Holly’s thumb sits in her clavicle. “I don’t know.”
Arkady is stroking his zits, content to let me talk.
“Baptiste Pfenninger became the first visitor to the Chapel of the Dusk. He found a portrait, or an icon of the Blind Cathar. It had no eyes, yet as Pfenninger stood there, and gazed at it, or was gazed at by it, he saw a dot appear in the icon’s forehead and grow into the black pupil of a lidless eye and …”
“ Isaw that! Where’s it from?”
I look at Arkady, who shrugs slightly in reply. “It’s what the icon of the Blind Cathar does, shortly before it decants a soul.”
Holly addresses me with a fresh urgency. “Listen. The weekend Jacko went missing. That dot-to-eye on a forehead thing. I—I—I had a—a daymare in an underpass, near Rochester. I left it out of The Radio People, it just read like a bad description of an acid trip. But it happened.”
Arkady subasks me, What if Xi Lo was cording images to her during the First Mission?
Why keep that from us? I hunt for a better idea. What if Jacko and Holly were already corded, as two psychosoteric siblings?
Arkady’s biting his thumb knuckle, a habit from his last life. Possibly. The cord’s remnants may have led Esther to Holly as you fled the Chapel. Like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs.
“ ’Scuse me,” Holly’s saying, “but I amstill here. What’s Jacko got to do with this medieval monk and a Napoleonic engineer?”
The candle flame in its stained-glass jar is tall and still.
“The Blind Cathar and the engineer talked,” I say, “and agreed upon a covenant, a pact of mutual assistance. We can’t be sure—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. This monk had been in his Chapel of the Dusk for, what, six hundred years? Now he’s inviting up visitors and making deals. What’s he been eating since the Middle Ages?”
“Naturally, the Blind Cathar had transubstantiated,” I explain.
Holly leans back. “Is transwhateveritis even a word?”
“The Blind Cathar’s body had died,” says Arkady, “but his mind and soul—which, for the purposes of our chat, are the same—had entered into the fabric of the Chapel. The Blind Cathar interfaced with Pfenninger via the icon.”
Holly considers this. “So the builder became the building?”
“After a fashion,” Arkady replies. “You could say so.”
“The bridge and the garrison at the Sidelhorn Pass were finished ahead of winter,” I pick up the thread, “and Baptiste Pfenninger returned to his family in Martigny. But the following spring he went on a fishing trip up to Lake d’Emosson, where, one evening, he took a boat onto the water. The boat was found, the body never was.”
“I get it,” Holly says. “The same as Hugo Lamb.”
Rain is softly muttering at 119A’s windows. “Jump forward six years to 1805. A new orphanage opened its doors in the Marais district of Paris. Its founder and director was a sturdy Frenchman called Martin Leclerc, whose father had amassed a colonial fortune in Africa, and who now wished to give sustenance, shelter, and scripture to the capital’s war orphans. 1805 was a bad time to be a foreigner in Paris, and Leclerc’s French had a Germanic slant, but his friends attributed his foreignness to a Prussian mother and a Hamburg education. These same friends, many of whom were the cream of imperial society, did not know that Martin Leclerc’s real name was Baptiste Pfenninger. One imagines the accusations of insanity that would have greeted the idea that Leclerc had set up his orphanage to source and groom Engifted children. That is, children who showed evidence of psychosoteric voltage or an active chakra-eye.”
Holly looks at Arkady, who narrows his eyes like a pondering interpreter. “Psychic gifts. Like you, aged seven.”
“Why would a … a Swiss engineer, who faked his own death and is now a French orphanage owner—right?—want psychic children?”
Arkady says, “The Anchorites fuel their atemporality by feeding on souls, as Marinus said. But not just any old soul will do; only the souls of the Engifted can be decanted. Like organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match. Around every equinox and solstice, the soul’s owner has to be lured up the Way of Stones into the Chapel. Once there, the hapless visitor stares at the icon of the Blind Cathar, who then decants the visitor’s soul into Black Wine. The body is disposed of through a Chapel window, and the Twelve Anchorites assemble at a ritual known as a Rebirthday where they drink the Black Wine, and for a season—three months or so—no cellular subdivision occurs in their bodies. Which is why Hugo Lamb’s body has remained in its midtwenties state, while his mind and soul are over fifty years old.”
Holly suspends judgment, for now. “Why’s Pfenninger now in Paris when you get to the ‘Chapel’ via a ruined Swiss monastery?”
“Any Anchorite can summon the Aperture anywhere.” Arkady lowers his palm over the candle flame. “And open it anywhere, too, from the inside. The Aperture’s why this War’s gone on for 160 years. For all intents and purposes the Anchorites are able to teleport themselves from place to place. It’s both the ultimate getaway car and a method of surprise attack.”
Holly’s voice cracks as she realizes something: “Miss Constantin?”
“Immaculйe Constantin is Pfenninger’s deputy. We don’t know why the First Anchorite recruited her as the Second, but she was the governess of the girls’ wing of the Marais orphanage. No less a personage than Talleyrand referred to Madame Constantin as ‘a Sword-wielding Seraphim in a Woman’s Form.’ Eighteen decades pass and we find her in Gravesend, grooming Holly Sykes. She made a rare error in your case, however, by spooking you, so that one of my ex-students brought you to my attention. I inoculated you by draining off your psychosoteric voltage and rendering you unfit for Black Wine. Miss Constantin was annoyed, of course, and although she never forgot Holly Sykes or her promising brother Jacko, she moved on.”
“The arithmetic keeps them busy,” says Arkady. “The Anchorites keep their numbers to twelve, so each individual member must source a decantible guest once every three years. Their prey can’t be drugged, bagged, and dragged up to the Chapel. Anchorites must befriend their prey, like Constantin befriended you. If the prey isn’t conscious and calm during decanting, the Black Wine’s tainted. It’s a delicate vintage.”
The figures in the painting watch us. The stories they could tell.
“Am I to understand,” Holly gathers her strength, “that Miss Constantin and the Anchorites abducted Jacko and … drank his soul? Is this what you’re really saying?”
The clock’s tick is either loud or quiet, depending.
“The thing about Jacko is …” I close my eyes and subsay Wish me luckto Arkady, “… he was one of us.”
Maybe it’s thunder somewhere, or maybe a garbage truck.
“Jacko was my brother.” Holly speaks slowly. “He was seven.”
“His body was seven,” says Arkady. “But his body was the vehicle for the soul of Xi Lo, an Horologist. Xi Lo was much, mucholder.”
Holly’s shaking her head, wrestling with this outrage.
I ask, “Remember when Jacko had meningitis, when he was five?”
“Of course I do. He damn nearly died.”
The only way is on. “Ms. Sykes, Jacko diddie that day.”
This is an affront, a trampling, and Holly’s at breaking point. “ Er, sorry—but he bloody didn’t die! I was bloody there!”
There’s no way to make this easier. “Jack Martin Sykes’s soul left his body at two twenty-three A.M. on the sixteenth of October, 1981. By two twenty-four, the soul of Xi Lo, the oldest and best of Horologists, was in possession of your brother’s body. Even as your father was yelling for a medic, Jacko’s body was out of danger. But Jacko’s soul was crossing the Dusk.”
Ominous silence. “So …” Holly’s nostrils dilate, “… my little brother’s a zombie, you’re saying?”