Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (27 page)

Is the organization supposed to die with you?
I had asked, and he hadn't answered that question. Not then. But earlier, he equated himself with the organization, and the organization had become diseased. It could no longer support life, and it had to die. Vivienne's point was well taken. Philippe had never said it outright—
kill me, Michael
—but the inference had been clear, and he had let me touch him with the Chorus.

Though, in hindsight, I wasn't sure the Chorus had harvested him properly. In the past, they had been a voracious hunger, driven by the
Qliphoth
to harvest darkness so as to keep the lies intact. Philippe had been the first soul I had taken since that night, and it was like the new voices didn't know how to do it correctly. Thinking about it now, though, I wondered if the problem wasn't that the Chorus was doing it wrong—that I had somehow forgotten how to break a soul—but that the Hierarch had leveraged some loophole in my mind. Some trick by which he could remain a separate personality within my patchwork soul, and now that he had friends, they were building a separate community within my brain. Kind of like a rogue state inside your national boundaries.

"No," I told Vivienne. "I'm . . . not sure."

Nothing is ever lost; it is simply transformed. The memories kept overlapping. Mine and Philippe's and Cristobel's and Lafoutain's. More so than the old Chorus had ever been, these new additions complicated my identity, confusing my self with this scattershot amalgamation of past experiences. The Chorus had been my psychic anchor, a nexus through which I drew power that sustained me as I did magick, and I no longer needed them for that. The upside of the Ascension Event had been a healing of the split in my psyche. I no longer believed in the hole in my soul, and as a result, I had been more able to actualize energy from the leys.

The Chorus was still my conduit, though, an old habit that was integral to my understanding of how magick worked. But they had changed too, and their new formation had new secrets. Nothing approaching the
Qliphotic
agenda that had driven me back to Seattle, but a subtle influence on me nonetheless.

You will be your own agent. That is all you will ever be.

"I'm sorry." I shook off the echo of the Old Man's suggestion. "I don't mean to be difficult. It's difficult to explain what happened . . . "

"Why don't you try?" She glanced at the table, and saw something there that caused a momentary hesitation. She touched my wrist, and through the contact, I felt the warmth of her pulse. "Tell me what ails you," she Whispered, and the words remained in my head, a glowing script floating in the cavern of my brain.

My hand had been fidgeting with the pen, and the touch of her fingers stilled that energy in my hand. I had been doodling on the page. Tiny strokes, over and over, blackening a tiny spot in the margins. A curve, two lines, a third perpendicular to the two. A curve, two lines, a third. Over and over again.

The shape of a cup, like the Ace of Cups.

The glowing words compressed into an ornate key that dove into the shadows of my skull, finding a lock. The one that, apparently, controlled my tongue. Almost without realizing I was doing so, I started telling her the truth.

"Philippe . . . bequeathed me certain gifts when he died. The key, his ring, and his deck of cards. Those were the physical artifacts I got, but there was something else too."

I set the pen down and moved away from the table. I was full of nervous energy all of a sudden, and I wanted to move about. To not be caged. It was like going to confessional and finding the small box too crowded, too full of your guilt and need to talk to someone about what you had done. I had had a long time to live with my guilt, and until now, I had never been overtaken with such a need to talk about it. And yet, in this room with Vivienne, I wanted to tell her what had happened. I wanted someone to know my side of the story, before it got lost in the noise of the Chorus.

"He gave me the symbols of his office because I was an outsider, because I had no stake in the outcome of the contest for the Crown. I didn't care who wore it next; it wasn't my fight. But I was uniquely positioned to be an . . . " I searched for the right word, falling through a sudden tear in the nebulous veil of the Chorus. Falling and finding myself in a place without shadows, a place of clarity. " . . . arbiter, I suppose, an arbiter of the ultimate selection for leadership of the organization."

I started pacing, my legs working off some of the energy coursing through my nervous system. I had been unlocked, and Vivienne's key had unleashed a torrent of words and thoughts. The Ace of Cups, spilling its water. The flood of life, unrestrained. I didn't want to think about where this desire was coming from; I wanted to let it all out.

"Philippe knew there were members of the organization who were actively plotting to remove him. But as long as he remained bound to his office, they were forced to skulk in the shadows and attack his power in an indirect way. When their effort to create a new Hierarch failed, they fell back to a secondary position: mortally wounding him by wounding the Land. His strength reduced, they could more readily best him physically. If it came to that."

"Did it?"

I shook my head. "No, he beat them to it. He died before they could take his Crown."

"Giving it to you."

"Yes."

"And it isn't a physical gift."

"No. It is his . . . "

"Essence?"

"Essentially."

"And what are you supposed to do with it?"

I stopped pacing. "I don't know."

She nodded. "No wonder Marielle brought you to see me."

"Excuse me?"

She closed her eyes for a moment, and the room felt darker. All the exhaustion of the day came racing back to the forefront of my brain. On the desk, the tiny drawing I had scribbled no longer looked like anything important. It didn't look like the Ace of Cups at all, and a tiny part of me wondered what I had been thinking.

Something had definitely changed in the last moment, but I didn't feel like I had been conned, or that the words had been taken against my will. Quite the opposite. It had felt liberating to tell her, and now that it was done, I was glad to be rid of the weight. But whatever glamour had been on me, it was gone now. In the back of my throat, something clicked shut and my tongue felt heavy in my mouth again.

She sat down at the desk and laid her hand on what I had thought was the mouse pad beside the keyboard. It glowed beneath her fingers, a green light outlining her hand.

"What rank did you achieve when you were actively part of the fraternity, M. Markham?"

"Please, Michael." We might as well be on first name basis, after that confession I had unleashed. My tongue still felt a bit wooden. "I made Journeyman."

"Seventh Degree?"

I flushed. "No. Only Third."

"And how long have you been gone?" The computer came out of sleep mode, and the light from the LCD screen illuminated her face, highlighting the shadows under her eyes. "Did you study during that time?"

"Five, no, six years now. I've been teaching myself since then."

"Ah.
Venefice
."

"I wish you wouldn't put it that way."

"You were—are—an unrecognized and self-taught magus, who was given access to the teachings of the society and who, while retaining those teachings, no longer answers to the hierarchy to which you once swore an oath. I don't know; what name would you give to that sort of person if not 'traitor'?"

"How about 'free radical'?"

"All right,
solute frater
." With just a touch of sarcasm in her voice. "Let me ask you a few questions."

She moved her hand across the pad, mousing with her fingers, and the flat screen on the wall came to life, displaying a line drawing of a human figure, but overlaid with the ten spheres of the Tree of the Sephiroth. The sphere at the top of the tree floated over the figure's head. This was
Kether,
the holy crown at the apex, and it wasn't by accident that it appeared to be a halo. Much like the representation of saints in medieval art and iconography.

Like the saints in the watercolors and stained glass at the Chapel of Glass.

"What's this?" I asked.

"You tell me," she said. "What does it look like to you?"

"It looks like an overlay of the Sephiroth on an anatomical drawing. Like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man without all the geometric distractions. It looks modern though, like some aspiring occult student did some sketching and didn't bother with doodling a bunch of commentary around the margins."

"Very likely," she acknowledged. "But what does it represent?"

"It's the symbolic representation of mankind. Rather, humanity, if you prefer a more gender-neutral word. We stand upon the globe of
Malkuth,
and the forces and energies of the Sephirotic realm travel up through our bodies so that we may attain the enlightened awareness of
Kether
."

She selected an icon on her screen and the picture changed. The figure was no longer standing with its arms outstretched over the Sephiroth of
Geburah
and
Chesed
– Strength and Mercy. Now, the figure was in the traditional crucifixion pose, and resting in his open and upturned palms were the globes of
Binah
and
Chokhmah,
the spheres of Understanding and Wisdom. His head was bent at an angle, and the sphere of
Kether
was a solar disk pressing down on his neck, like a vast weight.

A dim line went through the man's neck, separating the head from the body. It was the line on the tree between
Binah
and
Chokhmah,
and the center of the line corresponded to the base of the man's throat. Right where
Daäth
lay, the entrance to the nightside of the tree. The Abyss where the
Qliphoth
dwelt, where they waited for the innocent to call them forth.

"And this one?" she asked.

I swallowed the lump forming in my throat, a sympathetic memory of the night in the Pacific Northwest woods where I was initiated into magick and touched the Tree of the Sephiroth. I made the mistake of touching that dark spot between
Binah
and
Chokhmah
. "The ascended martyr," I croaked, as I turned away from the screen. "The one who knows he cannot sustain the weight of the tree. But he bears it anyway, and so it crushes him."

I closed my eyes, but the image was still there, and the similarities between Vivienne's picture and the enormous Christ figure in the Chapel of Glass were readily apparent. Head bowed by the weight of the crown, no longer supported by Strength and Mercy, but holding Understanding and Wisdom in his bloodied hands. This was the magus who Knew, who had Seen beyond the veil and understood the nature of the Divine. This was the man who died, knowing who he was and what he would become. I had thought the figure had been sleeping, but there wasn't much distinction between sleep and understanding.

Philippe Emonet understood. Hierarch of the Watchers, Architect of Architects.
I am the Silent Guardian Who Waits
. In that down-turned face, in the serenity that wreathed the slumbering visage, was peace.

When I had killed him, when I reached into his heart and broke his soul, he had smiled.

"I am the daughter of the Scholar," Vivienne said after a moment. She spoke quietly enough that I had to come away from my own thoughts to hear her. "I am the chief librarian of the Archives. I have devoted my life to the illumination of knowledge. I don't like questions that appear to have no answer." She waited for me to look at her before she continued. "Like: Why did the Hierarch choose to give an untested, untrained, and uninformed magus—a dumb courier, at best—the symbols of his office? So that you could arbitrate?" She shook her head. "I don't think so."

Peace is not for us, Michael. Responsibility yes, but not peace.

Something popped in my chest. A reaction to those words, to this question. "It's a perfectly valid answer," I snapped. "You just don't care for the inference that it carries. Philippe wanted someone untested, untrained, and uninformed in the ways of the organization because that would be someone he could trust. Not the rest of you.

"I am supposed to seem like a clueless monkey sent to deliver a message, and fortunately enough, I am pretty good at that sort of charade. But I'm not, and while this game of rubbing my nose in my lack of formal training might be fun for you, it's the very sort of self-righteous and sanctimonious attitude that has poisoned—"

She stiffened. "I'm not—" With an angry swipe of her hand, she blanked the screen. "You think this is about power? About me not being happy that after a lifetime of service to these Archives I'm supposed to eagerly welcome some rogue magus into my sanctum? 'Oh, sure, come in. No, I don't mind that you've thieved two of our more prized artifacts from us. No, not at all. I don't mind that you're a fucking clueless idiot who has no idea what is going on. It's okay. I'll wipe your ass and hold your hand.' "

Her vehemence surprised me, and I fumbled for a minute, trying to figure out where this came from. Okay, so maybe I had come on a little strong, but I was getting tired of everyone wondering how in the world I had managed to get the keys to the kingdom. "It's not like that," I said. "I didn't ask for—"

"Oh, with all due respect, go fuck yourself." She put her hands in her lap and sat rigid. Her eyes were moist, and she took several slow, deep breaths.

This isn't about you,
Lafoutain murmured, and Nicols reminded me of the pain one takes on when death comes close to you.

"I'm sorry," I said after a time with a voice that wasn't entirely mine.

"For what?" she asked sharply. "You killed her father, not mine."

I took a deep breath and pushed the Chorus away so that I could speak without their influence. "I'm sorry," I said, "that your father isn't here to tell you himself how much he loves you,
little chicken
. I'm sorry that, in
this
instance, I am just a dumb courier, because it is no substitute for the real thing."