Mark Teppo - Heartland

The identity of who he had killed for the rank was in my head somewhere, somewhere in the vast roster Philippe had kept of the rank-names, titles, allegiances, faces even-but they were all jumbled, as if they had been all tossed in a sack and shaken. Which one? I just needed a little hint.

"Protector Hieron."

There. One of the names came into focus, and I could now bind his history to my memory of Antoine. Yves Hieron. Originally from Brussels; took his oath during the '70s; one of the Renaissance alchemists. Never married; dedicated to his research. Unremarkable trials. One of those who stay with a company for so long they become management by sheer weight of their organizational history.

Antoine's choice was, as ever, a tactical one. He took out an old scholar, a man who made safe, dependable choices, and who preferred to stay on the fringe. He had arbitrated more than a dozen disputes over the years, acted as a Witness to even more duels. Hieron had been a centrist, one who could be counted upon to hold the line. In a time of upheaval and crisis, Hieron would have been a steadfast soldier of the status quo.

The rest of the fights were small advancements, magi leap-frogging each other up the ladder, but probably nothing of any consequence in the long term. Old rivalries were settled and some narrow-minded bitterness about perceived slights were probably worked out, but nothing dramatic. Except for Antoine, who had stepped in and snatched a position of historical responsibility. Regardless of Protector Hieron's working knowledge of combat magick, he should have been able to withstand the assault of a gifted, yet nominally ranked Traveler. And yet, Antoine had won and in doing so transformed a resolute and steadfast Protectorate into a wildcard, a position held by an enigma whose allegiances and motivations were unknown.

I had thought I understood Antoine's motivations after Portland, and for a moment or two, when we had been talking earlier this morning, I thought I had a handle on what he wanted. But now, with the ring and key missing, I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure Antoine wasn't pulling threads at a deeper level. He was slipping away from me, disappearing into that inscrutable void that no one could penetrate.

Not only did I not know the inner workings of Philippe's grand design, I was starting to realize Antoine's confusion and dismay at being played may have been an act. While he had professed to not be privy to Philippe's design, I was starting to wonder if the Old Man had underestimated his star student, if he had failed to penetrate Antoine's mask and See the naked Machiavellian desire in his heart.

Maybe it wasn't a matter of who had the best insight, but who could hide their true intent. Who could guard their heart best.

We've come to call it the Upheaval." Cristobel brought the conversation back on track. "Once the challenges started, the trickle became a flood. More duels were fought over the next twelve months than had been-cumulatively-over the last decade. There were two immediate results of this conflict: the rank was thinned, and those who survived were more inclined to be a fighting force than a group of scholars. The upwardly mobile brought with them a skewed morality. They didn't have any issue with using magick for personal gain; that was the underlying conceit in their intent. The theorists and the philosophers were cast aside, and what was left had a taste for blood. A taste that ran counter to Philippe's leadership."

"They'd lost their taste for Watching, hadn't they?"

The body must die. No wonder the Old Man had considered a scorched-earth solution. It was like God throwing up His hands and crying "Do over!" with the Flood.

"Precisely. A new direction that could come to fruition under new leadership." Father Cristobel's lips twisted downward. "I Saw the shape of it in the Weave, but thought it would only be a passing ripple. I didn't realize how much of an endemic change it would be until Philippe admitted he was ill."

"The cancer," I said. "I saw his leg."

Cristobel shook his head. "That came later, when he wasn't strong enough to repel it."

The black sores on his spirit, the darkness eating his brain.

"He was losing his mind," I said. I had felt it in my head, that cold touch, and I had mistaken it for a resurgence of the old Qliphotic hunger that had lain in my soul for so long. That ugly, gnawing hunger. I pushed the Chorus aside, and took a long hard look down there and considered the blackness.

No, this wasn't the same. Philippe's hurt was more of a void, an emptiness so much more terrifying for its alien silence. "Alzheimer's," I realized. "I thought there were therapies now. Stem cell treatments."

"They slow, but they don't cure," Cristobel said. "The decay is, ultimately, inevitable, an untenable condition for the Hierarch. He has to renew his Promise each spring, and if he isn't healthy, then he is. . rejected. . he is-"

"What?"

The priest was looking at me, Seeing through my skin. "You don't understand this, do you? You don't know."

"Know what?"

"Certain details of Philippe's history are clear to you-facts only he would know-and yet other aspects of being Hierarch are hidden."

"Maybe because I'm not the Hierarch."

"But you-" His brow furrowed, and I felt a tension in his energy field. A narrowing of focus as his magick intensified. As his Vision deepened. "You and he overlap. Your threads are intertwined to a point of being one, but you are still distinct souls. How-" Cristobel didn't finish his question.

Not that I had an answer to it anyway. The Chorus used to be echoes of the old souls I had taken, nothing more, but since Portland, they had changed. They were still bound to me, snared by Reija's white braid, but they weren't a collective mass of unconscious desires any longer. Could Philippe still be "alive" in some spiritual sense, riding me like a psychic leech? I had broken him, and absorbed his essence, and in the past, that would have been spirit death. His personality-his spark-would have been torn apart.

Yet, Cristobel thought he could still See Philippe's thread.

"Is it like Frobai-Cantouard's thread?" I asked.

"No. This is almost an optical illusion, the sort of glimmer on a mirage that becomes less visible the more you examine it. Philippe vanishes when I really look at your thread, but when I pull back and try to see the surrounding Weave, his touch becomes evident."

"His touch? You mean the fact that he has twisted me into this design of his?"

"No. Your thread shows definite signs of having been twisted. But this is deeper. Intertwined." Putting his hands together, he tried to demonstrate with his fingers. "This is your thread," he said, holding up his right index finger. "This is Philippe's." The matching finger on his left hand. He tried to wind his left finger around his right. "This is still your thread," he said, wiggling the pair of entwined fingers. "This is clumsy, I know, but you can see there is another thread wrapped around your thread. Like a-"

I swallowed past the braid of white hair around my throat. "I know how a braid works," I said hoarsely.

"Ah, okay," he said, dropping his hands.

"So what does that make me? Some sort of hybrid soul?"

Cristobel looked past me, toward the church, and appeared to be Seeing somewhere else entirely. His eyes tracked back and forth. "This is it, isn't it?" he mused. "This death that isn't Death. Are you testing me, old friend? Is this what you meant with those cards?"

"What cards?" I interjected.

His blind eyes tracked back to me and the Chorus reacted to his magick again. "You aren't him, even though, on a certain level, you are. You and I can tell the difference, but other. . entities may not."