by Jes Battis
Lucian leaned in and kissed her on both cheeks. “Enchantée. Mércis pour ta aide, et pour ta indulgence.”
“De rien.” She beamed at him. “It’s a treat to finally meet you, Mr. Agrado. I’ve heard so much about you. In a professional capacity, of course.”
He returned her smile. “Of course.”
“And this is Lady Duessa. I doubt she requires any further introduction.”
Cindée extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you. We really appreciate the support you offered us last year, with the Kynan case.”
Duessa took her hand. “It was nothing. But thanks.”
Something subtle but detectable passed between them, and Duessa held on to Cindée’s hand for just a few seconds more. She wasn’t testing her, exactly, but sort of nudging her. As far as I knew, Cindée didn’t have any specific materia proficiency. But she knew how to handle mages. She didn’t break eye contact with Duessa, and kept smiling, but I could tell that she was shielding slightly.
Duessa simply inclined her head, relinquishing her hold on Cindée’s hand. She seemed to have passed the test. I looked at Lucian, but he merely shrugged.
“Okay,” Cindée said. “If y’all just want to follow me—we’re keeping the breastplate in a locked facility.”
She led us past the various machines in the trace lab, pausing to check a readout from the mass spectrometer. We came to what looked like a closet in the back of the laboratory with a steel door, except that it had a card reader and a thumbprint panel. Cindée swiped her ID, then placed her thumb lightly on the glass panel. The red light next to it turned green, and I heard the sound of heavy tumblers turning on the other side of the door. Then it opened, and I felt a rush of cold air.
“Wee bit chilly in here, I’m afraid,” she said. “But come on in. You’ll get used to it in a bit.”
The closet was actually a temperature-controlled chamber, large enough for all of us to fit in. There were several pieces on display in Plexiglas holding units—a book that appeared to be made of smoke, a blue glass orb, and a serrated knife—but the armor was the central and most prominent item.
The breastplate was made of steel with a black sheen, probably achieved by heating the iron. That was pretty much the extent of what I knew about metallurgy. It looked slender but heavy, almost like a vest, with two solid plates connected by intricate leather straps. The plate had been fashioned into the likeness of two wings, both covered in scales. Each wing had six eyes, half open, half closed. The open eyes reminded me of Ordeño’s. I couldn’t tell what animal the wings were supposed to belong to: a bat, maybe, or a dragon? Vancouver had both, frankly, although dragons were difficult to find within the city limits.
Duessa stared at the armor. “Rayos. Are you seeing this, Lucito?”
He smiled at the diminutive version of his name. “I actually saw it at the crime scene. But it looks even more impressive under these conditions.”
“As far as we can tell,” Cindée said, “the steel’s been reinforced, or braided, with a kind of materia that we can’t identify. Our equipment picks up vestigial traces, but there’s no process like carbon dating for materia, so we can’t determine exactly what kind of energy was used to forge the breastplate.”
I thought of the rumor that Tasha had heard about Miles developing an alternative light source for detecting materia. It would have been pretty useful right about now. Maybe Selena had planned this all along.
Duessa walked in a slow circle around the holding unit, examining the breastplate from every angle. Then she turned to Cindée. “Okay. First, tell me what you think.”
Cindée opened up a red folder that she’d been carrying, glancing at her notes. “Well, I’m no expert. But the design resembles a number of types of armor, forged between 1550 and 1590, roughly during the beginning of Spain’s Golden Age. It could have come from Milan, which had an active arms industry at that time.”
“It reminds me of something I’ve seen before,” Lucian said, absently scratching at the day’s worth of stubble on his cheek. The gesture was unconsciously sexy, and drove me mad. I had to look away.
“In Florence?” Duessa asked.
“Yeah. At the Museo Nazionale. I remember the wings and the eyes. Spooky.”
I looked at him. “You’ve been to Florence?”
“You haven’t?” His expression was playful.
“It does resemble an Italian piece—” Cindée continued, flipping through her notes. “A breastplate made for the Duke of Urbino in 1546—”
“By Bartolomeo Campi,” Duessa finished for her. “Actually, that piece was made closer to 1549. And this isn’t Campi. It’s much too fine.”
Cindée blinked. “Do you specialize in Renaissance armaments, Lady Duessa?”
She smiled slightly. “I specialize in lots of old things, sweetheart. And I know that what we’re looking at is beyond the skill of a natural armorer.”
“It looks a lot like Campi’s piece, though,” Lucian said. “Isn’t that strange?”
“Maybe Campi’s breastplate was a copy, and this is the real thing.”
“Who else could have forged it, then?” I asked. “I mean, if it wasn’t this Campi guy. Were there blacksmiths in the Renaissance who had access to materia?”
Duessa turned to me. “Some. Filippo Negroli was the greatest armorer in Milan, and some say that he was a mage. Or maybe he stole dark secrets from someone else in order to create what he did.” Her eyes went slightly distant for a moment. “Such beautiful pieces. He made a pageant shield with a gorgon’s head on it, and I swear, those eyes could turn you to stone. The gold damascene alone must have taken months. And all so some princely fucking ass-hat could march in a parade, looking fine.”
“You think it should have been used in battle instead?” Lucian asked. “A piece so beautiful?”
“Sometimes beautiful things are killers.” She stared at the breastplate. “They have to shed blood like anything else. That shield, and this breastplate, are those kinds of things. They were meant to see blood, death, and carnage. Meant for the field.”
Cindée frowned at the armor. “It seems a bit fancy for battle, doesn’t it? All those eyes and wings?”
Duessa drew closer to the Plexiglas cube that housed the armor. She approached it as one would inch toward a sleeping lynx in a cage. “These things have a memory. If you want to know more, I’ll have to touch her.”
Cindée shook her head. “I’m not authorized to let anyone handle the piece. It has to be kept under controlled conditions.”
Duessa shrugged. “That’s fine. But if you want to know more about where she came from, I’ll need to lay my hands on her.”
“I didn’t know armor had a gender,” I said.
Duessa smiled. “There’s a lot you don’t know, querida. There’s no real craftsmanship anymore. All the stuff you’ve got in this lab, it’s shiny and it works great, but inside it’s just wires and chips. No blood.” She returned her attention to the breastplate. “She’s got a pulse. She was forged in el siglo del oro by a master smith. It’s a crime to have something like this under Plexiglas.”
Cindée gave her a look. “Is this like an art appreciation thing?”
Lucian interposed himself between Duessa and the armor. “I think what she means is that the breastplate is a sacred artifact. Something that required great skill and intensity to create. That kind of psychic effort leaves a trace, and someone with Duessa’s particular skill set can read that kind of trace far more effectively than your mass spectrometer. But only if you let her touch it.”
“Her,” Duessa corrected him.
He blinked. “Yes. Her.”
Cindée looked at me uncertainly.
I shrugged. “Call Selena.”
Cindée sighed and picked up her phone. She dialed an extension. “Selena? Hey, this might be a silly question. But I was just—” Her eyes widened. “Really? Are you sure? Well, you can’t blame me for wondering. Fine. I will.”
She cl
osed her phone.
“She told you to do anything Duessa asks. Right?”
Cindée frowned at me, then nodded. “Basically, yes.”
Duessa merely winked at her. “Don’t feel bad, sweetheart. It’s just one of the privileges of being a senior citizen in this community. Deference is a perk.”
I looked at her curiously. “Care to define ‘senior citizen’? ”
“Don’t even try it, Tess.” Lucian put his hands in the pockets of the lab coat. “If she won’t tell me her age, she’s certainly not going to tell you.”
Duessa shook her head. “Una mujer necesita sus secretos.”
He chuckled. “Tiene secretos peor que este, amiga.”
“And that’s how they’re going to stay. Secret.” Duessa returned her gaze to the armor. “Now. Let’s pop this top.”
Cindée entered a code into the keypad next to the display case. Then she swung the front open gently. “Please put on a pair of gloves, at least. The amino acids from your hands could do irreparable damage.”
I started to hand Duessa a pair of latex gloves, but she shook her head, reaching into her purse. “No worries. I have my own.”
She pulled on a pair of gloves and approached the case. We all fell silent. It was like waiting for the armorwhisperer to do something miraculous.
Duessa laid her hand gently on the front of the armor. Her eyes went distant. “Dímelo tu,” she murmured.
An arc of white light passed between her fingers and the metal. She leaned in closer. I felt something sharp in the pit of my stomach. Then I heard a strange buzzing in my ears. I turned to Lucian, but his expression was unreadable. If this was a technique for utilizing materia, it was older than anything I knew about. Something close to the way that Miles could “profile” a spatial scene, only deeper and more intuitive.
Curiosity got the better of me. I reached out just for a moment with my senses, trying to brush against whatever power Duessa was channeling. It hit me in the face like a blow, stinging, making my eyes water and my lips ache. There was earth materia bound up in there somewhere, but that was just the surface. Beneath that, there was a layer of roiling dark energies, hungry and incandescent. It took all of my strength not to make a sound.
If Lucian noticed, he said nothing.
Duessa took her hand away. The white light cooled to a glow, then dissipated slowly. Thin vapors curled around her fingers, and I smelled burning plastic. The latex glove was gone.
“You’re lucky you didn’t set off the sprinklers,” Cindée said. “What was that? Some kind of energy-based microscopy?”
“It would take too long to explain.” Duessa reached into her purse and withdrew a bottle of hand sanitizer. She sprayed both hands, rubbed them vigorously, then replaced the bottle. “Major magic like that can really dry out your skin.”
“Did the armor tell you anything useful?” I asked. “Like where it was made, or born, or whatever?”
She fixed me with a critical look. “Sweetheart, don’t take this too personally. But you need to have a little more respect for the powers that you tap into every day. What you call ‘materia’ is just one property among many that drives the occult universe, and it wasn’t put here to make your life easier. You have to honor it. Otherwise, you may call on it one day and find that it’s stopped listening to you.”
My face went red. “I’m sorry, Duessa. You’re completely right.”
And she was. I did take the power for granted sometimes. I assumed that it would always answer me, quickly and efficiently, as it had when I was a little girl. But even now, at twenty-six, I found that the magic came just a little bit slower. It didn’t always do exactly what I wanted. Basic techniques took more and more concentration to pull off successfully, and the recovery time got longer.
It was the same with drinking. I couldn’t pound back two pitchers of beer anymore. Red wine just made me want to go to sleep. Last week, I’d passed out on the couch while watching a Food Network documentary.
Duessa put her hand lightly on my shoulder—the same hand that, moments ago, had burned with frightening light.
“It’s okay, honey. We all forget sometimes. But trust me. You have to respect these mysteries, just like you’d respect a loaded gun. Your care and attention is the only thing that keeps them from turning on you. And nobody wants that.”
Lucian moved toward me. “Tess had been working really hard—”
Duessa raised a hand. “No excuses. That goes for you as well, Lucito. If any power needs to be respected, it’s yours.”
Cindée exhaled a tad loudly. “Can I put the cover back on now?”
Duessa nodded. “Of course. She’s sleeping now.”
“Right.” Cindée closed and locked the Plexiglas case. “And what exactly did y’all talk about?”
“It wasn’t really a conversation,” Duessa said. “More like a silent movie, with all of the scenes played out of order. But I still managed to pick up a few details.”
Cindée opened up her red notebook. “Did you find out when the breastplate was forged? Were we close?”
“Well…” Duessa raised an eyebrow. “It doesn’t quite work that way.”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Don’t give me sour face. For an artifact like this, determining time of birth can be as tricky as identifying time of death.”
Cindée blinked. “Okay. I can see that. How about a blurry estimate?”
“Mid-1570s. I’d guess.” She gestured to the armor. “Of course, there are some things you can tell just by looking at her. The cuirass is heat-blackened, with detailed piccadill borders, and overlapping lame-plates. That eliminates anything made in England or France before 1550. It’s far closer to Milanese plate.”
I nodded. “Right. I knew that.”
Cindée was writing things down furiously. “Lame-plates. Got it. What else?”
“There are brass studs on the shoulders and back-plates.” She gestured to raised gold buttons on the edges of the steel vest. “Post-1550, we might expect these to be Tudor roses, such as the kind you’d see on Henry VIII’s famous Montmorency garniture. But these studs are actually solid gold arming nails, meant to reinforce the cuirass against blows from a lance.”
“So it’s pageant armor,” Lucian said. “Meant for show, right?”
“It may have been made to look like pageant armor. But the steel remembers blood and violence. It’s definitely been on a field of battle somewhere.”
“Time out.” Cindée put down her notes. “So far, you aren’t really telling us anything that we hadn’t already considered. And it doesn’t matter if the armor was made for a pageant or a war. We need to figure out where it came from, and why Luiz Ordeño was wearing it the night that he died.”
I gave her an admiring look. “Wow. You’re starting to sound like a real OSI. Maybe you should transfer to the field.”
She sighed. “I’ve thought about it more than once. There’s only so many filament samples you can analyze before you feel like you’ll die of boredom.”
Duessa was still looking at the armor. “Pieces like this were also national texts. They were meant to encode the values of the empire. When a prince put on a suit of armor like this, he became a Roman hero. The metal tells the story of centuries’ worth of bloodshed, warfare, and pain.”
I followed her gaze. “So we have to read it like a history book?”
“In this case, you have to read it like a spell-book. Ordeño knew how to read it. Now you have to learn as well.”
“Me personally? Because I’m not great with languages. I still don’t know how to conjugate tener in the simple preterite.”
Lucian grinned. “But you’re trying. And that’s what’s important.”
“In a way,” Duessa said, “you’re right. The great metal-smiths, like Negroli, or Diego de Çais… they were working with a kind of steel alphabet. The damascene and the acid-etched images form a language, and in this case, the code is meant to conceal an old form o
f magic. Break the code, and you’ll figure out whatever the magic does.”
I gave her a look. “Really? That’s all you can tell me?”
“Why, Tess. You sound disappointed.”
“Come on. This is like when you said that you’d never met the Iblis. You know way more than you’re telling me.”
“Tess—” Lucian began.
Duessa just smiled. “Some things you have to figure out for yourself, niña. I’m not an esoteric GPS. I can’t give you directions to everything.”
“Of course not. But you can give us something better than ‘mid-1570s.’ Right? I mean, what would someone like Ordeño even be doing with a fancy breastplate from the Renaissance? What was it supposed to protect him from?”
Duessa returned my look coolly. “To know that, you’d have to think like a necromancer. So maybe you’re asking the wrong person.”
I turned to Lucian. “Yeah. Maybe I am.”
He took a small step backward. “Don’t look at me. I don’t know anything more than you do about medieval armaments.”
“I find that hard to believe. I’ve seen your library.”
“Those books are mostly for show.”
“Lucian, come on. Ordeño was a litigator. When we searched his apartment, we didn’t find any other bric-a-brac from the Golden Age. Just the armor. So what was he doing with it?”
“I don’t know. He was a mentor and an old friend, Tess, but I never knew much about his past. Maybe it was a family heirloom.”
“Or maybe he was alive when it was made. A necromancer like that must have been pretty long-lived, right?”
He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He seemed to be staring at a patch of space directly above my right shoulder. “It’s possible. Skilled practitioners have been known to manipulate necroid materia into slowing the aging process.”
“Practitioners. But not necessarily Ordeño. Or you.”
He blinked. “Are you asking how old I am, Tess?”
“I’m asking you to give me something that isn’t a vague estimate or a cryptic joke. We’re working together here, Lucian. If we don’t keep the lines of communication open, we’re just going to go around in circles.”