but I am to be your vengeance. Is that it?"

  In this dream, I am a ghost, a translucent vessel that is being filled with the morning light. A cup, not yet full of fire. I stand on the water of the Willamette River, and watch Antoine argue with his conscience.

  "I will wait," Antoine says. "I will Watch. That is what I will do for you. I will be patient, until my turn comes."

  As the light changes, as the vision becomes less like a dream and more like the morning after the death of Portland, I become more solid and the specter of the Hierarch vanishes. Antoine remains, standing on the edge, staring into the Abyss.

  Am I next?

  XXVIII

  Do you know the security code?" Antoine asked, leaning heavily against the back wall of the elevator in Tour Montparnasse. After leaving the beach, we had commandeered a car and driven back to Paris. Antoine had insisted on stopping at an open market outside of Caen where he had bought a bottle of expensive vodka. Something to dull the pain. I was still buzzing from the energy I had channeled and the sparks of Spiertz's soul; Antoine, on the other hand, was wiped out.

  Or so he professed, and after drinking most of the fifth in less than two hours, it wasn't much of a white lie anymore.

  "Yes," I lied. I hadn't seen the sequence that Marielle had entered, but it didn't matter. Every member of La Societe Lumineuse had their own code-the heavy security lay on the hidden floor anyway-and, according to Lafoutain, all the code did was announce your presence. As I had the memories of more than three Architects in my head, I had a choice of codes to choose from.

  I opted for Philippe's, and I was a little surprised when the code was accepted. I had half-thought they would have disabled his code already. With a tiny change in the air pressure inside the car, the elevator began to rise.

  "Starts with a nine," I told Antoine. "You know, the number of Architects."

  He looked at me, bleary-eyed, and pretended to not know what I was talking about.

  He wasn't as drunk as he seemed. I knew him now, better than he knew me. The conduit had been rather one-way in that regard.

  The elevator opened on the empty foyer of the Archives. I walked up to the door and tapped on it lightly with the tip of the Spear. The noise was tiny in the empty space, like a marble falling down a drain, but the reaction was quite dramatic.

  The walls went black and the lights went out. The only illumination was the yellow glow from the strip of lights along the base of the wall in the elevator carriage, and a violet pinprick like a distant star in the mantle of black space from each of the cameras set in the corners of the room. I held up the Spear, knowing it would register like a furious supernova on the magick-sensitive monitors.

  There was a long pause, a moment where both Antoine and the Chorus became increasingly nervous, and then Vivienne's voice spoke in our heads.

  "Why are you here?" she Whispered.

  "I've come for the Grail," I replied out loud, not having the same visual luxury as she to pinpoint my response.

  "A lot of men have sought the Grail," she Whispered. "A lot of them have stood where you stand and made the same demand. They all went away with nothing. You are no different than any of them."

  Antoine had spent a good portion of the drive back, most of it after he had started drinking, trying to convince me that Husserl would have already retrieved the Grail from the Archives. He had the ring; why wouldn't he claim the Cup? I had argued that the daughters wouldn't have given it to him; I didn't have a solid rationale, just the intuition that Husserl's Vision of the future required him to maintain anonymity as long as possible. As long as he was only an observer, he couldn't be enticed to become part of what he Saw, thereby limiting his exposure to the chaotic possibilities.

  I was starting to understand how scrying worked. Scryers remained in flux until they were forced to touch a thread. That was how they protected themselves from what they Saw. Rene had been too close to, too intimately involved in, the future he was Seeing, and as such, he hadn't been able to keep the bigger picture in mind, and had missed a critical detail that had cost him his life.

  Husserl knew I needed the Grail too, and if I succeeded in retrieving the Spear-which he, apparently, had every faith that I would-then I would need to visit the Archives. Why bother getting it himself when I would bring it with me?

  Though how I was going to get the Grail from the Archives was a bit hazy. Antoine wasn't too thrilled with my lack of a plan. Banging on the door and demanding it hadn't been his choice of methods, but as he hadn't offered anything better, it was the plan we had. He couldn't help but point out that the last time someone had tried to assault the Archives, they had brought an entire armored division with them. Hitler's occupation of Paris during World War II, Antoine had pointed out, had been an excuse to bring the heavy armor forward because the Schwarze Sonne Gesellschaft hadn't been able to crack the vaults.

  Then I had pointed out that Hitler's copy of the Spear had been a fake. We were ahead of the game this time.

  I tried to keep the conversation civil, though. No need to go ballistic. Not yet. "I have been designated as the Hierarch's representative," I replied.

  "Designated by whom? I do not see any symbol of office on your hand." she asked. "The Hierarch is dead. The spring equinox has arrived, and there has been no Coronation ceremony. Whatever rights his name afforded you are no longer applicable."

  I raised the Spear, and let the Chorus fill the blade. Not a fake. I was going to have better luck than Hitler's black magi. "Then I come under no banner but my own. I am Adversarius, and if you don't open the fucking door right now, I'm going to cut a hole in it with the Spear and come find the Grail on my terms."

  The dark got darker, as if ink had been splashed on the walls of the elevator and it slowly dripped over the emergency lights, dimming them by degrees. The Chorus flowed even thicker over my skin, giving me warmth as the temperature dropped, and Antoine bound a handful of leys to his Will.

  "Very well," Vivienne Whispered to us finally. The darkness began to abate, a slow emergence of light that revealed the endless stacks of the Archives. "However, the Spear does not cross the threshold. You may enter, but that phallic symbol doesn't. T
hose are my terms, and they are nonnegotiable."

  I made a show of hesitating for a minute, as if I were thinking it over. Much like she had with us. "Fine," I shrugged. I walked over to Antoine and held out the Spear.

  "Nice plan," he muttered.

  "Whatever works, you know?" I replied. "Could you sober up by the time I get back?" Keeping up appearances. Making him think I didn't know.

  The Chorus felt him probe me, and they rebuffed his attempt. Let him wonder.

  For a second, I froze, caught in a black panic that this was all a bad idea. A vision-seemingly prescient-that this would end disastrously. Then I realized it wasn't the Weave peeling apart and revealing the future, but just old memories caught in Philippe's past. When the Spear was brought out of hiding, blood followed. It was an old tradition, and I would have been more of a fool than I already was to think it wouldn't happen.

  "Sure," he said, finally taking the Spear. An involuntary shudder ran through his hand, a twitch that scampered all the way up his arm and into his spine. The Spear was quiescent, but it was still an artifact of power and I certainly knew what he was thinking. I knew what he was remembering.

  I'm sorry, Father.

  Absolvo et amo te.

  This would all be over soon. I met Antoine's gaze, and saw that he knew it too. One way or another, the end was coming.

  Now that I had been invited, I stepped across the boundary and entered the Archives. The wall became solid behind me, cutting me off from Antoine and the Spear. The Chorus registered a complaint, a rippling unease that moved across the back of my legs. Relax, I told them, this is all part of my cunning plan.

  They had grace enough not to laugh at me. Not this time.

  It was like Antoine had said: even the Nazi occult troops hadn't gotten in. Like I could have actually bashed the door down. Marielle had said you needed to be invited in order to gain access, and if they actually did have the Grail on-site, I had a pretty good idea why the place was impregnable. And why being asked was the secret key to unlocking the front door.

  Tell me what ails you.

  Sometimes the answer is in plain sight. Right there in the old stories.

  One of the other daughters was waiting for me, and without a word she led me through the stacks. The Chorus couldn't sync to the magnetic poles, and I knew she was taking more turns through the stacks than necessary, and somewhere along the way, I was pretty sure we had walked farther than the architectural plan of Tour Montparnasse allowed. The daughter, a muscular woman with long black hair who radiated a density of focus that informed the Chorus that she would-given the slightest provocation-be happy to break any bone in my body, led me to a free-standing room, a cube of stone that rested in the sea of stacks like a stone in the river.

  There were cases along each of the cube's walls, and on one side, between two of the cases, there was an open space where an ornate and Romanesque mosaic of a portal had been laid. The tile work was detailed and precise, the sort of attentive workmanship that was only found in old Italian villages; the largest tile wasn't more than an inch or so across, and the whole mosaic measured at least six feet by eight feet. I marveled at both the detail and the rarity of such a large piece surviving so many centuries.

  The outside edges of the mosaic were rendered as Ionic columns, pure white stone, and wrapped around each was a series of ribbons-red, yellow, and green. Hanging between the columns, suspended by iron hooks that, upon closer examination, were decidedly un-Romanesque clasps, was a tapestry. The Romans had always favored clean and simple lines, and the twisted knots of the clasps had a Celtic confusion to them. The tapestry depicted an idyllic scene, a Heavenly Garden, complete with a lush, viridian lawn, a grove of flowering fruit trees that were caught on the verge of exploding with color, and a sky, brilliantly clear.

  My escort stood to one side of the mosaic and raised an eyebrow at me.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I cannot open the door for you," she said. Her accent was Turkish.

  I glanced around, looking for Vivienne. Wondering if this was the punch line. I was invited into the Archives, but only so far. And she had already stripped the Spear from me, leaving me without that potent weapon.

  "Mlle. Lafoutain will join you inside," my escort said. "But you must find your own path within. The door will only open for those who know its secret."

  "You're serious," I said.

  She smiled and nodded. Her hands hung loosely at her sides, but I wasn't fooled by their casual placement. I had been granted access to the castle of the Grail, but I still had to prove my worthiness of being in its presence. The woman standing next to me was a guardian of the Cup; if I failed to open the door, she was perfectly within her rights to throw me out of the Archives.

  My guess is that she wouldn't mind doing so.

  I looked at the tapestry again, and mentally snapped my fingers at the Chorus. A head full of institutional knowledge, and no one wants to volunteer a helpful hint? They twisted counterclockwise, like springs unwinding, and remained silent. The Architects had too tight of a lock on the spirits wrapped around my soul. They weren't going to help.

  The landscape looked familiar, but I had had the same impression after a few hours of crawling through the archives of the British Museum a few years ago. A complicated confusion of favors had gotten me into one of their archives, looking for a landscape by Alfred Sisley that had supposedly been lost since the First World War. Someone had approached my client-known to be an avid collector-with this landscape, and the provenance had been good, but something about the deal had seemed rotten, and my client had asked me to put to rest a rumor that had been haunting her for years. Either the British Museum had this landscape or they didn't, but they weren't telling; she wasn't about to pay $12M USD to find out.

  I had spent hours looking at landscapes: works the museum hadn't catalogued because the provenance was suspect or entirely unknown; pieces so badly damaged they couldn't be restored, but which couldn't be destroyed either-curators collect and document, they aren't so keen on throwing things away; and, in a room deep within the byzantine subbasements of the museum, a collection of paintings the museum could never publicly admit they had.

  I had found the landscape in question-a dreary picture of an empty lane; Sisley was big on the en plein air method of capturing the light, and his early works showed a lack of understanding that some periods of the day were better than others for creating an impression of nature-and saved my client a lot of money. I later learned she hadn't been the first to have been approached with this scheme. There was a scam going, involving forgeries of pieces buried deep in the gray area of museum acquisitions. My client had gone hunting, and last I heard, the underground market was still reeling.

  A lot of art is a matter of learning by copying. Copies of other masterpieces, copies of the things the painter sees around him or her, copies of the piece they're working on in an effort to more fully articulate the idea caught in their head. Landscapes are easy: static, unchanging; you could come back over the course of a week, or a month, and the scene will be the same.

  There was one eighteenth-century Impressionist who did more than a hundred versions of the same scene. Unlike Monet, who transcended the entire movement with the emotional verisimilitude of his watercolors, this painter's style was entirely unremarkable. My source at the British Museum had shrugged and said, "They're part of history; it's not our place to decide whether or not they're worth keeping."

  The scene will be the same. Was this mosaic some view from Philippe's farmhouse? It had that nagging familiarity, as if it was the other scene: not the view out the front window, the one everyone remembered; but, rather, the view off the back porch. A vista seen but usually in context with something else. Something in the foreground that demanded your full attention.

  A connection came together in my head. It was something I had seen, but not like this. Not so naked. Usually there was a stone in the foreground. A tomb marker. And other figures too. Sh
epherds, clustered around the stone, inspecting the inscription.

  "Et in Arcadia ego," I said. It was a painting by Poussin; the Louvre had it. Seventeenth-century pastoral piece, thought to be cryptically symbolic for a number of pseudo-historical conspiracies. This tapestry was the same view, minus the stone and the shepherds. The world, unmarked by man. Still pristine, still innocent.

  My guide nodded, a glimmer of disappointment in her eyes, and stepped back from the mosaic. A breeze touched my cheek, a tiny caress of wind that wasn't the product of some HVAC system. A natural aroma of foliage and blooming flowers filled my nose and I turned toward its source. The tapestry fluttered, the wind coming from the other side, and the intoxicating scent of a pure land, untainted by exhaust or sewage, was a heady ambrosia. I realized the tapestry was nearly transparent. The landscape wasn't a picture detailed on the cloth hanging between the columns, but it was what lay beyond the curtain.

  I stepped forward, and was about to touch the fabric when the Chorus sparked against my side, reminding me of the stone in my coat pocket. I stopped, and reached for the hot rock I had brought with me from the beach at Mont-Saint-Michel. "Here," I said, offering it to the daughter.

  "What is it?" she asked, making no motion to take the stone.

  "What's left of Jacob Spiertz," I said. "Lose it somewhere in here, will you? And never catalogue it."

  When the Spear had shattered the skull, most of the pieces went into the water and most of Spiertz's soul had been harvested by the Chorus. But not all of it. A tiny nugget had remained, a twisted coal of an emotional resonance with the faintest hint of a malignant personality. It wasn't much; but it was the Architect. If there were other pieces, they would be devoured by the sea. This stone had fallen above the tide line, and I had picked it up. Just so it couldn't grow into something larger. Lost in the Archives, it would never have the chance to do so again.