Mark Teppo - Heartland

The stone rings on the assassins. Soul lock, conduit window, magick bomb: all wrapped up in one simple ring.

Who was the geomancer in the society? Which one was he? I ran through the list of secret names for the Architects: Visionary, Hermit, Crusader, Navigator, Thaumaturge, Mason. .

Jacob Spiertz, Cristobel provided.

"Where is he?" I asked. And, equally important: Why him? What was his rationale for wanting Cristobel dead? Was he the Architect of the original plan as well? The man who had given the go-ahead for Bernard and the Hollow Men's experiment with the theurgic Key?

Cristobel didn't answer, and the Chorus shied away as I grabbed at them. "Tell me," I growled, and when the Chorus darted away from me again, I froze them with an angry explosion of Will. They shivered and whimpered as I tore at them, ripping through them like I was swatting a frozen cobweb with a stick. Their strands shattered and melted, dissolving into white smoke that curled backward into the pit in my soul. I hacked and hacked, looking for Philippe in the strands, looking for the source of the glitter of amusement I still felt. "Tell me, you son of a bitch."

Telling you won't help. Cristobel manifested on my visual field, floating beside the wall of the passage. His serene face puckered with a hint of apprehension. The knowledge isn't enough. You have to understand what it means. You have to Know what has happened, and in doing so, you will See what is to come.

I went physical, flailing at him, even though it was a pointless effort. You can't hit a spirit. You can't touch a phantom of your own imagination. Not with your fists. All I did was scrape my knuckles on the wall, which didn't give me any of the satisfaction I wanted.

You can't fight him, Cristobel said, floating just out of reach now. My own brain taunting me with the immaterial nature of the spirits in my head.

"I don't want to fight him," I said, trying to catch my breath. "I just want him gone. I'm done with his games."

My left shoulder ached, and my hip was on fire. The bullet wounds from earlier. Surface wounds that weren't fatal, but all this exertion was tearing the scabs open. The rest of my exposed skin had suffered as well, tiny scabs from all the flying shards of glass. Trying to punch out a spirit and tearing up my hands was only compounding the trauma suffered by my flesh. I needed to get out of these tunnels and find a sanctuary. Somewhere where I could get some help. I needed to find someone I could trust in the midst of all this chaos.

The Watchers were all insane, and I was caught in the middle.

I could burn the Architects out of my head. I had done it before, when I had ascended the spire and faced Bernard. I had detonated the Chorus so as to drive back the soul-dead who had surrounded me. Samael's children. The zombies of Portland who had wanted to devour my light. I had driven them back by sacrificing the Chorus. I could do it again.

A spike of pain went through the base of my spine, and my legs gave way. I banged my face against the floor, and lay there, squirming like a stuck bug. The spike reversed, coming back up and exploding in my brain, and I cried out. My vision flared white, and in the stark emptiness that the ossuary became, I saw a negative man seated on a black throne. Black flames licked from his naked skull, and his chest was a ferocious storm of black smoke. You cannot be rid of us, Philippe said. That is not the way.

"I. . am. . not your pawn," I gasped through the pain.

We are all pawns, he reminded me. There is always a grander game than the one we control.

I don't want control," I said. "I just want to be free."

You always have been, he said, leaning forward. You are free to make your own choice. That is why I cannot tell you what you must do. His eyes glittered with black tears. Do you understand, my son?

When I reached for him, the vision vanished, and I was left groping for nothing in the dark. In my head, I could still see him sitting on that chair-the colors all normal now-the memory of those last few moments in the library before I spiked him. The expression in his eyes.

Philippe knew what he had been doing; he knew the pain his death would bring to those he considered his children, but he also knew the alternative was much worse. He chose his own fate, willingly, because that was the right path. The hard path, but the right one.

You are free to make your own choice.

In that conundrum lay the obstinate madness of his actions, of his long manipulation of his fellow Watchers. He couldn't tell us what his plan was, because to know of it would be a temptation. What if we could change it? What if we thought we could make a better choice?

But we couldn't. He was Hierarch. His understanding of the Weave was deeper and wider than any vision we would have. He Knew, and had twisted the threads so as to bring about the end he had already Witnessed. Did it mean we were on predetermined paths that we couldn't change? Probably. But to walk those paths meant we had to chose them ourselves. I was in the thick of a war for the succession of the Hierarch that had its roots nearly a decade back, and in the midst of all the coming conflict, I didn't know who I could trust. I didn't know who wanted what, and from that ignorance, Philippe knew I would have to make my own decisions.

He knew I would be loath to participate in this game of vengeance-if that is, indeed, what it truly was-but if I didn't know the rules of the game or what my designated role was, then I couldn't act counter to it. I couldn't try to extricate myself from this pattern.

Besides, there was a carrot. Make it personal, Philippe had said to me one night, back when I had been a young student, craving any bit of knowledge he deigned to give me. Always make any conflict personal. That way they hand you their thread and ask you to twist it.

I couldn't trust any of the Watchers. But there was one person whom I could trust.

Marielle .

It couldn't get much more personal.

I started crawling. I had a long way to go.

Eventually, my cell phone chirped, and the tiny signal meter climbed to two bars. I was close to the surface. Another icon appeared in the menu. Voice mail. I dropped the phone back in my pocket. It could wait a few minutes; I was almost there.

The dry smell of the dead had gotten more pervasive in the last half-hour, and the texture of the walls had started to even out. Several of the rooms I had passed through had niches in the walls, and the floors were polished by the tread of many years. This area was more recently used.

My internal compass had been thoroughly fucked by the soulquake, and even though the ley energy had gotten progressively stronger as I had made my way through the tunnels, I hadn't been able to sync myself to the natural grid. There was too much noise, both in my head and from my surroundings, which led me to think I was moving through sections of the Parisian underground that had been heavily used to inter bodies. The only thing that leaves more psychic history than the bones of a church are the bones of people.

I thought I was under Pere Lachaise, and the heavy iron gate barring my further progress confirmed that suspicion. I was on the wrong side, though, as the location of the lock proved. The keyhole had been filled in and the mechanism had been welded together. Parisian officials didn't want to fill in the tunnels, but they certainly didn't want anyone to think going further into the old tunnels was an option. Nothing short of an acetylene torch or some C-4 was going to open this gate. Or magick-the occult key of blunt force. When subtlety wasn't an issue.