Chương 97: 88. One Man’s Junk

"Tutankhamun was buried with an iron dagger centuries before the Iron Age. In 2016 the blade tested at eleven per cent nickel, which is a polite laboratory way of saying it fell out of the sky. The Egyptians already knew. They called it iron of heaven, and they kept it for kings. Smiths have been working metal the sky sent them for five thousand years. The sky has simply become more generous."

— The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, Piraeus Eleni was at the courtyard gate before any of them reached it, which meant she had been watching the lane for some time. She counted heads as they came up through the dusk, and then she had Sarah by the shoulders before anyone could manage a good evening. She turned her daughter a full circle under the last of the light. She checked her hands, her neck, the line of her jaw, and found nothing.

"I am fine, Mamá."

"You will let me decide that." Her face was just relaxing when her eyes went past Sarah and found Arthur. He knew how he looked. The armoured vest hung open across his back in four long tears. The smell of dried blood made the situation worse.

"Panagía mou." Eleni gave a small cry and led him to the bench beneath the lemon tree before he could resist and tell her he was fine. Her hands went over the torn vest, then found the bruises underneath.

"Why are you doing this? Torturing an old woman like this?"

"Mamá, I have been with him since the moment it happened. The wound is closed. He will be fine. And you only play the old woman card when you want to guilt me into doing something."

"Then why does he look like this?" Eleni snapped back.

"I know you are doing something important, but agapité mou, you have a family here." She looked at each one of them.

"All of you."

"This morning I was worried for Sarah." She pointed at Arthur with her chin.

"Now I see I have to add three more to my worries." The party stayed silent and Sarah clutched her mother's shoulders.

"Inside," Eleni said finally.

"Inside, all of you. Clean this smell of death on you, then I will set the table." Maria met them in the hall, took one look at Arthur's state and went for water and clean cloth without being asked. Yiayia watched him cross the room from her chair by the window, and said nothing, and missed nothing.

When the party came down after cleaning up they found the table set. There was bread still warm from the pan, gigantes soft under oil, horta with cut lemon and a fish very nearly the length of Arthur's forearm. Eleni stood over the table and the plates would fill back up again miraculously. It was the age-old instinct of a mother that told her by feeding them well, she could keep all evil away from them.

Petros arrived from the yard smelling of grease, kissed his mother, ruffled the nearer child and sat down across from Arthur with expectant eyes.

"So," he said.

"Tell me. How did it go?" They recounted the day with the dangerous parts cut away. The pack near the container yard was dead. They told him about Kastella and their intention of dealing with it. Petros put his fork down.

"Six," he said.

"The Council sends four men after one of these things, and all four do not always come back. Six in one morning, with just the four of you." His hand came up and circled, hunting for the word.

"Re, are you working me?" Steve looked to Sarah for help.

"He is asking if you are pulling his leg," she said.

"Me doulévis. Are you working me. It means he doesn't believe a word you're saying."

"Ne?" Petros tried to confirm with Sarah.

"Yes, we did kill six wolves."

"Every word is true." Arthur smiled.

"And every word should stay at this table."

"At this table, re, my sister kills wolves." Petros lifted his glass to Sarah.

"Outside it, she went to Nafplio."

"This Kastella den," Petros said, looking at Sarah after everyone had stopped laughing.

"On same hill, we played?"

"Same. But there is something else up there now. The old ruins are gone," Sarah confirmed.

"We plan to go check on it again once we get some new equipment."

"Ne, too close to the town," Petros agreed.

"We will, but not soon," Donna said.

"The packs it sent out are dead, and hopefully nothing else will come down that hill soon. We have time to do it properly, and properly starts with better equipment." They finished what was left of the food and Donna helped Eleni and Maria with the coffee.

"Look at you, getting all domesticated," Arthur joked, looking at Donna.

"Do you prefer your coffee down your gullet or over your head?"

"I spoke to Kostas this morning, at the market," Eleni said to Steve over the coffee.

"He remembers you. The Englishman from the conference who wrote him emails about Malta and Greek sites, he said. You can go meet him."

"He remembered the emails. Excellent," Steve said, delighted.

"He remembers everything. That's his worst quality," Eleni complained.

While the children were being put to bed, they went upstairs to allocate points. The four of them crowded into Petros's old room, under a faded poster of Giorgos Karagounis.

"Walls and a shut door," Donna said, and closed it with her heel.

"Go on, then." Arthur put all three into Dexterity, and the restructuring ran through him in the small recalibrations he had come to know, the floorboards registering a little more precisely under his feet with each point.

"Fifteen," he said.

"That is the plan finished." ARTHUR ASHWORTH — L17: STR 30 | DEX 15 | CON 29 | ACU 6 | RES 10 The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Donna put two into Strength and one into Constitution and offered no commentary on any of it. DONNA CALLAS — L17: STR 19 | DEX 35 | CON 21 | ACU 7 | RES 8 Steve gave one each to Constitution, Acuity and Resonance, and had updated the ledger before the restructuring finished with him.

"Good," Donna said.

"CON 15 is respectable for a caster."

"I told you, I had learned my lesson."

"Yes, and you also lied to me about your allocation in London," Donna said.

"One-time." Steve threw his hands up.

"That was one-time. When will you move on from that?"

"Never," Donna replied with a half-smirk. STEVE PARR — L17: STR 7 | DEX 7 | CON 15 | ACU 38 | RES 23 Sarah mirrored the spread, one into each of the same three, rolled her shoulders once when it was done and went down to help her mother with the plates. SARAH VASSILOU — L16: STR 7 | DEX 8 | CON 23 | ACU 20 | RES 26"Both Sarah and I can hit the threshold for CON and RES, next level up or in two, if we are being conservative," Steve commented, closing his ledger.

The raki came out once the children were asleep, and the table had the four of them, Petros, Eleni moving between the kitchen and her chair, and Yiayia with her cup presiding over it without saying anything. Donna laid it out without preamble.

"Before we touch that den, three things need replacing, at a minimum. My axe has a rolled edge that I can't grind out. The hammer is not packing enough punch. And his vest is open at the back." She turned her glass a quarter-turn on the wood.

"We have the cores. What we do not have is anything worth putting one in."

"The National Archaeological Museum—" Steve began.

"Still no."

"There is bronze in that building that has been soaking for over a month, Donna. Mycenaean blades—""And even if we could walk in and take some of them, we would be the four foreigners who robbed the national museum. If we are seen, the Council will turn on us immediately. We cannot take that chance. Wanted people cannot live in this house." She looked at Eleni as she said that, and Eleni nodded slowly. Steve looked down into his glass but did not counter her.

"The market, then," Arthur said.

"Petros. You think we can get something useful there?"

"Maybe, maybe not." Petros turned his palms up.

"I have seen what crosses those tables, my friend. Old swords, kitchen steel, garden tools. Sometimes something from an antique shop shows up, but it doesn't stay in the market for long. The Council has a lot of men to equip."

"Shallow stock," Steve said.

"Even if we get something there. It's metal that has been lying in a drawer for a month. I doubt these will take a full core. Now that I think about it, the same might be true for the museum pieces."

"There is still the Council itself," Sarah said slowly.

"They equip their own patrols. They could equip us."

"In exchange for what?" Donna shook her head once.

"We have no goods to trade, and we are not spending cores to save cores. The only thing we have is information they might want, but we trade information on our own terms or not at all."

"Which leaves the smith," Arthur said.

"How did Maria put it? Slow, but good. Something made rather than found."

"Stavros." Petros nodded.

"His forge is under the old rail bridge, ten minutes past my yard. He does some of the Council's ironwork: knives, spears, whatever they need. He also makes gates, hooks and railings. Solid." He refilled the nearest glasses.

"Tell him the Vassilou house sent you and he will not skin you on the price. Much."

"Then the morning is decided," Donna said.

"We take a walk down to his shop and see what he has."

The forge was not hard to find with the ringing of metal on an anvil. The old rail bridge crossed the channel on brick piers, and in the shade of the second arch they found the workshop. Stavros was at the anvil when they came down the path, a wide man in his sixties with forearms that made his hammer look domestic. He finished the pass he was making, stood the work in the slack tub and only then looked up at the four strangers standing in his yard.

"Kaliméra," Sarah said, and gave him her household's name before anything else, the courtesies ran in Greek while the others kept a respectful distance. At the Vassilou name he put the hammer down and waved them in under the arch. Steve stopped after taking only about three steps inside the forge. In the throat of the firepot, where a bed of coals should have been, a single shimmering stone sat. It was giving off heat while the firepot burned nothing else.

"Remarkable," Steve said.

"You have bound a core to your firepot." Just as he said that, Steve noticed faint violet lines etched on the hammer Stavros was using.

"And to your smithing hammer." Stavros glanced at the firepot and then his hammer.

"It does not eat coal and it does not go out in the rain." His English was the functional kind you learned at a port.

"The hammer shapes quicker. Traded it for four iron gates, for the Acropolis."

"Remarkable," Steve repeated.

"Cores would change how the world crafts." Arthur ran his eyes over the smith's stock and Stavros walked them down it without being asked: gate iron, bundles of rebar, fence pickets, a crate of fittings with the boatyard's green paint still on some of them, two scythe blades and a sheaf of flat bar.

"Good iron is thin," he said.

"Scarce," Sarah whispered.

"I make what people ask from what I get or… break. Knives. Spear heads now, for the patrols."

"Scavenge, I think," Sarah supplied. Steve drew a length of the flat bar and weighed it across both palms. There was colour in the metal, a faint blue down in the grain where the light caught it.

"I don't think this gives us any better weapons," he said.

"Maybe marginally better, but nothing you would notice."

"Bring me better and I will make you better," Stavros said with a hint of indignation in his voice.

"Good iron, very thin." Steve stood looking at the rack a moment longer with his hands in his pockets. Then he turned to Arthur and said, conversationally, "You know what I could eat right now? A tomato. A proper ripe tomato." He looked at Arthur and continued after a breath.

"I keep wondering if planting something near a hill versus planting it in a city affects the plant. Will the gradient affect the quality of the fruit?" Arthur had half-opened his mouth to answer before he caught the word and closed it again. Correct, Archie said, into all four of their heads. Saturation falls away with distance from a formation, and transmutation follows it. The rate at the margin of an anomaly exceeds anything in this city's open ground by an order of magnitude.

A month at a margin is worth years in a street like this one. This is assuming by a hill you meant Kastella, and consequently a node or an anomaly. The four of them held still while listening to Archie, then Arthur tried to fill the gap.

"Well, yes, a ripe tomato sounds delicious. I'm sure Eleni will have some." Stavros watched the Englishman talk about a vegetable in the middle of talking about iron, shook his head and went back to his hammer.

"Sir, will you be willing to trade labour for material?" Steve asked Stavros.

"What material?"

"If we find good iron, best iron, will you make things for us? Kilo for kilo," Steve clarified.

"You make us things from half the iron and you keep the other half as payment."

"Where you find best iron?" Stavros asked, raising an eyebrow.

"That is for us to figure out."

"Endaxi." Stavros shrugged.

"You find good iron, I make what you want." They made their goodbyes and walked up the path into the morning. Steve stopped where the bridge's shadow thinned.

"Well, care to share your plan?" Arthur asked before Steve had a chance to explain.

"The lorry," Donna said.

"Where we fought the wolves. There was an abandoned lorry sitting there. Three of the wolves were sleeping next to it."

"Spot on, old girl," Steve said.

"Gosh, thanks, Lord Grantham. Shall I fetch the horse and carriage?" Donna replied with a straight face. Sarah and Arthur burst out laughing at the pained look on Steve's face.

"As I was saying," Steve continued, "that lorry has been sitting next to an anomaly for over a month. The metal in that lorry is better than anything we will find anywhere in this city. All we have to do is scrap it."

"Is that all? And exactly how do you propose we do that?" Arthur asked.

"Arthur, you have like a gazillion points in Strength. I'm sure you can manage a lorry." Arthur went quiet as they walked back to the house, taking the lorry apart in his head.

"Leaf springs on the rear axles," he said.

"That is spring steel. Knife-makers were cutting blades out of lorry springs even when the world had steel mills, because nothing better came at the price. The prop shaft will give us a hammer head with weight to spare. Cab panels and the container plate for armour."

"Carrying so much steel back won't be easy and won't be quiet," Donna said.

"We will have to make multiple trips."

"I can ask Petros to come with us. People might think it is dockyard business if they see him with us," Sarah offered. Arthur nodded.

"Let's go strip a lorry," he said.