Kat had broken me and left me in the woods. As my soul bled, leaking light like oil draining from a punctured pan, something had come to me from the shadows. Yes, that was what it was. The Qliphoth. Always hiding in the shadows-of the trees, of my thoughts, of my spirit. He had whispered to me, that voice so like the sibilant echo of the Chorus. There is no hope. You are going to die. Unless. . How cruel the guttering spark of life; how cruel that instinctual craving for light. How tragically human was the desire for a second chance. Any path is better than no path at all. . Let me show you how to live.
"So many swords," I whispered. I touched the Lovers, my finger drifting across the woman's head and settling on the man's. Why did you do it? The card shivered under my touch, slippery and moist.
The Chorus retreated, folding in on themselves as they realized how transparent they had become. So engorged with the desire to find Kat, they had also allowed me to more fully see that part of the past which they had been obscuring. This proximity to Kat, this opportunity afforded me by the brush with Doug and the psychic touch of her presence, was kicking many things loose.
Too many things.
I had let him in. The Qliphoth entered through the rupture in my soul, and had shown me how to maintain the illusion of life. The way to retain light, the way to fuel the flesh: these were the secrets of the Chorus.
Piotr tapped the edge of the tray, drawing my attention away from the cards. "The tea," he said, his finger tap-tapping against the lacquer, "is good for the spirit. It calms divergent energies."
The Chorus burned in my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. He didn't flinch from what he saw in my eyes. "It only has the Will you give it," he said gently. "It only has what you feed it."
I blinked, and all the fierce heat was shuttered as if I had shut a furnace door. Lashing my Will to my arm and hand, I-very carefully-reached for the delicate teacup. As I raised it to my lips, Piotr dealt the remaining four cards.
And, like that, the past was gone. Hidden again, beneath the burr of Chorus noise. Beneath the black water in my soul. Like the Loch Ness Monster, all that remained was a nagging impression that something had shown its face. Some apparition had surfaced, albeit briefly.
The last four cards of the Cross were a vertical line just to the right of the Prince of Swords-the future as a wall to be surmounted in contrast to the cross of the past and present. From top to bottom: the Five of Wands, the Priestess, the Star, and the Prince of Cups.
"These cards are various aspects of the future," Piotr said to Nicols. "What Markham brings with him to this reading; what affect others will have; what he fears about this possible future; and, ultimately, what this future will be."
"This one is upside down," Nicols said, putting his finger on the Star.
"Please don't turn it," Piotr said. "A reversed card has an equally significant meaning. In this case, it indicates that Markham believes he has no hope of attaining the state represented by the Star."
" 'Every man and woman is a star,' " Nicols quoted. "Markham told me that. Yesterday, when I first met him. He said that we were all stars."
"Did he now?"
Crackling ice ran up my spine, and white-light explosions blew off against the nerve clusters in each vertebrae. The Chorus, burning an image with frigid clarity in my brain: a downward-pointing, five-pointed star. A sigil. One without a protective circle. The Chorus strained against their psychic restraints, sensing my confusion. My fingertips were cold, as they assaulted my nervous system.
The Star, reversed. Refused. A black hole in the heavens, a break through which the Qliphoth slipped into Eden and spat his poisons into the shadows at the base of the Tree. My roots, deep down in Malkuth, drank from a lake of venom-killing my legs, deadening my trunk, leaching toxins into my brain.
My hand couldn't hold the teacup, my fingers numb. The tea spilled, and the infused water looked like it was darkened by blood. Blood in the water. I tried to breathe, and felt like I was in the Seine again.
I had seen it, and now it couldn't trust me not to dig it out. That shadow of my past erupting through the agency of the Chorus. Blood, black in the water. Black, in the sky.
Then, suggested as an afterimage of the stars exploding along my spine, I saw through the illusion. Through the possibility of illusion. This past that had shaped me, this history I had been bound to-Kat's hand in my chest, the icy stars on my skin, my soul leaking out, the voice in the woods telling me how to live-who had built it? Was it my memory-was I its Creator-or was I just a fool following a path of least resistance? Trismegistus sought to teach his sons how to free themselves from the tyranny of the demonically touched flesh. Reason, in one hand; Insight, in the other.
Had I forsaken both?
I staggered from the table, fleeing the accusatory shape of the cards. My hand fumbled with the handle, and I forced the door open. I fell to my knees on the pavement outside. Cold air on my face, but my throat and lungs were already numb.
Overhead, the sky was black, blank of stars. The world wiped clean. Lost again within that dome of darkness.
I heard the wind, blowing through the rigging of the boats at the dock, and it sounded like the rasp of the leaves against branches. Voices in trees, whispering. It is done. It is done.
Close enough to touch.
Our hands, betraying us.
XII
This looks suspiciously like vagrancy." A voice forced itself into my head. "Or public drunkenness."
I came back to the world of the flesh, struggling to find myself. On my back, face turned toward a star-dappled sky, arms crooked like the wings of a dead albatross. Prickly heat filled my legs, making my ankles and feet ache.
Pender, on my right, wrapped in his long coat. His hands were in his pockets, and his jaw moved precisely around a piece of gum. He looked fresh-pressed and steamed. When he saw that I recognized him, he nudged me with a foot. "Lying about like this," he said. "It's more than a little sloppy. How much have you had to drink tonight, Markham?"
My mouth didn't work; all I could manage was a series of blinks and twitches. He bent down, examining the awkward movement of my face. "Having a seizure?" he asked. "Some ancient LSD payload finally detonating, or has some old curse foisted on you by a weekend witch finally taken root?"
I twisted my head to the side, and spat out a glob of black pitch. Pender wrinkled his nose at the bubble-flecked material from my lungs. "Hate," I croaked. "I'm full up."
"For whom? Your little renegade spirit Doug?" He shook his head. "You aren't interested in him. You want someone else. Doug's just a means to an end, isn't he?"
I swallowed more of the blackness, sending it back into the pit of my unruly stomach. "He's my link."
"I could be your link," he said. "Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. Maybe you're trying too hard to find something that isn't lost."
"Maybe you don't know what you're talking about." Pender stepped back as I levered myself to a sitting position.
He pulled a Polaroid out of his pocket and tossed it in my lap. "Maybe I do." It was a picture of Kat.
Her face had become thinner over the last decade and her hair was shorter, though still streaked with red highlights. It wasn't a face that would launch a thousand ships, but it had filled my dreams-filled my head and consumed everything. Seeing a fresh image of her face, I realized how easy it had been for Paris of Troy to descend into obsessive madness, to fixate on abducting Helen from Sparta as the solution to his brain fever. Yes, yes, this is the best solution. The simple path is the correct path. Covering the picture with a cold hand, I tried to put Kat out of my mind; I tried so very hard to quit the past.