Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (25 page)

The automata were another matter altogether, and they all knew it.
Glain had seen the ones surrounding Jess on the steps. They were already alert to him, ready to pounce in an instant. One wrong move and they would all be dead.

“We won’t solve that tonight. We’ve already been out too long,” Santi said. “Go back before someone discovers you’re missing. Especially you two.” He nodded at Dario and Khalila.

Dario laughed. “They won’t worry. I made sure they knew I wanted to show Scholar Seif the beauties of Rome in the moonlight.”

“Dario,” Khalila said, “tells everyone he’s trying to seduce me. It does make a very good cover story.”

“Not that it’s working,” he said gloomily. “The best I’ve managed is a kiss. Not even a long one.”

“It was long enough.”

“For what?”

“For me to tell if you knew what you were doing.”

“You see how she treats me?” Dario said to Jess. “I don’t know why I bother.”

“Then you’re even more of an idiot than I imagined,” Jess said. “Be careful. Both of you. This isn’t a game.”

“Spoken like someone who always loses when it is,” Dario said. “Cheer up, English. We’re survivors.”

Jess wished he hadn’t said it. It sounded like a bad omen.

G
oing back to bed was impossible now. He told Glain what he planned to do—she argued, of course—and exited silently down the hall and through a secured door that led out into the public space of the Basilica Julia: the daughter library, the Serapeum.

Like all similar institutions, it never closed, but just now it was utterly empty of visitors. It was flanked on all sides by steady rows of tall white columns and shelves upon shelves of Blanks. At regular intervals around the floor stood marble podiums, upon which large volumes of the Codex waited.

Nothing in the Codex will help me with automata,
Jess thought.
There might be other books, restricted from public view that would hold hints and pieces of a key.
He’d need a Scholar like Khalila to gain access. Being just a copper-banded High Garda had its disadvantages.

He ran his fingers over the smooth leather spine of a book. It was more of a talisman than a comfort; he just needed to remind himself of why the Library was so important. Books had become a symbol of trust and libraries places of peace and stability. In all the chaos of the world that counted people as different levels of worthy, the Library served all equally. All genders, races, levels of ability. It was the one place they could all be safe.

It was a fragile idea, and the safety was a fiction; the existence of the Burners proved that. Armies didn’t always obey the accords. Kingdoms fell. But the
ideal
was worth preserving.

I don’t want to bring an end to this,
Jess thought, and was suddenly afraid that was exactly what he’d be doing if they succeeded.

But there wasn’t much choice. Not if Thomas was to be free.

Jess moved out through the outer Serapeum doors to the moonlight-washed steps.

Dario was right: Rome was magical at night. The marble glittered soft as snow, and the stars above were hard and bright, set in a deeply black sky. A breeze moved down from the hills and brought with it the smell of dusty olive trees and sun-warmed stones. He descended quickly. The lions were clustered together near the other end of the building, the end where the Artifex would be sleeping in peace, no doubt. If the old man thought about Thomas at all, it was probably only with satisfaction that he’d stopped what he saw as the downfall of the Library.

That thought strengthened Jess as he moved through the deserted Forum, past empty temples and the shadowy forms of gods. There were no patrols out that he could see, not in this direction, but he went quickly anyway, moving from shadow to shadow, checking constantly in all directions.

Then he was at the statue of Jupiter. It towered far up, and from this foreshortened view it looked massive and monstrous.
What if it’s an automaton?
The thought struck him with real unease. A colossus like this could crush buildings, destroy armies. He put a hand on the metal. It felt warm, but a natural kind of warmth, residue from the day’s sun.

The foot
looked
ancient and solid, and Jess ran his hands over the pitted surface, worn by time, and realized that ancient as it was, Jupiter couldn’t have been here for more than a thousand years. This Forum had been a meeting place far longer than that.
Roots run deep.
Jupiter sat
over
the entrance.

He found the opening between the statue’s feet, shrouded beneath the falling golden drapes of the toga. Just enough room to squirm under into the hollow spaces, and send a large rat squeaking away in alarm. Set into the cobbles lay an old iron grate. Jess pried it up with his knife and carefully put it aside. The opening was hardly large enough to fit through, but he managed, and dropped into a damp, echoing darkness that smelled of mold and the faint, pungent whisper of rot.

Jess shook a chemical light to life, and the yellowish glow washed over rough stones built in a strong, arched structure only a little taller than his head. It had a shallow trough in the middle, through which ran a slow trickle of moisture. And though—as Dario had promised—these sewers were long disused, except to channel rainwater, the smell of old waste lingered. The tunnel seemed sound, and he went carefully, tossing the light ahead as he went to be sure nothing dangerous waited. The darkness was complete and claustrophobic. It felt like an almost physical weight against his shoulders, and he tried not to think about the old stones pressing down.
It’ll collapse someday,
he thought.
But not today. Keep your nerve.
It reminded him of the old tunnels beneath Oxford, but these were far older. He found engraved stones inset in the walls depicting a group of toga-wearing men gathered around a bull. The tunnel angled down. He felt the strain of it in the backs of his legs, and
had to be careful not to slip on mold, but then it leveled again and twisted in two directions. The basilica would be to the right, but just in case, he dropped one of the portable glows at the tunnel entrance before going on.

There was no sound here except for the faint rustling of rats and insects running from the light and the trickle of water in the tunnel’s center. He passed another engraving in the left-hand wall, then another, and then, finally, the tunnel split again. One side veered right and up. The other went down.

He dropped another glow and followed the left-hand path into the dark. It seemed to be a long journey, and then, suddenly, he heard something that didn’t belong here. Something up ahead, a scraping noise that sounded deliberate. A faint whirring.

He doused the glow and blinked, because an afterimage of it remained printed on his eyes. No, the glow he saw was a faint red.

Growing brighter now.

Spilling over ridges and curves that he didn’t understand at first, and then suddenly, chillingly, did.

There was a lion in the tunnel.

Jess stopped. Running would be useless; even at his best speed he doubted he could outrun the stride of a Roman lion in these cramped confines. The growling rumble of the thing echoed off the bricks, and he realized that he’d stopped breathing, as if that might hide him. It wouldn’t.
Stay ready. Stay calm.
Running would be death.

The lion padded toward him at a slow, inexorable pace. He backed away, moving one slow step at a time, and as if in a terrible dance, the lion paced him move for move, gliding forward as he retreated.

Jess stopped cold in his tracks, staring at the lion. He wasn’t looking at the ferocious, crushing jaws now, or the huge paws ready to smash the life out of him. The sphinx’s switch had been hidden just behind the thin beard, under the chin. The design of Roman lions, though different,
would follow the same logic. Pick a spot no one in their right mind would reach for. Either inside the mouth, or . . .

Or just underneath it, beneath the lion’s bearded chin. The challenge was that it was
much
harder to reach.

He heard the low, rumbling growl grow louder and echo in a continuous, angry pulse from the tunnel walls. The lion paused, very still, only a short distance from Jess, and the red illumination of its eyes turned everything bloody. It must have been confused, Jess realized; his High Garda uniform, the band he wore on his wrist must have made it pause and wait to see what he’d do. Any casual intruder would have already been dead.

That didn’t mean the lion wouldn’t decide at any moment that High Garda or not, Library band or not, he needed to die.
Don’t hesitate. Just keep moving.

Jess slowly raised his right hand. His fingers were trembling and twitching with the need
not to go near this thing
, but he controlled that and his natural desire to run for his life. His fingertips touched warm, slightly rough metal: the underside of the lion’s jaw. A jaw that could open at any instant and bite off his entire arm. A mouth that held razor-sharp teeth longer than his fingers and so much more terrifying than the sphinx he’d faced in Alexandria.
This is a bad idea. So very bad.

Jess’s sweating, shaking fingers slid along the creature’s jawline. The lion’s eyes sparked as red as blood, and a rumble built inside. The jaws parted, an instant away from clamping onto his arm and ripping it from his body in a spray of blood and torn bone.

His fingers brushed a slightly depressed area in the metal. It could have been a dent, since the beast was battle-scarred, cast-off, consigned here to lonely tunnel guard. But he pushed
hard,
knowing it was his last chance, and felt something click sharply inside.

The lion didn’t stop all at once. First, the rumbling died off, and then the glow faltered and flickered in its eyes. There was a ticking inside, like something very hot cooling off slowly, and then it was just . . . still.

A statue.

Jess pulled his hand back, still careful. Still wary. As the red glow died in its eyes the dark closed in and landed on him with the weight of real panic. What if he’d gotten it wrong? What if it was still moving in the dark and those jaws were opening? He fumbled for the glow he’d put aside and shook it back to life with so much enthusiasm, he almost dropped it.

The lion stared straight ahead, eyes dull gray now. One paw was slightly lifted and the body was tense, as if ready to lunge forward, but it stood utterly motionless.

There were still sounds from inside the body—ticks, pops, scratches. A spring slowly hissing as it uncoiled. Jess’s mouth was dry, and he felt giddy with relief. He tried to slow his breathing and had to stop himself from laughing aloud. After a few seconds, the exhilaration faded.

Mainly because he asked himself,
Why did they put it here? Why in this spot?
Surely it would have been a simple matter to position one right below the grate under Jupiter’s feet, the better to catch intruders before they even had a chance to discover any secrets.

If the lion had been put here, set to guard
this
spot, it meant it was important.

Jess squeezed past the bulk of the lion, moving carefully in case it should suddenly come back to life, and just beyond it lay the end of the tunnel. It emptied into a huge, rounded room lined with ancient mosaics dulled by time. But it was empty. This had once been some kind of ritual chamber, and on one wall Jess found a display of masks cast out of greenish bronze in frightening shapes.

He heard something directly overhead and looked up.
Footsteps.
They rang on metal, and as he raised the glow, he realized that there was a rounded, metal plate in the ceiling above. It looked solid and very old, and it was exactly where he would imagine a drainage grate would have gone. And who would remove a drainage grate and cover it with solid metal instead?

Someone who didn’t want anyone coming or going through it.

There it is. The prison.

Jess stood for a long moment, gaze fixed on that metal barrier, and then he turned and retraced his steps past the frozen lion, up the tunnel, out from under Jupiter’s robes, and back to the Serapeum.