In Plain Sight

“It’s where we would have gone,” Alex said. “Assuming it actually worked, this rune will transport everyone within ten feet to a spot over the north Atlantic about a mile off the coast of Greenland. We’d appear a hundred feet in the air, then the magic would teleport me back to a secure location.”

Sorsha’s eyebrows rose and she let out a soft whistle.

“I was right to have Davis and Warner leave the room.” She released Alex’s arm and sat back. “Of course, I’d have been very angry once I teleported home.”

Alex put on his most charming smile.

“If you teleported home,” he said. “Falling one hundred feet into freezing water is disorienting, and the temperature would send you into shock in under a minute. After four minutes your body shuts down and you drown. The Titanic disaster taught us important lessons.”

“You are not at all what I expected, Mr. Lockerby.” Sorsha looked at him hard, as if trying to look through him. “How did you power it? It must have taken years to prepare.”

“It uses a life rune,” Alex admitted. “I figure if I ever have to use it, I’d rather part with a year of my life than all of it.”

If Sorsha judged him for this line of thought, she gave no indication.

“Perhaps you can be some use to me after all,” she said, taking the folder off the desk and pulling out the photographs of the runes. “These runes are pictures of original drawings that came into the possession of the British government during the World War.” She began putting the pictures back out on the desk as she spoke. “No one knows where they came from, but they relate to a story about a Lore book called the Archimedean Monograph, supposedly written by Archimedes of Syracuse.”

“The guy who ran naked in the streets when his tub overflowed,” Alex said. Sorsha smirked.

“Something like that. He was reputed to be a runewright of incredible skill. According to the story, he wrote down his most powerful runes on sheets of vellum. When he died, those runes were passed around among lesser runewrights who didn’t know what they had until eventually they came into the possession of Leonardo DaVinci. He collected Archimedes’ pages together into a book and began studying them intently. There are supposed to be DaVinci’s handwritten notes all through the book.”

Alex whistled. Everybody knew DaVinci’s work as a runewright; he was one of the great masters. Just to be able to read his notes on Archimedes’ runes would be incredible.

“From DaVinci, the book went through the hands of many great runewrights; Rene Descartes, Sir Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin and others. Each man added notes to the pages. Somewhere along the way, it began to be called the Archimedean Monograph, and a powerful protection rune was put on the book so that only a worthy runewright would be able to possess it.”

Alex had to hold his hands to keep them from shaking. The knowledge in that book could be life-changing. A Lore book that had come down through the greatest minds in history, what secrets would that hold?

“What happened to it?” he asked, a little too eagerly. Sorsha shook her head, her platinum hair flying in front of her eyes.

“No one knows, but many have tried to find it.”

Alex picked up the picture of the finding rune.

“Is that what this is?” he asked. “Some kind of treasure map with the book at its end.”

“That’s what we believe,” Sorsha said. “A man named Quinton Sanders believed it, too.”

“Who’s he?”

“Sanders was a research assistant at the government’s runic studies facility,” Sorsha said. Alex didn’t know that the government even had a research facility for runes. “The facility has an archive with many Lore books in it. During the war, the United States acquired the originals in these pictures from the British Government.”

Alex didn’t ask if acquired meant stole.

“Since they were supposed to be from the Monograph, the government put their top people to work deciphering the runes. We think we know what most of them are, but all work was stopped in 1926.”

“Why?” Alex couldn’t imagine being ordered to stop working on something so interesting. Sorsha fixed him with a hard look before responding.

“Because, of the thirteen runewrights they had working on the project, twelve of them went mysteriously missing.”

Alex felt a cold chill run down his back that hat nothing to do with the Ice Queen.

“So how does Quinton Sanders fit into this story?” he wondered.

“Two months ago, a magical alarm was triggered when someone opened the file on the Monograph. Quinton Sanders was the only person in the office that day who had the proper keys to get into the secure archive.”

“Let me guess,” Alex said. “He went missing.”

Sorsha shook her head. “No, we traced him here, to New York. Since we have pictures of the original pages, I cast a scrying spell to alert me any time any of these runes are cast. So far, this one’s been cast twice,” she indicated the elaborate finding rune. “I couldn’t track the first one, but the second led us to Thomas Rockwell’s building.”