“Gun!” I warned.
“Got it!” Mike called.
Tomoenage is a sacrifice throw in judo, so I was on the floor when the next goon rushed me, thinking I was easy kickings. I screamed and made a show of scrambling away, but—clumsy me!—I accidentally slammed a foot against his legs, bending both of his knees sideways. I grabbed his shirt as he started to fall, and ended up on my feet with enough momentum to bring the goon with me in a roll.
I finished the roll. The goon ended up on the end of Mike’s receiving throw, and joined his buddies in our makeshift prison.
Four goons left.
Oops, my mistake. Four and a half: one of the goons Speedy had maimed was struggling towards an exit. It wasn’t even a trick to spin this guy over my hip and put him back on the ground, and then kick him across the wet floor towards Mike.
Above me, Speedy laughed as he shouted obscenities in a dozen dead languages.
I spun on the wet floor and hooked an ankle under another goon. This guy was a big ’un, at least twice my size and built like a muscly tree. He toppled over like one, too; I heard his head bounce off the concrete.
I pretended to slip as I was getting up, and toppled over sideways. Another one of Speedy’s victims had recovered enough to bring himself to crawl for cover, and I fell into a dakiwakare where I grabbed him as I was moving and then threw him towards Mike.
The last three goons were trying to rally and close as a group. None of them were making that inner jacket grab-hand gesture that came along with a gun, but they were mad. Like, mad-mad. They rushed me all at once, thinking that superior size and numbers gave them the advantage. Wrong. Not in a crowded marketplace in which everyone around you is hollering and stomping and trying to climb up shopping venues to grab the koala full of money.
I swept the leg.
Literally. One move, six legs. Wet floors are amazing.
I punted two of the goons towards Mike, who hooked them neatly into the hallway to join the rest.
“Shufflecock!” Speedy laughed gleefully from above.
“Shuttlecock!” I yelled back. “Shufflecock is something else!”
“I know!” He ran across a set of suspended lights, maneuvering to position himself directly above Mike.
I glanced at that last goon. Sure enough, his pants had fallen down around his knees, and between that and the leftover smoothie, he couldn’t quite get himself upright.
“Fair enough,” I muttered, and gave his shoulders a push with my feet to send him sliding into our holding cell.
Speedy dropped down from the light fixture and landed safely in Mike’s outstretched arms.
Then all that was left was, as the man once said, some ’splaining to do.
The market was locked down—no one in, no one out—to process what had happened. That wasn’t as bad as it sounds: the goons had guns, the market had security cameras, and we had a ton of witnesses who almost remembered what had happened but they were busy chasing a koala and didn’t someone say something about fifty thousand Euros? With the exception of being covered in smoothie, Mike and I came out of it clean.
Speedy, not so much. He had maimed four dudes, after all, even if those dudes had been trying to rob his friend-slash-owner, and Kos Town didn’t look favorably on dangerous animals running loose…
I sighed and gave the cops a stack of Euros to make sure they wrote off the incident as a random monkey attack, [14] and let them know that I would supply the monkey if necessary.
Mike placed a call to Ambassador Goodwin to prep him for any problematic questions from reporters, and asked him to direct any questions about monkeys to the local zoo.
Once the goon squad was hauled off, the checkbook came out again to pay for damages (again, *sigh*), and the rest of those Euros in my bag went to buying the crowd dinner as thanks for trying to help me retrieve my poor lost koala. We turned the marketplace into our own giant reception hall, with the locals teaching us tourists the old Greek drinking songs. Most of those songs had been around since before there was an America. I think some of them had been around since before there was an England.
At some point, I sobered up enough to run the room again. I had been doing this all night, of course, but nobody had struck me as weird or dangerous, and now that the doors to the market were locked, I wasn’t too worried about Smiling Goon and his remaining buddies popping up for a repeat of the main event.
My eyes roamed over the crowd. Most of the folks there were seriously drunk. I only spotted her because she was sitting quietly by herself.
Darling was four tables down.
She had lost that fantastic jacket, and was wearing the same jeans and short-sleeved shirts as the other women around her. She had done something different with her hair, and was actually rather pretty in the low light.
And she had been there the entire time.
CHAPTER TWENTY
You know all of those movies and television shows and comic books where the hero is keeping watch on a rooftop?
Why don’t any of those end with the hero toppling forward and tipping off the ledge because keeping watch on a rooftop is so damned boring that you can’t possibly help but nod off every ten minutes or so?
The Library of Alexandria—what was left of this particular branch—was kept in a museum basement. I had pulled first shift on the roof to keep watch for cops and goons, so that’s as much as I knew about it.
Forty feet below me, a door in the back alley opened, and Mike’s red hair popped out. I whistled softly, and he scooted up a nearby drainpipe to join me on the museum’s roof.
“This is fun,” he said, as I handed him the oversized dark hoodie I had been using for camouflage. “It’s too bad security is so tight on the museums back home. I could see us sneaking into the Smithsonian on girls’ night.”
“Sit up here for an hour and then we’ll talk,” I said. “You guys find anything?”
“Not yet. Speedy’s tackling the contents of the room like a general planning a battle. When he strikes, it’ll be over before you know it. I think we’ll be able to get out of here tonight.”
“Nifty,” I said, and gave him a quick kiss on the top of his head before I jumped over the parapet and slid down the drain pipe.
Darling was holding the door open for me. “You two can do this?” she said, looking towards where Mike was safely hidden on the roof. “Climb up and down buildings?”
“It’s not hard,” I said. “The biggest thing you have to worry about is when the drainpipes aren’t properly secured to the wall. That gets real tricky, real quick.”
“Ah,” she said, still looking up. “Could you teach me?”
“Sure,” I said, before thinking that through to the point where I realized that yes, a thief would certainly find scaling the sides of buildings to be a handy ability. “If we’ve got time.”
Darling grinned at me; I hadn’t fooled her in the slightest. “Of course.”
The two of us had had a long chat after the marketplace had gone off of lockdown, with me telling her how I found it really, really sketchy that she had played stranger and hidden in plain sight for hours.
She hadn’t even blinked. Instead, she asked me if I was okay being interviewed by cops while in the company of a known local criminal.
Point.
So why was she in the market in the first place?
Because she had happened to be getting a bite to eat when she saw her employer running down the side of a mountain in full view of the entire town, and by the time she finally found said employer, there was a major brawl underway.
Aaaaand point.
I swear, I’m too involved in conspiracies these days. Sometimes I can’t see the forest for those bright red dots from the sniper rifles.
(Still. I had asked Sparky to run her phone records and email history again, just in case. I might trust you as far as I can throw you—twenty-plus feet on a good day—but I hang out with dead dudes who can tell you the best stories about what a fa
bulous drinking buddy Benedict Arnold used to be. I live and learn so I can live some more.)
“Tell me about this place,” I said, as she and I entered the building.
“This?” she said, with an offhand shrug. “It is just a museum. The best items from Kos were taken to Athens years ago. This is just for the tourists, and for those studying at university.”
“Have you ever stolen anything from here?”
Darling didn’t reply, but I saw the corners of her eyes crinkle as she kept herself from smiling. She took me down a dark corridor and through another door, and then I was standing in the Library of Alexandria.
It had seen better days.
I guess I had expected it was residing in something space-age, with low white lights illuminating long glass cabinets, their drawers stuffed full of ancient knowledge. Nope. Think: shitty vinyl record collection in a teenager’s bedroom. Oh, and the kid has painted the walls black and hung a trash bag across the window to keep the light out.
No idea why the room smelled like feet, but there it was.
Don’t get me wrong; the old parchments and whatnot hadn’t been shoved into piles and left to rot. Everything was preserved between two airtight sheets of flexible Plexiglas, and cardboard bankers’ boxes were stacked to the ceiling. At one time, the room had probably been tidy and organized, but years of scholars doing exactly what we were doing had left it in a state of disarray. There was a thick layer of dust across every surface, and the trash cans were overflowing (ah, there’s the source of the foot stink). Maintenance hadn’t touched this room in a long time.
“I think I need a shower,” I said as I looked around the room. “This is just sad.”
“Money.” Speedy’s voice came from behind a wall of bankers’ boxes, where Atlas was helping him navigate their contents. “This stuff isn’t a priority.”
“It’s the Library of Alexandria!”
“It’s a bunch of old papers,” he replied, his nose nearly pressed flat against a document as he squinted to make out a line of tiny text. “Greece has got a metric fuckton of those. Besides, they digitized the best stuff in these archives ten years ago. Now, shut up.”
I grumbled something about backup systems and the value of originals, and went to tour the room.
It looked just as bad from the other side. There were tables in the center to serve as workstations, but no chairs. Darling had moved a few boxes from the top of an old filing cabinet and was sitting on this; Speedy and Atlas had staked out the floor.
“Mike thought this was fun?” I asked myself.
“He was helping us organize,” Speedy said. “Either get busy or get back on the roof.”
“Yup,” I said, and moved towards the tables to see what I could do to speed things along.
I swear I didn’t feel any ghosts in the Library—I definitely wasn’t expecting one of them to offer their own version of help.
Ten feet behind me, two bankers’ boxes toppled forward from a single stack, and the lid popped off of a third. A sheet of acrylic-encased parchment leaped out of that third box and fell on the floor with a plasticy fhwop!
Atlas made a little yipping noise; Darling whispered something in Greek and made the sign of the Cross. Speedy twitched an ear, but didn’t look up from his papers.
“Oops,” I said with a shrug. “Clumsy me. I’ll go clean that up.”
I went to see what the ghost had pulled from the stacks.
So what if I hadn’t felt the presence of ghosts? That didn’t mean much, since no ghost had been able to push my psychic buttons since Helen had come along. Hey, as far as I knew, the ghost who knocked the boxes over had been Helen herself.
I shoved the two boxes back on top of the third, and took the parchment over to one of the tables.
“Katadesmos,” I read, testing the strange word. “Hey, Speedy—”
The koala held up a clawed finger, as if testing the wind. “Fuck yourself in your primary pig hole,” he said.
“Right. Darling? Can you translate something for me?”
“Perhaps,” she said, warily circling the tables until she had convinced herself that the boxes toppling over was just a freak accident. “My knowledge of some of the ancient dialects is not very good.”
Darling didn’t do herself justice; it only took her a few moments to work through the text. “I recognize this,” she said. “It is a copy of a document by Tacitus in which he describes the death of an emperor’s adopted son.”
“Thrilling,” I muttered.
“Well, yes,” she said, her finger running across the Plexiglas to keep track of her place. “Germanicus was an exceptional Roman military leader, but he did not die a natural death. Tacitus claims he was affected by an illness of magical origin. A rival, Piso, is believed to have cursed Germanicus using several different methods of witchcraft, including the katadesmos you mentioned.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“A curse tablet,” she said. “They have been found all over ancient Greco-Roman territories. They are a scrap of soft lead inscribed with a curse, and pierced with nails or other sharp objects. The Greeks and Romans believed in magic, very deeply. They felt it was a force that bound them to the world.”
I nodded; the OACET dossier on the Antikythera Mechanism contained a large section on astronomy and fortune-telling. The fragment of the Mechanism that Rachel and Santino had found was an inscription to show how the machine could be used to plot an astrologic calendar. Curses and astrology weren’t the same sorts of things, but they were close enough to share a shelf at the local book store.
“Superstition was a tremendous motivating force in almost all ancient cultures,” Atlas said from across the room. “The Greeks were no different.”
“I think they were,” Darling said, as she slid the page in its protective plastic towards me. “Most cultures tended to impose curses that lasted long after the victim had died. The Greeks and Romans tended to end their curses at the moment of the victim’s death. I feel that was because their version of the afterlife had rewards and punishments that suited the deeds committed by each person in life.”
I remembered Mike’s discussion with Ambassador Goodwin, where he described the punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus in the Greek afterlife. I knew those stories well—I pay close attention to any story about an afterlife, an Afterlife, or any limbo in between—and Darling was dead-on (hah). The wicked and evil got stuck in Tartarus, that realm of Hades in which eternal torment was tailor-made. Maybe those who used a curse tablet didn’t want to step on any god’s toes.
“Neat,” I said, and went to return the parchment to its box.
So.
Somebody—Helen?—wanted me to learn about ancient curses.
That wasn’t ominous at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
While in Aphidna, I kept to the regime that I had followed since I was a child: five hours a day to the strength of the mind; five hours a day to the strength of the body; five hours a day to the strength of the spirit.
Aethra was the perfect hostess. At first, she no doubt indulged me in my habits as she felt I’d outgrow them, the soft living of her city lulling me to apathy. She allowed me to shave my head and dress as the local boys, to run for miles across the countryside, to return with wild deer and boar for her table. When my breasts began to grow and I could no longer hide in public, she filled a courtyard with sand and began to hire mercenaries.
I learned much from them. They came from distant lands, and brought with them strange and unfamiliar ways to fight. They taught me new techniques for using a sword, to fight with fists and feet. The women of Aethra’s household would watch as I fell, time and again, and as I would stand again after each time I was knocked to the ground.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” one of the serving girls asked, as we poured clean water to wash the blood from the sand.
“Of course it hurts,” I replied. “But today, this blood isn’t mine.”
When I wasn’t fighting
, Aethra taught me what it meant to be a queen.
At home in Sparta, I had had tutors teach me the rules of royalty. How to sit and stand properly. How to dress. How the fashions of the hair and face must be just so in one kingdom, and just so in another.
Those lessons had taught me nothing.
Aethra let me walk with her as she ran the business of the city. Aphidna was small in comparison to Athens or Sparta, but it was a border town and there were travelers aplenty. Most of these travelers respected Aethra, and spoke to her as an equal.
Some did not.
I was confused, at first. Aethra, the daughter of one king, the mother of another, plucked and tuned the myriad strands of the busy city until it played a fine song. She was clearly a queen, and just as clearly the source of power in Aphidna. Hers was the voice that decided matters from large to small, and while the townspeople often questioned her decisions, she would sit with them and persuade them to come around to her way of thinking.
Those travelers who declared that they would not discuss matters of economy or politics with her were rarely brutes. They were quiet and soft-spoken, with intelligent eyes. Aethra kept men of her own to manage such travelers. Her men had wise faces and well-trimmed beards, and when they spoke, their words were the queen’s.
Once in a long while, the travelers would realize they were still receiving instructions from Aethra, and then they would demand to see the prince.
Aethra would smile as she granted their request.
Aphidnus disgusted all who saw him, a slovenly lump of flesh on a gilded throne. He had been gifted the city some years before, but his best and greatest fortune was that Theseus’ mother resided in Aphidna and she needed something to do with her time. No sane man with a working mind should be satisfied with the prince when they had the option of Aethra, yet those soft-spoken travelers who insisted on meeting with him seemed to prefer his judgment over hers.
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