“Kill your contact? Probably. Or some innocent who got in the way.” Jess wanted to punch him for his deadly ignorance. “What did you think you were playing at, Dario? Were you trying to impress me?”
Dario swallowed hard, opened his mouth, then closed it. “Maybe I was.” Some awareness crept back into his expression, and he looked around. “I’ve never been in here. Have you?”
“No.” Another idiocy, Jess thought; Dario should have scouted this place thoroughly, on many occasions, at different times of day. He should have known how to get in, out, every possible route of escape. “Come on. We’re going up.”
The next level held the glass coffin of Alexander, and though he knew he shouldn’t, Jess found his steps slowing. There was a sense of terrible reverence here. Alexander’s withered, leathery body—embalmed and dressed in a set of gilded armor—lay under thick, ancient glass . . . or crystal, maybe. The body was smaller than Jess would have guessed. Alexander had conquered most of the known world as little more than a boy, and Jess wondered what he’d have thought of all this—of the tomb, the honors, the Library that had conquered the rest of the world in his name. Had he really wanted to be displayed like this, as his own museum piece?
Surrounding the coffin, inset in alcoves in the walls, stood statues of weeping men and women, their hands covering their faces. Lifelike and frightening.
Dario’s voice came hushed, but it still made Jess flinch. “Are those . . .”
“Automata? Yes. Don’t touch the coffin. They’re probably guardians.”
Jess stayed well away from Alexander’s corpse and took the next set of stairs up again, with Dario at his heels. They emerged into a large, empty veranda open to night breezes, furnished with stone benches and seats. It afforded a fine view of the sights of Alexandria, but no way up to the small roof or out. When Jess looked down on the gardens below, it didn’t surprise him to see that all casual visitors had vanished into the night. It was just him, Dario, and two pacing sphinxes below, staring up with intense red eyes. Terrible odds.
“Where are we going to go?” Dario asked. He sounded justifiably worried.
“Go down,” Jess said.
“The sphinxes—”
Jess took in a deep breath. “You go this way. I’ll draw the sphinxes to the other side of the building. Stay here and watch. When it’s clear, climb down.”
“Excuse me—climb down?”
“Swing over the edge, grab hold of a statue, shinny down to the next level. Repeat. You can make it.” It never occurred to him that it might be terrifying; he’d grown up seeing that kind of activity as normal. From the look that Dario shot him, clearly he didn’t share that idea. “Do you want to try to outrun the sphinxes instead?”
Dario silently shook his head and moved to the edge. “Are you sure none of these statues I’m supposed to grab onto are automata?”
“I can’t guarantee it,” Jess admitted. “Best of luck.”
Dario glared. Jess didn’t really blame him. “Go with God,” Dario said. “And also to the devil, scrubber, for making me do this.”
“I’ll take whichever of them will make me faster,” Jess said. “Give me two minutes to lead them off. Good luck. I mean it.”
Dario nodded and offered his hand. They shook, and Jess backed up and ran down the steps they’d ascended. The sphinxes would be expecting him to emerge from the tomb’s only door. He wouldn’t want to disappoint them, but he did want a good head start, so he stopped a floor up, in the area lined with glass cases, and eased between them to reach the statues beyond. This was the layer with rearing horses and warriors, and, luckily, they all were stone, or he’d have been dead in seconds. The sphinxes hadn’t seen him yet and were crouched at the tomb doorway.
It would be a long jump and hard fall, but he’d had worse. Jess took in four lung-expanding breaths, then launched himself forward into a flat dive. He had a terrifyingly good view of the sphinxes’ twitching tails as he sailed over them, but he’d done it well enough; the dive carried him to a landing point several feet behind them, and he curled into a ball before impact, rolled up, and was digging feet into the gravel and running before the sphinxes even knew he’d arrived.
It didn’t last more than a couple of fast heartbeats. He heard the twin shrieks of the automata, and didn’t need to look back to know they’d risen to join the chase.
Go, Dario. Get out. That was the only good wish he could spare for his friend, because he had to concentrate on angling his body just right to take advantage of the footing, the breeze at his back, the way his feet rose and fell. He needed every possible fraction of a second to live through this . . . And then he saw the corpse lying ahead of him in the path. It was the body of the man they’d been set to meet—a sailor fresh from a boat, or so Dario had said. Didn’t matter now; he was just a sad heap of meat and crushed bones, but lying next to him was a leather drawstring bag.