Authors: Anthony Francis
“Quit being so mysterious, who are we here to see?” I asked, as I bought my ticket and followed Michael inside. “An expert on the magic of cave art?”
“Experts on cave magic,” Michael said, grinning. “They’d like that. Here we are.”
“Oh. My. God,” I said.
Standing in the hall before me was a giant mural of moving graffiti.
Freestanding in the exhibit hall, underneath a huge banner proclaiming MYSTIC MARKS OF THE URBAN JUNGLE, was an irregular chunk of brick wall, ten feet high and thirty long,
covered
with moving graffiti, a panorama of toy soldiers fighting a slow-motion war complete with cartoony explosions that actually said KABOOM as they dissipated.
“An exhibit of magic graffiti,” I said. “What a helpful coincidence.”
Of course, I didn’t believe this was any kind of coincidence. I’d never
heard
of magic graffiti before, and now, when it was spreading through the city, a whole exhibit popped up before me. For a moment I thought I’d found a lead; unfortunately, my elation faded as I scanned the artwork. I didn’t see anything familiar, not the colors, linework, or even the logic of the magic. This was magic graffiti, all right—but it almost certainly wasn’t done by the killer.
“Not our guys,” I murmured, then aloud, “Wow, Michael, I’m impressed!”
“I’m not done,” Michael said, motioning to me from around the wall. “Let me introduce you to my friends Keif and Drive.”
I guessed Keif was the short, hefty, Latino man in army fatigues posing for a photographer. His feet were planted wide, he held a pair of paintbrushes in folded arms, and beneath his Indian-headdress spray of dreadlocks he had a mischievous smile. Beside him stood Drive, a tall, gaunt African-American man in blue and black racing leathers, blond-dyed head turned away from the camera with a snooty, bored look. After the flash, both seemed to relax: Keif pulled his feet together and let the paintbrushes clatter together in one hand, and Drive thanked the photographer with an easy, friendly grin.
“Dakota Frost,” Keif said, nudging Drive. “Look, it’s Dakota Frost—”
“What?” Drive said. “Speak of the devil.”
“Keif, Drive, I’d like you to meet one of my oldest buddies from high school,” Michael said, beaming. “I think you know who she is.”
“Do we,” Keif said, pumping my hand. “You’re all over YouTube, Frost.”
“I go by Dakota,” I said, smiling, “and … YouTube?” I shook my head.
“Keif, told you that floating clock bit was faked,” Drive said, shaking his head. “I’m sure they jazzed it up for the cameras … ”
His voice trailed off as I stretched a long, tattooed arm between the two of them, rippling it up and down. My tattoos glowed to life, and my (remaining) trusty asp lifted off my skin in a shower of sparks, tongue flickering in the air.
“Holy shit,” Drive said.
“Oh, man,” the photographer said. “I gotta get a picture of that.”
“Oh, for the love,” I said, coiling up my arms, then stretching them out again, releasing my vines into the air with enough mana that they would show up. My skin stung, and the vines had a bit of asymmetry, but with concentration, I compensated. “If we have to … ”
So Keif and Drive posed again, with me standing between them, arms thrown wide to cast a net of glowing tattoo magic around them. Keif muttered, “You’re not going to get in trouble over this, are you? There’s not a secret tattoo magic rule—”
“I don’t answer to anyone,” I said, “except God and my clients.”
Afterwards, the four of us walked the exhibit together. Drive actually didn’t do much graffiti: he was a “defense contractor for the middle school industrial complex,” creating ironic assemblages like a Big Wheels with handlebar-mounted toy assault rifles or a red wagon filled with toy soldiers pouring out into a sandbox like it was the beaches of Normandy. These had inspired Keif, who used the images repeatedly in his graffiti. Once he’d tagged all over the city, but now he made installable pieces in the comfort of his warehouse studio in the West End.
We paused before one of the larger tags—”no, not a tag, a top-to-bottom
piece,
” Keif corrected—life-size takeoffs of a GI-Joe and a Ken Doll kissing in a stylized closet. While I tried to suppress my smirk at their cartoony passion, Keif explained how the figures moved.
“It’s just graphomancy, geometric magic,” he said, pointing out the lines, the connections in the slow-moving figure. “Graffiti magic isn’t any different from tattoo magic, but since we’re largely self-taught the designs are usually primitive. That’s why I wanted to talk to you after seeing that YouTube clip. A fully functioning watch—
amazing.
”
“I’ll put you in touch with my graphomancer,” I said. “Designing magical marks and inking them are both sufficiently specialized skills that it usually takes two people.”
“I’m willing to learn,” Drive said.
“All right,” I said. “But I still don’t understand where they get the power. My tattoos are powered by the mana generated by my living body.”
“Well, most of them are just photomagic,” Keif said slowly.
“Photomagic doesn’t explain a tag under a tarp damn near tearing a vampire apart,” I said. “It doesn’t explain a tag at night nearly cutting a werewolf in half.”
“That is … difficult to explain,” Keif said, even more slowly.
“Look, Frost,” Drive said impatiently, “what Keif is not saying is there are a few tricks that can really jazz up graffiti magic that he thinks are his own trade secret.” Keif fumed, but said nothing. “Do you understand the yin and yang of magic?”
“I’ve heard the term,” I said, eyeing the cartoons of Ken and Joe move towards each other, then away. In the two circles of their heads you could imagine the yin and yang symbols intertwining. “Refresh my memory.”
“There’s the Vaiian thread, and the Niivan thread,” he said. “Day and night, light and dark, werewolves and vampires. The Vaiian thread is powered by life. That’s your basic tattoo magic, werekin transforms, almost all practical magic really. The Niivan thread is powered by decay. That’s your basic necromantic magic and the power behind vampires and zombies.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, keeping my face bland. I’d heard the Vaiian-Niivan theory of magic, but as far as I knew it was just New-Age nonsense. I really wanted to call bullshit, but I was asking for help from him and that wouldn’t be nice, so I just kept my mouth shut.
“But that shit’s like a circle, man, the circle of life, you know? Decay
is
life—the life process of worms and bacteria and fungi,” he said. I smiled skeptically, and he interpreted it as agreement. “You see. So that’s what we do—we use life, just not human life—”
“He’s trying to say, we tag walls that have mold,” Keif said, embarrassed. “You can cultivate it, but it takes forever to prep something that big.” He thumbed back at the brick wall dominating the center of the exhibit. “So back when I was still tagging walls in public—”
“Back when? You flaming liar,” Drive said, shaking his head. “Mister Art Crime here thinks
there ain’t nuthin’ like the thrill of live taggin’
—”
“Shut
up
, man,” Keif muttered. “So anyway,
back when
I didn’t care about being arrested, I’d find pre-painted surfaces with mold busting out. If you grind in the right crystals with your chalk, the tags move as much under a streetlight as they do in broad daylight.”
“No shit,” I said. “You think that if you cultivated it you could use enough power to—”
But Keif was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No way—at least
I
couldn’t. This goes back to why I wanted to talk to you. I think to do more than we do we’d need to start using more sophisticated pigments—like the kind skindancers use.”
“You want my mixes,” I said, and Keif kind of got an ‘
aw shit, she’s going to turn me down’
look. “Sure, but you’ll want more than just pre-made mixes that are specialized for human skin. You need to pick the brains of an actual stonegrinder, the people who make our pigments.”
Keif’s face broke out with a smile as I was talking. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “
Exactly.
Someone who’s been doin’ this shit for years and knows what works and what don’t.”
“All right,” I said, nodding. Between Michael, Keif and Drive, I had learned enough at Emory today to know what I needed to do—
without
having to go back to the library. I had to go back to school—but not college, this time. “I’ll ask my old master. No promises.”
Keif’s eyes widened. “So you
do
have an old master,” he breathed. “I knew it, I knew it. There was no way you picked all this up starting from ground zero. What’s he like?”
“He’s no Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I said, “but he is an old-school master, back when ‘master’ meant skindancing, stonegrinding
and
graphomancy. He inks, he comes up with most of his own designs, and grinds his own pigments from mushrooms and bark he gathers from the woods.”
“Oh, yeah,” Keif said, punching Drive in the arm. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“He goes by Arcturus,” I said. “Not his real name. He’s real private and
real
prickly. He prefers personal referrals—so let me put a toe in the water before I introduce you.”
“Fair enough,” Drive said. “So, Keif, if she delivers, you gonna quid pro quo and let her see your blackbook, you damn mooch?”
Keif’s expression froze. “Yeah,” he said, uncertainly. “Sure.”
“Show it to my graphomancer,” I said. “She’s mostly blind, but she’ll get a real kick out of scans of your book. Half the designs I wear are hers—I’m sure she could do a lot for you.”
We talked further, confirming that graffiti magic was even less well documented than tattoo magic, at least in the public literature. I’d need someone like Keif and Drive to help crack this thing—and they needed someone like me, or at least like Arcturus, who could help them develop better pigments. So we exchanged numbers, pressed flesh, parted.
I returned to the Rogue Unicorn like a conquering hero, climbing the rickety steps of the Little Five Points tattoo shop to find three customers waiting for me. Two of them had looked me up on the strength of the YouTube clip leaked from Valentine’s show—and two got tattoos on the spot, which is a better than average batting average for magical tattooing. Some days, even the ‘best magical tattooist in the Southeast’ doesn’t convince anyone to get a tattoo.
Then I tried to repair the asp that had been burned when I tried to save the werecat from the fire. Now that the swelling was down, the damage to the skin itself didn’t look so bad, but a lot of magical pigment was denatured. I cleaned most of it using a skindancing trick—activating a vine and sweeping it over the damaged tattoo to cull out bad pigment. Each time I raised the vine out of the skin, a few more tiny flakes of soot disappeared into the air; each time I sank the vine back it moved through the skin more smoothly. Eventually I cleared enough space to ink a new asp, but it was coiled around a small, Italy-shaped lump of dark pigment I couldn’t lift or move.
I frowned at it. There were a few ways around this, the most straightforward being laser treatments to break up the ink. But that offended my skindancer’s soul. Another tack was to ink a temporary pattern over the burnt ink, allowing it to heal, then lifting it off magically. But if there was enough magic ink left in the burn, I could end up with an even larger curdled mark and no way to remove it. I fumed. I didn’t have enough experience with burns to know what to do.
So I broke down and called my old master, Arcturus. After what felt like a hundred rings, I gave up and called Zinaga, the apprentice next in line after me at his studio.
She
picked up right away, but rather than putting me through to Arcturus, she called me a deserter and started to rant about how he was better off without me. After a bit, I cut her off and told her why I’d called.
First I described our problems with the graffiti, about its magic, about Keif and Drive and their quid-pro-quo requests. As I talked, she was quiet for a while, until, embarrassed, I told her about my burn. Then
she
cut
me
off and went to talk to him; after a few minutes, she returned.
“He says come out here this week,” Zinaga said. “He says ‘I
mean
it. Do
not
wait.’”
“Gotta love him,” I groused. The
least
he could have done is come to the phone. He had to be really pissed. Then it occurred to me that the first time I’d come to Blood Rock looking for the famed Arcturus, I’d been picked up, warned off, and dumped on the side of the highway in Conyers ten miles from my Vespa. “His pet sheriff isn’t going to give me shit, is he?”
“No,” Zinaga said, disgusted. “You really think we’d treat family that way? Now get out here before he changes his mind—or before those burns ruin your ink.”