Heartland

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?'

XVII

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 Defense. To my left, the Eiffel Tower, glittering yellow diamonds lighting up the night. I couldn't see the blocky structure of La Defense as it was hidden by the Eiffel Tower; there was another meridian running from La Defense, 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 Societe 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?

'Talking with the spirits?' the voice asked.

'Fuck.' I hadn't meant to let it out, but what was the point of trying to keep it in? The guy was nearly in my head already. 'Yes.' I took a moment to control my breathing. 'Okay, I get the point. . ' I made an intuitive leap. 'M. Husserl.'

'Yes.' He sibilated the 's.' 'Very good.'

The Architect known as the Scryer. Remote viewing. Forward looking. Physiology scanning. The legacy of Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly, scrying was a way of interpreting the Weave, though it wasn't the same inexact science as it had been in the sixteenth century. While tarot was a means by which one's part in the Weave could be