Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(69)

Lucky. Too lucky. He sensed some hand behind yet another windfall of good fortune, but he didn’t know where to look. Could be the Artifex, setting him—setting all of them—up for a disaster. Or, rather more unlikely, it could be a better angel looking out for them.

“Routes,” Troll said, and all of them got out their Codices. He scribbled down a map and labeled their names on hallways, and it appeared in rapid, neat strokes on the page in Jess’s Codex assigned for orders. Jess had been paired with Glain, which seemed natural enough; Troll would have recognized they worked well together.

The hall they’d been given to patrol ran the length of the first floor on the Forum side of the building. Jess remembered the maps he sketched out last night and the one that he’d drawn from Wolfe’s Mesmer session, and stacked them one atop another in his mind to see the differences.

Wolfe’s secret hall, the one that led from a concealed inner portal to the door that led down to the prisons, was on the other side of the wall from where they’d been assigned. Convenient, that. Too damned convenient. His feeling that they’d just so happened to be assigned here today and that they’d just so happened to be given a patrol so near to the secret prison entrance . . . it raised an itch on the back of his neck.

Better angels, or conniving demons. Something nipped at his heels.

He silently kitted up with the armored Library coat and his weapons, and found Glain—of course—ready before him. Rollison was checking off his squad as they left the room, and held out a hand to keep Glain and Jess back. They were the last out of the room.

Troll turned to Glain and Jess, closed his Codex, and said, “Follow me.”

“Sir?” Glain said, but complied. He didn’t explain, just set off at a quick pace. They fell in behind him as he led the way through a maze of doors that finally ended in a blind storage area lined with shelves.

“What is this?” Glain asked, and added only as an afterthought, “Sir.”

“It’s where you wait,” he said. “Captain Santi and the others are coming. Don’t worry, I’m— I can’t say I’m one of you, but I’ve known Captain Santi a long time. He and my father were friends back in training. After my father died, he and Wolfe made sure I had a place to live, enough to eat. I owe him this much.”

He turned to go. Glain grabbed his shoulder. “Wait,” she said. “Do you know what—”

Troll brushed her hand away with a move so smooth it almost seemed effortless. “No. I don’t want to know. It’s a favor for a friend, and that’s where it ends. When you’re done here, make your patrols.”

He left without a backward glance and shut the door. Glain frowned after him and said, “Do you trust him?”

“Do we have a choice?” Jess leaned against the wall. “I found the tunnel Dario talked about. It’s clear all the way down. I could hear footsteps above, and they weren’t from the basilica. They had to be from inside the prison.”

“No guards?”

“There was an automaton lion,” he said. “I took care of it.” He tried to sound offhand about it.

“You what?”

“Off switch,” he said. “I told you, I did it to a sphinx the night everything went wrong with Dario.”

She thought about it and shuddered. “That was a sphinx. I’ve seen the size of these lions. Not sure I’d have tried facing one down there in the dark. And you should have let me know what you were doing! If you hadn’t come back . . .”

She was right, of course. He should have left word. It had been a stupid risk; that fact had finally registered with the rising of the sun, and he could have disappeared without a trace into the dark, crushed and rotting beneath the prison. Worse than that, he could have destroyed any chance they had of finding Thomas. “Sorry.”

“Do it again and I’ll kill what the automaton doesn’t eat.” She meant it—or thought she did. Her Welsh lilt came out strong when she said it. He didn’t have time to reply—if he’d thought of anything to say to that—because there was a noise beyond the door, and as they both turned that direction, it swung open.

Santi. Khalila. Dario. Santi wore his uniform and carried a full pack and weapons. Khalila had opted for a dark gray dress with her robe thrown over the top and a head scarf, and carried a pack of her own. Dario was in plain, sturdy clothes and his Scholar’s robe. They all looked tense.

“Someone tried to kill Captain Santi,” Khalila blurted.

Glain, who’d been about to speak, was stunned into silence, so Jess jumped in.

“What? How?”

“Poison in the fruit in my room,” he said. “No way to know who put it there, but I think we can guess.”

“The Artifex.”

“He’s done toying with us, and I think he’ll close his trap now . . . He deliberately left us all behind while he went off to the Senate. We’re out of time.”

“But we didn’t bring all our things,” Khalila said. “Can we go back for them?”

“No. You can’t. If you turn back, you stay behind. Are you staying?”

“Don’t rush us,” Dario snapped. “It’s a big decision, you know, to turn our backs on our futures. Our families. Everything we’ve ever believed.”