The Arkana Mysteries Boxed Set

by N. S. Wikarski

  “Oh, so his name is Erik. He never exactly introduced himself.”

  “He’s part of the security team here. You’ll meet him another time.” She picked up the page and handed it to Cassie. “Did we miss anything?”

  Cassie recoiled for a second before taking the paper. She studied it briefly. “In my dream…” she began hesitantly. “When I saw him in my dream, his eyes were narrower. Light colored and kind of mean. He took his hat off, so I know his hair was dark brown, and he wore it combed back like somebody from the 1950s.”

  “You mean wavy and high, like a pompadour?” Maddie asked in surprise.

  “I guess that’s what you would call it. His lips are thinner than this, and his nose is a little bit longer.” She exhaled a deep sigh. “Otherwise, that’s him. That’s the guy who figured a piece of rock was more valuable than my sister’s life.”

  Maddie’s expression was grim. “We’ll find out who he is. Don’t worry. He won’t slip away from us. Just give us a little more time, OK?”

  The girl nodded mutely, unconvinced. It could take years.

  Sensing her visitor’s skepticism, Maddie added, “A guy like this has made a career out of shoving people around to get what he wants. He’s left a trail somewhere for us to follow. But I’d be willing to bet that in all his years as a professional bully he’s never come up against a goddess before.” She gave a harsh laugh. “I don’t like his odds this time.”

  Cassie noted the sharp gleam in Maddie’s eyes. Her doubts faded away.

  Chapter 19 – Conjugal Wrongs

  Daniel let himself into his wife Annabeth’s chamber unannounced. He caught her sitting at the small table waiting, her hands jammed into her apron pockets, no doubt to keep from biting her nails. At the sight of him, she sprang out of her chair and ran to the mirror above the dresser. She smoothed her hair and tried to pinch some color into her pale cheeks before nervously turning to face him.

  He paused at the threshold, feeling confused. “What is it, Annabeth? Is everything all right? Is our daughter sick? I received a message that you needed to speak to me.”

  Tugging lightly at his sleeve, she drew him into the room and hastened to reassure him. “Everything is fine with the child, Daniel. Don’t worry.”

  “Then what?” The young man asked, still puzzled.

  Annabeth looked at him expectantly for a moment and then rushed toward him. Flinging her arms around his shoulders, she attempted to kiss him.

  He recoiled as if bitten by a snake. “Annabeth!” he exclaimed in shock. “What are you doing?”

  She hesitated for a moment and then tried to twine herself around him again.

  He pushed her away. “Stop that. What’s gotten into you?”

  Annabeth looked as if she was about to burst into tears.

  Daniel relented. “Come over here and sit down, and you can tell me what this is all about.” He led her to a chair and winced as he caught a glimpse of his formal portrait hanging above the table. It reminded him of the portrait of his grandfather that hung in his father’s prayer closet. He couldn’t bear the comparison.

  She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at him beseechingly. “I don’t know what to do. You must help me, Daniel. I don’t want to lose my place in the kingdom.”

  Daniel was growing ever more bewildered. “Lose your place? What are you talking about, Annabeth?”

  She couldn’t speak for several seconds. Her lips were quivering as she dabbed away the tears streaming from her eyes. “The thought of being separated for all eternity—from my baby, from my kin, from you, from everybody I ever loved.” She shook her head emphatically. “No, no. I can’t even think about something as terrible as that. I don’t want to go to hell. I don’t want to be damned.”

  “Who said anything about you being damned?”

  She ignored his question. “Do you find me domineering? Am I a bad wife?”

  “A bad wife,” he echoed uncomprehendingly. “Where would you get such an idea?”

  She didn’t answer him immediately. Turning her head, she looked over her shoulder at the bed. “It’s been a long time since you visited me—since we had relations. What have I done to displease you?”

  Her words had the effect of an electric shock. He sprang out of his chair and began to pace around the center of the room. “Nothing, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Then why?” Her voice was plaintive.

  “I’ve had a lot on my mind. You can’t understand the kind of pressure I’m under. Father has charged me with a grave responsibility, and I fear the thought of disappointing him.”

  “But it’s been almost four years, Daniel,” she said softly.

  He stopped pacing as a new thought struck him. “Who have you been speaking to?”

  She didn’t want to meet his gaze.

  “Annabeth, tell me who,” he commanded.

  She raised her watery eyes. “The diviner came to see me.”

  The sound of that name chilled him to the bone. He had hoped this moment would never come but had secretly expected it. Daniel knew it was inevitable ever since his father had remembered he was alive and singled him out for attention.

  “He… he said he was concerned.” She began twisting the hem of her apron into knots. “He said we should have more children by now. And he told me…” she struggled to go on. “He… he… told me,” she started to sob. “That I was an overbearing wife and that maybe I don’t deserve to be among the consecrated.” The words tumbled out in a rush before she began sobbing in earnest.

  Daniel knelt down next to her chair and shook her arms gently. “Listen to me, Annabeth. Listen.” He shook her again until she stopped sobbing and sat limp and quiet. “You are a good wife. A very good wife.”

  She raised her eyes to meet his. “Then why?”

  He avoided giving her a direct answer. “If my father asks about the matter again, you are to tell him that we are trying to conceive another child.”

  “You want me to lie to the diviner?” Her pasty face drained of color completely.

  “It isn’t a lie.” He tilted her chin upward. “We will try again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Another baby?”

  She nodded, sniffling a bit. “Why else did God create woman? What else am I fit for? Without a husband and children, I have no place in the world. No place in the kingdom.” Annabeth hesitated. “I… I don’t want to lose my place in the kingdom, Daniel. If I don’t have more children soon, then your father will cast me out.”

  He put his arms around her lightly, in part to hide his tense expression. “Don’t worry. I’ll come to visit you very soon to try to increase our family.” He felt a flood of revulsion at the thought and instantly condemned himself for it. He released her and looked directly into her eyes. “For now, just remember what I told you to say if my father asks. You will remember, won’t you?”

  She nodded again and wiped her eyes on her apron.

  “You’re a good girl, Annabeth.”

  Chapter 20 – Underground Intelligence

  Cassie gave herself a few days to let her head stop spinning from her dizzying conversation with Maddie. When she felt that her brain had absorbed all the new facts that had bombarded it, she drove back out to the schoolhouse. “A glutton for punishment,” she thought to herself ruefully. She didn’t understand why Faye was pushing her to learn the basics so quickly. Sybil had been given years to understand the Arkana and how the organization worked. Something else was going on here. Something to do with the cowboy and the key, but she didn’t know what. All she knew for sure was that she was taking the crash course version of Pythia 101. She pulled into the clearing and walked up to the schoolhouse door. A familiar face peered around it just as she reached the top step.

  Startled, Cassie asked, “Why is it that I never get a chance to knock before you pop out like some jack-in-the-box with a necktie?”

  Griffin gave her a slight smile. “We have security ca
meras monitoring the grounds. I was alerted and came out to meet you.” He opened the door wide. “Please, do come in. Are you ready for your grand tour of the vault today?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said guardedly, remembering Maddie’s warning. “Wait until Griffin gets started.”

  He seemed a bit less ill at ease in her presence this time as they walked through the main schoolroom. It was just as quiet and empty as during her previous visit. When they entered the short corridor at the back of the building, Griffin stopped in front of what appeared to be a janitor’s closet. He pulled the door open to reveal another door immediately behind it—a modern steel elevator door. When he swiped a key card into a slot next to the door, Cassie could hear the elevator ascending to meet them.

  Reading her surprised expression, Griffin gave her a knowing look. “I would respectfully remind you of the adage about appearances and deception.”

  The elevator doors parted, and they walked inside. There were no buttons to push for the floor they wanted. Instead, Cassie saw a keypad on the inside of the door. Griffin punched in a code, and they began to descend.

  Nothing could have prepared Cassie for the sight that greeted her when the elevator doors opened again. They were standing in an underground room that was the size of a school auditorium. It was filled with desks—row upon row of desks. They were staffed by people of every nationality, race, gender, and age. Over a hundred of them. Some people were working at computers. Some were consulting books. Others were on the phone engaged in heated discussions with unknown people on the other end of the line.

  The ceiling was twenty-five feet above them, glowing with overhead light from some unseen source. Even though they were below ground, it felt like sunlight on Cassie’s skin. She was about to ask Griffin, but he anticipated her question.

  “You like our lighting system? It’s quite clever actually. Full-spectrum illumination that mimics the progression and intensity of natural daylight.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “You mean you have a sunrise and sunset down here?”

  He nodded. “The duration and angle of light is calculated to match the time of year outdoors. It’s brighter on the east side of the room in the morning and on the west side in the evening. Once our artificial sun goes down, people can use their desk lamps, of course, but we also have an artificial moon rise that corresponds to the actual phases of the moon. While our daylight sky is opaque, our night sky is transparent, complete with constellations appropriate to this latitude and longitude at any given time of year. We want to preserve a natural environment as much as possible.”

  “Speaking of which…” Cassie pointed to a dog which was lying patiently next to the desk of a middle-aged woman in the front row. On another desk, a cat slept curled up in an out-box. A third desk held a birdcage with a cockatiel inside.

  “People are encouraged to bring their pets to work. The more nature we can incorporate into the environment, the better.”

  “I guess,” Cassie offered noncommittally as her eyes wandered around the space. There were potted trees in the corners; some nearly reached the ceiling. Waterfalls trickled and splashed beside them.

  “Are we still under the school?” she asked.

  “Yes, partly. We excavated additional space around it too.”

  “There are so many people down here. Why didn’t I see any cars when I drove up?”

  “There’s an underground car park on the other side of the building. The ventilation system is state of the art.” Griffin cast a glance toward the multitude of desks in the middle of the room and gave a sigh. “It’s unfortunate our technological innovations haven’t yet extended to the information we collect. You see, we’re still in the throes of converting our paper records to computer format. Some of us are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the information age. I confess that I, myself, am far more comfortable with the printed page.”

  Cassie registered surprise. Griffin had to be in his early twenties, but somehow he’d managed to miss the digital bus. When it came to books, he seemed as technophobic as some Luddite in his seventies.

  Griffin clapped his hands loudly. “Everyone, may I please have your attention?”

  Immediately the cacophony of sounds in the room quieted. People who had been speaking on the phone paused in their conversations and looked up inquiringly.

  “It is my very great pleasure to introduce to you Sybil’s sister, Cassie. Our new pythia.”

  Suddenly a wave of humanity was rushing toward her. Cassie braced herself for impact. Hands reached out to shake hers, to pat her on the shoulder. Voices told her how happy they were to meet her at last. How much they had liked her sister. Everyone was offering encouragement and assistance with anything she wanted to learn, any time, any place. They all seemed to understand why she was here. They all seemed to know what she was supposed to do better than she did herself. They all seemed pleased to see her. She felt as if she’d stumbled into a reunion with a long-lost family she never knew she had.

  “Do you still think our vault is, as you put it, an empty schoolhouse with fancy bleachers and a big table?” Griffin asked with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

  Cassie was too dazed by the enthusiastic reception to speak.

  Griffin waited for the initial hubbub to die down, and then he shooed the throng of well-wishers away. “All right now, everyone. Back to work if you please. Give the young lady a chance to breathe. I fear you’ve quite overwhelmed her.”

  Cassie darted him a grateful look as he disengaged her from the crowd and led her around the perimeter of the main room.

  On the wall to the right of all the desks were six doors spaced equally apart. The sign on the first one read “Africa,” the second one read “Asia,” the third one “Australia,” the fourth one “Europe,” the fifth one “North America,” and the final one read “South America.” Cassie noted that there was no door for Antarctica.

  “Do you keep the relics behind those doors?”

  Griffin shook his head. “No, those are archives for each continent. We keep the records of our relics there. Oh dear, I’m going about this backwards. A proper definition of terms is in order. The room in which we’re standing is called the Central Catalog. Its function is to account for the relics we’ve retrieved. The relics themselves are stored in places we call troves.”

  Cassie looked up and down the main room. “Then where are the troves?”

  “Not here obviously. It’s a major undertaking to keep track of them all. New ones are forever cropping up in the most unlikely of spots. Each continent has many of them scattered about. Individual countries have their own as well. Wherever a cache of important artifacts has been discovered, we attempt to build a collection site around it.”

  The girl tried to hide her disappointment at not seeing any actual relics. “Who manages the troves?”

  “The person who is charged with the responsibility for a particular group of treasures is called a trove keeper though she or he also has many assistants.”

  Cassie wrinkled her brow. “Let me repeat this to see if I have it straight. The Catalog is the records department, and it keeps track of all the items in the troves?”

  Griffin nodded. “Yes, that’s right. While each trove has its own version of a records department, there is only one Catalog. One place that contains records of the objects in all the troves: maps, photographs, finder’s journals, and written descriptions of each item recovered. The purpose of this facility is to keep track, at a summary level, of what’s in all the troves around the world. We call this the Central Catalog or simply the vault. The one and only.”

  “I don’t get it,” Cassie said abruptly.

  “Excuse me?” Griffin seemed taken aback.

  “I see a bunch of doors geographically covering the entire planet. Anthropologists and archaeologists have been crawling all over the globe for at least a hundred years now. They have museums full of artifacts. What�
��s the difference between what you’re doing and what they’re doing?”

  The young man gave a thin smile. “As much as anthropologists and archaeologists may protest to the contrary, their work is highly subjective. Their observations are tainted by whatever beliefs they carry with them into the field. That was especially true a century ago. Many if not all of them drew highly inaccurate conclusions about the objects they were collecting and the cultures they were observing. As the old saying goes, ‘a fish cannot see water.’”

  “What?”

  “A human being living in a particular culture is very much like a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish is immersed in the ocean and therefore cannot see the environment that supports it. Until quite recently with the onset of mass communication, humans were so immersed in the values of a given culture that they couldn’t see their fundamental assumptions at all. Anthropologists of the past century would have been raised with overlord values. They would have overemphasized conquest and domination and underemphasized the pivotal role that the female gender played in establishing human civilization. Therefore, when confronted with ancient cultures and values, the only context they had for explaining what they saw was European.”

  Cassie stared at him skeptically.

  “Some errors of interpretation are minor. Some misperceptions are so fiercely protected that any attempt to correct the record would result in bloodshed. For instance, the meteorite enshrined at Mecca which Muslim pilgrims kiss so reverently was not originally sacred to the god Allah but to the goddess Al Uzza, the Mighty One. Muslim worshippers circle their shrine seven times without ever realizing they are mimicking the actions of Al Uzza’s priestesses almost two millennia ago.

  “Instead, Muslim lore tells that the meteorite landed at the feet of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and was subsequently found by the biblical patriarch Abraham. Now if I were to tell a Muslim fundamentalist about Al Uzza and her prior claim to the stone, I’m sure he would consider me blasphemous and instantly declare a jihad against me.”