“We retrieved the bodies,” Felix said.
Hugh got up. “Would love to stay and play doctor, love, but duty calls.” He headed for the door.
Play doctor? “Jackass.”
“Harpy.”
“Thank you for saving me in the woods,” she said to his back. “And for healing Alex.”
“You’re welcome. I’ll see you downstairs in ten minutes.
He left.
A moment later Rook slipped into her room and held out his writing pad.
Hugh needed help?
“No,” Elara said. “He was terrifying.”
10
The beast stretched about five feet ten inches on the shiny metal surface of the autopsy table. Fine brown hair, more like the coat of a horse than the fur of a dog, sheathed it. It thickened on the backs of its arms and at its crotch. Hard, ropy muscle wrapped its skeleton. It was likely incredibly strong, Hugh decided. Elongated digits, both toes and fingers, were sturdy and tipped with triangular, hook-like claws. No tail. Big ears with tufts of fur on the ends.
The face was a nightmarish mess. The eyes, human enough in shape, were unnaturally large, almost owl-like, surrounded by deep wrinkles, as if they pushed aside the flesh around them to make room. A short snout replaced the nose. Its upper lip split like that of a cat or a dog. The mouth slashed across its face, too wide to be human. Surgical clamps pulled the lips open on the right side, displaying long, conical fangs.
Next to Hugh, Felix grimaced. Hugh glanced at him. Felix waved his hand in front of his face. The stench. Right. The bitter harsh scent had to be hell on the shapeshifter nose. Bale, on the other hand, appeared to be completely unbothered. He had taken these two with him. Stoyan and Lamar manned the wall.
Elara had brought Savannah, Dugas, and Johanna. They stood on the other side of the table. The head witch wrinkled her face in disgust. Dugas appeared thoughtful.
They were in a large laboratory in the basement of the main tower. Three groups of people clustered around three tables. The first table, where he stood, supported the autopsied body of a beast, the second offered a similarly cut open warrior, and the third, where the smiths quietly argued with each other, held pieces of the warrior’s armor.
Hugh had to give it to Elara. Her people were efficient and well-trained, and their work spaces were always in good order, no matter if it was a pottery shop or an infirmary room.
The coroner, an older man with brown skin and sharp dark eyes, folded his hands together.
“It used to be human,” the coroner said.
Elara raised her hands and signed for Johanna.
Hugh examined the internal organs. Heart, liver, lungs. All the usual suspects. Some of the organs were deformed, but still appeared functional.
“How to explain this,” the coroner began, clearly trying to come up with a dumbed-down version. “Umm. Well, to simplify…”
“The orthograde spine,” Hugh told him. “None of the other bipedal vertebrates show the same adaptation. Penguins stand erect, but their biomechanics are completely different. The other upright vertebrates, ostriches, kangaroos, and so on, do not exhibit an orthograde spine during locomotion. The S curve of the spine with lumbar lordosis is unique to humans. Other primates show a C curve.”
He moved his hand to indicate the hip. “The examination of the femur head will likely indicate large femur size and valgus angle typical to humans.” He moved his hand further to the foot. “Evidence of longitudinal arches. Even though there is hallux opposability, the structure of the foot indicates adaptation to bipedal locomotion. There is no reason for a predatory simian animal to exhibit these characteristics.”
Silence fell.
“He’s a healer, Saladin,” Elara said quietly, then signed it.
“Well, this simplifies things,” Saladin said.
“Hallux whatchamacall it?” Bale asked.
“Opposable big toe,” Saladin translated. “Like in an ape.”
“They’re good climbers,” Dugas said.
Felix leaned forward, examining the feet. “And good runners. Calluses.”
“So they’re like cave people,” Bale said.
Everyone looked at him.
“Hairy, strong, stupid. Troglodytes.” Bale looked around. “What? We have to call them something.”
He was right.
Johanna finger-spelled something he didn’t catch. Hugh turned to Elara. “What did she say?”
Johanna stomped her foot and moved her fingers slowly.
“Mrogs?” he asked.
Elara grimaced. “Yes.”
“What’s a mrog?” Stoyan asked.
“A scary magic monster who lives in darkness,” Dugas said. “It’s a story we tell children to warn them away from dangerous magic they don’t understand. Most children have an instinct when it comes to magic. They know when things don’t feel right. Those who don’t listen to that instinct know that mrogs are waiting in the darkness for those who cross the line.”
“It fits,” Hugh said. “Mrogs it is.”
“What about those armored assholes?” Bale asked.
“Mrog masters?” Dugas suggested.
“Mrog soldiers,” Elara said.
“Whatever was done to this… um… mrog was done in childhood,” Saladin said. “There is no evidence of undeath or atrophy typical of vampires. But the abnormalities in the organs are severe enough that a normal human wouldn’t survive the transformation unless it was a gradual process that took place when the body’s healing was still at its highest. Unless we’re dealing with some sort of regenerative virus like Lyc-V.”
The Lycos Virus was responsible for existence of shapeshifters and came with fun side effects. It also left irrefutable evidence of its presence in a human body.
“Is there any evidence of past regeneration?” Elara asked. “Bands of new tissue on the bones? New teeth?”
“Not in the three we opened up so far. I’ll let you know if we find it.”
“Do you have protocol for handling vampires?” Hugh asked.
Saladin looked offended. “Yes.”
“Keep to that protocol for them until we know they’re not going to regenerate and rise.”
“We’re not amateurs,” Saladin said.
“If I thought you were, I’d put my people here to stand guard.”
Felix walked over and stared at the mrog’s face.
“Yes?” Hugh asked.
“Bigger eyes, longer nose, bigger ears,” Felix said.
“Every sense pushed into overdrive,” Elara murmured.
“Predators,” Savannah said.
Tame predators, like dogs. Trained to do what their masters told them.
“Anything else?” Hugh asked.
Saladin shook his head. “When the magic is up, maybe we can learn more.”
“Let’s see the human,” Elara said.
They moved to the second table. A large man lay on the steel surface, butterflied, his insides exposed for everyone to view. Geometric tattoos covered his skin, but only on the left side. An Indian woman in her late thirties stood next to him, holding up gloved hands. He’d met her before, Hugh remembered. Her name was Preethika Manohari and she ran the pediatric clinic in the settlement.
“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.”
“Can we have the beat-up armor after you’re done?” Gwendolyn asked.
Hugh almost sighed. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Conrad 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.”
“Is she alone?”
“No. Lisa is with her, and she is good with guns. Savannah got Deidre to talk. She has an aunt in Sanderville. We called her, and the family will be coming to pick her up in the next few days.”
“I’ll send an escort,” he told her.
“Thank you.”
“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “The kid is probably asleep.”