Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(80)
“Are they working?”
“Oh, some of them will be, since Glaudino will have fixed them.”
“We can’t fight automata, Thomas!”
“We won’t have to,” Thomas said. “They’ll be switched off. How else would Signor Glaudino even begin work on them? Jess, you and Glain have to take the master and his apprentices and lock them away, and give Morgan and me time to repair and change one. Do you think you can do that?”
“We can do our jobs,” Glain said. Then she sent Jess a look, and he knew exactly what it meant.
Is he really capable of doing anything after spending all that time in a cell?
Jess lifted one shoulder in a very small, almost invisible shrug.
Because they had no real choice.
Glaudino’s workshop turned out to be a large building, but not well secured. Jess assumed that nobody in their right mind would want to steal from the man who repaired Library lions, though, and so it was an easy matter for him and Glain to slip in the side gate. Stepping inside the building through an open sliding door, Jess came face-to-face with his own worst nightmare: an entire pride of Library lions.
But as Thomas had promised, they were all switched off, frozen in whatever pose they’d had when the button had been pressed. He heard Glain’s sharp intake of breath when she moved in beside him, and felt her shudder as she fought, and conquered, the urge to retreat. “Are they dead?” she asked him.
“They were never really alive,” he said. “And they’re shut off.”
Glain sent him a sharp look. “How did you learn that trick, by the way? I’ve never heard of anyone managing it before.”
“Desperation. Luck. Free exercise of my illegal trade. Take your pick. Come on—I hear voices this way.” Jess followed a clear space between the lions toward the back of the room, to a separate workroom where voices conversed easily in Italian. Stepping through the door, he found three men sitting at worktables and on benches. There was a lion crouched in the middle of the floor, motionless, and it had a pathetic air to it; someone had removed part of its bronzed hide and pulled out bundles of cables that spilled over the floor like wiry intestines. The lion’s face was frozen in a strange expression, as though it didn’t much like what was being done to it.
The oldest of the three men—Signor Glaudino, at a guess—looked up at Jess’s arrival, frowned, and switched from Italian to the more standard Greek that was the common Library language. “She’s not ready yet, this one. Tell your master we will deliver as agreed tomorrow. Yes?”
“No,” Jess said, and raised his gun. Glain stepped in beside him and mirrored the action. “Apologies, signori, but I need you all to move into that closet, please.”
“Why? What is this?” Signor Glaudino was a peppery little man, and he puffed out his chest and stood up to face them squarely. “You are ignorant people, to think you can do this to us! I have a commission from the Artifex himself for my work! The High Garda will hunt you down as soon as I tell them—”
“You won’t,” Glain said. She stepped forward, grabbed Glaudino’s shoulder, and marched him firmly to the open door of the closet. After checking it, she pushed him inside and gestured for his two employees to follow. Neither of them looked ready to put up a fight. “Codices, please. Now.”
All of them handed over their Codex volumes, which she stacked neatly on the nearest table, and then she searched each of the men with quick, efficient slaps. Glaudino squawked like a plucked chicken, but he was no match for Glain, who shoved them in one by one.
Glaudino began banging on the door almost immediately. She sighed and shook her head. “I tried to be nice,” she said to Jess, and then hit the outside of the door hard enough to make it shiver on the hinges. “Shut up, or I’ll tie you up and feed you to your lions!”
That got them blessed quiet. Jess fetched Morgan and Thomas, who’d been waiting in the shadows, and when he walked them into the workroom, Thomas’s blue eyes burned as if someone had lit a lamp in him. “Yes!” he said. “Perfect! You poor, lovely thing. What have they done to you, now?” He sat down on the bench, leaning over the lion, and Jess crouched down with him. Morgan took a seat nearby and watched with fascination as Thomas put his hands on the metal skin, very much as if he were petting a very live, friendly animal. “We will make you well. No, better. Much better.”
But then, in the next few seconds, the muted joy drained out of Thomas’s eyes and he began to shake. He sank down to sit next to the lion, put his head in his hands, and began quietly to cry.
“He needs to work,” Glain said, but at least she had the decency to mutter it to Jess, not to Thomas.
“He will,” Jess said, and sent her a warning look. “Leave him alone.”
“Do something,” she whispered back. But Jess felt helpless. He put one hand on Thomas’s shoulder and felt him shiver at the contact, then relax. Morgan took Thomas’s hand. Neither of them said a word, and Jess listened as Thomas’s ragged, labored breathing slowly steadied. He lowered his hands from his face but didn’t look up at them.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I— Scheisse. I didn’t think I would do that. Why did I do that?”
Morgan started to speak but then couldn’t seem to find the words. She looked up helplessly at Jess, and he finally nodded and crouched down until he and Thomas were on a level. “I’ve never been through what you have, but I’ve been in the dark a few times. Sometimes the light’s just too bright.”