Leonard nodded. “Most of these are unfamiliar to me, but there is something interesting here.”
He pointed at a tattoo on the man’s thigh, where an ornate crescent marked the skin, points down. A thin V-shaped line crossed the crescent, the point of the V under it, as if someone had shot an arrow just under the inverted moon, and the arrow snapped in a half.
Well, now that was interesting.
“V-rod and Crescent,” Leonard said.
“They’re a long way from home,” Hugh said.
“It appears to be so,” Leonard said.
“Is it Celtic?” Elara asked.
“No. It’s Pictish.” Leonard pushed his glasses up his nose. “We don’t know too much about the Picts, and what we do know depends on who you talk to. Some people say that the Picts were the original inhabitants of Scotland, predating British Celts and distinct from other groups like Celtic Scots and Britons and Germanic Angles. Other people say that they were ethnolinguistically Celtic to begin with. There was a DNA study done before the Shift and apparently, they were similar to Spanish Basques. None of which helps us, and I do realize I’m rambling. They left behind carved stones and the V-rod and Crescent is a reoccurring motif. But I’ve never seen one this elaborate. The detail on this tattoo is remarkable. I only had a few minutes with him, so I may be able to tell you more once I go over all three bodies with a magnifying glass. So give me time and more to come.”
All of that was good, but they needed to figure out how the bond between the mrogs and humans worked.
“We need to know how they’re controlling the mrogs,” Elara said. “We need to preserve the bodies until magic.”
That’s my harpy.
“We’ll put them on ice,” Preethika promised.
“One more thing,” Leonard said. “We all agree on this: whatever was done to these people and creatures is permanent and foreign. It has a different flavor.”
“What are you trying to say?” Elara asked.
“We are positive they can only survive in our world during magic. Tech will kill them.”
“They seemed to have survived tech just fine,” Hugh said.
“It probably takes some time,” Preethika said. “An hour, maybe two. Eventually they will die, though.”
“How sure are you?” Elara asked.
“I’d bet my life on it,” Leonard said.
They moved on to the third table, where three people waited: Radion, a short, muscular black man who seemed almost as wide as he was tall; Edmund, a white man in his late fifties who looked like life ran him over and that just pissed him off; and Gwendolyn, a tall redhead with hair like honey and the kind of eyes that warned men to stay the hell out of her way. The three best smiths in the place. A chain mail helmet, two boots, and two gauntlets lay in front of them.
“You do it,” Radion told Gwendolyn.
She raised her chin. “We can’t replicate it, we don’t know how they made it, or what the hell it is made of.”
Great. “Is it steel?”
“Possibly,” Radion said.
“There’s no evidence of rust and it hasn’t been oiled, so it may be some form of stainless,” Edmund said. “It’s non-magnetic, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Stainless steel comes in two types, austenitic and ferritic,” Gwendolyn said. “It has to do with atomic structure. They both form a cube on the molecular level, but austenitic steel is face-centered. It’s a cube with an atom in each corner and in the center of each cube’s faces. Ferritic steel is body-centered, with an atom in each corner and one atom in the center of the cube.”
“Austenitic steel doesn’t respond to magnets,” Radion explained.
“We weighed it,” Edmund added. “It’s running too light for stainless steel.”
“But then we ground it,” Gwendolyn said. “And it sparks like steel does.”
“We also filed it,” Radion said. “It’s almost as hard as steel but it’s flexible.”
“And we dropped 45% phosphoric acid on it, and it didn’t bubble, so it’s definitely not a low-chromium steel,” Edmund finished.
Hugh fought an urge to put his hand on his face. “So it may or may not be steel?”
“Yes,” they said in unison.
“Is it metal? Can you tell me that?”
“Yes,” Radion said.
“It’s a metal alloy of some kind,” Gwendolyn said.
Fantastic. Good that we cleared that up.
“How can we know for sure?” Elara asked.
“We have to send it off to a lab in Lexington,” Edmund said. “For photoelectric flame photometry or atomic absorption spectroscopy.”
“Both,” Radion said. “We should do both.”
“I agree,” Gwendolyn said.
Here it comes. Three, two, one…
“How much will it cost?” Elara asked.
Right on cue.
The three smiths shrugged.
“Find out,” she said. “When you do, take it to the Preceptor. He will approve or deny the expense and arrange for the security for the transfer to Lexington.”
Wow. That was new. Apparently, the key to Elara’s bank account was saving children from monsters in the dark woods.
“We could bird it,” Radion said. “They’d need a very small sample. A carrier pigeon should be able to handle it.”
“We may do that,” Elara said. “Talk to the Preceptor when you have something concrete.” She turned to him.
“You have tonight with it,” he told them. “Tomorrow, as soon as our guests leave, the armor is going up on targets and we’re going to cut it and shoot it.”
The three smiths drew a collective breath. Gwendolyn paled. Radion gave him a horrified look.
“We don’t need to know how it was made,” Hugh said. “We need to know how to break it.”
“But it’s like painting over the Mona Lisa,” Gwendolyn said.
Right. Pissing off all three smiths at the same time wasn’t a good idea.
“You can keep one,” he told them. “When we figure out how to crack it, I promise you all the armor you can stand.”
“Can we have the beat-up armor after you’re done?” Gwendolyn asked.
Hugh almost sighed. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Radion said. “We can live with that.”
Elara strode down the hallway. The after-battle jitters had morphed into unease, then outright dread. Exhaustion set in, as if a massive weight rested on her shoulders and kept getting heavier and heavier.
Quick footsteps echoed behind her.
Just what she needed. Elara caught a sigh before it gave her away. She didn’t have the energy for verbal sparring right this second.
Hugh caught up with her.
“How much do you want to spend on tests?” he asked, falling in step with her. “Give me a ceiling.”
She almost pinched herself. “How badly do we need them?”
“We don’t need them at all,” he said. “We don’t have to know what the armor is made of. We need to know how to break it and we’ll find that out tomorrow. Basically, how much money do you want to spend to keep the smiths happy?”
Thinking was too difficult, and making a decision was even harder. “A thousand. Fifteen hundred at most.”
They started up the staircase.
“More than I would’ve given them,” Hugh said.
“Since when are you fiscally responsible?”
“I spend money to keep us alive.”
She almost groaned. “Please don’t start about the moat, Hugh, I can’t take it right now.”
“Begging? Not like you. What’s bothering you?” he asked.
She missed her magic. It was her shield and her weapon; she felt naked without it. She wanted it so badly, it was almost a physical pain. This was wrong, Elara reminded herself. She tried to push the need out of her mind, but it refused to leave. The stakes were too high to give in to magic cravings. If she did, it would undo her in the end.
“Fourteen,” she said, grasping at a distraction.
“Yes?”
“There were three men and fourteen mrogs. If they all had the same number of creatures, where is the fifteenth mrog?”
“Perhaps one of them only had four.”
“The man at the Old Market had five too,” she said.
Hugh’s face showed nothing, but his eyes said he wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy with that thought either.
They came to the third floor and she turned into the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
“To check on Deidre,” she told him. “The little girl.”