The Rules of the Order

  I heed the runemasters’ counsel, for they have been where I am and thrived.

  I will teach what I know to my disciples, for their next rune may be the one they need to inscribe.

  I am the secret that shields my peers, for the mundane will never accept those who can change their world at will.

  Rumored to have been written during a night of excessive drunkenness.

  Apocryphal fourth rule of the Order:

  I obey the First Runemaster because Nimrod will not lift his finger for me if I don’t.

  Prologue: Danube, 2001

  That Indiana Jones speech about seventy percent of archaeology being in the library was a lie. Okay, not exactly a lie, but the thirty percent outdoor could sometimes feel like ninety percent of the suck in your life.

  For an American fresh undergraduate student from CUNY Hunter College, newly started on the track toward the hallowed Ph.D., like Stefan, the occasion to spend two months in exotic Romania, digging up the mysteries of the past should have been good times. On a good dig. Dozens of young students, some work during the day, bonfires and parties in the evenings.

  Good digs were the large Corded Ware and Eurasian invasion sites, like the one two hundred miles south where most of the others from Hunter College were.

  An early Iron Age farm previously excavated and deemed “unexceptional” was boring stuff for the local authorities, even if they wanted an underfunded follow-up and had managed to persuade some academic archeology departments to do so with some quid-pro-quo. Thus, you got a few undergrads on their own, with a single post-doctorate to manage them, under a pair of tents provided by the local government near the Danube. At the last minute, the local Romanian official and associated student had both bailed out, citing more significant concerns and coming only once a week to check on things, leaving only Stefan and Roberto, with a good-sized tent each for the next seven weeks.

  And Roberto liked 10 hours of sleep each day, so… no wild evening entertainment. If he wasn’t reading in his tent, he was sleeping. With, thankfully, no snores.

  At that point, Stefan had almost expected the rain to last the two months scheduled for the dig. But save for the initial two days when they arrived, the weather had turned out to be excellent, and so work was good. Boring but easy. Slowly dig, snap a picture with the wondrous new digital camera provided by Roberto’s Italian university, pencil notes and diagrams. Rinse, repeat. Nothing exciting, truly, but nothing awful either.

  At the moment, though, Stefan was slightly annoyed. Because of a leather bag in near-perfect condition.

  One simply does not find a leather bag in that condition buried in an Iron Age farm. 19th-century leather in the right conditions, okay, maybe. But leather surviving more than a couple of centuries completely intact? No way. Stefan knew that meant the bag just had to be a modern item. Someone digging a hole at one point during the last century to hide stuff… and that almost certainly meant some of the items they were going to find – or maybe had already cataloged – could be items from somewhere else.

  There was no real pressing need to ask Roberto what he thought about that particular problem since they were on a mere catalog mission, with maybe a few follow-up boring papers to write later, so Stefan carefully snapped a picture of the bag on site, dug a little, snapped one more picture – ah, the wonders of digital and not having to swap film every half-hour – and finally moved the bag to a side box, before resuming to dig bronze pins. There had been a lot of those bronze “pins” all over the farmhouse site, and the boxes of artifacts were starting to overflow with them.

  Stefan would label the bag, of course, and whatever it contained because that was what you did, even with anomalies. But it also meant he would need a lot more care in documenting the find’s structure because it was a disturbed one. Each item would require extra documentation to make sure it belonged to the original site and was not some unrelated shit. The last thing anyone wanted was someone claiming advanced steel tools were made at the end of the bronze age that would turn out five years later to have originated in a factory just before WW2.

  Stefan started to hate this summer.

  The pictures were transferred on the big smart cards for safe storage, and Roberto had already retreated to his own tent. That left Stefan alone with the day’s haul, and notably the bag.

  After a long sigh, he finally started on it. A first inspection made Stefan wonder precisely when the bag had been made. It was almost pristine, yet didn’t feel like a modern one. No straps, no steel buckles, no reinforcements. Just leather, sewn with leather strings and closed with a larger one. Weighting the bag had left Stefan with the impression that there were a handful of square-ish blocks in it.

  Even with care, the larger string was surprisingly easy to untie. Stefan finally lifted the flap, looking at the inside.

  There were twenty, maybe a bit more, small rectangular metal blocks that looked like bronze. Just seeing them confirmed Stefan’s impression of a relatively recent artifact because the bronze was definitely not corroded or pitted as one would expect from old stuff buried for dozens of centuries. Earth preserved things, but not entirely.

  Making room on the table, Stefan carefully pulled them one by one from the bag, placing them in the order they came out and staring at them.

  The blocks were… weird. That was the word that came to mind. They looked like small bronze plaques with a slightly round border. All of the same size, slightly larger than a business card. They looked more like some children’s blocs rather than real archeological finds.

  And they were simultaneously empty and not empty. Stefan could not find a way to articulate the way they felt. Each plaque was plain, but it was like there should be something in the middle. The closest thing he could find to compare to was the blindspot illusion. When you place a line, focus on a dot to the side and close one eye. You knew the line had to be there, uninterrupted, but the middle of it was somehow absent.

  That’s how the plaques looked. Like there ought to be something, except he wasn’t seeing it. Even when looking straight at the plaque with both eyes wide open and moving to the side and back. Fingering the plaque left a rough impression of old scars dug in the bronze despite the relatively smooth look.

  Despite the lack of oxide, the bronze also felt antiquated. Stefan might be a fresh first-year master on his way to a full degree, but he’d still seen a few artifacts as a student. Maybe the bronze wasn’t as old as the pins he kept digging these last few weeks, but it had the ineffable weight of ages that one associated with millennia-old items despite the lack of patina.

  Not to be outsmarted, Stefan turned the digital camera on and snapped a picture of the first plaque. Then looked at it.

  The plaque picture was empty, as expected. Not entirely, because unlike when he was looking at the original directly, there was no intuition of an unseen bit. Just a rectangular, flat bronze… wait a minute… flat.

  Perfectly flat. Not a scar.

  Stefan lifted the plaque and compared it to the picture on the back of the camera. The plaque did indeed look the same smooth, almost but not quite polished. Yet he could feel the slight depression of scars, grooves into the bronze itself, despite none apparent.

  Stefan took a second picture. This one clearly showed his fingers holding the plaque. There was no groove under them, despite what his fingertip told him was right there.

  Stefan returned the plaque on the table and stared at it for a long time.

  If he had taken some of his carefully hoarded Belgian beer or opened one of the local ?uic? bottles the Romanians had left as a way to be forgiven for his abandonment, he might have thought himself drunk. But his mind was clear. There was a… something… that kept making him see a flat surface where his fingers felt the truth. The not-quite-visible feeling was not just an optical illusion of a tired brain.

  All the plaques had the same effect. Grooves that weren’t showing on camera but felt carved under his fingers, and the impression that there was something he should be seeing, except he wasn’t.

  All plaques, that is, except one. When he finally took it to image it, there was something akin to an electric shock at the back of his eyes.

  That particular plaque had a sinuous curve engraved on it. Like a yin-yang border, except it turned back and crossed the top of itself. Or maybe a very, very stylized “P” shape. But the shock didn’t come from the shape itself or at least seeing the shape.

  The shock was that he somehow knew the shape meant something like light. Light, as the banishing of darkness, the guide under the moonless night, the safety of coming home in the middle of the wilderness.

  It wasn’t just etched on the plaque; it was clear in his mind. Stefan closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his eyelids, he could feel-see the shape right at the edge of his awareness. Like a half-seen constellation of dots swimming in his eye right before trying to sleep.

  Stefan snapped open his eyes. The shape in his mind receded, but it remained there, in his memory, as clear as anything. And, of course, engraved in the middle of the bronze plaque he was holding.

  All the other plaques felt empty. There was no hint of something unseen at the edge of his awareness. They were just plain bronze plaques. It was as if seeing the Light shape had banished the rest of the plaques. Even the ones he’d looked at first now felt normal, or almost.

  At least the grooves were still there. He could feel them under his fingers, even if the plaques seemed plain, and pictures still showed no carvings whatsoever. Not only that, but snapping a digital picture of the Light plaque showed the same empty bronze flat rectangle as all the others, despite the evidence of his eyes.

  Well, Stefan knew what archeologists had always done prior to modern inventory techniques. Pulling a notebook, he set out to reproduce Light on the paper as best as possible. He was very careful, trying to match every turn and swirl of the original. The exact proportions, the turning, and even the order for the start and end of the continuous line felt very important.

  He ended up spending about half an hour making sure he had the exact correct shape. Then, to ensure he didn’t forget somehow, he wrote “Light?” under it. To remind himself what the shape felt like, just in case.

  The sun had finally set, and the butane lamp on the table was the only light to be seen. And now, Stefan was tired, as if he had spent the entire day writing for his final report or something. Copying the shape had exhausted not his physical reserves but his mental ones.

  Time to sleep.

  Despite going to sleep early, Roberto was never the first riser. This new day was no different, and thus, Stefan was seated with the largest mug of coffee he had, contemplating the notebook when Roberto’s tent flapped open, and the Italian doctoral candidate pulled out, groaning as usual.

  Stefan automatically pushed the other guy’s mug toward the coffee pot while trying to make sense of Light. The usual small grunt was his only answer as Roberto poured himself his own full mug. But then, Roberto would usually complain about the weaksauce coffee that Americans brewed, so a grunt was just his admission of defeat. If Roberto wanted more robust coffee, Italian-style, he could wake up earlier and make it himself, after all.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Trying to find inspiration?”

  “Not exactly, no, but…”

  “Well, staring at a blank page isn’t going to make this dig any better.”

  Stefan shot an incredulous eye toward Roberto.

  “What do you mean, blank page?”

  “Okay, a blank page with the word light and a big question mark. So you’re not seeing the light? Well, neither am I, and we’re on the wrong dig for that, that’s all.”

  Stefan almost asked Roberto if he was joking about not seeing the shape that was taking the entire page but stopped at the last moment. There was something going on that he clearly didn’t understand, but… asking your digging mate why he couldn’t see what you drew on an apparently empty page suddenly didn’t seem like the best of options.

  Roberto started to put bread slices on the table, greasy fake bacon and the usual breakfast stopped Stefan from too much wondering.

  The day had gone by, with more stratigraphy at the edges of the current trench, collections of bronze pins, the edge of another wall starting to show up – matching the previous dig extrapolations – and no more anomalous leather bags. As Roberto finally retreated to his tent, Stefan was starting to fret.

  The light extinguished in the senior’s tent, Stefan pulled out his notebook and stared again at his Light drawing. He knew how much time he’d spent to make it; the pen’s ink was clearly there… and yet, Roberto hadn’t seen it.

  Just like Stefan had been unable to see the other plaques’ content. Well, he now assumed that the plaques held shapes. But Roberto hadn’t commented anything about there being something he couldn’t make out. He really hadn’t seen anything.

  On impulse, Stefan pulled in the camera and snapped a picture of his notebook.

  There was nothing on the page except a simple “light?” handwritten at the bottom.

  Nothing made any sense. He had drawn himself the Light shape, copying the original bronze. Both the plaque and his notebook held the same picture. He’d made it with a basic pen, black ink on plain paper. But his own drawing didn’t show on the digital camera. Only the added word.

  Like the bronze plaques.

  Stefan didn’t really want to admit it, but this was… magic. Not the art of the illusionist, but real, otherworldly, off-reality magic. He was not only in the presence of magic, but he, Stefan, had somehow managed to make a piece of the same magic.

  Okay, maybe not very useful magic. Just a shape that couldn’t be seen by normal eyes or put on a picture. He wondered if a normal photographic film would be able to snap it, unlike the modern digital thing.

  At that moment, Stefan decided to hide that magic. If he indeed were the only one who could see Light, when no one else would, not even a camera, then it would be worse than useless to try to convince others that he was really writing stuff and the plaques held magic. That way lay men in white smocks and a jacket that laced on the back.

  After a short hesitation, he pulled out the camera’s storage pack and meticulously erased all saved pictures of the bag and its contents. He would need to relabel some things to avoid leaving holes in the inventory, but otherwise…

  Another day of trying to concentrate on the dig. And now, Stefan was starting to count the days until its scheduled end. In just 11 days, they would put back the protections over the site, pack the computer and tents, and drive back to Br?ila, then Bucharest, and back to their respective universities to finish writing up their meager findings, maybe a brief holiday in September before the academic season started again in earnest. And Stefan would have all the time he wanted to study the shape, which he was already pretty sure he’d never report.

  Yet the shape was still bothering him.

  There was this curious knowledge borne out of nowhere. The shape meant Light; he was sure of it. But he hadn’t seen anything spelled about… light. It was just a concept, drawn as a continuous twisting line.

  He tore out the copy he’d made and started to draw it anew from memory. The shape has imprinted itself so much in his awareness… could he do it again, just from his memory? When he was concentrating on it, he had the exact shape, like in the corner of his vision.

  The shape took form slowly. He was careful about the right, exact shape. It was kind of like being a medieval copyist, making a manuscript precisely the right way but working from memory.

  Finally, the Light was complete. He pushed away from the notebook, satisfied, then paused. Frowning, he pulled the paper closer and looked. There was something…

  He stood up and moved away from the table, holding the page. And, in the fading sunset, he looked at it… and at the very faint trace of glowing light coming out from the paper.

  1. The Ren Faire

  There are serious Renaissance Faires and non-serious Ren Faires. Once upon a time, when Marcus Skyler was a younger boy, barely ten, his father brought him to The Ren Faire, the South Californian one near Santa Fe. While the boy he had been at the time was a bit too young to appreciate it fully, it made a lasting impression on him, and became the ruler by which all others could be measured.

  Thus, even though he wasn’t a history fanatic, for him, a serious Ren Faire entailed a serious attempt at reconstitution. Period food, period costumes, period crafts, and skilled performers that looked like they were straight out of Medieval Europe. But the “Maedievalle Fayre” was not medieval in the slightest and barely an open market fair the way it should have been then.

  To his disgust, this was more of a trap for random cosplayers trying to feel like their favorite fantasy novel while people were trying to pass greasy barbecue as “authentic food”. But Brigit had stumbled upon the advertisement for it on her social network. It wasn’t far from home, and she worked at him for four days before he admitted defeat and agreed to go for the Sunday. She should have known it would make him grind his teeth for the whole day, but she’d kept at it, and he still had caved in way too quickly.

  If he had done some research, he might have been able to anticipate this and warn her in advance. But he’d trusted her and was now paying the price.

  Of course, neither had bothered to rent something to wear beforehand, and the faire had a full-on cosplay rule. So, to add insult to injury, both he and Brigit had to pay some exorbitant price to rent a cheap-ass velvet doublet, long robes, and some floating flared pants for him to put over his clothes. At least his boots had been deemed okay. If he had had to change shoes for whatever was there, he would… probably have snapped and left Brigit there to go sulk in the car. Adulthood be damned. You might sometimes swallow your pride, but only if the goal is worth the price.

  After an hour, it was starting to feel like it would have been the best option. There was a blatant scam going on every twenty feet. Fake foods that had probably been frozen a hundred miles from there, medieval crafts that still had “Made in China” tags on them, and demonstrations of skills he would probably be better at without even practicing. The smith’s forge at least sported a real fire, but it was a mere excuse to display impractical knives to sell. This was not a medieval fair, just an excuse to nickel and dime visitors – which accounted for the incredibly cheap entrance price, costume renting excluded.

  At least there were no longer people trying to sell them their pictures. The age of the selfie had ended that particular scam. And Brigit had finally found most of her online friends, and they happily went from tent to tent without worrying about him anymore, as he followed, looking around in the hope of finding something truly interesting.

  The Great Oberthorpe was looking like one more of the latest fashion riders. Surfing on the slowly waning tide of the Harry Potter spinoffs, with a font straight out of the title movies, it was showing “magical wands”, blank papers “spellbooks” haughtily named “codexes” – which was mostly wrong, both grammatically and given the way they were bound at the top rather than the side – and, of course, lots of fantasy stuffed animals that, at least, looked professionally done. The jackalopes and six-legged ferrets looked almost like genuine beasts frozen into action by death and preserved by the taxidermist's art. At least the fur matched all over, which was more than what he’d seen in some stores for Christmas with plushies. Just the fact that you had an obvious fantasy fiction mixed in with the rest showed how serious about accuracy the “Fayre” organizers were.

  There was, however… something odd about the store. Something that bothered Marcus, without him being able to fully articulate what exactly twigged his sense.

  The corner of the tent store had a large wooden board that looked like it was made to snap magnets on it despite the wood-looking finish. But the board was entirely empty. Nothing written or pinned, no fancy inscriptions, no price lists for overpriced garbage. Just an empty board taking all of a corner for no visible purpose.

  And what was really bothering Marcus was that he felt like there should be something written on the wood. For some reason, it felt like the empty place was offending him personally. Which, in a way, was odd since he hated the rest of the merchandise and not just this tent in particular.

  He peered at the board more closely.

  Up close, the discrepancy was even more perceptible. There was nothing, yet he was certain that there should be something. Like it was missing, just around the corner of his eye.

  Straightening up, he noticed the shopkeeper looking at him.

  Seeming to be interested in anything in that store is not a good idea, Marcus thought. Any of those scammers would immediately latch on the slightest hint of interest in anything displayed. And, of course, this was the case, and the shopkeeper beelined toward him.

  “Greetings, my Lord. May I interest you in some of our other merchandise?”

  “No thanks. Just looking.”

  “We do have more serious items, available only… outside of the faire.”

  For a second, the shopkeeper had looked like he was going to break the cheap roleplay. The “online” term had been barely avoided. Marcus almost started to smile before remembering himself not to show too much interest. He steeled himself into a bored expression instead.

  “Here’s our card. Use it later to find out more whenever the pleasure takes you.”

  The shopkeeper retreated, having at least placed his business card in Marcus’s hand despite his projected lack of enthusiasm.

  Surprised, he looked more closely at the rectangle. The card was thick but felt almost like genuine parchment skin rather than thick paper or cardboard. Marcus doubted it was; genuine parchment would be too expensive for that. Besides, the business card was flat and rigid, like a thick cardboard one. It was sparse; just a store name and, of course, the anachronistic URL for visiting the online store. And the middle felt odd.

  It was feeling a bit like the wood board, in fact. Like there should be something written despite being blank. Usually, he’d have thrown the card in the closest trashcan – plastic bags disguised with wood – but he shoved it in his pocket for now. He’d have a look at it later.

  Moving along, he looked back at the Great Oberthorpe. The shopkeeper was looking at him intensely despite a couple beside him looking at the stuffed animals. Seeing him, the man gave a short nod and smile before finally turning back to the pair of better potential customers.

  Marcus felt like he had missed something important from the interaction.

  Brigit was still laughing all the time with her friends. Marcus was feeling more and more irritated. The day had been long, and it felt like every hour, his watch – totally anachronistic, but nobody had bothered telling him to remove it – numbers had moved by less than 10 minutes.

  He was feeling guilty about it, though, because he was a bit unfair. Unlike him, it was her first medieval faire, one she’d found and pursued because it was something she wanted and had never done. She did not have childhood memories of better things, and in any case, she had her friends around. Marcus’s own friends were few – most of his high school pals had moved on, the student crowd had sought all sorts of careers all across the entire country – or even abroad, for quite a few – and while he had made quite a few friends at the college itself, notably in the math department, none of them would be interested in medieval reconstructions. And after seeing the scam for what it was, he was very happy indeed that he never talked about it with any of them.

  Finally, there were kisses and waves, and it looked like the group was dispersing. Marcus waited until, at last, Brigit came around.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Why didn’t you come? You looked all sad and lost in your little corner. You should…”

  “I don’t know anyone,” Marcus interrupted. “And it was mostly your idea to come.”

  Brigit frowned. Maybe she realized how irritating this whole fake Faire business had been to him. She almost started, then stopped.

  “Fine, fine. If you don’t like those Faire things, you shouldn’t have agreed.”

  Marcus felt tired all of a sudden. She had kept nagging for days until he said yes, and now, she was going to say it was his fault for agreeing to come? He almost blew his top right there but managed to keep his outward calm at the last instant. They fought a bit at times, but this wasn’t worth one.

  “I do like Faires. I’m disappointed, that’s all. I just thought it was a good one, not this cheap stuff.”

  They both walked back to the entrance, where they relinquished the cheap disguises, took back the deposit – intact, for wonders – and started toward the car.

  They drove back home in silence.

  The next day saw Brigit leave very early. Both of them were relatively early risers, but Brigit usually lounged around until she was almost running late for her job. She had a junior logistic manager job – more like a clerk hanging on the phone with suppliers all day. But today, she’d left quickly.

  Maybe she is feeling guilty about yesterday?

  Marcus, in turn, headed out to the university where he had an assistant teaching job – riding herd on a bunch of students almost as old as he was while the official, well-paid professor was doing research instead of giving courses. This morning was doing data entry. Dumb, repetitive work, finding each student’s files and inserting the handwritten comment from the boss for the latest test, since the department’s main teacher didn’t believe in modern computers and wrote everything with a red pen on the test printouts that Marcus had done last week.

  After one hour, he needed a break. Commenting on a business case test was probably the closest thing to nonsense modern art prose Marcus had ever seen, and he’d done his share of that. Even without the excuse of smoking, he needed to take a breath of air.

  The business card still felt like parchment. Thinned calfskin, rather than fancy paper, despite the rigidity. It was at odds with the cheap-ass feel of the “Fayre” and the Potter rip-off store.

  The card also still felt like there should be something more on it. There was no reason for that, but the center had something… missing. He turned the card, and the back had a simple, stylized, modern logo on it. Unlike the front, this side didn’t feel as if there was a missing text.

  He spent several minutes looking at it, looking for inspiration, before finally putting it back in his wallet and forgetting about it for the moment.

  “Oberthorpe” sat on the computer and turned on the chat system. There were only six people registered in the conference system at the moment, and the two of them kept it vocal rather than text. Face-to-face conversation, even by remote, could be secured adequately, in ways text electronic communications could not. Alas, real face-to-face was not practical cross country, so this was the next best. At least paired obfuscation worked even with computers in the middle. If the corporation that provided the VOIP tools tried to use a backdoor and turn on text-to-speech on them for some reason, they would probably wonder why it spewed nonsense.

  “So, how was the day?”

  “Horribly boring. I mean, it’s like fishing in a barrel. Even on the lowest flux, these people can’t help themselves and figure out why they’re interested in buying stuffed chimeric animals made in Bangladesh.”

  “You know that’s not the point. Even if you make easy bonus money from it.”

  “I still don’t agree why you want any of us to hunt those scam fairs. There is no proof sensitives are drawn to fake fantasy shows. I should be doing demos at E3, not standing around with 50-dollar robes and a pointy party hat.”

  “So, no sensitives?”

  “Well, there was a guy who kept trying to see the trigger board. I gave him a tracking card.”

  “See? How many sensitives did you ever get with your faked airport travel signs? And that’s, what, the second sensitive in a year from faire honeypots?”

  “Hmph.”

  “Did he give any sign of more than peering? He couldn’t actually trigger, right?”

  “Of course not. I’m using only five tier 3 teaching runes. Unless he’s got an affinity off the scale for one, there is no way a level zero sensitive can trigger over that kind of board.”

  “OK, drop the signature of the tracking in the PO Box, and I’ll have Jen do some talent hunting. If he does trigger.”

  “Aye aye, First Runemaster.”

  “And out.”