Page 30 of Immortals and Ink

"Yes, he's aware that if Con put me in a corner, I would come after him. Arslan will be ready." Alexis thought of the overpacked storerooms in the cisterns. "He always is."

Phaidros was quiet for a moment. "Does Arslan know who Con really is?"

"He knows what Con is to me. Have I said the words 'he is Constantine the Great'? Then no, I haven't," Alexis huffed in annoyance.

"And Con doesn't know about Arslan's immortality," Phaidros guessed, folding his arms. "Cazzo, Alexis! You're going to put Con in an Order of Anubis cell, run by a man Con doesn't know exists. When he wakes up in a cell run by this stranger, he's going to think you have gone completely mad, and I'm going to be the one left explaining it to both of them."

Alexis rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Don't be so dramatic. I'm hoping that Con doesn't need to be locked up, but if he does, there is no safer place in all of Constantinople. I'll tell Arslan who he is, and he won't care. For Poseidon's sake, I told him I was from Atlantis, and he barely raised an eyebrow."

"Arslan won't care, but Constantine will, so perhaps you should start working on the words now."

"Vaffanculo, fratello! Let me deal with Con. I don't know why you're even concerned. You hate Con, so if you get a chance to be his jailer, it should make you happy."

Phaidros's grin turned sharp. "Oh, it will. I just want you to use all that brooding you're doing to actually consider what you're going to say and do. We are sneaking into a siege, Alexis. Don't forget that."

With a practiced touch on the tiller, Alexis set their course. The Hésperos leaned into the turn, settling on her new line as the sails filled.

They had left the familiar shipping lanes behind, sailing a lonely path Alexis had charted to slip between dangers. The Ottoman patrols weren't yet so bold as to venture this far, and the Venetian fleet had been drawn south by its own concerns.

After a while, Phaidros said, "Why didn't we ever do what Arslan has done?"

"Do what?"

"You know, the Order. Build a brotherhood. We have never done it. I've been thinking about it since you told me the Order has grown and how they go everywhere helping people and supernatural creatures."

"We didn't build it because none of us was ever that noble," Alexis replied honestly. "Arslan built it because he was alone and because it was going to finish him. Helping maintain the balance, as he calls it, was the only thing he could think of that would make the centuries bearable. We magicians had each other, our own group of seven. He had nothing, so he built what he needed."

Phaidros twirled a long dagger, flipping it in his hands. "And you think we still need nothing?"

Alexis didn't like the frown on his brother's face. "Every time we tried to help humans and interfered in their affairs, we made things worse. They always eventually saw us as gods, and that's never a healthy thing for an immortal to start believing."

"I suppose you would know Serapis," Phaidros said, his words sharper than the blade in his hands.

"My, don't you have some audacity to bring that up when you are the one who is remembered as Dionysus because you lost your temper at King Pentheus. What was the name of that little play they wrote about it?" Alexis tapped his chin thoughtfully. "The Bacchae, that's right. Sophocles or someone wrote it…"

The dagger flew from Phaidros's hand and landed in the wooden tiller by Alexis's hand. "It was Euripides, you asshole! It was a great success."

“And you ask why we should never attempt to make a brotherhood like Arslan," Alexis said, plucking the dagger out and tossing it back to him.

"You didn't have to be a prick about it." Phaidros caught the dagger, stood, stretched, and went to the rail and looked east, where the sky was beginning to bruise toward evening.

"I'm looking forward to seeing Arslan, and even you annoying me isn't enough to dampen that," he said after a while. "I haven't seen him since he came to Venice in, what was it, eighty-six years ago?"

"Eighty-seven. He came for Easter."

"Eighty-seven. We drank too much of Zo's home brew and got into a discussion about the Pythagoreans that went on for four nights. I haven't had a conversation that long with anyone since." Phaidros rubbed the back of his neck. "At least there will be one part of this trip I can look forward to without dread."

Alexis brought the Hésperos farther south to take the evening wind off the coast, and they were hit with the smell of charcoal, pine, and pitch. Underneath it was the iron-and-honey smell of black powder being worked.

Phaidros noticed it and went still at the rail. "Alexis."

"I know. I smell it too. They must have already started the bombardment," Alexis said, a flicker of dread curling inside him.

"How long do you think the city has?”

"I won't know without seeing a proper report." Alexis could only guess what the Hungarian-built canons were doing to Constantinople's walls.

Phaidros stood at the rail with his arms folded and his face unreadable. "I had told myself that perhaps it wouldn't be as bad as you said, and that the letter was Con overreacting."