Book Five, Chapter 82: Rolling Silver

~Riley~

On-Screen

“And you’re telling me for certain that I cannot touch the body?” Andrew asked.

“Don’t touch the body. Don’t touch the necklace. Don’t touch anything,” I said, trying to sound panicked. “Not with your hands at least.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Well, we’re not going to get much of an autopsy done, are we?” he asked.

“Just look at her. Can’t you tell anything just by looking at her?” I asked.

Andrew glanced down at what remained of Clara Withers. We were back On-Screen almost immediately after we left it because he was technically examining a dead body, which activated his The Slab trope.

In many ways, it felt like a misfire because he didn’t actually have time to examine her properly. My insistence on forbidding him from touching her or her necklace certainly didn’t help. The whole thing seemed off, yet we were On-Screen, and we had to play our parts.

Still, he was careful. Using a probe he carried in his pocket, he moved around her hair and clothes, examining them as best he could. He was unimpeachably methodical.

“She doesn’t appear to have been killed by physical trauma. In fact, I would have to conclude that she was fully intact when she was laid to rest. I confess I’m not certain what procedures were done to decedents in those days. She certainly wasn’t embalmed.”

“She was killed by a curse!” Kimberly said, pacing back and forth. “I told you that.”

“That is a rumor,” Andrew replied. “We have no idea what they might have meant by ‘curse’ in those days.”

“A curse, as in magic,” I said. “If she wasn’t killed by a silver bullet, the only way she could be dead is… is with magic, right?”

“Yes, that’s the only conclusion possible,” Andrew said sarcastically. “Alternatively, she could have died of a disease. She could have been suffocated or starved. In those days, the real curse was dehydration due to dysentery. I simply have no way of knowing, given her advanced state of decay and the limitations you’ve placed on me.”

“Is there anything else?” Kimberly asked Andrew.

He shook his head. “It would seem the secrets of her demise died with her,” he said.

After a little more back-and-forth, we went Off-Screen. I wasn’t sure how much of that Carousel was going to use, but it was good to have established that she did not appear to have died from a silver bullet, though I wasn’t sure how we would use it yet.

We left the crypt and returned to the fort. As we climbed the stairs into the manor house, Antoine was waiting for us.

“Did you get what you were looking for?” he asked.

“We got a lot,” Kimberly said, and then she went on to explain everything that had happened.

At that point, we were pretty much splitting up. Kimberly had to pursue her subplot further, and Antoine needed to work with the mercenaries. Andrew and I, however, were still together, trying to figure out what rolling silver was.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it,” I said as we walked across the overgrown lawn on our way to the fort. “It could be rolling silver because it’s really hot—you know, like a rolling boil.”

“Boiling silver,” Andrew repeated. “Silver’s boiling point is more than twice as hot as its melting point. Are we certain that, in those days, your journaler’s assistant would have casually been boiling silver?”

“No,” I said, “but I know who to talk to about it.”

Carousel must have liked my idea because as we entered the fort courtyard and started walking toward the silversmith’s hovel, we went On-Screen. It was midday by then.

The NPC, Hetty Morgan, didn’t look us in the eye as we arrived. I think the only person she had actually talked to for more than ten seconds was Kimberly.

After waiting for her to notice us, she finally said, “What do you want?” She did look busy—she was making spikes of some kind, like caltrops, out of silver.

“How difficult is it to boil silver?” I asked.

“You mean boil, or do you mean melt it?” she asked, not stopping her work. “Those are two different things.”

“Actually boiling it—not just melting it. Up to the boiling point.”

She shook her head. “I can’t do that here. Don’t have the fuel, don’t have the right rig, don’t have any good reason.”

Well, that was pretty definitive. I wasn’t sure if that was just Hetty’s personality or if it was us getting the proverbial door slammed in our faces regarding rolling silver.

I turned to Andrew. “Well, if it takes a huge rig to be able to boil silver, I’m going to assume that’s not what rolling silver is.”

He scratched his neck.

“Perhaps we dismissed mercury too soon,” he said.

We turned to walk away, but before we could, Hetty called out to us. “I don’t know about boiling silver, but if you want rolling silver, that’s a different thing.”

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We looked at each other, then back at her.

“You know what rolling silver is?” I asked. Obviously, we had to ask the silversmith eventually, but we had to wait until we had set up the question. I had no doubt that if we’d asked her initially, she might not have known.

“Yeah,” she said. “Every blacksmith, prospector, doomsday prepper, and even the occasional pyromaniac knows about that.”

We were getting somewhere.

“Can you show us?” Andrew asked.

“Sure, I have all the time in the world,” she said. She stopped what she was doing, grabbed a handful of silverware from a bin near her workspace, and picked up what looked to me like a rough frying pan with a long handle, though I knew that couldn’t be what it was.

She pulled up a rig that was essentially a blowtorch connected to a propane tank.

“Stand back,” she said.

She dropped the handful of silverware into the pan, set the torch in a metal rig at an angle, and turned the fuel all the way up. She lit the torch with a small clicking device and adjusted the angle of the flame until it hit the silverware in the pan. Then, with thick gloves, she grabbed the handle of the pan and began to move the pan around slowly.

“This old silver here is filled with impurities,” she said. “All you gotta do is melt it down. Get it nice and hot.”

It didn’t take long at all. The silverware started to melt, congealing into one glowing mass of metal. Then after it was way hotter than it needed to be for making silver bullets, all at once, I finally saw it—rolling silver.

The silver formed into one glob, perfectly round like a ball, and as she moved the pan, it rolled around, hissing and spitting, leaving behind a crust of slag.

“You see that?” she asked. “That is what the old timers used to call rolling silver. It’s a handy way of getting the junk out.”

I looked at Andrew.

“Of course,” he said. “Silver is a noble metal. It oxidizes at an incredibly high temperature, so if you heat it enough, many impurities react with the air and form slag while the silver itself stays molten.”

I watched as the impurities were pulled right out of the rolling molten ball.

“She’s purifying it,” I said.

The more she worked the silver, the more slag was left behind, until eventually all that remained was a small, round bulb of silver. She turned off the blowtorch and set the pan in front of us so we could see.

“There are better ways of doing it if you need a lot of pure silver,” she said, “but it’ll get the job done.”

Andrew and I exchanged amazed glances.