Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(87)

He froze, mind racing for any idea of how to battle an automaton while standing completely still on one small square. He didn’t find any.

The sphinx’s eyes slowly kindled to life, but instead of red, they were a pure, luminous blue. It didn’t rise.

“What must I do to be worthy?” Thomas asked it, and said it in Greek, in the hope that was the language Heron would have taught it to recognize. The sphinx tilted its head up to look directly at him.

“Answer this: I have a mouth but do not speak. I have a bed but do not sleep. I run but go nowhere.” It replied in Greek, but in archaic accents and usages that Thomas struggled to translate. He hoped he had it right. He’d be dead if he didn’t.

Jess might know this, Thomas thought. Or Khalila. Or Dario. Possibly even Morgan. I never paid attention to riddles. That, as it turned out, was proving to be a liability. Come on, Schreiber. Children play this game. He couldn’t be beaten so easily. It would be humiliating. And, secondarily, fatal.

I have a mouth. A bed. I run.

It came to him in a rush of giddy relief. “A river!”

The sphinx rose and walked out of its alcove. It padded toward him, and he looked for escape, but the careful, awkward hops he’d made to get to this point were impossible to replicate quickly. The sphinx didn’t trigger the spears at all, stepping fluidly from one safe spot to the next, and he thought, If I could get out of the way and trigger them myself . . . but there was nowhere to jump to safety. He’d be killing them both.

He held his breath and tried to remember the lessons Jess had taught them about how to turn the sphinxes off in midleap; his brain, frustratingly, seemed cloudy on the finer points. He cursed softly in German and realized he ought to be praying instead, but surely God would understand.

The sphinx calmly paced right past him and put a sharply clawed paw to the wall.

The wall opened with a click and a creak, swinging back and off to the side. The sphinx crouched down beside it, ruffled its metal wings, and then went still again. Its eyes flickered from brilliant blue to empty black.

Thomas couldn’t help the impulse to brush his fingers over the bronze skin. It didn’t move. Leave it, he commanded himself, and ducked into the opening. On the other side of the short, dark hallway, another wall waited.

This one seemed perfectly understandable. A single stone stood out from the others in the wall, jutting at least an inch forward. It seemed obvious that it should be pressed.

That was alarming. The obvious was dangerous here. Thomas examined the stone from as many angles as he could, and finally, lacking any other answer, pressed his fingers to it.

The wall collapsed in a rush, and he froze because what was inside was nothing he expected.

It was a garden, underground. A garden of crystals: intricate structures and spires and squares, shapes that caught and reflected his lamp in a thousand subtle hues. Beautiful. So beautiful.

So sharp.

There was a path between the crystals, but it was narrow. Even Jess would have had trouble sliding through, Thomas thought, and he was as flexible as an otter. There was no chance someone of Thomas’s size could move through without brushing against something delicate. I don’t want to damage them. But there wasn’t much choice. These crystals must have been slowly growing for ages.

The instant he brushed against one, it made a sound. A low, vibrating note. He wasn’t musical; he couldn’t possibly identify which note it could be . . . Surely that wouldn’t be required.

The next crystal he brushed against made an entirely different note. Hmmm. Please don’t make this a musical puzzle. Engineering, yes. Music, no. Or perhaps the notes had nothing to do with it at all.

As the second crystal sounded, the first sounded again. Atonal and strange.

The crystals now hemming him in on either side suddenly grew. He didn’t quite believe his eyes; surely that hadn’t happened. Surely the crystals he’d successfully avoided touching weren’t now pointing sharp tips at him, like a row of knives.

He’d have to ease past them. Carefully. As he tried, one sliced easily through his coat and cut a thin line through his skin like a Medica’s scalpel. It didn’t even hurt, but he saw the blood staining cloth. The coat offered little protection.

Moving through had to be done in torturous, muscle-cramping increments. A second’s inattention caused fabric to brush along another crystal. Three notes sounded, all out of key, louder than before.

The crystals grew. One drove straight into his palm, pinning him in place, and when he cried out in surprise the crystals cried out, too, a dirge of sound that vibrated through the cavern like a hellish chorus. Thomas gritted his teeth and carefully pulled his hand off the jutting, faceted spike. It glittered like false promises.

He was going to die here.

The crystal where he’d started chimed again. A single, pure note. He caught his breath and froze because he was afraid it would start the growth cycle all over again, but instead it seemed to slow down. Stop like a clockwork.

It is clockwork. It’s a puzzle. You have to solve it.

He had no framework for this. There was no metal, no wire, no gears, no steam, nothing that an engineer could understand or dismantle. He could not come at this as an engineer. Heron had made musical instruments, too; he’d made a steam calliope that had rolled on its own cart from street corner to street corner, playing different tunes for the amusement of Alexandria’s citizens. Heron saw music as a pleasing outcome of an engineering marvel.