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’dhad 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 ishard.” 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 antever- dant 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 beextremelyhot 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,farmore ancient. Far,farmore crafty.”
The lab fell silent, save for thehumof the electric current machine, which Wax flipped off.