Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (4 page)

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 realized, was sized for larger fingers. A young man’s fingers.

It stopped him cold, along with the realization 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 loudly and musically, and Anit turned her head toward 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.

Text of a message from the Artifex Magnus, head of the Artifex school of the Great Library, to 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, or, 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.

B
y 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.
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 realized 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 armored 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 recognized 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 swiveled to face her squad. “In the carrier,” she said. “Move!”

They scrambled in. It was a tight fit, but the carrier was 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 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 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 a bleak, unforgiving gaze. “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. A High Garda flexible armored coat 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.”

Jess shook his head; they weren’t beginners. They were a tight, trained squad now, and they’d all gotten to know how the others moved. He could pick up cues from body language through peripheral vision. They hadn’t had a targeting mistake since the first week together. Well, except for that incident with Tariq, but that had been
orders
, not accident.

Half-strength rounds were
not
normal. These would leave real, lasting damage, and if they hit in the right places outside of armor, could even break bones, damage organs.
Why use them today?
Another piece that didn’t fit in place. The assigned job was too easy, the location too remote, the ammunition too odd. There was something not right about this, and though Glain had an excellent, impassive mask of a face, he could see the tension in the sharp way she moved. She knew something
she wasn’t sharing. He was tempted to confront her, but he knew better; here, in front of the rest of the squad, she’d just slap him down.

He silently checked his weapon and nodded readiness, and once the others signaled, the squad moved to the door. The centurion creaked it open, and a puff of sand blew out in a smothering wave.
It’s not real,
he told himself.
Just a mock-up of a street, some actors thrown in for color and sound. It’s safe enough.
But he’d never been in this particular standing-exercise set before. He didn’t know what it would be like, and it made him itch all over to have it as a final challenge.

“You have thirty minutes to complete the assignment,” the centurion said. “This is your only exit, so remember where it is. Heads on a swivel, and good luck.”

He seems a good enough sort,
Jess thought. More than that, he seemed competent. He had another, more silent and nondescript comrade standing in the shadows.
A skeleton crew,
Jess thought, and wondered what resources they had in case something went wrong.
Not many,
he thought.

Another wrong piece to an unreadable puzzle.

He didn’t have time to try to put it together, because his squad was moving into danger.

“All right, it’s simple enough,” Glain told them as the door creaked shut behind them. “I want
perfection
. Watch yourselves. Assume nothing is safe. Understood?”

Jess always assumed the world was dangerous, however it appeared, because . . . well, it was. He knew that very well, had from the time he was old enough to be sent running across London with a contraband book strapped to his chest. Why would she bother to remind any of them? They weren’t careless. When the instructors had taken away points, it had been for small things—form, speed—never lack of awareness. She must be as nervous as he was.

If I were any more paranoid, I’d never function,
he thought. The amusement tasted bitter and strange on his tongue, like metal, and he swallowed hard and followed Glain into the barren, twisting streets.

The exercise set wasn’t at all what he’d expected. These were
not
Alexandrian streets—which were wide, clean, and beautifully planned—but architecture that spoke more, to Jess, of England. Weathered, cramped buildings. Shadows and rubble. Shopwindows filmed with grime, and what he glimpsed behind them seemed chaotic and cheap. A rail-thin dog with ribs showing under fur stood like an automaton in the shade of a narrow alley, and Jess felt a pang of pity for the poor creature. Was it supposed to be here? If this hadn’t been a serious test, he’d have stopped to toss it a bit of food, but even as he thought of it, the dog flinched and silently turned to run into darkness.

He didn’t see any actors playing parts here. He didn’t see anyone at all.

Glain, on point, was methodically checking the stops and doorways, while Jess and the young woman on his right, Helva, watched the dark windows that overlooked the street. There was no need to assign the jobs; each of their squad understood their roles in this action. They proceeded smoothly and quietly down the street, and at the end of it, Jess saw a lone figure standing at the corner. The man wore a sand-colored Library Scholar’s robe that floated on the harsh wind, and beneath, practical clothing showed black. Shoulder-length hair blew in a tangled mix of black and gray, and even before they got close enough to make out features, Jess knew who was waiting for them.