Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (28 page)

A tear slid down her right cheek. When it fell onto her clasped hands, she became aware of it, and she came out of her mental trance. She sniffed once, and pushed the next tear back with a knuckle. " 'Little chicken.' " She shook her head. "He hasn't called me that in . . . a very long time."

Her hands fell back into her lap and she stared out the window. "My father and mother haven't spoken since I was seven. The last time I saw her was the summer of my twelfth year, when I visited her in Tromsø. I didn't want to come back to Paris. My father had to send someone to come get me, and I hated him for a very long time for that. I didn't want to be his daughter; I didn't want to serve. I wanted to be my own person, to not be anyone's 'little' anything."

When she paused, it would have been polite for me to ask what changed, what happened to make her feel differently about her father, but I couldn't find the words. My chest was tight, and the Chorus was a heavy weight, pulling me down.

"It doesn't matter what we think, does it?" she said. "We can't control how other people love us, can we? Eventually we recognize that they do."

With some awkwardness, I became fascinated with my shoes. And the carpet.

"Goddess help you, Michael Markham," she said after an excruciating pause, "if you are that alone."

I chuckled. "Far from it." To lend the statement some weight, I met her gaze and dared her to call me a liar.

She looked away. "Of course. How silly of me."

Which only cut worse. To be so summarily dismissed.

She smoothed her hair, even though not a strand was out of place, and swiped her hand across the pad once more. The computer came out of sleep, and she found another icon. "Is this the key you lost to Protector Briande?" she asked as another image came up on the flat screen.

We were done sharing, it seemed. Back to the business at hand.

On the slowly rotating image, the bow was intact, and I examined the intricate carving and scrollwork. "Yes, though the top had been smashed." It appeared to be a three-dimensional combination of several pentacles.

"Before or after you received it?"

"Before."

"By Philippe?"

I searched my memory, and the Chorus swirled around my effort, both aiding and confusing my attempt. Philippe's spirit remained elusive, unwilling to come forward and offer a helpful hint. "I don't know." I wandered over to the screen to get a better look. "Can you freeze it?"

She did, and I peered at the symbols. "What are they?"

"We're not sure, and these are, at any rate, only a best guess. But we believe they are binding talismans."

"And the blade is wrong," I pointed out. "The teeth were . . . elusive. You couldn't focus on them. They kept changing."

"I know. It's not possible to show that readily in this program," she said. She was actually warming to me a little now, almost as if we had gotten past that awkward dance of verifying each other's credentials and were now talking as peers. Or almost peers. "Even though the program used to draw this is a modified auto-CAD, it doesn't lend itself well to animated loops."

"A loop? Not an endlessly random sequence?"

"Perhaps," she shrugged. "I've never actually seen the key. This graphic is an amalgamation of several sources."

"What does it open?"

She selected another image from the computer and sent it to the remote screen. A still photograph of a castle on a rocky promontory. A rounded dome with a tiny gold figure mounted on the top stood at the peak of the hill. Around the base of the cliffs was an endless expanse of blue water. "Do you know this place?"

"Mont-Saint-Michel," I replied. "On the coast."

"Have you been there? Recently?"

"No," I said, and then: "Yes." A flash of memory. The green grass of a cloistered space, surrounded by the peaked arches of a sanctuary. Then: vaulted ceilings with exposed ribs; an underground space, barely a niche, hidden behind one of the oldest walls. The floor before the small stone altar was covered in script, radial arms spiraling outward from a central starburst. Closer to the altar, there was a smaller starburst of script, and when I put the key in the center of the smaller image, all of the script—both sections—flashed white and violet, a series of wards coming to life.

The memory fled quickly as I tried to anchor it, and all I was left with was a smoldering sensation in my palm as if I had briefly held a warm stone.

"Which is it?" Vivienne asked.

"I'm having trouble with my memory. It's not all . . . linear, and—" I searched for a good way to describe what it was like to have memories of a time prior to my birth. How could I tell her without going into an extensive discussion about what the Chorus was and what I did with it?

You can't. So keep it simple. Tell her a version of the truth. Something you can believe.

"No," I said firmly. "I visited once, many years ago. But
I
haven't been recently. What's there?"

"One of the two artifacts necessary for the Coronation."

"Which one?" I asked, as if I knew what they both were.

"The Spear of Longinus."

The air fled from my lungs, and I mentally counted to ten as the pressure on my chest began to ease. The Chorus buzzed in my ears and my skin tingled with all the excitement normally reserved for the minute and a half before the first item went up for bid at a Sothby's antiquarian auction.

If the Spear was one part of the tools needed for the Coronation, what was the other? The answer floated in my head, an image almost teasingly offered by the Chorus—the tarot suits: Wand, Disk, Sword, and Cup—and I couldn't quite believe it.

I realized Philippe had given me his tarot deck, not just as a means to communicate with me, but also as a symbolic representation of the mystery of his office. If the Spear of Longinus mapped to the suit of swords, then what would map to the other suits? There was an obvious answer, when I thought about it, and while I couldn't quite believe, the Chorus simply countered with a simple question:
Why wouldn't they have it?
This was the archives of the
La Société Lumineuse,
after all. If there was any place where such artifacts would reside, it would be here.

Which posed an interesting question.

The Chorus released their hold on my chest finally and I could draw air. "Why isn't the Spear here?" I asked.

Vivienne favored me with a withering look.

While Vivienne and I had been talking, Marielle had been arranging transportation, anticipating the need for a vehicle of our own. Too keyed up by my conversation with Vivienne, I offered to drive, and the dashboard GPS directed me to the A13, heading toward Mont-Saint-Michel. Traffic was light at this time of night, and within a half-hour, I was far enough from Paris that the flow was barely a trickle, and most of it was heading back toward Paris.

Marielle was curled up in the back seat, my bunched up jacket a pillow beneath her head. I resisted the temptation to tilt the rear-view mirror enough so that I could keep an eye on her. I had enough on my mind already; I didn't need the extra distraction of watching her sleep. Of wondering what she was dreaming about.

One of two.

Vivienne said there were two artifacts necessary for the Coronation ceremony. While I had managed to eke out the identity of one—the Spear of Longinus—my gut told me the other one was the Grail. The Grail was stored at the Archives—it had to be—and, for no reason other than perhaps the danger of having two such artifacts in constant proximity to each other, the Watchers didn't store the Spear in the same location.

My brain couldn't stop repeating the words:
the Holy Grail; the Cup of Christ.

Every child knows at least one version of the Grail story—the Roman Catholic version, at the least. The Grail was the cup Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper, and, in all probability, was the one he offered to his Disciples when he asked them to drink the wine that was his blood. Other Christian versions say that the cup was received by Joseph of Arimathea when he interred Jesus' body in the tomb—kind of a party gift from a ghost of the Messiah.

Pagan mythology claimed the Grail was Celtic in origin, maybe even Bran the Blessed's cauldron of mighty resurrections; or that it was a curved plate used to carry the head of a king through the phantasmal halls of the Chapel Perilous. Chrétrien de Troyes' final romantic poem of the twelfth century was all about the Grail, and though never finished, it was the symbol by which the questing knight was to be recognized. When the seeker was pure enough, the Grail would come to him, and he would be able to heal the king, thereby restoring the land.

It was the holy fucking grail—literally—of Western esoteric artifacts. The thing that every occult relic hunter and alchemy-obsessed magus spent their lives searching for. The Nazis had come close to finding it during WWII; at least, that was the persistent myth that refused to be easily debunked. Where had the Archives been before Tour Montparnasse had been built? Was that part of the reason Hitler occupied Paris? To find the Grail?

The Nazis had the Spear of Longinus, but hadn't known how to use it. The Gospel of John reports that Romans wanted to break Jesus' legs in order to quicken his death—nothing makes an occupying army more nervous than a martyr who refuses to die quickly. Before they could do so, an unnamed soldier stuck Jesus in the side with his lance. Whatever came out—blood, water, or both—convinced the soldiers that the Messiah was dead, and they went away to conquer the rest of Europe, thinking they had squashed the local groundswell of mysticism.

The point of the lance, covered with the blood of Christ, passed into legend as an artifact of mystical power. Along with nearly every other trinket from that day on Golgotha. What made the lance valuable to any earnest megalomaniac was that it was supposed to grant invincibility to any army that you lead. As a mechanism for propping up one's psychoses, the Spear was hard to beat. Though, having the Spear didn't work out all that well for Hitler.

There was another version of the story of Joseph of Arimathea, one where he already had the cup—before Christ died—and when the soldier stabbed the Messiah, Joseph held up the cup and caught the falling blood. Was that the story that bound these two artifacts together? Could you only work the Spear if you had the Grail? Was that the trick?

There are no tricks,
Father Cristobel pointed out.
There is only belief.

"Belief in what?" I muttered, glancing back at Marielle. She didn't seem to hear me; I could probably have a conversation with the spirits and not disturb her. "That Christ was more than a magus with a flair for dramatic presentation?"

Maybe they are symbols. Representations that bind the mind. Is the Coronation a reenactment of the Crucifixion and Ascension of Christ? And if so, what is accomplished with this Passion play of death and resurrection?

"You tell me. Is that what the ceremony is all about?"

What are you willing to believe?

"No," I said. "It is what I Know that matters. Not what I believe."

Is it? Faith gave me back my sight. It gave Lafoutain the strength to face his destiny. It gave Philippe the insight necessary to wield his power. Why do you believe it has failed you?

"I don't—" I struggled to find an answer that wasn't an hour-long diatribe. An answer that was also honest, to both him and me. When I had been at the top of the tower, facing Bernard and his Key, I had been sustained by faith. I didn't Know what would happen after I gave up the Chorus and faced the Key. I didn't know what my sacrifice would give me.

I still didn't know. I could remember what happened after the Key detonated, but it was like someone else's dream. I had enough of those sorts of things in my head to know the difference between my own memories and those I collected. My memory of the palace of wind had two perspectives, and I wasn't sure which one was true. Or if they both were. Or if they were both nothing more than a dream.

But what isn't a dream? Life is nothing more than a series of wakeful and dreaming states. States that, in retrospect, the mind transforms into some allegorical and mythological justification for existence. Descartes said
"Cogito, ergo sum,"
but that only provides for a singular point of existence. What makes us human is the order offered by sequential history. Thinking and learning and thinking again.

But that was still a linear, nearly mechanistic existence. Simple computation. The type that we can replicate with a computer. Computers could, with extensive enough programming, argue that they, too, could pass the
cogito, ergo sum
test, but that only meant they were highly functional.

How do we become nonlinear? How do we learn to consider the possibility of consciousness and knowledge beyond what our brains currently hold? With the act of dreaming; the act of faith. Free Will was the ultimate expression of faith, wasn't it?

That was the crux of Cristobel's question, really. Did I Know the Cup of Christ and the Spear of Longinus existed, or was I willing to believe in them? If they existed, they were incredibly valuable historical commodities, so valuable as to be worthless on the open market. Considering them as religious artifacts, they would validate several thousand years of Church doctrine, and probably cause all manner of self-fulfilling prophetic apocalyptic reactions. As objects with mystical powers? Well, that was a bit trickier.

Prior to two months ago, I would have doubted the last. I would have acknowledged the first two and that would have been enough. But, having experienced the power of
The Book of Thoth,
I suddenly wasn't so able to dismiss the possibility anymore.

That was the trouble with questions of faith.

Perhaps,
Cristobel offered as he faded back into the phantasmal body of the Chorus,
the Cup and the Spear aren't important. Perhaps they are simply tools for a ritual.
His voice faded into a crackling storm of noise, a tempest of memory and emotion stirred up by the Chorus.
Rituals are the chains that bind us together.