The Last Rune 6: The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  “I’m surprised you’ve come today,” Eleanor went on, apparently content to carry on the conversation without any help from Deirdre. “Usually historians stay away on dreary days like this, as it’s hard to see anything. But then, we haven’t had many researchers at all lately. I don’t think the consortium likes having them poking about. You’re quite lucky to be allowed in. And they tell me you’re to have the run of the place, which is quite unheard of. You must stand very high in their regard.”

  Deirdre shook her head. “In whose regard?”

  “Why the consortium, of course. They own Madstone Hall, and they’ve kept it private all these years, rather than turning it into a public museum. Their goal is to preserve it just as it was in the late seventeenth century. As you’ll see, very little has been changed since then. There’s no plumbing, so if you need to use the loo, you’ll have to go out back to the portable. All the furniture is original, and the paintings on the walls, and everything else you’ll see. The only work we’ve done over the years is what we must: repairing the roof, and replacing broken windows, and airing the place out, of course, so everything doesn’t mold. It’s marvelous to see something as it was so long ago. I’m the third in my family to be a docent here, and so it is for the other caretakers. It’s as though Madstone Hall belongs to our families. Or rather, I should say, as if our families belong to it.”

  As she spoke, Eleanor had opened a stainless-steel thermos, filled a chipped teacup, and handed it to Deirdre. The tea was sweet and fragrant with lemon.

  “Thank you,” Deirdre said, trying to take all of this in.

  “You’re quite welcome.” Eleanor took an overcoat from the coatrack and pulled it on. “Now, I’m sure you have a great deal of research to do, so I’ll leave you alone. Do try not to disturb anything as you work. But of course, the consortium told you all about that, so you know what to do. I live just a half mile away, in the white house at the start of the lane—you would have passed it on your way in. If you need anything, my telephone number is by the phone in the carriage house. You’ll find tin lanterns and matches on the table by the stairs. Do be careful with them. And please be sure to shut the door if you leave. And watch the fifth step—it’s loose. Good day, Miss Falling Hawk.”

  Eleanor whisked herself out the door, shutting it behind her. Deirdre stood, staring, as she heard a car door open and shut. The sound of an engine roared to life, then faded. She was alone. Alone in the manor where Marius Lucius Albrecht had lived before he joined the Seekers, and where nothing had been altered since.

  How was it she had never heard of this place? The history of Albrecht she had read had mentioned Madstone Hall only in passing. Yet surely this manor was a treasure trove of information about the famous Seeker. And clearly the Philosophers knew about it. It had to be his doing that she had been granted entrance. All of this had the mark of her unnamed helper on it.

  “So what is it you want me to find here?” she said, looking around.

  Dim faces gazed at her out of the shadows: portraits adorning the walls. She moved to the table by the stairs and, with some effort, lit one of the lanterns. Gold light seeped out, not so much pushing back the dimness as making it deeper, more mysterious.

  She ascended the stairs—careful to avoid the fifth step— holding the lantern up to each of the portraits. Nameless men, women, and children—all dressed in the finery of lords and ladies—gazed back at her.

  At the top of the stairs was a full-length portrait. It showed a man dressed in black. His dark hair tumbled over his shoulders, framing a bearded face that was grim rather than handsome, yet compelling. She raised the lantern higher. The figure’s eyes seemed to reflect the gold light; they had been painted with gilt rather than pigment of blue or brown.

  Deirdre explored the upper levels, though she did little besides peek into each room. They were mostly bedchambers and sitting rooms, places where the manor’s noble residents and guests would have spent their private time. The top floor contained more austere accommodations—for the manor’s servants, no doubt.

  She headed back downstairs and one by one explored the grand front hall, the dining room, the cavernous kitchen, and a large parlor that offered spectacular views of a distant ridge, now mantled in clouds. Everywhere she went she saw tarnished candelabras, Louis XIV chairs, and Chinese porcelain.

  This place is remarkable, Deirdre. Museums or collectors would pay a fortune for some of these pieces.

  Only they had rested there for centuries, just where they had been left. According to the history she had read, Marius Lucius Albrecht had lived in Madstone Hall until about 1674, and Eleanor had said nothing had been altered here since the late seventeenth century.

  Which means everything is as it was about the time Albrecht left. Deirdre felt a spark of growing excitement. In fact, it’s possible that no one else lived in this manor after he left it.

  Again she wondered why the Seekers seemed not to know about this place. Surely this manor held vast amounts of information that could shed light on Albrecht, the greatest Seeker in the history of the order. Why wouldn’t the Philosophers want the Seekers to know about it?

  Maybe for the same reason someone deleted that file when you found it, Deirdre.

  She opened a door at the end of the front hall, then stared in wonder at the room beyond. Shelves lined the walls, filled with leather-bound books. A sword hung above the fireplace, gleaming dully in the lanternlight. There was a large globe in one corner, and a claw-footed desk dominated the center of the room.

  Deirdre moved to the desk, then drew in a breath. Ink stained the felt blotter—the ghosts of letters written long ago. Something near one corner of the blotter attracted her eye: a symbol drawn in dark lines.

  It was a hand holding three flames.

  Gripping the lantern to keep from dropping it, Deirdre circled around the desk. Unlike the faded ink stains, the symbol was crisp and black; it had been made recently. But by whom? By Eleanor? She didn’t seem the type to go about the manor idly doodling on furniture. And what would she know about the Seekers?

  Deirdre bent down. On the right side of the desk, just beneath the sigil, was a drawer. She reached out, then hesitated. She wasn’t supposed to disturb anything. Or was she? Maybe it was precisely to disturb things that she had been brought there. She opened the drawer.

  It was empty. At least she thought so. She couldn’t see the back of it; there wasn’t enough light. She stuck a hand in the drawer, groping toward the back.

  Her fingers closed around something hard and cool. She pulled her hand out. On her palm was a silver key, blackened by tarnish.

  Deirdre’s neck tingled. She walked around the library, searching. It didn’t take long. Tucked in a corner near the globe was a small cabinet of dark wood. The cabinet had two doors. One bore a keyhole. Deirdre set down the lantern. Her hand was trembling so hard it took her several tries to fit the key in the lock. She turned it, expecting it not to work. But there was a click, and the cabinet door swung open.

  She crouched. In the cabinet were two shelves. One was lined with books. Deirdre ran a finger over their well-worn spines, certain it would be fascinating to read them, but also certain that was not why she was there. On the other shelf was a wooden box. She took it, carried it to the desk, and set it down. Dust swirled up. She held her breath a moment, letting the dust settle, then opened the lid.

  There were three things in the box. One was a glass vial, empty. Its stopper was made of gold wrought into the delicate shape of a spider. The other two objects were books. One was small, its leather cover battered, its pages so dry they started to crumble when she tried to open the book. Hastily, she set it down.

  The other book was larger. Its cover was smooth and new, and its pages white, cut into a clean, mass-manufactured edge. This was no antique book. It was a journal such as could be bought in any present-day stationery shop. Deirdre opened it to the first page.

  A wave of dizziness came over her, forcing he
r to sit in the desk chair. In the dim light of the lantern, her eyes scanned the first lines.

  You should not read this. Because if you do—if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are—then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.

  Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.

  “Great Spirit,” Deirdre murmured, her hands shaking so badly she had to set the journal down.

  It was not just the words themselves that stunned her. It was the smooth, elegant hand they were written in. She didn’t need to reach into her pocket, to pull out the handwritten note she had received from him yesterday, to know that the handwriting was identical. He had written this journal—and just recently, by the look of it—this nameless Philosopher who had been helping her.

  Only he wasn’t nameless, not anymore. Because the moment she read those first lines, she had known at last who he was, who it was who had been guiding her all this time, advising her, leading her to this very place.

  “You’re Marius,” she murmured to the shadows, as if he was listening. “You’re Marius Lucius Albrecht. Somehow you’re still alive. You didn’t die in 1684. You became a Philosopher. That was what was in that file; that was why the Philosophers deleted it. They didn’t want me to learn the truth.”

  Only he did. But why?

  Deirdre held the answer to that question here in her hands. The daylight was failing outside the high windows; a storm must be coming. She moved the lantern closer, adjusted the wick to brighten the gold light, then opened the journal and bent over it.

  You should not read this. Because if you do—if you learn the secrets contained within this journal, if you come to see the Philosophers for what they truly are—then I will have doomed you just as surely as I doomed her over three hundred years ago. They will condemn you, they will hunt you with all their powers, and they will destroy you.

  Yet I beg of you, in the name of Hermes, keep reading.

  Forgive me the recklessness of these words, for I must write them in haste. It is ironic, for a being who is immortal, that I should have so little time in which to fill these pages, but they will soon turn their eyes in my direction. Unlike the ones they seek to understand, they do not sleep and have always kept watch on me. From the very beginning they have doubted my intentions, even as they transformed me into one of their own and brought me into their order.

  But then, is it not safer to keep the wolf where you can see him? Except I know now it is the lamb I am to play in this bit of mummery, and for good or ill it is nearly at an end. Would that I could use a computer to set down these words more quickly, but they monitor all such devices, and perhaps it is just as well that I compose this on paper with an old-fashioned quill pen. It reminds me of a time long past. Of my time.

  I did not seek to become immortal—that is the first thing you should know. On the contrary, when he first found me, life had no worth to me whatsoever, and at the ripe old age of fourteen I was doing everything I could to throw mine away. It was spring, in the year 1668, and Edinburgh was just beginning to stink.

  In that era, Edinburgh was one of the most densely populated cities in all of Europe, for the entire citizenry—compelled by fear of the English—had crammed itself within the confines of the city’s stone walls. They had come seeking protection. What they found instead were filth and poverty, disease and death.

  In Greyfriars graveyard, along the Cowgate below St. Giles, layers of corpses were stacked with barely a layer of soil between them, so that after a hard Scottish rain limbs would jut out of the ground like tree roots. The living fared little better. With no room to build out because of the constricting embrace of the city’s walls, the people of Edinburgh built up instead. Wooden tenements sprouted from the tops of stone buildings like fungi encouraged by the damp air. They were wretched structures, drafty in winter, stifling in summer, and rat-infested at all times, with narrow windows that opened only to allow the foul contents of a chamber pot to be thrown onto the street— and any unwary passersby—below.

  The tenements were always catching fire, or falling down entirely, taking their unlucky occupants with them, and thereby contributing to the population of Greyfriars. However, unwholesome and unsafe as they were, the folk who dwelled in those structures were not the city’s poorest by any means. For there was one other direction in this crowded city in which to build—and that was down.

  There is no telling when the excavations beneath Edinburgh began. Perhaps, in the gray time before the dawn of history, primitive men used crude tools to hew at the volcanic crag where the city would be built in a later age, carving out chambers in which to practice secret, blood-drenched rites. By the time I came to know them, the delvings were ancient and vast, and they were filled with a darkness that was far more than a mere absence of light. If fair maidens like Hope and Joy had ever stumbled into that place by mistake, then they had been ravaged and left for dead.

  While the warrens beneath Edinburgh were the only home I knew as a child, I was not born in them. Nor would my mother ever tell me how she had come to that place.

  “That’s a dark tale, James, and it’s already dark as Hell down here,” she would mutter. “Do not ask me of it again.”

  However, even as a small boy, I had a way of getting others to tell me their secrets. Over the years I prodded and probed, and when she was tired or ill or drunk—all of which happened often enough—my mother would let things slip, so that in time I pieced together the story myself.

  It was a simple enough tale. Throughout her youth she lived with her father: a former sailor who owned a shop on Candlemaker Row. Who her own mother was, she did not know. People along the Row claimed that, when her father returned from his last voyage at sea, he had carried a baby in his arms, swaddled in a fine silver cloth. He said the girl’s name was Rose, and that was all he ever said when anyone asked where the child had come from.

  When Rose was seventeen, her father perished of the fever that had swept Edinburgh that winter. One of his cousins inherited the shop, and as the man was not inclined to charity, Rose was forced to manage for herself. Thinking herself fortunate, she took a position as maid in the house of a well-respected judge. However, neither her status as maid nor the judge’s respectability lasted long. Though I can recall her only as a hunched and withered thing, others told me that my mother was beautiful in her youth, with raven hair and sea-green eyes. Barely a year after her arrival at the judge’s household, she gave birth to a son with striking gold hair—a match to the master’s own glided locks.

  His adultery revealed, the judge promptly repented his sins and proclaimed he had been placed under a spell by the lovely young maid. No one doubted him. Rather than find herself on Grassmarket Street hanging by her neck for witchcraft, Rose fled into the sewers with her infant son and found her way into the labyrinth beneath the city.

  The warrens were populated by beggars, whores, thieves, and murderers who preyed as often upon those dwelling below as those living above. What Rose did to ensure the survival of her and her baby, I will never know. That knowledge even I could never pry from my mother. She would cackle with laughter when I asked her about her first days in the dark, then weep and pull at her snarled hair. I grew weary of her muttering and moaning, and as I grew older I ceased asking.

  One morning—I was about ten, I suppose, though I did not know it at the time—I nudged her shoulder to wake her, and she did not move. This was in the cramped niche where we made our home: a hollow barely large enough for us both to curl up in, carved into the wall of a tunnel that, if you followed it upward, led all the way to a drain in Covenant Close.

  I gave her a hard shove and yelled at her, but still she did not move, and I knew by her coldness that she was not simply in one of her drunken stupors. For a time I stared at her, listening to distan
t, wicked laughter echoing down the passage. Finally I rummaged in our niche and found the last bit of bread we possessed. I sat cross-legged and ate both my share and hers, and after that I looted the body.

  There wasn’t much on her. A single halfpence, a small knife with a worn bone handle, and—tucked inside her filthy dress— a carefully folded piece of cloth. It was the size of a kerchief, and exceedingly fine, shimmering like silver in the gloom. The cloth was unsoiled, and even my dirty fingers left no mark on it.

  The laughter drew closer. The sound was crude—a man’s laughter. Others joined in.

  I wadded up the cloth and shoved it inside my shirt, then tucked the knife and halfpence into the pocket of my breeches. Often men would poke their heads into our little niche while we were there, looking to steal from us, or worse. My mother would brandish the knife, driving them back. Except it was the light in her eyes that kept them at bay more than the blade. They would spark green in the blackness, and even I would be afraid of her. The men would snarl and curse. Witch, they’d call her, and Jezebel . But they would leave us alone.

  A woman’s scream echoed up the tunnel, drowned out by the sound of rude jeers. That would keep them occupied, at least for a short while. I crawled through the niche’s opening and lowered myself down to the floor of the tunnel, making no noise. Red light flickered from down the passage, and shadows writhed there. I turned and ran up the tunnel as fast as my short legs would take me.

  “Hey, there!” a rough voice shouted behind me. “I see you, little rat. Come back here!”

  The heavy sound of boots thumped behind me, and I heard the grunting of breath, but I didn’t look back. I kept my head down, pumping my arms, and rounded a bend in the tunnel. Just ahead was a crack in the wall. It was barely more than two hands wide, but I was such a skinny little thing that I slithered through, quick as a snake.

  A hand shot in after me, clamping around my ankle.

  “Now I got you,” said a man’s voice, thick and slurred from whiskey. “No need to wait my turn. There’s nothing they can do with a lady I can’t do with you. Now come back here, little rat.”