“What sorts of things caught your eye specifically?” I’d skimmed through the headers after Dimitri had given me the translation but given it all to Willard without reading everything line by line. Most of it had been confusing gibberish to me. Like reading advanced chemistry papers without a background in the sciences.
“I’ve already made their susceptibility formula, the wrath reflector, and a couple of their poisons. One never knows when one might have to defend oneself. I have new neighbors.”
“By neighbors, do you mean the new owners of this property?”
“Indeed. The ten-year-old girl was already sucked into the haunted carriage house for attempting to take a puzzle off a shelf. The house is quite possessive about its belongings.”
From across the room, Dimitri grunted in agreement.
“I assume she got out?” I asked.
“The house spit her out the next day. She had a wild story for her parents. They didn’t believe her, but they also forbade her to go in there again. Excellent for my privacy. One doesn’t want to listen to footsteps thundering around overhead while one is working.”
“Have you drunk any of your neighbors’ blood yet?” I wondered how long it would be until this family also moved out and put the house up for sale.
“Their guests’ actually. They host card-game parties regularly that get quite boozy. This prompts guests to stay overnight with their throats available to anyone who climbs up the drainpipe and through the window.”
“I’m sure that’s a lot of people.”
“Myself and the occasional burglar.”
Zav came over and stood next to me to look down at the analyses. He had never seen the dark-elf notebook.
Realizing he might be the best resource we had on all things magical, I asked Zoltan, “Do you have a copy of your translation that we can see?”
Zoltan pulled a three-ring notebook off a shelf and slid it over to me without getting too close. He did glance at Zav’s neck, but I highly doubted he would make that move.
“How familiar are you with dark-elf alchemy and artifact creation?” I asked quietly.
“Not very.” But Zav flipped through the notebook and mentioned that he’d seen a couple of the formulas and artifacts before. “This is what they used to kill the thirty thousand shifters.”
The sketch managed to be both vague and menacing. I shivered, imagining such artifacts placed around a town and oozing power that slowly killed people.
Zav turned to the pages in the back. More than ten were filled with numbers in a long series without breaks but with numerous decimal points.
“There was no white space between any of these digits, Zoltan?” I touched a page.
“No.”
“But these have to be a lot of numbers, not one long one, right? You’d never have more than one decimal in a value, unless dark-elf math is special.”
“Math is the same everywhere,” Zav said. “The different species have different methods for recording and solving numerical problems, and some don’t use base-ten math—not everybody has a pair of hands with five digits—but the elves and dark elves have developed similar systems.”
Zoltan nodded. “The problem is that since they didn’t put white space into this book, we would only be guessing.” He pointed. “Is that 3.458 and 2.72 or is it 3.4 and 582.7 and 2?”
I gazed down at the rows and rows of numbers, trying to see a pattern. “I suppose Willard’s people would have dumped everything into internet searches, and probably searches in other databases, to see if any matches came up.”
“It would be difficult to do such a search without context.”
“Don’t we have context?” I asked. “It’s a book full of chemistry and magic. And they’re dark elves. What kinds of data would be of interest to them? These numbers couldn’t represent people who died in their experiments, not with decimals. Pints of blood poisoned?”
Zoltan snorted.
“Perhaps they were recording data from the world around them that could affect their experiments,” Zav said.
“If this is data that is publicly available out there somewhere, it should match up with a search.”
I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing out the first couple of rows, taking guesses at where the splits would be.
“If I had the original,” Zav said, “I could determine if all the numbers had been entered at once or if they were recorded over time.”
The original that had been taken out of Willard’s vault. I plugged my number guesses into my phone and waited while it did a slow internet search, limited by the poor reception.
“I had the original,” Zoltan said, “and I could not determine that.”
“You are not a dragon,” Zav said.
“I fail to see how your ability to fly and incinerate buildings makes you more astute at analyzing data.” Zoltan sounded miffed.
“I also have the ability to detect magic and smell and sense details about the world around me. Including ink on a page.”
Plugging a mass of numbers into a search engine didn’t return anything useful. I flipped to the very first page of data. The first entry was a single digit followed by a decimal point and more digits. How big were dark elves on zeroes? I didn’t see that many of them. Using the first entry as a pattern setter, I assumed each number set started with one digit, using zero through nine, followed by a decimal point and the subsequent digits.
“I already have a headache,” I muttered, tapping my possible numbers into another internet search. “This is why I give the intel stuff to Willard. She likes numbers. She likes problems of all kinds.”
“Willard is the grumpy colonel with all the weight equipment in her apartment, right?” Dimitri asked. “Who told me to get out of her way because she was as busy as a one-legged cat in a sandbox?”
“That’s her. Don’t let the Southern accent or the country idioms fool you.” I glanced at the time and wondered if it was too late to call her for something non-dire.
I still didn’t get a match from the new figures I searched, but adding the white space started getting me partial matches on some of the sets of numbers. None of the hits seemed relevant as I skimmed along, and I was about to give up when something on the seventh or eighth page made me pause.
“Earthquake in Thailand, 5.1,” I read a webpage title. I doubted our dark elves had anything to do with events in Thailand, but the report made me reconsider what the lists of numbers might signify. “If you lived underground, earthquakes might be a concern, right? What if all this data represents numbers on the Richter scale?”
“What is the Richter scale?” Zav asked.
“Our way of measuring the severity of earthquakes. It’s logarithmic.” I ran a finger along the lines I’d copied. “These would all be fairly low indicators of seismic activity. That 5.1 is the highest in this batch.”
“Would other data not have to be included for the list to be useful?” Zoltan asked. “Such as dates?”
“You would think.” I shrugged. “This is just a guess.”
If the dark elves were recording seismic activity… that put a chill down my spine. What if they were working on some artifact that could cause earthquakes? Seattle wasn’t the hotbed of activity that California was, but every now and then, the newspapers reported on the possibility of The Really Big One and talked about the destruction and tsunami that had occurred the last time one had happened in the area. Some three hundred years ago, if I remembered correctly.
I decided to risk Willard’s ire and call her.
“It’s almost midnight, Thorvald,” she answered, almost a growl. Her words broke up, and I was tempted to go outside, but they were understandable. “Did you find the dark elves or something worth waking me up for?”
“No, but there’s a card-game party on Zoltan’s property. I know you’re into euchre. I thought you might want to join in.”
“Report to the office at eight a.m. for an ass kicking. And tell me why you really called.”
“I’m looking at the numbers translated from the back of the dark-elf notebook. Did you guys try searching for them as Richter scale entries?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Here I’d thought I’d been brilliant.
“There weren’t any matches on the internet. We also pulled data from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.”
“From all the locations where activity is recorded?”
“No, from the monitors around Seattle, since that’s where the dark-elf lair is. Was. There’s a lot of data out there, so we had to make some assumptions. Primarily that they were interested in earthquakes around population centers. Everything we’ve deduced from their book and our informants is that they want to get rid of humans.”
“You have volcanos,” Zav said, having no trouble hearing both sides of the conversation. “I have flown over them.”
It took me a moment to get the connection. Right, seismic activity could be caused by magma moving underground, not only by movement along fault lines. “Did you hear that, Willard? Did you check the stations by Mount Rainier and Mt. St. Helens? What if it’s not earthquakes they care about but predicting volcanic eruptions?”
Or causing them? I rubbed my face. It was easier to imagine magic diddling with magma underground than moving entire continental shelves along fault lines.
“Willard?” I asked. She’d gone silent. “What do you think?”
She sighed. “That your dragon is smarter than he looks. I’ll get the data. Come by the office in the morning.”
“For an ass-kicking?”
“To retrieve staples from the walls of my outer office.” She hung up.
“I do not look smart?” Zav touched his jaw.
“You look pretty.” I patted his chest.
“These traits are mutually exclusive in humans?”