“Wait,” said Zofia. She held up a pendulum light, shining it on the metal. Small finger indents appeared where Enrique had tried to pull away the box. When she touched it, her Forging affinity for solid matter prickled through her fingertips. “That box is made of Forged tin, reinforced with steel.”
“Is that bad?” asked Enrique.
Zofia nodded, grimacing. “It means my incendiary devices won’t work on it. It’s flame-retardant.” She looked at the interior of the hollow angel and frowned. “And the inside of this statue is a sound barrier…” She touched the layers of sponge, cloth, and cork. Why would a device need to be silent?
A small chime sounded on Hypnos’s watch. He looked up at them.
“Five minutes.”
Zofia felt her throat tightening. The room felt too small, toobright, too much like the laboratory in her old university where they’d locked her inside and—
“Phoenix,” said Enrique softly. “Stay with me. What do we have? You always have something.”
Chardonnet silk was useless here. Beyond her regular tools and matches, all that was left was a controlled incendiary device, which wouldn’t help, and the ice pen in case they needed to freeze the hinges off doors.
“An ice pen,” said Zofia.
“In an already freezing room?” wailed Hypnos. “So, fire is useless… ice is useless… for that matter,Iam useless.”
“We can’t even pry it off the stand, so how will we crack it—” started Zofia, but suddenly Enrique paused, something lighting up behind his eyes.
“Crack,” he repeated.
“Aaaand there goes his sanity,” said Hypnos.
“Zofia, hand me that ice pen. It draws water out of the air, yes?” asked Enrique.
Zofia nodded and handed it over, watching as Enrique began to trace every single one of the cracks in the tin box. “Did you know—”
“Here we go,” muttered Hypnos.
“—In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal made his way through the Alps with his huge army and forty elephants intent on destroying the heart of the Roman Empire,” said Enrique. He poured out the water the pen had collected from the air. The liquid disappeared into the cracks of tin. “Back then, the standard for removing rock obstacles was fairly torturous. Rocks were heated by bonfires, then doused with cold water…”
He touched the ice pen to the box, and a glittering and crackling sound echoed in the silent chamber. Ice spidered out from the fissures. A snapping sound rattled from deep within the box.
“… which would make them crack apart,” said Enrique, grinning.
The box split open, the edges of the metal gleaming damply.
Enrique reached into the box, pulling out the delicate Tezcat spectacles. They were the size of ordinary glasses… albeit more elaborate. The gunmetal-gray frames formed an ivy-and-flower pattern of wrought iron that could be wrapped around the head like a diadem. A pair of square lens frames jutted out, but only one of them held a piece of prismatic glass.
Hypnos clapped slowly, grinning. “Well done! Although, I do find it strange that this time the engineer used a story and the storyteller used engineering.”
“I’m ahistorian,” said Enrique, tucking the Tezcat spectacles into his jacket. “Not a storyteller.”
“History, storytelling,” said Hypnos, waving his hand and smiling at Zofia. “Quelle est la différence?”
Another chime sounded. Soundlessly, the angel statue was swallowed into the wall, leaving them in a pristine marble room. Zofia turned around, but the walls were smooth, no sign whatsoever of the muse statues that had once been here.
“Time’s up,” said Hypnos. “And it’s rude to be late to weddings.”
“You’re going to have to get back into that cabinet—”
“—Ugh.”
“It’s either that or—”
Just then, the door to the chamber opened. The butler walked inside, carrying a tray of refreshments.
