Rune Scale (Dragon Speaker Series Book 1)

by Devin Hanson

  "Grubby little gunny probably wants to nick a scale, Eldred," one of the students sneered. Andrew was three inches taller than the student, but the way the man's head tilted back to look down his nose at Andrew and the disdain on his face was enough to make Andrew duck his head.

  Andrew knuckled his forehead. "Sorry, gov, I ain't meaning to budge in an all." He fell back to the peasant butchering of the language on reflex, hoping to get passed over until he could get the store clerk alone.

  Eldred frowned at him and turned his shoulder, clearly satisfied now that Andrew was away from the more expensive items, but the student wouldn't let it drop. "You heard the man," he said, lip curled up in a noble disdain. "I want your kind out getting eaten by dragons to fetch me materials for my experiments, not filthying up the streets with your stench and dirt." He made a shooing gesture. "Run off before I call the constable, gunny."

  Andrew threw a glance at Eldred, saw the look of pained impatience and left. The sun was just a thin sliver showing between the gaps between buildings. The window of opportunity he had before the shops closed was rapidly coming to an end. His stomach gurgled, reminding him that he hadn't eaten since the morning, and wasn't likely to until tomorrow.

  He turned into the alley next to the shop and slumped to the ground, too weary to make the long walk down to his bunk in the slums for the moment.

  "Taking that idiot's insults a bit hard aren't you?"

  Andrew jerked his head up in surprise. It was Professor Milkin, the alchemist he had met outside the Academy. "Professor!" he cried, relief washing through him.

  "I haven't seen you in months, lad." Milkin frowned. "You're looking a bit run down. Had a hard winter?"

  Andrew shrugged. Milkin had offered him a place to stay if things grew rough, but Andrew didn't like impinging on the old professor's hospitality any more than he absolutely had to. He could count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of people in Andronath who would even notice if he died out on the mountain. Milkin was his safety net, if everything went totally wrong, Andrew knew he could get at least a few nights at Milkin's before his welcome wore out.

  "It wasn't the worst I've had," Andrew lied. "Oh! But you'll never guess what I found!"

  Milkin's eyes widened. "Really? Then we must celebrate! Are you hungry?"

  Andrew's stomach growled impatiently in response. "I could eat," he allowed with a grin.

  Milkin nodded. "That's what I thought. Keep it put away!" he added quickly, when Andrew reached for his belt pouch, "Wait until we are inside. Too many eyes out here."

  "How was your trip?" Andrew asked as he followed Professor Milkin through the winding streets of the Guild Quarter. "You were going on an expedition, right?"

  The professor groaned theatrically. "I'm too old to be climbing mountains. Thankfully, my young prodigy did most of the hard work. I just helped guide us, as it were."

  "Jules, right?"

  "Yes. Did you ever meet? No? Well, she's supposed to be back in town one of these days. If you're not out in the mountains, I'll introduce you."

  The conversation drifted after that, and Milkin kept up a rambling discourse that touched lightly on all manner of inconsequential topics, from the weather to rumors that might have made it down out of the Guild Quartrer. By the time they reached a quiet tavern Andrew felt more at ease and was smiling at some of Milkin's tired jokes.

  They found a table in the back and ordered "whatever was still hot and a lot of it." They ate in relative silence, Andrew gorging himself on the best meal he'd eaten in months. By the time he was done, he felt slightly queasy and sat back with a tall beer to let his digestive system work its magic.

  Milkin waved a waitress over to have her clear the plates then leaned forward, his grey eyes lively with suppressed interest. "Had enough to eat?"

  Andrew nodded. "I can't thank you enough. I haven't been making the best money out on the hills the last few months."

  "I guess that brings us to the purpose of your trip up the hill," Milkin said. "You found something, didn't you? Something you couldn't hand over to the wagon master, am I right?"

  Andrew nodded, his grin matching Milkin's. "The other collectors, they would not have sat quietly if they knew what I found."

  "Ah, of course. No honor amongst gunnies." He pitched his voice low, "Honest, officer, the dragon done take him away!"

  Andrew snorted. His accent was off, but he definitely had the gist of the situation. "If they knew what I'd found… well. They'd just push me down the mountain and shrug when the wagon master asked why only five were returning instead of six."

  "Or one, instead of six," Milkin added darkly. "No reason to split the share if it could be helped."

  "And the wagon master might run the last one through and claim it for himself."

  "Wouldn't be the first time," Milkin agreed. "It's refreshing having a conversation with an educated gunny. Normally when I try to talk to one, half the time I can't make out more than a word every other sentence."

  Andrew quirked a smile. "I wasn't always a climber."

  "Ain't that the truth. I'd give a pretty to hear where you're from." He hesitated, giving Andrew the opening he needed to start talking then continued when Andrew held his silence. "Very well, perhaps a tale for another day."

  "Sorry, I—"

  "Nonsense. No need to apologize. If anything, I should be the one saying sorry. I'm an old man and think everyone's business is my own." He smiled, "Okay, stop with the teasing. Let's see what you found!"

  Andrew shifted in his seat, pressing the side of his leg into the wall. The scale was hot against his thigh and he swallowed. "It's a scale."

  Milkin pursed his lips. "A scale, you say? Surely you've found them before. They're valuable, but not that valuable. Not worth a dead body or two."

  Andrew swallowed, and shook his head. "That's why I started collecting in the first place," he explained. "I remembered what you said about gaining entrance to the Academy if I could find my own flux. I've been searching ever since then, never heard of a single scale found. And, to tell the truth, I'm not sure what it would be worth."

  Milkin relaxed. "I see, I see. Well, let me have a look then. I can tell you how much you can expect to charge and not get ripped off. Or if it would suffice to grant you entry to the Academy, if you decide to go that route."

  Andrew looked around the room then nodded when he was satisfied there wasn't anyone close enough to see and drew the leather-wrapped scale out of its pouch. The scent of burnt cinnamon wafted through the air, mixed with the thicker odor of charred leather.

  In the dark of the booth, a faint red light glowed from within the folds of the leather. Milkin hissed. "Put that away!"

  Andrew snapped his hand back under the table and fumbled the scale back into his pouch. Fear flooded through him and he half got to his feet, preparing to run.

  "Sit back down, son. Don't make a scene." Milkin had lost the demeanor of the kindly old professor and suddenly was sharp and calculating. He waited until Andrew had settled the rest of the way then let out a sigh. "For the love of… why didn't you tell me you had found a live scale? By the gods, it must be burning a hole in your pocket." He sniffed. "Literally, by the smell of it. Wrapped it in leather did you?"

  Andrew nodded.

  "Smart. The heat would have become rather unbearable otherwise."

  "Still is," Andrew allowed. He swallowed. "So, uh, how much do you think it's worth?"

  "More than your life. Even placid Eldred would have tried for your blood if you walked in flashing that thing around. His shop doesn't have the liquid cash to move a live scale like that and never will. Some rich lordling might be able to pay you fairly for it, but they'd just as soon run you through in an alley and pick it off your corpse."

  "So, I can't sell it?"

  Milkin chuckled at the question. "Oh, you could. You would have to get into the auction though. The Guild hasn't got its hands on it then?"

  Andrew shook his head. "Which
guild?"

  "The Alchemist's Guild, of course. They register scales to prevent exactly that sort of back-alley mugging, though a live scale like that…" Milkin shrugged. "If it was only a matter of money, you might be safe, but that'd be no guarantee. A scale like that though, it brings power with it as well. And power brings its own breed of hunters."

  "I took it straight here. Didn't bring it to the changing house where we turn in the dung from the day."

  "That was a good idea. Though I would love to be a fly on the wall if someone tried to turn that scale in. Ho ho. Bloodbath wouldn't cover half of it. Interesting. It's unregistered, which means nobody can accuse you of stealing it, but it also means anyone could steal it from you and claim it as their own."

  Andrew felt despair creeping up on him. "Is it hopeless then? I can't sell it?"

  "What?" Milkin seemed to notice for the first time what effect his words were having on Andrew. "No, no. Why would you want to sell it, anyway? The thing is worth more in hand than any amount of gold."

  Andrew gestured at himself, the motion taking in his tattered clothing, the iconic cloak on his back. "I would do anything to get out of the mountains. I don't…" he swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat. "I don't belong there, Professor. I hoped to use it to gain entry to the Academy, but now that doesn't seem like an option either."

  "Ah… No. But all's not lost. There are other ways." He frowned at the ceiling for a bit. "Well, I suppose it can't be helped." He tossed a few nobles on the table then gestured for Andrew to follow him. "Come on then, we have some more talking to do, and I would love to get a look at that thing where prying eyes can't see it as well."

  Chapter 8

  The Runes of Alchemy

  Milkin's house was on the edge of the Merchant's Quarter, about halfway up the mountain. As a sign of personal wealth and power, he ranked somewhere above a craftsman, but not by much. As such, it was better than a hovel; several rooms, a private cistern and room for a small garden on the side. The hearth was warm and there were candles to burn, a vast improvement over Andrew's current living arrangements. Milkin puttered about, lighting candles and prodding the fire back to life, leaving Andrew to stare around the small room.

  In Andrew's experience, there was little to compare with even the most mundane of Milkin's possessions. The cannon on the airship were crude, unwieldy machines, made for untrained hands and the rigors of battle. They were nothing like the intricate machinery scattered about, devices Andrew could only identify as alchemical, their purpose and use completely lost to him.

  He reached out to touch one of the more exotic devices and yanked his hand back when Milkin cleared his throat behind him.

  "Sorry."

  "Don't be. They're quite interesting." He picked up the device Andrew had been reaching for and turned it idly in his hands. "This is used for measuring… um… alchemical variances in dragongas. It's a lot more mundane than you might expect." He smiled widely. "But now my own curiosity is peaked. Would you like to show me your scale now?"

  Andrew nodded and drew the scale out once more. It was as hot in his hand as it had been the first time he touched it. He unwrapped it and quickly placed it on the table before he burned his fingers again.

  Milkin sighed, a great gust of pent up excitement. "Magnificent. The dragon must have been truly enormous."

  "Quite." Andrew fumbled for a word to accurately describe it and failed. "It was large," he settled with lamely, gesturing with his hands, knowing there wasn't anything he could do to communicate effectively the size of the dragon. "But not the largest I've seen."

  Milkin shot him a look before turning back to the scale. "You've seen many dragons then?"

  "Hardly. This one was my second, up close. They make quite the impression."

  "They do, that." Milkin waved Andrew closer. "You see these striations?" He traced some of the glowing lines with a stylus then quickly, without looking, sketched out an exact duplicate on a piece of paper.

  "How'd you do that?" Andrew asked, amazed. He'd looked at the scale for a long time and thought he might be able to trace out some vague shapes, certainly nothing so precise as the drawing Milkin had made.

  "These shapes, they're the basis of alchemy, son." On a fresh sheet of paper, he drew in bold strokes a single whorl from the pattern. "An. The rune of keeping." He leaned back over the scale. "See, it repeats. Here, here and here."

  Andrew followed the professor's stylus, eyes wide, mind racing. A pattern along the scalloped edge caught his eye. "It repeats along this edge here, only slightly different."

  Milkin chuckled. "You've got a sharp eye. It does indeed, though these runes are At, alternated with An. At is the rune of holding. Together with An they form a containing structure." Milkin traced the edge, where At and An alternated back and forth in tiny, almost imperceptible lockstep. "They are the reason why this scale remains hot to the touch. Here," he fumbled around on the desk until he found one of the familiar jars used to hold dragongas. "Look closely, along the rim of the cap."

  Andrew took the jar from the professor and held it up to a candle. Etched into the glass, the two runes danced around the rim. "This is sealed with alchemy?"

  "But of course. Dragongas in its raw form has an altering effect on whatever it touches, usually merely entropic."

  "En-what?"

  "Sorry, sorry. It's been a while since I taught a new student. Entropy, the gradual breakdown of energy. Matter is composed of energy, so matter therefore slowly breaks down as the energy composing it decays."

  Andrew nodded, though he didn't understand more than one word out of three. "And dragongas makes things entry?"

  "Entropy, yes. Let's see, a good example…" he scanned the room then snatched up a piece of paper with hasty notes scrawled on it in ink. "Here we are. See the page?" He twisted off the cap of the dragongas bottle and tilted it sideways a bit, letting some of the faintly orangish gas pool out onto the paper before fastening the stopper again.

  Andrew watched, entranced, as the dragongas ran over the paper as Milkin tipped it back and forth.

  "It has a surface tension," Milkin continued, oblivious to the non-comprehension of his impromptu student, "so it tends to stick together a lot like mercury does, which is a blessing. It's hard enough to use without it dissipating into the air. Wouldn't that be a mess." As he spoke, the ink crumbled in the wake of the gas and slid into drifts caught in the crease of the paper. "See? Entropic effect makes the ink's cohesion break down rapidly enough to observe with the eye. If I left it on the paper long enough, it would yellow and eventually fall apart." He opened the bottle one-handed and poured the dragongas back in.

  "The runes prevent entropy from setting in and ruining the integrity of the glass." Milkin directed Andrew's attention back to the scale. "Alchemy is an art as old as the ages. We've lost much over the years, but the runes are something we've managed to keep hold of for the most part. One hundred and twelve, to be exact. There are over a dozen more that are a mystery as to their function, even their names lost in time."

  "That's alchemy?" Andrew asked.

  Milkin chuckled. "That's runes. Alchemy is a good bit more complex than just that. Runes don't require dragongas or anything else to function. They're just a side effect of the dragon's nature." He held up the device Andrew had looked at earlier. "Look at it closely."

  Andrew took it reverently and held it close to a candle. The reflected light shone off tiny grooves covering the surface of the machine. "Along the edges, I can see At and An repeat. These markings, they're all runes?"

  "All of them. This is used directly in contact with raw dragongas, so it has to be sealed against the entropic effects." He started pointing something out with finger calloused from hard work then shook his head and put the device away. "That's a bit too complicated for a first lesson. Let's look at the scale again."

  Andrew looked longingly after the glass. The amount of potential knowledge represented by the piece of runework had his mind buzzin
g and it was only with effort that he pulled his attention back to the scale.

  Milkin started talking again, his voice falling into the worn pattern of lecture. "Let's start at the beginning. Dragons. Without dragons, we would never have learned the first thing about runes and alchemy would be impossible. The most basic principle about alchemy is that dragons defy the laws of nature. The most simple example of this is the Rightman Principle." He rattled off an equation that was incomprehensible to the attentive Andrew. Seeing the confusion on his face, Milkin tried again. "A dragon weighs what, eight tons? And that's a juvenile. A fully aged dragon weighs ten, twenty times that. A juvenile's wingspan is two hundred yards. There is no way that span could support the weight, nor its bones resist the tension."

  Andrew shrugged noncommittal agreement. His experience with dragons ranged from horrifying to downright mindblowingly terrifying. He had vague concepts of weight and strength, but all he could see in his head was the dragon blowing through the airship's gondola like it was made from balsa.

  "Right. So a dragon clearly weighs that much. We've seen the effects it's weight produces. There's no doubt that the mass is actually there. And yet, it glides gracefully through the sky as if it weighed no more than half a ton at most."

  This, also, Andrew had experience with. He nodded with a bit more enthusiasm.

  "This is one of the more obvious signs that dragons extend nature's rules. I wouldn't say break, nor bend, exactly, though some schools of thought would have you believe it. No, dragons still follow the rules of physics the rest of us are bound to. They just, how to explain, add another set of rules on top of the ones we're used to.

  "Water flows downhill. This is known. Apples fall from trees. But if you convinced the apple to follow the dragon rule set, it would drift, perhaps, depending on what you were trying to accomplish, or float. It wouldn't even be an apple any more, per se." He hurried on, trying to bridge past the purely conceptual data and get into stuff that Andrew could connect with. "Let's take something you're familiar with. Airon. You've seen this, yes?"