“Works for me,” I said, flopping down onto a plush couch. “Now, can you give me a little more detail about what’s going on here?”
Rune took a seat in an easy chair across from me. “It’s just as I said. An Incarnate was murdered.”
“How did it happen?” I asked.
A look of concern settled on my companion’s face. “We’re not sure.”
I blinked in surprise. “What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“Exactly what I said. We’re not sure what happened to her.”
“Meaning you’re not sure how she died.”
“Correct.”
“Well, what kind of condition was the body in?”
Rune pursed his lips, seeming to concentrate for a moment before responding. “There’s no real way to answer that.”
“Sure there is,” I insisted. “If a body was shot, it has bullet holes. If it was stabbed, it has knife wounds. Basically, the condition of the body can tell you what happened to it. You can pick that up from any detective show.”
“Agreed,” Rune murmured. “The problem is, there wasn’t a body.”
I frowned. “No body?”
“Nope,” Rune said.
“So how do you know she’s dead?” I asked.
“Well, aside from being Incarnates and having the ability to innately sense it, there’s also the fact that her effigy crumbled.”
“Her effigy?” I repeated with a frown — and then remembered. “Oh — the giant statues.”
“Yeah,” Rune said. “It basically disintegrated.”
“So you’re connected,” I concluded. “You and your effigy.”
Rune nodded. “As I mentioned before, it’s a manifestation of the bulk of my power. The part of me that you’re seeing right now represents my core — the essence of my being.”
“So this part of you that I’m talking to is like the life spark of Rune the Incarnate.”
He laughed. “Something like that, although it’s probably easier to think of the ‘me’ in here as the brain and the effigy as the body.”
“But while you’re in here, you’re vulnerable,” I noted, remembering what Rune had said earlier. “And if you kill the brain…”
I didn’t finish, but Rune, sobering instantly, knew exactly where my thoughts had been headed.
“If you kill the brain,” he echoed, “the body will die.”
“Okay, so what’s my role in all this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Rune asked in surprise. “You’re here to find the murderer.”
Chapter 4
“Hold on,” I almost shouted, sitting up. “I’m not a detective. Solving murders isn’t what I do.”
“Sure it is,” Rune countered. “How many times have you had to figure out what villain was killing people and find a way to stop him?”
I frowned. “That’s not quite the same thing.”
“I don’t see a distinction. Murder is murder, whether it’s done by a normal person, a supervillain, or an Incarnate.”
“Well, that sort of begs the question: how do you kill one of you guys?”
“Not easily, that’s for sure,” Rune stated, clearly concentrating on the question. “Even without most of our sivrrut.”
“Sivrrut?” I repeated, unsure what he was talking about.
“It’s a term used to describe the power of an Incarnate,” he explained. “Now, with respect to how we can be killed, the only thing absolutely certain is that only another Incarnate could do it.”
“So one of you is a killer.”
“So it would seem.”
“I guess now’s a time to ask a question I hadn’t focused on before,” I said. “Exactly how many of you guys are there?”
Rune appeared to reflect for a moment. “I’m not sure how to answer that.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “Is there something tricky about the question?”
“Our numbers aren’t set. That said, there’s never more than a score of us, and at the moment we number about a dozen. But a new Incarnate can arise at any time.”
“Well, how does someone become an Incarnate?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Rune declared, almost apologetically.
“Oh, come on,” I moaned in exasperation. “You’ve got to know the answer to that one. You’re an Incarnate yourself.”
“It’s not that I don’t know,” Rune explained. “It’s that I’m forbidden to tell you.”
I gave him a look of incomprehension, which led him to expound.
“It’s a bit like the California gold rush,” he said, “when people went completely bananas trying to strike it rich. Likewise, if you show them the path to almost limitless power, they’ll do unthinkable things and take insane risks to obtain it.”
I nodded in understanding. During the California gold rush — actually, just about every gold rush in history — people seemed to lose their minds at the thought of attaining a little wealth. They abandoned logic and reason (as well as their jobs and families) in hopes of getting rich, and did everything from claim jumping to murder in order to get what they wanted. What would they do if the nigh-limitless power of an Incarnate was dangled in front of them?
“Okay,” I said. “I get it. People will do almost anything for wealth and power, and if they knew how to become an Incarnate, you’d have billions clawing each other’s eyes out for the chance.”
“Pretty much,” Rune admitted, “which is why we don’t tell people how to become one.”
“But you also said that an Incarnate can ‘arise.’ That implies that it’s something that can happen” — I spent a moment searching for the right word — “what, naturally?”
“Something like that. Occasionally a new force or power comes into being, and some person becomes the physical manifestation of it — an Incarnate.”
I spent a moment letting his words roll around in my brain. Rune, watching me ponder and clearly wanting me to fully grasp the concept, took the opportunity to help me out with an example.
“Think about when mankind first split the atom,” he said. “All of a sudden you had nuclear power — this new force that hadn’t existed before. And then, in very short order, you had to appoint a department or person to be in charge of it, control it, oversee it, etcetera. Likewise, some new puissance might herald the advent of a new Incarnate.”
I nodded. “All right, that puts it
