Hey Everyone
I can’t believe we are up to Chapter Five already! Whoo!
Super quick reminder to make sure you check out this PNR and romantasy giveaway I’m in with 20 other PNR and Romantasy authors. You can win all of their books plus a new Kindle. Enter here.
Okay, onto Alexis and Arlsan’s adventures for the week!
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Chapter Five
The Hercules of Lysippos stood in a colonnaded hall of the Great Palace, and in the half-light of evening, he was the single most alive piece of metal Alexis had ever seen.
He was seven feet of bronze and weighed somewhere between two and three tonnes, because Lysippos hadn’t cast him hollow in the usual way. He had poured the chest and belly with extra bronze to represent the hero’s inner density. The right arm hung loose at his side with the club. The left held, lightly and almost thoughtlessly, the apples of the Hesperides, the theft of which had been his eleventh labor.
Alexis found it oddly amusing that he was about to perform his own labor by stealing the statue of a man who had been stealing apples.
Arslan’s four contacts were as solid as he had claimed. Their names were something like Petros, Petros, Petros, and Petros, because their mother had apparently given up naming sons after the first.
Sounds like Constantine trying to name his children, Alexis thought wryly.
It was no surprise that he was thinking of Con now as he stood in his city. Alexis had half expected him to turn up, but so far there had been no sign of him.
The Petros brothers didn’t ask why they were driving the cart for a delivery at seven in the evening, or why they were to wait in a particular side alley near the palace with instructions not to be seen.
They accepted half their pay in advance, and drank, moderately, from a skin of watered wine with Arslan’s stern instructions not to get drunk or there would be hell to pay.
The cart was hidden behind a warehouse three streets from the palace. Alexis and Arslan approached on foot by separate routes, having agreed to enter the hall from opposite ends, so that if one of them was caught, the other could pretend to be no one in particular.
Alexis came in through the east door, which was guarded by a single man, as if no one in the palace expected anyone to be stupid enough to try to steal a bronze statue that had stood there for eight hundred years.
“Good evening,” Alexis said in Greek, in a light, cheerful tone.
The guard looked up. “I’m sorry, the hall is closed.”
“I’m Brother Theophanes,” Alexis said, and the name settled onto him with a soft shimmer of glamour that suggested a cassock without quite producing it. “I’m here on behalf of Father Germanos. He wishes me to make a sketch of the hero before the relocation.”
“The relocation?”
Alexis added a little confusion to his expression. “The statue is being moved to the eastern gallery for safety.”
“I wasn’t told about a relocation,” the guard grunted.
“No? Father Germanos is making a private arrangement with the Keeper of the Hall. It’s not official, but he’s nervous. He’s heard the foreign fleets are coming, and he doesn’t trust them to stay on their ships like they are supposed to.”
The guard folded his arms. “The fleets are in Venice, priest.”
“Father Germanos has a friend at the court who has seen Dandolo leaving.”
The guard scratched the back of his neck. He glanced at the statue as though the statue might offer an opinion. “I’m not supposed to let anyone in.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“How quick?”
“Twenty minutes?”
“Ten.”
“Fifteen. I’m a slow sketcher, but a thorough one, and Father Germanos demands thoroughness,” Alexis insisted. “Or I could go and get Father Germanos to ask you himself.”
The guard grunted, “Fifteen. Don’t touch the statue.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Alexis said, a hand on his heart. The guard grunted again and waved him through.
Arslan came in from the far end of the hall through the western door. He certainly had a way with doors, and Alexis couldn’t help but be grateful that their paths had crossed. When Alexis turned around, Arslan was already halfway down the hall, walking softly over the mosaic.
Arslan wore the robe of a priest, carried a censer, and looked like he had been sent to bless something.
“You are very good at this,” Alexis said quietly.
“Thank you. I’ve had lots of practice pretending to be a Christian priest. How did it go with the guard?”
“Not a problem. We have fifteen minutes.”
Alexis circled the statue and laid a hand on the base. Arslan had been right, and the plinth was separate from the figure. Cast centuries apart, the figure was attached only by small copper pins. He let his magic flow from his fingers into the bronze, reading its weight and distribution.
“Two and a half tonnes, roughly,” he murmured.
“That’s more than the cart will take.”
“The cart will take it because I’m going to take part of it through the air,” Alexis explained, drawing his magic back in. “We’ll lift him three feet off the plinth, and I’ll hold most of his weight with a wind-bearing spell. Your men will guide the rest.”
“They aren’t clever, but won’t they notice they’re lifting a bronze hero of two and a half tonnes?” Arslan asked, his brow drawing together.
“They’ll notice it’s heavy, but not how heavy. I’ll make sure of it.”
“And the glamour?” Arslan prompted.
“When we are in the street, he will be a rolled carpet. The largest rolled carpet anyone has ever seen, but a rolled carpet all the same. People won’t look twice at this time of night.”
Arslan stood beside Alexis and laid his own hand on the plinth, and Alexis felt Arslan’s magic for the first time clearly at close range.
Alexis’s own magic was fluid like water or wind. Arslan’s magic was like…ink. His art reflected how he had learned it through books, and it still held echoes of it. There was a flicker of something else, too, something ancient that had a hot sand burn. Alexis wondered if Arslan knew that he still carried Anubis’s blessing.
Perhaps a conversation for another time over another hookah.
Alexis laid both hands on the base of the hero, took a centuring breath, and summoned the wind to him. It raced to greet him like a well-trained dog and twined itself around the hero’s legs.
Alexis lifted his hands, and there was a slight scraping sound as the copper pins parted from their sockets in the plinth. The hero hung in the air, held only by magic and Alexis’s concentration.
“Dear gods,” Arslan murmured, placing a hand on the floating bronze. “That’s incredible.”
“Yes, Lysippos really outdid himself with this one,” Alexis replied, admiring the smooth lines.
“I meant the magic, Alexis.”
Alexis waved the comment off. “It’s easy enough once you learn how. Let’s get moving before the guard decides to come and see how my sketching is going.”
They walked the hero down the length of the hall, Alexis keeping the currents of air balanced around it as Arslan guided them. Within minutes, they reached the western door. Arslan whispered it open, and the hero went through and out into the colonnade.
Two guards stood at the far end, engaged in a conversation about a woman and a wager. Their backs were turned, and Alexis glanced at Arslan. Arslan held up two fingers.
Two minutes, he mouthed.
Alexis nodded and wrapped the hero in illusion, making it into a huge red carpet.
“You take the front,” Alexis whispered. “I’ll take the back.”
They slipped into place and carried the carpet past the two guards, who didn’t turn as they laughed together over a bawdy joke.
Alexis and Arslan reached the end of the colonnade, stepped through the small service door that Arslan had unlocked on his way in, and were out into the side street.
The cart was waiting with the brothers. The eldest, whom Alexis mentally referred to as Petros One, took one look at the enormous rolled carpet and asked no questions, which was what they were being paid for.
The cart creaked as Alexis settled it in the back. Arslan dropped the censer into a sack, pulled off his cassock, and shrugged on another outfit. By the time he was standing next to the cart, he was a merchant again.
Alexis eased the statue’s weight into the cart inch by inch rather than all at once, and held the back bulk of it with his magic. The mules fussed as Petros Two flicked the reins and the cart began to rumble forward.
Alexis and Arslan walked alongside it through the narrow streets. A man leaned out of a window to ask who the carpet was for, and Arslan called up that it was for the wedding of a girl he had never heard of, and the man congratulated the girl, and that was the end of it.
They reached the quay two hours later by a circuitous route where the Eos was waiting. Theodoros was still there eyes wide, and Alexis tipped him three more coins and told him to go home and sleep. The boy thanked him for the coins and scampered.
The brothers lifted the carpet onto the deck of the Eos with only a little assistance from Alexis’s spell. They didn’t complain or ask why they had paid so much for a single carpet.
Arslan laid his hand briefly on each of their foreheads in turn, and the men’s eyes went slightly unfocused.
“It’s a kindness,” Arslan said quietly, as the brothers walked away. “I haven’t made them forget anything they would want to remember. Only our faces. They’ll remember a good evening’s work, a generous employer, and wine at the end of it.”
“Close to what I would have done,” Alexis replied with a smile.
“Possibly exactly what you would have done. I learned the trick from an Egyptian priestess who said the original spell was gifted to them by an Atlantean. You could be the great-great-teacher of my memory-magic,” Arslan said, his eyes twinkling.
“I don’t know whether to be flattered or to apologize on behalf of whoever taught them.” Alexis ran a hand through his hair, searching his memory. “It was probably Aelia. She used to enjoy playing a priestess in Egypt. She was even an oracle at Siwa at one stage.”
“She must have been convincing at it,” Arslan mused. “You can’t fool an oracle, this I know from experience.”
“She didn’t need to fool them because she was one on Atlantis as well.” Alexis saw the questions forming on Arslan’s lips and quickly cut him off. “Stories for another time. Come aboard and let’s settle Hercules properly and have a drink.”
Alexis and Arslan secured the hero in the hold, where Alexis placed a mirroring ward over the bronze so it would appear to remain in its place in the hall. After the fleet attacked, he would remove it, and everyone would believe that Dandolo had taken it. He was going to take everything else after all.
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Thanks so much for reading this week’s installment. Want to catch up on the other chapters? Click here for where I’m compiling them every week.
If you haven’t read Alexis and Penelope’s adventures yet, you can check them out here. Or if you are curious about who Arslan is, then click here.
In other news, yesterday I finished chapter planning the next book in the Order of Anubis series. Finally! I’ve only been trying to nail this plot down for about 18 months. It was like I had to write ‘Immortals & Ink’ to see what I needed to do for it, and suddenly it all made sense. With any luck, I’ll start drafting by the end of the week, and I can’t wait. If I can pull it off, it will be one of my favorite books I’ve ever written.
I hope you are all doing well out there. Stay hydrated. Take your meds. Touch the grass.
Ames x