"Nick?" I waited until he looked up. He had a smudge of dust on his nose. "Bad-tempered blond, in need of a haircut?"

"John? Oh, he's around somewhere." Nick dismissed him with one hand, while grabbing another book with the other.

I plucked it out of his hand. "This is what you've been researching down here?" There seemed to be an awfully lot of books devoted to Nick's hobby and none to the geis.

He saw my expression and hurried to explain. "No, no. Or, rather, yes, but it does tie into our search."

"It does."

"Yes. You see these?" He pointed out a line of symbols on the frontispiece, rendered in silver gilt and curving around the outside of the snake's scales. "The Ephesia Grammata," he announced proudly, as if that explained anything.

"And that would be?"

"Sorry. The Ephesian Letters. They gave an added…oomph…to the protection. You often see them on amulets in conjunction with the ouroboros symbol. They were said to have been written by Solomon himself." He flipped to a line drawing showing the snake surrounding a guy on horseback with a long spear. "That's him, attacking evil," he added, pointing to the figure in the middle of the circle. "And there's the Ephesian letters again."

"But what are they?"

Nick blinked at me owlishly for a moment through his glasses. "You've never even heard of them?"

"Why would I ask you about them if I had?"

"It's just…they're famous. Even to norms." He looked slightly offended at my level of ignorance. I crossed my arms and stared at him. "They were said to have been inscribed on the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, the center of her cult in the ancient world," he explained. "She was closely associated with protective magic, and the words were considered some of the most potent voces magicae in existence."

"Magic words," I translated. "And what do they mean?"

"That's just it." Nick looked at me proudly, like I'd finally said something smart. "No one knows."

"What do you mean, no one knows? Why use words if you don't know what they mean?"

Nick shrugged. "Words have power, some more than others."

"And yet no one's ever figured them out?"

"Oh, we know what the individual words mean," he said, sounding vaguely patronizing. "The first one, askion, translates roughly as ‘shadowless ones, probably some reference to the gods. The problem is that each word is only a mnemonic aid, a memory prompt for a line of text."

"It's only one word out of a whole line? What happened to the rest?"

"That's the point. Together, the complete text forms a spell too important, too powerful, for anyone to risk writing it down in its entirety." He grinned, a flash of large white teeth in his freckled face. "Except once."

"Let me guess. The Codex contains the full spell."

"The oldest riddle in all of magic," Nick said dreamily. "The secret to ultimate power."

I was beginning to understand why the Dark Fey king wanted the Codex so badly. "Sounds like something people might have wanted to hold on to."

"It's the same old story," Nick said, his smile slipping. "A group of power-hungry leaders, probably of the Artemis cult, didn't want to risk it falling out of their hands. So they only transmitted the full spell orally. But when the temple burned to the ground in 356 B.C., they all died."

"And since no one had ever written it down—"

"No one knew what it meant."

"Well, that was stupid."

"Exactly. It is possible to be too careful. Sometimes you can lose more by being overly cautious than by taking a necessary risk."

"Like telling me where Pritkin is?" I asked idly.

"Yes, I—" Nick stopped, frowning. "You tricked me." He sounded more surprised than upset.

"Where is he?"

"You need to give him some time. He's—"

"Had as much as I have, and I was attacked, too. I need to talk to him, Nick."

"I really don't think—"

I leaned across the table, slamming a hand down on his precious pile of books. Keeping my temper these days was starting to take a lot more concentration than I could spare. "Here's the thing, Nick. Tonight I have to pay a visit to the Consul, who has a bit of a short fuse and is already less than pleased with me. So I really need to know if a ticked-off demon lord is likely to crash the party. And the only way I can get that information is to talk to your buddy."

"I understand, but you have to consider—"

"And when I need to do that is now."

His frown deepened. "Are you trying to intimidate me? Because I think you should know—"

"I thought all war mages were sworn to the Pythia's service." Not that they recognized me as holding the office legitimately, or had so far shown any loyalty whatsoever. But supposedly Nick felt otherwise. Or else I had to wonder what he was doing here.

"Well, yes, technically, but—"

"I'm Pythia," I reminded him. "And you're a war mage. I don't have to intimidate you for information you are duty bound to provide."

Nick blinked at me a couple of times, then sighed and rubbed his eyes. He looked like he was getting a headache. "He's in the training salle."

"Where you should have been half an hour ago," Pritkin said crisply, from behind me. I jumped and a hand reached out to steady me. "If you kept your appointments, you wouldn't have to browbeat information out of my colleague."

Nick looked as surprised to see Pritkin as I was despite the fact that he'd been facing the door. I had this weird picture flash across my mind of Pritkin simply materializing out of thin air, like his father, before I squashed it. He was corporeal, all right, just damn sneaky.

"She didn't browbeat me," Nick said, offended.

Pritkin shot him a look. "Of course not." He was wearing gray sweats that looked like he'd already run a marathon in them. He gave my outfit a long look, but didn't comment. "Get changed and come with me."

"Why?" I asked, my stomach already sinking. Because it was that time of morning, only being up half the night I hadn't noticed.

"We're going jogging."

"I don't run for recreation. I run when someone's after me with a weapon."

"That can be arranged," he muttered, pulling me out the door.

Chapter 17

After I changed into a pair of old sweatpants and a ratty tank top, we made six circuits of the underground hallways and then ran up and down the stairs until I couldn't see straight. Pritkin swore it was only about two miles, which he counted as a warm-up, but I was pretty sure he was lying. Either that, or I was even more out of shape than I'd thought.

We stopped in what had served as the gym for a now defunct acrobatic act before Pritkin appropriated it for training purposes. A few practice mats were still rolled against one wall, looking incongruous considering the rest of the decor. The room was pretty, more like a ballroom than a gym, probably originally designed for smaller conferences that wouldn't need the larger room downstairs. It had thick paneled walls running up to a spandreled ceiling, with huge mirrors on three sides and tall stained-glass windows on the other. The light they let into the room rippled like water, splashing a mosaic of color over the wooden floor.

I leaned casually against the door, trying not to look like it was holding me up, while Pritkin dug around in a large canvas bag. He kept one eye on me, as if he thought I was about to bolt. Which was totally unfair, as that had happened only once and he'd been pulling out the jump rope of doom at the time. Not to mention that the only way I could make a break for it at the moment was if someone carried me.

I expected some fiendish new exercise equipment, or another gun that he thought I might actually be able to aim. The guy lived in hope. So I blinked uncertainly at what emerged instead. "What is that for?"