Bernard pursed his lips and pressed a finger against his slim mouth. As he considered his response, something microscopic on his pant leg finally caught his attention and he flicked the speck away with a sigh. "Your semantic barbs will not prick me, Mr. Markham. I will not be drawn into a tawdry shouting match."
"No? How about some straight-forward discussion then? You still haven't told me what you want. My blessing?"
He shook his head. "No, we have already been blessed."
I looked at Kat. "The Pope's been out?"
"Protector Briande-"
I flinched involuntarily. Protector? How had Antoine gotten that far? Five ranks in as many years. How could he-and then I realized the way it could be done. Ritus concursus. Antoine was clawing his way to the top, and, apparently, had the skills to pull it off. Losing a hand hadn't apparently done much to slow him down.
Bernard took note of my twitch. "Yes," he laughed. "A real Protector. Here, looking for you. What have you done, Mr. Markham, to anger him so?"
One of the slices of memory in my head rotated into an orientation where it found a natural grouping with a number of disparate elements. This combination of past events triggered a brief flash of illumination. For a second, I could see the Weave surrounding me. I understood the forces pulling the threads.
Antoine was already here. It was Antoine who had been in the back of Pender's car. Pender hadn't left the card mirage in Doug's mirror. That had been Antoine. As was the message on the back of the Polaroid: 61. A cryptic reference to the Abyss. Antoine hadn't told Pender anything about our history; his directive to Pender had simply been to Watch me.
The hotel had been a ruse, a snare meant to direct me along a path of their choosing. Nicols had been right: there had been ulterior motives beneath Pender's seemingly benevolent act. Pender had probably suggested the plan to Antoine-let's get him where we can keep an eye on him. Let's bait this snare with something that we know he wants.
It's a good thing they don't know where you are.
More pieces fell into place. Pender was the Hollow Men contact within the Seattle infrastructure. He had known about Doug before I told him. And, when I ran like a fool with a hard-on toward the hotel, Pender had called his friends. The Hollow Men had snatched me from Antoine's Watch. Because they had some purpose for me.
No. More tracing of the Weave's intricacy. My disappearance would distract Antoine. I was the flashy coin held in one hand, the object meant to snare the audience's attention while the other hand performed the magic trick. My purpose was simply to be out there, somewhere, a nagging itch Antoine couldn't scratch.
Meanwhile, whatever secret plan Bernard and Julian had been concocting with their secret manuscript was coming to fruition. Whatever they were hoping to achieve with their psychoanimist research. Body-jacking. .
"You're going to take control of a Protector," I realized. "You're going to subvert his Watch."
Bernard put a finger to his lips again, but this time he was hiding a smile. "Oh, nothing so mundane as that, I'm afraid. We have a much grander plan in mind."
XVII
More extreme than taking out a Protector? My confusion must have been evident in my inability to articulate a reply. "The Watchers aren't known for their forgiveness," I finally managed.
"Spoken like a man who knows." Bernard chuckled. "We are about to embark upon an ambitious project, Mr. Markham. A project that goes well beyond the discourse of TheCorpus Hermeticum. One that requires industrious men with extraordinary talents. I think you qualify. ." He hesitated on the remainder of the sentence.
"Julian doesn't like me," I finished for him.
He hesitated, considering his answer, and then sighed. "Julian doesn't like a number of things."
"So he is in charge?"
"No," Bernard disagreed.
I glanced at Kat and raised an eyebrow. "That's funny. It doesn't seem that way. I mean, call it what you will but he's not the one who locked himself in a crate with me. With you in here. ." I raised my shoulders as if to say that I didn't really have an opinion on the matter. All the while making it clear that I thought his presence inside was certainly not the action of a man in charge.
"You're being childish, Mr. Markham. Provoking me won't achieve anything."
I looked at Bernard again, held his gaze, and slowly raised the Chorus behind my eyes. "Nothing childish about it," I said. "Especially in light of what Julian knows." I let the Chorus pulse around me once, their wave setting alight the inscribed sigil. In the background, the three gunmen raised their pistols in a frantic effort to cover me with their laser sights. But, in the sudden darkness following the ward's illumination, they discovered the lantern had gone out. They couldn't see well enough to find a target for their little red dots.
In the tiny chaos caused by the Chorus' suffocating touch on the lantern's flame, I did exactly what Bernard warned me against. In the dark, I Whispered to him, my voice riding his ear. "Julian let you come in here because you were expendable." Bernard shouted incoherently, and I heard the chair tip over as he leaped to his feet. Boots scuffled as anarchy gathered the four men together, scrambling their efforts.
A flashlight clicked on. It reflected from Bernard's white shirt, momentarily freezing him in a bright spotlight, and then it swept in a flat arc across the floor.
Kat reached out in the darkness and found my hand. When the flashlight discovered us, we hadn't moved from our position. A second flashlight covered us as well, while the third lit up the door panel. The plastic butt of a handgun rang against the metal-three strikes, followed by two more. The heavy lever holding the door was lifted from the outside.
Kat and I raised hands to shield our eyes as the four men retreated through the open door. "An infantile prank, Mr. Markham," Bernard chided me as he left. "It wins you no favors." The portal closed and the bar and lock clanged into place, sealing us inside.
"Well," Kat said after a moment. "He's kind of right."
"Yeah, but it made me feel better," I said.
"Ah," she replied. "I'm glad that's one of those critical personal policies that you're clinging to."
I stood and fumbled across the room to where Bernard had left the storm lantern and sniffed at it carefully. There was still some kerosene in the reservoir. "It also put him off his game," I pointed out. I opened the tiny door of the lantern and snapped my fingers. The Chorus made a spark that leaped onto the oil-soaked wick. I adjusted the flame and lifted the lantern to better expose the container. "You heard him, Kat. They're planning something stupid. I'm the bait to distract Antoine. It wasn't their original plan, but they're certainly taking advantage of the circumstance. And until I know why they opted to make that change in their plan, I'm going to make mischief."
A finger-length in width, the metal plate on which the firestorm sigil was inscribed made the circuit of the wall. It wasn't a solid piece of metal but the pieces were fit snugly enough it was nigh impossible to find the seams. Even the plates on the end panels made allowances for the doors. The spell could have been written on the bare wall, but dealing with the ridged construction would make the process of crafting an unbroken line of text unbearably time-consuming.
Knowing it was based in Solomon's Lore and that it was similar to the ward used in the barn made it easier to discern the pattern in the script. By the flickering light of the storm lantern, I traced the sigil. It looped around the room four times, and it ended like it began: with the symbol of fire. Arcane punctuation marks.