Mark Teppo - Heartland

Then I had pointed out that Hitler's copy of the Spear had been a fake. We were ahead of the game this time.

I tried to keep the conversation civil, though. No need to go ballistic. Not yet. "I have been designated as the Hierarch's representative," I replied.

"Designated by whom? I do not see any symbol of office on your hand." she asked. "The Hierarch is dead. The spring equinox has arrived, and there has been no Coronation ceremony. Whatever rights his name afforded you are no longer applicable."

I raised the Spear, and let the Chorus fill the blade. Not a fake. I was going to have better luck than Hitler's black magi. "Then I come under no banner but my own. I am Adversarius, and if you don't open the fucking door right now, I'm going to cut a hole in it with the Spear and come find the Grail on my terms ."

The dark got darker, as if ink had been splashed on the walls of the elevator and it slowly dripped over the emergency lights, dimming them by degrees. The Chorus flowed even thicker over my skin, giving me warmth as the temperature dropped, and Antoine bound a handful of leys to his Will.

"Very well," Vivienne Whispered to us finally. The darkness began to abate, a slow emergence of light that revealed the endless stacks of the Archives. "However, the Spear does not cross the threshold. You may enter, but that phallic symbol doesn't. Those are my terms, and they are nonnegotiable."

I made a show of hesitating for a minute, as if I were thinking it over. Much like she had with us. "Fine," I shrugged. I walked over to Antoine and held out the Spear.

"Nice plan," he muttered.

"Whatever works, you know?" I replied. "Could you sober up by the time I get back?" Keeping up appearances. Making him think I didn't know.

The Chorus felt him probe me, and they rebuffed his attempt. Let him wonder.

For a second, I froze, caught in a black panic that this was all a bad idea. A vision-seemingly prescient-that this would end disastrously. Then I realized it wasn't the Weave peeling apart and revealing the future, but just old memories caught in Philippe's past. When the Spear was brought out of hiding, blood followed. It was an old tradition, and I would have been more of a fool than I already was to think it wouldn't happen.

"Sure," he said, finally taking the Spear. An involuntary shudder ran through his hand, a twitch that scampered all the way up his arm and into his spine. The Spear was quiescent, but it was still an artifact of power and I certainly knew what he was thinking. I knew what he was remembering.

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.