The Last Rune 6: The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  It was an intoxicating notion, and at the time not so outlandish as it might seem today. Before the discovery of the Americas, people had believed a ship that sailed too far west would fall off the edge of the world. However, Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan had proven otherwise. So who was to say there were not other New Worlds waiting to be discovered? Except to find them, one would indeed have to sail over the edge of the Earth. And we thought we were the ones to do it.

  Master Albrecht had warned me not to trust the ones who would come after he died, and while I did not entirely forget his words, I kept them at the fringes of thought. Surely his concern was with the Philosophers—the result of some old argument or misunderstanding with his peers—and while they were purportedly the leaders of the Seekers, it quickly became clear they were a distant authority at best. Rebecca and Byron had never seen the Philosophers themselves; in fact, I soon realized that none of the Seekers had. The Philosophers communicated with them only through letters sealed by wax and imprinted with their sigil—a hand holding three flames—and never appeared in person.

  I considered telling Rebecca and Byron of the time the three with golden eyes had come to Madstone Hall, but decided against it. The last thing I wished was for something that would mark me as different. I had never had a family. My mother, the Gilroys in their silent mausoleum, Master Albrecht and Pietro—all had offered comfort in some way. However, none had been able to provide that all-encompassing sense of inclusion I now felt. The Seekers were my first true family, and I embraced them with all my might.

  Those first months were filled with constant wonder and delight. The Seekers worked to discover new worlds, but I felt as if I already had, as if Rebecca and Byron had pulled aside a curtain woven in the dull grays and greens of Scotland and shown me the gilded door to a fantastical land I had never dreamed existed. London was grand and glorious, so full of life and beauty and grand squalor that it made Edinburgh look like one of the backward villages huddled around Madstone Hall.

  Once my initial astonishment at my new life was complete, I threw myself into my work as a journeyman Seeker. Rebecca had not lied; my talents were indeed perfectly suited to the organization. I had a zeal for both ancient and modern knowledge, and a keen curiosity; but then, so did many of the Seekers. What caused me to excel was my ability to combine these skills with the instincts I had acquired on the streets of Edinburgh. Just as I had been able to sense which passages beneath the old city led upward to light and which plunged into darkness, I was often able to discern the avenues of investigation that would bear fruit from those that were dead ends before concrete evidence favored one over the other.

  “You rise more quickly in the order than even I believed you would,” Rebecca said one evening as we lay entwined together on her bed.

  We had become lovers not long after our arrival in London. It was not a serious affair. Both of us were far too interested in our work to devote our hearts to another. All the same, our match was a good one. I was tall and handsome, and she had made it clear during the long journey to London that she favored my look. In turn, I found her mature flavor of beauty alluring.

  For all my work as a youth in Edinburgh, I had never lain with a woman, but that suited Rebecca well enough. We spent many hours in her chamber, on the upper floor of a small but comfortable house near Covent Garden, in which she taught me the art of making love. And when our bodies were pleasantly spent, we would engage our minds instead, drinking wine as we sat half-naked on the bed, speaking long into the night about modern science, and philosophy, and the nature of our vocation as Seekers.

  I learned much from Rebecca, and perhaps more than she knew—though I suppose she might have said the same of me, for it is hard not to become at least a little vulnerable in the arms of a lover. Still, I think each of us guarded our inner hearts from the other.

  I thought little about the life I had left behind in Scotland. Letters came from Madstone Hall—many at first, but fewer as time went on. I paid them little heed, and so I did not notice when they stopped coming altogether. I had no time for such cares. I threw myself into my work by day, while at night, if I was not in Rebecca’s bed, I could be found in one of London’s more raucous pubs with Byron—whose jovial company I had come to greatly enjoy—along with a band of the Seekers’ best and brightest young men.

  Once I made the mistake of letting Byron take me to the Cup and Leaf on a night that Rebecca was expecting me. When I tried to beg my leave, the boys grabbed my coat and hauled me back down to the bench.

  “Where did you think you’re going, Marius?” Richard Mayburn said. “You’ve had but a single ale.” Richard was a short, stout, red-haired young man who won every drinking bout he entered.

  “I have somewhere to go,” I said, glancing at the window in hopes of a glimpse of the moon, knowing I was already late.

  Byron gave me a sharp look. “By Zeus, you’ve got a woman waiting for you, don’t you, Marius? You sly cur.”

  My blush was all the answer he needed and elicited whoops of laughter all around.

  “So who is this tasty little trollop?” Richard said with an exaggerated leer. “And better yet, are you going to share her?”

  “Not with the likes of you, Richard Mayburn,” said a cool voice.

  We turned as one to see Rebecca stride across the pub. All eyes were on her, for she was out of place, but wonderfully so, like a dove in the midst of a flock of grackles. The smoky light softened the lines of her face, and her wine-colored gown accentuated the curves of her body.

  “What on Earth are you doing here, Rebecca?” Byron hissed. “This is no place for a lady.”

  “I’ve only come to fetch what’s mine,” she said, laying a hand on my shoulder.

  Byron’s eyes bulged, and Richard let out a loud guffaw.

  “Good show, Marius,” the red-haired man said, grinning. “Every man in the Seekers has tried to woo Rebecca and failed miserably, and now you’ve succeeded. What’s next? I suppose you’ll be telling us you’ve seen the Philosophers themselves.”

  In the humor of the moment, caution fled me. “I won’t keep it a secret from you any longer, gentlemen. The man I dwelled with in Scotland—”

  “Was purported to have seen the Philosophers once,” Rebecca smoothly cut me off. Her grip on my shoulder tightened, her fingers digging in. “Yes, so we learned before we came to see you, Marius. Though it’s just a tale, that’s all.”

  I looked up. Rebecca’s brown eyes glinted in the lamplight. Did she know that Master Albrecht had once been one of them? Byron and the others clearly did not, for their eyes went wide at her words, and they plied me with many questions about my former master. However, I kept my answers short, for I could feel Rebecca’s gaze upon me, and told them only that he had been an enigmatic gentleman who had taken me in as an orphan and about whom I learned little before he died. It was true enough.

  Not long after that night, my affair with Rebecca cooled. I went to her house with diminishing frequency, and we seldom shared her bed when I did. All the same, our partnership within the Seekers seemed stronger than ever, and we often worked together in our investigations. So often, in fact, that I fear Byron grew a bit jealous.

  Byron was a good lad, but he was woefully unskilled with women. Somehow, when he tried to speak with them, he always ended up with ale in his face. While the Seekers have had female members from the start, in that time Rebecca was something of a rarity, for I had met no other lady Seekers. Thus it was only natural that Byron should be somewhat fixated upon her; she was the one woman he could speak with and not end up all wet. I feared he would grow angry upon learning of my affair with Rebecca. However, such was his good nature that he said nothing of it, and he remained as jovial a companion as always at pub.

  I continued to rise in my career as a Seeker, and in only my fourth year as a journeyman I achieved a significant breakthrough. It was chance, really, that I came upon it at all, but my instincts alerted me that something was not a
s it seemed, and further investigation proved my hunch.

  Near the house where I rented a room, little more than a stone’s throw from the Tower of London, was a bookshop I often haunted for its unusual and varied collection of volumes, especially relating to history. I often engaged in cordial conversation with the proprietor of the shop, a fine, white-bearded gentleman who went by the name of Sarsin. When he learned of my love for Virgil’s Aeneid, he clucked his tongue.

  “The Roman poets were little more than thieves of the Greeks,” he said, then rummaged through his shelves and came up with many classic works of ancient Greece. After that, much of the wage the Seekers paid me went directly into Sarsin’s coffers, and I spent many hours sitting by the Thames, poring over the poetry of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

  It was when I moved on to the works of Shakespeare that I began to grow suspicious. Sarsin claimed that his uncle, who had owned the shop before him, had known the Bard, for he had often come into the shop. I did not doubt that. However, more than once, when recounting these stories, Sarsin spoke as if he were the one who had met Shakespeare, rather than his uncle.

  The shop owner was likely daft, I told myself. Yet I didn’t quite believe that, and my investigations soon proved I was right. Sarsin claimed that, like Shakespeare, his uncle had been something of a poet, and I convinced him to show me some of his uncle’s work, and to even lend me a yellowed piece of parchment with one particular song.

  That night, I compared the handwriting of the song to that on the receipts Sarsin had written for me when I purchased books. There was no doubting it; both documents had been written by the same hand. Certain I was onto something, I began to question the oldest folk I could find on the lanes around the bookshop, and I soon found an old woman, quite blind now but still sharp of wit, who recalled the former proprietor of the shop. She described him as a handsome, elderly man with a white beard, thinning hair, and bright blue eyes.

  It was Sarsin, of course. Not the fantastical uncle, but the one and only. Research into the city’s legal records confirmed what by then I already knew. Every fifty years or so, the owner of the Queen’s Shelf “died” and left the shop to his heir. However, though the names changed, the handwriting of the signatures on the deeds was always the same. There was only one answer: The man Sarsin had owned this shop for over a century and a half, and in that time he had not aged a day.

  Excited, I reported my findings to Rebecca and Quincy Farris, our superior in the order, and that was when I entered into my first argument with the Seekers, for Farris foolishly decided to approach Sarsin. This was strictly against the First Desideratum, of course; the Nine Desiderata were set down in the Book by the Philosophers, and every Seeker, upon joining the order, swore a Vow to uphold them. However, Farris was an ambitious man—overly so—and no doubt he thought by winning over Sarsin he could seize this finding from me and claim it for his own, thus furthering his rise in the Seekers.

  His action had the opposite effect; Farris was stripped of his rank as master and banished from the order. He hanged himself by the neck in a filthy shack in Cheapside a week later. Unfortunately, his death could not undo the damage he had caused, for now Sarsin was alerted to the Seekers, and he would have no conversations with any of us, myself included. The Sarsin case was closed, and all associated documents sealed in the vaults of the Seekers. There they were forgotten—though I did retain a copy of Sarsin’s song for my personal collection. It captured my fancy for a reason I couldn’t quite name, particularly the final verse:

  We live our lives a circle,

  And wander where we can.

  Then after fire and wonder,

  We end where we began.

  Though Farris’s meddling bungled the case beyond repair, my work in discovering the Sarsin matter did not go unnoticed, and in the summer I was elevated to the rank of master—the same rank as Rebecca, and ahead of Byron, who was still a journeyman, though the good-natured fellow seemed to hold nothing but genuine satisfaction for me. We celebrated with much ale, and everything in my world was good beyond my dreams. Then, on that dull autumn day in 1679, though I had no way of knowing at the time, the seeds for my undoing were sown.

  “I believe you’ll enjoy this particular assignment,” Rebecca said as she tossed me a folded square of parchment. It was the first of October, a thick layer of mist cloaked London, and we had retreated into the warm, crowded interior of a coffeehouse in Covent Garden to escape the chill.

  “What is it?” I asked, catching the paper and turning it over. It was sealed with a circle of red wax. Imprinted in the wax was a picture of a hand holding three flames.

  “How should I know?” she said, arching an eyebrow. “It’s from the Philosophers themselves.”

  Byron leaned over the table, his blue eyes bright. “Go on, Marius. Open it.”

  Although I was every bit as eager as Byron, I forced myself to break the seal slowly. I unfolded the letter, then scanned the contents. They were written in a thin, elegant hand.

  “What a dreadful burden,” Rebecca crooned in a tragic voice. “You’re to follow a noble lady about town and keep an eye on her. I’ve heard she’s quite lovely. Poor Marius.”

  I glared at her over the letter. “Prevaricator. You knew all along what my new assignment was to be.”

  Rebecca smirked and sipped her chocolate.

  “Following a lovely lady?” Byron said in a wounded voice, reaching for the letter. “Why did I not get this assignment?”

  “Because I’m the master,” I said with a laugh and tucked the letter inside my velvet waistcoat before he could snatch it away. I rose. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, it seems I have work to do.”

  Despite my nonchalant air, my heart pounded as I walked from the coffeehouse and turned down a narrow lane. This was my first assignment since being elevated to the level of master in the Seekers, and my first to come directly from the Philosophers themselves. I had expected something interesting, even remarkable, but this surpassed anything I had imagined. And despite her arch manner, I doubted Rebecca knew everything that was contained in the letter.

  I was to keep watch on a fairy.

  Or a half-fairy, at least. I ducked into a green, quiet space protected by stone walls: the courtyard of St. Paul’s Church. This was not Christopher Wren’s grand cathedral, which was still under construction. Rather, it was a small church built by Inigo Jones, and to me looked more like a forgotten Greek temple than a Christian holy house. I sat on a bench beneath a drooping wisteria tree to read the letter again.

  According to the information the Philosophers had given me, fairies were not mystical creatures that inhabited children’s stories and Shakespearean comedies; instead, they were unearthly beings, born of another world. And while the Philosophers knew of no true fairies on this Earth, they had encountered a few individuals who bore some fraction of fairy blood in their veins.

  Who these otherworldly people were and where they could be found, the letter did not say. If the Philosophers knew, they had not deemed it necessary to relate this information. What the letter did say was that there was a young noble lady—one Alis Faraday—who, unbeknownst to herself or her parents, was descended from one of these half fairies. How it could be that the young lady and her parents were unaware of her fantastical heritage was also not explained. All the letter told me was to observe this lady, keeping notes on everything I saw and heard, while adhering to the Desiderata, especially the first: A Seeker shall not interfere with the actions of those of otherwordly nature.

  At all costs, the letter closed, this young lady must never learn from you or any Seeker her true nature. For it is the purpose of this study to determine if one of otherwordly nature, who is unaware of this fact about herself, will—through her own volition, intuition, and power— come to learn of her unique her itage, or if she can be content to live as any other denizen of this Earth, with no knowledge of her inherent strangeness.

  I drew
a breath to steady myself, then tucked the letter into my coat and stood up from the bench.

  “Be careful, Marius.”

  I turned as Rebecca descended several stone steps, into the courtyard. Her gown was a gray so dark it was nearly black; she looked like a mourner, headed to church to weep for one lost.

  “Rebecca,” I said, and left it there, for I could think of nothing to say to her. The words of the letter burned in my brain, as if writ there with fire.

  She moved under the canopy of the wisteria; the mist had turned to rain. “An assignment from the Philosophers should not be taken lightly. You are no journeyman now. A master may be placed at far more risk. There is peril before you.”

  “What risk is there in watching a young lady, Rebecca?”

  “I’m not certain.” Her lips formed a sharp smile. “No, Marius, I don’t know all that is contained in that letter—only what the Philosophers relayed to me themselves, and that is little. I have no particular reason to worry for your safety. But guard yourself all the same.”

  There was genuine concern in her eyes. However, I was too excited to listen to her words. There was a person in this city with true otherworldly connections, and I was going to observe her. Perhaps, as she discovered her own heritage, I would learn as well—learn things that would help me find a way to another world. For by then I had already determined that I was going to be the first to accomplish what the Seekers had set out to do: to journey to a world other than this Earth. Master Albrecht had warned me not to trust these people, but I knew how I could be certain they would never rule me; I would rule them instead. I was going to be the greatest Seeker the order had ever known.

  “Good-bye, Rebecca,” I said, and hurried from the courtyard.