"We had a deal," I said, picking up my coat and checking the pockets. Just in case. "We were going to work together."
"We are," Antoine said. There was nothing in his face but that placid serenity that challenged me to be the one to say otherwise.
Could I trust him? I wondered. All history between us aside, did we really have enough of a common enemy to work together? Or was everything he said on the riverbank in Portland just what I had wanted to hear? Was he manipulating me to his own end?
Ask him, the Chorus challenged. Ask him for the ring and key back. Ask him as his liege. Ask him as is your right.
"Is there something else?" Antoine asked, prodding me in my hesitation.
I wanted to know why. From Antoine as well as the Chorus. Why was it important that I force this issue? If he had the missing items-and I didn't see any reason why he hadn't taken them; they had been in my pocket when we had left the train-why would he give them back because I asked? He knew I couldn't take them from him. So why wouldn't he just deny having them?
"You're not telling me everything," I said, and I wasn't sure if I was talking exclusively to Antoine.
"Neither are you." He smiled. "But at least we're being honest about it. I'd call that progress."
Antoine and I have, at best, a tempestuous relationship. We were brothers in the Weave, fellow Watchers who came up through the ranks at the same time, a few years back. Though Antoine's family-like Philippe's-had been part of the organization for several generations. I was a recent recruit, a promising mutt found scrounging for scraps in the gutters of Paris. He and I and a few others made a little coterie of young turks.
Hermes Trismegistus, in one of the dialogues recorded with his son, Tat, spoke of a great basin lowered down from Heaven. It was filled with Mind-a word rife with many connotations that had occultists and philosophers arguing for centuries-and it was only through man's focus and will that he could achieve a purified state. One that allowed him to bathe in the basin and be covered with the luminous dew of God's Will. Or some such thing.
Metaphor aside (or not, depending on what you believed in), we sought the basin, whether the archaic artifact or some modern facsimile. That was our reason for seeking initiation into the inner mysteries of La Societe Lumineuse: to be worthy of illumination. We had purpose and direction-for a little while-and then emotions got in the way.
Those basal desires that forever infect the flesh: lust, jealously, fear, greed. Always fighting those demons that haunt our bodies, aren't we?
It was a combination of lust and jealously that did us in. Assisted by the vibrant presence of Marielle Emonet. Daughter of the Old Man. Which wasn't to say that there weren't others who were interested in Marielle. Her proximity to the Hierarch alone made her desirable. In an unenlightened throwback to our medieval roots, there was an unspoken belief that she was the prize. She would be given to whomever the Old Man selected as his successor, which failed to bring into consideration a number of things. Not the least of which were her temper and her willful independence.
I hesitate to say she enjoyed playing Antoine and me off one another, but it was such an ingrained response that it happened almost involuntarily. Clarity on the tangled trinity of our relationship came grudgingly in the years after I left Paris, and I realized I was a means to get under Antoine's skin. She liked me well enough, but in the end, I was a message sent to the other man: Marielle would make her own choice, and Antoine needed to respect her opinion if he ever hoped to have a future with her.
But outside the contest for Marielle's affection, Antoine and I had been friends. I seemed oblivious to the aristocratic heritage that the others deferred to, and the respect I had for him was that of a peer, of a fellow student of magick. He frightened me because of what he knew and what he could do, not because of the rich stock of his bloodline.
Who knows what he saw in me; maybe it was as simple as the fact that I didn't cater to him, that I asked him to earn the right of my respect. Once or twice, I had cracked that armor of his and Seen inside, and that I could-and had-may have been part of the reason he had adopted me into his little clan of magi. I was a wild card, and Antoine-like the Old Man-knew the best place for wild cards was at one's side. Who knew what mischief they could cause if they weren't Watched?
Well, sleeping with the girlfriend, for one.
Shortly after my Journeyman trial, Antoine and the others had tried to embarrass me. We took a little extra-curricular excursion to a tiny village near the Swiss border where the locals still believed in werewolves; I had thought it was to celebrate our initiation into the first circle of the society, but that wasn't the case. They had tried to frame me for the death of a local, setting me up to be a target of local superstitions. I went off-script, and left them with a mess to clean up, and during the course of that engagement, I stripped Antoine's shields and showed the rest of the gang that he was twisting all of us. All our threads.
No one was too happy about that.
Antoine and I were wary of each other for several months after that, finding excuses to dodge the other, but such denial didn't last. We had already eclipsed the other's orbit once, and it was just a matter of time before we came into conflict again. New Year's Eve, in fact, at a club near the Eiffel Tower. Tempers had run hot, and Antoine had ended up laying down the challenge.
Ritus concursus. The primal way of settling differences, man to man. Usually reserved for upstart magi who sought to get ahead on the rank ladder, ritual combat wasn't normally engaged between brethren of the same rank. But there wasn't any other way for Antoine to call me out without consequences. The rite of combat was recognized as a way of settling affairs that didn't require the same weight of evidence and prosecution that more modern methods had. Old school rules.
In our case: swords; under the Pont Alexandre bridge; at dawn, on New Year's Day.
It hadn't gone well. Antoine lost a hand. I got run through with his sword, after which I fell into the Seine. By the time I dragged myself out of the river, I was out of Paris. And staying out was the best solution to our problem. I went underground, and let them think the river had claimed me. Antoine was only too happy to consider me dead, and under the rules of combat, he was cleared of any transgression. It had been a fair fight, as far as those sorts of fights go.
And the status quo had been maintained for a few years. I went about my business: buying and selling black-market occult paraphernalia, sneaking into libraries and reading illegal texts, and looking for Kat. Five years later, I finally tracked her down in Seattle, where I found a group of magi involved in psycho-animism-the art of releasing the soul from the body. They were working on a secret project, one that had Watcher backing.
And the man sent to oversee the project was Protector Antoine Briande.
There are only twenty-one Protector-Witnesses at any time, and typically when one dies the election process is a long drawn-out affair. The same was true for Preceptor, the final electable rank beyond Protector, which was about as complicated and contentious as electing a new Pope. Mainly a series of political machinations and some ethically shaky tweaks to the Weave until a clear candidate could be identified. As for the Architects? They were Preceptors who were further elevated in ultra-secret ceremonies. We knew their titles, but none of us knew who they were. Part of the mystique of the inner Inner Circle. Even when you were on the inside, you were still outside: another one of those little reminders that each of us, regardless of our gained wisdom and knowledge, didn't know everything.