I jogged up the road, listening to the grating sound of magick and granite dust in my lungs, to the sound of my feet slapping against the cold pavement, to the distant hiss of the ocean beating against the rocky edges of the shoreline; listening for some indication that there was someone else on the island. The desolate silence wasn't the same as that emptiness in Portland following the implosion of the theurgic mirror, but it was close enough that the Chorus moved uneasily in my spine as I ran. If there were still people in the buildings around me, they wouldn't be soul-dead, but they would be on the edge of the void, sliding toward that maddening hunger for light. They would be hiding in their beds, the covers pulled up over their heads, reduced to being children again, afraid of the darkness.
The ground felt sterile and cold beneath my feet. You don't realize how vibrant-how warm-the earth is with all the energy constantly flowing through it. You live with it for so long that you take it for granted. Like the sun. It has always been there, ever since our birth and the birth of all our ancestors. We know-with the certainty afforded us by the rigors of scientific faith-that our planet rotates about its axis, and the presence of the sun is an irrefutable fact of existence. We don't wonder-not anymore, at least-about whether or not the sun will come back.
For a magus, an awareness of the natural flow of energy is the same sort of instinctual belief. It is always there-nourishing us, guiding us, giving us extra-physical aid. When it is gone, when there is no power to draw on beyond your own reservoirs, you realize how tenuous and infinitesimal your Will is compared to the enormity of the Akashic Weave. The land and sea and sky around Mont-Saint-Michel had been stripped of their natural resources, and all that remained was etheric decay. This land was dead, and would remain so until enough light came back. When the light of the sun gave the world its psychic charge again.
The Universe operated as a closed system-and there was no reason to think otherwise-and this void wouldn't last. All vacuums are filled-the first law of Qliphotic possession-and having been in the Chapel of Glass when the oubliette fell, I had a pretty good idea of the cataclysmic repercussions the sudden return of the ley energies would bring.
At the top of the road, I reached the base of the Merveille, the three-story structure that ringed the top of the mount. The main cathedral of Mont-Saint-Michel was built across the top of the island, and the surrounding buildings were nothing more than the exposed sub-structure that held the long cross of the church in place. Vivienne's quick history lesson of the buildings flashed through my head. Once past the first gate and the Almonry, I wound around the rock to the first of two staircases that would lead me to the top-the External Grand Degre. The stone steps led to the Chatelet, the narrow spire of stone that was like the long finger of a giant, blocking access to the Abbey proper. Past the defensible cut of the Chatelet, it was the Interior Grand Degre and a maze of vaulted chapels, leading me-eventually-to the open air again with the Cloister and the main cathedral. But Vivienne hadn't thought I needed to go that far. I was looking for the Chapelle Notre-Dame-sous-Terre, one of the oldest chapels.
Every door was already open, a sure sign of Marielle's passage, and I followed the obvious traiclass="underline" around the rock and up the stairs. Philippe's memories-and the memories of Hierarchs before him-caught up with my feet and the rough stone of the interior passages took on familiar character. The arches and vaulted ceilings were a honeycomb where angels lived.
The wide-eyed look on Marielle's face when Philippe first told her that explanation for church ceilings nearly broke my heart. We had been so innocent once. All of us.
The Chapelle Notre-Dame-sous-Terre had all the unfinished aspects of the original Carolingian architecture: rough blocks of stone held together more by gravity than mortar, window niches cut whenever someone remembered that the human heart needed light, rough arches with none of the ornate finery that would become such de rigueur during the Gothic era. The chapel had two sanctuaries, and the northern one was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Vivienne had noted that during the reconstruction effort of the 1960s, workers had discovered an older wall behind the sanctuary, a wall that was most likely the original wall of St. Aubert's oratory. As I stood in the narrow chapel, I realized they had uncovered more than the first wall.
There was a hole in the middle of the sanctuary floor, and the rim of it crawled with sigils of old ward magick. On the other side of the hole was the mandala and starburst of magick I had picked up from Philippe's memory, filling the space between the hole and the niche where the wall was cut to show St. Aubert's original wall. In the heart of the squirming magick was the flickering knob of the key.
I edged close to the hole and peered down. The script on the walls of the well went down a long way, deep into old rock of Mont Tombe, like veins running through marble, and I cautiously reached out and touched the cold stone. The Chorus skipped off the spell holding the rock back; it was like touching hot glass. There was a breeze coming up from the hole, carrying a whiff of that familiar salty smell.
The Chorus couldn't penetrate the surrounding rock, and all they told me about the hole was that it was deep. There was no sign of Marielle, and while she could have kept on going up to the top level of the Merveille, I had no doubt she was down in the hole.
I kept my arms close to my sides and stepped off the edge of the pit. The Chorus ballooned out in a teardrop shape around me, a long strand running in my wake as if they were reluctant to let go of the surface world. I didn't blame them, but there wasn't any other way down. Descende. Gravity pulled my teardrop down and my skin erupted with goose bumps as I passed the rim of the hole. My vision went white with the warding magick for an instant, an overwhelming rush of the legacy of Philippe's memory and the active magick of his wards, and as my ears popped, the white went away.
The well opened up. It was nothing more than a narrow throat through the massive stone block of Mont Tombe that led to a large grotto. The bottom was further away than I had expected, and at first, I thought the warding magick was written on the walls down here too, but when the Chorus tightened my focus, I realized the flickering motion on the walls wasn't thousands of lines of script, but worms of ambient energy boiling through the stone of the grotto. The effect of the energy glow was to fill the chamber with a sourceless luminescence. There were still shadows, but they were out-of-focus shapes that capered madly at the periphery of my vision.
The leys might be gone, but down here, something else was filling that void. The squirming energy was an optical illusion, sort of a heat mirage, and it was more of an echo of history than an actual presence. But something had been here once upon a time, something big enough to fill this space, and it had left an impression upon the stone of this chamber.
The Chorus felt like a very tiny light in my head, and I flashed on a memory of cupping my hands around a flickering heart. Shivering on a cold stone that floated in an infinite emptiness, trying to preserve the infinitesimal spark of their heat. It was cold in the grotto; the constant fluctuation of energy greedily fed on any available source and our lights were not spared.
A tiny stream ran across the floor of the cavern, a rut carved in the rock by centuries of slow, steady flow. The smell of blood was stronger as I floated closer to the flow of water and it wasn't clear if there was something in the water or if it was the water itself that was the source of the smell. The stream came out of the wall below the hole to the chapel and flowed in a looping, curving path across the slope of the floor until it reached a pool at the farthest, lowest corner of the chamber. Standing in the pool, the water halfway up its chest, was a statue.