by Dan Willis
Half an hour later, Alex entered his third-floor room. He laid the thin red leather book on his bed, then took off his coat and vest. His comfortable reading chair beckoned to him, but this wasn’t pleasure reading, and he’d need a table and space to make notes.
Opening his own red rune book, Alex tore out a vault rune and licked the back of it. He’d followed Iggy’s example in the kitchen and painted a thin line on his wall in the shape of a door frame. Sticking the rune to the center of that imaginary door, he pulled out his cigarette lighter and ignited the paper. A moment later the heavy steel door to his vault appeared, melting out of the wallpaper and into existence. Alex pulled out the heavy brass key that would unlock the door and opened it.
Since Iggy’s brownstone was squarely in the middle ring, the magelights inside the vault flared to life even before he’d finished opening the door. Last year Alex had finally gotten a look inside Iggy’s personal vault. His mentor had everything in there; it was like an entire spare house with a bedroom, kitchen, library, and a surgery, in addition to the standard runewright’s workroom.
It had amazed Alex, whose own vault had consisted of a single workspace, up until that point. More than that, it had inspired him. Now Alex’s vault was at least as big as Iggy’s, and he’d moved his workroom to one side and put in a comfortable sitting room complete with a bearskin rug he’d received as payment for clearing a big game hunter of murder. It even had a fireplace that could produce heat by means of a boiler stone.
His workroom was much larger as well, with an enormous drafting table for rune writing and shelves and shelves of the various inks, powders, pigments, papers, and pens needed for the work. Along the wall behind the door were his secretary cabinet where he kept his kit bag, and a new cabinet that held his 1911, his brass knuckles, and a twelve-gauge shotgun with runes running up the grip beneath the barrel.
A short hallway at the back of the sitting room led to a small kitchen and bedroom that he’d managed to furnish piece by piece. It wasn’t as lavish or impressive as Iggy’s, but Alex was still working on it.
Moving to a large desk in his workroom, Alex laid the Monograph reverently on top. Opening one of the drawers, he extracted a bound notebook and a pencil box, then switched on the desk’s lamp and sat down.
He fidgeted a moment, making sure his pencil was sharp, and turning to a blank page in the notebook. Then he took a deep breath and opened the Archimedean Monograph.
The cover opened on a blank page, so Alex turned to the next. The first few pages were filled with DaVinci’s writing, explaining how he’d learned of Archimedes’ notes and then collected them. Alex’s Latin wasn’t great, but he could make it out. He wanted to press on, but out of respect, and a fair amount of awe, he read the forward. When at last he was done, Alex took a deep breath and, for the first time in two years, turned to the first rune and read it.
8
The Burglary
Alex was so tired the next morning that even after hurriedly downing three cups of coffee so fast it left his tongue scorched, Iggy still had to elbow him twice during Mass.
“What time did you get to sleep last night?” Iggy asked on their way home.
“Don’t know,” Alex said, leaning against the door of the taxi. “Feels like about ten minutes before my alarm went off.”
Iggy chuckled.
“Reminds me of my medical training,” he said. “Did you find anything that might be useful?”
“Maybe,” Alex said, stifling a yawn. “There are a few different runes that are designed to focus magic, make it more precise. I might be able to use one to limit the finding rune to a small part of the city, but if I’m reading the textbook right, I’d have to literally draw a rune around the area. So that’s out.”
“Two-dimensional thinking,” Iggy said.
Alex knew he was tired, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t gone to sleep and missed a part of their conversation.
“Come again?”
“You’re thinking in only two dimensions,” Iggy said again. It didn’t make any more sense the second time, and Alex said so.
“Have you looked at the runes on the front door?” Iggy asked. “I mean really looked at them.”
Alex shrugged, trying to remember.
“I guess,” he hedged. “There’s a harmonic rune linked to a couple of binding runes and an immobility rune. Maybe an absorption rune?”
“Can you make those runes?” Iggy asked, looking at him askance as their taxi plodded its way through the foggy streets.
“Yes,” Alex said after thinking about it. “I’d have to study up on a couple of them, but they don’t seem that involved.”
“So, if you didn’t have your key, could you nullify those runes? Could you break into the brownstone?”
Alex opened his mouth then shut it again. Iggy had a point, the runes on the door weren’t that difficult. Any runewright of ability should be able to bypass them with a nullification rune. But Iggy would never have left the brownstone so unprotected, especially with the Archimedean Monograph just sitting on a shelf in the library.
“No,” Alex guessed. “I don’t think I could break in.”
“And you’d be right,” Iggy chuckled.
“But I don’t understand why.”
“That’s because you’re thinking in only two dimensions.” Iggy’s grin got wide and he leaned in, conspiratorially. “Any runewright worth his salt could nullify those runes on the door, if they were all that protected the house.”
“I’ve seen the runes on the door,” Alex said. “They’re not tied to the ones on the foundation or the ones on the windows.”
“Of course they are,” Iggy said. “They’re linked to a very powerful rune construct that covers the whole house.”
“But when the front door is open, it’s not even touching the house,” Alex protested. “How is it part of a larger construct?”
Alex knew that runes could be connected into constructs by something as simple as a pencil line, but how could Iggy keep the runes on the door from unraveling every time the door opened?
“You’re not thinking this through, lad,” Iggy said. “You already know how to do this.”
Alex hated when Iggy did this. Part of his teaching method was to give Alex all the pieces of a puzzle and wait for him to put it together on his own. Supposedly it helped the learner really master the subject. So far, the only thing Alex was mastering was his temper. Which, if he thought about it, was a win.
“So you want me to think in three dimensions,” he said, thinking out loud. “Runes have height and width, but you want me to add depth. But paper is flat, just like the runes on the front door. So you don’t mean depth...you mean distance.”
He looked up and found Iggy beaming at him.
“The runes on the front door can’t be nullified,” Alex declared, “because they’re only part of the construct. The rest is somewhere else, safe from meddling runewrights.”
“The attic, to be exact,” Iggy said. “Good work. Now how would you break up a complex construct?”
Alex thought about that. Iggy said he already knew how, but all the runes he used were single constructs. Some of them were complex, but none of them used remote pieces. Except—
“The escape rune,” he said nodding. “It uses a linking rune to connect to an anchor rune, but the linking rune has to be touching both of the others when it’s cast.”
“Unless—” Iggy said, stretching the word out.
“Unless it doesn’t,” Alex said, not sure how that was possible, but knowing that was what Iggy meant. “If I can link runes that aren’t in the same physical space, I could set up nullification runes in a circle around a few city blocks, then only use the finding rune inside that area. With a convergence rune to focus the finding rune, I might be able to see where the fog is the thickest.”
Iggy nodded sagely.
“Sounds like a workable plan to me, lad. What say I show you how to link a rune back to a distant con
struct once we get home?”
Alex nodded. He could feel the hair on his arms standing up. He hadn’t been this excited since he first found the Monograph. For a while, the only new skills he’d been learning were how to write more and more complex runes. It didn’t feel like moving forward, like learning something new. If anything, it was just getting better at what he already knew. This, however, this felt like finding buried treasure or discovering an unknown island. It was new ground and Alex couldn’t wait to get home.
The cab ride from the church to the brownstone usually took fifteen minutes. By the time Alex and Iggy got home, Mass had been over for almost an hour. On the way home, they’d passed two car accidents before the cab driver decided to get off the main roads and take side streets.
“You should pack it in,” Iggy told the cabbie as he handed him a five spot. “This fog’s dangerous. Keep the change.”
The cabbie thanked them and dove off slowly into the fog. With the sun up, it was easier to see the steps, but Alex held the bannister as he went up anyway.
“I’m glad I’ve got some work to do here,” Alex admitted as he held the door open for Iggy. “I don’t want to even think about going back out into that.”
Almost on cue, the phone in the kitchen rang. Alex and Iggy exchanged glances, then Alex went to answer.
“Finally,” Danny’s voice assaulted him over the wire. “I’ve been calling for an hour! Did you start going to a different church?”
“No,” Alex said, “but you may have noticed the fog outside. What’s so urgent? I’m not supposed to meet you until after six.”
“That guy you wanted me to look into, what was his name again?”
“Charles Grier, why?”
“He’s an alchemist, right?” Danny said. “Has a shop on the South Side? The Philosopher’s Stone?”
“I take it your interest isn’t academic.”
“No. I’m standing in his shop right now. Someone broke in last night and tore the place up pretty good.”
“Did anyone see anything?”
“No,” Danny said a bit of an edge creeping into his voice. “When you said that you were looking for this guy, you tried to get into his house. Any chance you came by here yesterday?”
“I might have looked in the window,” Alex said. Danny had been around him long enough to know how Alex did his job, but they had long ago agreed not to get into detail about those things. That way Alex didn’t have to lie to Danny or put him in the awkward position of having to lie for him.
“Well, I need you to get down here and tell me what’s missing, because all I see is a mess.”
Alex looked out through the kitchen window at the fog.
“Do you really need me?”
“Well, I’d hate for the fingerprint guys to find one of yours without you being here to explain where it came from.”
“Right,” Alex sighed. “I’ll grab my kit and be over as soon as I can.”
“I thought you weren’t going out,” Iggy said, heading for the pantry where he kept his humidor.
“Remember that alchemist friend of Dr. Kellin’s? His shop was broken into last night.”
“I thought that was you,” Iggy chuckled.
“I don’t leave a mess,” Alex said. “Danny wants me to come by and have a look. Call me a cab, will you? I’m going upstairs to get my kit.”
“You look like hell,” Danny said once Alex managed to get to Charles Grier’s shop. He wore a brown suit with his detective badge clipped to the breast pocket of his jacket.
“Nice to see you too,” Alex said. “Did you learn anything since we talked?”
“This way,” Danny said, turning and leading Alex through the open front door.
As Alex entered, there weren’t any signs of a break in on the front of the building. The plate glass windows and the displays behind them were undisturbed and the door showed no signs of being picked or forced. Inside, however, was another matter. The display case with the cans of colored powders had been overturned, spilling its contents across the floor in a rainbow pattern. The shelves along the back wall had been emptied, and bottles, both broken and whole, littered the floor.
Since alchemy was a volatile magic, most of the spilled potions had already evaporated, but a few puddles of colored liquids were still present.
“Tell your men to be careful of the potions,” Alex said, pointing to a puddle of thick black liquid. Next to the puddle was part of a shoe print, evidence of where someone had walked through it. “I have no idea what might happen if someone tracks a random potion through all that spilled powder.”
Danny checked the bottom of his shoes, one after the other, then yelled at the uniformed officer in charge of the scene to have his men pay better attention. All around the room, the various officers who were inventorying the scene got the message loud and clear.
“I take it the shop didn’t look like this yesterday,” Danny said once he’d led Alex into the back room. The rear door had been broken in half, as if someone had run the nose of their car into it — or hit it with a battering ram. The file cabinet that Alex had made sure to leave as he’d found it had been tipped over and its files were scattered across the floor. All the drawers in the desk had been pulled out and emptied, adding their contents to the pile, and the only thing remaining on the desk were the accounting books.
“No,” Alex said quietly, looking around at the devastation. “Yesterday this place looked like it belonged in a magazine circular. Nothing was out of place. Even the wastebaskets were empty.”
Danny jerked his thumb at what remained of the little office space.
“Any idea what they were looking for?”
Alex shook his head. It didn’t look like whoever did this was looking for anything. From the way the folders lay, scattered across the floor, it was obvious they were all still in their drawers when the filing cabinet had been tipped over. If someone had gone through them looking for something, they would have thrown them on the floor one by one as they read them. This felt more like a distraction.
“Was there anything else on the desk when you got here?” Alex asked, pointing to the stack of Grier’s account books.
“No,” Danny said. “My guys picked up those after we got here. They were over there.” He indicated the corner by the stairs going down.
“His lab was this way,” Alex said, heading for the stairs. “Is it all torn up too?”
“You tell me,” Danny said, following Alex down.
The lab was very much as Alex remembered it. The remains of the acrid chemical odor still lingered in the air, but it was tolerable, and the glassware all looked to be where Alex had left it. There was one exception, however; one of the workbenches had been moved. When Alex had been there, all the benches had been in neat rows, each exactly the same space apart. Now two of the benches had been pulled back to back and an elaborate series of glassware and tubes had been laid out on it. A dozen glass containers with various liquids and powders inside stood in a neat row on one end of the double table, next to an unlit burner.
“That was burning when we got here,” Danny said as Alex examined the apparatus.
“This wasn’t here yesterday,” he said. “Whoever broke in did this.”
“Why?”
“They must have wanted to brew a potion of some kind,” Alex said.
Danny looked incredulous.
“Are you saying an alchemist broke in here just to make a potion? Then why trash the store?”
“As a distraction,” Alex said, leaning close to the liquid-filled glass globes. “I’ll bet you a fiver that those shelves of potions upstairs were knocked down so you wouldn’t be able to tell what had been taken, and the same for the chemicals in the display case.”
“How would we have known any of that?” Danny observed.
“Whoever our alchemist burglar is must have worried you’d call in an expert,” Alex said with a shrug, making his way along the elaborate maze of tubes. At the far end was a s
mall, cylindrical beaker. Being careful not to touch it, he leaned close and sniffed it.
“Did you find something?” Danny asked.
“Maybe,” Alex said, putting his kit down on a neighboring table. He pulled out his ghostlight burner, clipping it into his lamp, then strapped on his oculus. Once he lit the burner, he played the greenish light over the entire apparatus on the two tables. Each jar, tube and condenser held glowing residue of the magical liquids that had been moving through them, but the last few jars did not. He shone the lamp in the little beaker positioned to catch the liquid at the end of its journey through the machine. It didn’t glow at all.
Danny had remained quiet while Alex worked, but he must have seen something change in Alex’s expression.
“What is it?” he asked.
“When did you get the call that there had been a break-in here?”
Danny flipped open his notebook and turned a few pages.
“Around nine o’clock this morning,” he said. “From a Mrs. Osbourne.”
Alex nodded.
“I met her. She owns the millinery shop next door.”
“Apparently, she came to pick up something from her shop and saw the back door here broken open. Does that mean something to you?”
Alex didn’t answer as he blew out the ghostlight burner and replaced it with the silverlight one. Playing the white light over the glassware, dozens of fingerprints glowed back at him. Some were big while others were small, and most were smudged. Danny might be able to get a usable set from it, but he had no way of knowing where any of them had come from.
He turned to the corner of the basement where the vent fan stood. Next to it was a large tub-style sink and a drying rack. The rack was empty, so Alex turned his light on the little beaker at the end of the brewing line. Whoever set up this new apparatus would have wanted an absolutely clean receptacle for the fruits of their labor.
“Bingo,” he said as the silverlight revealed a near perfect set of prints. Alex looked up at Danny with a grin and waived him over. “Look here,” he said once he’d passed over his oculus.
