Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(38)
“Squad Leader Wathen, you commanded your team well under difficult circumstances, but because of your failure to spot this traitor within your team, you are hereby lowered in rank. You will no longer enter the High Garda at the rank of sergeant as was originally contracted, but as a common soldier. Nevertheless, I do not feel your failure warrants dismissal from the High Garda.”
Glain let out a breath, a slow and trembling one. She didn’t relax, but Jess could feel the wave of relief coming from her all the same. She’d have to give it all up if they went after Thomas, but that would be her choice. Failure would have been humiliating.
For the first time, the High Commander smiled. It only made him more daunting. “Your squad kept a Scholar—whether he should have been present or not—alive. That matters. That is everything, except for the protection of original books, which would take precedence even over the life of a Scholar. And for that, I have decided to accept this exercise as your final test.”
Jess didn’t dare speak this time, but after a long pause, he heard Wu say tentatively, “So . . . we passed, sir?”
“You passed,” the High Commander replied. “You will each receive your individual assignment soon via Codex. Squad dismissed.”
In a way, passing the test was more of a shock than failing; at least Jess had been properly prepared to be sent on his way, without a future. He couldn’t process the moment fast enough to really comprehend what had just happened. He’d gotten so used to assuming the worst that having the best actually arrive was somehow wrong, coming on the heels as it did of the escape from the tomb—and what had almost been his own tomb—in the park.
“Brightwell,” the High Commander said, and caught Jess in midturn. He spun back to face front. “A moment.”
He heard Glain’s footsteps hesitate, but only for an instant, and then she was gone. The door shut behind his friends, and he was alone with a man who could destroy his future in a breath.
At least he was used to that, after Scholar Wolfe and his harsh postulant training. And before that, life with his own father.
Jess stood perfectly still, perfectly at attention, while the man regarded him. Finally, the High Commander reached for a folded sheet of paper on his desk. It was sealed with gold, and stamped with the symbol of the Library. Jess opened it. His hands were steady, though his heartbeat jumped faster when he saw the name written at the bottom—a personal signature, not just a scribe’s notation.
The Artifex Magnus, head of the Artifex division of the Great Library. One of the members of the Curia, who advised the Archivist. But, in reality, the Archivist’s bullyboy and henchman. A villain with elegant handwriting, it seemed.
The message read, Our eyes are on you. Nothing else. But on the heels of that unsettling mess at Alexander’s tomb, it seemed even more ominous.
“Bad news?”
Jess’s head snapped up, and he met the High Commander’s eyes. He couldn’t read the man at all and he couldn’t trust him. So he folded up the note, put it in his coat, and said, “No, sir.”
He half-expected the man to ask harder questions, but it was late, and he was of too insignificant a rank. The High Commander brushed a hand toward him. “Go.”
“Sir.”
He walked out on legs that felt less steady than those he’d walked in on, and once he was out and the door boomed shut behind him, he still felt eyes on his back, as if gravity had increased its pull.
As he stood for a moment in the round vestibule, getting his mind together, for the first time Jess realized that there were no guards. The man in charge of the most feared army on earth had no guards. That was a stunning statement of his power.
That was when he looked up at the flanking statues of Horus and Menhit. The hawk-headed Horus and lion-headed Menhit stared back, and, as he watched, Menhit shifted her weight from the traditional pose. She held a flail in one hand, and the flexible metal strips dangling from it whispered against each other as she moved.
He tore his gaze from Menhit back to Horus, who carried a spear.
Horus cocked his head, birdlike, to stare harder at Jess.
Our eyes are on you.
He jumped when a hand fell on his shoulder and pulled him back a step.
“Cachu,” Glain breathed. “What is it about you they don’t like? Did you kill their pets? Come on!”
They walked fast, and Jess became horribly aware that all of the war-god statues they passed were turning their heads to stare. Behind them, Horus stepped down from his pedestal in the alcove on the wall and took a long stride down the hall. Then another. Behind him, Menhit descended, that hissing, sharp flail cutting the air before her.
It was all bluff. When Jess attained the end of the corridor, he looked back to see Horus stepping back up to his pedestal in an eerily smooth, flowing motion. Threats, he thought. Intimidation. The Artifex’s stock in trade—and the Archivist’s. Extremes of emotion colliding inside him made him feel sick.
The rest of the squad stood clumped at the end of the hall, looking one step from running as Glain and Jess caught up.
“Why did they do that?” Violet Bransom sounded utterly shaken. “Why would automata come for you?”
“They didn’t,” Glain said. She sounded brisk and matter-of-fact, and if he hadn’t known her well, he might have believed she hadn’t been frightened at all. “It was likely some malfunction. If they’d meant us harm, someone would be mopping our remains off the floor right about now.”