Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls

© 2010 by Mark Teppo
This edition of
Heartland: The Second Book of the Codex of Souls
© 2010 by Night Shade Books
Art © 2010 by Chris McGrath
Design by Michael Gin
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart
Edited by Marty Halpern
All rights reserved.
First Edition
ISBN 13: 978-1-59780-155-3
Night Shade Books
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com

Lightbreaker
Heartland
Angel Tongue
(Forthcoming)

"Yet, poor old heart, he helped the heavens to rain.
If wolves had at thy gate howl'd that stern time,
Thou shouldst have said 'Good porter, turn the key,'
All cruels else subscribed: but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children."
 

– William Shakespeare,
King Lear

Is the nature of your trip business or pleasure?"

"Business," I said. I showed the customs agent one of my generic business cards. "Meetings, actually."

He gave the card a cursory glance, as there wasn't much on it. Minimalist design aesthetic, that leave-much-to-the-imagination attitude that made it easier when I had to use a different passport. "Antiques," he said. The corners of his mouth moved up. "In Los Angeles."

"Hollywood," I explained. "Scouting for movie props, and for some private clients. That's why I'm here, actually. I figure if I can open an office in Paris, then—" A well-timed shrug. "—you know, they're all about façades out there."

As compared to
here
—at Charles de Gaulle Airport—not far from Paris, that glittering cultural center of the universe. But the rule still applied: tell someone what they want to hear, and without meaning to, they let you become invisible.

The agent's stoic expression eased, his lips edging toward a real smile, and he thumbed through several pages of my passport. "Yes," he said, nodding. "They are fascinated with how things look."

Like a well-used passport. He had been doing this job for some time as he had unconsciously started looking to match port of entry stamps with whatever his computer screen was telling him. But the old method of stamping passports was another victim of computerization. A lot of countries didn't even bother stamping the pages anymore, but that didn't wipe away the old rituals, the old way of thinking. Banishing the cultural and muscle memory took longer.

Piotr's contact had liked my suggestion of modeling the travel history on my own. Easier to keep the lies straight that way. The really clever bit had been to reuse a majority of the pages of my old passport so as to include those few places that still did the stamps. Authenticity is a matter of matching enough details to fool the experts, and more often than not, they presuppose what they should see anyway.

"Your French . . . " he said as he turned back to the front, " . . . it is very good." An inflection in his voice, just a hint there at the end of the word, suggesting a question.

"Thank you." I swallowed, pushing down the knot forming in my throat. In the past, my French had been serviceable; now, it was much better, but then I wasn't relying on my experiences alone. The Chorus twisted in my chest, a memory of old snakes, and from their coils, I heard the rising echo of their voice—the susurrating echo of many pretending to be one. I had always absorbed language quickly from the Chorus, but this time the connection was different, and my fluency was nearly perfect.

The customs agent nodded, his attention on my passport picture, and I realized he was waiting for me to elaborate. We had used the picture from my old passport as well, instead of playing games with image manipulation. My hair was shorter now, and lighter. Looking at the picture, I could see how haunted I had been: the stain of the
Qliphoth
in the flesh below my eyes, the distant stare, the slack skin of my face, the shadows at the base of my throat. I looked like a man worn out before his time, and the only distinguishing feature—the one detail that made the rest irrelevant—was the white band of hair. A narrow braid of fine hair ran around my throat. A gift from Reija, my Finnish witch. A reminder of what I had both lost and gained with the Chorus.

Piotr had vouched for the forger. A Five of Disks man. Reliable. Very competent. There was nothing to worry about.
This is one man's curiosity. Nothing more. Keep the lie simple. Make it
true.

"My mother's uncle lived along the Aude," I explained. The lie came easily—much like my new fluency with the language—as if it was
true
. As if
I
believed it. "We used to visit every year when I was younger." The Chorus coalesced into a stream of images: the farm house, its brick chimney leaning toward the east; the wooden railing of the horse pasture fence; the trees along the slow water. It wasn't my past, but the memory was mine now, part of the mental travelogue of my life.

There, in my head, the image of a dark-haired girl, chasing white geese across the pale field. Yellow flowers, early to bloom. Spring at the farm.

"But not recently," the customs agent said. His gaze flickered toward his computer screen.

"No," I said carefully. "I've been . . .
traveling
elsewhere."

He gave no indication he had heard my emphasis, and for a moment, I felt like a fool for trying such a trick.
They weren't watching. Not this way
.

A few months ago, when I had been interrogated in Seattle by the local Watcher, Lt. Pender of the Metropolitan Division of the SPD, he had pulled an extensive list of countries I had visited from TSA. It hadn't even occurred to me until a few days later that if Pender could pull that data so quickly, who was to say that other members of
La Société Lumineuse
weren't equally able to query this data? I had been careful to stay hidden on a magickal level, but I had been trusting to security through obscurity—stay off the watch lists, give the security agencies no reason to notice me, and trust that the avalanche of data could never be properly mined to track me.

Even with the reassurance in my head from the Chorus that they weren't Watching this way, even with the added obscuration of the fake passport, I couldn't help that momentary spasm of panic that I was being a fool for coming back to Paris. That I was doing exactly what someone wanted me to do.

You are,
a spirit in the Chorus whispered, and the rest of them turned the hiss of these two words into echoing laughter.

"Just the one bag?" the agent asked, oblivious to the tension knotting up my spine.

I nodded.

The agent's gaze flickered toward the line of waiting passengers behind me. "Most don't travel lightly," he said. "Lots of baggage."

I forced my heart to slow down. I exhaled slowly through my nose, pulling a Kundalini warmth up from my belly, up through the tension in my spine, up to my throat and face where it could lift the corners of my mouth. "I travel a lot," I said, the words falling through the warmth in my throat. "I learned the lesson some time ago: travel light; you never need as much baggage as you think you do." Each word came easier, drawing the tension out of my body. Growing lighter with each letter, shedding the weight of old paranoia. It was still so easy to be bound by that old way of thinking, that bleak fury that had driven me for so long, that restless need for revenge. In the dim chambers of my heart, it was easy to welcome back that old animal instinct. "Besides, the airlines charge now for extra weight. I tell you, they're getting cheaper all the time. Soon they'll be weighing us when we board . . . "

The customs agent nodded, no longer listening to me, as he tapped a few keys. "Welcome to Paris, M. Dupont," he said as he slid my passport across the counter. "Have a nice visit."

I took the folio. "Thank you," I said, making a small show of being annoyed that he had cut me off. Something to give him the satisfaction of having controlled the conversation. Something to make me seem smaller. As I walked past him, he had already waved the next person forward. With each step, I was vanishing from his mind.

They aren't Watching.

I walked toward the arch that separated the security area from the main terminal. De Gaulle was a series of pods, built years before modern security theater, and even after every attempt to turn it into a series of dehumanizing little boxes, it still evoked the interior of a gothic cathedral. The new arch was a faux wall, built from pressed wood products and molded plastic, and it certainly didn't have the grandeur of any of the arches of Notre-Dame. But it had its own magic: by virtue of its shape and design, it was a threshold; a portal between here and there, one magickal space and another. Arches, doors, entryways, thresholds: they were all symbols of change. Once I crossed it, I would be in a different world.

I would be back in France.

I had caught an earlier flight than the one that had been provided for me. The direct flight was too obvious, and I couldn't believe that someone wouldn't have been Watching there. Especially when my real name had been on the ticket. I had gone out to Sea-Tac much earlier in the day and had talked my way on to standby for the less direct flight. At the last minute, the gate attendant released a first class seat. I had feigned surprise and eagerly paid full price for the ticket. The airline had been happy to gouge me.

The flight went through Heathrow, where I had sat for several hours in the British Airways lounge and tried not to think about my final destination. Or the phone call I wasn't making. Excuses were plentiful: it was an international call; I didn't have a cell phone; she might not be home; what was the point of leaving a message. After all this time?
Hi, it's Michael; I'm not as dead as you thought.

Baggage. Lots of baggage. Physically, I had grown accustomed to traveling light, but, in my head, I was standing at the curb, waiting for a Sky Cap and a cart. The
rapture
in Portland had graced me with a new burden—a different sort of baggage—and not all of my old mistakes had been forgiven. Sins may be absolved, but the stains left behind were another matter entirely.

The Chorus flushed through the braid of white hair around my throat, leaving—in their wake—a tingling sensation that flowed down into my chest like a film of water racing across glass. An involuntary shiver followed, a purely physical reaction to the mystic flow. I still wasn't accustomed to this new freedom they enjoyed, this new independence from my Will. Certainly less of the malignant taint that had been eating at my spirit for the last decade, and there was a constant hum to them now, as if they were some sort of autonomous holistic system, keyed to maintaining my shell.

Too much like a guardian angel for my liking.

Then there was the issue with the Old Man. Maybe he was too strong of a spark to be subsumed quickly. Maybe the process of mapping history to mine was slower with the new Chorus. They weren't as ravenous as the last bunch, and it had only been twenty-four hours since Philippe and I had met in Seattle. In Harvey Alleningham's library, where we had talked. Father to son. Teacher to student. Magus to magus.

Less than a day had passed since we had had our talk, and I had taken his soul.

Staring at the arch that separated Customs from the main airport, I was reminded of Aleister Crowley's commentary on the Moon, the nineteenth card of the Major Arcana of the tarot. Well, the Moon was never far from my mind these days. Not since Portland. Not since Devorah nearly cut my throat with it.

On the Moon card, there is a void between the pillars, a threshold between the two paths represented by the pillars. A bloodied moon hangs low in the sky. The card represented the cusp of possibility. The Moon was the edge of midnight. On
this side
of its pillars, you were still in the real world, on
the other side
was both dream and nightmare. Unrealized until you stepped across. Until you actualized the future.

You See it, Michael, it becomes so; that is the key to the ego of the Moon.

While in the lounge at Heathrow, I had looked at the deck I had brought with me, and the Moon had been warm, the ink seemingly still wet on the card. Unlike Crowley's symbolic explosion, the Marseille Moon was like a surrealist landscape painting, a flat illustration of disparate objects: the pillars, the dogs, the rays thrusting forth from the lunar disk, the crab in the river, the moon itself. But it was a syncretic whole, all the objects to be treated equally, and not read solely as a representation of the swollen eye of midnight. The meaning of the pillars and the space between them was but a piece of the puzzle, as were the tears falling from the gibbous eye and the crab reaching up for them.

You could hold yourself on this threshold, balanced on this moment of possibility. You could live your life here, never crossing over, but it was a life in abeyance. A life never fully realized. You had to cross the threshold. You had to move forward and pass between the pillars. You had to decipher the mysteries offered by your existence, otherwise the river would—eventually—wash you away.