Heartland

comprehended, scrying was a tool by which the Weave itself was illuminated. Kelly hadn't been able to control his sight all that well, and he and Dr. Dee squabbled too much about the interpretation of what Kelly saw. But we had gotten better about understanding the Akashic Weave, and what lay there. We had become better readers. Scrying, unlike the sort of postulating and calculating that Father Cristobel did as Visionary, adhered more to the core principle of Witnessing. One could look ahead as a scryer; the trick was knowing what you were seeing, and Ulrich Husserl was, evidently, the best at Knowing and Seeing.

'Is this a social call? Just calling because you can,' I asked, my voice no longer unsteady, 'or is there a specific detail of my future you wish to impart?'

'The spirits will not be able to aid you forever. They will leave you.'

'I'm sure they will. Probably when I'm dead.'

'Assuredly.'

'But I don't need you to tell me that.'

'No, of course not. What you do need me for is to tell you when they abandon you. Prior to your death.'

'And in return for this piece of trivia, I'll grant you. . '

'Nothing, M. Markham. Any promise you give me is hollow. We both know that.'

'So this one is free.'

'The first one always is.' He laughed again, and my skin crawled even more this time. The Chorus swarmed like someone had just poked them with a hot stick, and the ripples of their unease went all the way down my spine.

I walked over to the desk and emptied out my pockets. I needed a way to get this guy out of my head. There had to be some way to shield myself or divert his astral eye. Wallet. Still had that pack of gum. Folded pages of the hand-drawn org chart. Cristobel's rosary. Philippe's deck of cards. Holding the phone between my cheek and shoulder, I upended the bag and spilled the cards out on the desk.

'What are you looking for, M. Markham?' Husserl asked. 'Some sort of ward against me?'

'Something like that.' For a moment, I considered Cristobel's rosary. It might protect me if I wrapped it around my head, but that's not what I needed right now. I needed something to cloud Husserl's vision.

'The first card you turn over will be the Four of Pentacles,' he said.

I slid the rosary off the table and put it back in my pocket, and then I flipped over the closest card. The way the Chorus was churning in my stomach suggested that Husserl was going to be right.

Four of Pentacles.

My hand drifted toward the next closest card. 'Eight of Swords.' He was right again. 'I could do this all night,' he pointed out. 'But we don't have that much time.'

I stopped flipping cards over and glanced toward the door. Marielle and Vivienne. Neither of whom would be terribly pleased to know I was talking with the man who had ordered the death of Vivienne's father.

'What do you want?' I asked. We don't have much time. He wasn't toying with me; there was an underlying reason for this conversation.

'I want you to understand the power that I have. The power I have given to the men who believe, like I do, in the future we've Seen.'

'Doesn't that kill the adventure?' I wondered. 'Seeing the future? You know all the conversations you're going to have tomorrow. What you're going to eat. What you're going to wear. Doesn't it make the future somewhat. . dull?'

I was stalling, and we both knew it, but if he had already Seen this conversation, then he wouldn't mind. Or it wouldn't matter. Whatever he wanted to tell me would come out. Wouldn't it? The advanced practices of astral magick and accessing the whole time/space continuum were the sort of theoretical occultism I had never managed to wrap my head around. You had to sit down and sort out the Free Will/Determinism argument with yourself before you could even begin to consider bending light into a cone through which you could See a different time; and I had been too much of a proponent of Free Will to get far in that discussion.

'That isn't the sort of thing we tend to focus on,' Husserl said.

'Yeah, I probably wouldn't either. Just the big picture, right? But once you See the future, doesn't that violate it? How can you Witness something and not have it be changed by the act of Witnessing.'

'Is light a wave or a particle?' he asked. 'It all depends on who is looking, doesn't it? The future is nothing more than a frozen collection of light, one of many million possible permutations that these particles can combine in.' Husserl laughed. 'But who's to say that my efforts to change them aren't the catalysts that bring them about? Witnessing the future is an act of creation.'

'So the future is set when you look at it?'

'Yes. There. That wasn't as hard as you thought, was it?'

What I was thinking was how terrifying a concept that was. You look at the future and see yourself getting hit by a bus in the next fifteen minutes. Now that you've seen it, it is going to happen; whereas if you had kept your curiosity under control, that bus might have missed you. Piotr always referred to reading the cards as akin to listening to echoes of people moving in the next room. There was room for interpretation, and with that uncertainty, you were never sure.

No wonder fortune tellers were happy to be listening from the other side of a wall. The possibility of being wrong left us with the illusion of Free Will. Without that illusion, what were we?

'So each scryer fixes the future a little when he looks forward? What happens when a room full of scryers all look?' I didn't really want to know, but I had a feeling he needed to tell me. We were building an aspect of the future he had already Seen.

'We build the future, M. Markham.'

'And if there were enough of you-?' I got it. 'Oh.' That's how the universe had been created. God looked forward. All the way to infinity, and thus was existence born.

And here we are. Right where he Saw us. Me, getting a sense of the big picture; him, giving me the nudge that made me See it.

'So what do you want with me?' I asked, more than a little shaken by the implications of what was coming.

'You are a singularity,' he said.

The Chorus erupted into a frenzy of light, thrilled by the arrival of the moment they had been waiting for. The moment where I was allowed to understand why I had been chosen. Why Philippe had come to me, given me his soul, dumping this whole shitty mess in my lap.

His enemies couldn't See past me. They were blinded by the divergence of souls in my head. They couldn't anticipate or See what lay beyond me. Therefore he doesn't Know the future.

I felt more of the veil fall from my mind. Philippe could undo what Husserl and the other scryers Saw. That was the balance that Cristobel mentioned. There was a change coming. They all saw it in their own way, and none of them could be sure what happened beyond it. But they wanted to be the ones who were in charge when it passed. Just like Bernard had tried with the theurgic mirror in Portland. He had wanted to be the one talking to God when the world started anew. And now, with Philippe gone, the question of who was going to stand at the Coronation was completely. . unknown.

In a stroke, I understood the brutal genius of Philippe's grand plan. It was all about Free Will, in a world that had been atrophying into Determinism. They all thought they Knew enough, they thought they Saw the whole of human existence and could-and would-take a grander role in directing it. But that wasn't the mission of the Watchers. It never had been. It had been to Watch, and to keep safe the mysteries. In order to keep his mission safe, Philippe had hidden everything from them.

By giving it all to me.

Whether or not that was a wise move was still up for discussion.

'You'd like me to remove myself,' I said to Husserl. 'You want me to be your noble sacrifice, and clear the way so that you can look ahead again.'

'Yes,' Husserl said.

'What do the other Architects think about this plan? The ones still alive,' I asked, shooting blind, but hoping to hit something. 'The Mason, perhaps?'

Husserl didn't answer, and that was answer enough.