Rune Master

by Amelia Wilson

  Blomgren agreed. “It certainly is. Did you know that there are gold coins from the Abbasid Empire among the goods excavated from the most recent ship burial? That’s Iraq, eighth century, right at the very beginning of the Viking era. It’s the earliest demonstrable contact between Scandinavia and Western Asia.”

  “Amazing,” she said. “The exhibit that came to Central City didn’t have any such coins with it, and none of the literature you send mentioned it.”

  “We have to keep our secrets,” he said, jesting.

  “How many coins?”

  “Five. They were in a box marked with runes that translate to, ‘payment for the hunters.’”

  “Hunters? Or huntsmen?” When he frowned, not entirely understanding what she meant, she refined her question. “Jägare or veithimathr?”

  “Veithimathr,” he answered, smiling. “I will leave you to get settled, and I’ll send in Inga from HR to explain the benefits and salary package.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sat at the desk, and after he left, she took up a pen and notepad from the drawer. She wrote down the names of the fallen huntsmen from Erik’s team. Rolf. Magnus. Gunnar. Hrothgar. She froze.

  Erik. That’s five.

  Who was paying for the veithimathr, and why? She made a mental note to tell Erik about this as soon as she spoke to him again. That missing-him pang returned, and she sighed. She had no idea when she would hear from him.

  This is terrible. He’s only been gone a few hours and it already hurts so bad…

  Inga from HR arrived, and Nika pushed her sorrows away so that she could concentrate. She still had a job to do.

  ****

  The next several hours were taken up with the mundanities of working life. There were forms to fill out, spiels to listen to, and then the docents requested a meeting with her. She was accustomed to the people at the Central City museum – relatively mild-mannered, sometimes obsessively possessive about their pet artifacts, and occasionally intellectual snobs and know-it-alls. It was a bit of a relief to realize that the docents in Stockholm were no different. It was the one known quantity in her new job, and she was grateful that this part of human behavior was a universal phenomenon.

  The Director of the museum was at an all-day meeting with donors, so she was scheduled to meet him tomorrow. She met and talked with the registrar, the exhibit designers, and the conservation and restoration staff. By the time afternoon arrived, she felt as if she had walked for miles, and she still hadn’t really seen the museum itself.

  She had an hour to herself, which was meant to be used to eat lunch. Food was a strange subject for her these days. Her need for regular food was less than it had been before she had become a Draugr, but strangely, she still needed it. Erik never ate human food. She wondered if that was a factor of age.

  The one thing that she did need every day, three times a day, was dreyri. Erik had been insistent that she should establish a regular schedule, taking the enchanted blood as if it were a prescription. Back in Central City, he would feed her himself, just a mouthful or so from his own veins.

  It had been awkward and strange at first, and the first few times she tried to feed from him, her teeth weren’t sharp enough and her technique was horrible. He had ended up with a shredded neck before she was able to get enough blood. Finally, he had just opened his blood to her himself, using his own teeth or a claw that he could grow or retract at will. Now that he was gone, she’d have to fend for herself.

  She was grateful that he hadn’t told her to start hunting humans or anything like she’d seen in the movies. It was bad enough that she was a parasite on her lover; she didn’t want to drink from a stranger.

  She had brought a little flask filled with dreyri from the cask in their house. She sat in her office with the door closed, seated at her bare desk – she really needed to bring in a picture or a desk calendar or something – and pulled the flask from her purse. As she unscrewed the top, she chuckled at the image of herself that rose in her mind. Swigging her liquid lunch like this, she looked like some movie version of an alcoholic.

  Nika drank the dreyri and felt it tingle down her throat, the magic coursing into her. It was still so strange to drink blood. The thickness of it, and the salty copper taste, were things she still needed to adjust to. The way the dreyri warmed her from the inside out, and the power that she could feel filling her from her stomach outward, were delicious sensations, like drinking hot tea on a cold day. It made up for whatever psychological stumbling blocks she had toward the act of drinking blood.

  She never expected to have become a vampire. Naturally, she had never even believed that they existed. At the time she had taken her first taste of dreyri, it had been what she needed to do, driven by their circumstances and her need to keep up with Erik and fight Astrid for the Rune Sword. She wondered, now that she was alone, if she would have taken that first drink if she’d had time to think it through.

  Did she want to be with Erik? Of course, without question. Did she want to be immortal? That was harder to answer. She had family in St. Louis, and friends that she still cared about. She wasn’t prepared to outlive them all. She wasn’t prepared to stop being human, to become some sort of monster who lived off of another person’s life force.

  Well, she thought dourly, draining the flask, too late now.

  With the rest of her lunch to kill, she thought she would venture into the museum proper for the first time. Her first destination was a natural, given the turn her life had recently taken, and considering that the gallery in question was to be her responsibility in her new job. She went to the ship burial gallery to see the Rune Sword.

  The floor was covered a graphic depiction of the ship as it was when it was new, loaded with its cargo. The glass case that had once held Hakon’s remains had been filled with an artist’s recreation based on the extensive photographs the archaeologists had taken. The realism was striking. Nika shuddered when she looked at it, remembering that withered body opening its eyes and turning on Erik.

  “We all react to the dead differently, don’t we?”

  She turned to face the speaker. It was Amari, the visiting professor from Baghdad. He was looking down at the artificial corpse on display.

  “Some people, like your archaeologists, see them as curiosities, something to be poked at and examined. Others believe that human remains are sacred and should be treated as such. And some, like the thieves who stole this body in America… Who knows what they think?”

  She smiled amiably. “Who knows, indeed? Maybe they thought he had precious stones or metals in his body, like the ancient Egyptians who put charms into the mummy wrappings.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it was something darker.” He looked up. “We shall never know, since they’ve not been caught and probably never will be. At least the Rune Sword was saved.”

  He walked to the display case at the head of Hakon’s replacement body. She followed him.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked. “Such intricate interweave design on the hilt and pommel. It’s a piece of art more than a weapon.”

  “Ah, but many weapons are works of art, are they not? And in some eyes, they damage they create is just as beautiful.” A dark look fluttered across his face. “Forgive me. I do not mean to talk about sad things on such a beautiful day.”

  “We’re standing in the middle of someone’s plundered grave,” she said softly. “If that doesn’t lend itself to sad thoughts, I don’t know what does.”

  “Indeed.”

  He accompanied her as she walked around the rest of the exhibit. Many of these objects had been too delicate to make the trip to Central City, and this was the first time she had seen them. One of the artifacts, a leather pouch, lay on its side in a little square display case, the coins it had held scattered around it, raised on acrylic stands.

  “These are the Abbasid coins,” she said, pointing. “That’s what you’re here to study, yes?”

  He looked flatte
red. “Those, and some other artifacts in the collection that are not on display. You inquired about my work?”

  “You mentioned it when we met, and I remembered. I did my Master’s Thesis on Norse art and history, so it was right up my alley.”

  Amari looked delighted. “We should talk more,” he said. “Perhaps we can compare notes on Norse travels in the eighth century.”

  She smiled as she considered someone else who could probably provide better information than she could, but she did not mention Erik to the professor. Instead, she said, “I would like that.”

  “Maybe over dinner?” She hesitated, and he hastily amended, “Purely platonic, of course.”

  “Maybe,” she allowed.

  “Tomorrow night? Perhaps you could bring your thesis. I would like to read it.”

  “I doubt it would interest you, but I’ll see if I can find it. I just moved, and the house is a disaster. At least cleaning it up will give me something to do until my partner comes home.”

  Amari’s face fell. “Ah. Your partner. Of course. No woman as exquisite as you would be without a mate.” He brightened, and she could tell that it was by force. “Well, my offer was platonic, as I said. Perhaps your partner…?”

  “He’s indisposed,” she said, shaking her head. “He was recently deployed.”

  “Ah! A soldier. American?”

  “Swedish.” She gestured toward the Rune Sword. “We met because of this exhibit, actually.”

  “Then he was one of the Special Forces men who retrieved the artifact. Only one survived – Captain Thorvald, was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must have been very hard on him, losing his comrades that way.”

  She looked down at the coin purse again. “I’m sure it was.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “He doesn’t grieve in front of me. He keeps his vulnerabilities closely guarded.”

  “A pity.” She looked up into his handsome face, and his smile turned gentle. “A man should always be open with the woman he loves.”

  The conversation was making her uncomfortable, so she changed it back to something more professional. “I was told that the Abbasid coins were actually found in a box that had markings on it.”

  “Yes, that’s right. The box is still being conserved, I was told.”

  “Ah.” She continued to stroll among the displays, and Amari kept up. “What is it that the inscription said, again?”

  “’In payment for the huntsmen,’” he replied. “It was difficult to translate, but luckily the Arabic was also written on the box.”

  “You’ve seen it?”

  “Yes. The interesting thing was the implication of the word used in Arabic. In English, the meaning would be more like, ‘in payment for the future delivery of the huntsmen.’” He sighed. “Presumably, the man who received the box was going to send some men back to the Caliphate, which at the time had its capital in Damascus. Did you know, in the middle of the eighth century, the Caliphate spread all the way across northern Africa and even included Spain?”

  “The moors,” she nodded. “They were from the caliphate.”

  “Yes, and at the same time, the Viking raiders were making inroads into Spain. They are known to have attacked Spain in 844, around the same time that the Abbasid dynasty was in control of the Caliphate. It would not have been unheard of for them to have trade contact, or even more.” He winked at her. “There are some Iraqis born today with blue eyes.”

  She laughed. “That’s a recessive trait. I doubt it would have lasted from 844.”

  “Well, that’s the story I like to tell myself.”

  They continued into the general Viking gallery, stopping to admire a particularly well-preserved wooden shield. “The Norse king in 844 was Horik,” she said, almost to herself. “And there was a powerful raiding band led by someone named Hakon.”

  He did not react to the name, which disappointed her. Instead, he shrugged. “Well, nobody knows who led which raid, really, unless they took the time to identify themselves to their opponents. The one who led the raid into Portugal and Spain was never identified in the chronicles of the time.”

  She was willing to bet that she knew who it had been.

  The owner of the ship burial had not been identified by name, at least not to the knowledge of the human world. She glanced back at the recreated corpse. “Maybe the occupant of this ship burial was Hakon.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he was someone entirely different. It is strange that there were no inscriptions on any of his grave goods to identify him.” He motioned vaguely back toward the exhibit. “The writing on the Rune Sword is nonsensical, as if someone who did not actually speak Norse tried to copy it. Perhaps he was a foreigner. We may never know. Such are the mysteries we are left with.” His dark eyes searched her face. “Do you like mysteries, Miss Graves?”

  There was something unspoken in his tone, something that hovered on the edges of her awareness like a threat. She cleared her throat. . "Thank you for your company, professor. I need to get back to work now. Perhaps we can talk more about it at dinner tomorrow.”

  “I would like that very much.”

  With her head full of information and just as many questions as before, she headed back to her office.

  Chapter Nine

  Against her better judgment, when she got home from work that night, Nika searched through the boxes stacked around the house. In the box labeled “böcker”, Swedish for “books,” she found her Master’s thesis, which bore the entirely uninspiring title of The Poetic Edda, Norse Art and the Culture of Viking Age Scandinavia: An Exploration. She remembered hours and hours spent slaving over books and primary sources while she was composing the thesis, and of the gallons of coffee she had poured down her throat to make it through a hundred all-nighters. Little had she known that she’d end up with a boyfriend she could have just interviewed for the same effect.

  She picked up her cell phone and pondered it for a moment, debating whether she should call him. The house felt so empty without him, and she truly hated the thought of sleeping in their bed alone. She decided that she needed to hear his voice, even if was only his voice mail greeting. She dialed.

  To her great surprise, he picked up almost immediately. “Thorvald,” he said, his voice all business.

  “Hi,” she responded, almost shy.

  When he spoke again, she could hear him smiling. “Hey, love,” he said. “What’s going on? Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, it’s fine… I just needed to hear your voice.”

  He chuckled, and the sound was warm and welcome in her ear. “I miss you, too, beloved.”

  “How is Karlsborg?”

  She could hear him walking, then the opening and closing of a door. He had gone somewhere to speak more privately. “About the same as it was last time I was here. Nothing much changes.”

  “And your team?”

  “Ugh.” He sighed. “The less I say about them, the better. They’re not Special Forces, and they’re not even regular army. They’re…impossible.”

  She frowned. “Oh, that sounds horrible. Do you think you’ll be able to train them?”

  “I can train anyone, if they listen.” He sighed. “I just don’t think this lot will be listening to me. They’re pretty argumentative, especially their leader.”

  “I thought you were their leader.”

  “I’m their commanding officer, but I’m not their leader yet. We’ll see how it goes after we really get to work. Speaking of, how is the new job?”

  She launched into a retelling of her day, keeping the awkwardness of her encounter with Amari from the tale. She talked about her office, about the HR executive and about the docents at the museum. She told him about the wonders of the collection she was curating now, and about the things she wanted to show him when he came home. He listened with interest, or at least he feigned interest by commenting at the right moments. When she stopped to take a breath, he chuckled again.

&nb
sp; “My Chosen, you sound as if you’ve found your soul’s true home.” His voice was a sexy, masculine whisper, and it made her shiver.

  “I have, but then my soul’s true home went to Karlsborg.”

  He made a breathy sound, something like a cross between a laugh and a sigh. It was like having his lips against her ear, and she missed him keenly. “I will come home to you as soon as I can.”

  “You’d better.”

  This time, he did laugh. “I will, I swear. Listen, I have to go. I can’t give leave these idiots unsupervised for long. I’ll miss you every day.”

  Her eyes stung with unshed tears, and she looked down at the carpet. “I already do. I love you.”

  “And I love you, from this lifetime to the next and the one after that.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “Please do.”

  They said their reluctant goodbyes, and then she hung up the phone. The house was still empty, but now that she had spoken to him, she felt a little less alone. She hoped that he felt the same way.

  ***

  Erik returned to the barracks, his phone in his hand. Stenmark was lounging on his own bunk, leafing through a skin magazine and ogling the picture of naked women with unnatural physical proportions. The twins sat together on Sven’s bunk, heads close together, reading a book together. Ulf, who was the only one actually doing something useful, looked up from cleaning his sidearm.

  “Woman?” he asked Erik.

  “Yes.”

  “She hot?”

  Erik shot him a hard look, warning him not to get too familiar. He did not answer.

  Stenmark replied for him. “She’s probably just a blood bag on legs to him.”

  The vampire turned off his phone and tucked it into his foot locker. Stenmark was trying to goad him into losing his composure. “She is beautiful, and she’s my woman, not my meal.”

  “So how many people do you eat a day?” Ulf asked. “Just curious.”

  “Yes,” Stenmark agreed. “How many people can you murder in their sleep? Asking for a friend.”