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Arslan stroked his beard, thinking. "I have four such men. They are brothers. They have run out of questions. They are reliable in their unreliability."

"They sound perfect. Also, I need to see the Hercules before dark. I need his weight, the angle at which he's standing, and whether the plinth beneath him is part of the sculpture or separate. If the plinth is part of him, we cannot take him. If it is separate, we can."

"It is separate. I know the statue well, like I know most things in my city."

"Then that is one less thing we need to worry about," Alexis replied.

Arslan closed the storeroom door behind them with a touch, and the stone slid back into place.

They climbed the stairs up out of the cistern in easy silence, and by the time they came out into the sacristy, Alexis realized he hadn't stopped smiling for most of an hour.

Nereus had warned him that he would find something he didn't expect. Alexis, being Alexis, had assumed it was going to be some kind of book he hadn't heard of. He never thought he would find a friend.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Hercules of Lysippos stood in a colonnaded hall of the Great Palace, and in the half-light of evening, he was the single most alive piece of metal Alexis had ever seen.

He was seven feet of bronze and weighed somewhere between two and three tonnes, because Lysippos hadn't cast him hollow in the usual way. He had poured the chest and belly with extra bronze to represent the hero's inner density. The right arm hung loose at his side with the club. The left held, lightly and almost thoughtlessly, the apples of the Hesperides, the theft of which had been his eleventh labor.

Alexis found it oddly amusing that he was about to perform his own labor by stealing the statue of a man who had been stealing apples.

Arslan's four contacts were as solid as he had claimed. Their names were something like Petros, Petros, Petros, and Petros, because their mother had apparently given up naming sons after the first.

Sounds like Constantine trying to name his children, Alexis thought wryly.

It was no surprise that he was thinking of Con now as he stood in his city. Alexis had half expected him to turn up, but so far there had been no sign of him.

The Petros brothers didn't ask why they were driving the cart for a delivery at seven in the evening, or why they were to wait in a particular side alley near the palace with instructions not to be seen.

They accepted half their pay in advance, and drank, moderately, from a skin of watered wine with Arslan's stern instructions not to get drunk or there would be hell to pay.

The cart was hidden behind a warehouse three streets from the palace. Alexis and Arslan approached on foot by separate routes, having agreed to enter the hall from opposite ends, so that if one of them was caught, the other could pretend to be no one in particular.

Alexis came in through the east door, which was guarded by a single man, as if no one in the palace expected anyone to be stupid enough to try to steal a bronze statue that had stood there for eight hundred years.

"Good evening," Alexis said in Greek, with a light, cheerful tone.

The guard looked up. "I'm sorry, the hall is closed."

"I'm Brother Theophanes," Alexis said, and the name settled onto him with a soft shimmer of glamor that suggested a cassock without quite producing it. "I'm here on behalf of Father Germanos. He wishes me to make a sketch of the hero before the relocation."

"The relocation?"

Alexis added a little confusion to his expression. "The statue is being moved to the eastern gallery for safety."

"I wasn't told about a relocation," the guard grunted.

"No? Father Germanos is making a private arrangement with the Keeper of the Hall. It's not official, but he's nervous. He's heard the foreign fleets are coming, and he doesn't trust them to stay on their ships like they are supposed to."

The guard folded his arms. "The fleets are in Venice, priest."

"Father Germanos has a friend at the court who has seen Dandolo leaving."

The guard scratched the back of his neck. He glanced at the statue as though the statue might offer an opinion. "I'm not supposed to let anyone in."

"I'll be quick."

"How quick?"