Mark Teppo - Heartland

I drove the Spear into the center of the skull's smooth forehead, and the Chorus filled the stone vessel with their light. Steam rose from the skull, and Spiertz shrieked and thrashed within the prison of stone. He wasn't human enough to curse me, but I felt his rage. I squeezed the shaft of the Spear, flushing power down to the Chorus, and the rock exploded. What didn't vaporize in the blast was thrown into the water, and clustered around the burning tip of the Spear like glowing fireflies were the tiny remnants of Spiertz's soul, clutched in the thorny claws of the Chorus.

Antoine severed the conduit as I returned to the beach. "Percutiam te et auferam caput tuum a te," he said, staring out at the gray stains in the water. The ocean washed the detritus of the giant away, the tide pulling the mud back out into the deeper water of the bay. I will smite you and take your head from you. David, telling Goliath how the giant Philistine was going to meet his end.

"Am I next?" Antoine asked.

I shivered. My skin was cold all of a sudden; the sunlight felt weak, as if the sun was looking elsewhere, and its heat was lost to us.

There's a memory I have of Portland, and I don't know if it was a dream or a vision, but it burns in my head. Antoine standing on the bank of the Willamette River, watching the water wash away the ash of Portland. "It is done," he says. The morning sun has burned away all the black, and none of the soul-dead have survived the dawn.

None but me.

"I am standing on the precipice of the Abyss," he says, "staring into the face of nothingness, and what do I see but the glitter of many lights. So many threads-undone, unbound, twisted free of the Weave." He turns his ruined face away from the ravaged cityscape and looks at the man standing next to him. "Where do they go?"

Philippe Emonet leans on his cane; his left leg, bent and twisted, pains him. His hair is in a disarray, and his face is slack and loose. He shrugs.

Antoine raises his silver hand and touches his face. The fingers come away wet, dappled with a pink smear of blood and water. "I am the Witness," he says. "I have Seen what has been done-what we have done-and I will carry this terrible knowledge with me for the rest of my days."

Philippe nods slowly.

"We're all responsible, aren't we?" Antoine says. He lowers his hand and the fingers dissolve back into the smooth shape of the silver cap. "But you are the lucky one, aren't you? You only have to carry this weight a little while longer."

Philippe's lips curl into something like a smile. Long enough, he says, his words clear to both Antoine and me, though his voice doesn't work. There are others who will carry it longer than you and I.

"Of course there are." A bark of laughter rips out of Antoine, a stab of noise that appears to be painful. "You still need me, don't you, Old Man? You've taken everything from me so that I am pure in my purpose, so that my desire is focused on one thing only. Markham may have been your salvation, but I am to be your vengeance. Is that it?"

In this dream, I am a ghost, a translucent vessel that is being filled with the morning light. A cup, not yet full of fire. I stand on the water of the Willamette River, and watch Antoine argue with his conscience.

"I will wait," Antoine says. "I will Watch. That is what I will do for you. I will be patient, until my turn comes."

As the light changes, as the vision becomes less like a dream and more like the morning after the death of Portland, I become more solid and the specter of the Hierarch vanishes. Antoine remains, standing on the edge, staring into the Abyss.

Am I next?

Do you know the security code?" Antoine asked, leaning heavily against the back wall of the elevator in Tour Montparnasse. After leaving the beach, we had commandeered a car and driven back to Paris. Antoine had insisted on stopping at an open market outside of Caen where he had bought a bottle of expensive vodka. Something to dull the pain. I was still buzzing from the energy I had channeled and the sparks of Spiertz's soul; Antoine, on the other hand, was wiped out.

Or so he professed, and after drinking most of the fifth in less than two hours, it wasn't much of a white lie anymore.

"Yes," I lied. I hadn't seen the sequence that Marielle had entered, but it didn't matter. Every member of La Societe Lumineuse had their own code-the heavy security lay on the hidden floor anyway-and, according to Lafoutain, all the code did was announce your presence. As I had the memories of more than three Architects in my head, I had a choice of codes to choose from.

I opted for Philippe's, and I was a little surprised when the code was accepted. I had half-thought they would have disabled his code already. With a tiny change in the air pressure inside the car, the elevator began to rise.

"Starts with a nine," I told Antoine. "You know, the number of Architects."

He looked at me, bleary-eyed, and pretended to not know what I was talking about.

He wasn't as drunk as he seemed. I knew him now, better than he knew me. The conduit had been rather one-way in that regard.

The elevator opened on the empty foyer of the Archives. I walked up to the door and tapped on it lightly with the tip of the Spear. The noise was tiny in the empty space, like a marble falling down a drain, but the reaction was quite dramatic.

The walls went black and the lights went out. The only illumination was the yellow glow from the strip of lights along the base of the wall in the elevator carriage, and a violet pinprick like a distant star in the mantle of black space from each of the cameras set in the corners of the room. I held up the Spear, knowing it would register like a furious supernova on the magick-sensitive monitors.

There was a long pause, a moment where both Antoine and the Chorus became increasingly nervous, and then Vivienne's voice spoke in our heads.

"Why are you here?" she Whispered.

"I've come for the Grail," I replied out loud, not having the same visual luxury as she to pinpoint my response.

"A lot of men have sought the Grail," she Whispered. "A lot of them have stood where you stand and made the same demand. They all went away with nothing. You are no different than any of them."

Antoine had spent a good portion of the drive back, most of it after he had started drinking, trying to convince me that Husserl would have already retrieved the Grail from the Archives. He had the ring; why wouldn't he claim the Cup? I had argued that the daughters wouldn't have given it to him; I didn't have a solid rationale, just the intuition that Husserl's Vision of the future required him to maintain anonymity as long as possible. As long as he was only an observer, he couldn't be enticed to become part of what he Saw, thereby limiting his exposure to the chaotic possibilities.

I was starting to understand how scrying worked. Scryers remained in flux until they were forced to touch a thread. That was how they protected themselves from what they Saw. Rene had been too close to, too intimately involved in, the future he was Seeing, and as such, he hadn't been able to keep the bigger picture in mind, and had missed a critical detail that had cost him his life.

Husserl knew I needed the Grail too, and if I succeeded in retrieving the Spear-which he, apparently, had every faith that I would-then I would need to visit the Archives. Why bother getting it himself when I would bring it with me?

Though how I was going to get the Grail from the Archives was a bit hazy. Antoine wasn't too thrilled with my lack of a plan. Banging on the door and demanding it hadn't been his choice of methods, but as he hadn't offered anything better, it was the plan we had. He couldn't help but point out that the last time someone had tried to assault the Archives, they had brought an entire armored division with them. Hitler's occupation of Paris during World War II, Antoine had pointed out, had been an excuse to bring the heavy armor forward because the Schwarze Sonne Gesellschaft hadn't been able to crack the vaults.