The Last Rune 6: The First Stone

by Mark Anthony

  I sure wish you had known that earlier today, she told herself with a grimace as she shoved the computer into her briefcase.

  She glanced at the clock, forgetting to will herself not to, and saw that it was after eleven. It was too late to catch either a train or a flight back to London tonight; they would have to wait until morning. Would that give them enough time? The seven crates were scheduled to arrive from Crete tomorrow, but she didn’t know at what time. She could only hope that she would beat them to London.

  Go to them for me, Marius had told her just before he died. Go to . . . the Sleeping Ones.

  Deirdre would go. How could she not? A Philosopher himself had asked her with his dying breath. Only it was more than that. It was the discovery of the Sleeping Ones that had caused the Seekers to come into being. To see the Seven was to see the beginning of the Order. And to see beings from another world. Whatever she thought of the Seekers now, she had not lost that desire to find and encounter the otherworldly.

  And what will you do once you get to London, Deirdre? Stroll past the Philosophers and whisk away the Sleeping Ones so they can do whatever they’re supposed to do? What do you think you can possibly accomplish if you go to London?

  She didn’t know. However, Marius had believed the Seven had been waiting all these millennia for some sort of transformation. And the writing on the arch suggested it had something to do with perihelion.

  When the twins draw near, all shall come to nothing unless hope changes everything. . . .

  But what hope did they have? Deirdre had no idea what sort of transformation the Seven sought, or what catalyst would allow it to occur. Again and again, as she paced in the waiting area, she had hummed the song under her breath: Fire and Wonder. She felt so close to knowing what the song was about, but the meaning was like a butterfly fluttering around her: lovely, beckoning, and always out of reach.

  All the same, she was certain the song held a clue to the nature of the catalyst. Marius had suspected that was the case, and her own intuition—which she was listening to for a change— told her the same. If she thought about it enough, it would come to her. She started to sing the song again in a low voice. . . .

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Deirdre gripped her bear claw necklace and stood up as a nurse approached. The nurse was middle-aged, her dark hair caught in a neat bun, a clipboard in her hand. Deirdre felt her throat go dry.

  “Your friend is out of recovery,” the nurse said. “They’ve moved him to critical care. You’re allowed to go in and see him if you’d like, but only for a few minutes. He’s very tired, and still groggy from the anesthesia.”

  Deirdre followed after the nurse, leaving Beltan asleep on the chairs. They moved through a pair of double doors and down a corridor. The nurse gestured to a stainless-steel door. Deirdre gathered her will, then stepped inside.

  The soft whir of machines filled the air, along with the sharp scent of antiseptic. She took a step into the room, and a shock jolted through her. She was used to Anders’s large, room-filling presence. The man crumpled on the hospital bed looked strangely small.

  “Hey there, mate,” croaked a weary voice.

  More emotions than she could name filled Deirdre: joy, relief, anguish, sorrow, and a dozen others. They had propped him up in the bed. A sheet covered him from the waist down, and his upper body was bare save for a large bandage wrapped around his barrel chest. IV needles had been inserted in each of his arms. He looked older than she remembered; the fluorescent light made his hair gray rather than blond. However, he managed a faint smile, and a hint of the usual twinkle glinted in his blue eyes.

  “Never thought I’d see you again, partner,” he said, the words hoarse. “Never thought I’d see anything again, for that matter.”

  Deirdre tried to speak but couldn’t. She gripped his hand. His fingers tightened around hers, stronger than she would have guessed.

  “Now, now, Deirdre. There’s no need to cry. Turns out I’m going to be just fine. Though it’s got the doctors baffled, to say the least. I gather the bullet put a nick in some important artery. They keep saying I should have bled to death in the time it took the ambulance to get there. Only I didn’t.”

  Deirdre couldn’t help smiling. “You’re full of surprises. Mate.”

  He grinned, and though a bit shaky, the expression was as impish as ever. “Sorry about that.” His grin faded. “I know you’ll probably never believe me, but I didn’t like lying to you. I always wanted to tell you the truth, but Nakamura wouldn’t let me.”

  Her own smile faded. “I believe you.”

  A grimace crossed his face. Pain from his wound? “Aw, mate,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She laid her right hand on his brow while her left kept a grip on his hand. In three years, she had hardly touched him. It felt good now to be connected. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I knew deep down I could trust you, and I let Sasha convince me I couldn’t.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Turns out Sasha had a lot of help in the matter. I never did quite trust her, though I couldn’t ever put my finger on just why. She always seemed to know a little too much, maybe. But Eustace—I thought the kid was true-blue.”

  “They fooled us both,” Deirdre said.

  “Yeah, they did at that. But you stopped them.”

  She shook her head. “No, Beltan did. And you did. But Marius . . .”

  “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  Deirdre could only nod.

  Anders’s blue eyes were thoughtful. “I have to say, I would have liked to have gotten to meet him. Crikey, a real Philosopher.”

  “They’re not what you think,” Deirdre said, her voice going hard.

  “I know. Not everything you do, I’m sure. But I think Nakamura had started to suspect something fishy was going on with the Philosophers, that not all of them were getting along so well. He’s been a Seeker long enough to notice when things started to change, and I think he was beginning to get conflicting orders from them. He assigned me to guard you because he had a feeling you were involved, though he didn’t know how exactly.” Again Anders grinned. “Turns out he was right. But it was important for him to make everyone believe I was just your new partner, yourself included. He didn’t want the Philosophers to know he had assigned you a bodyguard, for fear he might get their ire up.”

  So Deirdre wasn’t the only one with good instincts. Nakamura had gotten the sense that there was some conflict among the Philosophers, and the orders Marius kept giving him had made Nakamura believe Deirdre was involved. All the while he had possessed the good sense to appear neutral and unaware of the truth, even while assigning a guard to Deirdre without the Philosophers knowing it.

  Deirdre wondered what else Nakamura knew, but before she could ask Anders the nurse tapped on the window, giving Deirdre a stern look. She started to pull away.

  Anders gripped her, holding her down.

  “You’re going after them, aren’t you? The Philosophers.”

  She nodded. “The seven sarcophagi are being delivered to London tomorrow. They’re going to open the gate.”

  “Take me with you.” His eyes gleamed with fevered light. “I want to help with the battle.”

  She bent over him. “You have helped with the battle. Without you, there wouldn’t be a chance at all. Now it’s time to rest.”

  Deirdre’s face drew close to his, and a warmth encapsulated her: nourishing, healing. Her lips nearly brushed against his, then she moved and pressed them to his forehead in a gentle kiss.

  “Come back to me, mate.” Tears rolled from the corner of his eyes. “Promise me you will.”

  Deirdre let go of his hand. “Good-bye, Anders.”

  She walked past the whispering machines and left the room. For a moment she stood outside the door, gripping her bear claw necklace. The warmth that had enfolded her had been replaced by a cruel chill. Then she took a deep breath and headed down the corridor, back to the waiting area. Beltan was sitting on one of
the orange chairs. He stood as she drew near, a questioning look on his face.

  “Let’s go to London,” she said.

  44.

  Six hours later, Deirdre and Beltan caught the first train of the morning out of Edinburgh.

  Traveling by plane would have gotten them to London an hour or two faster; logic dictated that they should have headed to the airport. Instead, after they left their hotel, she and Beltan had walked up Princes Street in the gray predawn light to the train station beneath the National Gallery. Maybe it was her instincts again, or maybe it was simply a desire to stay grounded, connected with the Earth, but somehow going by rail seemed right.

  She could only hope that was true, that they would reach London before the shipment from Crete arrived.

  “I think we should have gotten more coffee,” Beltan said as they settled into their seats on the train. He crumpled the paper cup they had bought at a shop in the station.

  Deirdre gripped her own cup. It was still full and too hot to drink. “There’ll be a cart. You can buy more.”

  The blond man looked around expectantly, and Deirdre didn’t bother to tell him the cart wouldn’t come along until after the train was under way; watching for it would keep him occupied.

  Beltan looked freshly awake that morning, his green eyes bright and eager. He had removed the bandage from his cheek; the wound was no more than a thin scab now, as if he had gotten it a week ago.

  It’s the fairy blood in him. It’s what causes him to recover so quickly.

  Deirdre wished she had a little fairy blood herself. She had not slept last night. Not that she hadn’t craved to; she was more weary than she could ever remember being in her life. But such peace as sleep brought was for other people, other times. She had sat at the desk in her hotel room, reading through Marius’s journal—which she had taken from the manor—a second time, and a third.

  Just as surely as the fairy blood had changed Beltan, the journal—and the knowledge contained in its pages—had changed Deirdre. After reading it, she would never—could never—be the same person again. But who would she be, she had wondered, sitting alone in the hotel room? Instead of countless possibilities fluttering through her mind, she saw nothing. Nothing at all. The answer to that question would have to wait until what lay ahead of her was done, for good or for ill.

  She had spent the last hour in her room softly singing the song Fire and Wonder over and over. As before, she felt close to understanding what it meant, and she found herself wishing she had her lute, for her mind always seemed to work better when the instrument was in her hands. However, at that moment her lute was in her flat in London, and as close as she was to reaching understanding, it might as well have been a thousand miles away; she didn’t know what the song meant.

  As the time to leave the hotel drew near, she had found herself staring at the phone. Finally she had picked it up and dialed the number of the hospital. Before it could start to ring on the other end, she hung up. Anders was going to live; that was all she needed to know.

  There was a low rumbling as the train rolled into motion. Deirdre watched as the platform slipped past. A large group of people in white sheets stood on the platform, holding signs as they always did. Only the signs no longer contained words or dark spots. Instead they were completely black. Eaten.

  The window next to Deirdre went dark for a moment. Then the train emerged into the drizzly morning. The world was still here—for now.

  “So, do you have a plan for when we get to London?” Beltan said, his voice low.

  “I’m working on it,” she said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. Despite staying awake all night, she still had no idea what they were going to do when they got to London.

  “The Philosophers can be killed, we know that now.”

  “I know.”

  “I won’t try to keep from harming them if they get in our way, Deirdre.” A fey light shone in Beltan’s eyes. “They sent the Scirathi after Travis. They nearly killed him, and Nim as well. I don’t care if they’re immortal. To me, their lives are forfeit.”

  Gone was the cheerful blond man who liked food, beer, woefully bad jokes, and looking at handsome young men passing by on the street. Over the last several years, Deirdre had let herself forget what Beltan really was, but at that moment she remembered. He was a man of war. And he knew who his enemy was.

  “Ah,” Beltan said with a pleased look. “Here’s that cart.”

  It looked as if the attendant was heading toward the front of the train, but Beltan stuck out a big, booted foot, bringing the cart to a lurching halt. The attendant—a pasty young man— looked ready to protest, then quickly swallowed his words after one look at Beltan.

  “Coffee, please,” the blond man said. “And one of those sticky buns. No, better make it two.”

  The attendant complied, then pushed the cart up the aisle so quickly the wheels rattled.

  Beltan was about to start in on the second sticky roll when he gave Deirdre a guilty look. “You didn’t want one, did you?”

  She shook her head. Food, like sleep, was something she couldn’t conceive of just then. While he ate, she took a sip of her coffee—it had finally cooled to a subthermonuclear temperature—then pulled out a plastic bag of things she had purchased at the shop in the train station. There was gum, a candy bar she could give to Beltan later if he started getting fussy, a pack of tissues, and a paperback book she had plucked at the last minute off a rack of best sellers next to the clerk’s counter.

  It was a popular science book entitled Fall From Grace: How the End of Perfection Created the Beginning of the Universe. The book was by Sara Voorhees, the astrophysicist who, in the article in the Times, had suggested that the rifts in the cosmos might be a symptom of the beginning of the end of the universe. By the date inside the cover, the book had been published a few years ago. Voorhees’s recent comments must have renewed its popularity enough to land it back on the best seller list.

  Deirdre had grabbed the book on impulse. It wasn’t chance that the gate had come to light on Crete at the same time the rifts had appeared; both were related to the approaching perihelion between Earth and Eldh. And Marius had believed that, whatever transformation it was the Seven sought, it had to do with perihelion as well. So maybe there was a connection between the rifts and what it was the Seven wanted. If so, anything she could learn about the rifts would help her.

  The city slipped away outside the window, replaced by the gray-green blur of the borderlands. Deirdre sipped her coffee, opened the book, and began to read.

  Nearly four hours later, Deirdre shut the book and leaned back, resting her aching head against the back of the seat. Outside the window, the rolling hills of lowland Scotland had been replaced by the row houses and industrial buildings of the outskirts of London.

  She glanced to her left. Beltan was asleep. Two crumpled coffee cups were jammed into the seat pocket in front of him. Another, empty, was held in his hand. Crumbs dusted his cable-knit sweater. She decided not to wake him; it would be a few more minutes before they reached Paddington Station, and it was best to let him sleep. He was going to need his strength for what lay ahead. She was going to need it. Besides, she needed a few minutes to think about everything she had just read.

  Although the book was well written, Voorhees’s technical background in astrophysics had been apparent on every page, and Deirdre had been hard-pressed to understand a fraction of Fall From Grace. All the same, some of the things she had read had resonated—especially the discussion of virtual particle pairs.

  As far as Deirdre was able to understand, the basic fabric of the universe was not made of some concrete substance. Instead, the universe was founded on nothing at all. Its most basic substrate was a vacuum devoid of any kind of matter. But in that very nothingness was stored the endless potential for everything else.

  The vacuum contained infinite energy because it contained infinite possibility: At any one moment, anything might come of
it. And, in fact, it did. As physicists had discovered, the vacuum was constantly spawning pairs of virtual particles: one of matter, one of antimatter. The particles would exist for a fraction of a moment, then they would collide, annihilate one another, and vanish.

  It was like starting with a featureless plain and using a shovel to dig. The result was both a pile of dirt as well as a hole: matter and antimatter. Infinite holes could be dug in the plain, but all you had to do was put the dirt back in one of the holes and it was gone. The virtual particle pairs were the same. Every moment, at every point in space, countless pairs popped out of the nothing and were reabsorbed an instant later; the fact that they existed so briefly was what made them virtual.

  Only here was the tricky part: Sometimes the virtual particles could become real particles. For example, when a virtual particle pair appeared on the edge of a black hole, one of the particles might be drawn into the black hole’s gravity well while the other escaped. Thus the two particles would never collide and cancel one another out. And there were other situations in which the particles could become real.

  One was the beginning of the universe. According to Voorhees, in the beginning, the universe was perfect. It was completely symmetrical, devoid of all features. Then, somehow, that symmetry was broken, and everything fell out of the vacuum like candy out of a piñata. Matter and antimatter—in the form of tiny particles, quarks and antiquarks—would have gone whizzing around in all directions.

  There should have been the same number of quarks and antiquarks; they should have all collided, exactly canceling each other out and restoring the nothingness to its state of perfection. Only that didn’t happen. Somehow, in our universe, the number of quarks slightly outnumbered the number of antiquarks. The result, after all the canceling and colliding was done, was a surplus amount of matter. And that was the stuff of which stars and galaxies and planets were made.