“As you mentioned the crack in the raven on the wall and your concern that the damage had something to do with the darkness coming, I did ask them about that specifically. They did say that, with the petroglyphs they are familiar with, a crack in the stone should not lessen or alter the power of the petroglyph. But they stressed that the petroglyphs at Devil’s Boneyard were made by a people unknown to them and may behave differently.”
The wind rustled the trees; a far-off burbling spoke of a distant stream. From high above he heard the piercing call of a hawk.
“Thank you for asking,” he said. “At least we know that we have not ignored any possible line of inquiry.”
It would’ve been within the tribes’ right to decide that they would keep their knowledge to themselves and say so. But they would not have lied directly, and especially not to Mother Crone, and not about something that might endanger lives, no matter what the historic justification.
“What will you do?” Mother Crone asked.
“What else can I do? Research, and hope for a miracle.”
They walked a while longer in silence. Raven had once asked Mother Crone whether the Craft community had banded together to preserve and protect the Craft lands because there was an underlying sacredness to the land, or whether the gentle thrum of power that he sensed all around was the result of generations of Craft practitioners using the area for their rituals and their meditations. She’d smiled and said it was a little of both. Though Raven had no particular spiritual leanings and had never practiced any form of Craft, still he realized in this moment that the Craft lands were sacred to him, too. The idea that the darkness, if not stopped, could spread even to here tore his soul. Maybe if he could somehow hold back this darkness, protect the Craft lands as well as the people of the Three Communities, it would go some distance to redeeming the great debt left in his family name by his ancestors.
The trail looped back to the overlook. There Raven took his leave of Mother Crone and returned to the GII headquarters, where he ensconced himself in the library and started to look through indexes of the historic records to see if he could find anything like the current sweep of darkness. Though the soundproofing of the library shut out the buzz of nervous activity that ran through the building, Raven still had difficulty keeping focused. He kept on finding excuses to leave the library—to get a drink of water, to stretch his legs, to pour a mug of undrinkable coffee that would sit at his elbow until it grew so cold that he got up, emptied it into the sink of the break room, and started the process over again.
Each trip to the common areas brought new intelligence and the associated speculation. The kidnappers had carjacked a white van from an elderly couple at a truck stop. Was one of the kidnappers Mundane? There were mages who learned to drive, but it wasn’t common, especially outside of rural areas where vehicles were needed to transport livestock and feed. The involvement of a Mundane would increase the risk of firearms coming into play.
Someday soon, he would have to look into creating some form of magical protection against bullets. Just because it hadn’t been done yet didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. But what form would that protection take? Spell? Amulet? He’d have to find some way to predict and make allowances for the tendency for firearms to behave erratically in the presence of magic. Which meant first discovering why firearms behaved erratically around magic. And then he’d have to solve the problem of how to safely test whatever he came up with.
Focus. Countering firearms was a problem for another day. He took himself back to the library and the records. When next he surfaced, there had been conflicting sightings of the van in disparate locations at approximately the same time. None of the witnesses had gotten clear pictures or a plate number. The team had split up knowing that at least some of them were on a wild goose chase, and thinning their resources to dangerous level. Ordinarily they would’ve pulled GII agents off of other cases, or even called in local Guardians or Mundane police, but right now all available agents were working on crucial and time-sensitive cases of their own. Both the local Guardians and the Mundane police had already loaned them all the personnel they possibly could; they had their own fires to put out.
By early evening, word had come back that Cassandra and Rafe had narrowed the chase down to the right vehicle, but that vehicle had been found abandoned on a logging road outside of Estacada. K-9 officers had been brought in, but it was rough terrain and the kidnappers had a good head start. Rafe and Cassandra had set up a small base of operations near the abandoned van. It promised to be a long night.
Raven gave up on searching historical records and teleported home to see if he could find anything in the vast archive of dark magic that he’d inherited from his family. Late into the evening gnawing hunger drove him out of the library and toward the kitchen. On his way, he noticed the message crystal blinking to signal a call.
Although the light was clear, not red, he rushed to over to tap it. “Raven here.”
“Raven, it’s Sherlock. Cass just checked in, and she asked me to call with an update. She wasn’t able to reach you by cell. Figured you hadn’t charged it.”
Probably true. He hadn’t touched the thing since Sherlock and Cassandra forced it on him and wasn’t entirely sure where it was.
“Anyway, one of the dog teams tracked the kidnappers to an empty trailer on logging lands. Unfortunately, it’s a recent clear-cut, and so there’s no cover for agents and officers to get anywhere close, so now it’s a waiting game. Cass wanted you to know that the spokesperson for the kidnappers is going on about encroaching shadows and conspiracy.”
“The same as Heilman and that group in Molalla,” Raven said.
“This bunch is blaming the British government for some reason that only makes sense to them, but otherwise, yes, virtually identical paranoid ranting. And there’s no connection that anyone can establish between the groups, or between either group and Devil’s Crossing.”
“More evidence supporting the theory that the thing in the cave is somehow influencing events in a way we don’t understand.”
Sherlock sighed. “Exactly. Have you made any progress with the research?”
“Only if you count the elimination of numerous dead ends.”
“Thank you for all your work,” Sherlock said.
“It’s going to be a long night for all of us, I’m afraid.”
“Try to get some sleep,” Sherlock said. “You’re no use to yourself or anyone else without rest.”
“And you’ll be taking your own advice yourself, I’m sure.”
Sherlock snorted, told him he was a cheeky bastard, and ended the conversation.
Nuisance turned up with an insistent meow as soon as he stepped into the kitchen. He fed her a can of gourmet natural cat food (duck and lentils with gravy, hit with a warming spell to make it more palatable). Then he made himself a cold sandwich and a pot of Earl Grey. He carried these provisions into the library to settle down for yet another research marathon.
He leafed through the Ravenscroft journal for anything that he had missed that might help. He flipped through and discarded dozens of books in his personal library, many of them ancient, some of them technically illegal. There was nothing here that could help him. He had perhaps the most extensive private library of magical knowledge dating back to the arrival of Europeans on this continent. Some older tomes went back even further into the dawn of European magic. Nothing. Could the darkness be something unique to this continent? Something that tied into the petroglyphs, something that predated the arrival of Europeans? In his experience, magic was magic the world over. It might have different names, different theories, but it worked essentially the same. He ran his hands through his hair, thinking of myths and legends, of tales older than written language. Raven had not limited his scholarly education to the world of magic. He knew about Joseph Campbell, knew of his theory of monomyth. His idea that all of human history had a shared collective unconsciousness. Bran Tarrant had said something very si
milar in a cave in Australia, but Raven had been to dazed by his dream journey-hallucination-whatever experience and his narrow escape from death to fully absorb everything the strange man had been trying to tell him.
Nuisance drifted through the open library wall and rubbed against his legs. When that didn’t work to grab his attention, she jumped up on the table to walk back and forth across the book he was trying to read. He scooped her up and held her for a few moments, scratching her chin, and set her back down on the floor. With an indignant meow, she leaped back onto the table and nipped at his hands. Sighing, he picked her up, deposited her in the hall and closed the library door before returning to his reading.
His mind was taking him on paths that seemed a lot more like Craft than Art — only Craft didn’t work anything like the deadly shadow he’d sensed. Craft was a gentler, subtler magic, strong in its own way but not so easily weaponized. Craft worked with the forces and flows of nature, and whatever the hell was in that cave it did not feel natural. And yet the petroglyphs. . .And yet the petroglyphs.
All his training and understanding of how magic worked said the petroglyphs were part of Craft, not Art. Anthropologists had long theorized that in the earliest time of human history there was no separation between Art and Craft, there was only magic. Perhaps the anthropologists were right, and perhaps these petroglyphs were created in that long-ago time.
The spear-carrying warrior petroglyph was there to protect against the darkness. The raven image however. . . He didn’t want to believe that that could be the source of the strange darkness. He knew from his General Academy literature classes that the raven in literary works was considered a bird of bad omen, a symbol of evil and of death. Lines from Poe’s poem had been tauntingly quoted to him in study hall often enough to destroy any respect he might have otherwise had for the man’s artistry. And yet he remembered Mother Crone talking to him at a low point in his life, telling him that in some traditions the Raven was the savior of the people, a bringer of light.
His mind kept going back to the crack running across the raven petroglyph in the cave. Part of him still wondered if the raven had been there to hold back the shadow and the crack had undone that protection. But that made no sense. Cracks in cave walls did not lead to other planes, they led to more rock, or at most another cave. And Mother Crone’s contacts seemed to think the crack was irrelevant.
If only there was more information about the petroglyphs themselves, who made them, what their belief systems were, what the petroglyphs were meant to do. Mother Crone had been certain that the information reported in the archaeological journals was true. The tribes were not keeping any information to themselves to protect their own mysteries. The oral traditions regarding a people that had come before were all vague stories, the equivalent of fairytales and myths, the original facts lost in the retelling over time. As much a part of the monomyth as the Tuatha da Danaan of the Celts or the multitude of tales of the peoples destroyed by the great flood. The archaeological record agreed that there had been tribes that predated the ones now known. The details of their beliefs, their spiritual practices and magical traditions, had been as lost to the mists of time as any knowledge of the builders of Stonehenge or Newgrange. If understanding the petroglyphs was the key to understanding the shadow, the answers were not to be found in any book, no matter how old.
So what now? Raven wasn’t about to join the Wannabe tribe. He had far too much respect for Native Americans to go off on some fake vision quest like spiritual tourists with too much money and too much time on their hands. His own ancestry was mostly British Isles with a little French. When he took the British ancestry further back, he found mostly Saxon and Welsh with a little Scots thrown in. Some family history mentioned Pictish blood even further back along the Scottish line. People with their own spiritual traditions, but those traditions had been mostly trampled into the dust of history when the Romans came.
His hand wandered to the raven that he wore on a chain around his neck, the raven given to him by Bran Tarrant after he’d made it through the vision quest/fever dream/drug hallucination. Made it through the experience in the Australian cave that had led Bran Tarrant to proclaim him a mage with a shaman’s soul. He wondered now if a little more attention to the spiritual side of magic would have helped him now. Or maybe he was grasping at straws. Far too late to change, in any case.
Chapter Twenty
Raven had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now. He’d stopped thinking clearly some time ago, and yet he was way too wound up to sleep. Cassandra checked in at one point via crystal to let him know that she was safe, there’d been no recent developments, and she was likely not going to make it home until sometime in the morning, if then. Tony had put Ransley down hours ago, and was probably asleep by now himself. Raven went to the liquor cabinet, found a dusty bottle of absinthe in the back. He poured a measured amount into a tall glass, balanced sugar cubes on a slotted spoon and dribbled water directly from the tap. He had no patience at the moment for the extended ceremony of the raven-topped absinthe fountain currently holding pride of place in the china cabinet. He carried the drink into the parlor, or the living room as Cassandra would have it. A large flat screen TV hung on the wall above the fireplace where once his father’s portrait had stared down on him. Though not a fan of Mundane entertainment devices, Raven enjoyed immensely the thought of what his father would have to say about his portrait being replaced by one. He saluted the dark screen with his glass and took a long swallow. The house was utterly quiet. Nuisance had given up on him hours ago and stalked off in a tiff to find some soft place to sleep, probably the dead center of the bed he shared with Cassandra. The steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner grated, even though it was a sound he usually found soothing.
He sipped again at his absinthe. The remote that worked the television set taunted him from the antique Victorian side table. Beside it was a gift from Chuckie, a small, artisan-made notebook he had found at a craft fair on the coast. On the wooden cover the artist had etched a raven’s head surrounded by a circle of knotwork. Raven opened the notebook and flipped through pages of instruction written out by Chuckie; explanations of Uber and DoorDash and a lot of other Mundane conveniences that he thought Raven should try. He found the section on how to use the remote to turn on the TV followed by directions on how to find a particular program on something called Netflix.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams. He had watched the documentary once before with Cassandra and Ana, one of the few occasions he found it worthwhile to focus his full attention on the screen. It explored the archaeological theories about the recently discovered Chauvet cave in France. The place was a wonder of cave paintings and strange carvings and generations of handprints on a wall in red ocher. Archaeologists believed that the paintings were no mere decoration, and that the cave had been used for religious ceremonies for hundreds of years, but what the cave and its images meant to the people in that prehistoric time was left to speculation.
Monomyth. Collective unconscious. Early humans around the world with their caves, and their paintings, and the magic that might not have been all that different from the magic of today. Eventually he slipped in and out of a doze, moving from documentary to dream and back again, lost in images and mysteries and the haunting background music that spoke to some deep part of him that his rational modern mind had forgotten. The documentary ended and he came to full wakefulness just long enough to accept Netflix’ suggestion for a documentary on the passage tomb at Newgrange. He eased into half-sleep looking at mysterious spirals carved deep into the rock and an opening above the mouth of the tomb that, on the dawn that followed the longest night, allowed the light of the rising sun all the way into the depths of the main chamber.
Eventually he fell into a deeper sleep and a longer dream. He was walking through a spiral underground labyrinth, following its turnings with a sureness he did not question. As the passages joined, he gained companions. A gray-haired Pict that barely came
to Raven’s shoulders, dark skin painted with spirals of blue woad. A broad-shouldered Viking, tunic painted with runes Raven did not know. An auburn-haired woman in a simple tunic dyed the red of berries, embroidery at the neck and sleeves with a twining pattern of stylized birds and animals. Without greeting, without discussion, he and his companions continued on to the center. They all knew where they were going and why they were here. In the dream, he knew as well.
They reached the center of the spiral. His companions lit torches, one in each of the four directions at the edge of the circle in the heart of the labyrinth. In the center of the space there was a stone cauldron, suspended over a fire pit by a tripod of stone. Dreaming Raven could only spare a moment to wonder about the weight of the cauldron and how the structure supported it all.
“You know what the four torches represent,” the auburn-haired woman said.
The woman had not phrased it as a question, but Raven answered anyway. “North, South East, and West. Earth, air, fire, and water.” General Academy requirements included craft-for-mages course for students raised in Art so that they would not be completely ignorant about other parts of the Three Communities.
“And the cauldron in the center?”
He was more used to it being represented as the fifth point in a pentagram, but he could make an inference. “The center of all. Above and below. Within and without.”
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