Heartland

I'm sorry, Father.

Absolvo et amo te.

This would all be over soon. I met Antoine's gaze, and saw that he knew it too. One way or another, the end was coming.

Now that I had been invited, I stepped across the boundary and entered the Archives. The wall became solid behind me, cutting me off from Antoine and the Spear. The Chorus registered a complaint, a rippling unease that moved across the back of my legs. Relax, I told them, this is all part of my cunning plan.

They had grace enough not to laugh at me. Not this time.

It was like Antoine had said: even the Nazi occult troops hadn't gotten in. Like I could have actually bashed the door down. Marielle had said you needed to be invited in order to gain access, and if they actually did have the Grail on-site, I had a pretty good idea why the place was impregnable. And why being asked was the secret key to unlocking the front door.

Tell me what ails you.

Sometimes the answer is in plain sight. Right there in the old stories.

One of the other daughters was waiting for me, and without a word she led me through the stacks. The Chorus couldn't sync to the magnetic poles, and I knew she was taking more turns through the stacks than necessary, and somewhere along the way, I was pretty sure we had walked farther than the architectural plan of Tour Montparnasse allowed. The daughter, a muscular woman with long black hair who radiated a density of focus that informed the Chorus that she would-given the slightest provocation-be happy to break any bone in my body, led me to a free-standing room, a cube of stone that rested in the sea of stacks like a stone in the river.

There were cases along each of the cube's walls, and on one side, between two of the cases, there was an open space where an ornate and Romanesque mosaic of a portal had been laid. The tile work was detailed and precise, the sort of attentive workmanship that was only found in old Italian villages; the largest tile wasn't more than an inch or so across, and the whole mosaic measured at least six feet by eight feet. I marveled at both the detail and the rarity of such a large piece surviving so many centuries.

The outside edges of the mosaic were rendered as Ionic columns, pure white stone, and wrapped around each was a series of ribbons-red, yellow, and green. Hanging between the columns, suspended by iron hooks that, upon closer examination, were decidedly un-Romanesque clasps, was a tapestry. The Romans had always favored clean and simple lines, and the twisted knots of the clasps had a Celtic confusion to them. The tapestry depicted an idyllic scene, a Heavenly Garden, complete with a lush, viridian lawn, a grove of flowering fruit trees that were caught on the verge of exploding with color, and a sky, brilliantly clear.

My escort stood to one side of the mosaic and raised an eyebrow at me.

'What?' I asked.

'I cannot open the door for you,' she said. Her accent was Turkish.

I glanced around, looking for Vivienne. Wondering if this was the punch line. I was invited into the Archives, but only so far. And she had already stripped the Spear from me, leaving me without that potent weapon.

'Mlle. Lafoutain will join you inside,' my escort said. 'But you must find your own path within. The door will only open for those who know its secret.'

'You're serious,' I said.

She smiled and nodded. Her hands hung loosely at her sides, but I wasn't fooled by their casual placement. I had been granted access to the castle of the Grail, but I still had to prove my worthiness of being in its presence. The woman standing next to me was a guardian of the Cup; if I failed to open the door, she was perfectly within her rights to throw me out of the Archives.

My guess is that she wouldn't mind doing so.

I looked at the tapestry again, and mentally snapped my fingers at the Chorus. A head full of institutional knowledge, and no one wants to volunteer a helpful hint? They twisted counterclockwise, like springs unwinding, and remained silent. The Architects had too tight of a lock on the spirits wrapped around my soul. They weren't going to help.

The landscape looked familiar, but I had had the same impression after a few hours of crawling through the archives of the British Museum a few years ago. A complicated confusion of favors had gotten me into one of their archives, looking for a landscape by Alfred Sisley that had supposedly been lost since the First World War. Someone had approached my client-known to be an avid collector-with this landscape, and the provenance had been good, but something about the deal had seemed rotten, and my client had asked me to put to rest a rumor that had been haunting her for years. Either the British Museum had this landscape or they didn't, but they weren't telling; she wasn't about to pay $12M USD to find out.

I had spent hours looking at landscapes: works the museum hadn't catalogued because the provenance was suspect or entirely unknown; pieces so badly damaged they couldn't be restored, but which couldn't be destroyed either-curators collect and document, they aren't so keen on throwing things away; and, in a room deep within the byzantine subbasements of the museum, a collection of paintings the museum could never publicly admit they had.

I had found the landscape in question-a dreary picture of an empty lane; Sisley was big on the en plein air method of capturing the light, and his early works showed a lack of understanding that some periods of the day were better than others for creating an impression of nature-and saved my client a lot of money. I later learned she hadn't been the first to have been approached with this scheme. There was a scam going, involving forgeries of pieces buried deep in the gray area of museum acquisitions. My client had gone hunting, and last I heard, the underground market was still reeling.

A lot of art is a matter of learning by copying. Copies of other masterpieces, copies of the things the painter sees around him or her, copies of the piece they're working on in an effort to more fully articulate the idea caught in their head. Landscapes are easy: static, unchanging; you could come back over the course of a week, or a month, and the scene will be the same.

There was one eighteenth-century Impressionist who did more than a hundred versions of the same scene. Unlike Monet, who transcended the entire movement with the emotional verisimilitude of his watercolors, this painter's style was entirely unremarkable. My source at the British Museum had shrugged and said, 'They're part of history; it's not our place to decide whether or not they're worth keeping.'

The scene will be the same. Was this mosaic some view from Philippe's farmhouse? It had that nagging familiarity, as if it was the other scene: not the view out the front window, the one everyone remembered; but, rather, the view off the back porch. A vista seen but usually in context with something else. Something in the foreground that demanded your full attention.

A connection came together in my head. It was something I had seen, but not like this. Not so naked. Usually there was a stone in the foreground. A tomb marker. And other figures too. Shepherds, clustered around the stone, inspecting the inscription.

'Et in Arcadia ego,' I said. It was a painting by Poussin; the Louvre had it. Seventeenth-century pastoral piece, thought to be cryptically symbolic for a number of pseudo-historical conspiracies. This tapestry was the same view, minus the stone and the shepherds. The world, unmarked by man. Still pristine, still innocent.

My guide nodded, a glimmer of disappointment in her eyes, and stepped back from the mosaic. A breeze touched my cheek, a tiny caress of wind that wasn't the product of some HVAC system. A natural aroma of foliage and blooming flowers filled my nose and I turned toward its source. The tapestry fluttered, the wind coming from the other side, and the intoxicating scent of a pure land, untainted by exhaust or sewage, was a heady ambrosia. I realized the tapestry was nearly transparent. The landscape wasn't a picture detailed on the cloth hanging between the columns, but it was what lay beyond the curtain.

I stepped forward, and was about to touch the fabric when the Chorus sparked against my side, reminding me of the stone in my coat pocket. I stopped, and reached for the hot rock I had brought with me from the beach at Mont-Saint-Michel. 'Here,' I said, offering it to the daughter.

'What is it?' she asked, making no motion to take the stone.

'What's left of Jacob Spiertz,' I said. 'Lose it somewhere in here, will you? And never catalogue it.'

When the Spear had shattered the skull, most of the pieces went into the water and most of Spiertz's soul had been harvested by the Chorus. But not all of it. A tiny nugget had remained, a twisted coal of an emotional