Mark Teppo - Heartland

Abbot Suger, Cristobel identified the other man, narrowing the field of candidates to one. In front of the construction of Saint-Denis.

As I walked over to the last painting, I glanced in the basin. It was empty but for the water, and the golden light came from the inner lining, a beaten layer of gold.

Hildegard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Abbot Suger. I ran the names around in my head as I looked at the last painting. Contemporaries, so it would follow that the last one was as well, but I couldn't come up with a name. Nor did Cristobel or the rest of the Chorus provide one.

The pose was the stance of the Magician-one hand up toward Heaven, the other pointed at the ground-but I couldn't place his face. I stepped closer, peering at the object in his hand. It was smaller than a traditional wand. A writing implement of some kind. He sat in a plain chair, between two columns, and the landscape behind him was similar to Poussin's. Was it the same?

I didn't know, and I stared at his face for a long time, trying to divine his secrets. There was something about his eyes, about his sad, sardonic smile that hinted at a key. Hidden there on his tongue. Waiting to be discovered.

One of Houdini's great secrets was that his wife always carried the skeleton key that he would use to pick the locks. Just before he was thrown off a bridge, she would rush in and give him one last kiss. In that moment, their mouths locked together, she'd pass him the key.

I imagined Houdini's expression was much like the one in the painting as he allowed himself to be led to the edge and thrown into the river. Old lover, cold mother: hide me, and let me divest myself of my secrets. Let me be reborn from your darkness.

What sort of magician was he?

Have you identified them?" Vivienne asked.

She was standing beside the stone urn. The glow from the basin gave her skin a Mediterranean warmth, making her look more like a true sister to the daughter who had escorted me than a spiritual one.

"I have, I think."

"Do you know what connects them all?" she asked.

I glanced back over my shoulder at the mystery man one more time. "Not entirely. Hildegard, Bernard, and Suger were all contemporaries, but I'm not sure who he is. Some noble, perhaps. A patron? I don't know my twelfth-century nobility that well." An image drifted up from the deep well of the Chorus. An empty boat, its oars missing. A single pole resting across its bench. Something that could have been a spear shaft. Or a fishing pole. "The Fisher King?"

Vivienne inclined her head an inch or so. "Perhaps. The Hierarch was more invisible in those days. Not many knew who he was." She indicated the others. "These are the first Architects. The original trinity. The Visionary. The Scryer. The Mason." She pointed at each as she named them. Bernard. Hildegard. Suger.

The trinity. I let that sink in. Was it an accident that I had been directed to the Visionary when I had first arrived? That the Mason had been holding-though, in some ways, it could be argued that he had been, in fact, guarding-the Spear? That the one Architect still manipulating me was the Scryer?

Too many coincidences. This was the key to Philippe's master plan. Re-creating the cosmology. Recasting the original players. Which meant-

"You're part of the plan," I said.

Vivienne inclined her head. "We are all part of a 'plan,' Michael."

"No, I mean, this one . Philippe's succession. You knew what he was planning." The wheels turned in my head. "And so did Marielle."

Vivienne looked away, gazing into the golden water, and the light reflected from her eyes. "We are daughters," she said. "It is not our place to participate in the games of our fathers. In the games of men ."

"Bullshit," I said, recalling something Lafoutain had tried to tell me before the poison had taken him. "You're just as capable as any of them."

A faint smile creased her lips. "That's very flattering of you to say so, but you are-if I may remind you- Venefice . Your vote of confidence carries little weight with your brothers."

I indicated the picture of Hildegard. "But she was one of the original Architects. Doesn't that count for something?"

"Not for a few hundred years, it hasn't."

"But aren't the Archives run by women? Les Filles de Mnemosyne . You said as much to me earlier. You are as close to pure knowledge as I will ever find. How is that not recognition of your roles within the organization?"

"We are nuns, Michael. Cloistered here, with all the other treasures. We can't leave."

An involuntary shiver raced up my back. To be trapped inside this building for the rest of my life. It wouldn't take long before the Archives-seemingly infinite-shrunk down to a room like this one. Ever-present walls and ceiling. No natural light. Not being able to feel the wind or the rain. I wasn't claustrophobic; rather, I was accustomed to having a sky overhead.

I had been raised on a farm in rural Idaho. We could see the Grand Tetons from the back porch of my grandfather's ranch. Every summer, I had slept outside, under the stars, more often than in my own bed. As soon as I had been strong enough to lift my own weight, I had started climbing. The apple trees in my grandmother's tiny orchard. The outbuildings of the ranch. The rocky bluff on the other side of the river; and later, when I was in high school, any cliff I could drive to, climb, and return from by nightfall. It was part of my upbringing, a facet of who I was that was so integral that I assumed everyone had the same access, had the same desire to explore and participate in the natural world.

After we had lost the farm and Dad had moved us to Seattle, I discovered otherwise, but I always felt sorry for those people who let themselves be trapped by the rigors of the city. They had chosen to be part of a system, a construct bent on self-perpetuation that spent more of its energy and fuel on keeping itself alive than on improving its world.

Maybe that had been part of my fascination with Katarina in the beginning. She was a city girl who wasn't afraid of the woods. We had met at REI, and even though she later confessed that her main interest in learning about rock climbing had been to meet me, she still went camping. We had even climbed the East Ridge of Buck Mountain together. She had looked up at the night sky and not been afraid; she had lain down beneath a talk oak and listened to it creak in the wind; she had seen dawn transform a black horizon into a field of fire and light.

But all of that was forbidden to Vivienne and the other daughters. It wasn't that they had no interest in the world untarnished by our hand; that world was a world they could never touch. Cloistered. Kept. Caged. Locked away. I thought of the sensations that had assailed me when the Chapel of Glass had been cut off from the leys, or the panic and fearful claustrophobia inflicted upon Spiertz in his oubliette in Notre-Dame-sous-Terre. Were these even in the same class as a lifetime of being kept inside a glass tower?

All the knowledge in the world and she wasn't free.

"I'm sorry." I didn't know what else to say.

She nodded absently. Her eyes were unfocused, staring into the water of the basin. "We have never needed for anything. My father, and the others assigned by him, are-were-kind jailers, but they were still allowed to come and go. No matter how much we bent our wills and our minds to the tasks given to us, we could never forget that tiny fact: when they were done, they could leave. We never could.

"It has been argued that the outside world offers nothing that we don't already have. That it is a pit of perversion, and all of its influences are foul. By keeping us here, our jailers are, actually, protecting us from the sin and degradation of human existence. By remaining true to our studies, we are closer to the divine. This life isn't a punishment, but rather a gift."