In Plain Sight

The fabric covers on the sofa had been slashed open and every pillow was cut. The doors and drawers of a standing secretary cabinet were open and their contents spilled on the floor. Every cupboard in the tiny kitchen stood open, even the door to the range. No stone seemed to have gone unturned.

“All right,” he said to the empty room. “Let’s get to work.”

A sweep with his lantern revealed fingerprints all over, but not as many as he’d expected. Whoever tossed Thomas’ place must have worn gloves. He did, however, find an excessive amount of bodily fluids in the bedroom. Thomas might have been a bachelor, but he wasn’t spending all his nights alone, that much was clear.

Maybe his exercise partner can tell me what he was working on. On the other hand, if he has a girlfriend, why hasn’t she reported him missing?

After the silverlight, Alex used the ghostlight to look for magic. Being that Thomas was a runewright, it wasn’t surprising that his apartment lit up like a neon sign. There were protection runes on the door and runes of silence on the walls, ceiling, and floor to keep out noise from his neighbors. A few runes written on flash paper littered the floor, but these were all basic. The interesting runes were written on Thomas Rockwell’s kitchen table. A large central rune decorated the tabletop with at least four nodes, and six other runes wound around it. Alex knew most of the runes, but he’d never seen a casting this complex before. The big rune was for concealment — it was almost exactly like the one Alex had put on his book safe in Iggy’s library. The others all dealt with either privacy or finding.

Alex took out a pad of paper from his kit and meticulously copied the construct. It looked like something to prevent people spying on Thomas, magically or otherwise.

Something a man working on a revolutionary new rune might do.

Alex wondered why it was so intricate. There were better runes Thomas could have used that would make the construct simpler and more effective. Rune casting was always a balance between simplicity and power. Adding nodes to a central rune could make it more specific and therefore more powerful, but the more complicated a rune got, the more a runewright ran the risk of conflicts and backlash.

Satisfied that no out-of-place magic was operating in Thomas’ apartment, Alex packed away the ghostlight burner and turned to the mess on the floor. Clearly whoever got here ahead of him had decided that those things weren’t worth keeping, so it was likely they wouldn’t be of use to him either. Still, he had to check. Anything he could learn about Thomas’ life leading up to his disappearance would help when he cast his own finding rune.

Alex pulled the dining table to the center of the room, then put his multi-lamp on top of it. From his kit, he extracted another burner and clipped it in place, then lit it. He took the covers off the other three faces of the lamp, letting the amberlight inside fill the whole room. Amberlight looked just like its name implied, a ruddy reddish-yellow glow. Everywhere the light touched, rusty-brown shapes began to appear in the air. Iggy called amberlight, Newton’s first law of motion applied to time. If you shone amberlight on a chair, it would create an image of that chair in the place where it usually stood.

An object under amberlight showed where it was usually at rest.

As the light filtered out of the lantern and filled the room, Alex took a pair of yellow spectacles from his kit and clipped them to his nose. The amberlight after-images snapped into sharp focus, and Alex could see the room as it had been before it had been wrecked. The sofa had stood against the back wall opposite a bookcase that now lay in the center of the room, next to the open secretary cabinet. Alex returned them to their places, allowing the light to shine where they had been. A shower of book images rose up from the floor and flowed up onto the bookcase, each coming to rest where it had been. Several flickered, more indistinct than the others — these were books Thomas moved regularly, and Alex traced each one down where they lay on the floor and set them aside.

Moving around the room, Alex rearranged the furniture and picked up anything that looked important or often used. It took over an hour but when he finally blew out the amberlight burner he had a stack of books, papers, and curios to examine.

* * *