by Dan Willis
Alex jotted the name down, then joined Barton at his desk. The schematics didn’t mean much to him, but they really didn’t need to. The Brooklyn tower was an exact copy of the Bronx tower, so he knew the system was solid.
“Could one of your linking runes be faulty?” Barton asked. There was no accusation in the question, just an honest request for information.
“No,” Alex said. “Runes either work or they don’t.”
“Maybe the breakers are faulty.”
“Four of them at once?” Alex asked. “That’s beyond coincidence, you’re talking about sabotage.”
“I’ve had a security team on site during construction,” Barton said. “No one could have gotten in and damaged the breakers.”
“We know the system works,” Alex said, somewhat frustrated. “If it didn’t, we’d have the same problem at the Bronx Relay. Whatever is causing this must be coming from outside.”
“It can’t be,” Barton said, thumping the page with the math on it. “I’ve checked and rechecked the city’s power needs, there simply isn’t enough demand to trip four breakers.”
Alex sighed. Barton was one of those men who simply couldn’t abide when something that should work, didn’t. The situation was getting to him. Alex walked around the massive desk to the far side of the room where an ornate liquor cabinet stood. Taking out two glasses, he poured two fingers of fifty-year-old whiskey into each and brought them back.
“Drink,” he said, passing one of the glasses to Barton.
The sorcerer glared at Alex for a moment, then sighed and accepted the glass.
“A friend of mine is fond of saying that if you eliminate the impossible, what you’re left with must be the truth,” Alex said as Barton drank the scotch.
“How does that help us?” Barton said, setting the glass aside. “We’ve eliminated everything, there’s nothing left.”
Alex gave the man an enigmatic smile that made Barton’s expression sour.
“What?” he said.
“My friend went on to say that if you eliminate the impossible and then nothing remains, then some part of the impossible must be possible.”
Barton sighed and leaned on the table with his head hanging down.
“Did your friend tell you what do to in those situations?” he asked. His voice shifted from irritated to weary.
That, at least, was a question Alex had an answer for.
“Well, you said the breakers couldn’t be faulty and I said the linking runes couldn’t fail.”
“So we go to the Brooklyn Relay Tower and recheck everything,” Barton said with a growl. Motioning for Alex to follow him, he made his way back to the liquor cabinet and poured another round. “Are you ready?” he asked when they’d both finished their drinks.
Alex made a sour face, but nodded nonetheless. He held out his arm and Barton grabbed him around the wrist. A moment later they vanished.
“Rough day?” Iggy asked as Alex came shuffling down the stairs of the brownstone. The grandfather clock in the corner of the foyer read six-twenty, but Alex felt like it might as well have been two in the morning.
“You have no idea,” he groaned, slumping down into the reading chair on the near side of the little table with the lamp and the cigar box. Iggy’s chair was on the far side of the table and he leaned forward, setting the pulp novel aside, as Alex closed his eyes and sighed.
“I can see you need a drink and dinner,” Iggy said, getting up out of his chair. “And I’m thinking in that order.”
Alex could hear Iggy moving to the liquor cabinet, then the clink of a bottle on the lip of a glass.
“Here you are, lad,” he said, handing Alex what looked like a miniature wine glass, with a short stem and small cup. “A glass of port will settle your nerves until dinner’s ready.” Alex accepted the glass as Iggy pulled his pocketwatch from his vest pocket and flipped the cover open. “I have a stew on, but it won’t be ready for at least half an hour. Why don’t you regale me with the no-doubt harrowing tale of your day?”
Alex didn’t usually drink port, so he just sat and sipped it. The wine had a fruity, sweet flavor and just as Iggy predicted, its warmth began to seep into Alex’s tired body.
“Where to begin,” he said after taking a second swig. “You were right about Harcourt.”
“The government man?” Iggy probed.
Alex nodded.
“He wanted my notes on Alice Cartwright’s math. Point of fact, he wanted my whole notebook, but I threatened to make him show me his warrant.” Alex chuckled at the memory of Harcourt’s smoldering anger.
“Antagonizing him might not have been the smartest move,” Iggy said, trimming a cigar with a pocket knife taken from his jacket pocket. “Some of those government people can make proper nuisances of themselves if they’ve a mind to.”
Alex gave him a sly grin.
“Well I tagged in my own government contact.”
“Went running to Miss Kincaid for protection, did you?” Iggy said with a chuckle.
“Something about Harcourt just felt…off. I wanted Sorsha to make sure he’s on the level.”
“And what about Miss Kincaid?”
Alex let the question hang in the air for a long moment. He thought about playing dumb, but Iggy would put him on bread and water if he tried that.
“We’re going out tomorrow night.”
Iggy gave Alex a knowing grin, then puffed the cigar to life against the flame of his gold lighter.
“I’m surprised she let you off that easily,” he said, blowing out a cloud of aromatic smoke.
“I dazzled her with my sincerity,” Alex said, putting his hand on his chest with a wounded expression.
Iggy laughed.
“I’m not falling for that, and you can bet a sharp girl like Sorsha won’t either.”
“I guess I’ll know tomorrow night,” Alex said. Sorsha didn’t seem too angry that it had taken him four months to follow up on her invitation. That alone was probably a giant red flag.
“I take it that your romantic life isn’t what’s weighing on you,” Iggy said.
Alex sighed again.
“No, that’s mostly the last four hours I spent with Andrew going over every rune and spell in the Brooklyn Relay Tower.” He explained about the weird fluctuations and how, once they’d checked everything obvious, they’d discovered that the metal plate used to anchor the linking runes had a crack in it that was causing one of the linking runes to get an uneven flow of current. When the power fluctuated, it tripped the breaker, transferring too much power to the next one in line and tripping it too.
“All that work for such a little problem,” Iggy said with a shake of his head.
“That was the tiring part of my day,” Alex said, reaching into his shirt pocket. He pulled out his notepad and flipped to the page where he’d drawn the blood rune. “This is the disturbing part.”
He passed the notepad across the table.
“Is this a rune?” Iggy asked after looking at it for a long minute.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Alex said. He took another drink of the port and started in on the tale of Danny’s murder victim. Iggy didn’t interrupt, just sat puffing absently on his cigar as Alex wove the grisly tale.
When he was done, Iggy looked at the blood rune again.
“Do you know if this was drawn in the girl’s blood?” he asked.
Of all the things Alex had expected his mentor and friend to ask about, that one hadn’t made the list.
“Uh,” he said, eloquently. “I guess, why?”
Iggy puffed on his cigar before responding.
“You might want to find out,” Iggy said. “You’ll have to collect samples, of course, but Dr. Wagner should be able to tell you if the blood is human or not.”
Alex made a sour face at the idea of talking to the police coroner.
“Be sure you get samples from the outer shape as well as the symbol in the middle,” Iggy went on.
“
What are you thinking?”
Iggy leaned over the table, passing the notebook back.
“Have a look at the places where the inner symbol overlaps the surrounding geometry.”
Alex scrutinized the image again. He hadn’t noticed before, but the symbol at the center of the blood rune crossed the decagon in three places. Alex doubted the murderer was going for artistic style when he painted it, but if it had been a rune, those intersections would have fouled the magic. Symbols and shapes were simply not permitted to touch in rune magic.
“So it isn’t a rune,” he said at last.
“Don’t be so hasty,” Iggy said. “Look again.”
Alex did as he was told, but other than the intersections he’d missed before, the blood symbol appeared to be a rune and he said so.
“It looks like a rune,” Iggy said with a twinkle in his eye, “because I believe it is.”
“You were right about this,” Alex said, pointing to the drawing. “It definitely overlaps, and runes can’t do that.”
“You’re not thinking laterally,” Iggy chided. “Did you notice that the underlying geometry is done very precisely, but the symbol in the middle is sloppy by comparison?”
Alex checked the drawing again. Iggy hadn’t suggested that Alex had drawn it poorly because they both knew that reproducing symbols accurately was a runewright’s stock in trade. Alex had drawn the rune exactly as he’d seen it and Iggy was right, the decagon and its internal spiral pattern were made with a thin brush and laid down precisely. Alex had to go over the central symbol several times with the side of his pencil lead to capture the width of the symbol. Closing his eyes, he pictured Katherine Biggs’ floor in his mind’s eye. The symbol had definitely been made with a wide brush, and one that had uneven bristles that made the symbol appear sloppy.
“The symbol isn’t part of the rune,” he realized. “It was put down later to disguise what’s underneath.”
“Excellent deduction,” Iggy said with a satisfied smile.
“So we are looking for a runewright.”
“I don’t think so,” Iggy said with a shake of his head.
Alex’s mouth dropped open at that.
“But you just…”
“I don’t know of a single rune that used a geometry that complex,” Iggy said, jabbing his cigar at the drawing in Alex’s hand. “Do you?”
Alex was forced to admit that he didn’t.
“Then what is this?” he protested. “If it wouldn’t be recognizable, why hide it?”
“Maybe the symbol isn’t there to hide what’s beneath, but rather as a finishing step to whatever the killer was doing.”
“So what was he doing?”
Iggy puffed his cigar for a moment, then turned to Alex.
“This whole thing puts me in mind of the kind of outlandish setup you get in a pulp crime novel,” he said. “Murder committed by some voodoo priest seeking the blessings of the spirits or some such. You said the victim was a colored woman; maybe she was from Jamaica?”
“The crime scene did seem a bit overdone,” Alex said. “Like it was staged. Now all I need is a voodoo priest I can ask about it.”
Iggy chuckled.
“You can do far better than that,” he said. “Such lurid murders aren’t only the purview of the pulp novelist. They are just as often the stock in trade of the tabloid journalist.”
Now it was Alex’s turn to chuckle.
“Billy Tasker still owes me big for letting him in on the resolution of the Anderson murder,” he said. “Maybe he can put me on to someone who knows about this occult stuff.”
Iggy picked up his book and opened it again.
“Just make sure you’re not twisting the facts to suit that theory,” he said without looking up.
Alex finished his port and set the glass on the table.
“Is there another possibility I’m missing?”
“Of course,” the older man said in a voice that implied it was perfectly obvious what he meant. When Alex didn’t answer, he went on. “Your killer could be a vampire.”
Alex rolled his eyes.
“You’re not funny,” he said in an annoyed voice.
“I’ve got over a million readers who would beg to differ,” Iggy said without even the hint of a smile.
Alex leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees and stretching his back. When he finally sat up, he caught sight of some dust clinging to the cuff of his trouser leg.
“I’m going to go change,” he said, standing up. “I spent the last few hours crawling around Barton’s new tower, and I seem to have brought back some of it with me.”
“Alex,” Iggy said before Alex could head for the stairs. There was a note of concern in his voice that made Alex turn back to his mentor’s chair. “Have you finished your new escape rune?”
Alex had expended his most recent escape rune a few months ago when he yanked himself and Sorsha out of the path of a mad bomber. That rune had been fairly simple, one he put together quickly, and it wasn’t as elegant as his first one. On the plus side, it didn’t drain away huge chunks of his life energy either.
“I still have a few hours of work left to do on it,” he admitted. “My last one almost got Sorsha killed, so I want this one to drop me back here like the original one did. That way if anyone needs medical attention, you’ll be close.”
Iggy nodded, clipping his cigar between his fingers as he stroked his thick mustache.
“A solid plan,” he said. “One doesn’t use an escape rune lightly, after all.”
“Why are you suddenly interested in my escape rune?”
“Danny thought this killing might be the work of the Legion,” he said, contemplating his cigar.
“You agree with him?” Alex asked. He was pretty sure this wasn’t the Legion’s style, but it never paid to be too rigid in your thinking.
“It’s possible,” Iggy said with a sigh. “There’s a certain elegance to their work, but this killing seems more…theatrical. I’m worried about that blood rune though. You said it radiated magic?”
“So brightly I had to use a filter in my oculus,” Alex said. “Whoever made it might have mixed the blood with some alchemical solution though.”
“Or it might be something new,” Iggy said. “Five years ago, I would have said that I understood magic better than just about anyone alive, but now…”
Alex knew what he meant. Since the appearance of Moriarty, it seemed as if magic was getting darker and more dangerous by the day.
“You think this blood rune is something new?”
“Or something old,” Iggy said. “Very, very old. That seems to be the way of it these days.”
“Moriarty did say that what was coming had happened before,” Alex said. “Should we start poring over history books?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Iggy said. “But leave that to me. I don’t know whether this murder is a portent of things to come or just the work of a murderous sadist, but either way, I want you to keep your wits about you.”
“Always,” Alex chuckled, turning toward the stairs.
“And finish your escape rune,” Iggy called after him.
8
Cops and Robberies
At Iggy’s insistence, Alex spent the night in his vault poring over the delicate lines and intricate colors of his new escape rune. It was after midnight when he finished, and he’d retreated to the armchair in his library, intending to relax with a book for a few minutes before heading to bed.
When he woke the following morning, his back was stiff from having slept in the chair all night. Fortunately there was a bottle of single malt on the reading table along with a tumbler, so he poured himself two fingers’ worth and drank it before attempting to rise. At thirty-four, he didn’t feel old, but his body told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was too old to spend the night sitting up in chairs, no matter how comfortable they were.
Groaning as his back cracked, Alex shuffled to his drafting table. The compl
eted escape rune sat on the angled surface, drawn on a heavy sheet of parchment paper and glittering in the magelights like a stained glass window. The rune was inscribed in a circle with arcs drawn inside, creating a dozen cells around the edge. Each of these had runic symbols in them with runic text running around the inside and outside of the main shape. In the center was a combination of three runes written so that they interlocked, joining their magic together.
Unlike the blood rune, however, none of the symbols touched the geometric lines.
It had taken Alex the better part of a month to write this rune and it functioned just like his first one, though he’d moved the first jump several miles away from where he’d dropped Sorsha’s first castle, out of respect for its resting place. Sorsha had been quite angry about the loss of her home, even though that wasn’t Alex’s fault strictly speaking, and he had no wish to further antagonize her.
Since the creation of the intricate rune took such a long time, Alex had taken to keeping it in a picture frame that he hung on the wall near the drafting table. It was a piece of art, after all. Since he’d have to arrange for the rune to be tattooed on his body, Alex returned the rune to its frame and hung it back up.
When he returned to the drafting table, he saw the paper with the blood rune sitting to one side. He’d spent a frustrating couple of minutes last night trying to decipher it, but without any luck.
As he reached for the paper, intending to put it in his pocket with Alice Cartwright’s math, his breath suddenly quickened and he turned to look at a shelf off to the right of the table. Several containers of powdered ingredients he used to make ink sat on the middle shelf, nothing special or expensive, but behind them was a removable panel and behind that was his secret safe. Alex had installed the safe because he reasoned that it was so difficult to get into a runewright’s vault that any potential thief would never think to look for further concealment. The safe was where Alex kept his important papers, a few gold bars, a stack of ready cash, and a small mason jar.
