At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(18)

“I think I’ve got something you’ll be interested in,” he said. “I just emailed you a link to our database.”

She turned to her computer and selected the link. When she opened the document uploaded by the deputy, she clicked through the contents with growing excitement.

“This is amazing,” she said as she sent all of it to the printer.

He laughed. “You must be new on the job. Nothing amazes me anymore.”





CHAPTER 8


“If you would,” Evan said to Diana, “get R. I. Page’s book on runes. It’s in the section of the bookcase dealing with Old English and medieval literature. Grab the Barnes and Cragg books, too. I want to write out the entire English futhorc so we have something to work with.”

Diana headed toward the bookcase while Evan abandoned the chair and climbed up the stepladder. Now he had access to the entire board. When she found the page listing the runes in Page’s An Introduction to English Runes, she held up the open book so he could see.

“Keep holding it, please,” Evan said as he reached for the chalk.

Twenty minutes later, he climbed back down. “Lo and behold! The thirty-one letters of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, along with their names, meanings, and a transliteration of the runic letter into our Latin alphabet.”





Diana snapped the book closed. “So now we start transliterating the killer’s runes. Should I begin with the slat on the left and go clockwise?”

“Perfect.”

She picked up the chalk Evan had abandoned and wrote the transliterated letters from the leftmost wooden slat onto the chalkboard:

n listenupmightymeniundoanduntoearthisend

Underneath this line, she wrote another, breaking up the words and adding punctuation.

Listen up, mighty men. I undo and unto ear this end.

She stepped back and frowned. “Does that make any sense to you?”

“Perhaps the second half is meant to be, ‘unto earth I send.’”

“Mansplainer.”

“Don’t feel bad. The human brain tends to insert a break as soon as it sees a sequence of letters that form a word. Thus you saw the word ear and stopped.”

Diana erased and rewrote the words.

Listen up! Mighty men I undo and unto earth I send.

“Okay,” she said. “But what, exactly, is he sending? The victim? He’s sending the victim to earth?”

“As a metaphor for death and burial, it works. But . . .”

“But what?”

Evan crossed his arms. “But perhaps I was wrong with my theory about a numbering system. If the rune set off by itself is meant to indicate a number, I would expect it to be the first letter of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet. Instead, we have n, which is the tenth letter of the rune-row.”

Diana glanced at the chart on the chalkboard. “The tenth rune means need or plight. Perhaps there’s a clue in that.”

“It’s certainly a good word for our current situation.”

“You’ll figure it out.” Diana returned to the board and transcribed the runes from the next row.

Pocsden-madamaisesrocdethgiewretawrieth i

“It’s nonsense,” she murmured. Disappointment had softened her voice. “I see madam. And maybe deth is death? What’s the thing that looks like a hyphen?”

“I suspect it’s a hyphen.”

Her look dripped poison. “You said runes don’t have punctuation.”

“They don’t, normally. So this outlier hyphen is curious. Regardless . . .” Evan scratched his beard. “It is trickier. Let’s write out the rest of the lines and not worry about what they mean for now.”

Diana picked up Evan’s journal and copied all the runes onto the chalkboard.

n listenupmightymeniundoanduntoearthisend

pocsden-madamaisesrocdethgiewretawrieth I

x youknowwhyowerthesunswimmerhomeIcame

dligrewdedrywthiw?liawroirrawyraewa ?

p aslayerofthebonehallsbreak? fjorgyn

liwepusdnibtahtemurbehteugalperemnewirdthaeda j

s forminemineminegonebowelburiedbustedbybigbosses

debmotnenwabymfotraehrekahsdrowsemircrawtath t

l inward?irewardintohismouthofhear?Ipouredmymead

?dirfoxosirennisnikssihtegacenobsithfotahw e

m byskollfudslaitilaidhimlowwightisheandsoonwight

?? eth?reabllaacealgadnagerdneldnaflowrawrfludobem?kam b

i tellmebymanislaitilaiditoutprickmethisbut

nemnnnsagnortsthgitdlehiosllitsdlehrekamyenohsih d

y whenwail?thewordweawerarriwedforhisbletsian

eremoteremrorrimdidirorrimsihthiw a

? histholewasthusthathethankedthehelguard

dekciwsidrywwenkthgiwsihfothgiewehttlefeh ?

Diana groaned. “Half the lines are gibberish. More than half.” She glared at the blackboard as if it were to blame.

Evan picked out a few words of poetic imagery like sun swimmer and bone hall and mouth of hearing oddly mixed in with modern-day phrases like big bosses.

“Actually,” he said, “I believe the killer is using the style of writing known as boustrophedon.”

“Meaning he’s writing every other line from right to left?” She lost her glare. “I believe you’re right. Daem becomes mead. Retawrieth becomes their water. So what’s that circle with a dot in it? I feel like I should know that.”