Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (44 page)

I had stayed at the Grotto for a few days, watching and reading the city as it tried to understand what had happened. Trying to understand what had happened to me between the first light of dawn and the moment Antoine had Seen me walking back across the water.

I had been given another chance. The black stain on my soul had been purged, and I had been given new guides. New angels to fill the hole in my chest. What was I supposed to do with this knowledge? With this experience?

More importantly, why had Philippe twisted the threads in a way that had forced me to be the one facing Bernard. What was I to have gained from that experience that would then be useful to him? Originally, I had thought he would have called upon me to serve him, and I had waited patiently for a sign that I was to come to his side. I had never anticipated that he'd come to me, especially to die.

Was that all I was supposed to be: his dumb pack animal? The transformation of the Chorus had afforded him a way to postpone Death. He had willingly become part of the voices in my head, and in doing so, had managed to retain his own identity. Was it a low-rent resurrection, a life beyond life? Or was it truly a means by which the knowledge of the Architects could be saved? If it was the latter, and I was inclined to think that was the case, then there had to be a way for me to transfer this knowledge. A way that wasn't the same as the manner in which I took souls.

A memory stirred. A fragment that unfolded into a blur of steel and shadow. Her hands on me. The cold kiss of the bulkhead against my skin. Her legs wrapped around me, pulling me close to her. So very close. Beneath all the pleasure of the flesh, that other sensation: that sucking, pulsating whirlpool. Trying to draw something out. Trying to take a part of me.

Marielle.

She knew. She knew they were in my head. She knew what they offered, what secrets they held. She had tried to draw them off while we had been at Batofar. In the hallway. That was what she had been trying to unlock.

She had tried, and failed.

After that, things had gotten out of our control, and there hadn't been another chance.

I leaned out of the shaft and looked up.
What time is it?
I asked the Chorus.

They touched the ley, synced to the geomagnetic pulse of the planet, and told me.

After nightfall. Not yet midnight.

Unprompted, they also reminded me of the date.

"Second day of spring," I murmured. The seeds, planted in winter, were starting to break ground today. The dead kings, buried in the cold ground, rising again. The world, broken and bleeding, made anew.

I laughed, and something broke free in my chest. I coughed, spat, and laughed again, my lungs clearer now.
You are a sentimental bastard,
Old Man,
I thought.

He had waited until the last minute to come find me. So that everyone would be scrambling to find their new place in the organization. Within all that chaos, I would be able to move more readily, to be more able to accomplish the tasks laid out for me. But he could have initiated this plan weeks ago, in the cold death of winter, when everyone was hunkered down and waiting for spring to come. He could have surprised them all by starting early, but he hadn't. He had waited until the end of winter, until spring was imminent. For all of his education and enlightened thinking, he was still a vegetable god at heart. He was beholden to the cycle of the Land, and he wanted to be properly received into the bosom of that which waited for him.

In the old stories, the young lovers don't flinch when their goddesses tell them the price of being loved. They don't turn away when the ground opens up for them. They know, even before it is spelled out for them; they know what happens after that first kiss, and it never diminishes their love.

Leaning back into the shaft, I sent my tiny spirit light into the tunnel to see if there was any clue where it led. It went around a corner and bounced light back at me for a while. A route to follow at any rate; Lafoutain may have known where it went, but that knowledge was not forthcoming from the fog of the Chorus.

"What am I going to do with you three?" I wondered aloud. They were sulking, Lafoutain's suggestions about the way out notwithstanding, and the uneasy way the Chorus was boiling in my head said there was unrest in the rank. They were captive in my head, and it looked like I was going to miss the Coronation event; my presence wasn't required for it to proceed anyway. If I was supposed to give this knowledge over to the winner, then all I had to do was wait for someone to come looking for me. Antoine would probably smack his forehead tomorrow and
suddenly
remember where he left me. Then it would just be a matter of cracking my head open and letting the spirits out.

Was this what Husserl meant when he said they would leave me?

I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to die in this hole. That would ruin everyone's plan. As much as I wanted to curl up and die, if I tried—if I leaned forward a little too far and slipped off this shelf—the Chorus would just save me again. I wasn't done carrying them yet, and until I delivered them, they'd keep me alive.

So much for Free Will,
I thought, slumping against the wall of the access shaft. I could be pithed like a frog for all that my ego was needed. Just as long as basic motor functions stayed on. Just as long as the pilot light in my soul stayed lit.

Is that it?
the spirit of Detective John Nicols asked.

"Pretty much," I whispered, fending off his insistent question. "I'm pretty sure I can see bottom from here. What else is there?"

What about the child in the woods? The one who was frightened of the dark and the unknown? How did he survive?

"Was that survival?" I asked. "Look where it has led me. All that darkness, and for what? To be a pawn in someone else's game."

We're all pawns, Michael.
Another spirit intruded, another echo welling up.

"Fuck you, Old Man. You used all of us. Even your daughter. What kind of father does that?"

He didn't answer—probably thinking my question was rhetorical—and the Chorus stormed into a wall of white noise in my head. Nothing but noise.

What else was there?

There's a psychological oversimplification about men: they don't ask for directions. If you swallow that line, then there's a thousand more that follow, justifications and rationales for nearly every injustice or moment of human stupidity that can be read in our history. Men are too proud to ask for directions; their testosterone causes this hubris, this blindness to the world around them, and everyone else suffers for it. But if you look at our stories, the myths that have formed the basis of our society for generations, you find that part of the complex cycle of comprehending the Divine is getting lost.

If we knew where to go, then there would be no story, no crisis, no opportunity to transform our lives into something extraordinary. We would know all the secret portals to faerie, all the hidden paths through the black woods, all the secret signs that unlocked the sealed doors. Not knowing the path is an integral aspect of not knowing who we are, and being lost upon that path is critical to finding it, to finding ourselves.

It's not that men don't ask for directions; it's that most confuse the mundane journeys they take as being something extraordinary and special. Not every adventure from your front door to the supermarket or the deli or the shopping mall is symbolic of the great journey of self-discovery and initiation; some of these are errands. Some of them don't matter one fucking bit, and the sooner you get from point A to point B and back again, the sooner you can go about doing something that isn't a matter of fulfilling a baseline Maslowian need.

Neither is being lost an excuse for an existential meltdown. Sometimes being lost isn't anything more than not having the proper perspective on your situation, or not asking the right question about your current course and your heretofore destination. Being
lost
is a binary state, really, a frame of reference not much different from being
on track
. It's a matter of perspective. Flipping from being lost to being on track changes nothing about your physical state or your metaphysical location. You either know your orientation in space and time, or you don't. Light is either a wave or a particle. It all depends on the observer.

And his state of mind.

What else?

I still had the deck of tarot cards. The pocket they were in was somewhat inaccessible from my left hand (being on the same side), but eventually I managed to tug out the velvet bag. Everything else Philippe had given me was gone, but I still had the cards. I still had a way to
find
myself.

I tugged the bag open and spilled the cards into my lap. I didn't even bother trying to shuffle them; I moved them around for a moment, losing a couple to the long drop, and then picked five. I considered trying to get the rest back in the bag, and started shaping the pile into some semblance of the rectangular deck, but then a thought struck me.

Why?

Why was I bothering? They were Philippe's cards. What was the point of keeping them? John had called my attention to what I was doing in the beginning, but from his perspective, it hadn't made much sense. Keeping trophies. I was hanging on to the Architects. I was hanging on to the symbols of an office which was never going to be mine.

Why?

No more
, I thought, and I pushed the cards off my lap and let them twist away in the darkness of the shaft.

I was going to do a five-card spread. Keeping it simple. One for me; two for influences, above and below; one for the past, and one more for the future. I arranged them on my lap, face-down, and then leaned my head back against the wall of the access tunnel for a minute. Reflecting on what I was about to do.
It all depends on the observer and his state of mind.

Card reading wasn't the same as scrying, but it was close enough that I wanted to think twice before I committed to this course of action. Piotr would be the first one to point out that, invariably, the question asked wasn't the one answered by the cards. The reading always gave you a broader world-view than your tiny query encompassed; your subconscious' way of reminding you that your light was an infinitesimal dot in the vast sea of experience and being.

This is how it ends,
I thought, and let my breath out slowly as I opened my eyes.

Valet of Cups. Reversed.

Hanged Man. Reversed.

Knight of Cups. Reversed.

Ten of Cups. Reversed.

The Emperor. Reversed.

"Not much Grail influence there," I muttered as I swept them up and put them in my pocket. Struggling to my feet, I crouched and duck-walked into the access shaft. I had some walking to do, and there was probably another climb in there somewhere. Time enough to think about what the cards revealed.

Time enough yet.

I was a child of the Crowley generation, those magi who came into an understanding of magick in the era following the Great Beast's death. In the era following the occult revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s, actually. We were symbolically aware, charged with an understanding that every culture had its own sigils, its own systems of magickal reckoning. Crowley appealed to us because of the illusion he provided of being a great synthesizer. He spent a great deal of his life trying to convince people of his identity, and in the end, he forgot even that.

Crowley's entire tarot deck was a living thing—highly stylized, overflowing with a profusion of symbols, always fluid—in contrast with the more traditional decks. Like the version of the Marseille deck that Philippe used. While occultists before Crowley like Etteilla and Waite opted for simple designs that plainly evoked meaning, Crowley layered his deck with excess baggage, hiding everything in plain sight so as to obfuscate the real meaning within a wash of noisy symbolism. His cards tended to explode any given query into a profusion of interpretations, but I liked having more than one choice. A selection made it easier for me to understand the true path I should take.

Philippe's deck, though, was one of the Tarot de Marseille designs, one of the oldest patterns still used. There were variations of the Marseille pattern—two primarily—and over the years, printing mistakes and bad color correction had turned those two variants into a dozen or so. In Philippe's deck, the Fool was missing the seat of his pants and the small feline prancing behind him looked like it was about to claw his scrotum and penis. There was only one deck that featured a Fool with a bare ass and dangling sex parts. The John Noblet deck.

There was only one specimen of the deck—in the Bibliothèque Nationale—and it was missing a few cards—half the Swords. Marielle and I had gone to see the deck once, and when I had pointed this out to her, she had said something enigmatic. Something that hinted she knew more than I. As that was a common occurrence in those days, I hadn't given it much thought.

She had been right, in this case. There were other copies. Philippe's deck was complete, and the cards had been made in the last twenty years. Like Piotr, Philippe had probably made his own deck, and the cards, while worn and creased and stained with ink, felt like modern cardstock.

The Noblet cards were simple, line drawings filled in with a few colors. None of the confusion and motion of Crowley's deck. And yet, even with these simple drawings, there were hidden meanings to uncover, hidden symbols that would influence the querent's mind. I hadn't touched the cards very much after I had chosen them; I didn't want Philippe's influence to start changing them. I wanted a pure reading. One without too much noise. A reading that would clarify my confusion, that would show me the one path through the chaos of Philippe's death. I didn't care who wanted the Crown more; I didn't care who was manipulating whom, or how deep the thread-winding went.

I wanted to know my own mind.

The cards were all reversed, and typically that could be read as an error by the fortune teller, an inversion of the deck that, by being endemic, indicated a full rotation. A full circle. But I wasn't inclined to use that excuse. Let them all be reversed. It had been that sort of week.