The Drowned Vault Read Online Free PDF Page B

his wake.
    Three heads. Living heads? Dead heads? Cyrus liked the boxing monkey better. He watched the mapped mosaic floors slide past under his feet. He stepped over a tile street map of Rome. And then what he thought was the Grund of Luxembourg—but only because someone had told him once. He still wasn’t sure what a Grund was, but by now he was probably supposed to.
    He and Tigs had been walking over these mapped floors for a year now, and in that time Cyrus had come to genuinely like their new home. A lot. Even though the rich Skelton inheritance promised to them by the little lawyer John Horace Lawney VII had been a wash, and even though they were surrounded by people who always seemed to be giving them the stink-eye, this was the place where Cyrus had learned to fight and shoot and fly. He could wander halls lined with relics and artifacts that would have been beyond his collector’s imagination only a year ago. He knew what it was like to ride a bull shark and how its muscled sandpaper skin felt against his hands. There had been days when he had done nothing but search through faded old photographs of explorers, wondering which faces belonged to Smiths. But for all of that, he also felt stuck, almost more stuck than he had at the Archer Motel. He and Antigone weren’t allowed to leave the Estate without the permission of their Keeper, and Rupert was never around to take them anywhere off grounds. He certainly wasn’t about to let them go anywhere on their own.
    There were no classes and no real structure. Every time he looked at a book, he suddenly wanted to go for a run, or find a sparring partner, or ask Diana to take him up in one of her planes. But he was going to have to start making himself do the studying if he ever wanted to leave this place and hunt for Phoenix himself.
    Cyrus grimaced. Yeah, there was plenty he didn’t like. The looks in the dining hall. The muttered comments in the halls and the collections and even in the armory. And the fact that almost no one would train with him. That made him angry—even angrier because, on some level, the people who hated him were right. He, Cyrus Smith, had come to Ashtown carrying the Dragon’s Tooth—a dangerous relic given to him by an outlaw. And he had lost it.
    Next time … he didn’t even finish the thought. Even now, Cyrus could picture Phoenix’s face and see the beast he became without his white coat. He could feel those powerful hands, and even more powerful eyes, eyes that could close a throat and choke out breath.
    Cyrus shivered. He had to do something, had been trying to do something. But even he could see that his efforts to qualify for Explorer were usually distractions when he felt penned in. Would Phoenix really be any more frightened of Cyrus the Explorer than he had been of Cyrus the Acolyte? Phoenix wasn’t even frightened of Rupert.
    Cyrus hopped over a complicated tile map-tangle in the floor labeled
Sub Aquagium Parisii
. Aquagium? It didn’t ring a bell.
    “Tigs?”
    “Sewers of Paris,” she said simply. “You’ve scraped through one level of Latin. You should know that.”
    “You should know that I wouldn’t.”
    The three of them passed the loud dining hall and wound their way through the hallways. They passed photographs and strange animal heads and maps and guns and swords and battered wooden propellers until the hallway broadened and they finally reached the ancient leather boat of Brendan on its pedestal and the long dragon skin on the wall. Rupert strode past them to the great doors—the huge wooden doors that opened onto the courtyard lawn of Ashtown. Rupert opened a small wicket door on the right side and ducked out.
    Cyrus and Antigone hopped through after him, and a moment later, they were both blinking in the smoldering heat.
    The sun was already low, but the humid air held the warmth like … like a baked potato, Cyrus thought. A potato he had to live in. He groaned and shut his eyes. His skin already