Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (8 page)

“He hasn’t died at all,” Jess said. “He’s still alive.
Our friend is still alive
. And that means . . . That means we still have a chance to save him.”

H
e should have predicted that Glain would be angry, but, for some reason, he underestimated the speed of it, and when her fist hit him square on the left side of his jaw, he didn’t have time to duck. It was a solid punch, with considerable muscle behind it, and when the red haze faded, he was lying on the floor on his back, and Santi was holding Glain from behind by the elbows. From the absolute fury on her face, she was ready to haul Jess off the floor and give it another go.

“Thomas is
dead
!” Glain shouted, and it sounded raw and full of anguish. Tears glittered hard in her eyes. “They took him from our house, they tortured him, and they
killed him
! They told you
to your face
!” She launched into a blistering stream of Welsh that he was sure called everything from his manhood to his parentage into question, and didn’t stop until Santi whipped her around and shook her.

“Calm down, Squad Leader! That’s an order!” Maybe it was his stern presence or her awareness that she couldn’t hit a superior officer, but Glain stopped cursing and went still. She breathed fast and hard, but after a moment of silence, she nodded sharply. Santi let her go. Glain sank back down on the bench and balled her hands into hard fists that Jess watched warily as he got up.

Santi turned on him, and there was violence in him, too. Just better controlled. “Jess. How do you know this book isn’t a fake?”

“Because absolutely no one wanted me to have it,” he said. “I stumbled over the existence of it only because I was working my way through”—he caught himself in time; regardless of how much he trusted these three, his family’s business matters weren’t to be shared—“through an errand for my father. I overheard a reference to this book, and when I tried to follow up, I was blocked at every turn. It took me months just to verify the news of the guard’s suicide, and even longer to make contact with his family to finally pay for the book. They’ve got no love for the Archivist, believe me.”

“Or that could all be the signs of a very well-baited trap,” Santi said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. No help from him, Jess saw. He concentrated on Wolfe.

“Sir, it’s authentic. I’ve investigated.” He swallowed and held Wolfe’s stare, somehow. “I have sources you can check.”

“And I will.” Wolfe’s voice was as soft and dry as the desert sands. “I’ll expect a full accounting of them before I believe a word of this.” But he glanced at Captain Santi, and there was something in it that made Jess play a guess.

“You already knew this, didn’t you?” That got both Wolfe and Santi’s attention, and though Wolfe was hard to read, Santi, in that moment, wasn’t. “God. You
did
know Thomas was alive.”

“No,” Santi said. “We didn’t. Not for certain
.
”

Wolfe removed all doubts when he said, “I believed that he was. And no, before you scream at me, I had no real proof, not like this book of yours. The pattern follows what they did to me: arrest, torture, prison, erasing me as if I never existed. The Archivist doesn’t like to waste talent. Thomas Schreiber is gifted, and he knows that. He’ll want to . . . use him, if he can. The greater good of the Library and all that.”

There was a bleak sound to that, and Jess felt chilled as he remembered the entries in the journal, the shock he’d felt on seeing the name
Scholar Christopher Wolfe
written there, early on in the book. The guard had seen Wolfe arrested and taken for questioning, but had never seen him executed.

Wolfe had simply disappeared from the records.

Just like Thomas had disappeared, taken from the safety of their student housing. Gone in a whisper.

Dead, they’d been told.

“Is Thomas being kept here in Alexandria?” Glain’s voice had gone hard and cold. She leaned forward to put her weight on elbows braced on knees. “Where did they hold you, Scholar? What happened to you when they—”

“Stop,” Santi said. It was just one word, but the force behind it—not a shout, just pure
menace
—made her look at him in surprise. “He doesn’t need to relive any of this.”

“He does if it’s the same place Thomas might be held.” Jess stood up, and Wolfe’s gaze followed him. It seemed black and remote, but there was something behind it Jess couldn’t understand. “Where
are
they keeping him? Here?”

“No. They wouldn’t keep him in Alexandria, knowing he has friends such as us.” Wolfe leaned forward, and his shackles dragged across the wood. “Let me see it.”

“No,” Santi said.

Wolfe’s voice stayed warm. Almost kind. “I know you are trying to protect me, but, Nic, I see all this every night in dreams. You can’t protect me from memories.”

Santi finally gave up. The anger and frustration radiated off him like waves of heat. He wanted to
act
, and Jess understood that; he’d felt the same for the past months, knowing about this tantalizing book, hearing of its list of prisoners and executions. He’d intended only to punish himself by finding out exactly how Thomas had died, but instead . . . instead he’d found hope. And hope hurt.

Jess held out the book, and Wolfe took it. They were all silent a moment while he flipped the pages. Jess found himself watching the man’s face, waiting to see him react, but he might have been perusing some dusty academic work instead of reading about his own darkest hours. When he was done, he closed the book and sat back with a sigh.

“I suppose I should begin with what Glain doesn’t know,” Wolfe said. “Three years ago, I invented and built a device—something that threatened the entire foundations of the Library, though I didn’t see it at the time. My device was destroyed, and I was charged with heresy. My work was erased. I was made to disappear, too.” He glanced at Santi, who was still staring hard at the floor. “Nic was a fool and risked himself trying to find me. He nearly died himself in the attempt. At any rate, I was finally
released, under the condition that I never again publish or pursue any lines of research that the Library deems dangerous. I live on sufferance.”

Jess knew all this; he’d learned it from Santi and Wolfe when Thomas had disappeared. He’d never breathed a word of it to the others, and it jolted him that Wolfe was speaking of it now.

“But you got out!” Glain said. “That means there’s hope for Thomas.”

Wolfe was already shaking his head. “My mother is the Obscurist Magnus, and her influence and power meant that the Archivist couldn’t execute me out of hand, no matter how badly he wanted to. Even so, I didn’t just
get out
, though I was a man of high standing, of many accomplishments, with honors and friends. Thomas was just a student. A postulant.” Wolfe paused a moment, and Jess thought he was censoring himself about what to tell them. “If Thomas
is
still alive, it’s because the Archivist recognizes his worth to the Library. That means they’ll keep him until his will and spirit are thoroughly broken, and then they’ll put him to work in some secret corner. Eventually. It won’t be a life, but he will still be breathing.”

That was a horrible thought, but it was one Jess had already experienced. Thomas wouldn’t simply be
held.
It would be far worse than that. He didn’t want to imagine how much worse, but he could see from the lightless look in Wolfe’s eyes that the Scholar remembered. There was something not quite right in that stare, and Jess shivered. Maybe Santi had been right: maybe involving Wolfe in this was a mistake.

But we need him,
Jess thought. For the first time since he’d held that book and read the account of Thomas’s arrest and questioning, he felt less alone. Less helpless. He knew Glain wouldn’t let it go; despite Santi’s reluctance, the captain wouldn’t, either.

And with Wolfe’s guidance, Thomas’s fate seemed more and more like something they could change. Together. He’d never once, since realizing Thomas still lived, thought about leaving him where he was, to whatever mercy the Library might have.

Thomas was his friend. And he would find him. It was as simple, and dangerous, as that.

Glain, in the silence, turned to Santi. “Captain. Do you
really
think Thomas is dead? Or are you more afraid that Jess is right and it sends us all down a dangerous path?”

That was a pointed and perfect question, and Jess had to give Glain credit: she was much more clearheaded about this than he could be. For him, it was a raw, personal wound; he’d loved Thomas like a brother, and he still felt responsible, in no small part, for what had happened to him.

Santi chose his words carefully—too carefully, maybe. “I don’t want Christopher dragged back under this threshing machine. The book could be faked. They might be waiting to draw us in. There’s every reason to believe Thomas is dead, and almost none to believe he’s alive.”

“
Almost
none,” Glain repeated, still in that calm, quiet voice. “Which means there is, in fact, some. Do you really think we wouldn’t want to know that? That we wouldn’t want to find out?”

“It may get us all killed,” Santi said. “Think what you’re doing.”

Jess exchanged a look with Glain. A long one. And in it, he could see they were perfectly in agreement. “We have thought about it. We need to rescue Thomas,” he said.

“No matter what it costs,” Glain said. “We don’t abandon our own.”

Santi and Wolfe exchanged a look. Wolfe inclined his head a little to the side, with a strange, crooked smile. “You see? They’re as bad as we are.”

“Worse,” Santi sighed. He rose and unlocked Wolfe’s restraints, and packed the flexible cuffs back into the holder on his belt. “They haven’t even got a proper sense of fear. But that will come.”

Hadn’t got a proper sense of fear? They’d survived the bloodbath of Wolfe’s choosing of his postulants to the Library; they’d survived Oxford. They’d just this morning survived ambush, attack, and the death of one of their own, even if he’d been a traitor to them. They definitely knew fear. Jess just didn’t intend to let it stop them. “So, where did they hold you when they were questioning you?” he asked Wolfe.

Wolfe sighed. “That, you see, is the problem. I don’t remember. Can’t.
Believe me, I’ve tried. I can see pieces, but not . . . not anything significant. And I will admit, it’s not a memory I’m eager to relive in detail.”

“Even for Thomas?”

Wolfe looked away. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “But you’d best try to find another way to get the information you need.”

“Do it carefully,” Santi said. “Unless you want it to be buried along with you.”

J
ess spent the rest of the evening locked in his room with Anit’s little coded book about the automata. It wasn’t much, he realized: hastily written notes, likely a simple memory aid for someone in the Artifex division of the Library who’d worked on the design or repair of the machines. Some of it was utterly incomprehensible to him, even when he’d translated it from the code. Much of it would take an engineer of Thomas’s caliber to understand.

There was a notation of some kind of
script
that had to be changed when orders were altered, but it was a passing mention that noted the change could only be done with the help of an Obscurist. Interesting. Not helpful.

The one golden fact that he picked from the volume was that there was a way to turn an automaton
off.
In hindsight, it was obvious; anyone who had to work on these devices would need to shut them off for safety. But somehow, Jess had always thought of automata as having a sinister, independent, immortal life of their own. In the end, they were mechanical marvels . . . but still mechanical.

Maddeningly, the book didn’t give specifics; it wasn’t so much of a manual as an aide-mémoire, and it assumed the reader already knew most of the inner workings. All it said was that there would be a manual override located on the exterior of the automaton
.
Not terribly helpful. Jess could suddenly understand how Anit’s brothers had come to a bad end if they’d experimented with this particular, tantalizing clue: a Library sphinx wouldn’t
simply stand there while you ran your hands over it, looking for the hidden switch. It would claw you to death for taking liberties.