Back again with this week’s hit of Alexis and Arslan! I’m working on a new blog post that’s an update on my WIP, as well as a longer, nerdier post that’s almost an essay at this point (probably will be later in the month) so expect to see those soon too.
Feels kind of perfect to be dropping a chapter today when I just ran through the house screaming in excitement over the new Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis game trailer and release date announcement. Come on, archaeologists and Atlantis? Be still, my beating heart, that’s my brand at this point. No idea what I’m talking about? Click here and find out all about my Atlantis obsession xx
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Chapter Three
The church opened into a small, proper nave. A threadbare red carpet drew the eye past a modest iconostasis and three oil lamps. On the altar step itself, a single cat slept with extraordinary self-possession. As Alexis entered, it cracked open one yellow eye, weighed him in an instant, and deemed him unworthy of its attention.
Rows of wooden pews faced a triptych altar piece depicting the dog-headed saint and a black Madonna.
Among these interesting aspects, Alexis noticed, with growing amusement, that the east wall of the church was also a lie. It was constructed by someone who knew the best way to hide something was to place something slightly less interesting in front of it and let years of paint and incense smoke do the rest. The murals depicted the adventures of a dog-headed saint, but the landscape he walked through was distinctly Egyptian.
Hello, Anubis, what an interesting place to find you, old friend.
Arslan went to a small wooden door in the south wall that opened to a sacristy. Robes hung on pegs, and a cabinet held communion vessels, but none of it looked like it had been used. A second door at the back of the sacristy opened when Arslan touched it, revealing a hidden staircase descending into darkness.
“After you,” Arslan said, gesturing.
“I think not.”
“No?”
“I’m a guest. Guests follow, and so do people who like to protect their backs from mysterious strangers,” Alexis replied.
Arslan smiled properly for the first time, and it made his face twenty years younger. “You’re a courteous thief, Alexis.”
“I haven’t stolen anything yet.”
“Well, the day is young.” Arslan went down the stairs, clearly not concerned that Alexis would stab him.
The stairs were older than the church, made of stone and with the worn concavity in the middle of each step that only came from hundreds of years of the same feet. The walls were clean and oil lamps burned at intervals in small iron brackets. The air grew cooler and smelled of still water and wick-smoke, and then, as they descended further, there was frankincense. Rose oil. A thread of bitter cardamom. The faint, musky, green-earth note of blue lotus that Alexis had last smelled in a temple outside Memphis.
The stairs ended at a short wooden bridge spanning dark water, which made quiet lapping sounds against stone pillars carved with Medusa heads. Alexis crossed behind Arslan, and the bridge brought them out into the main chamber.
Alexis stopped in his tracks to stare around him. It had been one of the dozens of cisterns that networked the hills of the city like the roots of some enormous invisible tree.
Arched vaults of brick and stone ran in regular rows, their columns reflected in the shallow water that still ran around the base of each pillar. Lamps hung on long chains from the vaulting, not oil lamps now but small glass lanterns containing what Alexis recognized instantly as magical flame, just by its clarity and brightness.
Carpets had been laid over the raised walkway that ran down the center of the chamber. There was a low table in one corner, surrounded by cushions. The table was already set with a brass tray, two small glasses, and a copper pot. A hookah of beaten brass and green glass was off to one side, and Alexis understood with a sudden clarity that Arslan had been expecting him. He could sense magic, but it was the small, household kind that kept water hot and the shelves free of dust.
“You keep a very welcoming cistern,” Alexis commented, his eyes drifting to archways to the right, which showed shelved books.
“I keep the tea hot out of habit, and the day I stop, I am told, is the day I begin to die.”
Alexis snorted. “Who told you that nonsense?”
“Unfortunately, a small voice in my head that has been right about most things.”
Arslan gestured at the cushions, and Alexis sat. The carpet beneath him was so thick it took his weight the way deep snow took a footprint.
Arslan poured tea, a shocking shade of magenta, into the small glass. He accepted it, and by the scent, he knew it was made of pomegranate, mint, and a few buds of blue lotus. He would have to find out how Arslan got hold of it. He waited for Arslan to drink first before having a sip of the tangy concoction.
“This feels like two foxes at the same watering-hole,” Arslan commented with a sly smile. “So, you felt my magic before or after I spoke?”
“After, though, reading a book of sigils in public had my attention.” Alexis sipped his tea. “I’m interested to know what it’s about.”
“I’m sure you are,” Arslan said and didn’t enlighten him. “I felt your power as soon as you stepped onto the dock this morning. I knew that Theodoros would send you to his cousins, so all I needed to do was wait.”
Alexis hadn’t considered shielding his magic because it was so rare that he needed to. “I had no idea I was so obvious.”
“You dress like a commoner, which is a good enough disguise for most, but you have the bearing and energy of something…other. I thought it polite to wait until I was reasonably sure you weren’t a threat before I decided to speak.”
Alexis would always be a threat, just not to anyone who didn’t deserve it. “And now what do you think?”
“Now we drink tea in my house.” Arslan smiled and topped up his glass. “And we decide, together, how honest we are willing to be with each other.”
Since the fall of Atlantis, Alexis had many different versions of the conversation about what he was and what he was not.
He had found one version with Constantine, which had begun on a cold afternoon in a forum in Nicomedia. Con had been young then, slightly afraid to look him in the eye, and was too proud to admit it.
Alexis had told the Sufi in Isfahan that he was a magician. The Sufi had smiled, bent time without pride to demonstrate his own skills, then offered Alexis a pomegranate and told him, kindly, that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked.
Considering he was too curious about Arslan’s own origins, he decided to be reasonably honest with the man who drank tea beside him.
“My name is Alexis Donato. In the city of Venice, I’m known as a rich scholar. In other places, I’ve had other names. I’m much older than you, I’m afraid, but I won’t tell you the number, because numbers of that kind tend to end conversations, and I’m enjoying this one. How about you?”
Arslan tilted his head. “I was born in 1106, by your calendar. Which would make me almost a hundred, I suppose. I was a student in Damascus and a scholar in Cairo. I was a member of Saladin’s court in the Egyptian years, before he became what he became.”
“A philosopher of the period?”
“A librarian of the period,” Arslan corrected. “In the palace at Cairo, I found a manuscript. It was ancient and had been copied and copied again. The original hand was gone, but the knowledge was still inside it, curled up tight like a cat in a basket. I transcribed it, and the alchemist in me couldn’t resist making the potion recipe I found.”
“You just had to drink it,” Alexis tsked.
Arslan sighed. “Alas, I had to know the truth, so I drank it, though the text warned me not to.”
“It clearly didn’t kill you.”
“Oh no, I definitely died. I remember a river, and there was a jackal beneath an impossible night sky.”
Alexis simply waited for him to continue when he was ready. These kinds of confessions were never easy.
“The Great Anubis decided, for reasons he didn’t explain, to send me back to the land of the living. Since then, I have served him and done my best to protect those who need it. That is the short version, anyway. The long version is for another day.” Arslan refilled Alexis’s tea. “Now, your turn again. You don’t have to give me the long version, but I do want to know where you’re from, originally?”
Alexis hadn’t told anyone the truth for a long time, not because very few humans would recognize the name, but because something in the world still listened for it. Arslan had given him the name of his god and the reason for his immortality, so Alexis could give him the name of a country.
“Atlantis,” he said simply, and waited. Arslan didn’t laugh, but his eyes widened.
Alexis had given this information twice before, once again to Constantine and once to a skeptical astronomer in Mesopotamia who had set down his pen and gone to pour more beer. When he returned, he asked questions for three days without stopping, and on both occasions, disbelief was the first thing Alexis had to address.
Arslan simply nodded. “I see. How did you survive the sinking?”
“There were a few hours when I thought I was going to die, but Nereus moved the ship far enough out to sea so when the island had the final eruption, it didn’t take us with it.”
“Nereus is..?”
“First, she was my teacher and general. Now she is my friend and the matriarch of me and a handful of others. She sent me here to find you. Or rather, she permitted me to go. She doesn’t really send anyone. She simply looks at you until you do the thing she wants you to do, and by the time you do it, you think it was your own idea.”
Arslan’s laugh, a real one, came out of him for the first time. “I know that look. There was an old woman in the palace in Damascus who made me study Greek through that exact method. I did not want to study Greek. I ended up writing commentary on Aristotle that the senior scholars stole from me and published under their own names. The old woman never said anything about it, except to say she knew the feeling. I’ve never forgotten her. Good teachers are the most dangerous people in the world.”
“They are,” Alexis agreed with a soft chuckle.
Arslan lit the hookah with a touch of his fingers. No spoken word. No sigil drawn in the air. Just the small flicker of intention and the coal taking light.
Alexis’s own magic usually worked the same way, and he had, over the years, watched the magics of others work very differently. He understood something about Arslan from that single unshowy gesture. Arslan’s magic was quiet, practiced, and more powerful because of it.
“Tell me why you are really here,” Arslan said, leaning back against the cushions. “The ‘bookish business.’ Why come now, alone, and in a boat with no crew? Which is something that you will have to pay young Theodoros more coin to keep his mouth shut about.”
Alexis took the offered mouthpiece and drew in a breath of smoke.
“Because in about three weeks,” Alexis said, blowing it out again, “thirty-three thousand crusaders are going to be camped on the other side of that harbor mouth. They are going to come over the chain and take what they please. I’m not here to try to save the city from its fate, Arslan. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Cities die. I learned that many times. What I’m here to save is of true value. The things that, if they are melted down or burned or shipped back to be ground up for silver or cut into pieces for the holy markets of western Europe, won’t exist again. Not in this world. Not in any world.”
Alexis had said more than he meant to, and found he didn’t care. Arslan was quiet for a long time. The smoke of the hookah coiled up and was lost in the vaulting above them.
“You are going to take The Library, obviously,” Arslan said at last.
“Parts of it. Yes.”
“The Church of the Holy Apostles?”
“There are things in the crypts under the Apostles that, if Dandolo’s men find them, will never be seen again. I’m not yet sure how much of it I can get out.”
“The Hagia Sophia?”
Alexis set the mouthpiece down. “I’m not a holy man, Arslan. I’m not even Christian. Sophia will not permit me to take anything from her, even if I wanted to. She has her own defenders. I will walk through her, and say a prayer in my own language, and I won’t touch a single cup. She will be looted anyway, because the crusaders won’t care.”
Arslan made a sound of disbelief. “And you have come alone to do all of this?”
“I thought that I would move faster alone. I hadn’t considered that I would need a guide. I haven’t been in this city since Justinian.”
Arslan steepled his fingers and looked at Alexis over the top of them. “Is this your roundabout way of asking me for help, Alexis?”
“If I were to ask…” he began.
“I would say yes,” Arslan said, rubbing the space between his eyebrows with a thumb and forefinger. “You’re clearly going to need it.”
“Just like that? You haven’t heard my terms.”
“Oh, please, you have no terms. You have an emergency and a boat. I have a city I have been quietly looking after for decades, a storeroom of supplies, and a network of people who owe me favors,” Arlsan replied, and scratched at his beard. “If I’m being honest, I’ve been extremely bored for about twelve years. I was praying to my god this week for something interesting to happen, and he appears to have sent me you. Who am I to refuse the gift?”
“I just told you that your city is about to be sacked, and you don’t seem to care,” Alexis replied.
“I care very much, which is one of the reasons I wish to help you. If I were to go out into the streets and tell everyone I meet that crusaders are going to attack us, no one would believe it,” Arlsan said, and his eyes went sad. “I have also seen enough cities fall to know that it will happen, just like it will inevitably bloom again.”
Alexis didn’t say anything for a moment before he gave in and smiled. “Arslan, I think I like you.”
“I like you too. This, I suspect, will be a problem for us both in the long run.”
Alexis didn’t hold back the laughter that broke free from him. “Without a doubt, but for the next few weeks, it will be very useful.”
Arslan poured more tea. “Now, tell me everything. Start with Dandolo and the crusaders. Then the Library and the crypts. We will make a list! I’m very good at lists.”
Still laughing, Alexis relaxed in the warm circle of lamp-light and sweet smoke, and began to talk.
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Thank you for reading chapter three! Can you tell I was having WAY too much fun with this story? My boys, just hanging out *sappy heart eyes*
If you haven’t read Alexis’s adventures yet, you can check them out here. Or if you are curious about who Arslan is, then click here.
I’ll see you soon with that update,
Ames x