Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (29 page)

And through the storm of the Chorus, there came a bolt of clarity, like sunlight piercing a dense layer of rain clouds. I almost slammed on the brakes and stopped the car as I lost track of what was real and what was in my head. The vision passed in a second, but in its wake, there was a lingering strand of light, a flickering series of loops that I could follow back through the noise. Like a chain, or the stones of a rosary.

Anamnesis. Remembering what you have forgotten.

All the memories in my head, all those echoes of other men and other times, they were a chain. I hadn't been able to make sense of them because I hadn't any sense of context. But there was a way to understand them, to see how they all fit together. I had been confused by their overlap, by how they seemed to be variations of the same event, and in many ways they were. They were all celebrations of the same event: the same classic cosmological rebirth sequence. You celebrate the beginning of the world by re-creating that moment of Divine Birth. Each Hierarch came into power through this same ritual. Over and over again. Across several centuries. That was the chain that bound them all together.

When I grabbed the chain of light, the storm of the Chorus broke, splitting open like an enormous sunflower blooming, and its petals stretched all the way to the edge of my vision. I fell into the sunlit embrace of the petals, tumbling through a haze of light and dust, and I passed through a veil and out the other side where I saw the living pattern of the Weave. And I Knew what it was.

The Weave was a tapestry, a mass of threads woven together into a complex pattern too vast to comprehend. It was the Akashic Record of our souls, the threads that bind us to each other and to the world. We are who we are because of the passage of our threads through the Weave. It is. It was. It will be. Everything. All laid out in an infinite tapestry of existence. This was the body of God.

As I floated over the infinite canvas, I realized it was three-dimensional as well, having a depth that I could now perceive. This was how the Hierarch saw it; this was why Cristobel insisted that it wasn't a weave at all. Beneath the surface, the threads were tangled and knotted in unceremonious clusters and clumps; they were folds and ripples across time and space. I felt a whisper, a silent exhalation of agreement. Yes, these were the loops created by each Hierarch during his reign. The visible record of their manipulation of the threads—the cutting, the splicing, the severing: all the marks of their secret touch upon the world. And
there,
a clustered knot larger than any others. That was the knot through which all the Hierarchs passed. That was the knot where they were born and died.

The Cup and the Spear were, like all things man creates, nothing more than symbols. Tools by which the world can be re-created. But there is a difference between normal rituals, like the ones we do every day or even once a week in the sanctity of our churches, and sacred rites. That difference is magick. And magick comes from Will. And Presence.

I carried Philippe Emonet's presence in my head. Parts of his soul were still here, trapped in the web of the Chorus.

It didn't matter if I believed that the Watchers had the Grail and the Spear, there were others in the organization who did, and they believed in their ritual. They Knew of the power behind the rite. They knew someone got to be Crowned, and in doing so, would become the Hierarch. They wanted to Know the future, because it would be the one they imagined. The one they could manipulate into existence.

They wanted to Know the secret of the Body of God, and they would spill blood in order to achieve that vision because that was the way the ritual worked.
This is my body. This is my blood.

That was the way they knew how to transfer the spirit from one body to another, and the spirit they wanted was Philippe's because he knew the secrets. He Knew.

I blinked, snapping back to the car and the road, and the image of the Akashic Weave vanished. With the reduction back to the microcosm of my own head, I found some clarity as well, a focus consumed by one question.

"Who does Philippe want to be King?" I said it out loud, thereby anchoring myself in the flesh again. Anchoring myself with the basic question that simplified all of the confusion of histories in my brain.

Not only could he See all the threads, but he could twist them as well, and he had been. But to what end?

Why had Philippe given me the key and the ring, and his soul? While Vivienne had posed the question that was bothering her in those words, that wasn't what she really wanted to know. It wasn't the
why
that troubled her, but
to what end?

My history of Paris—the unfinished business between myself and Antoine, between Marielle and me—had been blinding me. I hadn't been thinking about the bigger picture. About the real reasons why Philippe came to Seattle. It wasn't to look me in the eye and try to justify Bernard's actions—or even the actions of the other Watchers. He knew what my reaction was going to be to his justification for their massacre. He knew I would be angry, prone to the violent nature which haunted me. He knew he could goad me into killing him.

I told myself it was doing him a favor, just as I told him I wasn't going to be his agent of vengeance upon the others. I told these lies, and then acted differently. Just as he knew I would. Because that was the way my thread was wound. A thread he had been twisting for a long time.

Was I his candidate for the Coronation? No. Vivienne was right: I was the wrong guy for that thankless job. However, was I his stand-in, his psychic avatar in the twilight of this era? Was this my penance to be paid for my flight five years ago: to die in the service of the organization that I had abandoned?

That question aside, if it wasn't me, then who was it? Like the slow collapse of a lengthy chain of dominos, a carefully constructed plan was coming to fruition. But, was this still his game, or had it been co-opted by someone else? Had things gotten out of hand, moved far beyond even his undead reach, or were we still beholden to his vision?

Who was it, then? Who had he envisioned as standing at the nexus of this coming era? Who was supposed to be Crowned?

I twisted around in the seat and looked in the back. I wasn't sure, but I thought I saw shadows squirm across Marielle's face. As if she had just closed her eyes.

Sometime after 4:00 a.m., when I had switched over to the A84 and put Caen behind me, the road vanished. The headlights still worked, but they revealed nothing. I glanced further afield and saw no lights either. In the distance, on either side of the road, there had been an irregular stream of lights from farms and tiny clusters of houses, but those were gone as well. Everything was gone; it was like the light of the world had been extinguished.

In the back seat, Marielle whimpered in her sleep. A sublimated cry of suffering that couldn't be held back.

I stopped the car, and twisted around in my seat to touch her. She was shivering, curled up into a fetal position—as much as the seat belt would allow—and when I touched her leg, she spasmed. Her head snapped back, bouncing off the headrest, and her eyes shot open. Wide and staring. Not seeing me. I grabbed at her knee as she started to thrash like she was having an epileptic fit, and when my touch didn't calm her, I bore down harder on her knee.

Her hands shot forward, her fingers wrapping around my wrist, and the Chorus shrieked. The psychic whirlpool was there, but it was a ravenous void now, a sucking hunger greedily pulling at them.

Vis,
I told them. Be strong. They held on to the anchor I offered them, and we became like a turtle caught in the path of a tornado: armor up, make as small a target as possible, and ride it out. All storms pass, eventually, and this one did too. Gradually, Marielle's eyes changed: no longer staring unseeingly, filled with stormy fury and blind panic; she came back to herself and knew me again.

"Goddess," she whispered. The white band of teeth marks on her ring finger were bright and visible, as were the bones of her knuckles, stark beneath her skin. She finally realized how tight she was squeezing me and let go. "What was that?"

"I don't know." I rubbed the skin of my wrist, trying to get the blood moving again through the mottled flesh. Part of me was wondering what I had seen in that naked terror in her eyes.
We are all bound to something, be it darkness or light,
the Chorus whispered, recalling the New Year's Day morning and the promises offered and taken between us.
Sometimes we choose which, and sometimes it is chosen for us.

She fumbled with her seat belt suddenly, struggling to get out of the confines of the car. She was halfway out when she threw up. I rooted around in the bag of processed food I had gotten at an all-night stop a few hours ago for something resembling a clean napkin, and when I got out of the car and offered it to her, she had finished heaving up the contents of her stomach. She accepted the cheap napkin and wiped her mouth.

There were stars in the sky. Orion looked down on us, and I felt less frightened knowing the heavens were still there. Whatever had happened could be more mundane than the terrifying cosmological possibilities of the onset of darkness if the stars were still in the sky. I knew their light was an echo, a stream of electrons that had been traveling for years and years, but my tiny human brain clung to them.
Let us choose this.

"Can you feel it?" Marielle asked, and when I shook my head, she grabbed my arm. The Chorus flowed down and leaped across the connection of our flesh, and I felt the sucking emptiness again. We were standing on the lip of the Abyss, its yawning need a persistent whisper in our heads.
Give of yourself. Give everything. Feed us; we are so hungry.

Like the circadian buzz of the soul-dead in Portland, their psychic chatter burrowing into my head as I had walked back to the tower and the unholy theurgic mirror.

"The leys are gone."

My eyes grew accustomed to the low gleam of starlight. The road was there, under our feet and the wheels of the car; a thin breeze, barely a whisper of breath, touched my face when I looked around; but, other than the hum of the car engine and the repeating warning bell of an open door, there was no other sound. The world was still there; it was just a dead zone.

"Look," she said, pointing. Instinctively, I tried to orient myself on the compass points, but without the ley energies, I couldn't tell what direction she was pointing.
Over there
was the best I could do.

A nearly invisible scatter of light clung to the horizon, like a dying searchlight that wasn't strong enough to penetrate a damp coastal fog. Too many shadows.
Too many echoes.

"How close are we to Mont-Saint-Michel?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. Fifty kilometers maybe. We passed Caen a while back."

I looked toward the other horizon as if I could see the invisible wall of force that had blown through the leys and scattered them. They hadn't been consumed; they had been driven away, and in the absence of that force, they would come back. All things return to fill a vacuum.

"We need to go," I said.

The oubliette at the Chapel of Glass. When the spell holding the grid at bay came down, the psychic energy came back, rushing to fill the void.

I realized how Marielle had been able to pinpoint the light on the horizon. The sucking vacuum wasn't coming from her; she was too attuned to the leys not to feel the hunger of a land bereft of its natural energies, and it was hungriest at the epicenter of the blast.

Beneath Mont-Saint-Michel.

There was a warehouse fire raging in the industrial district of Avranches. The rest of the city was dark but for isolated pockets of generator-powered illumination, and the fire was a vibrant spectacle of orange and yellow. Beyond the fire, we could see the psychic glow surrounding Mont-Saint-Michel.

Still a ways off, floating in a sea of darkness, the fortified island and cathedral were covered in a haze of sparkling motes. The void at the island was nearly palpable, and the ambient glitter of distressed energy was a pervasive cloud surrounding the rocky spire. Somewhere between ash and snow, the bleak cloud made Mont-Saint-Michel seem like it was caught in a localized snow storm. Fog and ice, filled with glittering reflections of moonlight. A storm made visible only because of the pure darkness beneath it.

Marielle hadn't said a word ever since we had first spotted the island, but I knew what she was thinking.
Antoine
. He had the ring and the key, and Vivienne had been certain that he knew what to do with them. He had come to fetch the Spear before us, and had triggered some sort of psychic trap.

Though to call it a "trap" was to categorize it as the same sort of thing one used to catch rabbits or squirrels or even a bear; this was on a different scale entirely. But the principle was the same: put your hand in for the prize, trigger the snare, and it all comes down on you. In this case, it was like yanking a lever and having a small-yield nuclear warhead drop on you.

Every kilometer we drove got us closer to the island, but it wasn't fast enough for Marielle. The Chorus was turning in an ever-tightening gyre, feeding off her tension. It wasn't just concern for Antoine, there was another, deeper, panic surging in her chest as well. A paralyzing fear, the sort you never thought possible, but which was caught in your chest now as if it had always been there, as if it had been lurking for a long time, waiting to squeeze your heart. The Chorus knew that sensation, and we circled each other, memory and instinct spinning in frenzied orbits.

The GPS guided me to the frontage road that ran along the tide flats, and I ignored the water on the road as best I could, drifting and praying through each turn that the wheels would find dry pavement again. This close, there was physical damage, evidence that the leys had been scattered from their regular paths. The pavement was cracked in places, jarring edges that slammed against the wheels as I drove over them. The tide was in too, further than it had been in years, and sections of the road were under black water. Fortunately, none of it deep enough to swamp the car engine. Yet. I fully expected each puddle to be the big one that would drown the car, but our luck held.