Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(104)

Khalila looked glad to hand hers back to him. “I suppose we need them,” she said. “But they’re—”

“Powerful,” he said. “Yes. And dangerous. But we need to be dangerous now, don’t we? If we want to survive?”

She nodded. And though he didn’t want to, he knew they were both thinking of the same question.

At what cost?

Khalila walked with him back into the workshop, where they found Scholar Wolfe standing there. He’d put on a black Scholar’s robe, and in all aspects, Thomas thought, he looked mostly unchanged since the first day he’d met them at the train to Alexandria. For all the damage, Wolfe survived.

“These are astonishing,” Wolfe said. “You did these overnight?”

“I needed to keep busy.”

Wolfe laughed, but it sounded bleak. “Yes. Obviously. But only Thomas Schreiber could keep busy by perfecting a beautiful death machine like this. Perhaps you should take up cards.”

“We need them,” Thomas said.

“Oh, I know we do,” Wolfe agreed. “But forgive me for clinging one more moment to the fiction that right will prevail without becoming worse than its opposite.”

Thomas felt something zip through him, like a high-tension wire breaking, and he didn’t know he was angry, truly angry, until that moment. “You want to let them continue to do what they did to us? To thousands before us, and after? Do you really think it will stop, if we don’t stop it?”

“I’d like to believe that even now, there is some argument that avoids a bloodbath.”

“Then make it,” Thomas said. “But I won’t let them do what was done to me, and to you, to Dario or Khalila, or anyone they’ve taken.” He took one of the rays and held it out to Wolfe. “It’s time to decide, Scholar. Are you talking, or fighting?”

Wolfe glared at him and at the weapon; Thomas knew he was thinking about Santi, who would never have hesitated.

He took the ray and said, “I can do both.”

“Then let’s be ready,” Thomas said. “Because it won’t be long now.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX




SANTI

From his perch on the roof of the Spanish embassy, Santi watched the procession wind past the Serapeum. He’d borrowed a pair of field glasses from the Spanish commander, who’d been more occupied with loading weapons, armor, and valuables into the convoy of trunks set to depart shortly; the embassy staff would be going with it, and the ambassador, too. To his credit, Alvaro Santiago truly didn’t want to go, but he was sensible enough to know that should the Archivist come out of this day on top, Spain would be next on his list to crush, and the embassy would have all of the safety of a globe of Greek fire.

“Well?” Zara asked. She was at his shoulder, as still as a lounging cat. “Anything?”

“High Garda Elite companies,” he said, and lowered the glasses. “Not a single High Garda banner. I think you’re right. The High Commander closed the compound.”

“Or, just as likely, he’s no longer the High Commander,” she said. “Given how popular he wasn’t with his peers. They’ll sit this out. But that might not matter. The Elites are enough, especially with the automata out in force, and that beast up there.” She nodded toward the Serapeum, where the metallic shimmer of the dragon sat coiled around the top of the pyramid, awaiting its orders. “That has to go first, or we’ll end up like pigs turning on spits.”

“Nothing from the Iron Tower?”

“Nothing except that the Obscurist has left it, along with a solid contingent of the guards assigned there. That’s him, in the red. The automata are still working. Nothing’s changed. Whatever your girl was doing in there, she’s failed.”

“I wouldn’t count her out.”

“Or in,” Zara said. “We have our company. We have whatever’s left of your Scholar’s students. We have . . . what else, exactly? Nic, this is a fool’s errand. The odds aren’t even high; they’re zero. If we go out there, we will die. And they will win, forever. Is that what you call victory?”

He didn’t answer her. He took up the glasses again and tightened the focus. It was far to the road where the procession was taking place, but he thought that walking just behind the Obscurist was someone in a white robe. Someone who might have been Morgan.

If he’s taken her from the Tower, what does that mean? That she’s won? Or that she’s lost? He couldn’t know, and Zara’s points were irritatingly right. There were a few failure points, and thus far, all of them seemed to have crashed in on themselves. Jess and his brother were missing, gone off on some revenge mission. There was no indication that any of the Scholars that Wolfe had approached—or any from the distant Serapeums—would offer their support. The automata remained a danger, and the Obscurists showed no sign of turning on their master.

And Dario was missing. Taken, and perhaps dead, and of all of these things, Santi felt that the keenest. The loss of any of these young, brilliant minds was something he, like Wolfe, didn’t want to face. And as unlikable as Dario might have been at times, he’d changed. He’d become something better.

He deserved a chance. So did those prisoners who were being marched now in that procession toward the amphitheater.