Page 15 of Immortals and Ink

Two minutes, he mouthed.

Alexis nodded and wrapped the hero in illusion, turning 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 to 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 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 an Atlantean gifted the original spell to them. 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.

CHAPTER SIX

The Library of Constantinople was one of the best that the world had produced. There was a main reading room in the Augustaion, a smaller theological library attached to the Patriarchate, and the old imperial collection in the Magnaura, which had never quite recovered from the fire of 475.

It had scattered rooms in the palace itself where manuscripts had been moved and forgotten, and the catacomb library beneath the Basilica Cistern, which Alexis had especially come to visit.

"The library was my idea originally," Alexis told Arslan as they sipped their wine on deck. "It was built to my design in the spring of 538 AD and stocked over the course of four decades. Justinian gave the order, but only because Theodora made him."

Alexis smiled, remembering the force of nature in a woman's body. He enjoyed that about her.

"I had been at court two years. Justinian had been the kind of admirer of mine that emperors usually are, which is to say, he was glad I was useful and kept a close, paranoid eye on me at all times. I proposed a secondary hidden library where objects that the main libraries couldn't be trusted with would be safe. I'd learned that lesson the hard way in Alexandria. Theodora had heard me out and said, in the dry voice she used when she had made up her mind, 'I want it to be done.'"

"I can only imagine how many men jumped when she commanded," Arslan chuckled softly.

"All of them. The chief librarian of the Patriarchate holds the key," Alexis continued. "The current one is a man called Andronikos. He's sixty and has held the post for twenty years. He has never used the key, because no one taught him the phrase. The knowledge was supposed to pass from librarian to librarian. At some point in the last century, the chain broke. Andronikos believes the key opens a cabinet of Pascha decorations in the east wing."

"And you know this right phrase because?" Arslan prompted.

"Because I wrote it."

"Of course you did. How foolish of me to presume otherwise." Arslan gave him a long look. "So you were an advisor to Theodora and Justinian."