Lightbreaker, p.32
Lightbreaker, page 32
"Hello, Philippe," I responded awkwardly, the phrasing of . . . peerage . . . strange on my tongue. "What brings you to Seattle?"
"What indeed?"
The Watcher method: questions answered by questions, layers of obfuscation and redirection. They were mirrors, invisible spirits who—when they deigned to be substantial—were nothing more than reflections of the space in which they were present. They weren't here; they were transient recorders of events surrounding them.
I shook my head. "You summoned me," I said. "You wanted this conversation, and you can actively direct it. Or, I walk out of here, and pretend your messenger didn't find me."
A hint of some emotion quirked the corner of his mouth. Maybe a smile, maybe a frown: it was hard to tell. "You were so young—so innocent of the world—when you came to us in Paris, Michael. You needed a family, a rock to which you could cling in this great river of experience. We were your rock."
"Rocks block the natural—" I stopped. He was doing it already, dragging me into a conversation that was about me and not about him. Twist it back. "Rocks block the channel. They force the flow in unnatural directions."
"True. But hasn't that always been the nature of the stones moved by man?"
"Especially for the Watchers."
He shrugged, and idly pushed the book he had been reading more in line with the texts surrounding it on the shelf. "Sometimes we grow impatient with the journey, Michael. We want to reach the headwaters of the flow upon which we ride; we are unsatisfied with the capricious drift of the natural world. We want to arrive at a destination."
"There is no destination," I said.
"Some of us forget that. Or rather, we neglect to remember that truth."
"Is that what happened? Someone forgot?"
His left leg moved awkwardly, and his hand unconsciously strayed toward his cane. "I did come to talk," he said. "Honest talk, magus, though it is hard for one like me. Among the Watchers, I am the Silent Guardian Who Waits. I am the Hierarch. I do not sit as Judge."
"Salve . . . meus pater." I found the strength to say those words. Yes, I could respond to that. Yes, I could give my blessing. The back of my mouth still hurt, still ached from some words which I could not understand enough to form.
"Ah, Michael. Your blessing is filled with such . . . You speak to me as if you know what lies in my heart, as if you understand the weight of the burden of my stewardship; and yet I cannot pierce the Weave about you. You are a knot—a convergence of too many threads. More come in than go out, or it may be that more leave than arrive."
"Too many voices," I said. "Too many lives have passed through me."
There was honest sorrow in his eyes. "I am sorry about that."
"But not sorry you planned for it."
"Would you have preferred the alternative?"
"I would have preferred Bernard had never been allowed to gather the manuscripts he did. I would rather you had stopped him before he had even gotten started."
"But what was he starting? And when did we know?"
The subtext, so accessible beneath his question: At what point do we kill all those who might wander astray? At what point do we decide all thought is dangerous?
I felt the Weave—that very tangle the Old Man couldn't read—tighten, and for a second, the room was alight with the tangled web of threads. Deeper now. Follow the threads between him and me. Where did his planning start? Where did it go?
He was as tangled in the Weave as I, but his hands were still tugging and threading. It had been his design that had put me in Seattle; his Weaving had put me on a collision course with the Hollow Men and, eventually, Bernard de Guyon and his twisted Hermeticism. While some of those threads had been cut, there were still more, too many strands twisting through the fabric of the Weave. Too many lines touching his fingers.
"What did you want to talk about?" I asked, trying to rise above the recent past and focus on the future.
"I am not here to remind you of the lessons you have missed, of the laws and rules which you have ignored, or of the history and the tradition which you have cast aside," Philippe said, and his words, while they were an admonishment for my betrayal in Paris, were hollow. Like a ritual recitation.
"I have gone astray," I said, trying to follow his lead. "I need to know how I have lost my vision."
He nodded. "Yes, the body has become diseased. It can no longer support life. It must be slain."
"Killed?"
"Yes, Michael, the Watchers must be destroyed."
The Weave churned in the wake of his pronouncement, and for a second, it was stretched out behind him, limned by the fire, and I saw the entirety of the tapestry it could become, if properly threaded. I saw everything.
Nothing is ever lost; it is simply transformed.
The Universe is a closed system. Matter cannot leave, nor can it be added. Everything that ever was, is, or will be, is already here. It is just a question of timing and forms. "Destruction" is a purely human concept, an affection of Man's based on his naiveté about the true nature of God. We "destroy" because we do not understand the concept of transformation.
Philippe waited for me to respond and, when I didn't, he leaned heavily on his cane and limped over to one of the leather chairs. His left leg dragged, stiff and recalcitrant. I wondered if we were talking about the organization or its leader; I wondered how sick he was.
I let the Chorus lick the room, let them taste the air for some drifting hint of Philippe's health. The Chorus colored my vision, and the yellow glow of the fireplace was eclipsed by the halo of intense light around the Old Man's frame—his presence made visible through the filter of magickal sight.
He lowered himself into the chair, fingers digging into the armrest. He brushed away my magickal queries with a wave of his other hand. "The organization has a King," he said as he unbuttoned his suit coat with a gliding movement of his hand, a practiced sleight-of-hand that verged on being a magic trick. "And the King is the organization. You know this mythology?"
"I've heard it once or twice," I said.
He smiled at me. "You have grown cautious since you left us."
"I'm waiting for you to explain yourself. I've been a pawn too long to blindly believe what I am told. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop."
"Yes," he said. "Information is power. It is the only true power there is."
"Even when you are being direct, you're only telling me a fraction of what I need to know. I was in the organization long enough to realize that our faith was an illusion fabricated by the omissions and lies we were told. We were too young to make our own decisions, to formulate our own understanding of the threads. We had to rely on the Protector-Witnesses and the Architects for our guidance." I shrugged. "I've forsworn that guidance; I am my own Witness now."
"Tell me," he said. "What did you Witness that night when you climbed the pillar of the world?"
"Your dog didn't tell you?"
"Antoine's Record is filled with his exploits."
I wasn't terribly surprised. Antoine had come to Seattle to shape the Weave to his own end. Though, in the end, he had hesitated. He had seen the hand of the Hierarch in the threads, and had realized we both had been subject to the machinations of the Old Man. Antoine had—"He was the True Record," I realized.
He had killed the only other Watcher present. At the time, I had thought Pender's assassination had been a clumsy effort to manipulate me, to wound my spirit in response to the hand I had taken years ago. But it wasn't. Antoine, by killing Pender, had become the sole Witness.
Philippe raised an eyebrow. "Was it?"
I smiled—feral grin, full of teeth—and said nothing. The Weave split open for me, revealing the reasons for the lack of repercussion from the Watchers. Antoine had returned to Paris, and had taken full credit for stopping Bernard, for silencing the very experiment he had been sent to Witness and Protect. Whatever schism had developed within the rank, Antoine had changed sides with his Record. He had been sent to take part in the attempt to touch the Divine and had, instead, gone back and stood against those who had allowed the attempt to happen. "He's your favored son again, isn't he?"
"None of my sons are ever out of favor, Michael. Even when they are lost, they are still my children."
I looked away.
"What was it like?" he asked quietly. "What did you See?"
I growled at him, an animal sound rising up from my belly, rising through the stiff lines of the Chorus. "Fifty thousand died in an effort to talk to God and remake the world. The experiment failed—"
"Did it?"
"Fifty thousand were taken before their time. They were taken without a choice."
"What were their lives worth in the first place?"
"Who are we to judge the value of a life? Of fifty thousand lives?" I shouted at him, then expelled a wordless howl of inchoate rage that bled fire from my mouth. The leather of his seat darkened from the expressed heat and the wood of his staff glowed as it was touched by the magick of my frustration. Philippe sat through it, untouched and unbowed by the expression, waiting patiently for me to run out of breath.
"You still don't understand anything you've learned, do you?" He didn't raise his voice, but it cut through the echo of my cry as if it were nothing but the breeze left by a hummingbird's wings. "Our knowledge isn't meant for the masses. It never was and never will be. They won't believe you. Their brains aren't configured for such data. They need mystery, unexplained phenomena. They need us to be in the shadows; they need to know we are out there, protectors of the arcane knowledge of the Universe. They need to know that there are men who are carriers of the secret knowledge they aren't meant to have.
"We have struck a very mean balance with the world, Michael. You know this. We have gazed into her dark belly and brought back an understanding of what we have Seen. We have fallen into the caves and crevasses of the earth and have seen the striations and the painted symbols on the walls within. We are the elite, the elect who have been selected to guard and shepherd this knowledge to ensure that the common man doesn't destroy himself in his ignorance."
"Innocent people died for this knowledge." My voice broke on these words, and my cheeks were wet with the memory of the liquid heat of those souls as they passed through me. Each one, taking the offered sacrament and crossing the threshold I had become in the palace of wind and light.
"Innocent people die every day." His voice, hard like iron, beat against me. "Most of them from stupid mistakes and misguided ventures of other mad visionaries whom they had the accident to touch. Most die in darkness and in pain, their minds filled with idle garbage about their bank accounts and whether or not they were loved by their children and respected by their friends. Those people in Portland died in an attempt to bring us knowledge of the Infinite, of the Creative Spirit that made everything. Those people didn't die in vain. They died for a cause. They died so that we could understand why we live, Michael. They died for knowledge.
"In ten years, there will be another million souls born on this planet. In ten years, Portland will be rebuilt and this will all be forgotten. We'll still be destroying the world as we refashion it with our limited bovine imaginations. Time slays us all, Michael, and the vast majority of people that it takes will never make any sort of positive impact on this planet. Why shouldn't they make an actual contribution in the search for knowledge? Why shouldn't they be allowed the opportunity to participate in a transmission to the Other Side? Bernard sought an audience with the Primal Agent of Reality. Those who sponsored him sought to Know the Divine. Can you damn them for the effort they made?"
I stared into his fierce eyes for a long time. The taste of ash was strong in my mouth. "Yes," I said finally. "Yes, I do."
His lips twisted into that hint of a smile again. "I made the right choice then, didn't I?"
"What happened?" I whispered. "I admired you, looked up to you. I was proud to have been a guest in your House."
"You spent fourteen months in my House. You think that was enough time to learn all there was about me? About my family? You think you know me so well as to pass judgment?"
"Judgment is based on words, and your words are placing you in the arms of the enemy."
"Are they? You said it yourself: we only tell you what you need to know. Are you sure these words are mine? Just because they are coming out of my mouth doesn't mean anything, Michael. Words are the weapons of the Watchers; what we say is not what we mean. What you hear is the only meaning that matters. I am not Witness to my words; you are."
Witnessing. The axiomatic truth of the Watchers. We were all recorders, arrays of sensory inputs that make and remake the world every day with our perceptions. God didn't fashion us because He was curious as to the function of Free Will or Rote Determinism; He made us because He wanted someone to Witness His Creation. He wanted it to be made permanent by our eyes and ears and hearts.
Antoine had maintained my non-existence when he returned to Paris and took credit for Bernard's death. I didn't exist in the Record and, for a time, I was still dead to the Watchers. Was his act one of virtue or personal gain? It certainly wasn't veritas.
And Philippe's words now. What did he seek to gain by exciting me to passion? What change—what act—did he seek to bring about by attempting to validate the reasons for the unholy experiment? His words were for me alone. We were on neutral ground—a private place where neither of us had any influence.
"Are we Weavers then?" I asked. "Do we presume to direct the course of threads? Many of those people suffered. Was that our right? To bring them pain?"
"Life is suffering, Michael," he said pointedly. "First principle in the Eight-Fold Path. Didn't the Buddhists teach you anything?"
I swallowed heavily, the Chorus moving with some agitation in my head. I had never told Philippe about my time in Tibet, had never spoken to him—or anyone in Paris—about what had happened at the monastery.
"Do you think their deaths were justified?" He sensed my hesitation. Whether he knew or not, he sensed a hole in my armor, a thin slit through which he could pour more words. "Do you think they died for any reason other than your failure to control the fury in your soul?"
"That was different," I whispered. It was a bad lie, a bad defense which wouldn't deflect him at all.
And he knew it too. "Was it? How many were in that monastery, Michael: Ten? Twenty? Does their small number make your actions any less reprehensible?" He let me reel a moment before he split me open with his next question. "And if they hadn't died, would you have been ready to stop Bernard? If you hadn't learned how to control the darkness in your heart, would you have had the strength to stand up to him in that split second between this world and the next?"
"Speculation," I tried. "Simple, idle speculation. 'What-if?' scenarios have no place in reality, Philippe. You have wandered into the realm of historians and statisticians."
His open hand cracked against the arm of his chair. "History predicts the future. It is the only way we can prepare ourselves for what is yet to come. I expect better of you, Michael. History is our future. You blind yourself if you ignore it. You give your enemies everything they need by failing to look behind you."
He sighed and rested his face upon a hand. "I'm disappointed. You are still such a child, still so lost. You are still frightened by the darkness."
"The Qliphoth nearly killed me, nearly forced me to kill someone I cared about."
"No," his voice tightened. "You still don't See, do you? You didn't kill her. You didn't lose control of yourself because it is your self. Your Finnish witch knew and this is why she left you, why she wrapped her hair about your neck and abandoned you in the wilderness to face yourself alone. It was your shadow you were fleeing. You don't understand the nature of your own light.
"What guilt drove you to take the souls of the spiteful, the evil, the morally bankrupt? Did you think you were doing anyone any favors by taking them into you? They still live; their influence is still felt on the world. You would have been better off simply killing them and letting their souls go free and taking the souls of artists—painters, composers, writers—men with brains who could have made a difference in your intellect, in your understanding of the world.
"When your soul was torn and you fell under the spell of your darker instincts, you chose a dark route to knowledge. You found a path to learning that allowed you to gather more into you than you could have ever hoped to gather in your own lifetime, and you have squandered it. You have selfishly kept it to yourself, to protect you from harm, to insulate the weak part of yourself from the strong half of your soul—the half which can make a difference. Who do you think stood before Bernard? Was it those voices in your head?"
"No," I croaked. "It wasn't."
"And what did you discover when you stood at the apex of the tower with all those souls?
