Iron and Magic

“He’s human,” she said. “His heart is about 25% larger than average. The lungs are larger as well. Nothing outside of the realm of human norm, but with those hearts they can pump much larger volumes of blood and their VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen the lungs can intake, is much greater. The other two are the same.”

“So they’re stronger?” Bale asked.

“They have high endurance,” Preethika told him. “Some of this is genetic, some of it is training. Look here.” She picked up the man’s right hand and held it up. “Calluses from sword use. Scars here and here.” She traced the thin lines of old scars. “All done by a bladed weapon. Except here, looks like an acid burn. The scars are of different ages.”

“A veteran,” Hugh said.

She nodded. “Same story with the other two. These men fought for years. But there is something I don’t see.”

“Bullet wounds,” Dugas said.

“Yes. All three of them are in their thirties and professional soldiers. Most men of that age who are professional soldiers have been shot at. It’s possible that these three were lucky. Some other interesting things.” Preethika used forceps to lift the man’s upper lip. “No evidence of dental work in any of them. Their wisdom teeth are still there. No surgical scars. No inoculation scars. No piercings. Then there are their tattoos. Most people with tattoos tend to choose at least one or two for cultural reference. A tattoo must mean something to the owner. There are no modern cultural reference tattoos on these men.”

She stepped aside, and a man in his forties stepped forward. He was white, with a head full of reddish curly hair, a sparse beard, and light-blue eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses. He looked out of place in here, as if an English professor had wandered into the autopsy by accident.

“This is Leonard,” Elara said. “Our head druid scholar. I asked him to look at the tattoos because they look vaguely Celtic to me.”

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.”