“So you are,” Arcturus said, and despite my warning, lifted the back of my shirt to inspect my inking more closely. After a moment, he said, “Impressive. I thought you’d have gotten sloppy, running all that commercial ink. But you’ve gotten better.”
“I love my work.”
Arcturus released me, and I turned back to face him.
“Tell me, Frost,” he asked, “are you ready to learn to fight this thing?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you have anything to teach me?”
“Oh, do I,” Arcturus said, his eyes glinting. “I don’t have secret knowledge about graffiti, but there’s a lot about skindancing I didn’t teach you before you quit.”
“Damnit,” I said. Actually I had hoped Arcturus would have some secret knowledge, but there would be no silver bullet. “I don’t have time to get bogged down with dancing lessons.”
“You don’t have time not to,” Arcturus said. “Tell me all you know about the graffiti, and together we’ll work out how to take it apart. Then I’ll train you to do it, using improvements to your library of tattoos and specific moves to use your new tattoos to defend yourself. Deal?”
I blinked at him. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “All right. I’m in.”
No Easy Answers
The fires in Atlanta petered out after a few days, according to the news, but I was not relieved. The attacks had stopped for a week after the werehouse fire-then we lost Calaphase. Now we were a little over a week past that round of fires-and running out of time.
But I had no idea how I could be working any harder or faster.
“Understand me. This is no Yoda nonsense,” Arcturus said- again. He moved his arms in a slow arc, which I mirrored with difficulty-and increasing frustration. “Fuck ‘do or do not, there is no try.’ No. Try and try again, piece by piece, until each piece is right. Then puzzle the pieces together, over and over again, until the big picture is second nature.”
Since I’d arrived, each day had been devoted to skindancing until I could barely stand, and each night to graffiti analysis until we could barely keep our eyes open. Yet, deep in the night, trying to drift off in the musty chill of the spare room, I often lay awake, worrying about Cinnamon, mourning Calaphase… or dreading what disaster was coming next.
I sent Cinnamon a postcard through Doug, but I was too paranoid to call directly. I was off the radar and planned to stay there. I did try emailing her through an anonymous proxy-I remembered a few tricks from my days volunteering in the Emory computer lab-but got no response. Heck, I didn’t know if Palmotti was letting her use the Internet.
When I logged in, however, I found my secret admirer had no problems with his Internet connection. Based on the press clippings he’d flooded my inbox with, Arcturus and I estimated the new fires had killed at least thirty-five people. Also, a werekin lawyer disappeared at the same time, and I suspected a transportation attack like the one on me and Calaphase.
Counting everything, the death toll from magic graffiti had nearly hit eighty. It got worse each time: a handful of people around New Year’s Eve, twice that many after Revenance died, and another doubling after Calaphase died. I was dreading what was coming next.
At least I was making progress on skindancing. Arcturus had showed me a technique to remove the curdled ink left in my burn, then helped me design a better asp I inked in its place. We also added a few defensive marks that might help if I ran into Zipperface again.
As I carefully inked the design to Arcturus’ impatient direction, I guessed why he had let his own marks get so crude. If you tattooed yourself repeatedly, only to pull them off so you could ink new ones, I could see how you could start focusing on the magical lines over the artistry. I love my work, though, and when I was done, even Arcturus was impressed.
But, as my new arsenal healed up, Arcturus didn’t let me rest on my laurels. Instead, he gave me a crash course in skindancing logic-first, with a refresher of the basic moves, and then a review of the Dances-what in karate would be called a hoke or a kata.
We practiced beneath the trees on a big hexagonal sand pit behind his wooden split-level home, a crisp January wind making the shadows of the branches dance with far more grace than I could manage. Strangely, the regular exercise seemed to be helping my knee: maybe I had been pushing myself too hard at the dojo. Regardless, being in less pain didn’t mean I made fewer mistakes. Soon, I stumbled again, sand kicking up from my foot where I caught myself, and Arcturus broke his form and stood beside me, watching me move.
“Pathetic. Back to the Dance of Five and Two,” he said sharply, walking beside me, correcting my arm here and there, occasionally cuffing me upside the head as I stumbled through the motions. My feet drew out a pentagram, forward, back left, right front, left front, back right, forward again, then repeated it again, switching right for left. I felt like I was falling over my own feet with every little J-step. But at the end Arcturus grunted, pleased.
“Not bad,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Thought you’d abandoned your practice?”
“Rarely doesn’t mean never,” I said. “And I do martial arts. They’re similar.”
He laughed sharply. “Not likely,” he said. “What’s your most similar move?”
I thought a moment. “Not so much a move, as a formsemay-no-hokay. ”
“Means nothing to me,” he said. “Show me. Or must you put on jammies to fight?”
“It’s not a fighting form,” I said. I knelt, bowed to touch the sand, and leaned back up. I exhaled completely, lifted up on one knee, extended my hands-then pulled them back in, inhaling, and started windmilling myself through semay.
Its movements weren’t that difficult; the really taxing part was its elaborate pattern of controlled breathing. Soon everything else was pushed out of my mind. Arcturus, despite his protests, seemed to instinctively get the form, even correcting my hands once.
“Not bad,” he said, with the same little grunt. “Doesn’t sum like the skin dance, but you’re going over many of the same moves. I can see why it helps. Let’s take a break.”
He poured some lemonshine for us from a pitcher on the picnic table and took a swig. When I tried, I gagged, half from the alcohol and half from the lemon. I’d forgotten how strong he made it. “Gaah,” I said, “worse than ever. Is this lemonade or a margarita?”
“Can’t quite make up its mind, can it?” he said, grinning. “Zinaga has been feeding in limes along with the lemons. That and the tequila gives it quite a kick.”
I stared at the drink, suspicious of anything prepared by Zinaga. But I had convinced Arcturus to forgive and forget, so I had to put my money where my mouth was. I grimaced through another swallow, and set it down. “Gaah. All right. How bad am I doing?”
“Terrible. Rusty as all getout. It will take a month to get you back to fighting form.”
“We don’t have a month,” I said. “We’ve got to figure out how to defeat the graffiti before it starts killing people again-”
“Dakota, we’ve spent almost a week and a half looking at graffiti, and neither of us have made headway because there’s no headway to be made,” Arcturus said. “Trust me, there are no secrets to be found looking at more pictures or drawing more diagrams.”
“Then we’re not looking hard enough,” I said. “There has to be some weakness-”
“What is this, the Star Wars theory of battle?” Arcturus said, plucking an M amp;M out of a jar on the picnic table. “Hoping to find that small exhaust port just below the main port?”
“Don’t mock me,” I said. “I need to find out how the tags work so I can beat them.”
“Dakota, you can’t beat the tags,” Arcturus said. “You can’t. He can spray one as big as the side of a barn, with a thousand layers, and all you have is two square meters of skin. If you go toe to toe with that, it will burn you. You need to learn to beat the tagger. ”
I sat down on the picnic table. As soon as he said that, I knew he was right. I close
d my eyes, running through the math. Doug once called magic conceptual physics: the part of the world affected by pure ideas. Well, it wasn’t that simple: a magical intent is only as strong as the mana that powers it. Against stronger magic, that intent can pop like a soap bubble.
Ignore for a moment where it was getting the power, and just look at the surface area, at the layers. At a rough guess… the magic that a large tag could put out could be a thousand times as much as that put out by a person. And the source of the mana? If he painted enough layers, it could be the world’s best magical capacitor, storing up the trickle of magic put out by the living mold underneath for hours or days before releasing it all at once in a torrent of mana.
No wonder I hadn’t been able to shield against the graffiti.
It was like trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper.
Inside Arcturus’ basement studio, the phone began ringing, and I started to get up to answer it, just like I always had when I’d been his star pupil.
“Leave it to Zinaga,” Arcturus said, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder. “Why so quiet? Trying to use all your college maths to figure out how it beat you?”
“Yep,” I said. “Actually, I’ve pretty much nailed it.”
Arcturus sighed. “Cocky as ever. You keep thinking you understand magic, but calling it mana is no better than calling it qi and looking for chakra. Everyone tries to reduce magic to laws they can understand. But magic doesn’t obey the laws of nature. Magic is super natural.”
“Supernatural doesn’t mean anything,” I said, staring out at the patterns in the sand as the phone went silent. “It’s just a word we use for the ‘vitamins’ of nature, the parts you can’t assemble out of smaller pieces unless you’ve already got the material to work with.”
“By that definition radioactivity is magical, or damn near close to it,” Arcturus said, rubbing his hands together. When the roughly inked yin-yangs on his palms came apart, a glowing pattern spread between them, a cat’s cradle of light far more delicate than anything that sprung from the finer lines of my tattoos. “But you know better than that. Magic is more than just a rare spice. It’s the spice of life-living, breathing life forms.”
I stared at the dance of light between his fingers. I knew the graphomantic patterns that made the form possible, could gauge his intent, maybe even measure his mana, but there was more to it than that, something just beyond my reach, elusive and tantalizing.
Then the phone started ringing again.
“Let me shoo whomever’s on the phone,” I said, standing.
“Don’t,” Arcturus said firmly. “ Don’t answer it.”
I stared at him, as the phone kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing.
“Answer your own phone on your own time,” Arcturus said. “Leave my phone alone. No one has any business calling my phone. If I wanted to talk, I would call them.”
“That won’t work if everyone has your attitude,” I said, as the phone kept ringing.
“I am not everyone,” he said, ignoring the noise. “I am Arcturus. I’m a skindancing master. And I’m with my star pupil, trying to beat some sense into her.”
“That’s incredibly annoying,” I said, pointing at the ringing phone. “I need to concentrate. Let’s at least take it off the hook.”
“Learn to ignore it,” he said. “Would you stop and answer a cell phone during a fight?”
“We’re not in a fight,” I said. “And what if it was important-”
“It is never important,” he said.
“My daughter was kidnapped last year,” I snarled. “They called to tell me what to do. What if I hadn’t answered the phone? They might have-”
“They were not going to kill your daughter just because they couldn’t get you on the phone,” Arcturus said quietly. “They took her because they wanted something. Killing her wouldn’t get it from you. They will find another way to deliver the message.”
“How do you know that?” I said.
“Trust me,” he said, even more quietly. “I know.”
I just stared at him, as the phone rang, and rang, and rang. Arcturus was an aristocratic Chilean, educated at Cambridge, hiding out in the backwaters of rural Georgia in a cabin filled with pictures of a wife and daughter I had never met and he had never spoken of.
As usual, dumb old me never thought to ask why.
“Arcturus,” I said softly. “Who was on the phone the last time you picked it up?”
“What?” Arcturus said blankly. “What? No! Not kidnappers, if that’s what you’re asking. I have picked up the phone since then, Dakota. Last time for my brother, I think.” Then his face clouded. “But… yes, once it was. And the experience left me with an aversion.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged, turned away. “Waters long under,” he said, pulling out his sheaf of notes. “Back to the here and now. Back to the sound. On the other end of that phone, a person is looking for you, but they can only find you if you pick up. The sound is just an alarm. It can’t hurt you. It doesn’t oblige you. But it can distract you. Realize that, then learn to ignore it.”
“Ignore what?” I asked.
He smiled, picked out a diagram, put it in front of me. “And now something else to ignore: chakra, smakra, mana, qi,” he said, smoothing the paper out. “All pretty words for the flow of magic, for the loci where it collects in the body. To fight the tagger, you must master that power-not intellectually, but intuitively, as an instinctive reaction without thought.
“Your martial arts have done you well. You have maintained your skill at concentrating magic in your loci, maybe even improved it a little. Now you must learn how to concentrate more coordinated patterns of magic and use them to generate more complex spells on the fly.”
But I was staring at the diagram: it was the Pentacle of the Dance, a pentagram that showed how the five different kinds of magic used by skindancers related to each other. I’d seen it, drawn it a thousand times: walking the pentacle was a fundamental tool used to check the magic of flash to make sure the magical circuit worked as advertised.
But this one was different. Overlaid on the pentagram was a square, then a circle, then a naked, spreadeagled human figure: the Vitruvian man, the iconic figure drawn by Leonardo da Vinci five centuries before I was born. This Pentacle, Arcturus explained, showed how the human body itself was not just a source of magic, but a component in its logic.
“Oh, God,” I said, flashing on Revenance’s spread-eagled form, on Tully, suffering in the vines, even on Cally, broken body splayed out in a crude X as his life’s blood spilled out onto the tag. “It is skindancing. The tagger is using skindancing logic with graffiti magic.”
“Now how is he doing that, Frost?” Arcturus said. “There is no dancer-”
“The writhing of the victims. Hence the barbs, the sawing, the prolonged torture. ”
“Frost!” Arcturus said. “We went over that. Random movements wouldn’t sum-”
“It would if there’s a ratchet, like a self winding watch,” I said, staring into the Pentacle. “What if it’s not just a receiver, but a transmitter? It traps people, kills them, and beams the harvested magic elsewhere to power… something else. Do you have a map of Atlanta?”
Arcturus froze, then went out to the garage, yelling for Zinaga while I got the graffiti pictures. When he returned with the map, I tamped it down with the pitcher and M amp;M jar and used M amp;Ms to mark where graffiti had been found or where fires had been reported.
In moments the picture emerged. Our data was not complete, the diagram not perfect, but there were enough little bits of candy to see the beginnings of a great pentacle spread over the whole of the city of Atlanta, just like the Pentacle of the Dance on the Vitruvian Man.
“It’s a city-sized resonator,” I said. “No wonder the tags never seem to run out of mana. They aren’t just powering themselves-they’re powering each other. Mana building up in the mold capacitors all over the city gets beamed to the t
raps, which in turn use that power to torture more magic out of their victims. It’s a… a distributed necromantic network.”
Arcturus’ jaw clenched. “God damn it,” he said. “And it will be more than just mana-it will transmit the tortured intents of the dying victims back to the source. It’s not just a city-sized resonator. It’s a city-sized harvester of pain. That is foul.”
I thought about Transomnia, Nyissa, and their auras prickling against my magical tattoos. “It likes vampires because their auras extend beyond their body,” I said. “That triggers the magic and springs the trap. Shapeshifters can trigger it too, but anything alive could feed it.”
“Vampiric graffiti using skindancing magic,” Arcturus said. “Killing people as part of some far vaster spell… to do what? ”
“Something really horrible,” I said, pointing at a join on the network. Arcturus had taught me something new, just in this short week. “Look at the corresponding point on the Pentacle. This isn’t a chi junction. It’s an intent nexus. That’s why the network transports people.”
Arcturus stared at the map, then the Pentacle. “How do you figure that?”
“Extracting a person’s intent is a short-range process,” I said. “And these points on the Pentacle are points of pain. It moved Revenance-it moved me and Calaphase-to the place which needed the most pain to be applied. This network is collecting suffering.”
“God,” Arcturus said. “We must stop this.”
I laughed bitterly. “No argument.”
He nodded a couple of times and took another swig of his limonshine. “I have to call the vampires,” he said with distaste. “I don’t believe this. I’m going to call the bloody vamps. I’m going to thank them for their gesture, then propose we work together to eliminate this threat.”
My eyes widened. “You’ll… you’ll fight with me against the tagger?”
“What? No… I can’t leave Blood Rock, Frost,” Arcturus said, pained. “I can’t afford to be outside the Sanctuary circle, much less appear in public. I am marked for death.”
I stared back at him. “You’ve been here, what, twenty years… ”
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