Free Thaumatology 101 by Niall Teasdale

of them have several hundred glyphs…’
    ‘You need to be more… artistic about it,’ Twill said. ‘Each of the pictographic systems has a style to it. You should be able to narrow the search by determining which group it belongs to.’ She flitted across to hover over a book. ‘Look, it’s clearly not this one because there’s no repetition enumerator at the top.’
    Ceri blinked. The tiny fae was right, of course. She pushed that book away, and then a couple more on the same class of ideograms. ‘Okay then,’ she said, ‘it’s probably not either of these. They both use ideogram pairs to form any word and the symbol is probably supposed to mean something on its own.’
    Twill lifted from the books, smiling in the same kind of way Doctor Tennant did when she was pleased with someone’s progress. Flitting across the room she quite calmly landed on the side of one of Lily’s breasts and folded herself into a lotus position. Lily gave her a slightly sour expression and then went back to drinking her coffee. Ceri, now thoroughly concentrating on the weeding out process, did not notice the exchange.
    Ten minutes later, Ceri looked up and blinked at the sight of Twill, still sat on Lily’s breast, now with her elbows resting on her knees in boredom. ‘Uh…’ Ceri said.
    ‘You’ve found it now?’ Twill asked.
    ‘No, but I think I’ve found the language. It’s… uh… I’m not sure I’m pronouncing this right, Ctholnaraeic?’ Her finger moved down the page, following the text. ‘Sorry, I’m translating from Latin… it’s probably the oldest of all demonic languages… hardly ever spoken… used in some of the most powerful of enchantments…’
    ‘It’s the language the oldest, nastiest demons use amongst themselves,’ Twill said. ‘They say you can still hear it in the Unseelie Court sometimes. Mostly it’s a dead language, seen only in written form, and then rarely as whole sentences.’
    ‘You trying to scare the crap out of us, fairy,’ Lily said, ‘cos you’re doing a good job on me.’
    Ceri turned a page in her book, grinned, double-checked her drawing against it, and started to read. Then she went white. ‘Want something to add to the scare? It’s called Blotherian. It’s the rune of “betrayal, assassination, and the opening of hidden ways.”’
    ‘Not freaky at all,’ Lily said, ‘but it was a dream, right? I mean… Hang on, you said you were in the lab.’ Her body shifted slightly as though she was going to sit up, but she was stopped by the fairy sitting on her chest.
    Ceri nodded. ‘I saw that symbol glowing through the salt in the outer circle. It says here that it can be used to find secret doors and open locks.’
    ‘But if there was actually one of these runes under the salt of the circle,’ Lily said, ‘Shane the Pain would have noticed.’ She paused and her face darkened. ‘Unless he put it there, of course.’
    Ceri remembered her thoughts on the day of the accident. Some of the mistakes she had found in the code for the pulse generators had seemed almost deliberate. She shook her head. ‘I can’t go accuse him of sabotaging the experiment without proof,’ she said.
    ‘Then we need to get some,’ Lily replied.
    ~~~
    Etherstream was a quantum leap in wide-area, high-bandwidth networking. That’s what it said on the help page Ceri found while checking the settings. Etherstream devices connected to other Etherstream devices via a medium range broadcast over sub-membrane field space, rebroadcasting to other devices until the data was delivered to a base-station connected to the terrestrial Internet. It was all encrypted so that no one could eavesdrop on your traffic and perfectly safe. Or so the documentation said.
    Still, getting through to the Metropolitan’s public gateway proved easy enough. From there, her login credentials let her onto the staff system. Sheer curiosity made her go look at the data files from the day of the accident. Just over a