The Kaisho, page 33
“But you can see things—feel them. You knew Okami was not in his palazzo; you saw the bloody Domino mask before we found it.”
“What I am able to do is to tap into certain elemental laws of nature. They’re light-years away from quantum physics or solid geometry or any of the other sciences mankind has created so it can make order out of chaos.”
The train slowed into a station; the usual exchange of passengers made talking difficult for a moment. When they were on their way again, he said, “Perhaps Tau-tau comes closest to mathematics, which man created by unconsciously translating the heartbeat of the universe into a language he could understand. Music—which is universal to all cultures—is merely a matter of mathematics.”
“The rhythm in the air just before the Kanfa bridge appeared.”
“That’s right.”
They got off at the St.-Paul stop. Emerging onto the street, they found themselves in the heart of the Marais.
Celeste was silent, but Nicholas could feel emanating from her the disturbing sensation akin to throwing the transmission of a car from drive to reverse and back again.
The Marais had a fascinating history. It had been shunned during the Middle Ages because it straddled an arm of the Seine that turned its ground swampy, thus its enduring name, which meant “marsh”; disease was rampant here. In the thirteenth century, monks devised a way to drain the water away, making the area habitable. A century later, it was taken over for a time by Charles V, and it came into vogue. But when during the First Empire the nobility moved out for posh residences in the Faubourg St.-Germain, it fell into decline, and the Jews took over, transforming it into an area of tradespeople.
All this Nicholas related to Celeste as they walked toward the Place des Vosges, the most famous spot in the area.
“How do you know so much about Paris?” she asked.
“I spent a year here, setting up the French office of the advertising agency I was working for.”
“You, in advertising? I can hardly imagine it.”
“Believe it or not, neither can I.”
They walked in silence for some time. At length, she said, “That was a difficult year for you, wasn’t it?”
He was startled at the accuracy of her comment, but then he knew people invariably emanated all manner of unintentional signals via their tone of voice, their facial and body expressions. No doubt she had picked up on a number of these.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “but it had nothing to do with business.”
“A woman.”
He looked at her. “Maybe you’d like to tell me about her.”
She laughed, coloring. “God, no. I have no idea . . .”
“You said it was a woman.”
“Any female would have known.” But she seemed distracted now, almost uncomfortable. They were a little more than a block from the Place des Vosges, and the working-class food markets were giving way to trendy clothing and shoe shops, postmodern stationery-as-art boutiques, and the occasional antiques store.
All at once Celeste started, clutching at him. “It’s him!” she said hoarsely. “There! The man who was following us in Venice. He’s hiding down that side street! The one we followed, who almost trapped us on the Kanfa bridge.”
Nicholas turned, heading into the street she indicated. He was not yet concerned because he was certain she was mistaken. Surely if the man was there, Nicholas would have picked up the emanations of his Tau-tau-trained psyche.
The narrow thoroughfare contained a tangle of shoved-together shops and shadows. Sunlight touched the upper floors of the buildings but left the street itself in deep shadow. Nicholas wound his way through the pedestrian traffic, his eyes and mind searching for the Messulethe. He had a clear picture of the man in his mind, from when his hat had blown off and he had bent to retrieve it: chiseled Oriental face, bronze skin, the lips firm: a mole on his lip at the corner of his mouth. He saw no one fitting that description. He felt nothing; there was no sign of any disturbance, physical or psychic.
After a thorough search up and down the street proved fruitless, he returned to where she stood, fingertips pressed hard against her temples. They were white with strain.
“I couldn’t find him. Are you all right?”
“Just a slight . . . headache.” She shook her head. “Sorry. I must be seeing goblins.” But her eyes were clouded—with pain or doubt? he wondered.
Extending his mind toward hers, he felt her emotions swept away from him like fog scuttling along the ground on a cold, wet morning. He could not tell what she was feeling.
He took her hand, led her back toward the wide Rue St.-Antoine where sunlight and crowds beckoned gaily. He could tell she was shaken, and he wanted to do something that would shift her mood, bring her back to where she had been before. He decided to tell her about that year in Paris, so long ago.
“Her name was Mylene,” he said as he propelled her along, “the woman I met here years ago. Red hair just like yours. I fell in love with her and almost married her.”
“What happened?” She looked at him and he could see that the translucence had returned to her eyes. Happily, he had reengaged her attention.
“The relationship spun out of our control. Neither of us understood ourselves, let alone the other person. As a result, we were either making love—at all hours, in any venue imaginable . . . and a few that weren’t—or we were at each other’s throat. In the end, we exhausted each other emotionally and physically. We had nowhere to go.”
“How did it end?”
He could see the arch that led to the Place des Vosges, a magnificent square of park, recently remodeled, surrounded by attached residential buildings of varying shades of pink and sienna, colonnaded on the street level, where shops and restaurants plied their trades.
“Badly,” he said. “There were tears, flying fists, clashing ids, screams, and finally, a ferocious coupling. You couldn’t exactly call it making love; we’d finished with that emotion sometime before. We were driven by rage and, I imagine, a good dose of fear. What would we do without one another?” He smiled at her, though the memories, so long held in check, were particularly painful. “Live, of course. But in those days neither of us knew how to do that very well.”
“It sounds like a film.”
“Perhaps so. We were torn from one another as if by a hurricane.”
“And you never heard from her again?”
“No.”
They passed through the south entrance into the Place des Vosges, and in that moment, the whole of bustling Paris vanished behind them in a mist. The studied calm of the colonnaded park embraced them. Children ran along the paths, laughing, and near one fountain, a group dressed in suits and gowns flowed together as a photographer took pictures. The young couple in the center giggled just as the flash went off, and everyone began to laugh, ignoring for the moment the photographer calling them to attention.
“Oh, look,” Celeste said, “a wedding party!”
They watched from a discreet distance as the young couple kissed chastely for the camera and then, urged on by their friends and families, spontaneously embraced as the photographer’s flash went off again and again.
“This reminds me of my sister’s wedding,” Celeste said. She seemed more relaxed, as if secreted away here, she could forget the disturbing mirage of the Messulethe. “It was held outdoors. I remember it rained in the morning and we were all despairing. But then an hour before the ceremony was to start, the clouds broke and the sun came out. There was a rainbow, briefly, and the photographer caught them with it in the background.”
The wedding party broke up, wending their way out of the square, and Nicholas and Celeste began to walk toward one of the colonnades.
“I often think that golden afternoon was the high point,” she said, sober again. “Everyone seemed so blissfully happy, but perhaps I’m misremembering it.” She shrugged. “The truth is, I don’t think she has a very successful marriage.” She smiled wistfully. “But then my sister is extremely willful—and you know how Italian men are. Women in their place and all the rest of it. ‘Your sister’s too smart for her own good,’ that’s what my father used to say.”
“And what did he think about you?”
“Oh, he’d say, ‘You’re different, Celeste. You’re clever.’ Now, cleverness is a trait a man can put up with in a woman.”
Nicholas laughed, but he could see for her it wasn’t funny, and for the first time he got an inkling that her relationship with her father had not been perfect.
“So in some ways your father was Old World Italian.”
“No, he was Venetian, and that’s not the same thing at all. There was Carthaginian blood in him, Cycladian—who knows what else. From what I could gather from him he relied on my mother’s advice. She was an extraordinary woman, so my father loved to tell me, filled with ambition for him . . . and for herself.” She put her head down, but not before he noticed her eyes going opaque. “She died in a fire. There were many—my father’s rivals, superstitious women whom she had frightened by her inversion of what they saw as the natural order—who believed that her life was taken by God or by the priests, that she died like a heretic at the stake.”
“When did this happen?”
“Barely a year after I was born.”
Shadows from beneath the colonnade striped their faces, stitched long shadows to their feet. All around them, set into the colonnade were tea and antiques shops, bistros, small businesses. One of them was Avalon Ltd.
Nicholas, looking across the square, could see its facade. There was nothing remarkable about it, just another storefront with scrollwork lettering on the window: Avalon Ltd. Masks Designed and Hand-Made.
Celeste was watching the door into Avalon Ltd. “He might be there,” she said. And then, after a long pause: “Isn’t there anything here—a rhythm—that will tell us if Okami-san is alive?”
Nicholas, hearing the desperate tension in her voice, considered lying to her. But what good would that really do? Instead, he said, “Think of me as a hunter. Sometimes, when the wind is right, when other conditions allow it, I can smell the prey before I come in sight of it. But it’s not all the time, and I’m not always in control of those conditions.”
“Then he might already be dead.”
“Let’s hope not. There will be little satisfaction in bringing his murderer to justice. It has occurred to me that Mikio Okami must know more about what has been happening to him—and to us—than he revealed to me or to you.”
Here and there, leaves fell, tumbling through the air. A police car turned in through one of the entrances, proceeded to make a slow patrol around the perimeter street. It stopped for a moment, its engine idling, then moved on, at last disappearing through the opposite gate. A middle-aged couple strolled in. The woman read her guidebook while the man took some pictures of the fountains and the pigeons. They didn’t stay long.
All the while, Celeste’s gaze had not wavered from the storefront across the colonnade.
“Time to see what’s inside,” Nicholas said.
“I’m afraid. I have an intuition Okami-san is in there, dead.”
“Celeste, one way or another, we have to find out.”
“Just give me a moment, okay?” She had that distracted expression he had seen earlier when she had had her false vision of the Messulethe.
As she wended her way to the nearby bistro at the corner of the colonnade, Nicholas contemplated her enigmatic life. What she had revealed to him had had a searing impact, and yet, quite unexpectedly, he found that he knew as little about her as he had before. He found that quite extraordinary.
He was just thinking of the odd approach/avoidance emanations coming from her when he saw her emerge from the shadows at the side of the bistro and slip out a side entrance without looking in his direction.
He went after her. She was headed out of the Place, through the north arch. Immediately, she turned left, heading up the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
The prelunchtime streets were more crowded now, and Celeste had picked up her pace. Then, like a twig pulled inexorably on by a stream’s current, she disappeared around a corner, and Nicholas broke into a run, because now he felt the darkness, the sinister pulse of the silent chorus at kokoro, the chant that set up black vibrations like the desperate pulse of a fly caught in a spider’s web, reverberating . . .
The Messulethe!
Nicholas swung around the corner, almost collided with a middle-aged woman with her hands filled with netted bags heavy with groceries. He excused himself and, already looking past her, swerved out of the way.
Down the street he pounded, feeling Celeste in his mind moving closer to those malevolent reverberations, following her path with his mind’s eye, his tanjian eye, using Tau-tau now because he knew he must in order to save her, but also knowing he was alerting the adept to his presence by the extension of his power.
He knew he was playing a very dangerous game. He had only come up against two tanjian adepts, and both of them had come near to killing him. This one was, of course, different: he had tapped the numinous power of the Messulethe, and the profound sense of the unknown here was like a yawning abyss whose size and depth were veiled in mystery.
He could feel him more clearly now, and that sense of the rhythm, the silent beat against the membrane of kokoro, at the heart of all things, began to fill his mind with its hideous strength. It was the primitive cadence that made things happen, that brought what others thought of as magic out of the realm of the mind and into the physical world. The excitation of kokoro set into motion the networks by which Tau-tau gained its strength. It was a mentally fatiguing act, this excitation of the membrane of kokoro, and it was only now when he was so close to the adept that Nicholas understood, and his blood ran cold.
As he at last caught sight of Celeste at the far corner of the crowded street, he knew what made this adept different—and so very dangerous: he was able to keep the rhythm of kokoro going endlessly. No conjuring it up from time to time when it was needed for him. That was for lesser tanjian.
Then the horror of what he had discovered was blotted out. Nicholas felt the pressure in his mind as the adept increased the tempo of the cadence, saw with his special sight the extension of Tau-tau, like a liquid shadow that entwined itself through all the shadows of the street, unnoticed by passersby, by Celeste herself, who was standing stock-still at the street corner, her head moving from side to side, her eyes wildly darting in every direction.
He launched himself forward, darting between angered pedestrians, his way encumbered, slowing him down when he had no time to spare. He caught sight of the Messulethe and, to his shock, did not see the face he was expecting. This was a different Messulethe from the one he had seen in Venice.
His path was made more difficult now because of the sudden press of people. The sidewalk was narrowed by the stained wooden planks of a construction crew repairing gas mains below the ripped-up pavement. As he pressed on, he became aware of the Tau-tau shadow detaching itself from his hiding place, flashing with black light directly toward Celeste. To Nicholas it represented pure malignancy, and he knew he would never reach the Messulethe in time. He smelled the acrid stench of sulfur, knew he was the only one around who would, and his psyche expanded.
Like a great beast it wrapped itself around Celeste just at the moment the shadow struck her. The sheer force of it staggered her, thrusting her off the curb and into the street, but Nicholas’s protection held.
The pressure in his mind was so great now that all vision was distorted. Rainbow colors smeared themselves like auras around every living thing that moved in his field of vision, and he experienced that disconcerting sense of sliding sideways, outside the grip of time, so that it seemed as if he could see himself in the struggle with the Messulethe.
The Messulethe redoubled his efforts to get to Celeste, to crush her mind with the force inside him. Nicholas staggered with the enormous effort required to protect her. Battered by unknown forces, he felt a rushing in his ears, and he was blind, fully inside Akshara, time-slipped, acutely, painfully aware of its shortcomings.
If only he had koryoku, the access to what he knew had once existed and could again: Shuken, the whole of Akshara and Kshira, the power of the Dominion.
All at once, the rushing in his ears became a howl, and the cold sweat broke out on his goose-fleshed skin because he knew that Akshara was not enough to win this battle. The reverberations the Messulethe had set in motion at kokoro were so powerful that they were threatening to tear him apart, and he knew he had to get them away, now, or they would both be finished.
Already he could feel his protection cracking, slipping away from Celeste, leaving her open and vulnerable to the Messulethe’s assault. The most appalling noise filled Nicholas’s mind, making rational thought impossible. He knew he was at the limits of his power; he felt weak and ineffectual against this malignant power that drove against him with the force of a pile driver.
In seconds, he knew, it would be over. He would be overwhelmed, and Celeste, stripped of his protection, would be killed.
He did the only thing he could.
Stripping himself from Akshara, he closed his tanjian eye and, returning to real time, opened his physical eyes. He saw the Messulethe, concentrating, his face lined and sweat-beaded with effort.
His protective force had been withdrawn and he knew he had only precious instants to act before Celeste’s mind would be pulverized beneath the Messulethe’s relentless assault.
He reached down, hefting a chunk of concrete from the rent sidewalk and, without conscious thought, hurled it as he would a shuriken, a steel throwing star.
The Messulethe must have heard the whirring of the missile as it neared him, but he was time-slipped, his focus narrowed to the diameter of a filament as he concentrated his psychic power.
Awareness came too late. The concrete slammed him backward, throwing him off his feet.
Nicholas raced toward Celeste, on her knees in the street. Traffic blared as a taxi bore down on her despite the driver desperately applying his brakes.
