Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(4)
The two men who’d been listening to us inside emerged from the back door at that point and spotted us huddled together, talking over a ring of solid gold that would command a rich price in the market. That, apparently, was cause enough for them to cease their incompetent spying and switch to open belligerence.
“Begging your pardon,” one said, thick-necked and swinging arms like pork haunches, “but are you both Roman citizens?”
Citizens were afforded certain rights and could go where they pleased. Those who were not could be harassed or jailed for little or no cause by the Roman authorities. We weren’t citizens and they probably already knew that, so it was obvious that they meant to establish it, then find a thin excuse to confiscate the torc.
“Camouflage,” Ogma whispered, and he promptly winked out of sight, binding his pigments to his surroundings. I didn’t have my charms back then or his powers, so I had to take off a sandal to draw upon the earth before speaking the binding aloud. While I did that, the two men shouted at Ogma’s disappearance and told me not to move. I didn’t move, but I did fade from their sight a few seconds later.
They cursed and then looked around, as if I might have just moved really quickly when they blinked. It’s a natural reaction people tend to have when they see someone disappear, and I always took advantage. While they had their eyes pointed elsewhere, I took the opportunity to move a bit, as quietly as I could, and no doubt Ogma was doing the same thing. That was necessary because the next natural reaction to sudden disappearance is to poke the air where we had been standing. Sure enough, they stepped forward, hands outstretched in disbelief but needing to confirm that we were really gone. They grabbed nothing but air, even though I had stopped very close by. I could have reached out and slapped the thick-necked fellow on his shoulder. His companion, a lean younger man with whipcord musculature, offered a quiet theory.
“I’ve heard of this kind of thing happening before. They might be Druids.”
“Druids? Here? I thought they were in Gaul.”
The lean one nodded. “That’s where I’ve heard of such disappearances. But then the legions still get them, because they don’t really leave. They are still here; we just can’t see them. But maybe we can bleed them.” He reached for his gladius and had it halfway out when the left side of his face mashed in with a sound like wet meat slapped on a butcher’s block, and teeth flew out of his mouth in a spray of blood. Ogma had sucker-punched him, and he collapsed. Taking my cue, I laid into Thick Neck from the opposite direction and broke a knuckle on his jaw. Still, he went down, and neither of them would be in shape to pursue us soon.
“Let’s continue elsewhere,” Ogma said in Old Irish to me. “We’ll need to leave the city. Word will spread to look for two Druids.”
“Right.”
We left the two spies moaning in the dirt, slipped out of the public house, and dropped camouflage on the street. Some people were startled by our appearance but didn’t think anything of it except that they had missed us somehow. We walked briskly to the nearest gate and exited before word could reach the guards to be on the lookout for suspicious types like us.
“Well? What say you, Siodhachan?” Ogma asked. “Will you fetch those scrolls, take whatever else you like, and earn a favor? Or will you leave this treasure to be destroyed by the Romans?”
I didn’t like his either-or framing of the issue but didn’t think it wise to comment. “When must it be done?” I asked instead.
“You do have some time to get there, but the sooner, the better. You don’t want to be caught in the city when rebellion arrives and the Romans respond. That’s what Brighid has seen.”
“There are no groves for me to use to shift down there?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“Weeks on horseback, then. But every step will be farther from Aenghus óg. All right, Ogma. I’ll do it.”
“Excellent.”
I shook my hand once out of town and cast a healing spell to bind the broken knuckle back together, sure that it was only the beginning of what waited ahead.
Outside the great library of Alexandria, my nose inhaled salt and fish and baked stone, sweat and blood and rotting garbage. Inside it was different: dust and musty lambskin, inks and glues settling into papyrus, and the occasional whiff of perfumed unguents desperately trying to distract from the scent of an unwashed pair of armpits.
I stabled my horse prior to entering, double-checked my clothing to be sure my tattoos were hidden, and also stuffed what gamers today might call a mighty bag of holding into my robes, concealing Fragarach there as well. Then it was smiling and nodding and a few quick exchanges in Coptic. Most of the scrolls were not free to be browsed. Rather, one had to request information from a librarian and the relevant material would be fetched. There were, however, some shelves one could browse on the main floor, and I pretended to do that while searching for a set of stairs leading downward. Once I found a doorway into which librarians came and went, I put the golden torc Ogma had given me about my neck and felt the power waiting there. I drew on some of it to cast camouflage and entered the stairwell, arriving in a basement thick with dust and disuse. Shelves rose up the walls and also in rows between support pillars. After a quick circuit informed me that few librarians came down here and they were heard before they were seen, I dispelled camouflage to preserve energy. The pillars, I noticed, were covered in hieroglyphs—somewhat unusual, since hieroglyphs had passed out of usage hundreds of years ago. There were also some passages of Demotic, perhaps intended to function much the way the Rosetta stone did, helping modern readers to decipher the glyphs, but that language was already dying out in favor of Coptic.