Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (40 page)

Vivienne took a piece of paper out of her pocket and offered it to me. I unfolded the page and looked at the color photocopy of a medieval drawing. A figure meant to represent God sat on the top of a tall mountain, and the mountain was filled with tiny windows from which people looked out at the sparks and rays of light emanating from His being. At the base of the mountain stood two figures, a child whose head had become a stream of light rising up to the foot of the angelic being at the peak. The other was a figure made entirely of eyes—

The Chorus flinched, and I crumpled the page.

Vivienne nodded. "I thought you might recognize it."

I shoved it back at her. When I inhaled to speak, I felt like I was breathing glass splinters. "What is that?" I gasped.

"Hildegard's first vision. She wrote about it in her book,
Scivias
. She recorded twenty-six visions, and wrote commentary on them all. Her record of this one mentions much of what you see here, and of the individual at the base, she writes: ' . . . At the foot of the mountain, stood an image full of eyes on all sides, in which, because of the eyes, I could discern no human form.' Does this sound familiar to you?"

Portland. The tower with the bloody eye. The shining light of the theurgic mirror. The darkness that followed, sweeping across downtown. The wave of cold hunger, rushing down to the river, wiping out all the lights. The Chorus, shrieking and burning as they were torn from me.
An image full of eyes on all sides.
What was I but a confusion of identities, a proliferation of desires and needs held together by a singular foul purpose. What was I but a being with no shape of its own. Only a Will.

Does this sound familiar to you?

How could she know?

I cleared my throat. "It depends," I said, equivocating. "On how you interpret the image."

"Well, that's the question I'm asking, isn't it?"

She still hadn't taken the page from me and I let it fall to the floor.

"I'll take that as a 'yes,' " she said.

"That was over eight hundred years ago. I don't believe in prophecy. I've seen too many of them twisted to suit the needs of the oppressor."

"The Watchers have been waiting for more than eight hundred years. You can imagine how, after a few hundred years, they started to get a little frustrated. No one really enjoys being a footnote to history. No one wants to be one of the innumerable generations who—stoically, of course—kept the faith." She bent and picked up the page. "You don't have to believe in prophecy. For the record, neither do I. But you do recognize the importance of symbolism and ritual, don't you? You have to concede that power is nothing more than the energy of those who are realizing their desires. There is always strength in numbers. What does it matter if it happens to be a picture drawn last week or eight hundred years ago?"

Goosebumps ran along my arms. "Is this the justification for what happened? It was ordained more than eight hundred years ago. We aren't responsible. We're just carrying out our destiny. Is that it?"

Vivienne smoothed out the page on the edge of the basin and looked at the picture. "Perhaps. Would you want that to be true?"

"I'd like—" I stopped. She was right. It was all a matter of interpretation and of rewriting history. Did it matter why Bernard and the Hollow Men attacked Portland? Did it matter why the Watchers had allowed it to happen?

No. Yes. Neither. Both.

If Hildegard had Seen that event, if she had Scried that night in Portland, then she had brought it into being. According to Husserl's argument for the power inherent in scrying. See the future; make the future. The rest of us were only fulfilling the world already visualized. Thinking that I failed to stop Bernard or that I had somehow triggered a series of events leading to this fight for the Crown was to take on guilt that didn't exist. There was no fault to assign, no blame to carry, because there was no free will involved. I walked on a predestined track—we all did—and what I
thought
about my actions and my desires was a subjective hallucination. Every decision I came to as a result of reason and logic were pieces in a puzzle that was already cut. Every hard choice I made was no choice at all.

If I wanted to believe this line of thought, then there was no tragedy. No crime committed against humanity. It was all part of a predestined course of action. We were but tiny players in God's cosmic drama, one He had written at the dawn of existence and was now watching play out.

"I don't want it to be true," I finished.

She held up the picture so that I could see it once more and then dropped it in the basin. "So, don't believe it," she said.

The paper darkened immediately as the ink ran, the lines blurring and smearing. The image of the angel went first, and then the tower with all its windows. The child with the long neck became even more distorted as the page floated toward the bottom of the basin, finally losing all semblance of human shape. Only the figure filled with eyes remained intact, and eventually it became invisible against the smear of ink. It looked, all too familiarly, like one of Philippe's tarot cards.

"Is it still there?" she asked, watching me.

I blinked and took a deep breath.
Was it?
I took a step closer to the basin and peered more closely at the page. The paper rested on the bottom, edges curling up along the slope of the bowl. The ink had run completely now, and some of it was bleeding off the page, tiny tendrils wisping into the water where they became bleached of their darkness. Fading strands of smoke that vanished as they became filled with light.

"No," I said. "There's nothing left."

"See? So easily dismissed. So easily turned into nothing more than a bad dream."

"You can't dismiss the vision as easily as that," I said. "You can't just throw it away and pretend it doesn't exist."

She leaned forward and looked at the nearly blank page. "I did, though. Besides, how do you know I was telling you the truth? Maybe that wasn't something Hildegard drew at all. Maybe it was something someone gave to me. 'Show this to him,' they said. 'See what he does.' " She shrugged. "Freaked you out, didn't it? How I got under your skin so quickly."

I took a step back from the basin. "No, now you're lying to me." The pictures on the walls seemed to flow, the faces changing into demonic visages wracked with laughter.

"Are you sure?" she asked. "Or is it more convenient for you to believe that I am?"

What do you Know, foolish magus?
The faces all danced with mirth.
What do you Know?

"I was there," I tried, my voice faint against the raucous laughter ringing in my head.

"Where?" Vivienne asked.

"Portland," I whimpered. "When Bernard activated the Key of Thoth and tried to talk to God."

"Were you?" she asked, pressing the point. Her words came hard and fast. "Not according to the Record you weren't. We had a Witness there. He didn't see you. Are you accusing a Watcher of falsifying a True Record?"

Antoine lied. He lied to protect himself and to elevate himself in the eyes of the Watchers. He hadn't done it to protect me; he had done it to take power for himself. His report gave him control of the situation. Whatever he claimed as the Record became permanent. I had been written out, like the shadow filled with eyes. Smeared into the background and then dissolved.
What's gone is gone
.

What was I doing now? Was I part of the cosmological rebirth that was coming? Was it my destiny to take up the Cup and drink from it at the Coronation ceremony? To be Crowned, thereby receiving the vision and wisdom of the Hierarch. Me—the untested, untrained, and uninformed magus—who had been given the keys of power by a madman. Or was that part of the lunacy of Husserl's interpretation: to twist me so much that I argued that I wasn't the Hierarch's tool, performed the tasks anyway, and when the end came, was pushed aside because, yes, I really wasn't his tool after all?

I didn't exist. I had died in the river, buried under all that water and flowing energy. There was no Record that I was still alive. Not if the Record was to be believed, and who was I to contradict the Record? To accuse a Protector-Witness of lying? I was a lonely voice in the wilderness, crying out to be heard, to be accepted, to be loved.

But why? Why did I want their affection? Their adulation? Hadn't I spent five years hiding from them, trying to get away from my past? Hadn't I tried so very hard to not be a Watcher? Yet, here I was: running errands for the Architects, killing the competition, and being twisted by the continued admonishment that I wasn't a real player, that I wasn't worthy of being initiated into the secret histories and occult mysteries of
La Société Lumineuse.

I took another step back and collided with the wall. My hand touched the painting and it felt warm and resilient, more like flesh than dried oil paint. A hand grabbed mine and I tried to pull free, the Chorus sparking down my arm and into my neck, but something sharp pierced the top of my skull and the lights went out.

At first, I thought the lack of illumination had simply been a result of the bowl going dark, but when the light in the basin came back, I realized I was sitting down, back against the wall, with no recollection of how I got there. I reached up and touched the top of my head, expecting to find an entry wound, but there was nothing but a tender spot. Nothing was broken. The Chorus buzzed in my ears like angry bees, and my sense of balance was off by several degrees in the wrong direction.

Vivienne crouched next to me, and put her hand under my chin so as to lift my head. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"No," I admitted. "It's been a long day. Couple of days, actually." Now that I was sitting, I really didn't feel like getting up. The thought earned me another buzzing pass from the Chorus. Angry little bees.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I understand. I was a bit abrupt. I could have been a bit—"

"No, no. That's fine," I interrupted. "I . . . just . . . well, never mind. It's not important." I forced a smile onto my lips. "I get it, though. I'm not the white knight everyone expected."

She pursed her lips. "What makes you think we need one?"

I started to protest, and then wondered why I was bothering. "You know?" I said, "I don't really fucking care if you do." My social filters were low, and I let the words out. I didn't care anymore. "I don't really care if Hildegard foresaw the Ascension Event in Portland. I don't care if it was
my destiny
to stop Bernard. All I know is that a lot of people died that night, and, really, there's no spin you can put on what happened that will alleviate the moral culpability of the Watchers. You were either Witnesses or participants, and both positions aren't acceptable to me. Both positions are reprehensible."

She looked at my face a moment longer, watching the movement of the Chorus in my eyes, and then she let go of my chin. "Very well." She sat back on her heels, and her hands fell into her lap where they unconsciously folded into a penitential prayer. "You came for the Grail."

I swallowed some of the bile backing up into my throat. "I did."

"You threatened to break into the Archives, to carve your way in with one of the old relics. Do you think you would have been successful?"

"No. I wanted to get your attention."

"Were you trying to impress me?"

A short laugh rattled in my throat. "No. I have a feeling you're far too cynical for me to woo you with a method as unsubtle as that."
The worst sort of bull.

"Woo me?" Her hands unclasped and moved to her thighs. "Well, yes, 'wooing' me with the threat of violence is certainly the least effective way to grab my attention."

"Is that why you sicced Nuriye on me?"

She hesitated for a second. "There are two lines of thought suggested by your statement, M. Markham. Both of which are offensive to me and to Nuriye. Would you care to try again?"

I swallowed the rest of the rage, and took a deep breath. Her tone had gotten brittle, and it didn't take the Chorus to read an elevation in her stress level. She was right—it had been an indelicate question—but her protestation of affront was partially a cover. There was some validity to the question.

"Fine," I said, letting go of my indignation and moving on. We had gotten off-track once before, and I knew I could keep pressing her, but what would it gain me? Moral satisfaction? It would be satisfying, but it wasn't what I came for. I actually did need her help in this instance, and her permission.

"One must be invited into the sanctuary in order to approach the Grail," I said. "I know that. Just as I also know that I can't 'steal' the Grail; it has to be offered to me."

"And why would I offer it to you?"

"Because you're supposed to."

She stood and walked away; she walked back to the basin and looked down at the glowing light. "Is that right?" she said finally.

"All this bullshit about Hildegard and destinies aside—this endless argument of Free Will versus Determinism that is the topic on everyone's mind—we were talking about coincidences. You tried to distract me, but it's not coincidental that a Visionary died yesterday to put me on this path, that I had to take the Spear from a Mason, and that a Scryer asked me to bring the Grail to him. It's all part of Philippe's grand fucking plan to re-create the world: it's the cosmological re-creation of the original meeting between the twelfth-century trinity."

"You're reading too much into recent events," she said.

"That's a hollow sounding excuse," I continued. "Bernard du Guyon thought he was playing at God with his little soul harvester, but he's like a kid with his first magic trick compared to Philippe, isn't he?"

Vivienne shrugged. "I wouldn't know."

"Your father wasn't part of the plan, was he? He was a casualty in this war. He wasn't supposed to die." I paused for a second, making sure I had the right answer before I took the next step. Who thought he had Seen his victorious ascension into the role? Who wanted it the most? Who wanted to be Hierarch?

"What did he promise you?" I asked.