Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (7 page)

“What if it wasn’t a simulation? Could Burners get in here?”

Botha didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he just didn’t want to say. But Jess doubted that the enemy who’d attacked them was really part of the Burner movement.
This came from inside the High Garda itself,
he thought. Tariq had turned on them, after all. There would be questions to be asked in the wake of this, hard ones.

Botha put up a fist and Jess came to an instant halt. They were just at the corner, and Botha looked around, then back at Jess. His eyes had gone narrow and cold. “How many out there?”

“I don’t know. Just saw shadows on rooftops. Maybe ten?”

“Armed with Greek fire?”

“And guns,” Jess added, though he knew Botha hadn’t forgotten. He just felt a little defensive. He swallowed and said, “If you see any of my squad, watch them, too. I think some of them may be . . .” He trailed off, because he didn’t want to come right out and say
traitors
, but the implication hung heavy in the air between them.

Botha shrugged. “I always keep an eye on recruits. They might shoot me in a panic.”

Jess decided then that he liked the man. “Better follow me, then. I trust
your
aim, at least.” He stepped out into the street. For a second, he felt dizzy, waiting for the inevitable bullet to hit, but nothing did. Silence, except for
the hiss of sand stirring in the wind, and the roar of the fire behind. The blaze that had kicked off the whole mess was dying down in the middle of the street ahead, and Jess used that as a guide to look for Tariq. There he was, still lying where he’d fallen. Jess wanted to stop, but Glain, Wolfe, and Helva had to be his first priority. He’d find out the rest later.

Glain stepped out of the shadows of the broken window and pointed her weapon past Jess, at Botha. “Halt,” she snapped, and Jess felt Botha coming to alert. “Drop it!”

“He’s here to help,” Jess said. “He’s got antivenin for Helva, and Santi’s on the way.”

“You bring it in, Jess,” Glain said. “I don’t know that one.”

Botha laughed. It sounded genuinely amused. “Smart,” he said. His pack thumped the ground by Jess’s feet. “Take it in, recruit.”

Glain’s posture stiffened just a little more. “Check the pack,” she told Jess. He crouched down, opened the flaps, and looked in. Standard field equipment, with a full Medica kit inside. He looked back over his shoulder at the centurion.

“You’re Medica?”

“Cross-trained,” Botha said. “I do field medicine. You don’t need me for this, though. Just give her the injection.”

“Do it,” Glain said. “Hurry.”

Jess found the antivenin and eased by Glain, who kept a sharp watch on the centurion. He found Scholar Wolfe beside Helva, taking her pulse. Wolfe held up his hand without even looking up, and Jess handed the shot over and watched as Wolfe slid the needle in. The injector hissed a little as the gas capsule triggered, and the clear liquid contents pushed into Helva’s vein. She was still and quiet, and Jess would have thought his fellow soldier dead if not for the flutter of her pale eyelids. Her color was bad—as bad as it could get, Jess thought, without Anubis appearing to personally drag her to the underworld. “Is it too late?” Jess asked. He didn’t want to care. He’d tried hard not to care about any of them.

“I don’t think so,” Wolfe said. He put his hand on the young woman’s
forehead and held it there for a moment—
Not medically useful; just comfort,
Jess thought. The action of a kind man, though Wolfe wouldn’t like being thought of in that way. He went out of his way to be seen as a hard, uncaring bastard. “I’ve seen this stuff revive those worse off.”

How often?
Jess wanted to ask, but didn’t. He didn’t want to know. Instead he turned back to Glain, who was still aiming her weapon squarely at Botha. Botha was watching her with a smile, but had dead-serious eyes above the upturned lips. “I’m going to check the others,” Jess said, and stepped through the broken window with a crush of glass under his boot. “Centurion, come with me. She probably won’t shoot you in the back.”

“Probably,” Glain agreed, deadpan. She didn’t relax her vigilance until he’d led the centurion away to Tariq.

Botha rolled the younger man over and checked his pulse. He sat back and shook his head. “He’s gone,” he said. It staggered Jess, but he steadied himself quickly.
Tariq was aiming at the Scholar. I had to do it. I had to.

“They said we had half-strength rounds,” Jess said, and that got a look from the other man. A pitying one.

“This wasn’t you, recruit.” Botha rolled Tariq’s limp body over to the side, and Jess saw the red-rimmed hole in his ribs. “The shot punched straight through and came out the other side—armor-piercing. From the angle, this came from above while he was already slumped down. Definitely wasn’t you.” Botha, while he talked, kept his gaze up on the area above them. Jess looked up, too. Nothing but sky and blazing morning sun. “Decent shot from that angle. Your squad mate would have been gone in an instant, never knew what hit him. Come on. Let’s find your other lost lambs.”

Jess hoped they weren’t, like Tariq, lambs to the slaughter.

They found one inside another storefront, well concealed and unhurt; the others were grouped together in a defensive position down the street. Unlike Tariq’s, the worst wounds were bruises and cracked ribs
from half-strength rounds. Tariq had been deliberately executed, Jess thought, for failing in his mission to kill Wolfe.

“What in Allah’s name happened?” That was from Zelalem, one of their squad who was taller than Botha, and cadaverously thin. “What kind of test was
that
?”

“Pass or fail,” Botha said. “Fall in, all of you.” The three of them groaned as they stood up from their meager cover of a fallen block, and Zelalem swayed like a reed in the wind before Jess braced him. “I said fall
in
, not fall over. Move it. I want all my ducklings together.”

Lambs; now ducklings. Botha must have been a farmer in a previous life. Jess thought about mentioning it, but he didn’t think the man was in a particularly joking mood. As they moved back toward the storefront, there was a storm of movement at the far end of the street, and all of them, with their weapons out, drew instinctively to the cover of doorways.

It wasn’t necessary, because the movement turned out to be Captain Niccolo Santi, leading a half century of his troops down the street, all at high alert.

The centurion stepped out to flag Santi. “All clear here, sir,” Botha shouted. “Coming out!”

He gestured to the rest of them, and Jess fell in as they jogged their way to the main force. Glain stepped out of the wrecked window with an arm around Helva to prop her up, while Wolfe took the other side.

Niccolo Santi held up a closed fist to halt the advance of the troops, and the look he gave Wolfe was long and unreadable. “Scholar,” he said. “Any damage?”

“Not to me,” Wolfe said. “This one needs Medica. Cobra bite. We’ve given her antivenin.”

Santi gestured, and two of his command stepped out of formation and rushed to take Helva. Some of the pressure in Jess’s chest lifted.
She’ll be all right.

Jess expected a barrage of questions from Santi, at the very least, or an outpouring of concern for Wolfe’s safety.

So it came as something of a shock when Niccolo Santi, longtime partner and lover to Scholar Christopher Wolfe, turned to Botha and said, “Put Scholar Wolfe in restraints. He’s under arrest.”

The strangest thing of all was that Wolfe didn’t seem at all surprised.

From the personal journal of Scholar Christopher Wolfe (interdicted to Black Archives)

There are mornings when I wake and I am back in the cell, and I see nothing but the dark. Feel nothing but the pain. On those mornings, I am convinced I never escaped that place, and the life I have had since never existed at all, except as a fantastic illusion.

I should leave you, Nic. I know that, because I’m not really here at all. I should vanish and never come back, because one day either I will break and fail you or I will make you break your own vows to the Library to save me from myself.

But I can’t. Leaving you would destroy everything in me that remains true and good. Leaving you means giving up on a better world.

I’m sorry, Nic. I love you more than you can ever understand. I wish I could be strong enough to protect you from my own stupidity.

J
ess got no answers all the way back to the barracks, where he was put in a waiting room with the rest of the squad. They were all exhausted and confused, drenched with rank sweat, and though they were allowed to strip away their armor and were given food and water, the bare room offered no other comforts but wooden chairs. They had a watchful guard who, when Jess posed a question to Glain, snapped, “Quiet. No talking.”

He leaned back against the cool wall and closed his eyes. At least they couldn’t keep him from resting.

His Codex gave a small, strange tingle, like a tiny shock; it was a sign someone had written him a personal message, and it pulled him out of a slow slide toward dreams. He straightened and fumbled for the book in its case at his side. Every time he opened it, he remembered his parents gifting it to him before he’d left to train at the Library—a rich gift, leather bound, with his name inscribed in gold Egyptian hieroglyphs on the front. It had suffered some from hard use, and the scratched, roughened, battered surface looked nothing like the crisp new thing he’d brought just a year ago to Alexandria.

Felt like his, though. A part of him now.

The first section of the Codex held the standard Library listing of volumes available for reading and research—constantly updated by means of a science that was the secretive work of Obscurists, but that wouldn’t
have triggered the shock—and, behind that, the contents of the latest reading he’d requested, which happened to be a history of the ancient Romans in the time of Julius Caesar. For all his faults, the man had put aside his quarrels with Cleopatra and Antony to save the Library. In many ways, the modern world owed its whole existence to him.

Behind his reading, on a separate tabbed page, were messages that came in handwritten directly to him. Normally they were from his family—innocuous questions about his progress and health, deep coded with requests from his father for information about books. Nothing new from family, though. Today, on a new, blank page, a message had come from a nameless source, and he recognized the neat, precise writing immediately as being from an invisible pen moved over the paper on the other end of the connection.

Is Wolfe all right?

He stared at those words hard for a moment as they faded from view. The message was from Morgan Hault, locked up in the Iron Tower of the Obscurists; the girl could not leave and had no chance of escape, and yet every time he saw her handwriting, he remembered the silken feel of her skin and the heat of her body against his. The scent of her hair washed over him in a warm wave. He’d told himself to forget her; she was trapped, and she must still blame him for that. He’d been the one to hand her over. He hadn’t fought to keep her free.

She didn’t ask how he was. Only about Scholar Wolfe. That said volumes. And stung more than a little.

He wrote back,
He’s fine. Are you all right?

The words faded, and there was no immediate reply. He hated that she didn’t tell him what was happening to her inside the Tower. Still, she had to be safe enough: Obscurists were rare. Valuable. Necessary to the continued operation of the Great Library and the entire system of the Codex, and Serapeum. They’d have no reason to hurt her. And surely she wasn’t yet old enough for them to be demanding a child from her, to continue the Obscurist line. That would be in her future, but not yet. Surely not yet.

At long last, as he watched, a pen moved over paper somewhere in a room far away.
Does that matter?

As simple as that was, it ripped a piece of his soul away. She hadn’t forgiven him.

Of course it matters. Are you?

Is anyone?
she replied.
As long as the Library rules us?

She was right, of course, but he wished, futile as it was, that the Library could be what he’d always believed it to be as a child: the light of knowledge, the protector of science, arts, history—a force for great and eternal good.

The terrible truth was that the Library still
was
all those things. It
was
a force for good. It
did
protect what would otherwise have been lost in wars and chaos and disasters. It
did
encourage scholarship and knowledge across the world, across religious and national lines. It
did
set knowledge and learning in a place of honor above all other considerations.

It was just how it went about it that turned his stomach and made it all wrong.

The Library will change,
Morgan wrote, and he could hear the whisper of her voice saying it, too.
It has to change. We must make it change. Is that still our bargain?

As if they had the power to do that. Jess’s optimism had guttered out months ago, and whatever embers remained were fast losing their heat. He took up his pen and hesitated. He knew what he needed to write to her; it was the same information he needed to give to Glain, and to Wolfe, about Thomas. But, as with Glain, he couldn’t think of the words.

Morgan’s pen moved one last time, to write,
I will have more information soon. Look after Wolfe.

He wrote,
Don’t take unnecessary chances.

She didn’t reply to that last, only marked down a final
X
to let him know she was finished, and then the words vanished from the page as the Codex scrubbed any trace that she’d ever written to him at all.

He didn’t understand how she could do this—cover her traces so thoroughly from other Obscurists who should have been watching them both. Morgan was clever and resourceful; she’d concealed her abilities as an Obscurist for most of her life without being detected. Still . . . he knew it was a risk every time she sent him a message, and yet he still craved any contact from her like a drug. One day, she’d let something slip, some sign she was letting go of her anger and bitterness.

One day in the distant future, she might even forgive him.

He returned his Codex to the case on his belt and saw Glain looking at him from across the way. She might have suspected Morgan was still in contact with him, though he’d not been completely forthright about it. Glain knew too many of his secrets as it was.

Jess was just about to shut his eyes again when Santi strode into the room, swept all of them with a look, and pointed to Glain, then to Jess. “You two,” he said. “With me.”

He executed a crisp turn and left, leaving Jess and Glain to scramble up and after with as much decorum as their battle-sore bodies could manage, while the rest of their squad stared holes in their backs. Santi didn’t pause as the door shut behind them. He continued a quick march down the long, plain corridor, then up a flight of stairs decorated with Anubis statues in alcoves, and to an office door with an armed guard beside it. Santi accepted the soldier’s salute with one of his own.

“Dismissed,” he told the guard, and watched the man leave. Then he opened the door and led the way inside.

Christopher Wolfe sat on one side of a large solid table. He was shackled at the wrists.

“Sit down,” Santi said to Glain and Jess as he shut the door, and gestured to a wooden bench at the side of the room. He was still wearing that cool military expression, and it gave Jess a creeping sense of unease. Wolfe in chains, Santi acting utterly unlike himself . . . And the four of them in a locked room.

Glain slowly eased herself down on the bench and glared at Jess until he sat next to her. Santi dragged a wooden chair, a noisy slide over the stone floor, and thumped it in place across from Wolfe at the table.

Wolfe finally looked up. He seemed drawn and exhausted and—so wrong to Jess—vulnerable. He lifted his bound wrists silently, and, when Santi shook his head, dropped them back with a heavy clank of metal to the table.

Though he’d brought the chair over, Santi didn’t sit. “You’re still under arrest, Scholar Wolfe,” he said in a quiet, calm voice that raised the hackles on the back of Jess’s neck. “You’re going to stay that way. You know why.”

“Nic—”

“No.” Santi cut Wolfe off clean. “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t you understand the consequences? One of my recruits is dead. Another may never regain the use of her arm. That’s
you
. That was
your
choice to put yourself at risk when you damn well knew better, and I told you to stay away!” There was a flare of emotion at the end of that small speech, and Santi paused, as if he hadn’t meant to let it out. When he started again, his voice was once again pressed flat. “Tell me why I should ever let you roam around unmonitored again.”

Wolfe hadn’t looked away from Santi’s face the entire time. Hadn’t blinked. Hadn’t displayed the slightest flicker of guilt or anger. There was a strange light in his eyes that Jess couldn’t reckon. “Because hiding me away isn’t
working.
”

“It’s keeping you alive. That’s what I care about.”

“Then you care too much,” Wolfe said. There was a tremor in his voice now, and in his hands, too. Something broken behind his stare. “You’ve
locked me up.
I don’t take well to that. As you know.”

Santi sat down slowly, as if he didn’t even realize he was ceding ground. “It was necessary. You haven’t been yourself.”

“You tried to get a message to me,” Wolfe said, looking past Santi at Jess and Glain. “What did you have to tell me?”

Santi quickly leaned forward and grabbed the chain of his manacles tightly to pull Wolfe toward him. “No,” he said flatly. “Stop. For the love of the gods, don’t you understand that someone just tried to kill you out there? The Archivist wants you dead. I trust today finally hammered the point home, since it was written in the blood of others this time instead of your own!”

“Captain,” Jess said, and Santi actually flinched, as if he’d forgotten them in his intensity. “Why did you bring us here if you won’t let me answer?”

“Because I want you to understand, too,” he said, and turned to stare at them. “Leave Wolfe alone. Don’t contact him. Don’t try. You see what happens—you’re the reason he came out of seclusion, to talk to
you
. He could have been killed. The Archivist is burning for an excuse to see him dead.”

Wolfe’s smile this time was strangely warm. It nearly looked normal. “The Archivist needs no scrap of an excuse to do that. No, Nic, be honest: you brought them here because you thought they’d take one look at me and leave me alone out of sheer pity.”

“Chris . . .”

Wolfe didn’t appear to regard his lover at all. He kept looking right at Jess and Glain. “I’m not insane,” he said. “I’m not on the verge of it. I may be stretched to my limits—my limits being admittedly lower than they should be—but you have something to tell me, and that thing is important enough that despite all the well-meaning captivity Nic has put around me, I will continue to risk my life until you
tell me
. He can’t stop that, and he knows he can’t.”

Santi gave a wordless shout of frustration and fury, knocked his chair over backward, and stalked around the room. His face was tense and pallid, and there was something else there—real fear, Jess thought.

“All right,” Wolfe said. “Ask.”

“It isn’t so much a question as something I need to tell you. All of you, I suppose, though I hadn’t thought it would go quite this way.” He
swallowed, because he’d drawn Santi’s attention now, too. The weight of their stares felt heavy as an elephant on his chest. And speaking of his chest, the harness beneath his shirt seemed to pull even tighter on his bruised skin.

He silently unbuttoned his uniform jacket and shirt beneath. Both were sodden with sweat, and the kiss of cooler air on damp skin made him shiver. No one said a word as he pulled aside the fabric to reveal the smuggling harness, and then unsnapped the pocket to pull out one of the two books inside.

“Your life is on a thin edge right now,” Santi told him softly. “I’m still an oath-sworn member of the Library High Garda. That contraband had better be worth your risk, Brightwell.”

Jess’s hand felt cold and sweaty as he gripped the battered, flexible leather of the cover, and for a long moment he said nothing. Couldn’t think how to begin to tell them. Then he said, “This is the last confession of one of the Archivist’s personal guards. The man killed himself a couple of months ago. In it, the man gives detailed records about who he arrested, who was tortured, who was released. Who was executed and how.” He swallowed. “Your name is in here, Scholar Wolfe.”

No one moved. Jess raised his gaze from the book to meet each of theirs in turn.

“There’s another name in here. Thomas Schreiber’s.”

Glain took in a breath, then slowly let it out, and bowed her head. “Does it say how he died?” she asked. “What they did to him?”

“It has a record of Thomas’s arrest,” Jess said. “And they did . . . they did hurt him.” He didn’t want to think about that. He’d read the entries, forced himself to do it, and he’d hurt for days after, like his mind and body had been cut and torn by it. “But Thomas wasn’t executed.”

None of them seemed to quite grasp what he’d said at first. Not even Wolfe, who was usually so quick off the mark. The silence stretched, and Glain finally said, in a hushed and muffled voice, “Then how did Thomas die?”