by Devin Hanson
"Eighth. He'd supersede me."
"He has much to gain."
"Makes him desperate. He'd try anything."
"So giving up on hunting the brooder isn't an option, then?"
"Not even remotely," Jules agreed pleasantly.
"I'm so glad I knew all this before we set out."
Jules laughed. "Would you have done anything differently?"
It was Andrew's turn to laugh, though it was rueful. "Not a thing. Except maybe make sure you wore your cloak."
Jules flapped her good hand, a parody of someone talking incessantly. "So you've mentioned."
Andrew ate for a few minutes in silence. "I still am having trouble believing I'm sitting on a mountaintop with the woman eighth in line for the throne. What are you doing up here?"
Jules shrugged. "My father all but disinherited me. Legally I'm still in line, he can't change that, but I have no money from his name."
"But--"
"Money counts for more than you'd think in this world. Happily, I no longer have to deal with my father's money, nor his rules. If it came down to it, the Viscount could raise an army to challenge my right. I'd have myself alone to defend my honor." She snorted. "Assuming they could find me."
"The Viscount?"
"My father's brother."
"Oh. But... shouldn't you be in a court somewhere?"
"Ugh. Spare me. You're beginning to sound like my father."
"Sorry."
"You should be! It's all a colossal joke, you see. When my father married my mother, he was marrying below his station, if you can believe that. It wasn't until after my brother was born that Delran led his armies to victory and claimed the crown as his own."
"And suddenly your father became very close to the succession."
"You've no idea. Three people died in the war that would have succeeded first. And four more of disease and childbirth. Before the war, my father was more like Trent. Nowhere near the succession, and happy that way."
"So, in theory, though, you could succeed."
She sighed. "Only if we went back to war. Which isn't going to happen, not any time soon. Or a plague broke out, gods forbid. All that is irrelevant though. I'm no more raised to be a queen than you are to be a king. Leave that headache to someone who wants it, that's my philosophy."
"And so you're on a hilltop with a gunny hunting a dragon."
"Much more exciting, you have to admit. Though my gunny is turning into a Runemaster, which is equally exciting. I'd rather be having an adventure with a Runemaster than a gunny."
"I'm working on it. I saw something... I'm not sure what, with the runes last night. Couldn't quite put my finger on it. It's there... I saw something different... but I'm not sure what it is, or if I'm just deceiving myself out of desperation."
"Hah. Desperation. You've been doing this for less than a week and you're desperate already. Andrew, I've known men who've taken a year to make their first functional Tan. At the Academy, at least a week is expected."
"I don't see what is so hard about it," Andrew shrugged, embarrassed, "just look at the rune, draw what you see."
"And that is why you're going to be a Runemaster before the week is out."
"Wait, that's it? One rune perfected and I'm a Runemaster?"
"What? You wanted more? Yeah, that's all it takes. I'm a Runemaster too. I have mastery of four runes."
"Which?"
"Tch tch. That'd be telling. Again with the secrecy. You'll catch on eventually, Andrew. In the Guild, secrecy is almost as important as learning the runes themselves."
"Seems self-defeating to me," Andrew grumbled.
"Collect the power at the top," Jules illustrated with her hands, "don't let it diffuse downward. Most people study for years before learning a master rune."
"Not you?"
"Not me," Jules agreed. "I learned my first master rune after my second year of study."
"How long did you stay in the Academy? If you don't mind me asking."
"I don't mind. I left halfway through my third year. Trent had taken notice of me, the rising star then learned who I was. He made my life miserable with his attentions. I had to leave. That or kill him."
"Maybe you should have," Andrew sighed.
"Finally! Someone who agrees! I complained to Milkin and he put it before the Board of Professors. Said Trent was harassing me."
"So Trent should have stopped?"
"Trent's father donated three hundred thousand crowns the next day."
"And money is power."
"And power ought to get you the girl. But I heard about it and left the Academy before the sun came up. The professors still hadn't wrapped their wits about everything or I would never have gotten out of the city. Once I was out, though, they couldn't stop me. My admissions lapsed the next month and Academy law no longer applied to me."
"You can't go back?"
She laughed. "I wouldn't want to. And no, I can't. Not while Trent is there. I can go into Andronath, but I'm no longer a student of the Academy. I can't gain access to the vaults." This last was said with a faraway look in her eyes.
"The vaults," Andrew asked, "are they really that impressive?"
Jules smiled sadly. "Someday, hopefully, you'll get to see them yourself."
That more or less killed the conversation and after a while Andrew dug his scale out to study it again.
"You spend a lot of time staring at that thing," Jules observed.
"Well yeah. That's what Milkin told me to do. So I'm doing it."
Jules leaned back against her pack and stretched her legs out. "He told me the same thing. Not that I listened, of course."
"Of course." Andrew just barely suppressed a smile before it broke into a laugh.
"Hey now, don't judge me!" Jules smacked Andrew on the arm.
"Not judging. Just studying. Or trying to."
"No judging until you're a master too. Then you can judge all you want and I will eat it up gladly. I suspect you'll be teaching me soon enough."
Andrew held the scale up to the light, trying to find the feeling of having something just not quite right that he had the night before. "You're awfully humble."
"I'm just enjoying being able to lord it over you while I still can."
Andrew sighed and put the scale down. "Right now that's looking like all eternity."
"Can't find it?"
"Nope."
"Well, mastery doesn't come in a week," Jules said smugly. "Why don't I teach you a new rune then?"
Andrew nodded, brightening back up again. "I really want to learn the Airweight Saying."
"You don't aim low, do you. If I teach you that Saying, that means I have to carve it out for you."
"Or you could just point it out on my scale. I'll learn from that."
Jules laughed. "I doubt you have the eyes to see the Airweight Saying without a magnifying glass. They're usually pretty tiny."
"Oh. Well, you got anything better to do?"
Jules made a face. "I guess not. The brooder already fed for the day, so we've nothing to do until morning tomorrow." She heaved a sigh. "Okay, first thing to learn is the Saying itself. If you understand the Saying, the runes flow together in your mind and the carving becomes easier." She cleared her throat, hummed a bar. "Right. Listen carefully:
Bind the air to the body,
Keep the air held close,
The body will keep,
The air will bind."
"It's a poem?" Andrew asked when she finished.
"Hardly. Any poet who tried saying that rhymed would be thrown out on his ear. No, it's a Saying. It's some clever human putting words to the sequence of runes as they appear. Note that 'body' changes based on what is being carved. Lets saying you're carving it on stone. The runes would therefore be
On Ir Da An Ir At Da An Ir On
It's a mess, and the runes are pronounced somewhat differently since half of them are runewords. The Saying is pronounced
On Idani At'dani O
n
Much cleaner."
"Idani, that's four runes?"
"As well as At'dani. The pronunciation gets shortened quite a bit."
"So if I was to transmute iron, I would use the Ca rune instead of Da, and the Saying would be On Icani At'cani On."
"Exactly."
"What happens if you put the wrong body in the Saying?"
"Nothing happens. You've either wasted a colossal amount of time or a lot of vitae."
"I see. I already know all the runes except the body runes, why would it be hard to teach?"
"You know a few source runes and simple runewords. Care to guess how to join an Ir and an On? Or how to finish the Saying so the On's match up?"
Andrew waved his hands in defeat. "Okay. I submit. Teach me, great Master!"
"That's more like it. We'll do it first on paper, using the wood rune. You haven't learned that one yet. Here, I'll draw it out." She drew a fast Me and handed the sheet over. "You practice that while I draw out the Saying for you."
Andrew nodded and used the paper to find the rune on his scale. There weren't many and it took him a few seconds before he isolated the particular arrangement of whorls and hash marks. Learning the rune only took him a few minutes. He was starting to get the hang of how the peculiarities of the runes flowed. It seemed to speak to him on a primal level, like a harmonic just out of the range of hearing. He knew when he had the rune correct, it just seemed right to him. Almost as if he had known all along. Of course the swirl was just so, how could it be any other way? It's the only way to say Ca.
Jules had the Saying ready for him when he looked up to let her know he had finished.
"You have the eye for runing," she said with a nod. "Milkin has an eye for talent and I guess he was right about you. Said you were going to be the next Runelord."
"I don't even know what that is."
"You'll find out eventually. That's above even Milkin's ability. We're talking master Sayings. Among other things. But first you must learn this Saying."
"How many do you know?" The question was out before he realized it was probably bad form to ask.
The look on Jules' face confirmed his fears but she replied anyway, if a bit stiffly. "Scores. Hundreds. I don't know, I stopped counting. You get so you pick them up quickly."
Andrew ducked his head. "Sorry, I shouldn't have asked."
Jules sighed. "You couldn't know. It's strange for me, talking openly about runes with someone. Even the professors can be tight-lipped sometimes. You have to fight and scheme for every shred of knowledge in the Academy. If you lose favor with a professor, you could lose a month or a term without learning a single thing."
"I don't understand the Academy at all."
"Course you don't," Jules sighed. "You're a merchant's son. It'd be like if people refused to teach you how to add and subtract. Imagine if they made you fight for every hint of how to add a column of figures together."
"It'd be impossible to learn anything."
"No, you would figure it out eventually. People are adding all around you, eventually you'll catch on."
"No wonder it takes people years to learn to rune."
"The Alchemist's Guild," Jules said with a seated bow and a spoiled flourish of her cloak. "Welcome."
Andrew laughed and put his attention on the Saying that Jules had drawn. The Saying was a complex knot of runes, each intertwined with the next. With the spoken Saying running in his head, he followed the runes from one line to the next, ending with the connected On's back where it started.
"I can see why this might take a while to carve."
"It takes long enough on paper, and that's just drawing it out. Imagine what it'd be like etching it into a steel structural beam. Could take days to do it right."
"And if you slipped just once..."
Jules made a motion of crumpling up a sheet of paper and tossing it over her shoulder. "Sand it down and start over again."
"No wonder you didn't want to carve it into the stone."
"No wonder," Jules agreed peaceably. "So. Think you can copy it?"
Andrew picked up the paper scribed with the Saying and found it weighed exactly nothing. It drifted in the slightest breeze and Andrew had to actually hold onto it so the sheet didn't blow out the shelter and whip off in the wind. "Yes." Andrew said then looked closer at it. "Though it will require study."
"That's my boy. I'm going to take a nap. Wake me when you've got it down." She rolled up in her cloak and lay with her back to the fire and within seconds her breathing settled out.
Slightly envious of her ability to just fall asleep at will, Andrew bent to the task of learning the saying. He weighed the sheet down with a rock so he didn't have to always hold onto it then picked up the pencil Jules had set aside. "Bind the air to the body," he whispered, "Keep the air held close. On Icani."
The meaning of the words flowed through his pencil and he drew it out only checking Jules' Saying a few times in the process. "The body will keep, the air will bind. At'cani On." He finished the Saying and lifted his hands away. The paper shifted in the breeze, but stayed put. As a first effort, it surprised even Andrew.
He fed his attempt to the campfire then bent over the pad of paper again. On Icani At'cani On. Over and over again. Eventually, the pronunciation of the Saying came to equal, in his mind, the concept of the Saying he was drawing.
His last effort, done without referral to Jules' Saying, floated on the air, completely weightless. Satisfied, he nudged Jules back awake.
"I did it," he announced happily.
"Hrmm?" Jules sat up and cuffed her hair back into obedience. "What did you do?"
"The Airweight Saying. It's complete now." He showed her his piece of paper drifting idly in the shelter's drafts.
Jules rubbed sleep from her eyes and leaned out to look at the sun. "It's only been a little over an hour," she complained. "I can't get any sleep around you."
"Once I got the meaning of the Saying, it became easy," he explained. "On Icani! Makes total sense."
Jules sighed. "Next you'll be asking me to teach you alchemy. Which," she added, "was not part of the bargain."
"So now what?"
"Now we duel."
Jules defeated him soundly and repeatedly and finally Andrew put his hands up in defeat. "Okay. Okay. You're better at this than I am."
"I would certainly hope so," Jules said. "I'd be horribly embarrassed if I weren't."
"I haven't found anything different about Tan this time."
"Maybe you're looking at the wrong thing."
"What do you mean? I look at my scale for the perfect rune."
Jules sighed, clearly frustrated but equally unwilling to just give him the answer. "A Runemaster knows his tools as well as his runes," she said cryptically and threw his pencil at him. "Study those as well."
Andrew picked up the pencil and left the shelter to set up the wind sieve. The sun was starting to set, so he stayed out to watch the end of another day. He turned the pencil over in his hands, glancing down at it occasionally. It was the same pencil he'd been using ever since his trip started, if somewhat shorter now. Well, she said to study it, so he sat down with his back to a rock and bent his will to the task.
Hours and hours of studying runes had given him a certain mindset where he forced himself to look objectively. See what you see, not what you think you see. The pencil was shorter than it was a few days ago through repeated whittling to sharpen the tip. It was a manufactured pencil, expensive, a round rod of wood carefully split and hollowed out, then glued back together with a thin strip of pressed charcoal in the middle.
Unlike the pencils he had used growing up, this one had an oblong charcoal center. It was subtle, only about a half again wider than it was tall, but enough that he had taken to holding his hand in such a way as to only hit the edge of the charcoal rather than the flat.
He thought back to the many samples Jules had drawn for him and released that her drawings had subtle variatio
ns in the thickness of width of the lines. That was no accident. The pencil was made to facilitate such variations. But the runes on his scale did not have variations in the width of the lines. Understanding flirted at the edge of his consciousness then left without Andrew coming to any conclusion.
The sun set the rest of the way and Andrew picked himself up off the ground and made his way back to the shelter, his back stiff from sitting still for so long. The wind sieve had filled the waterskin while he studied his pencil and watched the sun set and he took it back with him.
Jules was in the middle of changing the bandages on her hand, so he helped her unwrap the linen and rinse down her burns. The speed of her recovery was shocking. Andrew was used to small burns taking weeks to heal, but this major burn, almost completely covering her hand, was nothing more than tender pink skin. In the few places where the blisters had burst she had scabs forming, but they were firm and didn't leak puss or fluid.
"It's almost magical," he said as he helped bind her hand back up again. "I've never seen a burn heal so fast and so clean."
Jules waved it off. "Seems normal to me. I'm hungry. You?"
It wasn't until after they had eaten and Jules had curled up with her book that Andrew realized how thoroughly she had changed the subject. He thought about bringing the topic up again then decided to let it slide. He had plenty of time to get his endless questions answered.
His mind was strangely alert, though, not ready for sleeping at all, so he dug the scale out of his pouch and set to examining it again. After a few minutes he asked, "Do you have a magnifying glass?"
Without a comment, Jules dug one out of her pack and handed it over, the smug smile on her face making him wonder why he hadn't asked for one before.
Andrew turned the scale until he found one of the clearer Tans and peered at it through the glass. It was quite a different experience and Andrew was somewhat astonished to find the grooves in the scale were not uniform in depth. In fact, when he tilted the scale a bit so the light from the fire was shining more obliquely, he could see the depths of the grooves were quite erratic.
"Jules, I--"
Jules held up a finger to her lips without looking up from her book. "Shh. No telling."
Excited by his new discovery, he set about memorizing the depths. It was like learning the rune all over again. The grooves seemed to have a depth varying from about seventy to a hundred percent of the deepest part. The merchant in him latched onto the similarity between the pencil and the depths of the grooves. He was willing to bet everything he owned that the comparable proportion was no accident.