Not that I had an answer to it anyway. The Chorus used to be echoes of the old souls I had taken, nothing more, but since Portland, they had changed. They were still bound to me, snared by Reija's white braid, but they weren't a collective mass of unconscious desires any longer. Could Philippe still be "alive" in some spiritual sense, riding me like a psychic leech? I had broken him, and absorbed his essence, and in the past, that would have been spirit death. His personality-his spark-would have been torn apart.
Yet, Cristobel thought he could still See Philippe's thread.
"Is it like Frobai-Cantouard's thread?" I asked.
"No. This is almost an optical illusion, the sort of glimmer on a mirage that becomes less visible the more you examine it. Philippe vanishes when I really look at your thread, but when I pull back and try to see the surrounding Weave, his touch becomes evident."
"His touch? You mean the fact that he has twisted me into this design of his?"
"No. Your thread shows definite signs of having been twisted. But this is deeper. Intertwined." Putting his hands together, he tried to demonstrate with his fingers. "This is your thread," he said, holding up his right index finger. "This is Philippe's." The matching finger on his left hand. He tried to wind his left finger around his right. "This is still your thread," he said, wiggling the pair of entwined fingers. "This is clumsy, I know, but you can see there is another thread wrapped around your thread. Like a-"
I swallowed past the braid of white hair around my throat. "I know how a braid works," I said hoarsely.
"Ah, okay," he said, dropping his hands.
"So what does that make me? Some sort of hybrid soul?"
Cristobel looked past me, toward the church, and appeared to be Seeing somewhere else entirely. His eyes tracked back and forth. "This is it, isn't it?" he mused. "This death that isn't Death. Are you testing me, old friend? Is this what you meant with those cards?"
"What cards?" I interjected.
His blind eyes tracked back to me and the Chorus reacted to his magick again. "You aren't him, even though, on a certain level, you are. You and I can tell the difference, but other. . entities may not."
"What sort of entities?" I asked, trying to keep his focus. Trying to keep Cristobel from losing himself to an old conversation with a man who wasn't here. Philippe had obviously pushed me toward the priest, but I had to keep him focused on talking to me and not to the spirit he saw in my head.
"Every year, the Hierarch renews the Promise extracted from him at his Crowning. Every year, he is vetted as being suitable for the role."
"By whom?" I prompted.
"By the Land."
"Which land?"
"All of it."
"Gaia? What? Some sort of earth spirit?"
Cristobel shook his head. "No, the Land itself. The Hierarch is bonded to the leys. What they feel, he feels; he becomes one with the energy patterns of the morphic fields."
I was going to argue the point, but then I flashed on the cancerous decay of Philippe's leg. The sympathetic destruction wrought on his flesh by the event in Portland. "Their fall-back plan," I breathed. "Even if the Ascension failed in Portland, they knew the devastation would reflect on him. They couldn't touch him, but they could touch the Land."
Cristobel nodded soberly as he picked up the bottle of whisky. I pushed my glass toward his open hand.
The old vegetable rituals: the Corn King slain in winter, resurrected in spring. Like all pervasive mythological structures, they were reflections of old sympathetic, magico-religious rites. What happens down here is reflected up above.
Dumbly, I watched as Cristobel, having poured an inch in my glass, guided the mouth of the bottle to his own glass with a finger, and then poured. And missed, the whisky splashing on the tabletop.
The flashing display on the microwave went dark. I may have blinked, or perhaps time simply started again, but the green numbers came back, blinking "12:00" as they always had.
The Chorus prickled up my spine, like ice crystals forming on an exposed rib of stone. Something had just happened, a subtle twist to the ley grid, but it had been enough to trigger their defensive reflexes.
Father Cristobel ignored the spill of whisky. "The chapel grid has been compromised," he said as he stood and moved toward the cupboard.
The Chorus poured out of my fingers, streaking for the ley energy surrounding us. They had to go far, as they only found a thin trickle running beneath us. When I squeezed them, sending them deeper, they found no sign of a natural etheric stream. Nothing but blank space, a void that reminded me of the yawning darkness in Philippe's head.
"We've been caged," Father Cristobel said, sensitive to the radiating confusion in the Chorus. "This is a nexus, but you can't See that now, can you? We've been placed in an oubliette."
He returned to the table with a small mahogany box. It had no hinges or visible lock, and his fingers danced across the tight pattern of raised dots on the surface. A latch clicked, and the top twisted to the right, revealing a hidden cavity inside. He lifted out a long strand of dark beads, a strand longer than the space available within the box. They were black glass-obsidian, perhaps-and of two sizes. "My rosary," he explained as he slipped the chain of beads over his wrist. It was meant to go around his waist, a loop of glass with a long tail. A silver disk, inscribed with a magick circle, terminated the loop and the tail, and when he put it on his palm, the wide chain of beads slid around his arm like a serpent. The loop tightened, and the tail became longer. At the end of the dangling strand was a metal sphere, inlaid with black and white script.
"Why did they cut us off?" I asked, reeling the Chorus back in just as they were starting to read bright spots beyond the walls of the church. Oubliette. A prison within a prison, cut off from the rest of the world in every way possible. Like being cast out into the void before creation.
"This is holy ground," Father Cristobel said. "The circles and sigils are mine. But without access to the energy grid, they're just writing on the wall."
I nodded. The Chorus sizzled in my fingertips as I touched the puddle of spilled whisky. The alcohol reacted to the energy beneath my skin, bursting into a blue flame that crawled up to my knuckles. "They're taking away your advantage."
"Yes, it is not an unexpected move on their part."
Visionary. He was the one who had made the stained-glass panels, who Philippe used to track missing magi in the fields. Regardless of their secret names, the Architects were still thread winders, long-term plotters and manipulators. "You played war games, didn't you?" I asked. "Contingency planning. 'What if?' scenarios, disaster planning, tactical mapping-"
Thread winding, the Chorus supplied. Our oldest art. They had a secret in their mouths, like a grouse brought back from the field by an eager retriever. Each thread had a unique tension, a special vibration that, if you knew how to read it, made it stand out against the noise and chaos of the Weave. When a thread was tightened-pulled, plucked, wound-it reacted, generating a sub-psychic pulse through the surrounding threads. Reading this vibration was how the Architects built their machinations. They considered the possibilities and permutations, winding threads until they had the right tension. Until they twisted and bent in the direction of their choosing.
"Which one?" I asked. "Which winding is this?"
"A variant of the Blitzkrieg, most likely."
Germany's rapid assault of Eastern European targets in World War II. An overnight deployment and seizure of targets, effectively immobilizing the enemy before they know the fight has begun. So soon after the news of the Hierarch's death. Yes, this is the way I'd do it. Quickly, while everyone is still in shock.