Free Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls by Mark Teppo Page A

shop was a pay-as-you-go type and I had put a couple hundred minutes on it while at the store. It included, among what seemed like a dozen other functions I'd never need, a calendar that informed my jet-lagged body that today was March 19. The spring equinox was tomorrow.
    The Coronation.
    Not much time.
    Antoine hadn't taken Philippe's tarot deck, and I emptied the cards out of the velvet bag and shuffled them. The Marseille deck was the oldest design, light and precise with the symbolism as opposed to the flood of versions that came out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on some of the cards Philippe had written tiny marginalia. Marielle's phone number was written in an arc over the head of the High Priestess, and I transferred the number to my new phone.
    I dialed, and while I was waiting for her to answer, I shuffled the cards together and cut the deck.
    Nine of Swords.
    I almost hung up the phone, not wanting to bridge a connection between this card and Marielle, but the call went to voice mail immediately. "It's me," I said. "I have a local number. Call me when you can."
    The Nine was a piece of work. The swords, hanging behind the figure on the card. The imminent approach of doom. Pain and suffering, not just the physical kind. There was mental anguish associated with the Nine. Someone else's physical pain, resulting in your mental agony. As I tried to decipher Philippe's notes, scrawled along the left edge near the hilts of the swords, the letters twisted. The words lost their shape, bleeding and writhing into echoes of Philippe's history.
    When I absorbed another soul, in addition to the raw energy of that light, I also took on various other aspects of that personality. A lot of it faded over time, mental detritus that I didn't have any way to anchor, but some of it stuck. Memory is extremely subjective, nothing more than a collection of biochemical impulses, and what keeps it vivid and intact for a person is how well it connects with other clusters. "Mental scaffolding" is the term a Boston-based psychologist I knew had told me once. Like the sort of thing you see on the side of a building that is being retrofitted. A jumble of ladders and metal pipes, somehow staying together while simultaneously affording easy access to every floor and every window of the building.
    We are nothing more than the aggregate of our experiences, and if you tear the scaffolding down, the rest falls apart in rather short order. I was the dominant personality in my head, and everything ultimately found some place in my ego personality. Everything became part of my memory, but I had learned how to reconcile absorbed memory with my history.
    The memory of Marielle playing in the field, for example, and others like it were memories that didn't match my personal history. They stemmed from a time before I was in Paris, before I knew her. Things from her childhood: picking at the seams of the school uniform from when she was a small girl, the one forced upon her by the rigors of private education; standing before the Nike of Samothrace and staring up in open-mouthed wonder at the headless, winged woman; laughing at the expressions on the gargoyles atop Notre-Dame, the wind blowing her hair—worn long and black during this period. These memories clumped in my head, attaching themselves to my history of her. In this way, the history of the Chorus became my own: I knew what they knew, learned what they learned, feared and loved what moved them as well. I became more than the individual parts.
    However, this behavior with the cards was new, a vestige of Philippe's connection with the deck. When I put the card down, the writing slowed and became fixed; when I touched a hilt of one of the swords, the words started crawling again. Flowing into the hilts and up through the blades until each of the nine swords was awash with text. My fingertip started burning, but I didn't move it. The swords filled with black ink, more than there had been