Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (24 page)

At the tower, Marielle typed a security code into the pad in the elevator, and we ascended to an unmarked floor. The doors opened onto a simple foyer, with a rose marble floor and pale green walls. There was no other exit, just a small marble plaque—the same sort of rose stone like the floor—with the letters "l F d M" engraved in it and another security keypad.

Mounted in each of the four corners of the room were tiny blisters of security monitors. Discrete enough to be easily missed, but not so invisible that you didn't see them if you were looking.

Marielle entered another passcode and the light on the pad flashed green, but nothing happened. In response to my raised eyebrow, she nodded toward one of the security cameras. "Entering the right code only announces you," she said. "You still have to be invited in."

"In where?" I touched the plaque, tracing the letters, hoping the Chorus would provide some clue as to what they meant.

"
Les Filles de Mnémosyne
," Marielle said.

The daughters of Mnemosyne, who, according to Greek legend, lived on Mount Parnassus. The nine Muses.

The Chorus registered the magickal release of a seal, and the walls of the anteroom flickered out of existence, leaving us standing at the edge of an immense room, filled with rows upon rows of tall bookcases. The marble floor around the elevator remained, as did the elevator column itself, and Marielle stepped across the line separating the marble from the warm polish of the library's wooden floors.

I followed, and the Chorus shivered as we crossed over, an animalistic twitch that ran through my veins. The seal activated as I crossed, binding the walls solid again, and on the inside, layers and layers of magickal script vibrated with activity. The wards of
Les Filles de Mnémosyne
.

"Welcome to the Archives," Marielle said. "Don't touch anything."

I snatched my hand back. The case next to me was devoted to books, and as I looked more closely at the nearby shelves, I noted that some of them held display cases of varying size. Most of them weren't lit with any sort of track lighting—this wasn't a public museum after all, and long-term exposure to artificial light could very well damage some of the artifacts held here. The ambient lighting of the grand chamber was purposefully restrained, leaving the contents of the cases in mysterious—and tantalizing—shadows.

"That's a copy of the
Secretum Secretorum,"
I said, indicating the book I had almost touched. "One of the Tulbriss editions." Only fourteen were reputed to have been made, and they were a facsimile of the original translation done by John of Seville back in the twelfth century. There were English translations readily available—some of them even on the Internet—but they were very literal, and a great deal of the symbolic richness—the magick bound into the text—had been stripped out. This edition had been commissioned to re-create the arts lost in the mundane translations, and before I could stop myself, I found the catalog description on my lips, the words nearly falling out of my mouth like money out of the wallet of a drunken old bookseller: Roxburghe-style binding, lambskin leather, gold stamp lettering, Fabriano Ingres endpapers, an oyster paper interior—

"You know the Tulbriss?" The speaker was a robust woman, dressed in a charcoal suit that managed to be corporately stylish and haute couture at the same time. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her round face and plaited in a long strand down to her mid-back. Perched on the peak of her forehead was a pair of red-rimmed glasses. Definitely going for the sexy academic look, and succeeding very well, though the arch of her eyebrow at my expression suggested she had heard enough variants of "hot librarian!" over the years that for me to mention it out loud now would be as banal as pointing out that she was wearing shoes.

And they were pretty great shoes too.

"Yes," I said, with no small amount of clumsiness. My chest was tight, and it took me a minute to realize the sensation wasn't some schoolboy reaction (you never forget your first librarian crush), but a spirit sensation from the Chorus, an agonizing pang of loneliness. I knew why she looked familiar. "You're—"

"Vivienne Lafoutain," Marielle said.

Lafoutain's daughter.

Stricken, I looked at Marielle for help. The pain in my chest increased, and my heart skipped.
Once was enough. Don't make me do this again.
"I can't," I whispered. Don't make me tell another daughter that her father is gone. That I've taken the soul of someone they love.

Marielle's face softened. "I'll tell her."

"Tell me what?" Vivienne asked.

"Your father is gone, Viv. I'm sorry."

Vivienne took her glasses off her head, glanced at the lenses for a second, and then settled them on her face. "The Tulbriss," she said, after clearing her throat, "how familiar are you with the edition? Have you actually handled one?" Behind her glasses, her eyes were shiny, the only outward sign that she had heard Marielle.

"Yes," I said, feeling incredibly awkward, even more than I had a moment before.
Little chicken,
a voice cried from the Chorus,
don't hold it back.
"I, uh, acquired a copy once. For a private collector."

"One in Hong Kong?" She touched the corner of an eye, wiping at something so faint neither Marielle or I could attest that it had ever been there.

"I can't say."

She favored me with a tiny curl of her lips, an expression so haunted with a different emotion entirely that the Chorus nearly exploded in my chest. "You don't have to. Aleister Forge is the only collector who knew there were copies still out there."

"Viv—" Marielle took a step forward.

Vivienne shook her head, and her face hardened. "No,
sister
." Her hands clenched into fists. "I won't share this with you." Her anger shook a tear loose and it slid down her cheek. Her hand still balled tight, she swiped the tear away. "So, you're the one."

"Yes," I said, knowing without knowing why that I was.

"Come with me," she said, turning and walking further into the stacks. She hadn't glanced at Marielle. "
She
said earlier that you two needed some guidance. An understanding of the process by which the Coronation is completed. Yes?"

"Yes," I said, sticking with the safe answer.

"There is an artifact that must be retrieved. The Hierarch had a key. I can tell you where the lock is."

And there went sticking with the safe answer. "I . . . "
The key.
"I don't have it."

Vivienne stopped, reversed her direction, and walked close enough to me that I could see the cracks in her emotional armor. "What do you mean?"

"Philippe had a key—one with a smashed top and magicked teeth. 'Abbadon' he called it. That one?" When she nodded, I reiterated the bad news. "I don't have it anymore."

"Who does?"

"Antoine." I swallowed, stealing a glance toward Marielle. "I think."

When Vivienne finally looked at Marielle, her gaze was filled with such fury that I expected Marielle to burst into flames from the intensity of the glare. "Of course," Vivienne said. "Why does that not surprise me?"

Vivienne left me in a room with a window while she and Marielle had it out. It might have been a conference room if someone had brought in a table and more chairs. There was a single desk, on which a fairly generic-looking computer and monitor sat, and a larger flat screen mounted on the wall opposite. The lack of other ephemera of occupancy made it hard to classify the room as an office either.

I stared out at the Parisian landscape and did some deep breathing techniques, calming and re-centering my spirit. In the distance lay the lights of the Louvre, the Ferris wheel near the Tuileries, and the gold spire of the Place de la Concorde. The Great Meridian that ran east to west through the center of Paris, all the way out to La Defénse. To my left, the Eiffel Tower, glittering yellow diamonds lighting up the night. I couldn't see the blocky structure of La Defénse as it was hidden by the Eiffel Tower; there was another meridian running from La Defénse, through the Eiffel Tower, to Montparnasse.

The Chorus thrilled at such architecturally precise geometry; it appealed to their nature, all the monuments built to facilitate the flow of energy. The natural course of the leys in this region followed the Seine, but occultists from the Renaissance onward had consciously strived to bend the leys to their Wills. All of the great cities of Europe were built—to some degree or another—in a way to maximize the flow of energy through specific points. You didn't build a city without giving some thought and effort to making it both defensible and a conduit of power to a central seat. Paris had always been one of the greater achievements of civic planning from an occult perspective. Louis XIV's sobriquet of "Sun King" was well earned. A tad overreaching, much like Crowley's self-chosen title of "The Great Beast," but power has a tendency to dull one's sense of humility.

Like a worm wiggling back in the ground when you turn over a rock, a tiny thread twisted in the dark depths of the Chorus. They boiled over the memory of Bernard du Guyon, but I already noticed that tiny shard of him moving in my mind. I couldn't look out over the nocturnal glow of a city landscape and not think of him, standing at the top of that tower in Portland, incanting the culmination of his great work. He had tried so hard to unmake everything, a petulant child who believed destruction came from the same divine urge as creation. Every inhalation is but a prelude to a
Hallelujah!;
all life rushes back on itself so that it can be born again.

The only trouble with that theory is the assumption that the universe will eventually contract as God finishes exhaling. To believe that He mirrors us—inverting the supposition that we have been built in His image—is to conflate our ability to dream with His creativity.

Thus it always has been with power. With knowledge. With the truths we conceal. We harbor the keys to these occult secrets and think ourselves greater than the rest, scurrying about in these jeweled landscapes. We stand above them, in great towers raised by sweat and blood and sacrifice, and think we are closer to Heaven. We think we are closer to God from this height because we can See all the way to the edge of the world.

A phone rang somewhere and I turned, confused, as I hadn't remembered seeing one on the desk. When it rang again, it also vibrated. Against my side. Because it was my cell phone ringing. Making a mental note to change the ringtone to something other than the stock ring, I fumbled the phone out of the inside pocket of my coat.

My phone didn't recognize the number, which meant it wasn't Marielle.

"Hello?"

"Hello, M. Markham." The voice was clipped and precise. Each word afforded just enough breath to form all the letters, and each word was equally spaced from the others. It would have been easy to think it was computer-modified in some way so as to disguise the speaker, but there was more of that old analog warmth of a human throat behind it than the cold sterility of a vibrating speaker. "Enjoying the view?"

I glanced around, and didn't see any obvious cameras, and I was too high up to be clearly seen from the street. The windows were polarized too, so even if someone down on the street level was watching me with binoculars, they shouldn't be able to distinguish features enough to recognize me.

"I am," I said. "You?"

"It is a bit voyeuristic, I admit, but I like to See."

" 'Seeing.' Interesting word choice. Most voyeurs are 'Watchers.' " It was a cheap shot, but I might as well see what sort of man I was talking to.

His laugh had none of the characteristics of human warmth, though. Like a loop of sound that wasn't cut quite right, and there was a jagged hiccup at the end as it leaped back to the beginning again. I had mental images of steel jaws opening and closing in a parody of amusement. "Not tonight, M. Markham. I am not bearing witness. Not now."

I shivered involuntarily, and tried to pretend it was a reaction to the dry air of the office. I stopped trying to find the camera pinhole, because even if there was one, he wasn't watching me through it.
Not bearing witness.
Whoever he was, he was using remote viewing, astral magick to See me from afar.

"Do they know you can peer into the Archives?" I asked.

"Only the outer ring," he said. "They're fastidious with their security."

"I'm sure they are." I looked out at the flickering lights of Paris. "So, other than this demonstration of power, what else would you like
me
to Witness this evening?" It was an old distinction, one coded very specifically into the rules of
La Société Lumineuse
. Remote viewing wasn't recognized as a means of Witnessing—the official manner in which history is marked and recorded by the Watchers—unless it was grounded first by another Watcher. Someone had to verify the remote viewer was, indeed, viewing the proper location and event before the Viewer could enter a True Record.

There were a couple of moments in history that needed a Witness but were problematic in the matter of the on-site witness surviving. Setting up a remote view prior and then extracting the Watcher on the ground was a concession to the alternative of losing the magus and the Record.

"You asked me to call," the voice said.

"I did?"

"Yes. You spared the Journeyman's life in hopes that he would carry a message for you."

I actually looked at the phone to make sure it was mine and not Tevvys'. "I believe I told him that we'd be reachable on Tevvys' phone."

"Ah, my apologies. I was under the impression you wanted me to call you from it. Why else would you have left it behind?"

"Why else?" I tried to be nonchalant in my response. Tevvys had never known my phone number, nor had there been any reason for Marielle—the only person who knew it—to give it to him. Before the others realized the food had been poisoned and had bashed his skull in.
Don't let him rattle you,
the Chorus murmured,
it's a display of power. "We think we are closer to God . . . " Remember?

I remembered that I had been thinking that thought just before the phone rang, which made it all even less of a coincidence.
Pointing that out was supposed to make me feel better?