Page 4

He frowned. "Nereus, what exactly have you seen?"

"That's all I can tell you," she said with an innocent smile. "It came to me in a dream, and I don't know what it means. Be slow with your knife, Alexis. That is my only instruction. We aren't the only unique things in this world, and it would be a shame to lose one."

* * *

Alexis sailed at dawn the next day, carrying the other magician's blessing in their own unique ways. Lyca had given him a freshly forged dagger and hadn't embraced him because embracing wasn't something Lyca did.

Galenos had sent him off with a bundle of waxed cloth containing three books and a note in Atlantean that said, 'Replace these with better.'

Zo had appeared at the door of his tower at four in the morning, arriving from his journey early. He handed Alexis a sack of bread and an entire side of cured pork and had stood on the threshold looking at him for a long time before saying, "Don't die."

Aelia hadn't arrived in Venice yet, but somehow, she knew he was leaving. Alexis suspected Zo because he struggled to keep any secret from her. A new ring had appeared on his bedside table instead, with a note in her looping hand that read Bring it back. Bring yourself back. In that order. He had dutifully put it on with all his others.

Alexis cast off into a tide that pulled him out through the lagoon as though the sea itself had been waiting for him. He called the wind as soon as he was past the last marker, and the Eos heeled over and took it like a horse that had been waiting for a good run. Venice faded behind him like a magical island disappearing in the mist, and there was only the sea.

He tilted his head back to face the sun and breathed deeply, the knotted part inside of him finally loosening like it always did on the open water. He was born of the sea— Poseidon was his god—and it was always the salty waves he returned to when his heart was troubled.

Alexis thought of the one artifact he prayed to the Sea God he would find in Constantinople, and his belly fluttered with hope. He had followed its rumors and shadows for so long that he almost feared it would be another dead end. He had to know for sure, no matter how much it hurt.

On the fourth morning, Alexis woke and went up onto the deck to see, in the distance, the skyline of a place he hadn't seen in years. Every time he had visited it since the days when it was the Megarian colony of Byzantion, it had changed.

The walls of Constantinople rose from the water as if they had grown out of the depths. They were a reef of stone, made by clever minds who understood the sea would work to reclaim it and so had built them to defend against both time and man.

Defender, Alexis thought, looking at those walls. You and me both, my ancient friend.

He nudged the tiller, and the Eos answered instantly, her bow swinging in a graceful arc toward the mouth of the Golden Horn. In that simple, deliberate motion, he felt the weight of his choice settle over him. He was setting a course not only for a harbor, but for the heart of an empire, a place filled with the ghosts of people he had known and the echoes of words he had read. He was sailing into a memory that was still breathing, though it was labored.

Alexis didn't know it as he guided his ship past the great chain that guarded the harbor's entrance, but he was following a current in the river of time, a pull as certain and unseen as the tide beneath his hull.

It was drawing him not just to sacred relics and forgotten knowledge, but toward a single, quiet soul who would, in the embers of this great city, keep its last keys, long after every other keeper was dead and dust.

CHAPTER TWO

The wind off Golden Horn smelled of salt and woodsmoke from the bakeries on the Galata shore, the first ovens of the morning already firing for the day's bread. The sweetness was mixed with the tang of wet rope and tar from the commercial quays, where Genoese cogs and Pisan galleys bedded down for the night in the rough democracy of every port in the civilized world, which was that everyone hated everyone else equally and had agreed to leave it outside the harbor gates.

And under all of it, faint and unmistakable, was the scent of incense and memories that you only ever found in old cities. Nereus had once told Alexis that what he was really smelling was the collective magical residue of ancient places, and he believed her. Most of all, it was a signal that said, 'I have been here longer than you, and I will be here longer still.'

Venice smelled like that. So had Alexandria, when it had been a city and not a cautionary tale. Rome had lost that smell when the empire left. Constantinople still had it, and in the thin silver light of dawn, with the gulls arguing overhead, it told him he had arrived more clearly than anything else.

A single bell started its morning call somewhere up behind the Tower, and Alexis found he had missed Constantinople more than he was prepared to admit. It was one of the few places he found himself returning to again and again.

Alexis let the Eos drift in on the last of the tide. The great chain that stretched across the mouth of the Horn had not yet been raised for the day. Even if it had been, he would have talked his way under it with a smile and two bags of coins, because men who worked the chains at dawn weren't paid enough to question a well-dressed merchant captain in a modest private boat with no visible cargo.

The trick was always the same. Look as though you belong and as though you would prefer not to be asked.

The Galata shore loomed closer. The Tower itself stood at the top of the slope, a squat gray drum of masonry that the Genoese had convinced themselves was impregnable, with the usual enthusiasm of people who had never seen what a determined Venetian could do to a wall. Alexis hated that they would soon find out.

Below it, the waterfront crowded itself into the sea: warehouses two and three deep, the tiled roofs of merchants' houses stepping up the hill behind them, the small church of Hagios Georgios squatting where it had been sitting for six centuries at least, its dome weathered to a color that was almost green in the dawn light.

Alexis eased the Eos alongside a mooring at the southern end of the quays, in amongst a cluster of smaller private vessels where she wouldn't stand out. He threw a line to a boy of about twelve who had appeared as boys of about twelve always appeared in harbors, summoned by the ancient and universal boy-sense that told them there was money to be made.

"Tie her properly," Alexis said in Greek, handing down a coin. "And your name, please?"

"Papas." The boy pocketed the coin as though it had never existed.

"I want someone to watch my boat for the morning." Alexis raised a single brow. "Papas, can your father be paid to watch a boat for longer than that?"

"My father will watch anything for coin," the boy replied with the weariness of a child who had learned early what his father would and wouldn't do. "Do you want me to go and fetch him?"