The Annex
“It’s not about the gold,” Jenkins realized. “It was never about the gold. It’s about the Pot.”
Jumper cables linked a vintage rotary phone to the magic mirror, allowing him to FaceTime with Baird and the Librarians without any of those newfangled smartphones, which were far too easy to tap into or hack, in his considered opinion. His jury-rigged apparatus was infinitely more secure, while still allowing him to inspect the Pot at long distance—and without any roaming charges.
“What about the Pot?” Baird asked. Behind her, the exhumed Pot rested at the foot of the steps leading up to the tower. “Explain.”
A voluminous tome on Irish myths and legends lay open upon Jenkins’s desk, revealing a portrait of a particular Celtic deity that matched the image on the gold coin from Bridget’s pub. The same visage—of a crowned and bearded god-king—was embossed on the exterior of the Pot. Jenkins silently castigated himself for not identifying the god in question earlier. The problem with immortality was that one’s memory tended to get overstuffed, making it harder to retrieve any relevant arcana without an excess of rummaging around first.
“That not just any pot,” he said. “That’s the Cauldron of Dagda, one of the four great treasures of ancient Ireland.”
“An empty pot is a treasure?” Ezekiel asked. “Seriously?”
Baird stayed on point. “What’s the story there?”
“Legend has it,” Jenkins said, “that when the Tuatha Dé Danann first came to Ireland, in the misty days of yore, they brought with them four powerful magical objects from the mystic islands from which they hailed: a stone, a spear, a sword … and a cauldron.”
“Which is basically just a fancy word for a cooking pot,” Baird said, “like witches use to brew their potions.”
“And druids,” Jenkins said. “In fact, the Dagda—whose visage is emblazoned on the Pot—was among the mighty leaders of the Tuatha Dé Danann. He was a god of fertility, magic, and druidry. It’s said that his bountiful pot, which was forged by one of the oldest and wisest of druids, could feed multitudes without running dry, so that none ever went away from it unsatisfied.”
“So it’s a magical all-you-can-eat cooking pot?” Cassandra said, sounding puzzled. “That doesn’t sound terribly bad or dangerous.”
“On the surface, perhaps,” Jenkins said, “but if you dig deeper, there are far darker legends concerning the Cauldron.”
Baird sighed, as though expecting as much. “How deep and how dark?”
“Human sacrifice and necromancy, to be exact.” Jenkins flipped over a page in the book to reveal a pair of rather more ominous illustrations. The left-hand page depicted writhing human forms being cast into the Cauldron, while the facing page showed living skeletons arising from the depths of the Pot. “According to some old tales, those sacrificed to the Cauldron would rise again as unstoppable undead creatures, under the sway of whoever controlled the Pot.”
Stone nodded in the mirror. “Kinda like the Children of the Dragon’s Teeth in Greek mythology. The ones Jason and his Argonauts ran across.”
“A very similar motif and magic,” Jenkins agreed, “but let us not digress, given that the Serpent’s Teeth were filed down by an earlier Librarian back in the eighteen-fifties.” He pushed that long-closed case out of his mind to focus on the discovery at hand. “Like the Dagda himself, the Cauldron embodies both abundance and destruction, the eternal cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. In the wrong hands, this power could be put to terrible ends.”
“Which is where the Serpent Brotherhood comes in,” Baird said, grasping the threat with commendable speed. “In theory, they could use the Cauldron to create an army of unkillable zombie soldiers.”
Jenkins nodded gravely. “In a nutshell, Colonel.”
“Whoa!” Stone said. “No wonder the Serpents have been after the Pot for centuries. It all makes sense now.”
“Except,” Cassandra pointed out, “how did O’Gradaigh get his hands on the Cauldron in the first place?”