My forehead was wet too, and when I reached up to wipe away the blood, I found a tarot card stuck there.
"Yeah," I said. "I suppose I was."
Black marks wiggled around the Grail like the lines in comic books drawn to indicate motion. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It's the flying cup! I wiped my fingers across the card, smearing blood with the ink, and the surface became a blur of motion. A riot of symbolic suggestions.
Reflections glittered off Husserl's glasses. "Ah, the Hierarch's cards. What do you see, blind little magus?" His voice still had that same mechanical precision, and I finally realized why. The thing on his throat was helping him speak. The trim throwback to the nineteenth-century fashion on his face was stuck there, like his eyebrows, with spirit gum. His skin was as smooth as a baby's because it was just as new.
Someone had hurt him recently.
"Blood and water," I said honestly.
"Yes, the Grail. I see it too."
I watched the motion on the card for a little while, and Husserl was patient. Why wouldn't he be? He knew the future.
"Rene didn't have much luck with the future," I said, remembering the earlier encounter before the storm hit and I had been swept into that inchoate conflagration. That tsunami of etheric energy that had hurled me into an out-of-body experience-a cosmological dream. "I don't think he saw me coming."
Husserl sighed. "No, he was too close. He was no longer in flux. He failed to look in the right direction."
"You didn't warn him?"
"It is difficult to change what you See. Dangerous, too, because one can become tangled in that Weave."
"Ah, yes, that whole seeing is creating thing." I glanced around again, and there was a glint of metal in the floor nearby, a shard buried in the center of a ragged circle that looked like an imprint of my fist. The key-
"You can't remove it," Husserl said.
"Remove what?"
"Even if you could," he said, "what would you do with it?"
"I hadn't had a chance to think it through that far."
"Trust me, then: it won't help you."
You need the ring.
I shrugged. "Okay, I suppose I can give you that one." I put the tarot card down, giving some thought to standing up. Not a lot. I examined Antoine, trying to find his left hand. In my dream, he had been missing his ring finger. He had taken the ring too, along with the key. Did he still-
"He doesn't have the ring," Husserl said. "Nor does it matter," he repeated, his voice hardening. "Even if you could retrieve it." The thought of trying to take it from the Architect had barely entered my head. "The lock is broken."
I relented, relaxing against the floor. "Okay, so no ring and no key. What are we doing here then?"
"That depends on you, M. Markham," Husserl said.
I spread my hands. "I suppose it does then, doesn't it?" The Chorus squeezed my neck, and I held them in check. As long as Husserl could play the Farseeing trick, he had the upper hand. I wasn't convinced that scrying would enable him to foresee every possibility-I had managed to trick Rene and the way I had touched Husserl's thread back at the Archives had seemed to surprise him-but he was anticipating everything readily enough at the moment that the best option might be to simply hear him out. The man had a propensity to talk. "What's on your mind?"
"The same thing as yours," he said.
I laughed. "I doubt that."
"Don't be so sure of yourself. I may not have the advantage of carrying spirits, but I have been privy to the Hierarch's plans for a long time. I knew every thread he was going to twist before he did."
"And you figured you'd let him do all the hard work, and then swoop in at the last minute."
He inclined his head slightly. "Perhaps."
"Don't you think Philippe might have anticipated that?" Husserl didn't seem inclined to answer that question, and a moment later, I found my own answer. The Chorus had uncovered a handful of memories and was feeding them to me. "Oh, wait, he did. At Chateau Neuf de Meudon."
He gripped the head of his cane. "Yes, M. Markham. The Hierarch and I had a discussion there-"
"A discussion?" I interrupted him with a snort of laughter. "That's not the way I remember it. Seems like someone got their face burned off." The memories weren't complete. They were stuttering loops like I was watching a short surrealist cut-up film. Fire, reflecting off the glass ceiling of the Grande Cupole. Husserl's cane with its knob of black glass. My hand on his throat, flames licking at the cuff of my shirt. His hair, burning.
Husserl took a step forward. "Is that all you remember? You are a very poor Witness, M. Markham."
There was more. Husserl had been smiling. Even as I crushed his throat and burned him, he had never stopped smiling at me.
"But shouldn't you be asking yourself why he didn't kill me?" Husserl asked. "If he knew what I planned, why did he stop with my face?"
Why hadn't I killed him?
Husserl cocked his head to one side, and the weak light reflected off his glasses. "You're not sure. I don't have to See to tell that you don't know the answer to that question. Your head is filled with spirits, but you still don't know anything useful. You don't know why."
If Philippe had known who the Opposition was, why hadn't he killed them? Why had he let them live?
A really troubling point intruded on my thoughts: What if everyone had been lying to me? What if there was no Opposition. Perhaps they were all scrambling in the vacuum to be the last one standing. It is the first way.
"Why don't you tell me?" I asked Husserl, shoving that possibility aside. That was too chaotic, too unstructured, and I couldn't believe that Philippe would have left so much to chance.
He laughed. "Why should I? Why don't you ask him? You're his master now, aren't you? Or are you just a simple tool?"
"You're trying to twist me," I said. "Just like he did. Everything you say is the same manipulative bullshit that Philippe used to pull on us. He read people very well, and he didn't have to know the future to know how they'd react in certain situations. You're doing the same thing."
"Of course I am," Husserl said. "We all do, M. Markham. It's a facet of being human: all that lying, cheating, and conniving. It's what makes our meat so sticky sweet to the pure light of our souls. All that corruption. All that filthy sin. What else would the Divine Spark soil itself in but that which is the very opposite of its purified innocence?"
"Don't make this metaphysical," I said, realizing that sentiment applied to my line of thinking as well. Keep it concrete. "I'm talking about the very specific mechanics of shaping events and people to your ends. You're just like Philippe: whispering what we want to hear; suggesting what we already know, but can't bring ourselves to want. The only difference between you two is that he was better at it than you. Even with your special glasses."
Husserl laughed. "Better than me? You think my actions are driven by jealousy, by some vague psychological need?"
"Are they?"
"Why do you think Philippe and I are at odds? How do you know this course of events isn't something that we planned together?"
"You-" And I stopped. Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't that explain why Philippe hadn't killed him. What about the others? Cristobel had accepted his sacrifice eagerly; and Antoine, burned by my actions in Ravensdale, had suffered that pain in order to receive his reward. Why couldn't Husserl's actions be considered in the same light? Who was to say that they weren't all so aware of the big picture that a sacrifice of the flesh was but a minor token if it moved the plan forward. Hadn't Husserl done exactly that when he had called me at the Archives, ostensibly from Tevvys' phone? He had claimed to have done so at my request, but I didn't know that Moreau had delivered that message any more than I knew how Husserl had gotten my phone number. What had that conversation accomplished? He had told me I was a singularity, a point beyond which no future was certain, and that realization had unlocked an awareness of the Hierarch's grand plan. He had moved Philippe's design forward in a manner that suggested he was aware of some of the details of that vision.