by Dan Willis
“What magic is this?” she said, her voice full of wonder.
“That’s something the Nazis have cooked up,” Tennon said. “The rock is coke, the kind of coal you use in a forge, but it’s been treated with some kind of alchemy. This is the result.”
“Why do floating stones make the Navy want sticky fog?” Alex asked.
“Because,” Tennon said, his gruff voice back. “The Germans are making these things by the ton and stuffing them into their zeppelins instead of using hydrogen.”
“According to our engineers,” Lt. Commander Vaughn said, “if this rock is an example of the lifting capacity of the process, existing zeppelins will be able to carry twice what they could before at the same volume.”
“Which means the Nazis could load them up with guns or bombs and use them as stable offensive platforms,” Tennon explained. “They could cut off the Atlantic supply route.”
“Unless they can’t see the convoys because they’re covered in fog that moves with them,” Alex said, finally understanding what Project: Shade Tree really was.
Tennon flashed an evil grin.
“They could shoot and bomb all day and not hit anything,” he said.
“But the Navy didn’t see it that way,” Alex guessed.
“What do you mean?” Sorsha asked.
Alex nodded at Tennon.
“Remember, he was paying Dr. Burnham out of some private account,” Alex said. “And Burnham was doing his work at home.”
Tennon sneered and sat back down behind his desk.
“The next time you come see me, Sorceress,” he growled, jerking his thumb at Alex, “leave this guy at home.”
“The admiralty didn’t think that zeppelins would be an effective fighting platform,” Vaughn said. “And as long as they’re filled with hydrogen, they aren’t. But with this,” he pointed at the floating yellow rock, “zeppelins would be much more difficult to shoot down. If they flew high enough, it’s possible our aircraft couldn’t even reach them.”
“So Vaughn and I created the SEI,” Tennon said. “The Strategic Engineering Initiative, and I’ve been paying Dr. Burnham out of my own pocket. If he was successful, we’d sell his invention to the Navy.”
“And retire?” Alex guessed.
Tennon shot him a look that was pure venom.
“I am not doing this for money!” he shouted. “Do you know how many ships will set sail from here if there’s another war? Hundreds. Those brave men are my responsibility and I’ll be damned if I send them out without the best protection I can get my hands on!”
Alex held up his hands in a gesture of peace, and Tennon got a hold on his temper.
“Now you know what we were doing,” he growled, turning back to Sorsha. “We don’t have Dr. Burnham’s device, and we didn’t know the fog was dangerous until you told us. Now if that’s all, I’ve got a dozen ships I need to send out of port before this fog, how did you put it? Combusts?”
Sorsha nodded.
“Thank you, Admiral,” she said, handing him one of her cards. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, please call me.”
Tennon looked at the card for a moment, then he took it.
“If you find Dr. Burnham’s machine and you manage to get it turned off,” he said, “we’d appreciate getting it back.”
“That’s certainly fair,” she said in a neutral voice. She passed Tennon the floating rock on its string, then turned and strode gracefully from the room.
Alex admired her as she went, walking like a movie starlet at a premier. The sorceress was a strange mix of things. She had a way of being soft and hard at the same time. Her power made her intimidating, and she used that to the fullest. At other times, she dropped the pretense, and simply let her feminine grace and beauty speak for her.
He followed her out into the reception room, past Lieutenant Leavitt’s desk and out into the foggy afternoon.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” Agent Redhorn asked, once they had all piled into the floater.
“Yes,” Sorsha said. “I could make a lot of trouble for him if he isn’t, and he knows it.”
“I bet the city would still sue him if the fog burns anything,” Alex added. “Even though he didn’t know that was possible.”
“So what do we do now?” Agent Redhorn asked.
“Shouldn’t we evacuate the city?” Mendes said.
“No,” Sorsha replied, shaking her head. “It would cause a city-wide panic.”
“But if the fog combusts, isn’t that worse?” Mendes looked around the back of the floater and saw only grim faces.
“That might not happen,” Sorsha explained. “But if we tell the public that the city might burn down, everyone will rush into the streets and across the bridges. Thousands could be killed in the chaos.”
“Besides, over a million people live in this city,” Alex said. “We’d never be able to get even a fraction of them out — it would take weeks.”
Mendes clearly didn’t like that answer, but she didn’t argue.
“Then what do we do?” she repeated Agent Redhorn’s question.
“Now we go to my place,” Alex said, mustering a smile. “If Iggy has the modified finding rune done, I’ll use it and hopefully we’ll find the Navy’s missing fog machine.”
“And if the rune doesn’t work?” Sorsha asked.
“Then I’ll let you buy me lunch,” Alex said with a grin. “I’m starving.”
20
Iggy’s Rune
The trip from the front gate of the Navy Yard to the street in front of the brownstone took twenty minutes, and Alex couldn’t help but be impressed. He didn’t have a high opinion of floaters; they were both expensive and slow, but he did have to admit they were an efficient way to get around.
“This looks a bit uptown for you, Lockerby,” Agent Redhorn said, once they were far enough up the front stair to see the town home.
“I just live here,” Alex said mildly. Agent Redhorn seemed to be going out of his way to get a rise out of him, so Alex decided not to play the game.
“The building belongs to Alex’s mentor, Doctor Ignatius Bell,” Sorsha said. “Late of His Majesty’s Navy. I expect you to conduct yourselves with the utmost respect.”
Alex hid a smile as he flipped open his pocket watch. He felt the runes inside activate and mesh with the ones in the door. This time when he pushed, the door swung open, and he ushered the sorceress and the agents inside.
“Just a minute,” he said, as Sorsha tried to open the inner door to the vestibule and found it shut tight. Alex closed the outer door without closing his watch and the inner door popped open.
“Interesting security you have here,” Agent Mendes observed as Alex tucked his watch back into the pocket of his vest. “Just out of curiosity, would I be able to open the door if I had your watch?”
Alex gave her an enigmatic smile. She was much more observant than he’d given her credit for being. Iggy would like her.
“No,” he said, then hung up his hat on the usual peg in the hall. “This way,” he went on, leading them through the library.
The kitchen was large, serving as both a place to prepare food and a dining room. A long, heavy oak table occupied the bulk of the room with ten chairs set around it. To the left was the back door that led out into the green house, where Iggy grew orchids, and the brownstone’s tiny back yard. To the right was the oven and range next to the icebox and a large sink. Beside the icebox a door led into the pantry.
A third door stood beside a wall-mounted telephone, only this door wasn’t always there. Iggy had long ago painted a line from the floor up, over, and back down again in the shape of a door. Whenever he wanted to use his vault, he simply stuck the rune inside the painted doorway and opened it there.
Iggy considered his vault a personal sanctuary and almost never invited anyone inside. Alex was Iggy’s apprentice and he had been in the vault exactly once, last year. Since that time, his mentor had hung a fancy bea
ded curtain with an oriental design inside the door to his vault, making it impossible to see inside when the door was open.
Alex knocked respectfully on the wall next to the open vault door.
“I’m back,” he called out. “And I’ve brought guests.”
A moment later the curtain parted, and Doctor Ignatius Bell emerged from inside. He was dressed in a plain shirt and trousers, the clothes he used to tend his beloved orchids, and his face lit up when he saw the sorceress.
“Sorsha,” he said throwing his arms wide. “How are you?”
Alex expected the Ice Queen to rebuke the old man for such a gesture of intimacy, but she smiled fondly and embraced Iggy.
“I’m sorry I haven’t visited,” she said, as if they were old friends.
“How’s your hip?”
“Fully healed,” she said. “Thanks to you.”
Alex was taken aback. As far as he knew, the only time Sorsha and Iggy had met was when the old man had pulled a bullet out of her when one of her former FBI men had shot her.
“These—” Alex was about to say gentlemen but figured Mendes wouldn’t appreciate that. “Agents,” he substituted, “are from the FBI.”
Sorsha introduced her team and Iggy shook their hands as if having the feds in the brownstone were all part of a perfectly normal day. Never mind that the infamous Archimedean Monograph, the most dangerous book of rune lore in history, was sitting on a bookshelf in the library, not fifteen feet away. Alex wondered what Sorsha and the Agents would do if they knew that.
“Alex says you might have a way to find Dr. Burnham’s fog machine,” Sorsha said.
Iggy gasped at that and turned to Alex.
“It’s a machine?” he asked, his voice full of wonder.
Alex gave him the short version of Dr. Burnham’s project for the Navy.
“Fascinating,” Iggy said once Alex had finished. “Did the Germans really come up with a floating rock? That’s amazing.”
“Why is that amazing?” Agent Mendes asked. “New York has six floating castles.”
“True,” Sorsha said. “But a sorcerer can only maintain one flying construct at a time. If the Germans can mass produce their yellow rocks, they could put a fleet of airships into the field.”
“So,” Alex said, getting back to the subject at hand. “Do you have it?”
Iggy pulled his green-backed rune book from his shirt pocket with a theatrical flair and tore out a page, passing it to Alex. The construct on the paper was delicate and complicated. Alex recognized the foundations of his finding rune, but instead of the nodes that would trace a person’s essence, there was a rune he didn’t know.
“This is a transmutation rune,” Iggy said, indicating the new part.
Alex shook his head.
“I don’t know that one.”
“It’s based on ancient alchemy,” Iggy said, dropping into his lecture voice. “Years ago, alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold, so they used a bit of real gold as a sort of catalyst. The rune operates on the same principle.”
“So it will turn lead into gold?” Mendes asked.
Iggy chortled at that.
“No,” he said. “Mostly this rune is used in developing countries to purify tainted drinking water. The idea is that you use a small sample of pure water and make the polluted water change to match it.”
“So how does that help Alex find the fog machine?” Sorsha asked.
“The original rune uses the symbol for change,” Iggy said. “I substituted the one for duplicate, or exact match in this case. The finding rune will use a small sample of something and find the best example of that thing inside its radius.”
“And since no one else is going to be using Dr. Burnham’s Genesis Water,”Alex pulled the stoppered bottle from his pocket and set it on the table, “the only thing the rune should lock on to is the fog machine itself.”
“Let’s get started, then,” Sorsha said, sounding tired.
Alex went to the wall where Iggy’s vault door stood open.
“Do you mind?” he asked his mentor.
Iggy nodded, and Alex shut the door. Iggy pulled the ornate key out of the lock on the outside. Immediately the door melted into the wall, leaving no trace that it had been there. As Iggy stepped back, Alex pulled out his red rune book. He tore out a page with a vault rune on it, licked the page, stuck it to the wall, and then ignited it. A moment later his own heavy vault door appeared.
Using his own ornate key, Alex pulled the door open and stepped inside to retrieve his kit bag and his maps and compass. Leaving the door open, he went to the massive kitchen table and rolled out his map of Manhattan.
“What if the machine isn’t on the island?” Sorsha asked.
Alex opened the cigar box where he kept his jade figurines and the brass compass he used with finding runes.
“We know it’s in the city,” he said, using the figurines to weigh down the ends of his map. “If it’s not in Manhattan, I’ll make more of these runes and we’ll use them around the city until we find the machine.”
Sorsha looked as if she wasn’t happy with that answer, but she didn’t say anything. Alex put the battered brass compass down on top of the map, then folded the modified finding rune and set it on top. To that, he added the bottle of Genesis Water, placing it on top of the folded rune.
Taking out his lighter, Alex cleared his mind. He thought about what he knew of the fog machine and the man who had created it. When he was satisfied that he had it firmly in his mind, he squeezed his lighter and ignited the flash paper.
Usually when Alex ignited a finding rune, it burst into a glowing orange symbol that hovered over the compass. This time the rune was a sickly shade of yellowish-green, and it didn’t spin so much as wobbled like a wounded bird. Eventually the needle in the battered compass began to spin with it until the rune popped and fizzled out of existence.
“Did it work?” Sorsha asked.
Alex put his finger and thumb gently on the edges of the compass and moved it slowly across the map. As he did so, the needled stayed pointing squarely at a spot near the South Side docks.
“Here,” he said, sliding the compass across the map until the needle began to spin. He lifted the compass off the map, which broke its connection, and pointed to the spot directly under it.
Sorsha took a minute to study the area, then put out her hand to Alex.
“Take my hand,” she said.
Alex knew what she had in mind, and he held his hands up and away from her offered one.
“Just like that?” he said, incredulous.
“We don’t have time to waste,” she said, giving him an exasperated look.
“Do you mind if I get a few things first?”
Sorsha rolled her eyes but acquiesced. Alex packed up his crime scene kit, then headed back to his vault.
“Follow me,” he said to Redhorn and Mendes. The pair of them exchanged looks but followed Alex into the extra-dimensional room. Alex took off his jacket and hung it on the standing coat rack inside the door before heading to his gun cabinet. First, he took down his shoulder holster and put it on, then he shoved his 1911 into it after checking that it had a full magazine. He pulled two other magazines from a shelf in the cabinet and slipped them into the elastic holders on the opposite side from his gun. One of them had a white stripe painted on the bottom, indicating that it held special rounds, the ones Alex had inscribed with a spell-breaker rune.
Satisfied that he was as prepared as he could be, Alex took down his Browning A-5 and offered it to Redhorn.
“No thanks,” he said, opening his jacket to reveal his own 1911. “I prefer this.”
Alex shrugged and offered the shotgun to Mendes. She thought about it for a second, then accepted the weapon, checking the magazine expertly.
“One more thing,” Alex said, opening the cupboard door below the gun cabinet. He withdrew a heavy bag, much like his kit, and passed it to Redhorn. “There’s a trench coat in there,” Alex said.
“When we get where we’re going, open the bag and put it on, just make sure I’m at least twenty feet away when you do it.”
Redhorn looked confused as Alex pulled on his suit jacket.
“Why?” he asked.
“The coat has five shield runes on it,” Alex explained. “They’ll stop bullets from killing you, at least until they run out.”
“How many bullets can they stop?” he asked.
“One per rune.”
“Then why don’t you put a hundred on there?” Mendes asked.
“Shield runes don’t work well in large groups,” Alex explained. “The most you can have at one time is five.”
“Why do I have to wait to put it on?” Redhorn asked.
“Because I have two of them left on my jacket,” Alex said. “If more than five get too close together, they start to lose their effectiveness. Just leave it in the shielded bag until we get there.”
Redhorn nodded, hefting the heavy bag.
“You’re all right, Lockerby,” he said. “But if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it.” His voice was gruff, but he wore a half-smile.
“If you’re quite finished in there,” Sorsha’s impatient voice drifted in from the kitchen. “We should be going.”
Redhorn and Mendes exchanged worried looks, and Alex didn’t blame them. Teleportation might be fast, but it was a horrible way to get around.
Alex followed the feds back into the kitchen and shut his vault door.
“It was very thoughtful of you to provide Agent Mendes with a cannon,” Sorsha said with a raised eyebrow.
“We’re going to confront people who stole a secret project,” Alex said with a shrug. “They might be jealous chemists...but they could just as easily be dangerous mobsters, so I figured we’d better be prepared.”
Sorsha gave him a hard look.
“You’ll be with me,” she said as if that explained everything. “You won’t have anything to fear.”
Alex stepped close to her and dropped his voice so that only she could hear him.
“The last time that happened, I lost several decades of my life and you almost died.”