The priest waved a hand toward nearby chairs as he walked over to the pantry cabinet. "Tea?" he asked as he got out a battered metal pot and filled it from the tap.
"Please," I said. I ran a finger along the spines of the nearest row of books, and selected one at random. It was written in the same patterned script as the book on the table. I ran my fingers lightly across the page and felt the raised bumps.
He didn't watch me put the book back, but I could tell he heard me replace the volume. I went to the table and sat in one of the chairs, waiting quietly for the water to boil. Watching him as he performed the ritual task of measuring loose tea into two tea strainers by touch. He was quite practiced and conscious of putting me at ease. He looked down at the tea as he measured it, though I noticed that his head was cocked a little to the right-much like he had when we had first spoken in the church. He favored one ear.
"There," he said, as he put the two covered porcelain cups on the table. "We will let it steep for a few minutes."
The clock on the microwave was flashing "12:00." As if it had never been set.
Up close, I could see that it was a piece of glass that gave his right eye its bright color. Faint scars ran along his cheek and neck, and part of his right ear was gone. The right eye watered, a perpetual tear forming in the corner of his distressed socket.
"I was prepping a chandelier," he said, innately aware of the question on my mind. "At Versailles. The studio I was working for had been commissioned to provide art for a centennial celebration. We were behind schedule and were overtaxing our hot shop. Too much heat, too much glass, too many of us-tired and exhausted-and there was an accident. Some of it I stopped," he said, showing me his hand. Knots of scar tissue roped across his palm, and more curled around to the back. "Some of it grazed me," he continued, "taking nothing but skin, but one piece stuck. The doctors thought they got all of it out, but it had broken off in my head. Grazed the inside of my eye socket as it had gone in. It didn't show on the X-rays, and several months later, it was just there, caught in my eye." He shrugged. "And there it stays."
"And the left?" I asked.
He smiled. "I stared too long at the sun of the forge."
"Before or after you became a priest?"
He lifted the covers from the teacups and removed the tea strainers. "Milk or sugar?" he asked. His smile was all the answer I was going to get to my previous question.
"Both," I said.
Once we had both doctored our tea to our satisfaction, he sat across from me, silently, staring at nothing in particular, and sipped his tea. He gave no indication that he was in a rush to talk, and-gradually, grudgingly-I became aware of how noisy I was on the inside.
The Chorus was buzzing in my spine, electric sparks of memory and energy that I couldn't quite control. I wanted to move; I wanted to lay the deck of cards on the table and put the priest's hands on them. I wanted to ask him questions, so many of them fighting for position against my tongue. And part of me still wanted to flee, wanted to run and hide from the magick storm brewing across the leys of the city.
But I sat there, instead, with a modicum of patience, and listened to the micro-ambience of this inner sanctum. I was a weary traveler, and without speaking a word, he gave me the space to find some wisdom.
VII
Eventually, the priest gave a small nod, and pushed his cup aside. The sound of the china moving across the laminate surface of the table dispersed the meditative ambience of the tiny apartment.
"It is not an easy task to quiet oneself," he said. "Many of us forget. Your energy is still much too quick, but I can see the impression of its orbit now. There is a lot of history bound to your light."
"I'm impressed," I said. "Most can't see me at all."
He snorted. "Most are blinded by their own light. Too caught up with the glitter of their own thread. All they see is the surface, the forward and backward of their lives."
"But you see deeper than that, don't you? Beneath the Weave."
His hands moved on the table, as if he were re-arranging pieces of a game. "We teach the new ones to call it the 'Weave,' because that is a concept they can readily understand, but it is like teaching a child to play checkers. It's a simple game, two-dimensional really. Only later are they ready to play a richer game on the same board."
"Chess."
He nodded. "The Akashic Weave extends in every direction, and when I gave up my sight, I was to see it more properly. I was able to understand the true nature of how the threads bind together."
"The big picture."
"Yes. There is a balance to all things, and we are too small and mean to want to believe such universal hegemony exists, but that is part of what we must strive toward. An understanding of the reflections and shadows that the unconscious symbols of the Divine leave in their wake. So that we, too, may be creators."
The Chorus caught a slice of memory, and turned it over, spinning it like a coin; it opened up. A small burst of memories exploded: the fiery eye of the glass furnace; the priest pulling and stretching a piece of red glass into a flat sheet; on a nearby table, a rack of colored sheets-green, blue, yellow, white-cooling. The priest wore a modified pair of goggles. Only the left eye was protected from the light of the forge.
"You made all the glass," I said, answering my previous question about his vocation. "From his designs."
The Chorus twisted the images in my head, turning them inside out so as to see a different perspective. A different time, in the same place. The priest, now kneeling before the furnace, sweat and grime staining his naked torso. A pair of hands entered the frame-my hands-and removed his protective goggles so as to firmly grasp his head. I held his face still as he opened the blast cover of the furnace. Tears started from his eyes, droplets like molten glass streaming down his cheeks. In his right eye, the emerald shard of glass glittered; in his left, a howling whiteness devoured his cornea. I could feel the heat from the forge on my hands.
The priest was unafraid, and the expression on his face held no pain.
This was not punishment. This was a reward.
"And when you were done," I said, slowly, the words shivering up from the snarled core of the Chorus, "I took your other eye and gave you your new name: the Visionary."
In speaking those words, in being Philippe for a brief second, a cascade of the Old Man's history fell into place, now anchored by my act of speaking aloud. I knew the priest's name, how Philippe recruited him, his secret training and preparation for the task of making the stained-glass panels, the title given to him by Philippe; all that and more were known to me as if I had always known them. It was a disconcerting moment of vertigo as I flickered between my identity and Philippe's before returning to my-now altered-self.
His name was David Cristobel. Once: an itinerant laborer; a student of the arts; a glass-blower. Now: parish priest, and one of the secret masters of the society. The Architect known as the Visionary.
Father Cristobel bowed his head. "Our Father," he whispered, "who art in-"
I stopped him. "No, not yet."
He hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. "Yes, of course." He raised his head and looked directly at me, Seeing me. "It is a bold binding, and he hides you well." He wasn't speaking to me; he was talking to the spirit of the Old Man, as if he was-
"He isn't hiding," I said. "Philippe is dead, but some of his. . personality hasn't faded yet."
He stared at me more, and the ever-present tear finally slipped from the corner of his right eye. "The Lightbreaker," he said. It was his turn to name me. "You knew all along, didn't you?"