Shadows on the Aegean (47 page)

Most important, she was too busy to focus on Cheftu.

Chloe slowed to a stop before Atenis. The gray-eyed woman did not offer her encouragement, just put a hand on Chloe’s elbow
and turned her around.

Another field away, Chloe saw a woman running. Her shift was short, her hair bound up, but she was poetry in motion. Fast,
graceful, and like all great artists, she made the skill look effortless.

“Who is it?”

“Kela-Ileana.”

Chloe and Atenis watched the Queen of Heaven as she ran rhythmically. Chloe doubted she’d even broken a sweat. Not only did
she look good in Aztlan’s elaborate clothing, but her body hummed like a working Jaguar auto. Chloe watched her competition,
feeling more and more deflated. The earth shifted beneath them, and Chloe touched Atenis’ arm for support. A tremor. They
were so often and so gentle that Chloe was not quite certain when they hit. Another? Or was she just nauseated from watching
Ileana?

“You have a good chance,” Atenis said. “You need to find your pace though first.”

Chloe started to stretch, feeling her muscles bunch from stopping cold. “Teach me,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

After all, if this race were part of the reason she was here, she should give it her best.

Sibylla, if she still lived, said nothing.

T
HE VESSEL WAS FLAWLESS, SMOOTH, AND EVEN
, so fragile that Cheftu could see light through it. The art of shaping stone. Two meals lay uneaten on the floor, and he
rose from his crouched position and grabbed a piece of stale bread. Determined not to turn his back when the table changed,
he yawned, forcing his eyes open.

He had no concept of day or night, he felt neither heat nor cold. Even his beard had not grown. He stretched his legs, touching
the floor with his hands. A soft whirring made him look up, but he had missed it. This new table was higher, with a new box
and a beehive-shaped clay vessel on top.

Cheftu ate some fish, still warm, and an olive-and-wild-lettuce salad while he paced the chamber, easing the ache of his muscles
and allowing the tension of the past decans? days? to pass through his body.

He rinsed his fingers, then rubbed and massaged his neck as he prepared to go into what he hoped was the final pyramid test.
This must be the quest to transform.

Transform what? Into what?
Mon Dieu
, be with me.

After staring at the beehive for a decan or so, it came to him. The clay beehive was an oven! He’d seen a picture, a picture
in his own time, of one.
Intéressant
. Also, there was a bowl, a lump of dark rock, three or four vials of liquids, a box of dried herbs, and a gold ingot.

Ovens and gold, ovens and gold. Cheftu gnawed his upper lip as he searched through his memories. The oven was an
athanor
, the container in which an alchemist heated his lead, creating gold. Transforming the everyday into the sacred.

Transforming. Surely Aztlantu couldn’t change lead to gold even in this mythological land? He turned over the dark rocks in
his hands. Not lead; lead had not yet been discovered. Transform … transform through heat. He opened the vials. Chemicals
and herbs?

He’d read that alchemists in imperial France believed each object carried within itself the ability to develop, to metamorphose
into that which was beautiful, powerful, and useful. Each man and woman had the same ability. The art of alchemy was not just
knowing the properties and reactions of liquids and solids, but the art of refining the coarse into the perfected.

It was the ultimate search: to sift and modify until godhood was achieved. Alchemists claimed it was a spiritual quest, the
refining, the most perfecting skill of all.

How? he thought, staring at the oven, the vials, and the rocks. These skills, if they were known in Egypt, had not been part
of his education. Cheftu felt cold, sick, and panicked.

How much time had passed? Did they know he was stymied? Running his hands through his sweat-soaked hair, Cheftu fought for
calm.
God, there is nothing I can do. I know nothing here. Please, help me
.

Trust me…
.

The voice was solid and reassuring. Cheftu took deep, calming breaths, then returned to the table. Chemicals and heat interacted.
Order was significant here. He sniffed each vial, forcing the scent to recall its name and properties, how it could be used,
and for what.

His mind narrowed to a nib of intense concentration, Cheftu leaned on his instincts and tried to transform fear into faith.
He began mixing and measuring.

The stench of the
athanor
was repellent after a while, and his eyes ran with tears as he fought for breath. There was no way out of the room, and he
wondered if asphyxiation were the price of failure in this exam. The room shook slightly, another earthwave, Cheftu assumed,
but when he opened his eyes again, he saw an obsidian sarcophagus.

Not only am I killing myself, I’m to bury my corpse also?

As it heated, the
athanor
was taking the air Cheftu needed into its red-hot body, spewing out poison. Cheftu stripped off his clothes and walked to
the sarcophagus. It was cool to the touch, deep and curved to fit the shape of a man’s body.

Dizziness assaulted him, and Cheftu knew he had only a few minutes of consciousness. Once, in the initiation of Amun, he had
learned how to send his spirit away, slow his body down to the sleep of death. Could he do it again? Place himself in an attitude
of stasis?

Tired muscles screaming, he pulled himself over the edge and into the depths of the sarcophagus. Lying down, he breathed deeply.
Please, God, please
. He could not see above the edges of the sarcophagus. Closing his eyes, Cheftu steadied his racing pulse, counting and resting,
slowing his body. A whirring noise touched his ears, but he refused to splinter his attention. He felt his body gaining weight,
growing heavy and slow.

It was similar to the sensation of moving through time, when his body had first slipped off him, like a heavy coat, and he
had sailed naked both soul and body through … Cheftu’s mind ceased to process, and he rested, above his body, above the room,
above the pyramid, above Aztlan.

T
HE
C
OUNCIL WANDERED AROUND
the chamber, eating and drinking, glancing at the serfs, who would run to check the sky and report back.

The new Spiralmaster was running out of time.

Chloe’s fingers were like ice around her rhyton, and she’d already bored Dion and Vena to death when they’d tried to engage
her in conversation.
Come on, Cheftu! Think! Work! Do what it takes! The sands are running down!

Selena had mentioned, obviously aware that Sibylla was very interested, that Phoebus and Niko were in the Rising Golden’s
apartments, preparing to celebrate when Zelos went to kill the failed Spiralmaster.

These people take competition way too seriously, Chloe thought.
Come on, Cheftu!

C
HEFTU WOKE WITH A JOLT
—his body cold as snow, the sarcophagus sealed. With a great gasp, he breathed. The stench of the
athanor
filled his nose and he coughed, staring up at the black lid across his lower body. He was immobile. He forced his fingers
to move, pumping blood back into the digits. He ran a shaky hand over his face—once again his beard had not grown. Easing
up, he leaned against one side of the sarcophagus. It was lighter in the room, lighter than it had been when he had fallen
“asleep.”

Muscles shaking, heart pounding, he crawled over the side of the sarcophagus. Cheftu leaned against it in shock. Before him
on the table stood a lump of
shalcedon
. It was the size of the
athanor;
indeed it
was
the
athanor
. This was how the Aztlantu built the pyramid, he realized. They made faux jewels from ordinary stone through
al-khem
and heat. Their incredible wealth of precious stones was nothing more than a facade! Cheftu walked over the
shalcedon
, touching the still warm stone. He scratched it with his nails.

Grâce à Dieu!

The
shalcedon
was smooth, lumpy only from the ridges on the clay base. Cheftu tried to move it, but it wouldn’t budge. Remembering the
last thing Dion had told him, Cheftu ritually baptized the stone with a quick slice to his wrist. He hadn’t died in the testing;
still, some blood was demanded.

The floor fell away from beneath him and he went down in a wild slide, swallowing his screams. He shot out into a pool, beneath
the fading blue sky. Water closed over his head and he came up sputtering and stared in surprise at the Council members in
the room. They stared back, equally surprised. Chloe’s face was white, her eyes as wide and green as the
shalcedon
.

Had he succeeded, then?

Zelos reached out his hands, hauled Cheftu from the pool. “Welcome to the Council and to Aztlan, Spiralmaster Cheftu!”

Cheftu’s first official duty was to go to the deathbed of one of Zelos’
hequetai
. The man was young, only a few summers Cheftu’s senior, yet he moved as though he were decades older. His babbling and hysterical
laughter terrified his wife. Tears of fear streaming down her face, she refused to be in the same room with him. Already the
serfs had placed him in the lustral bath.