Heartland

It is time to go back.

The roaring sound of the world fire filled my ears and the blood running from the Grail obscured my vision. I reached for Philippe, but you can't grab a spirit. I reached for something, and as there was nothing there, I fell.

XXIV

Bad dream?'

The stone floor was cold beneath me, and I sat up slowly, feeling like I had been beaten by a half-dozen men with sacks of rocks.

The chapel wasn't completely dark. The stones of the exposed wall behind me gave off a slight glow, vibrant with the returned ley energy. The room stank of blood and my pant legs were stiff with it. There were huddled shapes on the floor. In the gloom at the back of the nave, catching and reflecting what light there was, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, watching me.

I recognized his voice more than I knew his shape, and seeing that I was conscious, he came closer. Like Philippe, his bearing had that aristocratic aloofness that centuries of European breeding made instinctual, though the cut of his suit wasn't quite as traditional as the Hierarch's. He wore no tie, opting instead for a dark-colored shirt beneath the dark jacket. Disguising the male pattern baldness he had been suffering from for decades, his head was shaved, but the color of his pale eyebrows and the trimmed and oiled shape of his goatee gave away the fact that he was an older man. The rest of his face and neck were surprisingly smooth, but for a patch of blackness darker than the rest of the shadows in the chapel nestled at the base of his throat. He leaned on a metal-tipped walking stick.

'Salve, Architect Husserl,' I said, naming him. I know who you are. I know what you are.

'Salve, Adversari,' he replied. And I, say the same of you. 'Were you having a bad dream?'

The ward had closed, sealing the floor. I was sprawled beside the altar, my legs lying in the pool of blood from Henri's headless torso. My right hand hurt, and I could only move two fingers without a great deal of pain. Charles' body lay where it had fallen, also making quite a mess, and Antoine lay on his side, arm still caught in the floor. There was no sign of Marielle.

My forehead was wet too, and when I reached up to wipe away the blood, I found a tarot card stuck there.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I suppose I was.'

Black marks wiggled around the Grail like the lines in comic books drawn to indicate motion. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's the flying cup! I wiped my fingers across the card, smearing blood with the ink, and the surface became a blur of motion. A riot of symbolic suggestions.

Reflections glittered off Husserl's glasses. 'Ah, the Hierarch's cards. What do you see, blind little magus?' His voice still had that same mechanical precision, and I finally realized why. The thing on his throat was helping him speak. The trim throwback to the nineteenth-century fashion on his face was stuck there, like his eyebrows, with spirit gum. His skin was as smooth as a baby's because it was just as new.

Someone had hurt him recently.

'Blood and water,' I said honestly.

'Yes, the Grail. I see it too.'

I watched the motion on the card for a little while, and Husserl was patient. Why wouldn't he be? He knew the future.

'Rene didn't have much luck with the future,' I said, remembering the earlier encounter before the storm hit and I had been swept into that inchoate conflagration. That tsunami of etheric energy that had hurled me into an out-of-body experience-a cosmological dream. 'I don't think he saw me coming.'

Husserl sighed. 'No, he was too close. He was no longer in flux. He failed to look in the right direction.'

'You didn't warn him?'

'It is difficult to change what you See. Dangerous, too, because one can become tangled in that Weave.'

'Ah, yes, that whole seeing is creating thing.' I glanced around again, and there was a glint of metal in the floor nearby, a shard buried in the center of a ragged circle that looked like an imprint of my fist. The key-

'You can't remove it,' Husserl said.

'Remove what?'

'Even if you could,' he said, 'what would you do with it?'

'I hadn't had a chance to think it through that far.'

'Trust me, then: it won't help you.'

You need the ring.

I shrugged. 'Okay, I suppose I can give you that one.' I put the tarot card down, giving some thought to standing up. Not a lot. I examined Antoine, trying to find his left hand. In my dream, he had been missing his ring finger. He had taken the ring too, along with the key. Did he still-

'He doesn't have the ring,' Husserl said. 'Nor does it matter,' he repeated, his voice hardening. 'Even if you could retrieve it.' The thought of trying to take it from the Architect had barely entered my head. 'The lock is broken.'

I relented, relaxing against the floor. 'Okay, so no ring and no key. What are we doing here then?'

'That depends on you, M. Markham,' Husserl said.

I spread my hands. 'I suppose it does then, doesn't it?' The Chorus squeezed my neck, and I held them in check. As long as Husserl could play the Farseeing trick, he had the upper hand. I wasn't convinced that scrying would enable him to foresee every possibility-I had managed to trick Rene and the way I had touched Husserl's thread back at the Archives had seemed to surprise him-but he was anticipating everything readily enough at the moment that the best option might be to simply hear him out. The man had a propensity to talk. 'What's on your mind?'

'The same thing as yours,' he said.

I laughed. 'I doubt that.'

'Don't be so sure of yourself. I may not have the advantage of carrying spirits, but I have been privy to the Hierarch's plans for a long time. I knew every thread he was going to twist before he did.'

'And you figured you'd let him do all the hard work, and then swoop in at the last minute.'

He inclined his head slightly. 'Perhaps.'

'Don't you think Philippe might have anticipated that?' Husserl didn't seem inclined to answer that question, and a moment later, I found my own answer. The Chorus had uncovered a handful of memories and was feeding them to me. 'Oh, wait, he did. At Chateau Neuf de Meudon.'

He gripped the head of his cane. 'Yes, M. Markham. The Hierarch and I had a discussion there-'

'A discussion?' I interrupted him with a snort of laughter. 'That's not the way I remember it. Seems like someone got their face burned off.' The memories weren't complete. They were stuttering loops like I was watching a short surrealist cut-up film. Fire, reflecting off the glass ceiling of the Grande Cupole. Husserl's cane with its knob of black glass. My hand on his throat, flames licking at the cuff of my shirt. His hair, burning.

Husserl took a step forward. 'Is that all you remember? You are a very poor Witness, M. Markham.'

There was more. Husserl had been smiling. Even as I crushed his throat and burned him, he had never stopped smiling at me.

'But shouldn't you be asking yourself why he didn't kill me?' Husserl asked. 'If he knew what I planned, why did he stop with my face?'

Why hadn't I killed him?

Husserl cocked his head to one side, and the weak light reflected off his glasses. 'You're not sure. I don't