Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(6)
The Alexandrian black market had two obvious faces. The more public one, known as the shadow market, sold illegal but harmless copies of common Library volumes—punishable, at worst, with fines and short prison stays. It catered to those who wanted a book purely for the criminal thrill of it, even if the book was shoddily transcribed and incomplete, as they often were.
A smuggler called Red Ibrahim presided over the darker, more private end of the trade, and he was legendary well beyond the city; his reputation was spoken of even in Jess’s house back in London. He was a cousin, someone in the trade you could rely on in a pinch and for a price. Jess had actual blood cousins in the trade, but the main tests to becoming a trade cousin were long-term success and a certain ruthless loyalty to fellow smugglers. They were bound—pun intended, he supposed—by the business of books, of history set in leather and paper.
Forbidden fruits.
For months, Jess had steadily dealt with a succession of Red Ibrahim’s subordinates—he had a network of at least thirty—and found them all cold-eyed and capable. His Brightwell bona fides had been checked again and again at every stage; he was, after all, a High Garda soldier, wearing the copper band of service to the Library, even if he was a smuggler by birth. Reconciling that and earning trust, even with the Brightwell name, had been a tricky job.
Tonight, as he walked, his initial directions wrote themselves out into his Codex in the Brightwell family code, and he immediately erased them. He visited a market stall, where he was told verbally to go to another shop, and then to a third, a darkened bar where sailors cursed at one another over dice games and a proprietor slipped him a paper note. The route took him halfway across the city, and his legs were truly aching by the time five words scribed themselves in his Codex: Knock on the blue door.
He stopped, put the book away, and looked at the houses on the street where he stood. They were neat rectangles painted in pale shades, with Egyptian decorations at the roofs and fluted columns in miniature on the porticos. Respectable homes for modestly well-off families, something a silver-band Scholar might own, perhaps.
There was a house with a dark blue door on the right, and he stepped through the square gate and passed through a garden of herbs shaded by a spreading acacia tree. An ornamental pond cradled lazy fish and large lotus plants. It was a traditional household, with Egyptian household god statues in a niche by the door, and he made the required respect to them before he knocked.
The man who opened the door was nondescript—not young, not old, not tall or short or thin or fat. A native Egyptian, almost certainly, with sharp, dark eyes and skin with a rich coppery sheen. The local fashion was to shave all body hair, even eyebrows, and this man clearly abided by it.
“Jess Brightwell,” he said, and smiled. “I’m honored. Be welcome to my home.” He stepped back to allow Jess entry, and closed the door behind him. It had a significant lock, and Red Ibrahim engaged it immediately. “We’ve heard much about each other, I’m sure.”
“I expected you to be ginger,” Jess said. The man raised what would have been his eyebrows. “Sorry. English term. Red haired, I mean.”
“I am not called Red for that.”
“Then for what?”
Ibrahim smiled, just enough to send a chill down Jess’s back. “A story for another time, I think. Please.” The man—Jess placed him at about forty, but he could have been younger, or even older—gestured to a small, dainty divan, and Jess sat. A young girl with straight black hair worn in a shoulder-length cut walked in with a tray of delicate coffee cups and a silver urn. She was maybe fourteen years old, petite and pretty, and smiled at Jess as she poured for both of them.
She took a seat on the divan at the other end from Jess, to his surprise.
“This is my daughter, Anit. The gods have smiled upon my house, and she is an intelligent girl who wishes to study the trade. Do you mind if she listens?”
“No objection,” Jess said. He remembered his father doing the same for him and his twin brother, Brendan, though he didn’t recall either of them having much of a choice. “It took quite a while to arrange to see you.”
“Yes, of course, and I mean no offense by my caution. Does your father, the excellent Callum, receive every stranger claiming to be in the trade?” Red Ibrahim handed him a cup so small it felt like a child’s toy in Jess’s fingers, but the coffee inside was sweet and potent enough to make his heart race after only a sip. “Or does he ensure his business’s—and his family’s—safety by being wary?”
“He’s a careful man,” Jess agreed, though he remembered his father ruthlessly risking him, and his brothers, without much thought for the consequences. His older brother, Liam, had swung from a gallows for the careful way his father did business. “He wants to obtain some information, and you’re the best positioned to have it at your fingertips. It’s a delicate matter, of course.”
“Of course,” Ibrahim agreed. “Naturally.” He waited with polite attention.
“Automata,” Jess said.
“There are no truly rare versions of Heron’s work, as you no doubt know—”
“Not interested in rare volumes,” Jess said. “We’re looking for books that describe the inner workings of the creatures. And how to disable them.”
Red Ibrahim was in the act of drinking his coffee, and though he hesitated an instant, he finished so smoothly Jess almost missed the reaction. Almost. Then he laughed, and it sounded completely natural. “Do you know how often this request is made, young Brightwell? The automata are the enemies of both smugglers and Burners in every city on earth! Do you not think that if such information was available, we would have obtained it and made an incredible fortune with it by now?”