fifties. If he’d sagged when I mentioned the second guard, he deflated now. “The Cauldron of Matholwch.”
Billy looked up from his conversation with dead people and said, “The
So did I, but when I said it, it was with bewilderment, and when Billy said it, it was with dread and amazement. I’d spent a lot of quality time online and in libraries the last few months, reading up on shamanism and the occult, but all it took was one phrase to let me know just how far at the back of the class I still was.
Fortunately, Sandburg didn’t seem to expect that I’d recognize the name. “You might know it by its more common name, the Black Cauldron. It—”
“Wait! Wait! I know this one!” I bounced and waved my hand in the air, then remembered there was a dead man not fifteen feet away and tried to pull together a little decorum. “Like from the movie, right? I saw it when I was little. There’s an army of undead in it, right?”
There’s an expression of betrayal that I associate with deceptions on the magnitude of learning there’s no Santa Claus. It says,
Billy and Sandburg both had that look. My hand sank and I looked between them, finally venturing, “No?” in a small, apologetic voice.
Sandburg recovered first. From Billy’s expression, he might never recover, and he would definitely never forgive me. “That cauldron,” Sandburg said a bit frostily, “originated from the true Cauldron, which belonged to an ancient Welsh king called Bran, who gave it to the Irish king Matholwch as a wedding gift when Matholwch married Bran’s sister, Branwyn. The dead could be resurrected into undying warriors by placing them in the cauldron. It was reputedly destroyed in battle between Matholwch and Bran, by a living man climbing within it.”
I held my hand up again, a finger lifted. “Battle between the king who gave the cauldron and the one he gave it to?”
Sandburg lost a little of his despondency, obviously enjoying the chance to lecture. “Matholwch mistreated Branwyn, and so Bran invaded Ireland to rescue her.” He brightened further, adding, “Of course, there’s no way of knowing for certain that this is Matholwch’s cauldron. It was found several years ago at an ancient battlefield and gathering place in Ireland, with the remnants you see there.” He gestured toward the display. “All of the artifacts are Celtic in origin, but compositional and artistic differences in the pieces suggest some are Welsh, while others are Irish. Combined with the cauldron’s presence, it lends credence to the legend, and makes a wonderful story and artifact to draw audiences to museums. It’s on tour.”
His pleasure faded again and he looked at the empty space where the cauldron had been. “We must recover it, Detectives. It’s insured, but there’s no way of realizing its true value in monetary terms. It’s a piece of legend and of history.”
“How big is this thing?” I asked dubiously. “Big enough to put a dead man in, I assume. And made of iron?” A full-grown man could fit into, say, a fifty-five-gallon barrel, though not comfortably. I looked at the gaping spot in the display, and at Sandburg. “Even empty, that’s got to weigh a ton.”
“Some seventy gallons,” Sandburg said, “and made of oak with iron bands. It’s not quite a ton, but it’s very heavy.”
I stared at him a moment before questions poured out in the order of least relevance: “How long ago was this supposed to be? Wouldn’t oak have rotted away? Wouldn’t you have noticed somebody waltzing out of here with a seventy-gallon barrel bumping along behind them? Wouldn’t the security cameras have footage?” No wonder Billy hadn’t let me interrogate the ghosts.
“It was preserved in a peat bog.” Sandburg got all bright-eyed and enthusiastic again. “Two partial bodies were recovered, as well. They’re considered too fragile to travel, bu—”
“Sorry, Mr. Sandburg.” Billy came over with his best wryly sympathetic look. “I’d love to hear about the bog men sometime, but right now Detective Walker’s questions have to take precedence. Could I see the security- camera footage? Walker, you can oversee the forensics team.” We’d been working together long enough that I understood the code in the simple phrase.
It meant I could oversee the forensics team.
All right, all right, it also meant he’d gotten what he could out of Jason Chan’s ghost, and that it was my turn to study the crime scene on the supernatural level.
I’d consciously decided not to use the Sight when I first walked in. I’d done it first thing on at a few scenes, and I’d learned it superseded the real world too much. I could never quite see things the way they were supposed to be seen once they’d been tainted with the colors and emotional impact the Sight brought along. It was worth more to me to go in clear-headed and then move into the unusual. That, and Billy couldn’t turn his off; if there were ghosts, he’d see them, so one of us seeing the unadulterated world while the other studied the magical one seemed like a good idea to both of us.
I took a look at Sandburg on his way out. He was agitated, darkness and discomfort whirling through what were otherwise very mild colors: for all his adventurer-clothing style, his aura was made up of pastels and whites. If I’d looked at him that way first, I’d have called him lily-livered, which wouldn’t have been fair at all. Billy, beside him, looked much richer in color, which pleased me. I’d need to remember to give him another energy boost, just in case, but it looked as if his ghost riders weren’t gaining any toeholds. The men disappeared around a curve, and I turned to look at the crime scene.
Knowing Billy saw ghosts made me surprised that I didn’t, especially when I knew one was there. But aside from last night, my only experience in seeing the dead had been on a different plane of existence. I called it the Dead Zone, a vast purgatory-like nothingness. I’d told Billy the door in my garden led to a place people went when they were dying. The Dead Zone was where the already-dead hung out, at least briefly. I was absolutely terrible at calling them to me, and had very nearly gotten myself killed trying. My mentor, Coyote, had saved my sorry ass more than once. I missed him.
I sighed and pulled myself back to the job at hand. No ghosts for me. That was okay. There were plenty of other things to see.
Foremost was the cauldron. Even gone, it left a mark of darkness in the air, intense enough where it had rested that I had to move in order to see some of the artifacts. A general malaise hung over them, their energy— because everything had energy, which I’d eventually learned was one of the tenets of shamanism; all things were inhabited by a spirit of some sort, one that lent the object purpose and definition—their energy drained to a dull tarry brown. Well, they’d been buried in a peat bog for who knows how long. I’d be brown and sticky, too.
But it was more than that, at least where the cauldron had rested. There was—I hesitated to call it
They only wrapped around me, cool and uncomfortably inviting. I hadn’t seen a death aura before, and if I’d been asked, I’d have guessed it would be terrifying, an unknown slash of black and fear. This glimpse made me think the auras surrounding illness were worse; there was fight left in the sick, and what encompassed me now had moved far beyond that.
I backed up, uneasy with the accepting nature of the cauldron’s remnants. If its shadow took away the edges of pain and the sharpness of worry, the cauldron itself would be much more potent. If it offered that kind of peace to everyone, I didn’t think a living body diving in would be the charm that broke it apart. It’d be an easy suicide, climbing into that thing. I shuddered and took another step back.
With distance, and maybe with my rejection, the cauldron’s shadow lessened. The books and manuscript fragments burned away most of their murk, as though they’d been freed of the cauldron’s touch. They were gorgeous, ciphers standing out in gold against creamy backgrounds. I edged closer, peering at the display-case information to learn what was oldest, and turned to the piece—barely more than a sliver of parchment—to see what ancient knowledge looked like with the Sight. I had the idea that if I could hold my gaze just right, then a picture or an answer would leap out at me, like a magic-eye optical illusion.
For a while the gold cipher on the page simply wavered at me. Then it twinned, a scarlet streak racing through it, and dizziness made my eyes cross. The Sight vanished, and I clapped a hand over my face, muttering. Aside from turning the Sight off, that was basically what the magic-eye illusions did to me, too. I should’ve known better.
My cell phone buzzed and I slipped it free, glad of something real to focus on. Billy’s voice came over the
