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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Serie: Great Library
- Sprache: Englisch
In Ink and Bone, Jess Brightwell learned that the shining light of the Great Library of Alexandria was an illusion ... one that hides great darkness. Now, barred from his goal of becoming a Scholar, he's determined to make his career as a High Garda soldier a success. But news that a friend may be imprisoned and suffering brings Jess back with his old companions, and to a common cause: rescue. Failure means death. Success means that their uneasy truce with the Archivist becomes open war. But they have a secret that may shake the very foundations of the Library ... if they dare to use it. Paper and Fire takes us on a breathless journey from battlefields to ancient tombs, from Alexandria to Rome, and to the edge of a world that must change to survive.
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Seitenzahl: 596
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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PAPER AND FIRE
VOLUME TWO OF THE GREAT LIBRARY
RACHEL CAINE
To the scholars. To the students. To the librarians. To those who fight for all of those, every day.Shine the light.
Contents
EPHEMERA
Excerpt from a Report Delivered via Secure Message to the Archivist Magister, from the Hand of the Artifex.
I thought that you were being soft when you ordered us to keep the boy alive, but he’s been incredibly useful already. As you said, a brilliant mind. When we allow him access to books and papers, which we do as a reward, his observations on engineering are quite groundbreaking. After breaking him using the usual means, we provided him with chalk, and on the walls of his cell, he began to write some unusual calculations and diagrams. These I have enclosed for your review.
He also had observations, which he confided to a guard I had ordered to be friendly to him, about the maintenance of the automata within the prison. Clever boy. And dangerous. He might have succeeded in turning one of them to his own uses if we hadn’t kept a constant watch.
I know you want to keep him alive, but even after this long, he continues to be outwardly cooperativeand inwardly quite stubborn. I haven’t seen the like since … well, since his mentor, Scholar Christopher Wolfe.
As bright as he is, I don’t how we can ever control him completely. It would be far kinder to kill him now.
Reply from the Archivist Magister, via Secure Message.
Under no circumstances are you to kill the boy.
I have great plans for him.
CHAPTER ONE
Every day, Jess Brightwell passed the Spartan warrior statue on his way to and from his quarters. It was a beautifully made automaton, fluid and deadly, with a skin of burnished copper. It stood in a dynamic pose on its pedestal with a spear ready to thrust, and was both a decoration and a protection against intruders.
It wasn’t supposed to be a threat to those who belonged here.
Now as he passed it, the shadowed eyes under the helmet flickered and flared red, and the Spartan’s head turned to track his passage. Jess felt the burn of those eyes, but he didn’t return the stare. It would take only an instant for that form to move and that spear to drive right through him. He could feel the very spot the point would enter, like a red, tingling target on his back.
Not now! Jess sweated, terribly aware of the leather smuggling harness strapped to his chest, and the slender original book hidden inside. Calm. Be calm. It was incredibly difficult, not only because of the threat of the automaton, but the anger that burnt away inside of him. As he walked away, the tingle in his back rose to a hot burn, and he waited for the rush of movement and the horrible invasion of the spear stabbing through his body … But then he was a step past, two steps, and the attack didn’t come.
When he looked back, the statue had gone back to resting mode, staring blindly straight ahead. It seemed safe. It wasn’t. Jess Brightwell lived on sufferance and luck at the Great Library of Alexandria. If he’d been half as clever as his friend Thomas Schreiber, he ought to have figured out how to disable these things by now …
Don’t think about Thomas. Thomas is dead. You have to keep that thought firm in your head, or you’ll never make it through this.
Jess paused in the dark, cool tunnel that led from the Spartan’s entrance into the wider precincts of the complex where he was quartered. There was no one here to watch him, no fellow travellers at either end of the tunnel. The automaton couldn’t see him. Here, for this one sheltered moment, he could allow himself to feel.
Anger sparked red and violent inside, heated his skin and tensed his muscles, and the tears that stung his eyes were driven by rage as much as grief. You lied, Artifex, he thought. You lying, cruel, evil bastard. The book in the harness on his chest was proof of everything he’d hoped for the past six months. But hope was a cruel, jagged thing, all spikes and razors that turned and cut deep in his guts. Hope was a great deal like fear.
Jess bounced his head against the stones behind him, again, again, again, until he could get control of the anger. He forced it back into a black box, buried deep, and secured it with chains of will, then wiped his face clear. It was morning, still so early that dawn blushed the horizon, and he was tired out of his skin. He’d been chasing the book he smuggled now for weeks, giving up meals, giving up rest, and finally he’d found it. It had cost him an entire night’s sleep. He’d not eaten, except for one quick gyro from a Greek street vendor nearly eight hours ago. He’d spent the rest of the time hiding in an abandoned building and reading the book three times, cover to cover, until he had every single detail etched hot into his memory.
Jess felt gritty with exhaustion and trembled with hunger, but he knew what he had to do.
He had to tell Glain the truth.
He didn’t look forward to that at all, and the idea made him bounce his skull off the stones one more time, more gently. He pushed off, checked his pulse to be sure it was steady again, and then walked out of the tunnel to the inner courtyard – no automata stationed here, though sphinxes roamed the grounds on a regular basis. He was grateful not to see one this time, and headed to his left, towards his barracks.
After a quick stop to wolf down bread and drink an entire jug of water, he moved on, and avoided any of the early risers in the halls who might want to be social. He craved a shower and mindless sleep more than any conversation.
He got neither. As he unlocked his door and stepped inside, he found Glain Wathen – friend, fellow survivor, classmate, superior officer – sitting bold as brass in the chair by his small desk. Tall girl, made sleek with muscle. He’d never call her pretty, but she had a comfortable, easy assurance – hard won these past months – that made her almost beautiful in certain lights. Force of personality, if nothing else.
The Welsh girl was calmly reading, though she closed the blank and returned it to his shelf when he shut the door behind him.
‘People will talk, Glain,’ he said. He had no temper for this right now. He needed, burnt, to tell her what he’d learnt, but at the same time, he was on the precarious edge of emotion, and he didn’t want her, of all people, to see him lose control. He wanted to rest and face her fresh. That way, he wouldn’t break into rage, or just … break.
‘One thing you learn early growing up a girl, people always talk, whatever you do,’ Glain said. ‘What bliss it must be to be male.’ Her tone was sour, and it matched her expression. ‘Where have you been? I was half a mind to call a search party.’
‘You damn well know better than to do that,’ he said, and if she was going to stay, fine. He had no qualms about stripping off his uniform jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. They’d seen each other in all states as postulants struggling to survive Wolfe’s class, and the High Garda wasn’t a place that invited modesty, either.
He really must have been too tired to think, because his fingers were halfway down the buttons on his shirt when he realised she’d see the smuggling harness, which was a secret he didn’t feel prepared to share just yet. ‘A little privacy?’ he said, and she raised her dark eyebrows but got up and turned her back. He didn’t take his eyes off her as he stripped off the shirt and reached for the buckles of the leather harness that held the book against his chest. ‘I need sleep, not conversation.’
‘Too bad. You won’t get any of the former,’ she told him. ‘We’re due for an exercise in half an hour. Which is why I was looking for you. The orders came after you’d gone sneaking into the night. Where exactly did you go, Jess?’
Jess. So they weren’t on military footing now, not that he’d really thought they were. He sighed, left the harness on, and replaced the old shirt with a fresh one. ‘You can turn,’ he said, as he finished the buttons. She did, hands clasped behind her back, and stared at him with far too much perception.
‘If that bit of false-modesty theatre was meant to distract me from the fact you’re wearing some kind of smuggling equipment under that shirt, it failed,’ she said. ‘Have you gone back into the family business?’
The Brightwells held a stranglehold on the London book trade, and had fingers in every black market across the world, one way or another; he had never told her that, but somehow, he also wasn’t surprised she’d know. Glain liked to learn everything she could about those close to her. It was a smart strategy. He’d done the same with her, the only daughter of a moderately successful merchant who’d nearly bankrupted himself to earn her a place at the Library. She’d been raised with six brothers. None of them, despite sharing her strong build and height, had been inclined at all to military life. Glain was exactly what she seemed: a strong, capably violent young woman who cared about her abilities, not her looks.
‘If you’re a Brightwell, you’re never really out of the family business,’ he said, and sat down on his bed. The mattress yielded, and he wanted to stretch out and let it cradle him, but if he did, he knew he’d be asleep in seconds. ‘You didn’t just barge in here to make sure I was still alive, did you?’
‘No.’ She sounded amused, and completely at ease again. ‘I needed to ask you a question.’
‘Well? As you said, we’ve got only half an hour—’
‘Somewhat less now,’ she said. ‘Since we’re having this conversation. What do you know about the Black Archives?’
That stopped him cold. He’d expected her to ask something else, something more … military. But instead, it took his tired brain a moment to scramble to the new topic. He finally said, ‘That they’re a myth.’
‘Really.’ Scorn dripped from that word, and she leant back against the wall behind her. ‘What if I told you that I heard from someone I trust that they’re not?’
‘You must have slept through your childhood lessons.’ He switched to a childish singsong. ‘The Great Library has an Archive, where all the books they save—’
‘Not fire or sword, not flood or war will be the Archive’s grave,’ Glain finished. ‘I memorised the same childhood rhymes you did. But I’m talking about the other Archives. The forbidden ones.’
‘The Black Archives are a story to frighten children, that’s all. Full of dangerous books, as if books could be dangerous.’
‘Some might be,’ she said. ‘And Dario doesn’t think it’s a myth.’
‘Dario?’ Jess said. ‘Since when do you believe anything Dario Santiago says? And why is he talking to you at all?’
She gave him a long, unreadable smile. ‘Maybe he just wants to keep track of what you get up to,’ she said. ‘But back to the subject. If it’s where they keep dangerous information, then I say that’s a place that we need to look for any hints about what happened to send Thomas to his death. And who to go after for it. Don’t you?’
Thomas. Hearing his best friend’s name said aloud conjured up his image behind Jess’s eyes: a cheerfully optimistic genius in the body of a German farm boy. He missed Thomas, who’d had all the warmth and understanding of others that Jess lacked. I can’t think about him. For a wild instant, he thought he’d either shout at her, or cry, but somehow he managed to keep his voice even as he said, ‘If such a place as the Black Archives even exists, how would we go about getting into it? I hope Dario has an idea. I don’t.’
‘You know Dario – he’s always got an idea,’ Glain said. ‘Something to think on, anyway. Something we can do. I know you want to find out how and why Thomas died as much as I do.’
‘The Archivist told us why,’ he said. ‘Thomas was convicted of heresy against the Library.’ Tell her what you know, for God’s sake. The thought beat hard against his brain, like a prisoner battering at a door, but he just wasn’t ready. He couldn’t tell what saying the words out loud, making them real, might do to him.
‘I don’t believe that for a moment,’ Glain said softly. Her dark eyes had gone distant and the look in them sad. ‘Thomas would never have done anything, said anything to deserve that. He was the best of us.’
Just tell her. She deserves to know!
He finally scraped together just enough courage and drew in a deep, slow breath as he looked up to meet her eyes. ‘Glain, about Thomas—’
He was cut off by a sudden, hard rapping on the door. It sounded urgent, and Jess bolted up off the bed and crossed to answer. He felt half relieved for the interruption … until he swung it open, and his squad mate Tariq Oduya shouldered past Jess and into the room. He held two steaming mugs, and thrust one at him as he said, ‘And here I thought you’d be still lagging in bed …’ His voice trailed off as he caught sight of Glain standing against the wall. She had her arms crossed, and looked as casual as could be, but Tariq still grinned and raised his eyebrows. ‘Or maybe you just got up!’
‘Stuff it,’ Glain said, and there was no sign of humour in her expression or voice. She moved forward to take the second cup from Tariq and sipped it, never mind that it was probably his own. ‘Thanks. Now be about your business, soldier.’
‘Happy to oblige, Squad Leader,’ he said, and mock-saluted. Technically, they were off duty, but he was walking a tightrope, and Jess watched Glain’s face to see if she intended to slice through it and send him falling into the abyss for the lack of respect.
She just sipped the hot drink and watched Tariq without blinking, until he moved to the door.
‘Recruit Oduya,’ she said as he stepped over the threshold. ‘You do understand that if I hear a whisper of you implying anything about this situation, I’ll knock you senseless, and then I’ll see you off the squad and out of the High Garda.’
He turned and gave her a proper salute. His handsome face was set into a calm mask. ‘Yes, Squad Leader. Understood.’
He closed the door behind him. Jess took a gulp of the coffee and closed his eyes in relief as the caffeine began its work. ‘He’s a good sort. He won’t spread rumours.’
Glain gave him a look of utter incredulity. ‘You really don’t know him at all, do you?’
In truth, Jess didn’t. The squad had bonded tightly, but he’d held himself apart from that quite deliberately; he’d formed deep friendships in his postulant class and seen some of those friends dismissed, injured, and dead. He wasn’t about to open himself up to the same pain again.
Still, he considered Tariq the closest he had to a friend, except for Glain. Glain he trusted.
His uniform jacket was still clean, and he put it on as he finished the coffee. Glain watched in silence for a moment before she said, ‘You were about to tell me something.’
‘Later,’ he said. ‘After the exercise. It’s going to be a longer conversation.’
‘All right.’ As he stopped to check his uniform in front of the mirror, she rolled her eyes. ‘You’re pretty enough for both of us, Brightwell.’
‘Charmed you think so, Squad Leader. You’re quite handsome yourself today.’ Handsome was a good description. Glain had chopped her dark hair closer for convenience; it suited her, he decided, and fit well with the solid curves of a body made for endurance and strength. There was no attraction between them, but there was respect – more now than before, he thought. Some, like Oduya, might mistake it for something else. She might be right to be concerned. Jess met her eyes in the mirror. ‘That compliment stops at the doorway, of course.’
She nodded. It seemed brisk, but there was a look in her eyes that he thought might be some form of gratitude. ‘Stop preening and let’s go.’
They left his room together, but, thankfully, no one was in the hall to see it. The squad had gathered towards the end, talking casually, but all that stopped as Glain approached. Jess silently took position with the rest of the squad, and Glain led them out at a fast walk for the parade ground. Despite his sweaty weariness, he looked forward to this; it was a chance to let a little of his anger out of that locked, chained box. There wouldn’t be any real surprises. It was just an exercise, after all.
He was dead wrong about that, and it cost him.
They were in the tenth long hour on the exercise ground when Jess saw a flash of movement from the corner of his eye and tried to turn towards it, but he was hampered by thick layers of cloth and the flexible armour, and just simply too slow, too tired, and too late.
A shot hit him squarely in the back.
Then he was on the ground, looking up at a merciless Alexandrian sky scratched white by the heat, and he couldn’t breathe. The pain crushed all the air out of his chest, and for a split second he wondered if something had gone badly wrong, if all the safety measures had failed, if he was going to die … And then his frozen solar plexus muscles unlocked, and he gulped in a raw, whooping mouthful of air.
A shadow blocked out the burning sun, and he knew her by the short-cropped halo of hair that bristled up. After blinking a few times, he saw that Glain was holding out a hand to him. He bit down on his pride and took it, and she hauled him to unsteady feet.
‘What the hell did you do wrong, Brightwell?’ she asked him. There was no sympathy in her voice. He shook his head, still intent on getting breath back in his lungs. ‘I told you all to watch your backs. You didn’t listen. If these weapons had been loaded with real ammunition, you’d be a mess to clean up right now.’
He felt halfway dead, anyway. The training weapons that the High Garda of the Great Library used were not toys; they delivered real jolts and very real bruises. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, and then, a second too late, ‘sir.’
Now that she wasn’t just a silhouette against the sun, he could see the warning flash in her eyes. We’re not equals here. Forgetting that was a stupid, personal issue he needed to overcome, and quickly; she couldn’t afford to let it slip for long without seeming to encourage a lack of discipline in the ranks of their squad.
Hard habit to break, friendship.
The rest of the squad gathered together now from around the corners of the mock buildings that served as their training ground. It was mercilessly hot, as it always was, and each of his fellow Garda soldiers now looked as exhausted and sweat streaked as he did. Glain wiped her face with an impatient swipe of her sleeve and barked, loud enough for the rest of the squad to hear, ‘Report what you did wrong, soldier!’
‘Squad Leader, sir, I failed to watch my back,’ Jess said. His voice sounded strained, and he knew from the still-burning ache in his back that he was going to have a spectacular sunset of a bruise. ‘But—’
Her face set like concrete. ‘Are you about to excuse your failure, Brightwell?’
‘No, sir!’ He cut a look at Tariq, who was openly grinning. ‘It was friendly fire, sir!’
‘Oh, be fair. I’m not that friendly,’ Tariq said. ‘And I did it on orders.’
‘Orders?’ Jess looked at Glain, whose face was as unreadable as the wall behind her. ‘You ordered him to shoot me in the back?’
Glain’s expression never flickered. ‘In the real world, you’d better watch your friends as much as your enemies. Allies can turn on you when you least expect it. I hope the bruises remind you.’
He hardly needed the tip, and she knew it. He wasn’t a fool; he’d grown up never trusting people. Trust, for him, was a recently acquired skill that had developed in the company of his friends and fellow postulants. Like Glain. Who was trying to remind him not to rely on it.
Jess swallowed a bitter mouthful of anger and said, ‘No excuses, sir. Tariq always struck me as shifty, anyway.’
‘Then why’d you let your guard down, you bright spark?’ Tariq said. ‘I admit, I like playing the heinous villain, sir.’
‘Playing?’ someone else in the squad muttered, and Tariq mimed a finger shot in her direction as he swigged from his canteen. Jess would have laughed if it didn’t hurt so much, but Glain’s lesson had been pointed … and on point. I can’t afford to relax, he thought. I knew as much from the beginning. Glain’s just trying to remind me. With, unfortunately, Glain’s typical subtlety.
‘Settle,’ Glain said flatly, and the squad did. Instantly. Nobody questioned her – not for long. Jess certainly didn’t. ‘We’re nearly at the end of training,’ she told them, and paced back and forth in front of them with a lithe, restless energy that never seemed to go away, no matter how long the day. ‘We will finish in the lead. Screw that up, any of you, and I’ll slap you out of service hard enough to brand my palm print on your grandmother’s face. Clear?’
‘Clear, sir!’ they all responded, instantly and in perfect chorus. They’d learnt how to move and speak in concert long, painful months ago. That was Glain’s doing. She’d end up High Garda commander one day … or dead. But she’d never settle for less than perfection.
‘I’m tempted to make you run it again,’ Glain was saying, and there was a barely perceptible moan that ran through the group which she didn’t acknowledge, ‘but you’ve bled enough for one day. You weren’t terrible, and next time had better be an improvement. Shower, drink, eat, rest. Dismissed.’
That, Jess thought, is why she’s good at this. She’d pushed them all very hard, to the point of breaking, but she knew when to give just a touch of encouragement. And, most of all, she knew when to stop. None of them, not even him, were being carried to the Medica tents, which couldn’t be said for a lot of other squads who weren’t as highly ranked as Glain’s.
Around them, this section of the High Garda training ground was almost deserted; it was reserved for trainee testing. Everyone else had called it a day long ago, since the mess bells had pealed half an hour back, and now that Jess had the chance to think about it, his stomach growled fiercely. He’d burnt off the light breakfast hours ago.
He fell into step with Shi Zheng and Tariq, but stopped when Glain said, ‘Brightwell. A word.’
Others gave him sympathetic looks but didn’t pause; they walked around him as he halted and turned back. Glain was still pacing, and doing it in full sun; she never minded the scorching Alexandrian heat. The sun loved her just as much, and her skin had darkened to a warm, woody brown over the months of exposure. Jess, who’d been in the climate precisely the same amount of time, had managed to achieve only a light coating of translucent tan over layers of memorable burns. ‘Sir?’
She fixed a stare somewhere over his shoulder, towards the horizon. ‘Message came in earlier to me from Captain Santi. He says to tell you … no.’ She suddenly shifted to fix her gaze right on his. ‘No to what, Jess?’
‘Glain—’
‘That’s Squad Leader Wathen to you, and no to what?’
‘I asked to talk to Wolfe. Sir.’
‘Why?’
It was the coward’s way out, but he gave her the second reason he wanted a meeting with their old Scholar Christopher Wolfe, who’d pushed them through a memorable period of hell as postulants. ‘I wanted to know if he knew anything of the Black Archives.’
She blinked, and her look shifted – still suspicious and dark, but a good deal more concerned. ‘You told me you thought they were a myth just this morning. You must have asked days ago.’
‘I did. For the same reasons you gave. Seemed to me that if the Black Archives existed – and I never said I thought they did – then it might be a place to look into Thomas’s death.’ He looked down. ‘I got a letter from his father, thanking me for being his friend. He asked if I knew exactly how his son died.’
Glain said nothing to that, but after a moment, she nodded. ‘You didn’t want me looking into the subject because you already were.’
‘And they watch us, Glain,’ he said. ‘All of us.’ It was burning his tongue to tell her the truth, but he knew, knew how she’d take it. And he was too tired. He wanted to tell her in better circumstances, when the clock wasn’t ticking down. If there was an exercise, she needed her focus more than he did … or, at least, that was what he told himself.
‘Which brings us to the point: stay away from Wolfe. You know it’s not safe, for him or you.’
‘I won’t ask again.’
‘Dismissed, then, Brightwell. We’ll talk later.’
He nodded and jogged away to put space between them. Curious that Captain Niccolo Santi had passed the message, and Wolfe hadn’t sent it himself. But, then, their teacher had been a barbed puzzle since the start.
Wolfe was not a kind man or a natural teacher, but he’d tried his best to save his students. That didn’t make him a friend, exactly, but Wolfe would want to know the truth about Thomas, too. Once he did … No wonder Captain Santi wants to keep me away from him, Jess thought. Wolfe wouldn’t let it go. No more than Jess could. Or Glain, once he told her. Good that he had a little more time to think. He needed a plan before he set that particular cat among the pigeons, didn’t he?
His back ached, and his head pounded from the heat and exertion. Dinner was as fast as breakfast, fuel he ate without really noting it, and afterwards Jess fell into bed for a few short hours – far less than he needed – before dragging himself up. He still had things to do that couldn’t be done in the open.
He showered, changed to civilian clothing, shovelled down food in the common dining hall, and slipped away from the High Garda compound into the embrace of a rich, sea-cooled Alexandrian evening, beneath a blue-black sky scattered with hard stars.
This was work better done in the dark.
EPHEMERA
Excerpt from Report from Obscurist Gregory Valdosta to Obscurist Magnus Keria Morning.
…regarding our new problem child, Morgan Hault, I have seen little improvement and much to worry me. I’d have thought six months of intensive training and supervision here in the Iron Tower would have wrought some changes in her, but she remains stubborn, sly, and dreadfully smart. Only this morning I found that when I put her to work writing out standard representational formulae for changes to the Codex, she instead came up with a system to disguise entries – in effect, to hide them. I gave her a simple task of alchemical preparation of a calix of gold, and instead she seized the opportunity to try combining mercury, vitriol, common salt, and sal ammoniac to create a virulent mixture to melt the thinnest part of her collar. She was unsuccessful, of course, and is being treated for a burn, but the concern is that she came very close to discovering a compound that might work.
I’ve set her to work, supervised, on the boring task oftranscribing official messages into the books, but I don’t dare put anyone with her for long. The little criminal can be quite disarming. I realise that giving her access to some of the messages might be dangerous; she still retains her allegiance, as far as I can determine, to Scholar Wolfe and all her fellow students. But, believe me, she’ll do far less damage with pen and paper than with alchemical preparations.
And for the love of Horus, keep her well away from anything to do with translation. I shudder to think how we could hold on to the girl if she was able to translate herself away from here.
She continues her resistance to the rules of the Tower, but I have determined, through the proper charts and analysis, that her ideal time for propagation will come soon. I have not warned her of this. Gods know what she would do to avoid doing her duty.
I know you are sensitive on this subject, Obscurist, so forgive me for my frankness, but I still feel you give the girls too much freedom in this matter, allowing them three refusals before they undergo the compulsory procedure.
She has, of course, already used up all three of these refusals.
Your faithful servant, Gregory
CHAPTER TWO
The Alexandrian black market had two obvious faces. The more public one, known as the shadow market, sold illegal but harmless copies of common Library volumes – punishable, at worst, with fines and short prison stays. It catered to those who wanted a book purely for the criminal thrill of it, even if the book was shoddily transcribed and incomplete, as they often were.
A smuggler called Red Ibrahim presided over the darker, more private end of the trade, and he was legendary well beyond the city; his reputation was spoken of even in Jess’s house back in London. He was a cousin, someone in the trade you could rely on in a pinch and for a price. Jess had actual blood cousins in the trade, but the main tests to becoming a trade cousin were long-term success and a certain ruthless loyalty to fellow smugglers. They were bound – pun intended, he supposed – by the business of books, of history set in leather and paper.
Forbidden fruits.
For months, Jess had steadily dealt with a succession of Red Ibrahim’s subordinates – he had a network of at least thirty – and found them all cold-eyed and capable. His Brightwell bona fides had been checked again and again at every stage; he was, after all, a High Garda soldier, wearing the copper band of service to the Library, even if he was a smuggler by birth. Reconciling that and earning trust, even with the Brightwell name, had been a tricky job.
Tonight, as he walked, his initial directions wrote themselves out into his Codex in the Brightwell family code, and he immediately erased them. He visited a market stall, where he was told verbally to go to another shop, and then to a third, darkened bar, where sailors cursed each other over dice games and a proprietor slipped him a paper note. The route took him halfway across the city, and his legs were truly aching by the time five words scribed themselves in his Codex: knock on the blue door.
He stopped, put the book away, and looked at the houses on the street where he stood. They were neat rectangles painted in pale shades with Egyptian decorations at the roofs, and fluted columns in miniature on the porticos. Respectable homes for modestly well-off families, something a silver-band Scholar might own, perhaps.
There was a house with a dark blue door on the right, and he stepped through the square gate and passed through a garden of herbs shaded by a spreading acacia tree. An ornamental pond cradled lazy fish and large lotus plants. It was a traditional household, with Egyptian household god statues in a niche by the door, and he made the required respect to them before he knocked.
The man who opened the door was nondescript – not young, not old, not tall or short or thin or fat. A native Egyptian, almost certainly, with sharp, dark eyes and skin with a rich coppery sheen. The local fashion was to shave all body hair, even eyebrows, and this man clearly abided by it.
‘Jess Brightwell,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I’m honoured. Be welcome to my home.’ He stepped back to allow Jess entry, and closed the door behind him. It had a significant lock, and Red Ibrahim engaged it immediately. ‘We’ve heard much about each other, I’m sure.’
‘I expected you to be ginger,’ Jess said. The man raised what would have been his eyebrows. ‘Sorry. English term. Red-haired, I mean.’
‘I am not called Red for that.’
‘Then for what?’
Ibrahim smiled, just enough to send a chill down Jess’s back. ‘A story for another time, I think. Please.’ The man – Jess placed him at about forty, but he could have been younger, or even older – gestured to a small, delicate divan, and Jess sat. A young girl with straight black hair worn in a shoulder-length cut walked in with a tray of delicate coffee cups and a silver urn. She was maybe fourteen years old, petite and pretty, and smiled at Jess as she poured for them both.
She took a seat on the divan at the other end from Jess, to his surprise.
‘This is my daughter, Anit. The gods have smiled upon my house, and she is an intelligent girl who wishes to study the trade. Do you mind if she listens?’
‘No objection,’ Jess said. He remembered his father doing the same for him and his twin brother, Brendan, though he didn’t recall either of them having much of a choice. ‘It took quite a while to arrange to see you.’
‘Yes, of course, and I mean no offence by my caution. Does your father, the excellent Callum, receive every stranger claiming to be in the trade?’ Red Ibrahim handed him a cup so small, it felt like a child’s toy in Jess’s fingers, but the coffee inside was sweet and potent enough to make his heart race after only a sip. ‘Or does he ensure his business’s – and his family’s – safety by being wary?’
‘He’s a careful man,’ Jess agreed, though he remembered his father ruthlessly risking him, and his brothers, without much thought for the consequences. His older brother, Liam, had swung from a gallows for the careful way his father did business. ‘He wants to obtain some information, and you’re the best positioned to have it at your fingertips. It’s a delicate matter, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Ibrahim agreed. ‘Naturally.’ He waited with polite attention.
‘Automata,’ Jess said.
‘There are no truly rare versions of Heron’s work, as you no doubt know—’
‘Not interested in rare volumes,’ Jess said. ‘We’re looking for books that describe the inner workings of the creatures. And how to disable them.’
Red Ibrahim was in the act of drinking his coffee, and though he hesitated an instant, he finished so smoothly Jess almost missed the reaction. Almost. Then he laughed, and it sounded completely natural. ‘Do you know how often this request is made, young Brightwell? The automata are the enemies of both smugglers and Burners in every city on earth! Do you not think that if such information was available, we would have obtained it and made an incredible fortune with it by now?’
‘A unique treasure like that is more useful when used strategically, for your own purposes.’ Jess put an edge on his voice. ‘This is the most dangerous place in the world to smuggle a book, and yet you’ve made a career of it – an empire, of sorts. You’d make it a mission to have that information at your disposal.’
‘No one can disable these creatures. It’s impossible.’
‘Nothing’s impossible,’ Jess said. ‘They’re mechanical creatures. They’re made. Someone knows their secrets, and secrets are always for sale to those who look hard enough. And if I know anything about you, sir, it’s that you would look very hard.’
‘At everyone,’ Red Ibrahim agreed. He put down his coffee cup with precise control. ‘What does your father offer in exchange for this gift of all gifts? Presuming such a thing exists at all.’
Jess tried to keep his face as calm as Ibrahim’s, his pulse as slow. He didn’t blink. ‘I have a copy of the Book of Urisen, by William Blake.’
Ibrahim’s expression was just as still. ‘There are eight copies of such a book in the world,’ he said. ‘I would need something a great deal rarer. It is, as you say, precious treasure indeed, this information.’
‘There were eight copies,’ Jess said. ‘Six of them were purchased by ink-lickers, who ate them in some sort of sick ritual four months back. As I’m sure you already know. That leaves two: the one in my father’s vaults … and the one I have stashed here in Alexandria. Which can be yours, if you have what I want.’
‘Ah,’ Ibrahim said softly. ‘Now we come to it, I believe. What you want. It is not your father who asks. He’d never let you trade away such an important, valuable volume. He’s got along well enough without such information, despite the best efforts of the London Garda. No, I think it is you who needs it so badly.’
Jess didn’t answer that. He felt sweat break out in a hot mist on the back of his neck, but he hoped his face remained unreadable. After a moment, he said, ‘One of two copies left in the world. I’m offering it in fair exchange. It’s a prince’s ransom.’
Ibrahim exchanged a look with his daughter. Anit said, ‘It is a good price, is it not?’
‘It is,’ Ibrahim agreed. ‘But that isn’t the point. The point is that young Brightwell here is trading against his family’s interests, for personal reasons. Tell me, does it have to do with the book you spent so much time and geneih tracking down, and bought only yesterday, perhaps? The one about the prisoners of the Archivist?’
This was dangerous. Very dangerous. Jess said nothing. Ibrahim sat back against the cushions and rested his chin on one hand. He wore a ruby ring on one finger, and it looked like a drop of fresh blood. ‘I want no involvement in Library affairs,’ he continued. ‘Nor in the private crusade of a brash young man. This is not our trade.’
‘I’m asking for information, and that is your trade,’ Jess shot back. ‘Do we have a deal or not?’
Ibrahim continued to stare at him with those unsettling dark eyes for so long Jess felt words bubbling up and trying to escape – angry words. He swallowed them down and waited. Finally, the man stirred, rose to his feet, and looked at his daughter, who still sat quietly watching. ‘Anit. I leave it to you.’
‘What?’ Jess shot to his feet, but Red Ibrahim was already going, heading for the doorway that led to the interior of the house. For a hot moment, Jess thought about chasing after him, but he also knew a man like that didn’t survive by being careless. If he’d turned his back, there were plenty of knives ready to protect him.
‘Sit,’ Anit said, and there was an unexpected layer of steel to her voice. ‘Sit down, Jess.’ Young and tender she might be, but she was something else, too. Hard in a way that he had never seen before – not unless he saw it in the mirror. She put her hand to a chain around her neck, one that held a ring dangling from it – a large carved ring, with an Egyptian hieroglyph of a bird.
He stared after her father as the man closed the door, but he sank onto the cushions again. ‘What’s he training you in tonight? How to refuse to help and still keep the Brightwells as allies?’
‘He meant what he said. It is my decision. He has left it to me.’ Jess moved his gaze to her, and found her nearly as unreadable as her father, but there was a little lift at the corners of her mouth. Amusement. ‘I imagine you’re thinking what a cruel fate it is, being left to the whims of a mere girl.’
‘Something like that.’
She played idly with the ring on the chain. ‘We are survivors, Jess,’ she said. ‘You and I. We come from the same dark places. If you think I don’t understand you … Tell me, why didn’t you go to your brother for this instead? Surely it would have been simpler and cheaper?’
‘Brendan?’ Jess felt his brows lower in a frown. ‘He’s not in Alexandria. He’s gone. Back to London.’
‘No,’ Anit said. ‘You should perhaps keep better track of your twin. I don’t wish to offend you, but he can be a nasty piece of work.’
‘Sounds like my brother, all right. Why is he still here?’
She lifted both palms. ‘Ask him. I’ll tell you where he stays.’
‘And you’d like to be rid of him, is that it?’
‘One Brightwell in Alexandria is more than sufficient. We would rather that be you.’ She lowered her hands to her lap and cocked her head, with a real smile dancing on her lips now. ‘I had two brothers myself. I know how difficult they can be.’
Jess cleared his throat. ‘So, what’s your decision? Your father left it up to you.’
‘He did.’ She studied him for a long moment, then said, ‘Will you swear you will never betray where you got this information?’
‘I swear on – what would you like me to swear on?’
‘The soul of your firstborn.’ She outright grinned this time. ‘It’s traditional.’
‘The rate I’m going, it may be an empty promise. All right. I swear on the soul of my firstborn that I won’t tell anyone where I got this information. Not my friends or my family. I’ll never betray the house of Red Ibrahim.’
‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘And if you break that oath, Egyptian curses are cruel, Jess. And quick. Remember that.’ She rose to her feet and headed for the door.
‘Wait! Where are you going?’
‘To get the book you asked for,’ she said.
‘I didn’t bring—’
‘I trust you,’ Anit said. ‘If I didn’t, you’d be dead already.’
It wasn’t a long wait, which surprised him; they must have kept this incredibly dangerous information here, in their home. His father would have been scandalised. The Brightwell business was always kept completely separate from the Brightwell residence, though Jess had sneaked in plenty of illegal books in his time – to read, not trade.
She was back in only moments, casually carrying a little leather-bound volume. It looked worn and plain, obviously someone’s personal notebook. As he took the volume from her, his fingers felt a rougher patch on the leather, and when he looked closer, there were dark stains soaked into it. Blood.
He opened it to look at the contents, stared, and then raised his gaze to hers. ‘It’s in code.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And I will give you the cipher to read it when you bring me the payment you promised. I said I trusted you. I’m not a complete fool.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘Jess, I said I had two brothers.’
He was busy flipping pages, trying to see a pattern in the cipher – a useless effort, of course, but better than giving in to frustration. ‘Are you threatening to set them on me if I don’t deliver? I will.’
‘I had two brothers,’ Anit said, and put her hand to the chain around her neck and the engraved ring that hung there. ‘They’re dead. The reason they are dead is the book you are holding in your hands.’ The ring, Jess realised, was sized for larger fingers. A young man’s fingers.
It stopped him cold, along with the realisation that the dark stains on the cover could have been her brother’s blood. He looked up and into her eyes. They were as unreadable as her father’s.
‘If you try to use this information,’ she said, ‘you’ll be killed. I would hate to see that happen. It’s a fool’s bargain, Jess. My father paid a great deal to get this book, and it’s cost us more than it could ever be worth. I’m only giving you fair warning.’
His throat felt suddenly tight, and he forced a smile as he said, ‘I’ll be back with the Blake in an hour.’
She nodded. ‘I will be waiting.’ Somewhere in the back of the house, a bird began to sing loud and musically, and Anit turned her head towards it with a smile. ‘It’s our pet skylark,’ she said. ‘My younger brother built a house for it. The song is so beautiful, isn’t it?’
Jess held the bloodstained book in one hand and said, ‘It is.’
If this ended badly, at least he could enjoy the bright, familiar song of a bird he’d grown up hearing back home.
EPHEMERA
Text of a message between the Artifex Magnus, head of the Artifex school of the Great Library, and an unnamed recipient.
Greetings and fair wishes, brave soldier. You have already been made aware of your mission, and I know you have doubts of the morality of such an action. You need have no fear. In firing this shot, you will remove from the ranks of the Library one of our most difficult and dangerous traitors, one for whom there is no cure but death.
I do not give this order lightly, and I know you do not take it so. The Burners cry that a life is worth more than a book, but we know the truth: knowledge lives on. No single life can claim so much.
And so a man who threatens knowledge must be dealt with – by persuasion, by force, and, if all else fails, by death.
Blessings upon you from your god or gods, and from the hands of the Archivist Magister himself, who has approved this action.
HIS SEAL.
CHAPTER THREE
By the time he’d retrieved the Blake from his personal stash of rare books and delivered it to Anit in exchange for the cipher, it had been well into the dark hours of early morning. Then Jess spent hours poring over the contents of the book, writing out a translation page by careful page.
The results were startling, and he’d ached to keep going, but by the time his clock showed three in the morning, his eyes were too grainy to focus, his brain too numb to think. Jess finally admitted defeat and fell into bed, where he slept the sleep of the dead … Until a pounding on his door resurrected him.
‘Mup,’ he mumbled, and rolled sideways off his bunk. He desperately wanted to flop down again and die; his body felt nine kinds of sore from the trauma of the exercise the day before and the night’s adventures. He hadn’t had nearly enough sleep. The book, he thought, and grabbed for it and the sheaf of translated pages. He stuffed it into the smuggling harness, which was getting a good deal too crowded for safety, then threw on a robe to answer the summons.
Glain stood there, crisply uniformed, and she said, ‘Unplanned exercise. Get ready. It’s our last one. Thirty minutes.’
‘Glain—’ But she was already moving on to knock at another door. He’d hoped to find a moment to talk. But this wasn’t the right one again. Maybe that was better saved for after, when all this was done, and he could guide her more gently through the levels of shock, grief, and anger that he’d already experienced.
Dressed and fortified with a cup of sweet Egyptian coffee, he jogged with his squad to the training grounds and their assigned place to form up on the field. Other squads were coming, too, but none, Jess saw, had beaten them there.
Glain hadn’t made the run with them.
She isn’t here.
He realised that only as they formed their rank and stood at attention. It wasn’t just unusual for Glain to be missing, it had never happened, and he exchanged a sidelong glance with the young man to his right – Tariq, who’d shot him the day before – without moving another muscle. Tariq seemed calm, but he was already sweating. The loud morning tone sounded from the top of the High Garda watchtower, and … Glain still didn’t appear. Other squads were inspected and dismissed. Jess’s group stood silent in the hot sun, at attention. If the others worried as much as he did, they were too well trained to speak.
Finally, Jess saw one of the Garda’s armoured carriers speeding across the ground; his eyes tracked it as it approached them. Glain Wathen jumped out almost before the hissing steam-powered vehicle came to a halt. She was followed by someone Jess recognised only slightly: High Garda Captain Feng, who was smiling this morning, though his eyes were like chips of cold black ice. Feng had never appeared on the parade ground before. Never interacted with their squad at all. He had quite a reputation as a hard man to please.
From the rank behind him, Jess heard someone take in a startled breath, but he concentrated on staying as still as he could. Feng’s gaze – cold and impersonal – swept over each of them as he walked the rank. He gave Jess exactly the same assessment as the others, no longer or shorter, and said nothing until he reached the end of his inspection and returned, with Glain, to stand before them. He and the young squad leader were silhouetted by the merciless glow of the rising sun. It effectively hid their expressions.
‘Scores,’ Feng said to Glain. She briskly unhooked the small waterproof box on her belt and snapped it open. Inside lay a blank, a book connected to the Great Library’s vast archives, though this was one whose cover shimmered with the Library’s gold seal and the feather of Ma’at – her recording journal, which copied itself daily into a mirroring blank on the shelves somewhere in the distant bowels of the High Commander’s offices. Military issue.
Glain presented it to Feng with both hands, and he took it the same way – a sign of respect for the book itself, not for her. He paged through, reading her reports and notes, and then handed it back with the same care. ‘Well done, Sergeant Wathen,’ he said. ‘Well done, squad. Take ease.’
That was a relief, and Jess heard a quiet sigh as they all spread their feet and relaxed their spines a bit. That was a mistake, as Feng continued, ‘You lead the roster in points, and, as such, we have decided to issue you a special test today, one that will challenge you to the level we wish you to achieve. Are you ready to excel, recruits?’
‘Yes, sir!’ they all responded at once and as one. Nobody had to feed them that response. Every member of Glain Wathen’s squad was driven to excel, and their gods preserve them if they weren’t. Glain added her own voice. She stood even taller, even straighter. She was in her element here.
Jess envied that. Right now, he desperately missed the quiet comfort of his books. This, he thought, is going to be hard. Feng hadn’t set up a special challenge for them for the fun of it, and Jess had no doubt at all that it was going to be a brutal affair.
‘Squad!’ Glain called, and they all gave back a deep-chested sir in response. Even Jess. ‘We lead by two points in the rankings. This is not enough. We will bring in this exercise with a comfortable five-point lead, and we will finish with the top score! Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir!’ Jess barked, in unison with the rest. He wanted to finish this bloody training in first position as much as Glain did, but having attracted the attention of Captain Feng was a mixed blessing at best.
Feng walked slowly up and down the row, but he looked into the blank middle distance as he said, ‘Your assignment today is a confiscation. Your job will be to enter and search a home for contraband books, and, if found, tag and recover them for the Library. You may meet resistance. Be ready.’
That sounded deceptively easy. Glain and Jess had been on real book-confiscation missions as postulants competing for their current positions; every person in the squad had qualified on situations much harder than this. In fact, it sounded so remedial that it was utterly out of place, given where they were in their training.
Jess shot a look to his right, where a Scandinavian girl named Helva stood at rigid attention. Helva’s glancing look told him his unease was shared. Not right at all. If Glain thought the same, she gave no indication of it, but, then, she’d always had the best face for secrets that Jess had ever seen.
Glain swivelled to face her squad. ‘In the carrier,’ she said. ‘Move!’
They scrambled in. It was a tight fit, but designed for a full squad and gear. Jess found his seat as the steam engine hissed and gears engaged to rattle the carrier forward. It picked up speed on the flat ground. No windows, so Jess couldn’t tell where they were going except far and fast. The parade ground itself was enormous, and held close to twenty different environments and set pieces around the edges. He’d been in most of them during training, including one that doubled as a set for an Alexandrian street. He assumed that was where they were being driven.
He was wrong.
When the carrier jolted to a stop again and the squad jumped out, Jess found they were at the farthest western edge of the High Garda compound: a restricted area near the edge of the field where trainees were not allowed to venture. Jess’s misgivings twinged again as the squad lined up again behind Glain’s rod-straight form. Not right, he thought. The entire area was surrounded by a high stone wall, with just one visible gate.
Behind them, the carrier’s bubbling hiss rose to a gusting sigh as gears engaged again and it raced away. The tracks spat a long plume of sand over the squad. As Jess blinked grit away, a solid man in High Garda uniform with two Horus eyes on his collars – a full centurion in rank – looked them over with bleak, unforgiving eyes. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Gear to your right. Get it on. You have sixty seconds.’
Jess joined the rush to the equipment piles off to the side. High Garda flexible armoured coats emblazoned on the back with the Library symbol, and a heavy black weapon. No reloads for it. Jess was all too familiar with the gun; he’d carried one in Oxford, when he was still a postulant. Even after all the practice he’d had with it over the past few months, it felt like a hot alien creature in his hands, unfamiliar and hostile.
It brought back such bad memories.
‘Live rounds?’ someone behind him asked as Jess checked his weapon.
‘You have live stunning rounds and half-strength regular rounds,’ the centurion said. His accent had the lilt of southern Africa, Jess thought, and it matched with the burnished darkness of his skin. ‘They’re still dangerous, so pick your targets and try not to kill each other.’
