Chapter 131 - 129 — The Ash Side I

**POV: Jace**

---

Mercer had them on the bench under a cloth and he did not take the cloth off straight away.

"Before you look at them. Two things."

"Go on."

"One. I have used all of it. There is no adamantine left over and there is no second attempt at anything."

He put his hand flat on the cloth. "Two. When you have them on you are going to feel the weight and wonder whether you made the right call."

"Do not tell me about it today. Tell me in a fortnight."

Then he took the cloth off.

---

They are the same gauntlets.

That is the first thing and it is the thing I had not braced for. I had been expecting an object.

What is on that bench is the pair I have been wearing for five weeks, with the same leather at the wrists and the same shape to the cuff, and four parts of them are now a different colour.

The knuckle plates. The backs of both hands. A band across each wrist. And a long face running up the outside of each forearm, three quarters of the way to the elbow.

All of it dark silver, flat, no shine on it at all, sitting slightly proud of the older metal beside it with a clean line between the two.

Everything else is what it was.

---

"You said knuckles and forearms."

"I said knuckles, forearm faces and the wrist join, and I did the backs of the hands as well because I had the metal for it and because you punch with the whole of that surface whether you know it or not."

He picked the left one up and turned it. "Look at the join."

There is no weld I can see. The adamantine sits into a bed cut in the original plate and the original plate closes over the edge of it.

"It is not stuck on," he said. "It is let in. Nothing is going to peel."

---

"The weight."

"Go on. Pick it up."

I did, and I had the same problem I had with the ingot, which is that my arm came up expecting one thing and got another.

"That is about two hundred and forty grams a side more than you had."

"It does not feel like two hundred and forty."

"It feels like more because it is all at the far end." He took it back off me. "That is the cost. I told you there was one."

I made a fist with it on and the cuff took my hand the way it always has, and the weight arrived at the end of the arc about a fifth of a second after the rest of me did.

Then I did it three more times and the fifth of a second went away.

Strength thirty-five. A month ago that would have been a problem I noticed all day.

---

"Now the part you did not ask for," he said, and turned it over, and opened the inside.

The lining is gone and there is new lining in it, thicker at the heel of the palm and thinner across the back.

"Your old lining had been cooked flat in two places. You were getting a hot spot on the wrist bone and you probably did not notice it as a separate thing from everything else being hot."

"I did not."

"No. And the flat lining is why your plates were loosening." He put a finger inside. "Every time you ran that fire, the assembly grew, and then it cooled and shrank, and the lining was not taking any of that movement, so the rivets were."

"So the movement goes into the lining now."

"The movement goes into a gap I have left, and the lining stops your skin knowing about it. There is about a millimetre and a half in there doing nothing except being available."

---

"And the channels."

"Bedded round the adamantine, because adamantine will not carry anything." He turned the gauntlet so the wrist band was up.

"I have brought them out wider than they were. They finish at the plate edges further apart, which means the same output sheds over more edge."

"Does that change what I can do."

"It changes how long before the joins go hot. I am not going to give you a number because you will hold yourself to it and get it wrong." He shrugged. "It is better. It is not different."

---

Then he put both hands on the bench and said the thing he had clearly been waiting the whole conversation to say.

"Last item and I want you looking at me for it."

"I am."

"That metal will not break. You could put those knuckles into a wall for a week." He tapped the adamantine on the back of the left one. "Your arm is not made of that."

"Understood."

"I do not think you do, so I am going to say it the ugly way."

"Something big enough hits you on that forearm face, the plate holds, and the whole of the force goes into the bone underneath. You come back to me with a perfect gauntlet and an arm in two pieces."

"So it changes what breaks."

"It changes what breaks and it does not change how much arrives." He picked up the scribe. "Men die in very good armour, Nolan. Put them on. Twice, because the first fitting is a lie."

—

He was right about the first fitting.

I wore them for eleven minutes while he worked on somebody else’s harness, and then took them off.

He adjusted the left cuff by about a hole and a half and changed the angle of one strap, and the second fitting was a different pair of gauntlets.

Then I sat on the end of the bench and opened my Status, because I had been carrying fourteen points around for nine days and I finally knew what I was going to be standing in.