Page 1 of Immortals and Ink

PROLOGUE

Cara mia,

You once asked me whether I had ever found any other survivors of our beloved Atlantis, and I told you that we were the last.

That's true. We never did find Atlanteans, but we did find other magicians…and immortals.

I have never told you this story because I didn’t know how to begin. It sits badly at a dinner table and doesn't fit into one of Zo's anecdotes or Phaidros's theatrical retellings. It belongs to me, and now, since you have given me a chance to collate a book for all our lost tales, it belongs to you.

I once met an immortal magician named Arslan. He has held the city of Constantinople as his territory and home for centuries, as I have held Venice. He came to a long life through alchemy and old secrets he found in a book recorded with spells from before the world was flooded. He was bold enough (or perhaps foolish enough) to follow where the magic in the book led him.

He was a scholar in Saladin's court before he became what he is now. He reads hieratic and Ancient Greek and the old Arabic of the early astronomers the way you read a shopping list. His tea is very good, and he likes to drink it in a cistern beneath a church dedicated to a saint who is, if you look closely, Anubis in a Byzantine cloak.

You are going to like him, cara. You both have the same kind of curious mind that never rests.

I first encountered him in 1204, when Dandolo's fleet came hungry for a city that hadn't yet learned how far a Venetian could fall.

The second time was in 1453, when I took from Constantine the one thing that broke our friendship for hundreds of years.

You know the second of those stories in pieces. Con has told them to you, and badly, in my opinion, as he tells all stories that cast him in a less than favorable light. He leaves out Arslan because he was allowed to believe he was merely a jail keeper on my behalf.

I feel like when I do tell him the truth about Arslan and his Order, he might be even madder at me. You know what he can be like.

I wanted you to have this tale first because you have always seemed so delighted by the idea that I sacked Constantinople in my own way before Dandolo ever did.

I didn't think I would ever tell most of the tales in this book that you hold in your hands. You changed my mind on that, my lovely Penelope. The world is different, and a letter arrived last month from Istanbul that has made me want to take you there, but first, I need to introduce you to an old friend.

Read.

When you have finished, perhaps you will wish to visit the church near the Galata Tower, with its dog-headed saint guarding its doors.

Arslan will smile at you like a friend who has been waiting to have tea and hookah with you (my own was a gift from him long ago), then he will glance over your head at me with mischief in his eyes, and I'll smile twice as wide because I have been waiting for you all my life.

Sempre tuo,

Alexis

CHAPTER ONE

Venice, March 1204

The boat was made of oak and cedar, her hull sealed with pine tar that had taken Alexis most of the winter to apply. She sat in the quiet dry dock he kept hidden behind the lagoon island of Poveglia, her mast bare, her name painted along the bow in Atlantean script where no Venetian would read it.

Eos. The dawn.

Alexis was coiling the last of the hemp lines around his forearm when Nereus found him.

"You have been building for months," she said, stepping onto the dock with the unhurried walk of a wolf who had her prey cornered. She wore her cloak pulled close against the March damp, the blue wool heavy with the small beads of fog that had followed her across the water. "I wondered when you would tell me why."

"I didn't want you to try and forbid it," Alexis replied.

"I haven't been your mentor for a long time, my boy."

"You'll always be mia maestra to me."

"Don't try to be charming with me when I'm annoyed with you. Besides, I don't forbid anything. You know that," she said, folding her arms.

Alexis smiled. "No. You only disapprove, which is far worse."