by Mark Teppo
My left side burned, and I couldn't even feel the Grail as it slipped away from me. Someone shoved me forward and I stumbled, tripping over my own feet that refused to respond to my mental commands. I was as clumsy as a bull in the ring, weakened by blood loss from the picador's lance.
The Spear was pulled out, a savage yank more traumatic than the initial thrust. My legs gave way, and I collapsed in a heap, banging my elbow and forehead on the floor. The Grail struck the marble and rang with a muffled note, almost a sob; or maybe the sound came from my throat. I wasn't sure.
The world was inverted. Gravity flowed in the wrong direction, and my ears were filled with a buzzing harmonic tone. In the distance, Vivienne stood upside down, clinging to the floor like a vampire bat. The Grail lay nearby, its cloth cover coming undone, like a partially unwrapped Christmas present.
It's not time, I thought. Not yet.
I reached for the trailing edge of the cloth, my fingers groping desperately for the fabric.
"No, my friend," Antoine said as he put his foot down on my arm. "Not this time."
With a smooth motion, he brought the Spear down and I thought I saw the sun break through the fog, but there was no fog, nor was there any sun. It was just the fiery touch of the Spear as it cut through the flesh and muscle and bone of my wrist.
Antoine, his body shivering and glittering with the fading magick of the spell which had hidden him from my sight, crouched so that he could look me in the eyes. "Endgame," he smiled-that old, feral grin of his. "Your part in this Weave is done. It is my turn now."
I tried to grab the Grail again, but my stump just shook and spat blood all over the cloth. I tried to find the Chorus-to make them heal me, to tell them to make the pain go away-but they were scattered in my head. Like single fireflies, strewn across an acre of open field. I couldn't catch them. I couldn't hold them. I couldn't hold anything. Long smears blurred across my field of vision.
Antoine put his foot against my side and shoved. As I slid across the floor, my head flopped around and I could see Vivienne, who hadn't moved. Who did nothing but watch as Antoine pushed me toward the open elevator shaft. I reached out to her, or maybe I just wanted her to see the stump of my arm.
My right leg went over the lip of the elevator, and my left feebly tried to find some purchase on the cold marble floor. My left hand scrabbled on the smooth floor, and when I couldn't grab something there, I tried for Antoine's leg as he shoved me one last time. I felt the fabric of his trousers slip through my fingers. Too much blood. Too slick.
Vivienne never looked away as Antoine shoved me into the elevator shaft. And what made me let go, what extinguished the fading hope in my chest, was her expression. She knew he had been waiting for me. She had known his plan. This was her revenge, allowing one suitor to murder another. Or perhaps it was deeper than that. Perhaps this was her message to Marielle. You took my father; I will take your lover.
But we both knew it was an empty message.
She had warned me, but I hadn't listened.
Goddess help you, Michael Markham, if you are that alone.
I was just the dumb courier. I was expendable. A piece to be used and then discarded.
Antoine had warned me too. I will be patient.
I hadn't listened.
THE FIFTH WORK
Felix Anima
O libenter veniam ad vos ut prebeatis michi osculum cordis.
Virtutes
It is our duty to fight alongside you, o daughter of the king.
— Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo Virtutum
XXXI
In each corner of the room, squat stands with a dozen candles each provided illumination. Not enough to reach to the ceiling, not enough to reach to Heaven, but enough to light the lower realm. Opposite me, hidden by muslin screens, was a narrow bed, and shadows danced on the wall behind the bed, phantasmal figures partially visible over the top edge of the screens. Whoever lay in the bed was tied down. I could see enough through the gaps between the screens to discern that the figure wore a plain cotton habit, and judging by the shape of the bare foot I glimpsed, it was a woman.
Kneeling beside the bed-on the side where there were no screens-were three figures. Plain brown robes, belted with long strands of polished beads. Their hoods were up, hiding their faces. The one on the left was holding the long strand of his rosary, his fingers working the beads as he prayed. The one on the right had his hands clasped over his ample stomach, and from the angle of his hood, I wondered if he was praying or sleeping. The one in the middle leaned forward, his hands on the edge of the bed, listening intently to the sounds coming from the woman's mouth.
She was making guttural noises: not quite words, not quite moans of pain; growling as if there was something in her mouth, something obstructing her lips and teeth. Whatever she was saying was important enough that he listened, but not so important that he took the gag out. As if the sound of her voice was more important than the actual words she was trying to say.
What I say and what I mean are never the same.
Something cold touched my side, and startled by the invasiveness of the sensation, by the reminder of my own flesh, I tore my gaze away from the tableau of the madwoman and the priests attending her. There was a hole in my chest, one that wept blood, and for a moment, I couldn't remember how I had received such a wound.
I fell, John.
A fourth priest, kneeling beside the chair in which I was sprawled, was wiping the flow away with a blood-stained cloth. He held the rag over a narrow basin and wrung it out. Blood spattered on the dusty floor, leaving tiny blots of blackness.
My right arm ached; more blood-stained rags were wrapped around the truncated end, and around my forearm, a chain of glass beads-black as night-had been cinched tight. The rosary tourniquet. The silver medallion lay on the underside of my arm, pressed tight against my skin by the loops of the beads. The silver ball on the end of the chain-the sphere that hid the cross-hung from an inch of chain near my elbow. It knocked against the wooden frame of the chair as I shifted my dead weight.
The priest attending me pressed his cloth against my chest wound again and I recognized the blunt shape of his hands. I reached over and tugged back his hood. "Hello, John," I said. "Thank you for trying to save me."
Detective John Nicols nodded. "They say you can't feel anything, but I think they're wrong." As a spirit, he looked much more rested. More at peace with himself.
I looked away, directing my attention to the three wise men. "They've been pretty right so far."
"You're letting them be right," Nicols said. "You're believing what they tell you."
"Why shouldn't I?"
"Because they've also said everything they tell you is a lie."
Nothing is true; everything is possible. When Nicols and I had first met, I had thrown that old phrase at him. Mainly to rile him up, but there was some truth to its seeming contradiction. You could find some freedom in the chaos of that phrase. You could liberate yourself from the tyranny of those old manacles of William Blake's-those mind-forg'd ones-by adopting such an axiom as the foundation of your belief. Nothing is true, and so why believe in anything other than what you wish? Everything is possible, so why not dream of meeting God?
"Why are we here?" I asked.
"Because she Saw us," Nicols said.
"Who?" I looked at the woman on the bed. "Hildegard?"
"Yes," Nicols said. "She looked into the future and Saw us."
"You too?" I asked. "Eight hundred years of Western history preordained by this woman. I don't believe it. John. I can't."
"You can't dismiss it," he countered. "Remember the vision? The figure with all the eyes? The child who ascended into Heaven?"
"I can't trust anything Vivienne told me," I said bitterly. "Especially now."
"But you know, don't you? In your heart, you know she is right. You know who those two figures are."
"I'm sorry, John. I should have been stronger."
He p
ressed the cloth to my chest, and when he took it away again, there was less blood. "Strong enough," he said. "It's all right, Michael. I know it wasn't your fault."
"I can't subscribe to the belief that this all happened because it was supposed to. It makes it all so meaningless, and so many people died, John. There has to be some meaning to it. There has to be some hope that we could have made a difference." I closed my eyes as a wave of pain ran through me, a shuddering pulse that rippled from front to back. When it passed out of me, I choked and coughed, and there was blood in my mouth.
Nicols didn't say anything as he leaned forward and wiped my lips clean.
"She only had twenty-six visions," I continued when the shakes passed. "She saw key points at best. She couldn't have seen everything. Like Nostradamus. And look at his track record."
"True, but you're assuming you know everything he wrote. Maybe the material that was clearly the ravings of a madman are the only works that were made public. What of the rest?"
"Well, I guess I wouldn't know, would I?" I nodded at the three wise men clustered around the bed. "Not having all the answers like them." Now that I had acknowledged John's aid and that he and I were talking, I was stronger. More anchored in this dream. It was easier to breathe now, easier to speak.
"I'm willing to guess that the old batshit Frenchman didn't squirrel away a bunch of papers where he put things down in a much more lucid way. Even if Nostradamus had secret papers, deciphering them would still be a matter of interpretation, wouldn't it? Like the vision Vivienne showed me. It could mean anything. It doesn't have to be a representation of what happened in Portland."
Nicols smiled. "Of course, it doesn't. But that's the case with all of the secrets, isn't it?"
Through the gaps in the screen, I watched Hildegard suffer her ecstatic fervor. Was she Seeing the future? Like Husserl had said: scry reality and fix it in place by Witnessing it. Had her records been better than Nostradamus', or had they been the same sort of vague poetry that we associated with him: open to so many interpretations that it could fit whatever excuse you needed to justify your actions?
But the mission of the Watchers had always been to be True Witnesses, objective observers of history so that there was at least one record that was untainted by special agendas or personal biases. Or was that just the lie all of us eager neophytes wanted to believe?
How different was that from any history we learned?
I got lost in the woods, a scared little boy who was afraid of the dark and the monsters that might lurk within it, and so I invented a way to be strong. I invented a history for myself that would sustain me, that would allow me to understand this strange new world in which I had found myself. And what had that gained me? Wisdom? Understanding? Peace? Hardly. It had been a way to justify the pain.
Hildegard moaned and bucked on the bed, straining against her bonds. Her head moved on the bed, and there was a smear of blood on the mattress. Were her visions any different? What she saw, what she wrote down: Was it a record of the future, or a justification of her pain?
I looked down at my wound, now a pale hole in my chest. The bleeding had almost stopped, and the hole looked like a shadow on my skin. Nicols squeezed the rag over the nearly full basin, and pale blood spattered the surface of the pool. Like rain falling on the ocean. Why did we feel pain? Why had the Creator given us this failing? Why hadn't He made us stronger?
If you believed we were His eyes, distinct observers who could look upon His work and validate it by Witnessing it, then our purpose was to inhabit this world, to be part of its existence as a way of giving it all purpose. It is a grand extrapolation of the question about a tree falling in an empty forest: If no one is there to witness creation, has it really happened?
But was it more than that? Were we justification of His pain? Were our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our nervous systems, our souls a means by which the Creator expressed His own apprehension of being? Was our pain an infinitesimal part of His, split and shared across billions and billions of points of light?
"Of course, it is," Nicols said. He sat back on his heels. "All existence is suffering. Don't you remember the Eight-Fold Path?"
"Why are you here, John? And don't tell me that you're the guilty part of my conscience. I don't think I can take you parroting back to me everything I told you."
He smiled. "No, I'm a volunteer."
"Why?"
"To watch over you."
"What about them?"
"They're transient. They won't stay much longer."
I recalled Husserl's comment about the Architects. They will leave you.
"When?" I asked Nicols.
"Soon." He lifted his shoulders at my expression. "It's not my place to tell you." He looked at the three men and the possessed priestess. "You will know, I think. When it is time."
"But not yet."
"No." He shook his head.
I lifted my stump from the chair's armrest. The candlelight reflected from the silver medallion pressed into the pale flesh of my forearm. Cristobel's magick circle, meant to protect him from injury. What good had it done him when an entire building fell on him?
"I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft. I should be dead."
He took my shortened arm and turned it over so he could examine the medallion too. "You should be."
"But I'm not."
He smiled. "Not yet. Death isn't a part of this place. Neither is time. We are like that kitten. The one in the box."
"Schrodinger's."
"That's the one. Caught on the cusp. Neither one nor the other. Not until someone looks in the box and observes us."
"Who?"
"God, perhaps."
I shook my head. "I don't believe that. That would imply that there is a place where I can go that He cannot. That would invalidate His existence. That would invalidate mine."
"Unless you were God."
"But I'm not."
"Are you sure?" he asked. "You thought you were once."
"That was different."
"How?"
"I was trying to rattle Bernard. I was trying to get him to doubt himself. To doubt that he was right. He was going to kill us all with his insane plan to harvest everyone's soul. I didn't have the power to stop him; I had to trick him. I had to plant a seed of doubt."
"It worked, didn't it?"
"Yes, but-"
"So why does it have to be a trick? Why couldn't it be the truth? One you were more ready to accept than him?"
"I'm-I'm not sure. . What do I believe, John? What's the point of trying?"
Nicols laid the rag down on the floor and stood up. He offered me his hand, and waved his fingers when I looked at him dumbly. "Come with me," he said.
"I'm-" I indicated the hole and then, realizing I was pointing at it with the stump of my right hand, I waved that at him too.
"Those are the limits of your flesh," he said. "They don't matter here." He gestured again. "Come on, Michael. We need to wake her up or she'll never stop dreaming."
At first, I felt the pain of all my wounds, recent and historical: every bone ached, every joint complained; the old holes in my chest-imagined and real-burned like hot coals had been placed against my skin; the new hole, this one made by Antoine too, spewed a great rush of dark water-tears and blood; I lost sensation in my right arm again, a frost descending upon my nerve endings. The chair exerted a tremendous pull on me, like a mother's embrace. But I stood.
"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?"
