Philippe nods slowly.
"We're all responsible, aren't we?" Antoine says. He lowers his hand and the fingers dissolve back into the smooth shape of the silver cap. "But you are the lucky one, aren't you? You only have to carry this weight a little while longer."
Philippe's lips curl into something like a smile. Long enough, he says, his words clear to both Antoine and me, though his voice doesn't work. There are others who will carry it longer than you and I.
"Of course there are." A bark of laughter rips out of Antoine, a stab of noise that appears to be painful. "You still need me, don't you, Old Man? You've taken everything from me so that I am pure in my purpose, so that my desire is focused on one thing only. Markham may have been your salvation, but I am to be your vengeance. Is that it?"
In this dream, I am a ghost, a translucent vessel that is being filled with the morning light. A cup, not yet full of fire. I stand on the water of the Willamette River, and watch Antoine argue with his conscience.
"I will wait," Antoine says. "I will Watch. That is what I will do for you. I will be patient, until my turn comes."
As the light changes, as the vision becomes less like a dream and more like the morning after the death of Portland, I become more solid and the specter of the Hierarch vanishes. Antoine remains, standing on the edge, staring into the Abyss.
Am I next?
XXVIII
Do you know the security code?" Antoine asked, leaning heavily against the back wall of the elevator in Tour Montparnasse. After leaving the beach, we had commandeered a car and driven back to Paris. Antoine had insisted on stopping at an open market outside of Caen where he had bought a bottle of expensive vodka. Something to dull the pain. I was still buzzing from the energy I had channeled and the sparks of Spiertz's soul; Antoine, on the other hand, was wiped out.
Or so he professed, and after drinking most of the fifth in less than two hours, it wasn't much of a white lie anymore.
"Yes," I lied. I hadn't seen the sequence that Marielle had entered, but it didn't matter. Every member of La Societe Lumineuse had their own code-the heavy security lay on the hidden floor anyway-and, according to Lafoutain, all the code did was announce your presence. As I had the memories of more than three Architects in my head, I had a choice of codes to choose from.
I opted for Philippe's, and I was a little surprised when the code was accepted. I had half-thought they would have disabled his code already. With a tiny change in the air pressure inside the car, the elevator began to rise.
"Starts with a nine," I told Antoine. "You know, the number of Architects."
He looked at me, bleary-eyed, and pretended to not know what I was talking about.
He wasn't as drunk as he seemed. I knew him now, better than he knew me. The conduit had been rather one-way in that regard.
The elevator opened on the empty foyer of the Archives. I walked up to the door and tapped on it lightly with the tip of the Spear. The noise was tiny in the empty space, like a marble falling down a drain, but the reaction was quite dramatic.
The walls went black and the lights went out. The only illumination was the yellow glow from the strip of lights along the base of the wall in the elevator carriage, and a violet pinprick like a distant star in the mantle of black space from each of the cameras set in the corners of the room. I held up the Spear, knowing it would register like a furious supernova on the magick-sensitive monitors.
There was a long pause, a moment where both Antoine and the Chorus became increasingly nervous, and then Vivienne's voice spoke in our heads.
"Why are you here?" she Whispered.
"I've come for the Grail," I replied out loud, not having the same visual luxury as she to pinpoint my response.
"A lot of men have sought the Grail," she Whispered. "A lot of them have stood where you stand and made the same demand. They all went away with nothing. You are no different than any of them."
Antoine had spent a good portion of the drive back, most of it after he had started drinking, trying to convince me that Husserl would have already retrieved the Grail from the Archives. He had the ring; why wouldn't he claim the Cup? I had argued that the daughters wouldn't have given it to him; I didn't have a solid rationale, just the intuition that Husserl's Vision of the future required him to maintain anonymity as long as possible. As long as he was only an observer, he couldn't be enticed to become part of what he Saw, thereby limiting his exposure to the chaotic possibilities.
I was starting to understand how scrying worked. Scryers remained in flux until they were forced to touch a thread. That was how they protected themselves from what they Saw. Rene had been too close to, too intimately involved in, the future he was Seeing, and as such, he hadn't been able to keep the bigger picture in mind, and had missed a critical detail that had cost him his life.
Husserl knew I needed the Grail too, and if I succeeded in retrieving the Spear-which he, apparently, had every faith that I would-then I would need to visit the Archives. Why bother getting it himself when I would bring it with me?
Though how I was going to get the Grail from the Archives was a bit hazy. Antoine wasn't too thrilled with my lack of a plan. Banging on the door and demanding it hadn't been his choice of methods, but as he hadn't offered anything better, it was the plan we had. He couldn't help but point out that the last time someone had tried to assault the Archives, they had brought an entire armored division with them. Hitler's occupation of Paris during World War II, Antoine had pointed out, had been an excuse to bring the heavy armor forward because the Schwarze Sonne Gesellschaft hadn't been able to crack the vaults.
Then I had pointed out that Hitler's copy of the Spear had been a fake. We were ahead of the game this time.
I tried to keep the conversation civil, though. No need to go ballistic. Not yet. "I have been designated as the Hierarch's representative," I replied.
"Designated by whom? I do not see any symbol of office on your hand." she asked. "The Hierarch is dead. The spring equinox has arrived, and there has been no Coronation ceremony. Whatever rights his name afforded you are no longer applicable."
I raised the Spear, and let the Chorus fill the blade. Not a fake. I was going to have better luck than Hitler's black magi. "Then I come under no banner but my own. I am Adversarius, and if you don't open the fucking door right now, I'm going to cut a hole in it with the Spear and come find the Grail on my terms."
The dark got darker, as if ink had been splashed on the walls of the elevator and it slowly dripped over the emergency lights, dimming them by degrees. The Chorus flowed even thicker over my skin, giving me warmth as the temperature dropped, and Antoine bound a handful of leys to his Will.
"Very well," Vivienne Whispered to us finally. The darkness began to abate, a slow emergence of light that revealed the endless stacks of the Archives. "However, the Spear does not cross the threshold. You may enter, but that phallic symbol doesn't. Those are my terms, and they are nonnegotiable."
I made a show of hesitating for a minute, as if I were thinking it over. Much like she had with us. "Fine," I shrugged. I walked over to Antoine and held out the Spear.
"Nice plan," he muttered.
"Whatever works, you know?" I replied. "Could you sober up by the time I get back?" Keeping up appearances. Making him think I didn't know.
The Chorus felt him probe me, and they rebuffed his attempt. Let him wonder.
For a second, I froze, caught in a black panic that this was all a bad idea. A vision-seemingly prescient-that this would end disastrously. Then I realized it wasn't the Weave peeling apart and revealing the future, but just old memories caught in Philippe's past. When the Spear was brought out of hiding, blood followed. It was an old tradition, and I would have been more of a fool than I already was to think it wouldn't happen.