Immortals & Ink: Chapter Eight

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

I hope you are all having a fabulous week wherever you are in the world.

It’s bloody freezing here in Melbourne, and I celebrated a birthday in true magicians’ style – with lots of delicious Greek food, cake, cocktails, and shisha. Have I picked up a cold because of these shenanigans? Yes. Do I regret it? Absolutely not.

I’m plodding along with ‘Thieves and Oracles’ and doing my usual winter bullshit of ‘I must do random DIY on the house and garden.’ Let’s just say, I have a very understanding husband.

Now, onto our weekly dose of Arslan and Alexis!

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Chapter Eight

The Church of the Holy Apostles sat on the fourth hill of Constantinople like a jewel that had been held up to the light for so long it had forgotten it was a stone. It had five domes and a cruciform plan that had made Justinian’s architects weep with pride.

Alexis had been inside the crypts only once, a lifetime ago, on the afternoon he had helped carry Constantine’s body down the stairs in 337 C.E, and he had never gone back.

The main reason was that Con had woken up again, thanks to a miracle (or a curse, depending on how one looked at it), and had sent a note a year later when he wasn’t a raving madman.

Con was currently somewhere east of Edessa in a caravan he had attached himself to for reasons he would have to explain when Alexis next saw him. Alexis intended to have words with him about it, because leaving in the middle of winter with no warning or forwarding address wasn’t what friends did to each other.

“You are muttering,” Arslan observed as they approached the church through the side gardens dressed as two minor clergy on late business.

Alexis grunted. “I’m thinking about a friend who isn’t answering his letters.”

“You are worried about him?”

“I’m always worried about him. It is how the friendship works. He is reckless, and I worry. He complains about it, but I worry anyway. Then he does something reckless again, and we start the cycle over. We have been doing this for hundreds of years now.”

Arslan chuckled softly. “That would be exhausting.”

“It sounds like you have already met him,” Alexis replied. He had wanted Con with him for this trip, and if he hadn’t been so secretive about it, maybe Con wouldn’t have gone off with a bloody caravan. 

Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. If Con saw a fleet of crusaders about to invade the city, he would see it as a challenge and not a threat. 

Arslan smiled a little at the paving stones but didn’t tease him about being a mother hen. They reached the side door of the nave, where Arslan opened the door, and they stepped inside.

The nave was empty but for two lamps still burning and one old monk sweeping the floor with a steady rhythm that suggested he had been sweeping the same floor for fifty years and would sweep it until he died, and no one would stop him because no one had ever been able to.

“Good evening, Father,” Arslan said softly.

“Good evening, my sons.” The monk’s voice was thin and deep at once. “You are working late.”

“A small matter in the crypts. Father Gregorios sent us.”

“Father Gregorios has been dead for three years.”

Well, there goes that idea, Alexis thought grimly.

Arslan didn’t blink. He made a small gesture of apology with his free hand and said, with the rueful tone of a man admitting an embarrassing mistake, “Forgive me, Father. I sometimes forget which Gregorios. The new Gregorios, then. My apologies. He has sent us.”

The old man cleared his throat.”The new Gregorios is a boy.”

“He is a boy, yes.”

“He isn’t old enough to send anyone anywhere.”

“He isn’t, Father. We are humoring him. He’s taking his duties very seriously, and we are allowing him to feel useful.”

The old monk considered Arslan for a long moment and looked at Alexis for a longer one.

“You are not priests,” the old monk said finally.

Alexis’s hand moved, very slightly, towards the blade Lyca had given him. Arslan’s hand, not looking, caught Alexis’s wrist and held it.

The old monk smiled. “You are not priests, but you are something else. I don’t mind. My father told me a story once about how he met a man with eyes that didn’t match his face, and how the man had saved him from a bandit in the street in Nicaea. The man had then walked away and had never asked for thanks. I have always wondered whether I would meet such a person myself before I die. It seems I have now met two.”

The monk leaned on his broom. “I’m not going to stop you from going into the crypts. I’m going to keep sweeping. If you damage anything down there, I’ll notice and tell the priest in the morning. If you don’t, I’ll say nothing. Are we in agreement?”

Arslan inclined his head. “We are, Father. Thank you.”

“Go on about your business then.”

They went before he changed his mind. The stairs down into the crypts were narrow and spiraled tightly. Alexis paused when he hit protection wards he hadn’t expected.

“How interesting, someone actually figured out how to do wards properly,” he murmured. 

The wards were old, hostile, and had been laid by someone who expected thieves to try to rob the place. The wards bit at Alexis’s skin the moment he set foot on the third step.

“I feel them,” Arslan said, placing a hand to the stone.

“I expected some kind of protection magic, but the kind that priests make with prayers. These aren’t like that at all. They are older.”

Arslan’s face lit up. “How old?”

“Older than the church above us. Someone laid these before the church was built, perhaps when the ground under our feet was a temple to another god…no, a goddess,” Alexis replied, and crouched down to touch the floor. Magic hummed under them. He closed his eyes and caught a whiff of incense, torches, and barking dogs. “Ah, there it is. This site was once a temple to Hekate. It’s her priestess’s magic. The wards think we are grave robbers.”

“There are some I know in the city who still pay her homage who are going to be very interested to learn this,” Arslan replied. “Can you get us through, or should I send them a message?”

“I can break them, but I’ll need your help,” Alexis said and stood up once more.

They spent five minutes on the third step of the spiral stair, heads bent together, whispering. Alexis taught Arslan a small layered spell of passage that Nereus had taught him when he was a young apprentice.

The spell required two magicians, because the first wards of the old city had been laid to require two priestesses to lift. They spoke the layered spell together, and the wards on the stairs peeled open like the petals of a flower being encouraged into bloom.

The crypt at the bottom of the stairs was an antechamber that had three passages leading from it. The left went to the porphyry hall of the imperial tombs, which Alexis wasn’t interested in tonight. The right led to a series of smaller vaults where the city’s bishops had traditionally been buried.

The center passage was the one they wanted. It had been dug by builders in the fourth century, enlarged during the Justinian renovation, and during that time, the side chamber Alexis needed to find had been walled up, plastered, painted, and forgotten.

“The wall we want is a little further, on the left-hand side. The hidden space is behind a painting of Saint Matthias.”

“Why are you describing it to me rather than finding it yourself?” Arslan asked.

“Because I’m probably going to be useless from the moment we reach it.”

Arslan’s eyes narrowed. “Explain, please, Alexis.”

“If the fragment is real, and if it’s in that casket, then it’s highly likely the magic of it, and the magic in me are going to recognize each other,” Alexis said, struggling to find the right way to describe it. “I don’t know what form that recognition will take. It has been nine thousand years since I last stood near a piece of the altar. I don’t know what will happen after all this time. Orichalcum in such a form was always more sensitive to magic, and who knows what it has absorbed. I’m telling you in advance because I may not be clear enough to let you know if something happens. If I seem to be somewhere else, work around me. Get the casket out. Keep me moving. Don’t leave me in the crypt.”

“I now have about a hundred more questions, but I know we don’t have time,” Arslan stated, putting his hands on his hips. “Don’t worry, I won’t leave you in the crypt. I promise you.”

“Thank you. I don’t like the idea of being another thing that priest sweeps around for years,” Alexis replied, earning a surprised bark of laughter from Arslan.

It didn’t take them long to find a bad painting of Saint Matthias healing a leper. The saint had been painted by someone who didn’t understand halos or noses or lepers, for that matter.

Alexis laid his hand on the plaster below the painting and sent his magic through it.

“Hollow,” he said, his pulse starting to pick up in excitement. “Behind perhaps a handspan of plaster and brick. Can you open it?”

“Hmm, I haven’t tried it before on something like this, but I don’t see why not.” Arslan closed his eyes and placed his hand on the wall where Alexis’s had been. His magic swirled around him, and a moment later the plaster flaked away from the wall in a slow, controlled disintegration, a drift of white dust falling at their feet like the finest snow. In under a minute, the painting came off in one solid piece. The bricks behind it cracked along their mortar and opened in a chamber smaller than a wardrobe.

At the center, resting on a small plinth of Egyptian granite, was a single lead casket, no bigger than a loaf of bread. Arslan took the casket and opened it to look inside.

Fire and gold swirled out. Alexis couldn’t move as he went hot and then cold. Arslan was saying something, but he couldn’t make it out. A long tolling note was coming from the casket and speaking to something at the very bottom of him that had been asleep and had now woken up, snarling.

The note struck again, and suddenly he was standing on the polished floor of the temple of Poseidon. The altar was three paces in front of him, and was humming with the same resonance of the sea outside the temple doors.

The priest on his right was saying something about an offering. The priest on his left was laying a hand gently on Alexis’s shoulder. The air was full of the green-blue smell of salt water and incense, and the strange, heated smell that orichalcum gave off when keyed to a ritual.

He was a boy. He was terrified. He was in love. The altar stone of shimmering reds and swirling golds was the most beautiful object he had ever seen. He had no idea that all of the beauty around him would be lost under ash and salt. He was simply alive in the sound of the altar.

“Alexis!” Arslan was holding the casket in both hands. “I have it. We need to move.”

The altar stone was still calling to him, and he made a whimpering sound as the memories tried to drag him back.

Arslan’s free hand came up and gripped Alexis by the back of the neck, grounding him so he didn’t faint.

“Alexis. Come back. We are in a crypt. The casket is closed. Breathe. Look at my face.”

Alexis focused on Arslan’s eyes, and the sound of the tolling grew softer. Alexis breathed, and warmth began to seep back into his limbs.

“I have you,” Arslan said firmly. “I need you to walk with me out of this crypt, up to the nave, and out to the street. I’ll carry the casket. You don’t need to touch it until we are safe. Do you understand me?”

“Y-Yes,” Alexis stammered, his lips not wanting to form the words properly.

“Good, now walk.”

The plaster and stone moved back into place at Arslan’s command. With a flick of his fingers, the bad painting rose slowly off the floor and reattached itself to the wall.

Alexis sent a touch of his own magic toward it, and the paint on the halo shifted a little as it returned, the nose adjusted, and the leper gained a new countenance. Arslan didn’t mention it, only offered him an arm to lean on as they made for the stairs.

***

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.

Have a great week, everyone!
Ames x

P.s. A 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.