The bodies of the three assassins were too badly burned to identify, which pissed Eirian off, even though she was the one who'd burned them.
"It's better than letting them get away," Chenzhou assured her as he, Eirian, Mingzhe, Yuze, Kai Low, and Li crouched around the three bodies, laid out on a blanket. All three of them were male, of average height, and wearing all black clothes. The pieces that had survived were all pieces of different uniforms.
"These are all made in the Camelia." Chenzhou frowned, carefully examining a piece of burnt black fabric.
"They wouldn't be hard to steal, though," Mingzhe pointed out. "Most of them are basic enough that supply would hand them out without question."
Eirian ran a finger over one of the masks. She tried to pick it up. It gave an ugly squishing sound and refused to come completely loose. Chenzhou looked a bit sick at the sound. "The skin melted to the mask," Eirian muttered and accepted a small, slim knife from Li. She leaned down to get a better view as she cut and scraped the skin away enough to pull the mask free. Strips were still hanging off when she lifted it free. "Ugh. I forgot skin kind of looks like melted cheese."
Chenzhou squinted at her. "You love cheese."
Eirian glared at him. "It's not the same."
He uttered under his breath about never eating cheese again, and he didn't look like the only one, as both Kai Low and Mingzhe also looked sick to their stomachs.
She handed Li the blade and tried to wipe away the soot from the fire. "It's metal. Very fine." It was so thin it was almost hard to believe it was metal at all, but she could feel the impacts from the hammer that had rendered it such.
"It would have to be if they made a mask out of it." Li reached over and fingered an edge with a small hole and a thin strap of leather, burnt down to the knot. "And for it to stay in place with such a small tie."
"I've never seen a design like it," Yuze commented. The mask was simple, pounded thin, shaped like a face with no detail other than small holes for the eyes and a protrusion for the nose. There were no details or paint added or etchings carved into it. "There are no defining features at all." He frowned. "But this must have taken skill to make."
"And a smithy," Chenzhou added. "You can't just have one in a random room, right?"
Kai Low gave him a disgusted look. "No. You would die."
Chenzhou ignored his tone. "It would be hard to conceal as well. The surrounding houses would notice something." He turned to Li. "Can you send your guards out to question the residential neighborhoods?"
Li nodded, but Eirian shook her head. "They could have just used the smithy when the regular smiths were gone. Or placed a special order anonymously."
"Using a blacksmith's tools requires training and experience. It's likely someone attempting it for the first time without training would probably injure themselves." Mingzhe added, frowning. "And they certainly wouldn't have made anything of this quality. Not without practice."
"Years of practice," Li muttered.
"And money, for the metal." Kai Low added. He reached over and took the mask from Eirian. "This is pure. It wouldn't be so strong while so thin otherwise. We rarely see it in the tribes because it costs so much, but what little we have lasts for years before it wears down."
"If that's the case than it should be easy enough to track who bought and sold it. Not all of the metals we use for weapons are pure, because they don't stand up well after repeated hits." Chenzhou tapped a finger on his chin thoughtfully. "We should go through the Inventories again."
So they did, but, infuriatingly, they didn't find anything useful. There were no small orders small enough to just be the masks, and the larger orders were all placed in legitimate channels and could be accounted for down to the ounce.
Marian had practically moved into Eirian's rooms while they'd been investigating, keeping all three children with her. Lili and Samuel had been informed of their parents' deaths.
Lili hadn't been surprised. She'd told them her mother had heard the commotion from Brendan's room, and a few seconds later, she'd come running back in with Brendan and shoved all three of them into the secret passage. She'd closed it behind them, and Lili had heard shouting before she'd herded the two younger boys deeper into the passageway.
She may have been young, but she'd known from the fear on her mother's face that she wasn't going to see her again. She'd stayed strong for her younger brother and Brendan, but she'd cried herself to sleep in Marian's arms the last few nights once they were already in bed.
Brendan and Samual were too young to understand death. They'd kept asking for Min, Sam, and Finn the first few days, until they'd started to notice the reactions of the adults around them. Whoever said children were stupid was a fool; they didn't understand that they were gone, but they'd figured out something bad had happened.
Brendan clung to Eirian whenever she managed to visit. And to Mingzhe and Yuze and all three children seemed attached to Kai Low now. Eirian wasn't sure how to feel about that, but she was also confident that the tribes had nothing to do with what had happened, so he'd gone from stranger in their midst to one of the few people they could actually trust.
Eirian, Yuze, and Kai Low had gone back to question the Darrows and several other families who were tied into the supply world of the Crimson Army, but all of them had denied any recognition of the masks or the metal used to make them.
The blacksmiths themselves had been confused when they'd shown them the masks, commenting that they would have taken years of skill and weeks to make, but that none of them had taken part. They'd all had explanations for their whereabouts that included witnesses who'd been more than happy to speak to Eirian.
Which meant the masks hadn't been made in any of the official forges in the Camelia, so where the hell had they come from?
The only helpful thing the blacksmiths had said was that the type of metal used for the masks was the same as that used for smaller pieces of jewelry and decorations on the uniforms, but they rarely needed to buy new batches before those pieces were melted down and reused so often.
~ tbc