“Give me a minute,” murmurs D’Arnoq. “I need to revoke my Act of Immunity, so we can merge our psychovoltage.” He closes his eyes. I walk over to the oblique-angled west corner, where a window offers a view over one mile or a hundred miles of Dunes, up to the High Ridge and the Light of Day. Holly follows me. “See up there?” I tell her. “That’s where we’re from.”
“Then all those little pale lights,” whispers Holly, “crossing the sand, they’re souls?”
“Yes. Thousands and thousands, at any given time.” We walk over to the eastern window, where an inexact distance of Dunes rolls down through darkening twilight to the Last Sea. “And that’s where they’re bound.” We watch the little lights enter the starless extremity and go out, one by one by one.
Holly asks, “Is the Last Sea really a sea?”
“I doubt it. It’s just the name we use.”
“What happens to the souls when they get there?”
“You’ll find out, Holly. Maybe I will, one day.” Today?
We return to the center, where D’Arnoq is still inside himself. Фshima points up to the apex of the Chapel, and traces an invisible line down to the north corner where the icon appears to be watching us. I shut my eyes, open my chakra-eye, and scan the ceiling for the crack mentioned by Esther …
It takes a moment, but I find it. There, starting at the apex and curving down to the shadows in the north corner.
Yes, it’s there, but it’s a terribly thin crack on which to gamble five Atemporal metalives and one Temporal life.
“Is it me,” Holly is asking, and I close my chakra-eye and open up my physical eyes, “or does that picture … sort of … reel you in?”
“It’s not you,” replies Elijah D’Arnoq, who is now back with us. We look at the icon. The hermit wears a white cloak, his hood draped about his shoulders to expose his head and a face with blanks instead of eyes. “But don’t stare at him,” D’Arnoq reminds us. On the Way of Stones, sound was muffled so you had to speak twice as loudly. Here in the Chapel, whispers, footsteps, and even the swish of our clothing sound amplified, as if collected by hidden microphones. “Look a way, Ms. Sykes. He may be dreaming at present, but he’s a light sleeper.”
Holly forces herself to look to one side. “It’s those empty eye sockets. They drag your eyeballs into them.”
“This place has a sick mind,” remarks Arkady.
“Then let us put it out of our misery,” says D’Arnoq. “The Act of Anesthesia is done. As per the plan, then: Marinus and Unalaq, you hiatus the icon to ensure he won’t wake while Arkady, Фshima, and I psychoflame the icon with every volt we’ve got.”
We approach the northern corner, where the eyeless figure gleams pale as a shark’s underbelly. “So all you have to do to bring down this place,” Holly asks me, “is trash that painting?”
“Only now, at this point in the cycle,” D’Arnoq answers on my behalf, “while the Blind Cathar’s soul is housed inside the icon. At other times he resides in the fabric of the chapel, and then he would have sensed our intent and melted us like plastic figurines in the flame of a blowtorch. Marinus: Begin.”
If Elijah D’Arnoq is betraying us, he’s keeping up a convincing act until the last minute. “You take the left,” I tell Unalaq, “I’ll take the right.” We stand in front of the Blind Cathar and shut our eyes. Our hands intone in synchronicity. Xi Lo taught Klara Marinus Koskov the Act of Hiatus in Saint Petersburg, and as my Indian self, I taught Unalaq. To strengthen and deepen the act, our lips recite it, silently, from memory, like a pianist’s eye navigating a complex but familiar musical score. I sense the Blind Cathar’s consciousness rise to the icon’s surface, like a swarm of bees. We push it back. We succeed. Partly. I think. “Quickly,” I tell Elijah D’Arnoq. “It’s more a local anesthetic than a deep coma.”
Unalaq and I step aside. D’Arnoq stands before his ex-master, or his current master, I do not know, and holds out his hands at his sides, palms up. To his left and his right, Arkady and Фshima press their palm-chakras against D’Arnoq’s. “Don’t even thinkabout getting off on this,” mumbles Фshima.
Pallid and sweaty, D’Arnoq shuts his eyes, opens his chakra-eye, and channels the ember-red light of the Shaded Way at the throat of the Holy of Holies.
The Blind Cathar is no longer dreaming. He knows he’s being attacked. Like a drugged giant, like my house in Kleinburg in the grip of an Arctic gale, the Chapel strains and struggles. I stagger, I think I blink, and the Blind Cathar’s mouth is twisted into aggression. His chakra begins to dilate, a black spot appearing on his forehead, growing like an ink stain. If it opens fully, we’re in severe trouble. An earthquake is trapped in the Chapel walls, and Elijah D’Arnoq is making a high, inhuman sound. Channeling so much psychovoltage is killing him. His defection must be genuine; this will kill him. I think I blink again and the icon is firelit and smoking and the depicted monk is roaring with agony, as two-dimensional flames burn him alive, his chakra-eye flickering here and not-here, here and not-here, here and …
GONE. SILENCE. THE Blind Cathar’s icon is a charcoal square and Elijah D’Arnoq is heaving, bent over double. “We’ve done it,” he gasps. “We’ve bloody well done it.”
Wordlessly, we Horologists consult with one another …
… and Unalaq confirms it. “He’s still there.” Her words are our death sentence. The Blind Cathar has merely left the icon and fled to the floors, walls, and ceiling. We have been participants in a charade to allow the Anchorites time to stream up the Way of Stones. Their arrival is imminent. D’Arnoq’s defection was indeed a trap, and the Second Mission has become a kamikaze attack. I’d subsend an apology to Inez and Aoife if I could, but their world is out of range. “Holly? Stand behind us, please.”
“Did it work? Is—is—is Jacko going to … appear?”
I’d like to hiatus her now so she won’t die hating me. The Script has failed us. At Blithewood Cemetery I should have turned around, called Wendy Hanger, explained there’d been a mix-up, and gone back to Poughkeepsie station. “I don’t know,” I tell Holly the mother, sister, daughter, widow, writer, friend. “But stand behind us.”
Message from Esther, subreports Фshima. She’s started the Last Act. She’ll need up to a quarter hour.
“We had to try,” Unalaq says. “While there was hope.”
Elijah D’Arnoq is still pretending: “What are you talking about?” He even smiles. “We’ve won! The Blind Cathar’s dead. Without him to maintain the Chapel fabric, where we’re standing will all be Dunes and Dusk within six hours.”
I look at what, in spy-novel terms, is an old-fashioned double agent. I don’t even need scansion to be sure. Elijah D’Arnoq isn’t as skillful a liar as he believes. For part one of the deception, at my house outside Toronto, he had indeed been “turned” into a genuine penitento, but at some point in the last few days, Pfenninger or Constantin turned him back to the Shaded Way.
“May I, Marinus?” asks Фshima. “Please?”
“As if mypermission ever mattered to you. But yes. Hard.”
Фshima fakes a sneeze and suckerkinetics D’Arnoq along the table, clean off the end. He comes to a halt only at the Umber Arch.
Xi Lo did the same to Constantin, I subremark, though he only managed to bowl her about halfway down the table.
“D’Arnoq’s more of a lightweight,” says Фshima. “It’s an obvious play: long, smooth, table; annoying person. Who could resist?”
“I … guess this means he’s not one of us,” says Holly.
“You,” Elijah D’Arnoq picks himself up and is shouting from the far end of the Chapel, “you,” he points, “will smoulderand shrivelin the heat!” Nine men and a woman melt from the air around him.
“GUESTS, GUESTS, GUESTS!” Baptiste Pfenninger claps his hands and smiles. The First Anchorite is a tall man, utterly at ease in his well-toned, well-dressed body. He sports a fastidiously trimmed, silver-tinged beard. “How the old place loves guests, and so many!” I’d forgotten his bass, actorly voice. “One per quarter is the usual quota, so today’s a very special occasion. Our second very special occasion.” All the men are wearing dinner jackets of various cuts and fashions. Pfenninger’s looks Edwardian. “Marinus, Marinus, welcome. Our only repeat visitor in the Chapel of the Dusk’s history, though, of course, last time you’d left your body back on earth. Фshima, you’re looking old, burned, tired, and in need of a resurrection. It won’t occur. Thank you for killing Brzycki, by the by; he was showing signs of vegetarianism. Who else? ‘Unalaq’—do I pronounce it correctly? It sounds awfully like a brand of superglue, however one says it. Arkady, Arkady, you’ve got taller since I last sawed your feet off. Remember the rats? Dictators really were dictators in the days of Salazar’s Lisbon. Seventy-two hours you took to die. I’ll see if I can’t beat it with Inez, eh?” Pfenninger clicks his tongue. “A pity L’Ohkna and Roho can’t be here, but Mr. D’Arnoq,” the First Anchorite turns to his double agent, “netted the fattest fish. Good boy. Oh! Last and least, Holly Sykes, mystic lady author turned Irish egg farmer. We’ve never met. I’m Baptiste Pfenninger, interlocutor of this miraculous”—he gestures at the walls and dome—“engine, and, oh, titles, titles, they drag behind one like Marley’s chains, Jacob’s not Bob’s. Two of our number are even more thrilled than I to see you here at last, Holly …”