Assault in the Wizard Degree, page 17
“Mother is rather particular about crafting with iron,” Galen said, leaning over to whisper to me and Grimshaw. “She’s the senior blacksmith and weapons-maker here at Braceward Holt.”
Shaw chuckled under his breath. “Mine own brain had figured that out a mite earlier.”
I had as well. It explained the separate work area and smoke-belching chimney. That would be the heat source for Inga’s forge.
“Actually, these are human-made,” Rikka said, once she could slip a word in edgewise.
Inga gave a snort that could have dwarfed one of Angbor’s. “Hmph. Well then, I will re-work these out of mercy. You can’t expect mere humans to work metal the way we do.”
“What might that be?” I asked, as I was genuinely curious. “I mean, how do centaurs work metal better?”
Inga looked me up and down again with a dismissive air. “You’re a curious one.”
“Dayna is quite knowledgeable about many things, I assure you,” Galen began, before his mother hushed him.
“It’s good to see you, but you still need to learn to let others speak their turn,” Inga said gently. Her voice hardened a little as she returned her gaze to me. “Why do you wish to know? I can see your arms, your hands. They’re as pale and soft as the belly of a fish. You’re no warrior. And you’re no smith.”
“I’m not,” I admitted. “But I do know materials. The elements and compounds that make up soil, rocks, and swords, for that matter. We’re all here because I found traces of wolfram in a crust of dirt from Sir Caltrop’s hoof. I’m told that you use wolfram in crafting swords.”
“That I do.” Inga pursed her lips in thought, then snapped her fingers. “Very well, I shall show you the difference. Rikka, you know the house. You’re in charge of finding spots to bunk our visitors…and my long-lost son.”
“Oh, really…” Galen demurred, blushing. “I have never been ‘lost’ to you.”
“Wizard staff or not, don’t contradict your mother. Rikka, be sure to check the larder as well for our afternoon meal, I’m sure you’ll all be hungry.”
Shaw cleared his throat and said, “Thou needs not worry about me. I would be happy consuming one of thy sheep out back.”
“You might be,” Inga said, fixing the griffin with the same appraising eye she’d turned on me. “But the mark of a civilized guest is eating meat that has passed over a flame at least once. And doing so at a proper and clean table. So, I ask thee: Art thou a civilized guest?”
The drake I’d seen face down a stone dragon swallowed, hard. “Aye, and cooked meat o’er a fine table sounds more to my liking right now.”
“I thought it might. Come along, Dame Chrissie.” Inga trotted back towards the entryway. I quickly shrugged off my backpack and handed it to Galen before following his mother into the house.
I only got a quick glimpse of the house’s insides as we passed through, but I liked what I saw. As with the outside, the wide, tall rooms of the house were devoid of paint. But the interior was bright and colorful, as the roof was punctuated with small, porthole-shaped skylights. Each round window had been filled with leaded glass in bright orange, red, or blue. A bunch of flowers sat in a vase atop the typically high centaur table, and the clean, fresh smells of herbs and freshly baked fruit pie made my mouth water.
Inga and I emerged out the back of the house and went around to the side, where the smithy stood amidst three heavy walls and a sunlit veranda. The reddish glow of a forge glared from inside, and the smell of pig iron blotted out the domestic scents from the house. Inga bade me stand near a gigantic anvil as she spoke again.
“There are four secrets to our superior smithing,” she said. Her gruff voice sounded as tender when speaking about her craft as when she’d been reunited with her son. “The first is temperature. We centaurs can turn our smithies into regular blast furnaces, running hotter than any human’s. This is why.”
Her hooves made a dull clanking sound as she moved around to one side of the furnace. She slipped them into what looked at first like a quartet of leathery slippers. Inga moved her legs as if she were moving at a loping pace, left hooves in unison, then right hooves in unison. The slippers were attached by straps to a gigantic leather bag that undulated as if breathing, in and out. A dull roar came from the forge’s mouth, and the flames shot higher and brighter red.
Abruptly, I understood what I was seeing. Like other smiths in Andeluvia, the air movers were muscle-powered bellows. Only here, the centaur smiths had a full-horsepower motor on tap to feed oxygen into the flames. It made perfect sense.
“Here is reason number two,” Inga said, as she removed her hooves from the contraption, grabbed a silvery chunk of metal, and threw it to me. I caught it as she added, “That’s wolfram ore. Our swords are only as strong as a human’s, but they bend better, keep their shape better, and hold their edge better. All thanks to wolfram added to the steel.”
I nodded. “That’s reasons one and two. What are the others?”
Inga smiled broadly for the first time since I’d met her.
She held up her left hand. “That’s three.” Then the right hand. “And that’s four.”
I couldn’t help but smile back. “You have me there, Inga. I only had the wolfram part figured out.”
“That’s still not bad, for a human. Wolfram melts easily, crumbles cleanly into anything. I’m impressed that your ‘forensics’ was able to find traces of it at all.”
I paused for a moment before crossing my arms and giving Galen’s mother a critical look of my own.
“Now, it’s my turn to be impressed,” I said. “By the fact that you know what my ‘forensics’ are. Given that you’ve ‘never heard of me’ before now.”
Her smile vanished without a trace.
“Forgive an old, foolish mare,” she finally said. “I felt it best that no one know I have been doing my best to keep tabs on my son. That included learning about the companions he holds dear. That griffin of yours, Shaw, is nothing short of astounding. So is that deer princeling of yours.”
“He’s the Protector of the Forest now,” I added. “I suppose that Angbor has been passing on our information?”
“Oh, him and the rest of the Grimmies do that. It’s a tighter-bonded family than you might think. I knew that when I joined them as Angbor’s mate and took his name.”
Grimmies? I thought, and then I realized the answer. That was her version of Angbor’s family name, the Skallgryms.
“Well, I hope the press has been good,” I said honestly. “And that over time, we earn your trust.”
“Mayhap you shall.” She sighed, and rested a massive hand on her anvil. “Understand that my feelings are very mixed right now. I credit you for bringing my son back into the family fold. That counts for a great deal. But if you seek the source of wolfram, along with Sir Caltrop, you will take both of my children into the Hinter Lands. Into a cursed place. And in the company of a creature like Grimshaw, who views death as the ultimate reward.”
“Shaw’s…well, he’s been learning to moderate that tendency,” I said, feeling the waves of warmth from the forge waft in my direction. “I’ll do my best to keep them safe, Inga. But they’re more likely to watch out for danger on my account, not the other way around. Your son’s an incredibly powerful wizard, after all.”
Inga let out a deep laugh. “He would be. He gets it from me.”
“He does?”
“Of course! What is a smith but a person who fuses metal with magic?”
“You have a point,” I admitted. “And I can’t think of a stronger sword-and-sorcery combination than your kids.”
“Those two are that, aren’t they? It’s why I’ve been thinking about bedding Angbor again next year until I’m gravid with another foal.”
I blinked. “Really? Why is that?”
“My firstborn came out loving books too much and swords too little. My second came out the reverse. Perhaps the third time I’ll be able to average out the two.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. “That’s a brilliant plan.”
“It’s a sensible one, at least,” she agreed. She nodded towards the house. “I see Rikka in the pantry. We should go see what I can serve up for lunch that even a griffin will eat.”
“That’s not hard,” I said. “They can eat almost anything, sleep almost anywhere.”
“Good to know. What about humans?”
“We eat what centaurs eat, but our sleeping arrangements are somewhat different,” I said honestly. “You don’t have to worry about me, though. I’m using one of your son’s spells to return to the ‘Land of the Angels’ this afternoon. I’ll return exactly two days from now.”
“Very well,” she said. “Then it’s even more important that you eat something at our table. If there’s one thing that might keep you upright when using magic to travel, it’s having some ballast in your belly.”
With that, we returned inside to the delicious aromas of Inga’s kitchen.
Chapter Thirty
The next day dawned in a world where I’d swapped out my Andeluvian doublet for an Ann Taylor dress. Gone were the hand-crafted buildings with fourteen-foot-high ceilings. I was back in a place that wasn’t so generous with the head room and used drab white acoustic ceiling panels instead of heavy beams of carved wood.
But at least the coffee at the OME building had two things going for it compared to the Centaur Realm: it was dark roast, and there was a lot of it.
I’d been put back on the case involving the shoe print on the dusty wooden board. Luckily, the powers-that-be had finally upgraded my computer during my last multi-day absence. I wouldn’t exactly call my new machine fast, but at least it didn’t whirr and chug along like an asthmatic marathon runner. I spent the early part of the morning trying to isolate some of the tread marks I’d gotten from my ‘window film and stun gun’ trick.
My cell phone rang just as I was about to hit ‘print’ on one set of pictures. I held off for a moment as I sorted through my jacket’s outer pockets. My pulse jumped in tempo as I found the phone and saw the name on the screen: Maxwell Cohen.
I hurriedly swiped the ‘answer’ function before the damned thing rolled over to voicemail.
“Hey, Max,” I said. “What’s the news?”
His reply was clear, but raggedy sounding with indistinct background noise. I got the impression he had called me from outside, and somewhere very windy.
“The news is that I’ve found smoke, Dayna,” he said. “And you know what they say when you find smoke.”
“That there’s fire nearby?”
“Called it in one. I’ve found a couple of interesting things about Crossbow Consulting. There’s a lot of covert stuff going on, and I think it involves weapons dealing or counter-op work.”
“What do you mean?”
The wind buffeted his receiver so that Cohen had to pause before he spoke. “Archer’s hired a lot more than a handful of ex-cops and some temp office help. From what I can tell, he does more than just offer security to rich and important people with enemies. In fact, he’s got several small teams stationed around the world doing ‘security work’. But they’re all directly accountable to him.”
That all-too-familiar sinking feeling I got lately formed in the pit of my stomach. “Are you kidding? How the hell did he end up with all those people?”
I heard the shrug in Cohen’s voice. “Just like any businessman, I guess. He’s been building up Crossbow Consulting for years, doing work all over the Middle East, Pakistan, and South America.”
“But you’re saying that he does have records, then. Going back…years?”
“More than twenty years, yeah.”
I put the heel of one hand to the side of my head, as if trying to ward off a migraine. This was turning out differently than I would have guessed. A lot differently.
At our last one-on-one meeting, Grayson Archer had revealed that he knew my Andeluvian title of ‘Dame’ Chrissie. He’d been unsurprised by my mention of magic or the implication that he used it. And most tellingly, he’d divined something from the medallion that Holly had pressed into my hand at the moment of her death.
This pointed to an inescapable conclusion. Grayson Archer was either intimately familiar with the world of Andeluvia, or he was from Andeluvia himself.
Cohen’s news had knocked my perceptions completely out of whack. So far as I knew, there were only two beings who had traveled between my world and Andeluvia before Galen had summoned me with his magical medallion. One had been locked away in stasis by King Fitzwilliam. The other had been buried by my father in our backyard in rural Illinois.
But what if I was wrong about those being the only two?
“Dayna, you still there?” Cohen asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” I said. “You just surprised me, that’s all.”
“Well, there’s bound to be some more surprises, that’s for sure.”
I sat up. “What do you mean?”
“There’s a couple of strange things I’m still chasing down.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure yet,” he admitted. “I got a couple more calls out to people I know, see if I can nail it down before I give you a full report.”
“Max, you’re killing me here,” I said honestly. “Come on, at least give me a hint.”
“It could just be a fluke, but…” He let out a sigh, and the wind howled in the receiver for a moment. “Look, I’ll share with you this much. I’ve found records for Grayson Archer going back a bit more than two decades…but nothing before that.”
“No business records, you mean?”
“I mean no records, period. None, zilch, nada, zip.”
“That’s…kind of odd.”
“More than odd. It’s what my grandma would’ve called meshuga. Crazy. I’m not turning up school records, immunization records, nothing. His friend Damon Harrison’s got even less, and a lot of what there is looks damned fake to me.”
“I want to see what you found, on both of them,” I insisted. “Unless you don’t think it’s safe for us to meet, that is.”
“I’ve kept so low to the ground on this that I need to clean the front of my shirt and pants,” Max joked. “And I should have some answers for you by this afternoon. Tell you what, you pick the place, I’ll be there. I don’t want to go anywhere near the OME or the LAPD for now.”
I thought about it for a minute. My work hours had been staggered this week so that I’d gotten in at the crack of dawn. That meant I could leave as early as three in the afternoon, completely bypassing the rush hour. And I did want to hear what Cohen had dug up.
“Let’s say four in the afternoon today, at my house. Detective Esteban will be joining us too. Will that be a problem?”
“Alanzo? That’s no problem. He knows how to keep quiet about work like this.”
“Sounds good. I’ll spring for dinner.”
I got a chuckle at the end of the line. “Hey, if there’s free food, I’m there.”
I gave Max my home address and hung up. Then I did my level best to put his call and its implications out of mind. The case involving the shoe print had to come first. I put nose to electronic grindstone and finished the final report of my analysis over the next couple of hours.
My stomach had begun to growl more insistently. And in truth, I was craving something healthy for a change. All the heavy meat-grain-dairy meals I’d been having at Bloodwine Holt had left a semi-permanent grease stain on my tongue. But there was nothing in the vending machines that would come remotely close to a salad or veggie sandwich.
Come to think of it, there weren’t any places within walking distance, either. The vegan place Shelly had warned me about (back when I’d gotten sick from eating ‘bark, leaves, and grass’ with the fayleene) had finally been shuttered by the health department. I’d have to drive.
I glanced at the clock. Half-past eleven.
If I left now, I could get to my car and beat the lunch rush. Without a second thought, I gathered up my jacket and made my way down the hall towards the stairs. I peeked into Shelly’s office to see if I’d get lucky. But at this time of day she was still two floors down, working with our most recent ‘dead-on-arrivals’ in the chiller room.
The low heels on my shoes clacked as loudly as centaur hooves on the marble floor as I exited the stairway and headed to the lobby. I wasn’t a fan of the minimalist ‘black glass and matching marble’ look that the OME had chosen, for a couple of reasons.
First, there was the awful click-and-squeak noises that everyone’s shoes made on it. Second, when it was wet or waxed, it could be like crossing a skating rink. And finally, there was the glare factor.
On a clear day like today, when the sun was at just the right angle, it could reflect right into the lobby. I found that I had to shade my eyes with an upraised arm as I crossed the sunlit zone towards the security gates. When leaving the building, I didn’t have to put my jacket through the metal detector, but I did have to flash my badge to the unsmiling, supremely bored security guard that waited off to the side.
She gave the barest of nods as I walked through and approached the exit doors. Now that I’d gotten through the ‘glare point’, I lowered my arm. While I waited for a clot of people to clear the doors, I squinted through the semi-transparent tinted glass towards the parking lot.
Damon Harrison sat on the trunk of my car.
The blood in my veins turned instantly into pure liquid nitrogen.
Chapter Thirty-One
It took a second for my brain to process the image of that one-man crowbar novelty act and wrecking crew sitting atop my car’s trunk.
Then my survival skills kicked in.
I took a single, shivery step to the right. That got me out of the lobby’s traffic flow and let people pass me on the way to the exit. Now I had time to get a damned hold on myself and decide what to do next.
