Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (20 page)

This time, the laugh didn't get caught in her throat. I tried not to react, but it was like getting hit in the face again. She knew I had no idea.

The Chorus read a haze of magick coming off Marielle as she stood next to the car and leaned over to talk to the driver again. The driver smiled, welcoming her suggestion and letting it smooth his memory. His window scrolled shut and the vehicle slid away slowly from the curb. Marielle didn't look at me until she had walked a few paces and realized I wasn't following her. The wind pulled at her hair, winding it about her face and neck.

I pointed across the street at the massive shape of the one-time gunpowder factory, now a celebrity hospital. "Uh, the hospital is over there." I could have said it a hundred different ways, but my tone was nothing but petulant attitude.

"Too many eyes." Marielle said it like she was talking to a child.

"We don't have much choice," I pointed out. "I don't know how you're doing, but this thing is eating me." I tried to be a little more conciliatory, assuming that part of our crankiness toward each other was due to the twisting spikes in our guts and not the petty argument we had had in the cab. "I'm not going to be able to hold it off for much longer."

"Then you have some incentive to follow me, don't you?" She didn't wait for me to answer.

I sighed. Obviously the disagreement about Moreau was going to hang on a bit longer.
Ride it out.
Within an arc of steady light floating in my head, the spirit of Detective Nicols exuded a calming influence.
Hold on to what matters; let the rest go.
And, a second later, when I hadn't moved:
Follow her.
My legs started kicking on their own accord, and I stumbled into a steady trot, jogging to catch up with her.

We didn't go far, just a block or two further along the road, and when she turned toward the river, I saw our destination. I would have had to be blind to miss it. It was anchored at a quay on the river, and lit up with a thousand strands of red lights.

"Batofar," she said.

We could hear the music from here, and at quayside, there was a line waiting to get in. Batofar was an old lighthouse boat, Marielle explained as we walked over. Moored on the Left Bank since the turn of the century, it was a progressive nightclub catering to the electronic and industrial crowd. Small and intimate, it had several bars onboard as well as a dance floor below deck.

"And why would we want to go inside?" I asked. "There's not a lot of advantages in a cramped space with no escape route."

"It's not on land," she said. "And they have absinthe."

I swallowed a scathing comeback.
Ride it out.
But she read the annoyance and disbelief in my face. Somewhat surprisingly, she didn't bite back.

"I can mix a drink with absinthe that'll take care of the poison," she explained. "And it'll be harder for the geomancers to read us if we're not in direct contact with the leys."

Now those were two reasons I could get behind.

Dockside, there was a narrow gate with a temporary shelter that looked like a good breeze would tear it off the quay. Three blocky men in dark trench coats were slowly processing people through a security checkpoint. Everyone going through the gate was decked out in their best gothic and industrial gear: helmets and headpieces studded with rivets and chains; piercings through every visible (and invisible, I'm sure) body part; gas masks and insectoid goggles; black jackboots and long trench coats with sinister authoritarian logos; vampire teeth peeking out from black-stained mouths; Victorian-era clothing, decked out with steampunk accessories.

I hesitated as we approached the dock. Marielle could get away with the minimalist goth look in her black top and pants, but I was looking like a country hick in town for a weekend while my uncle took the pigs to market. Even with the cool pockets on my jacket.

"We're not going to be conspicuous in this crowd?" I asked.

"Eccentric," Marielle corrected. "There's always a couple."

"Couldn't we find someplace where we could be invisible instead?"

"We will be." She softened, shedding more of the black mood that we had brought from the cab. "Trust me."

I did, and when my hand started to reach for her, she met me halfway, wrapping her fingers around mine. Turning my hand up, she pressed her lips against my palm. I cupped her face in my hand, and didn't want to let go.

She lowered my hand, gave me a sad little smile, and led me toward the boat. Nothing more was said. Nothing more needed to be said.

The security detail took one look at me, and tripled the cover charge. Because I looked like that sort of sucker. They would have considered rolling me for my wallet and dumping my body in the river, if it hadn't been for the unconscious glitter of the Chorus under my skin which gave them pause.

On board, the red lights strung along every surface made everything appear as if covered in blood. Through Chorus-sight, I could see sigils woven everywhere: across the bulkheads, around the metal pipes, crawling across the hinges and locks of sealed doors. The lighthouse stack was a confusion of arcane script that seemed to tell some sort of story about ascending angels and Enochian watchtowers. The bar in the front prow of the boat was lit by black light, and most of the drinks were glowing green and yellow. As were the fangs of more than one patron milling around in their best gothic finery.

The entire structure shook with the music. Most of the upper register was a mess of echoes, too many metal surfaces that broke everything above subsonic into shards of noise. The lower registers, though, reverberated through the frame of the boat; the rhythm pushed at me from every direction, like being caught in the crush of a midnight rave. The beat echoed in my lower back and groin, a steady thrum that was creating a bit of stir.

Piotr had once told me that the engines on old boats—like the rusty freighters on which he had shipped around the world during his time in the Merchant Marines—would sometimes vibrate at a frequency that drove the sailors nuts
. You stay at sea too long,
he had said,
and it doesn't take much to get you off. The ship takes care of her own.

"What?" Marielle asked, noticing my expression.

"Nothing," I said. "Something a friend once told me about boats."

Her naked arm brushed against my hand. Instinctively, I stroked her skin, a motion of old familiarity. A shiver ran through her frame, and she turned slightly, moving closer to me. She put her mouth next to my ear, and my hand grabbed her waist. Comfortably, as if we did this every day. She exhaled for a minute, sorting through some response in her head, before she settled on a string of words. "The poison," she said. "We need to deal with it. First."

When she turned away, most of her body slid across mine. Hip, breast, shoulder. It was the sort of broad stroke a painter used to cover as much of the canvas as possible. It was the sort of motion that made it clear what was on her mind.

The poison.
The Chorus wound into an ever-tightening knot in my groin.
Focus.

She led me toward the door that would take us down to the lower bar and the dance floor. Inscribed on the door in ink that glowed white in Chorus-sight was a magick circle, calling for protection against spirits and possession. It didn't flair as we passed.

One of the pentacles of Saturn.
Constitue super eum peccatorem, et diabolus stet a dextris ejus.
Protecting the innocent from possession and the influence of foul spirits.

Not much help for those already lost.

Below deck, the light was purple and crimson, splashing off metal surfaces so as to create a play of shadows and reflections that made the hallway seem wider, the ceiling higher, and the dance floor cavernous. The DJ booth looked like it was a half-mile away, and the intervening space was filled with a crush of gyrating bodies. Whatever gothic aloofness or mechanical inflexibility was adopted by the patrons of the club above ground was abandoned down here, laid aside for a feverish exultation of the music.

The bar, a long slab of shiny steel, was near the door, and Marielle dove into the surging crowd like a championship swimmer vying for a channel crossing. I stayed near the wall, feeling a little more grounded with a steel bulkhead at my back. Colorful flashes of light were bursting at the periphery of my vision, and I was pretty sure they weren't the club's light show. Sweat ran down my back, and the Chorus was moving uncontrollably in my head.

I was running out of time. My reserves were dwindling quickly. The energy I had acquired from taking Lafoutain was going too fast, eaten up in a losing battle with the poison in my system. I had lasted longer than the others, but that was a small comfort in the long run.

A woman bumped into me. Hooded and wrapped in translucent latex, she was anonymous but for the swirl of her tattoos visible through the sheer material. Flaming snakes crawled up her belly, and ravens with lightning clutched in their talons rode her shoulders. She groped me like an old friend, and laughed as I responded to her eager fingers. Her tongue was pierced with a star, and the light behind her eyes was entirely unworldly.

Her companion, a sleek dominatrix with bloodied lips and too-pale skin, pulled her away from me. The shining one, still laughing, waved to me as they dissolved in the sea of bodies, and for a second, it looked as if she were carrying the disembodied head of her stern friend on a platter.

Behind them, flickering in the crowd like a reflection caused by something in the corner of my eye that was catching the light from the DJ booth, was Antoine. My teeth chattered as a cold draft snaked down my collar, and my vision washed out with too many colors as I started blinking uncontrollably. He was suddenly everywhere, hiding behind every face, and the more I tried to find him in the crowd, the more I wasn't sure which face was truly his and not some illusion. I spotted the woman in latex again, still laughing with the star in her mouth, and when I tore my eyes away from her dancing light, Antoine's face was gone.

But the sensation that he was watching me was still there.

Tremors ran through my legs, vibrations that increased in amplitude as they moved to my chest. Pressing my back against the wall for support, I scanned the crowd near the bar for Marielle. The Chorus reached out, flicking from light to light, trying to find her psychic signature. I needed something familiar. Something I could trust.
My anchor. Where had my anchor gone?

A centurion stood near the bar. I blinked, and he remained. Out of time and place. Glistening as if he had just stepped in from the rain. Over his head, a bronze fish was attached to the wall. The ostrich plumes of his headdress were crimson and black. He held a pole in his right hand, and the top was ragged as if several inches of the stick had been crudely snapped off. The shaft was stained black, as if it had been dipped in oil, and some of the blackness was on his hand too. He wore mirrored sunglasses, an incongruity that made him more like a costumed patron than a vision.

Something burned my side, and when I slapped at my coat, my hand hit the pack of tarot cards in one of the inner pockets. Like a detoxing alcoholic who finds a tiny bottle of vodka in the sofa cushions, I dug for the bag and fumbled with the strings. The cards spilled out, and I frantically grabbed at them, trying not to lose any.

Death. The Tower. Lots of swords. The Eight of Cups. The Moon. The High Priestess. Too many. Too many possibilities. I couldn't focus, and I felt like I was drowning. The beats were waves, battering me against an unyielding shore. Too . . . many . . . choices.

It was the Chorus, flush with a cacophony of voices. Too many willful souls so recently taken. I couldn't control them, not in my current state. Their histories and personalities were overwhelming me—still too vibrant—and I was vanishing. Struggling to block out the sensory tumult of the dance floor, I tried to relax.
Don't force it,
I thought.
Don't try so hard.
My hands knew what to do. They could master the deck, and I wouldn't drop any of the cards; and if I could hold the cards, I could hold my thread. I could find myself again.

Somewhere in the rush of noise in my head and the pounding waves of sounds, I found shelter. I imagined a tiny alcove, almost like a monk's cell, tucked away in the bowels of an unknown monastery. No light. No windows. Just a space large enough for a man to kneel and consider his own fate. His own choices, and the paths granted to him. A quiet place, where I could sift through the detritus and the dross of my being and ascertain what had been lost. Where I could remember who
I
was.

This tiny place was like the altar I had visited. Not in any profane church, not in any physical building. The one surrounded by wind and light, though when I realized the stone was there beside me, there was neither wind nor light. Just an empty void, a vacuum without life or spark.

The stone was bare, unmarked by Bernard's water. This place was untouched, unmarked by sacrifice. I hadn't come here yet. No one had. It didn't exist. Not yet. It was just an idea in my head.

There was something in my hands, and I thought it was the deck of cards, but it wasn't. The cards were gone, gone with the rest of the real. I was somewhere else, hidden away in this wilderness of the mind. The object in my hand was luminous, twitching and squirming in my grasp as if it were alive. My fingers were translucent from its light.

There was a wound in my side, a long rip weeping slow tears. Dried on my naked skin, in a track running down to my waist and thigh, was a line of rose petals.

If I opened my hands, would the light go out? There was no answer to my question, not even from my own spirit, and so I kept my hands pressed together tightly. I was afraid to find out what happened next.

I do not Know the course of the future. I cannot See what comes next.

In the darkness before the world began, I hugged my warm hands to my bare chest and wept.

Drink, my lord. Drink from this vessel.