Antoine shook his head, and though his expression was still serene and filled with empathy for her pain, there was a spark of anger in his eyes. "No," he said. "I wouldn't have let him go if I had known."
After the detonation of the Key in Portland, Antoine and I had talked. We had realized that the Hierarch was working on a design much larger than either of us had imagined. We had been twisted to be his agents, but to what end hadn't been clear. The only real way to find out was to ask the Old Man directly, and that task had fallen to me.
Our best guess was that he would, eventually, come to Seattle. All I had to do was stay put and wait him out. But, the Old Man had outfoxed us. He hadn't come to talk; he had come to die. At my hand, and in doing so, his problems became my problems. His wisdom became mine.
And what did that leave for the Protector to protect? came the whisper in my head.
Suddenly, I had a creeping suspicion who had tipped Henri off.
Antoine stared at me, trying to read what I was thinking. "Endgame," he Whispered via magi-speak so that Marielle couldn't hear. "The revolution is upon us."
I cleared my throat. Sooner than you think, I thought. "We need to go," I said aloud. "Henri and the others are coming. We can have this out, but let's not do it here." Marielle's face was taut with fury and sorrow, and I flinched at the sight of the hurt I had inflicted on her. Not my intention, I wanted to tell her. It's not what I wanted.
"I'm sorry," I said. The words couldn't heal the pain. Nor would they change what had been done, or absolve me of having done it. They were meaningless sounds, empty tokens that did nothing to wipe away my sin, but they were all I had to ease her despair.
She started to speak, and then shook her head. A tear tracked down her cheek and she slowly unclenched her fists. For a second, I thought my apology was actually going to be enough, but then her face hardened again. This time, I didn't even bother trying to block the punch.
I had earned it. What is done is done, what is gone is gone. I had earned her wrath. In so many ways. My knees buckled and I fell back against the car. Then everything went black.
In the weeks following the Ascension Event in Portland, I fell into a temporal loop when I closed my eyes. During the winter, a splinter group of magi had unleashed an experiment on the Rose City. Using a theurgic harvester, they had attempted to collect the living energy of every soul within reach. The device hadn't been properly prepared, and it didn't devour the entire city-just all of downtown. Everything between the bluffs and the river. More than fifty thousand souls.
When I tried to sleep, I snapped back to that night in a bad cosmological loop. Standing at the top of the tower built by Bernard du Guyon's hubris, and watching the dazzling un-light of the harvester. Even though the sphere of mirrors had been destroyed, I could still remember its hypnotic facets. I could still remember the device's hunger for all those souls. I could still remember the emptiness. The Qliphotic void.
The Chorus, as I had lived with them for a decade while I had chased my own ill-remembered history, had died that night. Detonated so I could escape the soul-dead of Portland, expelled from my broken shell to complete the purge of their poisonous taint. Spiritually naked, I had ascended to the top of the spire; there, given another chance to climb the mystic tree I had first seen at my initiation into magick, I had clawed my way to the top branches and touched the crown. Kether, the first Sphere of the Tree of the Sephiroth.
So far from mud-footed Malkuth. So far from that time of crawling on my belly among the roots of the trees. So far from who I was: a child, blind to the magick of the world; a pure soul, untouched by the corruption of the Weave.
Somewhere in the explosion of self and soul that followed, I found a new Chorus, a new collection of voices and personalities who were tasked with filling the cracks of my shell, who were meant to make me whole. A little bit of Bernard du Guyon was in there, a black coal sulking in the fiery pit of my heart. As were his Anointed, the psychoanimistic inner circle of the Hollow Men, the Seattle-based coven who had helped him build Thoth's Key. John Nicols, the Seattle detective who had fallen during the battle with Bernard's magus, was in my head too. Unlike the old collection of dead men, the new Chorus nearly had individual voices, soloists who occasionally rose out of the throng of voices.
You are different, they-he-had told me. We are different.
The experience at the peak of the tower had been one of the moments that Mircea Eliade, a twentieth-century Romanian mythology scholar, had quantified as a sacred epiphany, a cosmological instant of death and rebirth. At the axis mundi, the pillar of the world that reaches from our profane meat space into the sacred world of the spirit, a seeker is granted an audience with the Divine. Be it God, or Pure Ego, or Ptah, or Animal Spirits from Dogon: the name doesn't really matter, as they all fail to truly encompass the Infinite that breaches into the Finite. When the light goes out and the Ineffable retreats, the seeker is returned to his secular world, changed by his experience.
The Chorus wasn't the only thing I lost that night. I also lost that last part of my innocence. I had been clinging so tightly to it, to that tiny ego child of deniaclass="underline" I wasn't responsible for what had happened to me in the woods ten years ago when I had first seen magick; I wasn't responsible for the choices I made that night, or that I made over the successive years when I took lives. I did these things so that I might live, so that the hole in my soul might not devour me. All these lies over the years, wound around my frightened spirit like a security blanket. It's not my fault.
But it was. They were all my sins, and at the top of the tower, frozen in the eye of the Ineffable, I was judged and found wanting. I was thrown back, like a fish that was too small. Rede, mi fili. Go back, my son. Go back, and try again.
When I sleep, I dream of that night. I dream of throwing Julian, Bernard's insane right-hand man, out the window. I dream of the crown of stars I tore from his head; I dream of how it felt in my hand, the weight of those souls, and I imagine putting that crown on my head. Anointing myself, and fighting Bernard before he can trigger the device. I dream of rising and falling, over and over, as I try to understand the judgment delivered.
Go back.
But now-nunc-the dream changes. When I fail and fall, the tower exploding behind me, I fall through layers-concrete and timber and sheet rock-until I land in a library. In the dream, the fireplace is real, and the marble busts aren't medieval replicas but real heads, stuck on sharp sticks. And Philippe Emonet-the Old Man, the Hierarch of the Watchers, the Silent Guardian Who Waits, Marielle's father-is older and more decrepit, as if he had been wearing a glamour when I had last seen him-less than twenty-four hours ago-and now, in the True Seeing vision of my dream, the true extent of his illness was apparent.
His hair is gone, and black sores like weeping eyes cover his skull. His left leg is gone entirely, amputated just below his hip, and his left hand is reduced to a tiny claw like a dried chicken foot. He is blind in one eye, and he stutters fiercely when he speaks.
This is what would have happened if you had failed to stop him, he says. This is the map of Portland, carved into my flesh.
But, I remind him, some did die. I didn't save them all.