Episode 1: For the Thief's Chalice, chapter 5

When a person spends any length of time in a room with no windows and no link to the outside world, time starts to become blurred. You sit down at your desk in the morning and start typing up a research paper or some notes, then suddenly your stomach complains and you look at your watch to find it's almost eight in the evening and you've entirely missed lunch. Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.

Jenkins was used to skipping meals. Having a magical health care plan that makes you almost immortal gives you the option of making do with nothing but air on your plate. It wasn't pleasant, but he could go days without food if he had to. Weeks even. He hadn't got as far as months yet. As his stomach grumbled and settled down into its long wait, he recalled the last time he had endured such discomfort. That had been the longest occasion, certainly. Being stuck behind enemy lines in the middle of a war zone did tend to make travel arrangements a tad tricky. Of course that was while the back door had been broken. Then he had retired and hadn't bothered trying to fix it. These young people didn't know how easy they had it. These young people.

He looked down at Ezekiel, muttering and twitching in his fever-ridden sleep. These young people who risk life and limb to finish a job you started, he told himself. These young people who drop everything to travel halfway around the globe to help people they had met only once, or never at all. These young people who, in their naive faith in you, put you to shame at every turn. If they only knew. 'Beware the hero' didn't just mean Lancelot.

Jenkins looked at the watch he had laid on the table. It was time to check his temperature again. About an hour before, the patient had come round long enough to be persuaded to take a dose of paracetamol, an antipyretic. His fever should be on the wane now. The old man looked down at the display and sighed. No change. There was little he could do but wait, keep the saline flowing and try to bring the fever down with medicine and cooling pads. Mostly, just wait.

And the waiting was interminable.

Jenkins made a mental note to install a select collection of volumes in a small bookshelf in the first aid room. Something that could sit in the corner, out of the way, with a glass-fronted door that would keep the dust, and blood, out. He leant back and began picking out his desert-island books. The collected works of Aristophanes would be there. Always good to have something humorous in a sickroom. There was a small volume by a Paul Davies that he found quite interesting. A volume or two of M. Verne's stories for something to read aloud if necessary. Perhaps some collected poems for the next time Mr Stone or Miss Cillian required bandaging. Malory was always good for a laugh. Homer was lying around in his lab somewhere. He never had made it through all of that. It was such a circuitous ramble.

He got up and removed the cooling strip from Ezekiel's forehead. It had been there well beyond its time span. He sponged down the boy's face with cold water, watching the droplets shrink and disappear as they dried. He fixed another cooling strip on the heat reddened forehead and sat back. The young Librarian's breathing was harder to spot now, and his body lay still. Jenkins held out a hand, but couldn't feel any air movement. He checked the pulse monitor on the patient's finger. The heartbeat readout worried him. It was far too fast. Should he let him sleep? Or should he try to wake him? If he had a book he would try reading to him, but hindsight was a wonderful thing. There was one book, of course, that he did not need to have in front of him to read. He sat back and took a deep breath. At least, if the others did return mid sentence, he could always say it was a story he grew up with. It wasn't technically a lie.

"Once upon a time, there was a king named Pelles..."

XXXX

The sound of multiple feet warned Jenkins of their approach before they were close enough to hear him. He broke off and waited patiently. Colonel Baird was clearly feeling better as it was her voice that was first to sound through the locked door, accompanied by the loud hammering of her fist on the wood.

"Jenkins, are you still in there?" Baird yelled. "Is Ezekiel with you? What's going on?"

"I assure you Colonel, everything is under control," he called back.

"I didn't ask that," she retorted. Guardians were so much more difficult to distract than Librarians.

"Mr Jones is unwell," Jenkins replied with a sigh. He walked over and leant against the door frame. "He picked up a germ of some kind on his latest mission. He now has a fever. I, having already been exposed to said pathogen, am treating said fever with fluids and antipyretic drugs. Due to the ancient nature of said pathogen, and the speed with which it traversed Mr Jones' immune system, I feel it would be wise to curtail the spread of such a disease."

There was a pause. Through the wooden door, he could hear Cassandra's voice, but not clearly enough to make out her words. He assumed she was translating. He thought he had simplified it clearly enough.

"Did Jones bring home the plague?" Baird shouted back.

"A plague, potentially," Jenkins corrected her. "Not The Plague. His immune system is holding its own. Mine is unaffected. I have everything I need right here. We'll be fine."

"What did he bring home?" Flynn's voice chipped in now.

"The Thief's Chalice of the Ancient Swedes," Jenkins replied as if her were reading a simple shopping list. "And an ancient earthenware vial containing the juice of one of the Golden Apples of Idunn."

"I think I have an allergy to those," called Cassandra.

"Different apples," Jenkins heard Stone mutter. "Idunn was a Norse goddess who..."

"I have locked both of them into air secure containers in the main Library," continued Jenkins as he considered his audience. "Do not open them. Anything you want to know about either item I can tell you here and now, Mr Stone, or later once Mr Jones is back on his feet. The cases stay locked."

"Duly noted," came the disappointed reply.

"Can't we use them to heal Ezekiel?" Cassandra wondered aloud.

"Not without risking infecting whoever touches them," answered Jenkins. "Nor can we use anything else in the Library. No matter what item you used, it would involve opening this door. That is something that I am not prepared to do."

"It's not a perfect seal you know," Flynn informed him.

"I know. But it is the best we have, and the less the air moves about the better. Once Mr Jones is up and about again, we'll clean the surfaces with disinfectant and incinerate the bedclothes. It may be a good idea to incinerate Mr Jones' clothes too, so a clean set by the door would be appreciated."

"I'll see to it," said Baird.

"There is another matter," Jenkins continued, pausing slightly to give them time to roll their eyes should they so choose. "As part of our work in finding the chalice, Mr Jones arranged for an archaeological dig to be set in motion at Gamla Uppsala. He portrayed himself as the secretary of a wealthy amateur who wished to fund the expedition. I had intended to portray the latter should the need arise, but I'm sure the character would be easy to pass off as Mr Carson or Mr Stone."

"Stone can manage that," Flynn breezed, and Jenkins could almost hear the wave of the hand.

"I ain't acting like some gent," Stone countered. "I'm only just starting to get people to believe our cover stories!"

"Keep telling yourself that, sweetie," Jenkins heard Cassandra mutter.

"Oh, I can play the gentleman easily enough," said Flynn before Stone could add anything.

"Then what's the problem?" Baird's voice rose in exasperation.

"I just..." Flynn's voice tailed off and Jenkins pictured The Librarian searching the ceiling for inspiration. "I, er, I can't actually, um, I can't remember how to be an amateur..."

Silence.

"OW! Ow, ow, ow..." Flynn's complaints and protestations died away as the Colonel dragged him back down the corridor toward the office.

"Ear?" Jenkins asked nonchalantly.

"Yep," both remaining Librarians replied.

"Good, good," said Jenkins. "Well, she'll find everything she needs on my desk, under the crystal sphere."

"Paperweight?" Cassandra asked lightly.

"Present from a king," Jenkins informed her.

"We'll let her know," said Stone, and two pairs of footsteps receded.

Jenkins went back over to the peacefully sleeping form. Ezekiel's skin, which had paled to an ashen grey no more than twelve hours ago, then flushed to an unnatural shade of red as the fever rose, had began to regain some of its usual vitality. Sweat beaded his face. Jenkins breathed out a sigh of relief. The fever had broken. He took the boy's temperature, checked his pulse and breathing, and dabbed the cool, damp sponge over his face once more. Everything was starting to return to normal. He sat down and picked up his story from where he left off.

"Once I met a beautiful lady in Naples. She was the illegitimate daughter of the Pope at that time..."

"You've already told me that one," rasped the voice from the bed.

The words were faint, but they were clear. Jenkins sat up and looked down at the young man, his eyes still closed but his mouth curved up into a faint smile. The old man got up and poured some bottled water into a glass. He took it back to Ezekiel and helped him sit up and sip the water.

"How do you feel?" Jenkins asked gently.

"Like I haven't moved in a month," replied Jones. "And like I've been hit by one of Colonel Baird's punch bags."

"You're temperature has gone down, but it's still above normal," Jenkins told him. "You'll be fine, but you still need to rest."

"It feels like it's dropped through the floor," complained the thief, drawing the covers closer. "You sure it's still up?"

Jenkins reached for the digital thermometer and measured again. He looked at the result, pulled a face, then showed Ezekiel. Ezekiel shrugged.

"Normal is boring," quipped the thief, lying down again and pulling the covers up over him. "Why were you talking about Lucrezia Borgia?"

"I got bored sitting here with nothing to do but mop your fevered brow," sighed Jenkins, "so I started telling you my life story. A pity you were unconscious for most of it: some centuries were quite interesting, I thought."

"Exactly how old are you?" Ezekiel frowned, trying hard to convince his sweating body that he was not freezing cold. His teeth chattered and his guts felt as though someone had made him swallow hot lead. "Come on, dude: I'm dying. Who am I gonna tell?"

"You are not dying, Mr Jones, we've been through that," said Jenkins sternly.

"Fine, then I'm celebrating not dying!"

The old man regarded him silently, his eyes searching the boy's face and figure for something. Whether or not he found it, Ezekiel never knew. He appeared to make up his mind about the thief's first question, at the very least.

"Four hundred and seventy two," Jenkins replied, his eyes never leaving the young man's pale face.

"Nearly five hundred years old, eh?" Ezekiel laughed, but the laugh was a pale shadow of its former self. "And you don't look a day over three hundred!"

"AD."

"What?" Amidst the pain and discomfort, a look of confusion darted out of hiding on Ezekiel's face.

"It's not my age, child," said Jenkins, keeping his voice low and quiet. "It's the year I was born. There or thereabouts, anyway. So many calendar changes it's become hard to keep track."

"But that makes you..." Ezekiel's brow creased in frustration as numbers danced in his head and refused to make sense of themselves.

"One thousand, five hundred and forty three years old."

Ezekiel's eyes went wide. "Woah!"

"Quite."

"And you still got pissed about not hearing mosquito tone!"

"One sees no reason to expect one's faculties to decay when one's body cannot."