Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(22)
“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.”
Jess 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.
Not to mention the fact that there were many kinds of automata: sphinxes, lions, the Spartan that watched Jess balefully in the courtyard. Surely different models had different locations for such an override. Morgan might be of some help, he thought, but he had to wait until she contacted him; there was no way he could write directly to her. Frustrating.
What would Thomas do? Jess closed his eyes and imagined the automaton that was most common to Alexandria: the sphinx. From pharaoh’s head to lion’s tail, it was a fearsomely intimidating creature the size of an actual lion, and armed with the claws and power of one, too. He’d never seen one with an open mouth; did they have lion’s fangs, too? Or human teeth? Somehow, imagining them with an open mouth and human teeth to bite with made them more frightening. Where would Thomas put an off switch?
Thomas had never built automata like the Library’s versions—his had been toys, dolls, chess sets—but one thing he’d said seemed significant now. You never put the activation button on top, Thomas had said when he was constructing a miniature horse. You see? Anywhere it could be accidentally pressed would be bad design. It must go underneath.
Underneath. But what engineer in his right mind would want to slither underneath a sphinx to turn it off? Has to be somewhere the average-sized person can reach, Jess thought. He was imagining the sphinx so vividly now, he could see its blank eyes staring straight into his own. A pharaoh’s stiff headdress. A human face with a nose and mouth. A chin. A neck flowing down into the broad, muscular body of a lion.
Does that mouth open? Would Thomas have put a switch inside? Not if there was a risk the jaws might close, Jess thought. The idea was efficiency and safety.
He just didn’t know, and he thought, with a tired shudder, that Anit’s brothers had likely done this same mental exercise and gotten it wrong. When it had come to their final test, they’d lost their lives. No wonder Red Ibrahim didn’t use this information. He’d sacrificed enough to it. And Anit gave it to me to let me try, at a considerable profit. Clever girl. No risk to her family, and if Jess managed where her own brothers had failed, she’d probably buy that information back from him.