Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant #1)(69)

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.