Sword and Pen

by Rachel Caine

  Thomas closed his eyes and felt the lock as he worked the tension lever and rod, probing at the rudimentary, stiff mechanism until he had it mapped in his mind in elegant detail. Opening it was a simple lever operation, and as he turned both the wires he felt the tumblers turn and fall.

  Click.

  With noiseless elegance, the entire statue of Thoth rolled backward on the plinth and revealed a narrow staircase leading down. The air that breathed out of that chamber smelled ancient and stale. Thomas didn’t move, though every impulse demanded he charge recklessly down toward the secrets that Heron promised. “How many died of bad air?” he asked.

  The Archivist touched his fingertips to his chin, as if trying to remember, though Thomas knew he must have every fact memorized. “A few,” he finally said. “But since you’ve asked so nicely . . .”

  The High Garda Elite captain held a mask. It shimmered with some kind of coating, a chemical that was probably also alchemical, activated by an Obscurist’s work. Thomas took it, strapped it on, and was pleasantly surprised by the fit of the thing. It felt perfectly balanced, and when he breathed in, the air seemed fresh and clean.

  “We use them for fighting fires. This will last two hours,” the captain said. “If you aren’t out by then, you won’t be coming out.”

  “I’ll need light,” Thomas said. The Archivist nodded again, and the Elite captain handed him a portable glow lamp.

  “Anything else?” the captain asked.

  “A basic tool set wouldn’t be unreasonable.”

  “I’m afraid not,” the Archivist said. “Seeing that you can do a lot of damage with the contents of a tool kit, Thomas. I’m not a fool. If you need something, we will send it down to you. Until then, you have what you need.”

  Thomas pocketed the lockpick wires, in case the Archivist was inclined to take them back. And then he thought, I’m free. If I can break through the soldiers and run . . .

  But truthfully? He didn’t want to run.

  He wanted to know.

  Thomas placed his boot on the first step. He paused, listening. No sounds of machinery, not yet. He descended the staircase slowly, ready to plunge up or down at any sign of a trap.

  But the stairs, at least, were safe.

  He was not so certain of the floor, when he arrived at the last tread. It was not a large chamber, and there was nothing in it but gray flagstones, all identical as far as he could tell. This, he thought, was where Jess’s speed and agility would have come in handy; his friend’s reactions were supernaturally quick. Next to that, Thomas knew his size was a liability here. He crouched down and lowered the lamp, looking closer. As he did, he caught a faint, quick shimmer on one of the flagstones.

  Moving the glow back and forth showed him that the stone had a very light coating of something on its surface. But whether that marked it as safe or dangerous . . . impossible to tell without experimentation.

  Thomas reached into his pockets. The soldiers had, of course, confiscated almost everything; what he had left was a bit of paper, the twisted wires he’d used for lock picking, and lint. But he did have something else, he realized, and rolled up his sleeve to remove his golden Scholar’s bracelet. For the first time, he remembered that the Obscurists could track locations. Had his been rendered inert? Or was it possible that Morgan could look for him? That rescue was on the way?

  No way to be certain.

  Thomas carefully tossed the bracelet onto the coated stone.

  Nothing. No movement. No sound beyond the clink of metal on rock.

  Now for the other test.

  The glow lamp had a handle on top, and he held it by that as he slowly lowered it to one of the plain flagstones directly in front of the stairs.

  He heard the hiss of steam. Pressure release. Thomas snatched the lantern back just as gleaming metal spears slammed down from the ceiling through openings that had been invisible in the dim light. They withdrew just as rapidly as they’d appeared, like a deadly mirage. By the time alarm ignited in his nerves, it was already over.

  No bodies or blood here, so that meant that whatever tomb robbers had made it inside had managed to figure it out.

  So that meant the coated flagstones were safe. It was a simple kind of challenge, meant for the careful and observant. Easy enough to avoid if someone knew how to reason it out.

  He still tested the theory. The weight from the lantern on a coated flagstone got no response.

  Was the floor considered the first trial? Or the second, after picking the lock? He couldn’t be sure. Thomas balanced himself carefully as he rose and stepped onto the first safe stone and bent to retrieve his bracelet. The space on the stone was a narrow fit for his feet, and he realized that this was going to be harder than he’d thought. Ancient people had been smaller than average, and he was considerably larger. He’d need to go with great care.

  Picking his way across the flagstones took time, but he had managed to avoid triggering any deadly surprises. The path led him to a blank wall. Completely, utterly blank. Interesting.

  Thomas placed his hand on the wall. If the statue of Thoth had reacted to a Scholar’s bracelet, perhaps this test did as well.

  It did not. He nearly lost his precarious balance on the safe flagstone when he heard something moving behind him.

  He had to suppress the impulse to recklessly turn, which would have surely killed him, and slowly looked over his shoulder. In an alcove that had been hidden before stood an automaton sphinx, but one that seemed sleeker, more well defined than the ones he knew from above in the city. This was Heron’s work. He wanted to run his hands over the lines, get into the mechanism, see the wonders of this thing . . . and then he realized that this wondrous thing was likely going to kill him.

  He froze, mind racing for any idea of how to battle an automaton while standing completely still on one small square. He didn’t find any.

  The sphinx’s eyes slowly kindled to life, but instead of red, they were a pure, luminous blue. It didn’t rise.

  “What must I do to be worthy?” Thomas asked it, and said it in Greek, in the hope that was the language Heron would have taught it to recognize. The sphinx tilted its head up to look directly at him.

  “Answer this: I have a mouth but do not speak. I have a bed but do not sleep. I run but go nowhere.” It replied in Greek, but in archaic accents and usages that Thomas struggled to translate. He hoped he had it right. He’d be dead if he didn’t.

  Jess might know this, Thomas thought. Or Khalila. Or Dario. Possibly even Morgan. I never paid attention to riddles. That, as it turned out, was proving to be a liability. Come on, Schreiber. Children play this game. He couldn’t be beaten so easily. It would be humiliating. And, secondarily, fatal.

  I have a mouth. A bed. I run.

  It came to him in a rush of giddy relief. “A river!”

  The sphinx rose and walked out of its alcove. It padded toward him, and he looked for escape, but the careful, awkward hops he’d made to get to this point were impossible to replicate quickly. The sphinx didn’t trigger the spears at all, stepping fluidly from one safe spot to the next, and he thought, If I could get out of the way and trigger them myself . . . but there was nowhere to jump to safety. He’d be killing them both.

  He held his breath and tried to remember the lessons Jess had taught them about how to turn the sphinxes off in midleap; his brain, frustratingly, seemed cloudy on the finer points. He cursed softly in German and realized he ought to be praying instead, but surely God would understand.

  The sphinx calmly paced right past him and put a sharply clawed paw to the wall.

  The wall opened with a click and a creak, swinging back and off to the side. The sphinx crouched down beside it, ruffled its metal wings, and then went still again. Its eyes flickered from brilliant blue to empty black.

  Thomas couldn’t help the impulse to brush his finger
s over the bronze skin. It didn’t move. Leave it, he commanded himself, and ducked into the opening. On the other side of the short, dark hallway, another wall waited.

  This one seemed perfectly understandable. A single stone stood out from the others in the wall, jutting at least an inch forward. It seemed obvious that it should be pressed.

  That was alarming. The obvious was dangerous here. Thomas examined the stone from as many angles as he could, and finally, lacking any other answer, pressed his fingers to it.

  The wall collapsed in a rush, and he froze because what was inside was nothing he expected.

  It was a garden, underground. A garden of crystals: intricate structures and spires and squares, shapes that caught and reflected his lamp in a thousand subtle hues. Beautiful. So beautiful.

  So sharp.

  There was a path between the crystals, but it was narrow. Even Jess would have had trouble sliding through, Thomas thought, and he was as flexible as an otter. There was no chance someone of Thomas’s size could move through without brushing against something delicate. I don’t want to damage them. But there wasn’t much choice. These crystals must have been slowly growing for ages.

  The instant he brushed against one, it made a sound. A low, vibrating note. He wasn’t musical; he couldn’t possibly identify which note it could be . . . Surely that wouldn’t be required.

  The next crystal he brushed against made an entirely different note. Hmmm. Please don’t make this a musical puzzle. Engineering, yes. Music, no. Or perhaps the notes had nothing to do with it at all.

  As the second crystal sounded, the first sounded again. Atonal and strange.

  The crystals now hemming him in on either side suddenly grew. He didn’t quite believe his eyes; surely that hadn’t happened. Surely the crystals he’d successfully avoided touching weren’t now pointing sharp tips at him, like a row of knives.

  He’d have to ease past them. Carefully. As he tried, one sliced easily through his coat and cut a thin line through his skin like a Medica’s scalpel. It didn’t even hurt, but he saw the blood staining cloth. The coat offered little protection.

  Moving through had to be done in torturous, muscle-cramping increments. A second’s inattention caused fabric to brush along another crystal. Three notes sounded, all out of key, louder than before.

  The crystals grew. One drove straight into his palm, pinning him in place, and when he cried out in surprise the crystals cried out, too, a dirge of sound that vibrated through the cavern like a hellish chorus. Thomas gritted his teeth and carefully pulled his hand off the jutting, faceted spike. It glittered like false promises.

  He was going to die here.

  The crystal where he’d started chimed again. A single, pure note. He caught his breath and froze because he was afraid it would start the growth cycle all over again, but instead it seemed to slow down. Stop like a clockwork.

  It is clockwork. It’s a puzzle. You have to solve it.

  He had no framework for this. There was no metal, no wire, no gears, no steam, nothing that an engineer could understand or dismantle. He could not come at this as an engineer. Heron had made musical instruments, too; he’d made a steam calliope that had rolled on its own cart from street corner to street corner, playing different tunes for the amusement of Alexandria’s citizens. Heron saw music as a pleasing outcome of an engineering marvel.

  Thomas knew Heron would be very disappointed in him right now.

  The crystal chimed again. Thomas had the strange idea that it was trying to help him. He found himself humming and realized something: he did know something useful after all. A tone was just a waveform, no different than waves in the ocean, waves on a string. Sound traveled in waves. Frequencies were mathematical.

  He lowered the note he was humming until he heard no opposing waves in the sound between that and the crystal’s, and hummed it louder. He didn’t dare sing it for fear of going off-key, but perhaps humming . . .

  The first crystal chimed twice. It was a warning. He was going in the wrong direction.

  Go back, he thought. Start over. Think it through.

  Getting back was torture; he had to twist himself carefully, so carefully, around every jutting crystal so as not to wake any more vibrations. When he arrived back at the first, he took a moment just to breathe. The mask he wore was frustrating and confining, and he dripped with sweat; before he thought why he shouldn’t, he pushed it up to gasp for breath.

  The air smelled . . . fresh.

  He waited, heart pounding, for any sign that he’d made a fatal mistake, but nothing happened. The air continued to taste, smell, and function just as normal. With a relieved sigh, he shoved the mask in his pocket, wiped the sweat from his face, and tried to compose his thoughts.

  Sound was just mathematics. If he approached it that way, perhaps he could do this. Clearly, he was looking for harmonics. Waveforms that complemented one another.

  He carefully tapped the first crystal, and a pure, singing tone sounded. It almost sounded encouraging. Look at the forms. These were organic crystals, yes, but at the same time they had been somehow planned. He tried to ignore the glittering facets, the deadly spikes, and unfocused his vision.

  Something emerged out of the chaos.

  Color. He’d noticed the variations, but there hadn’t seemed to be a pattern; when he looked at the crystals without really seeing them, he realized he was looking at a rainbow. The first crystal he’d struck had a slight reddish hue. What did he know about red? It has the longest light wavelength.

  This wasn’t simply a puzzle of music. It was music and light, and the light was a clue.

  The problem was, he’d never really noted the order of colors in a rainbow. Was it red, orange, yellow, blue—no, it couldn’t be. Yellow and blue made green, green had to come after yellow, simple logic. Then blue, indigo, and violet. But the problem was that the hues kept shifting as he moved. From one angle the scheme was clear, but as soon as he moved, it vanished.

  Move until it’s clear again.

  The hues gleamed again, and he looked carefully. Orange. He tapped it. The first crystal hummed in harmony with the second. He carefully edged around a particularly dense jutting of crystal and found the yellow. It added a rich tone to the chorus. Halfway through. Only three more shades to go.

  But when he touched the green—or what he thought was the green—it hit a discordant note. Dissonance.

  And the crystals shot toward him at a terrifying rate. No, no, no, surely green comes after yellow, it has to . . . but then he took another breath, steadied himself, and unfocused his eyes again. Looking at the blurry colors without looking.

  Green was a trap. Green was being filtered through another, false crystal. The real green lay behind it.

  He had to start over, edging past crystals that left shallow cuts all over him and tattered his coat to a ragged mess. His breath came in short, unconscious sobs. Despite his concentration, he was afraid. He started with the red crystal. Found the orange. The yellow. Edged oh so slowly and carefully to twist himself around the concealing clear crystal to the green behind it.

  Harmony.

  It was then he noticed the bones. Human bones, dry and white. They littered the ground around the green crystal. A skull sat impaled on a jutting clear spike.

  Slowly. Go slowly.

  It was terrifying, this puzzle, but he had the key now. Unfocus his eyes, find the color, make absolutely certain he was touching the right crystal. The last two fell without triggering another reset, though the violet crystal—the last—was located in a whole forest of disorienting, faceted fakes that he checked five times before deciding to risk his final choice.

  The harmony blended, and the crystals’ rich, pure chord rang through the chamber. It built and built to an almost painful level, and the colors flashed bright enough to blind.

  The crystals retracted com
pletely into small, gemlike stubs. One still dripped his blood.

  There was another door standing beyond the last crystal outcropping. Another keyhole with no key in sight, but it had a very particular shape. He thought about trying the lockpicks, but then realized what it was. Obvious, really.

  He went back and searched the crystals until he found the correct shape, and the instant he touched it, it broke off from its stem. He inserted it in the lock, and the wall rolled aside. With it came a powerful, awful stench.

  The smell of death.

  Thomas wasn’t sure what it was, but he grabbed the mask from his pocket and put it on, in case there was something truly dangerous waiting for him. Like toxic gas, which seemed eerily likely.

  Another sphinx sat beyond it, the identical twin of the last. Thomas, despite the pain in his pierced hand and the burning cuts, took a moment to simply admire it before he said, “May I pass?”

  Its eyes turned blue. “Who makes me has no need of me. Who buys me has no use for me. Who uses me cannot see or feel me. What am I?”

  Thomas felt a jagged surge of real exhaustion and frustration. Another riddle. He hated this. His tired brain slid off the clues. Who makes me has no need of me. Plenty of things were made for others that their makers had no use for. Who buys me has no use for me. Why would someone buy something useless? Who uses me cannot see or feel me. Air? Oxygen? No, none of it made any sense at all. He wanted to shout at the automaton, tell it that he was doing this to save lives, just let him through. But he knew it wouldn’t help.

  He closed his eyes and thought for long moments, leaping from one thought to another. His nerves burned under his skin. He just wanted to smash his way through.

  Who makes me has no need of me.

  What did someone make, and someone buy, that neither one used? What did someone use who couldn’t see or feel it?