by Dan Willis
Alex shut the inner door and locked it in place with a heavy bolt, then he moved to the comfortable reading chair in front of his fake hearth. Iggy’s book was already on the side table, along with an expensive bottle of single malt scotch and a shot glass. He poured himself a slug, turned on the lamp on the table, and sat down to read.
The clock on the mantle above the hearth was an elaborate number with a carved wooden case and a glass front that covered a small pendulum. Alex glanced up at it when a knock sounded at his security door. He’d been reading for a little over two hours.
With a sigh, he set Iggy’s monograph aside and went to answer the door. He knew it was Leslie because she’d knocked in the pattern he’d taught her, two quick knocks, then three slower ones. If there had been a problem, it would have been different.
“Karen Burnham is back,” Leslie said when he pulled the door open. “She says she needs to talk to you.”
That was surprising. She had seemed quite resolute in her dismissal of him on Friday. Alex closed his vault, but didn’t lock it. He didn’t want to have to use another vault rune if he didn’t have to, and he was reasonably sure he could physically prevent Karen Burnham from entering his vault if the situation arose.
“Ask her to come in,” he said.
Alex waited behind his desk until Karen came in. She looked tired and out of sorts, but she had managed a weak smile.
“How’s your grandfather?” Alex asked, offering her a seat.
“About the same,” she said. “The doctor gave me some drops to help him sleep, but he seems restless, even when he’s sleeping.”
“Does he remember anything?”
She shook her head.
“No. He seems more disoriented now than when he was at the soup kitchen, always muttering something about a shade tree.”
“Is there a tree in your yard?” Alex asked, trying to picture Dr. Burnham’s house.
“Not one big enough to cast shade,” Karen said. “I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’m afraid he doesn’t know either. I’m very worried about him.”
“What can I do to help?” Alex asked, sitting on the edge of his desk.
“I wish there was something you could do,” Karen said. She opened her handbag and took out three, crisp dollar bills. “You paid for the cab when we went looking for my grandfather,” she said, handing Alex the money. “I didn’t reimburse you for that.”
Alex had forgotten about it. It was only a couple of bucks, but Karen’s integrity impressed him.
“Thanks,” he said accepting the bills.
“Well, that’s everything,” she said, standing.
“Before you go, Miss Burnham,” Alex said, standing as well. “I can’t help feeling that there’s something strange about the attack on your grandfather.”
“You said that before,” Karen returned, her voice calm and even. “I don’t understand what happened to my grandfather, but now he’s home where he belongs, and our neighbor Mrs. Phillips is looking in on him while I’m at work. I can’t imagine he’s in any danger.”
Alex opened his mouth to object, but she continued.
“That said, I can’t imagine him being attacked by anyone in the first place.” She looked up at Alex with her plain, earnest face. “Tell me what it is that you see, Mr. Lockerby. What makes you think my grandfather is in some sort of danger?”
“I have to be honest with you, Miss Burnham, right now it’s just a feeling. That said, I’ve been in this business a long time and I’ve learned to trust my gut...and my gut’s telling me there’s more to this affair than you and I are seeing.”
“What is it you want me to do?” she asked. “Even if your gut is right, how would we know?”
“You said your grandfather spent all his time out back in his workshop, right?”
Karen nodded.
“Well, then let me go back there and have a look around,” Alex said. “If what happened to your grandfather was just some random thing, he’s in no danger, but if I’m right, his being attacked has something to do with that workshop.”
She considered that for a long moment.
“You were right when you said my grandfather is well off,” Karen said. “But he didn’t get that way by being a spendthrift. I don’t think there’s anything to find in grandfather’s workshop, and I don’t want to pay you to look for ghosts.”
Alex could understand that, but his gut was still telling him that Dr. Burnham, and by extension Karen, were still in danger.
“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment this afternoon, but if it’s okay with you, I’ll come by after that and give the workshop the once over. If I don’t find anything, you don’t owe me.”
“What if you find something you think is important, but I don’t?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
Alex laughed.
“You’re very cynical for someone so young,” he said. “If you don’t think anything I find out is important, then the deal stands: you don’t owe me. At least then we’ll be reasonably sure you and Dr. Burnham are safe.”
“All right,” she said after a moment. She turned toward the door, but stopped. “For the record, I hope you’re wrong, and not just so that I don’t have to pay you.”
With that, she left his office and, after a moment, he heard the outer door to his waiting area close behind her.
“What was that about?” Leslie asked as Alex stood in his office door.
“I’m going back over to Dr. Burnham’s house after I meet Danny,” he said. “Be a doll and run over to the library while I’m gone. See if you can dig up anything on Dr. Leonard Burnham. He used to work at Dow Chemical, and he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, so there’s bound to be something on him.”
“Is there anything specific you want to know?” Leslie said, scribbling on a note pad.
“Yeah,” Alex said, looking at the outer door where Karen had gone. “I want to know who gets Dr. Burnham’s money if he dies.”
10
The Purity Construct
Alex sat back from his drafting table and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He’d forgotten about the bruise over his left eye, but the rubbing reminded him, and he winced in pain.
“You need to go see Jessica,” he admonished himself. “She’d fix you up quick.”
Absently he took out the flask of rejuvenator that he was now carrying in his back trouser pocket. Glancing at the clock over the mantle in his vault, he saw that it was almost two. He took a swig of the rejuvenator and closed his eyes as the potion eased his weariness and sharpened his foggy brain. Breathing deeply, he put the cap back on the flask and returned it to his pocket. He couldn’t be sure, but it felt like the flask had two more swigs left, maybe three.
He resolved to go see Jessica once he was done with Dr. Burnham’s workshop.
On the drafting table in front of him were the results of the last few hours work. Two runic constructs and three single runes all on their own sheets of paper. Four of them were on the usual flash paper, but the fifth had been drawn on a study sheet of parchment paper.
According to Iggy’s monograph, separate runes and constructs could be joined by casting them in proximity to a linking construct — a runic circle with one linking rune for every separate rune you wanted to join. Alex held up the parchment paper and reviewed it. The runic circles had three nodes, each with its own linking rune, with a fourth linking rune in the center.
Setting that aside, he picked up three of the remaining runes and examined them, one by one. These were all identical purity runes. Alex had seen these in the textbook two years ago when he’d first read it, but hadn’t seen any real use for them. They originated in the past when merchants began to travel to distant lands to trade, bringing with them whatever coin they were used to. Runewrights of the day developed the purity rune to test foreign coins to see if they contained a pure sample of gold or silver. All a merchant had to do was put the trader’s money in a pile alongside an impure sample of the m
etal, then cast the rune on a pure sample and a bit of wood floating in a bowl of water. The stick would then point to the purest sample.
Now Alex would use it to locate the densest fog inside a certain area.
Setting the purity runes aside, he picked up the last paper. This was a finding rune, but one unlike any he’d written in years. Originally, finding runes had very limited areas of effect, usually enough for a single small home or large hall. What made Alex’s finding rune so effective was all the things he added to extend its range. Alex’s rune could cover all of Manhattan, more if the rivers hadn’t blocked the magic. For the fog, however, Alex had to think smaller. Adding a focal rune to his own finding rune would cut the area of effect in half, but that would still cover miles, and his purity runes wouldn’t work at that range. What he needed was something that would only search a radius of a few blocks.
Instead of using his more powerful version, he had to go back to the original rune and find a way to increase its area only slightly. The rune would cover a radius of one hundred feet, so Alex spent most of his time trying various ways to increase that. Finally he wrote a boost rune and a doubling rune without destabilizing the construct, and that got him to roughly three thousand feet. It wasn’t enough to seriously search the city, but it was big enough for a test.
Leslie had gone to the library as he’d asked, so Alex packed up his kit with the tools he’d need and headed out, putting the Gone to Lunch sign on the door as he left. Since New York blocks were actually rectangles, he went five blocks east from his office, then stuck one of the purity runes to the side of a random building. Before he lit it, however, he brought out the parchment paper and touched the corner to the flash paper.
The purity rune burst to life as the flash paper disintegrated, leaving the parchment paper unharmed. As the rune glowed for a moment on the brick wall, a similar rune burned itself into the parchment paper, joined to one of the three linking runes around the runic circle.
Alex repeated the process two more times to the northwest and southwest of the first building, then returned to his office. With the three purity runes spread out around his own building, he could use them to triangulate the location of the thickest fog inside the minor finding rune’s range.
He bypassed his floor, pausing only to check that the sign was still on the door, a clear indication that Leslie hadn’t come back. Continuing up to the roof, Alex laid out his map of Manhattan, then laid the parchment paper with its three linking and purity runes right over his location. He pulled three compasses from his bag, placing one on each of the linking runes, then adding the modified finding rune to the top.
Pulling out his lighter, he said a silent prayer that his calculations were right and that the unfamiliar construct wouldn’t blow up in his face. Satisfied he’d done all he could, Alex squeezed the side of the lighter and the top flicked open, illuminating the surrounding fog with a halo of yellow light.
When he lit the finding rune, the flash paper vanished, leaving the finding rune hovering over the map as it usually did. This time, however, the parchment paper began to smoke and burn, charring at the nodes of the runic construct. After a moment, glowing runes sprang up from them as well, hovering over each compass.
Alex held his breath as the compass needles spun in time with the linking runes, then slowly stopped. He pulled out a straight ruler and drew a pencil line along the direction of the first arrow, then again for the second. When he got to the third, he cursed himself for being an idiot. The first two pencil lines already crossed inside the radius of the spell, so he didn’t need the third spell at all. He’d assumed that because it was called triangulation, he needed three points.
“I’m glad no one was around to see that,” he muttered as he cleared the compasses and the smoldering parchment away. His map had gotten a little singed, but he could still read it. He’d have to figure out a way to protect it in the future; maybe a rune that would resist burning?
According to the pencil lines on his map, the densest area of fog inside the spell’s ten-block radius was on a ten-story apartment building just over the line in the inner ring. Alex stood and took his bearings, locating the building quickly, off to the east. It was easily the tallest building in the area, which was surprising. He’d expected the fog to be thinner up high, though now that he thought about it, he didn’t really know enough about fog to make such a determination.
“Looks like it’s your day for being wrong,” he said to the empty roof as he rolled up his map and returned it to his kit. “Let’s go see if there’s anything on that building I can use to redeem myself.”
The inner-ring apartment building had a doorman, but Alex avoided him easily while the fellow was hailing a cab. Since this was a nice, upscale building, it had an automatic elevator, so Alex rode up to the top floor before climbing the last flight of stairs to the roof.
The view from there would have been spectacular if the entire city hadn’t been socked in fog. He thought he could make out the park, off to the south, but there just wasn’t any way to be sure.
Turning away from the view, he opened his kit and pulled out his ghostlight burner. He swept the greenish light all over the roof, but found nothing, not even a trace of magic.
Undaunted, he switched to silverlight. This was much more fruitful, if Alex wanted to count finding evidence of pigeons, alcohol, vomit, and illicit encounters as success.
After almost an hour he sat down on the edge of a stone chimney and sulked. Pulling out a cigarette and lighting it, he just sat, glaring at the uncaring fog. He’d tried everything he knew and there just wasn’t any evidence that the fog here was any different than any other fog anywhere in the city. He was sure of one thing, though, this fog wasn’t magical in any way.
“Well that’s not true,” he muttered, remembering how Sorsha had said it didn’t want to move, even when subjected to strong winds.
Alex stood up suddenly, startling a nearby pigeon. Flinging his cigarette away, he dug into his kit and pulled out his multi-lamp and oculus again. This time he clipped the amberlight burner into the lamp.
Amberlight would reveal what Iggy called temporal positioning. If an object was used to being in one location, it would develop a temporal bond with that place. When you shone Amberlight on the object, faint orange lines would connect it to the place where it usually was located. This was an indispensable tool for reconstructing crime scenes or following stolen vehicles back to where they were usually parked, but that was about it. Unless, of course, you had a mysterious fog that didn’t seem to move. If that was true, Alex would be able to see it under the amberlight.
Lighting the burner, he closed the lamp, then swept it around the roof. Through his oculus, the fog lit up like a Macy’s Christmas window. Ghostly orange lines swirled all around him, bunching and stretching as if someone had actually drawn the fog with pencil lines.
At first it was confusing, but as Alex moved around the roof, he began to see patterns. Each mass of fog seemed to be connected to the others. He followed the connecting lines until they led him to a corner of the roof where an enormous brick chimney stuck up. Lines of connection radiated out from the chimney, tying it to the surrounding masses of fog. To Alex it looked as if the masonry had grown a mass of fine orange hair.
Reaching out, he ran his hand through the faint lines, but the fog just swirled around him. There was nothing physical there to grab, at least nothing he could feel. As he moved his hand back and forth, however, the orange lines began to swirl and distort. When he stopped, they slowed and returned to their original positions. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but the fog on this roof was anchored to the big chimney. That was why it couldn’t be blown away; it would move, but once the force disturbing it went away, it returned to where it had been.
If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, Alex wouldn’t have believed it. This fog clearly wasn’t normal fog, but he knew for a fact that it wasn’t magical.
“So far as you know,” h
e corrected himself, remembering the glyph runewrights he’d met last year. Just because he couldn’t tell it was magical, didn’t mean it wasn’t. Also, some kinds of alchemy stopped being magical once their initial magic was expended. Healing potions worked that way, along with some others.
Whatever this was, Alex wasn’t going to figure it out standing on a rooftop in the fog. He picked up his equipment and rode the elevator down to the building’s lobby. Stopping at a pay phone, he tried his office and Leslie picked up almost immediately.
“Where are you?” she asked. “Danny called, he said you can meet him over at Grier’s apartment any time.”
“All right,” Alex said. “I’ll head over. Did you have any luck with Dr. Burnham?”’
“He was actually pretty easy to find,” Leslie said. “He has over a dozen patents to his name, including one for making super-efficient gas mask filters. They were so good that the Army used them during the war.”
“Bet that made him a pretty penny,” Alex observed.
“You’d never know it, but it must have,” Leslie said. “Burnham sold the process to Dow for an undisclosed sum.”
“Which is the paper’s way of saying a lot. What about his family?”
“He has one son, Jeremy Burnham,” Leslie said. “He’s the manager for a fertilizer plant in Missouri.”