Read Online Time's Mistress by Steven Savile - Free Book Online Page B

silhouette of the Harpy Tomb from Xanthus and the seated figures from Branchidae , a sepulchral monument pillaged from an Etruscan tomb. Reaching into the deep pockets of his Churchill, he withdrew a thin stiletto knife. The blade was coated with an oily residue. He worked the blade patiently between the leading and the glass, gently teasing the leading loose. Strip by strip he pared it away and then chivvied the tip of the blade beneath the edge of the glass and pried it up. There was a soft popping sound as the glass came free. It slid. He caught it before it could hit the floor, and set it down gently. Reaching inside, he undid the very basic locking mechanism and eased the window open and slipped inside.
    The air inside the museum was stale, musty and, to his nostrils, reeked of antiquity.
    He moved with the surety of a man who belonged, ghosting through the room without disturbing a thing despite the fact that there was no artificial light within the Ancient Greek gallery. It was yet another of those antiquated notions of the curator’s, the fool actually believed electric lighting would damage the integrity of the treasures under his care. Still, the reliance upon the sun offered him a wealth of shadows now. Indeed, the only electric lighting within the entire museum was in the Reading Room, allowing the scholars to pour over the wealth of words well into the dark hours without the risk of a clumsy candle or drips of wax marring irreplaceable texts.
    The huge door opened with a sigh; in the darkness it sounded like the last breath expelled by a dying man.
    He stepped through the crack and eased the door closed behind him. It was thirty-nine steps to the mausoleum room and the colossal chariot-tomb erected to Mausolos by his sister-wife Artemisia, forty-two more to the Elgin room, overflowing with the grandest remains of Greek sculpture, the Parthenon marbles and procession-frieze. His footsteps echoed hollowly up and down the long galleries, the only sounds in the otherwise silent museum. Five rough and ready bruisers were employed as night-watchers, but with the building itself being an enormous square with four huge wings and the central Reading Room being a completely different construction, they were nothing more than a token. They did their rounds together, sharing a dram and lying about the various delights of the bordellos, bawds and hussies they had conquered with liberal coin. They paid scant attention to the task at hand, after all, who would dare rob the Empire’s treasures and risk the wrath of a surly Victoria?
    He lurked in the shadows of a standing sarcophagus, waited patiently for them to pass and be on their way. Not one of the five so much as glanced in his direction. When their laughter and ribaldry faded he moved on.
    Wall upon wall was dominated by bound manuscripts, rare editions and exquisite typographies. None of these interested him. He walked the length of the corridor, past marble busts, zoological specimens, mammals, birds, rare Arctic dwellers and curious sand worms, past rooms of rare coins and fossilised plants, pygmy elephants and splendid meteorites fallen from the sky. He moved deeper into the museum, looking for the Kruptos Door, which itself was masked from idle discovery. The door opened on to the true secret treasures of the museum, the Arcanum, the stolen artefacts that between them promised the power to transmute, alter, and restore the flesh and spirit. Beyond the door lay the treasures of the One-Mind, as the alchemists called them, the evidence that linked heaven and earth.
    He followed the clues laid down in the stones of the floor, alchemical cyphers for spirit, which looked oddly like a cross from the Holy See, and earth, an inverted triangle with the lowest angle marked out. The cyphers were laid in the stone with tin, silver and copper wires and scuffed down by the weary procession of tired feet for the best part of eighty years. They led through the lower galleries, the