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dead men, the new Chorus nearly had individual voices, soloists who occasionally rose out of the throng of voices.
    You are different, they— he —had told me. We are different.
    The experience at the peak of the tower had been one of the moments that Mircea Eliade, a twentieth-century Romanian mythology scholar, had quantified as a sacred epiphany, a cosmological instant of death and rebirth. At the axis mundi, the pillar of the world that reaches from our profane meat space into the sacred world of the spirit, a seeker is granted an audience with the Divine. Be it God, or Pure Ego, or Ptah, or Animal Spirits from Dogon: the name doesn't really matter, as they all fail to truly encompass the Infinite that breaches into the Finite. When the light goes out and the Ineffable retreats, the seeker is returned to his secular world, changed by his experience.
    The Chorus wasn't the only thing I lost that night. I also lost that last part of my innocence. I had been clinging so tightly to it, to that tiny ego child of denial: I wasn't responsible for what had happened to me in the woods ten years ago when I had first seen magick; I wasn't responsible for the choices I made that night, or that I made over the successive years when I took lives. I did these things so that I might live, so that the hole in my soul might not devour me. All these lies over the years, wound around my frightened spirit like a security blanket. It's not my fault.
    But it was. They were all my sins, and at the top of the tower, frozen in the eye of the Ineffable, I was judged and found wanting. I was thrown back, like a fish that was too small. Rede, mi fili. Go back, my son. Go back, and try again.
    When I sleep, I dream of that night. I dream of throwing Julian, Bernard's insane right-hand man, out the window. I dream of the crown of stars I tore from his head; I dream of how it felt in my hand, the weight of those souls, and I imagine putting that crown on my head. Anointing myself, and fighting Bernard before he can trigger the device. I dream of rising and falling, over and over, as I try to understand the judgment delivered.
    Go back.
    But now— nunc —the dream changes. When I fail and fall, the tower exploding behind me, I fall through layers—concrete and timber and sheet rock—until I land in a library. In the dream, the fireplace is real, and the marble busts aren't medieval replicas but real heads, stuck on sharp sticks. And Philippe Emonet—the Old Man, the Hierarch of the Watchers, the Silent Guardian Who Waits, Marielle's father—is older and more decrepit, as if he had been wearing a glamour when I had last seen him—less than twenty-four hours ago—and now, in the True Seeing vision of my dream, the true extent of his illness was apparent.
    His hair is gone, and black sores like weeping eyes cover his skull. His left leg is gone entirely, amputated just below his hip, and his left hand is reduced to a tiny claw like a dried chicken foot. He is blind in one eye, and he stutters fiercely when he speaks.
    This is what would have happened if you had failed to stop him, he says. This is the map of Portland, carved into my flesh.
    But, I remind him, some did die. I didn't save them all.
    You can't, he says. Every day, innocents die. His voice beats against me. I am too soft in the dream, and his words are hard. Most of them from stupid mistakes and misguided ventures of other mad visionaries whom they had the accident to touch. Most die in darkness and in pain, their minds filled with idle garbage about their bank accounts and whether or not they were loved by their children and respected by their friends. What do we gain by saving them? Do they recognize us for our efforts? Do they reward us by continuing their menial, grubby lives?
    We don't get to decide, I argue.
    Of course we do. That is what we do; that is who we are. Every time you kill someone, Michael, you act like the Lord.
    I contract at his words, at his blasphemous