Pullo and Caesarion rushed forward to the Egyptian, kneeling to look for any sign of life. There was none. The whole of his body was contorted with the appearance of pain and death. The air that hung about him smelled of blood and bone.
Hannah had stood and walked deliberately across the chamber to look down upon Shushu’s remains. Her face was impassive. “It’s said among our scriptures that the Ark is death to those who are unworthy,” she said. “I think it means that it destroys those unable to control its power.”
“But how can anyone know without trying?” Pullo asked, holding one of Shushu’s wrists with a look of revulsion that Caesarion would not have imagined him capable of feeling.
Hannah shrugged. “I do not know. If any man had such knowledge of the Shards, it has not been passed on. It’s not our place to be tempted with the power of the divine. It has always been thus.”
Caesarion looked down at the broken man before them. His stomach churned with anger, grief, and horror. And guilt, too, he decided: guilt because the dead man had been there only because of him, guilt because the Egyptian was dead while he still lived, and guilt because he knew that they would soon walk away from the corpse, moving on to the matters of the living. “What about Shushu?”
“We can do nothing for him now,” Jacob said, coming forward to join them. “Only the Ark matters. And we cannot take it back to the Serapeum. Unless your friend has failed, your boat will be close at hand soon.”
“Vorenus won’t fail,” Pullo said.
“I hope not,” Hannah said. Behind them, the guards had found two long poles laid out to either side of the dais, and they were fitting them carefully through thick rings at the corners of the Ark’s base, in order to move it without touching it.
Caesarion looked around at the featureless chamber. “How will we get the Ark to the sea?”
Hannah looked up from Shushu’s corpse to the blank wall of stone. “We go through the door,” she said, pointing forward.
Pullo stood and ran his fingers across the smooth surface. “Another hidden door?”
“It is said to be based on the designs of Archimedes,” Jacob said. “It can only open from this chamber. Your friend Didymus would’ve liked to see it, I should think.”
“That he would have,” Caesarion agreed, at last standing to join them. “I can see nothing. How does it open?”
Hannah set her hand against the wall, leaned against it ever so slightly. “Archimedes was a very clever man,” she said. “Just push.”
There was a clicking sound from within the stone. Then, a few heartbeats later, it repeated. Then again, faster this time. And again and again, speeding up until they heard the sound of metal gears winding into motion. At last the stone wall vibrated and split vertically along a hidden seam. Tendrils of dust spilled out, and all at once two newly formed halves of a door swung out with smooth precision, folding back into the walls and revealing a passageway that was twice the height of a man and just as wide.
The smell of the sea washed over them all, briny and thick. Then, as the grinding sounds of rock and gear fell silent and the two halves of the door settled into their final positions with an echoing thump, they heard the call of seagulls and the steady beat of waves on a rocky shore.
The passageway before them was clearly made to seem a simple part of the city’s freshwater system: it had a trough cut down its center, and it gently ramped downward to what Caesarion immediately recognized as one of the primary water-carrying canals beneath the city, as broad as the avenue above it. The little sliver of its wide surface that he could see at the end of the sloping passage was flashing with the reflected light from some nearby opening to the sun and sea. Looking up, just on the other side of Archimedes’ door, Caesarion could see a rock-lined opening in the ceiling that extended up, through the subsurface of Alexandria, to some rainwater collection point far above. There were hundreds of these collection points, which combined to help keep the underground aqueducts full even in the driest months of the year: like roots for trees or veins in flesh, the network of deep canals was the lifeblood of the city. And looking up here from the canal, no one would have a reason to suspect that the stone wall at the upper end of this particular tunnel was actually a most remarkable hidden door—not that it could be opened anyway.
Hannah had passed him by, picking her way down the drier edges of the sloping tunnel, and Caesarion followed her, marveling at what a brilliant piece of engineering and design it all was.
He had toured this very part of the undercity before, but when he at last reached the edge of the canal he saw it now with fresh eyes. There were walkways running along each side of the canal—just a couple of feet above the surface of the water and meant for maintenance, of course, but also just broad enough, Caesarion now supposed, to safely maneuver the Ark. Looking up here he saw the vaulting ribs of arches that extended out from wall to wall, stretching into shadow as they followed the paved street above, going south. A part of him expected to hear the rhythmic beat of marching footsteps echoing down through the stone—the sound of Octavian’s armies overrunning the city—but he doubted that they would have reached so far so soon, and the stone above them was probably too thick to hear such things anyway. Looking in the other direction, to the north, he could see where the wide watercourse ended against the stone wall that marked the edge of the Great Harbor; he could see and smell the ocean through both the access gates at each end of the twin walkways beside the canal and the iron-barred spillway a foot or so above the water between them. Hannah had stopped at the canal’s edge, but Caesarion moved along the walkway in the direction of the harbor and the light, feeling eerily like a ghost beneath the city that was—or at least had been—his.
The access gate was locked, as it ought to have been. Between its bars, Caesarion could see that Hannah’s directions on the map had been perfectly accurate: the broad street above the canal was the very same road that ran forward along the Heptastadion, the giant causeway that stretched out from Alexandria like a finger pointed northward to the island of Pharos. Huddled just inside each of the locked gates sat four or five large clay jars, big enough to need two men to move them. Explosive pots, he knew. And outside each of the gates sat a square stone platform extending from the harbor wall, perhaps a dozen feet on a side, where the main supports for the Heptastadion’s first wooden bridge were rooted into the strong rock a man’s height above the tide. That bridge arched over the water, extending forward above Caesarion’s head, shadowing the sea directly in front of the spillway. Though he couldn’t immediately see them through the access gate, Caesarion knew that even more pots were hidden among the bridge’s beams and rails higher above the water: he had ordered them placed there, he remembered, after one of his boat rides with Khenti, on the day he first learned of the Shards. They’d passed under this very same bridge, looking to see that such defensive explosives were in proper position to destroy it if the city were attacked from Pharos. Caesarion felt a strange kind of amazement to have returned to this place, and to see it through such different eyes. Not as a pharaoh now. Not anymore. Just a man in a greater fight to protect the Ark.
Hannah had followed him, and she quickly unlocked the gate using a key that few were meant to have—Caesarion decided not to ask how she had obtained it, instead wondering to himself how he had never noticed how much larger this access gate was than it needed to be—and let it swing open to its small platform beneath the bridge. Below, the harbor waves broke on scattered rocks, and gulls reeled in the cool air of the morning.