In Elendel, he’d expanded his curiosity tenfold. A basement full of metal samples, acids and solvents, burners, microscopes, and even a room with a forge and an anvil. It all reminded him of the Roughs in a good way. Of Lessie laughing when he made a breakthrough. Of evenings spent folding metal like he was some ancient warrior making a knife meant to kill a god — rather than a novice trying to make a dining implement.
Lately, he’d found electrolysis and plating fascinating, and his new electricity-powered spectrometer was absolutely brilliant. Together with the graphs representing the spectroscopic colors of various elements, it let him identify practically anything. How would trellium react to that? Or to his acids, or to the magnets?
The questions energized him. It was a kind of excitement he’d lost during his middle years. It was too pure. He hadn’t been able to feel excitement about something so simple and enriching at a time when his life had been falling apart.
He strapped on his goggles. Steris followed, putting on her own, then got out her clipboard. She handed him an apron, and he relented — he was wearing one of his nicer vests, though he’d tossed the cravat aside somewhere. Her own apron was more enveloping and thick, almost a flak jacket. He’d only recently persuaded her that maybe she didn’t need two pairs of goggles at once; she could just order an extra-thick pair.
They set up at one of the tables, where Wax inserted the spike into a clamp to hold it steady.
Marasi stopped in the doorway, then grinned. “You two,” she said, “are adorable.”
Wax shared a look with Steris. “I don’t believe I’ve been called adorable since I was Max’s age.”
“She should get her eyesight checked,” Steris said. “Marasi, dear? I have goggles with corrective lenses, arranged in the drawers to your right.”
“I’m fine,” Marasi said, stepping in.
Steris clicked her tongue and pointed at the sign just above the doorway. GOGGLES REQUIRED. It had an asterisk and a scrawled handwritten note below — in crayon — that said, “’Cept Wayne.”
“It’s a good rule,” Wax said. “You know how things happen around us.”
“Things?” Marasi said, selecting a pair of goggles. “You mean explosions?”
“Not just explosions,” Steris said. “Acid spills. Fires. Accidental weapon discharges. Though I suppose that one is technically a subset of explosion. How’s the hardness?”
“Hard,” Wax said as he tested the spike with various substances. “Scratched by diamond, but barely marks corundum. Just above a nine.”
“Noted,” she said.
“It’s brittle too,” Wax said, carefully chiseling. “Not like harmonium at all, which is nearly as pliable as gold. Would you get one of the burners going?”
Steris lit a gas nozzle. Wax got a chip of trellium off and brought it over in a tungsten alloy bowl, then set it under the flame and watched carefully. The chip soon heated to white-hot, but did not liquefy.
“Melting point is extremely high,” he said. “Over twenty-five hundred degrees.”
“Similar to harmonium,” Steris said. “Try the electric melter?”
He nodded. The melter ran a powerful electric current through the metal in order to heat it beyond what the burner could manage. He’d had some luck with harmonium using this process. Unfortunately, although the little bit of trellium again turned white-hot, it wouldn’t even bend or stretch.
“Rusts,” Wax said softly, using tinted goggles to stare at the glowing bit of metal. “This stuff is hard.” How was he going to make an earring out of it?
Was he actually considering that? At the thought, he realized he didn’t know the envelope was from Him. Anyone could drop off something like that. He should talk to Harmony before doing anything foolish.
“TenSoon says that the metals are the bodies of divinities,” Steris said. “So-called God Metals were the source of the mists back in anteverdant days.”
“So why weren’t everyone’s lungs burned?” Wax said. “If I can heat this to over three thousand degrees without it liquefying, then it must be extremely hot when vaporized.”
“Perhaps,” Steris said, “these metals — unlike common ones — don’t change states based on temperature, but on other factors.”
Wax nodded in thought. Marasi leaned down beside the table, looking at the spike. “It’s full of power,” she said. “It’s a Hemalurgic spike, so it’s…”
“‘Invested’ is the term the kandra use,” Wax said. “It has taken a part of a person’s soul, through Hemalurgy, and stored it. Like a kind of … battery for life energy.”
Marasi shivered visibly. “It’s kind of like a corpse, then?”
“A murder weapon, at least,” Steris agreed, turning off the burner.
“Wax,” Marasi said, sounding reluctant, “when I was pulling this out of the Cycle, he started ranting. The way Miles did when he died.”
Wax looked up from his experiment. “What did he say?”
“He talked about men of gold and red,” Marasi said. “Like Miles. And then … he talked about starting the ashfalls again, as in the Catacendre. Restoring the days of darkness and ash.”
“Impossible,” Wax said. “The land just isn’t set up that way anymore. The Ashmounts are either nonexistent or stilled. There isn’t the tectonic activity to cause another ashfall.”
“Are you sure?” Marasi asked.
He hesitated, then shook his head. “When Harmony showed me Trell’s influence enveloping our planet, even he seemed baffled. Our world, and our god, are basically three and a half centuries old. There are things out there that are far, far more ancient. Far, far more crafty.”
The lab fell silent, save for the hum of the electric current machine, which Wax flipped off.
“So we catch up,” Steris said, rapping her pencil against the clipboard. “What’s next?” Admittedly, she did look adorable in her oversized goggles and military-caliber vest over her tea gown. He also noticed his cravat sticking out of the pocket of her dress.
“Spectroscopy,” Wax said in response to her question. “Let’s burn some flakes.”
“Wait,” Marasi said. “You couldn’t get it to melt — how are you going to burn it?”
He took a file to the clamped spike, catching the shavings on a piece of thick cardstock. “Most metals will burn, Marasi, if you can get the pieces small enough and can apply enough oxygen. We’ve managed it with harmonium, even though we couldn’t melt it fully.”
“That’s … strange, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Indeed,” Wax said. “But we are, as has been noted, talking about the bodies of gods.”
He set up the spectroscope and managed to burn some flakes, using the oxygen line, to take some readings. Then he heated a piece again to get it to emit light waves and took readings on that. The machine made a pen move on a piece of paper, like a seismograph — only here, the highs and lows represented frequencies of light. Those patterns of light corresponded to different elements.
In this case, strangely, he got a straight-across line — a full spectrum. Though at the end of the spectrum, in the red, the machine tried to send the line higher than the maximum. Which shouldn’t have been possible, for all that he’d seen it once before.
He unscrewed the pin holding the arm in place on the paper and reran the machine. Again a full spectrum at maximum — into the red, where the pin on the arm swung out and off the paper with a jerk.