One hand remained above the surface of the thankfully not too deep rain basin of water. The runes in the wall pushed outward with frightening force, threatening to cast him into the man-made river. If not for Alvarn and his rope, that’s exactly how the next few seconds would have elapsed. Instead, Vidar spun around himself at an angle where the water stream struck his body. The change in position made it impossible to keep hold of the slippery stone floor, and he went under screaming.

  Submerged in freezing water, the shock of it all made it difficult to keep his mind clear enough to think. Only when his feet touched stone beneath him did he figure up from down. Vidar pushed for all he was worth, barreling to the surface. He emerged with a gasp, desperately clawing the stone for some little protrusion that’d hold him. Pain flashed from the tip of his finger, but he didn’t care. If he went under again, he would not have the strength to haul himself back up.

  With Alvarn pulling on the rope for all he was worth, Vidar managed to get a foot up onto the walkway. It was enough. Rolling up and out of the water, he gasped and coughed before puking water everywhere.

  Huddled into a ball of trembling limbs, he muttered, “I got it.”

  “What?” Alvarn shouted, right near his head.

  Vidar turned to his back, so he looked up at Alvarn’s concerned face. “I saw it! The rune!”

  Together, they got Vidar to his feet and back into the viewing chamber where they could speak. Alvarn held out his notebook. “Sketch it for me.”

  Vidar accepted the book and the pen, but his fingers trembled too much. The tips of several of his fingers, where the fingernails were ripped away from trying to grasp the stone walkway, bled onto the pages of the notebook. He had to return them without being able to put down a single line.

  “Later,” Vidar said through chattering teeth.

  Alvarn’s eyes almost seemed to glow from the barely restrained need to know, to learn. Vidar recognized the feeling and raised a finger in the air to sketch the simple symbol.

  “It looks like the M character,” Alvarn said, scribbling in his notebook. He held it up for inspection. “Like this?”

  “Yes, except more pressed together, thinner. And the angles are tighter too.”

  Alvarn made a second attempt and Vidar nodded tiredly. “Near enough.”

  While Alvarn excitedly wrote in his little book, Vidar leaned forward and drew on the ground. In his dazed, exhausted, and thoroughly cold and miserable state, the act of using his own blood to make a symbol didn’t register as a poor idea. With fingers too numb from the cold to feel any real pain, he created the symbol he’d seen, or a close enough approximation of it. After almost forgetting to encircle the symbol, and then correcting his mistake, Vidar closed his eyes and saw the circle in his mind.

  Very little essence remained for him to use in that condition, but he willed some into the circle, imagining the symbol in the middle and what function that symbol represented. To push.

  “Vidar! What are you doing?” Alvarn shouted, but it was too late.

  Vidar triggered the rune.

  Not having had the foresight of removing his head from above the rune, it pushed on him with enough force to throw his head back, unbalancing Vidar so he fell back and thudded the back of his head painfully against the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Alvarn shouted. “Do you know how dangerous that was?”

  Vidar sat, rubbing at the back of his head. He turned and looked up at his friend, not saying anything.

  “What?” Alvarn asked.

  Still, Vidar said nothing.

  Alvarn’s gaze shifted to the rune on the floor. Vidar did the same. They both stared at it for a good long while until Alvarn broke the silence. “A new rune.”

  “A new rune,” Vidar agreed. A moment later, he spoke again. “The naming rights are mine.”

  “It already has a name.”

  “What is it, then?” Vidar asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “New discovery, new name.”

  Alvarn held up his pen to his once again open notebook. “What’ll you name it, then?”

  “Pushy?”

  A dead-eyed glare was all the response he got for that suggestion, so Vidar tried again. “Thrust?”

  “Better, but not good enough. We have kenaz, sowilo, and isaz. Adding ‘thrust’ to those sounds wrong to my ears.”

  Vidar considered for a moment, then relented. “You’re right, it doesn’t sound right. I have a friend who is good with old languages and things like that. He’s a little crazy, but I’ll ask him.”

  “You let me know,” Alvarn said.

  Vidar laboriously got to his feet. “Are you going to try?”

  “No, not here. Later.”

  Even through the bone-chilling cold and his daze, Vidar couldn’t help but consider applications where this new rune might be useful. None jumped up at him in that moment, but he did not let that discourage him. Vidar was certain this new discovery would lead to riches beyond his wildest dreams. The rune scribes’ guild would not be able to touch him. Neither would the city guards, those assholes. Perhaps the long arm of the Crown would prove too short to reach him once he’d established himself. He just had to be careful and plan for the best way of revealing this knowledge without anyone stealing it.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  For a brief second, he glanced suspiciously at Alvarn. With this, his new friend would be his competition. “You won’t give this to the guild, will you?”

  Alvarn looked up from his notebook. “What’s that? No, of course not! The knowledge of this must be shared, of course, for the betterment of everyone. The guild would hoard the information and use it to further their own agenda. We cannot let that happen.”

  “Right.”

  A moment’s rest later, Vidar reached out a hand to Alvarn. “Give me a few warmth runes and let’s get that second one so we can get out of here.”

  That earned him a skeptical look. “Are you sure?”

  “You don’t think I can do it?”

  Alvarn held out a hand and pulled Vidar to his feet. “I’m just worried about you. You’re shivering and bleeding. Could be you’re going into a state of hypothermia?”

  “Hypo-what?”

  “You need to rest.”

  Vidar disagreed. “What I need is to never return here. Now, how are we breaking that glass?”

  A moment of searching through his bag later, Alvarn withdrew a hammer.

  “Give me that,” Vidar said, grabbing the heavy tool. “Thought of everything, did you?”

  “I like to be prepared.”

  “Let’s get this over with, then. Whatever rune it is, it will be ours. Just you wait, and hold on tight to that rope, you hear?”

  Alvarn picked it up and followed Vidar to the window with the spinning structure.

  To Vidar’s surprise, the glass broke easily. With it broken, the sound of the sea overwhelmed the small chamber.

  With all the glass gone, Vidar dropped the hammer and clambered into the tight space to sit facing Alvarn. This way, he could lean back and out while holding on to the wall. It didn’t take long for him to understand that his friend’s concern for his health might not have been entirely unfounded. His arms trembled and very little strength remained in his hands.

  “Hold on tight!” he screamed. If he lost his grip, Alvarn was all that held him back from being squashed like a bug by the spinning wood construct of death.

  Water churned around it, coming in from the sea to push the stupid thing. Finding the rune was trivially easy, but there was a hitch.

  “I can’t see it clearly from here either!”

  “What?” Alvarn shouted. He hadn’t been able to hear.

  Vidar struggled back through the window and shouted right near Alvarn’s ear. “I can’t get close enough to see without risking my head! The water spray and all that spinning make it impossible!”

  “We need that rune!”

  Vidar agreed. He looked around for something to throw against the spinning structure but found nothing big enough. The rope might work, but it could just as easily snap under the force.

  “The thrust rune,” he said, pointing to the wall near the window. “Far enough down and pointing to the spinning thing!”

  Alvarn sounded shocked. “That’ll break it!”

  “A few planks, yes. That’ll make it stop. Hopefully!”

  “You want to break one of the few remaining sources of fresh water? No!”

  “Got any better suggestions?”

  Vidar saw it in his friend’s face that he didn’t. “I’ll help you repair the other ones!”

  Eventually, Alvarn relented, and Vidar climbed back up into the window overlooking the seawater intake. He turned back and shouted, “Is there some way to choose where essence is being drained from when I craft a rune and rejuvenate it?”

  Alvarn shook his head.

  He’d just have to do this the hard way, then. Armed with a brush from Alvarn’s pack, loaded with heavy red paint, he leaned out the window and reached down as far as he was able to paint the thrust rune. If he’d eyed the position right, this should work. With how fast the planks were spinning, they were bound to hit at least one or two. That should be enough.

  “What are you doing?” Alvarn shouted when Vidar climbed back in through the window, still holding the brush and dragging it across the stone.

  He leaned back out to finish the other line before connecting them together on the inside wall where his friend waited. “You do the honors!”

  Alvarn, confused, leaned out the window and peered down. “The circle reaches all the way down and around the symbol?”

  “It does!”

  Instead of finishing the work, Alvarn brought out his notebook and began scribbling in it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t know this was a possibility!” He pointed to the not-very-round barrier around the symbol. “Well, I suppose I did know about it, but never thought to use it in this way! All we learn is that you should keep the barrier line near the symbol to create the most efficient rune each time!”

  “You can be efficient in your own time! Now power the rune and trigger it!”

  Alvarn touched the inside of what was supposedly named the barrier line. He closed his eyes and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  A loud thud sounded from the other chamber, followed by a crashing noise and the very distinct breaking of wood. They’d done it!

  Both of them cheered, their hands up in the air. Then Vidar calmed down. “Not durability runes, then. It stopped in a good place. I can see the symbol.”

  “It won’t do us any good if we don’t figure out its use.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Vidar said, studying the rune.

  Coming back in through the window, Vidar made his report. “It looks a lot like the other one we found.” Grabbing Alvarn’s notebook, he printed the lines with trembling fingers. “Like this, only the shorter lines go all the way to the longer ones, like a cross,” he said, holding his fingers out in an X symbol.

  “I see,” Alvarn said, his nose near the page to see through the droplets of water on the glass of his thick glasses.

  “I wonder if they are related somehow.”

  Alvarn peered up at Vidar. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re similar, no? Perhaps their function is similar, too. One thrusts, perhaps this one pulls. Want to try?”

  “No!” Alvarn said, more than a hint of fear in his voice. “We don’t try until we know its function. It could kill us both. Producing a pulling effect seems unlikely to me, considering the placements on the runes down in the basin. Give me some time to think on it and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to come up with a likely effect. Tomorrow, a lot of people are going to wake up to saltwater in their houses. Us breaking this cannot be for nothing, or I would not be able to live with myself.”

  “Fine,” Vidar grumbled. “I won’t try the rune.”

  They stood, looking around the chamber for a little while longer.

  “So,” Vidar began.

  Alvarn finished his thought. “Want to head back up?”

  It must’ve been getting late up there on the surface. He needed some sleep so he could wake up well rested and ready to teach those people in the thieves’ guild.

  “I really do.”

  Tired beyond words, with arms and legs feeling leaden, Vidar stumbled into his room. He used what little essence remained in him to power a warmth rune before hanging his sodden clothes from a clothesline. Barely able to make it the few steps to his bed, he collapsed into it and pulled the meager covers over his shivering self.

  Despite his exhaustion, sleep was long in the coming. He couldn’t stop thinking of their discoveries down in those dank chambers. Two new runes, one of which they could use. This would make him rich and famous, he knew it would. Fame didn’t matter all that much to him, but riches? Without money, you were no one. With it, you could be whoever you wanted.