Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(109)

He caught a look at Santi’s face, and his heart stopped for a moment. That was the face of a man who knew it was over. Who knew they’d lost.

“Did you really think I’d have brought you to that workshop without a reason?” the Archivist asked him. “I knew you’d betray me, whichever Brightwell you proved to be. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. You delivered my enemies.” He gestured, and another door opened. Jess’s heart thudded back to life, and he took better hold of his rifle. Shoot whatever comes out, he thought, but what came out was a young woman in a white Obscurist’s robe, and it was Morgan, who staggered a few steps and then dropped to her knees.

He broke ranks to run to her, grabbed her, and hauled her to her feet again. She was gasping for breath, and one glance at her face was enough to tell him that she was in no shape to help anyone, not even herself. “It’s okay,” he told her. That was a lie, but it was all he could give her now. He got her safely back to the High Garda lines, where Khalila took her and said, “What’s wrong, Morgan? Morgan?”

Morgan tried to speak, but she couldn’t seem to. She ripped away her collar and threw it onto the sand that covered the arena floor, and finally managed to say, “Drugged. Trying.” She grabbed for Khalila’s hand. “Together.”

“Yes,” Khalila said, and looked desperately at Jess. “We’re together now.”

Another door opened, and two High Garda Elites came through dragging another limp form. They left him on the sand and retreated. Khalila gasped, and this time she was the one who dashed forward. Glain was a step behind her, and together they towed Dario Santiago back to whatever safety this was. He’d been beaten and bloodied, but he managed to give Khalila a broken smile and say, “Hello, madonna,” before turning to Jess and holding out his hand. Jess thought he was meant to take it, but Dario impatiently shook that off and said, “Gun, Scrubber. Give me a gun!”

Glain passed her sidearm over.

“Now,” the Archivist said. “You’re all present. I would have included Red Ibrahim with you, except that he was found dead yesterday. I wonder which one of you killed him. Not that I intended to let a single smuggler live after today, but it would have been a nice symbol, having him here. At least we have his heir. Anit, is it?”

She stepped forward, all of fourteen and as old as the stones of the city, and made a startlingly rude gesture up at the box. “Remember the name, old man,” she shouted back. “We’ll spit on your funeral fire!”

He shook his head. “You are stones in the shoes of history, and you will be shaken out. No more tolerance. No more black markets, Burners, rebels. The Library will continue, and you will not.” He raised his voice into a shout. “Knowledge is all!”

The Scholars and librarians repeated it. No great shout of affirmation, Jess thought; it was almost a prayer, instead. They’re waiting, he thought. They need something to show them there’s hope.

Jess spun, raised his rifle, and fired straight at the Archivist.

The shot hit an invisible shield, and the bullet hung there a foot away from the old man’s face, vibrating. The Archivist nodded to Gregory, who gestured, and the bullet dropped to the sand.

No one spoke. Jess changed targets and fired at the Artifex, then Gregory. None of the shots made any difference.

Santi reached out and pushed his rifle down. “Save your ammunition,” he said. “This is only just starting.”

The Artifex raised to his lips the whistle that Jess had noticed, and it made a high, thin, trilling sound.

Above them, the sky filled with birds, launching out of hollows in the top of the amphitheater. Circling and catching the light of the sun on metallic wings.

Jess felt a strange impulse to laugh. Birds. They’d brought down a dragon. He wasn’t going to fear a few sparrows.

But it wasn’t a few. It was thousands. They continued pouring up, blackening the sky, circling in a vast whirl . . . and then the Artifex whistled again.

And the birds dived.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE




MORGAN

She could hardly keep her feet under her, but she felt the black energy of the birds circling overhead. Automata: small ones, light and simple, without much complexity in their formulae. One of them, ten of them, easily crushed.

Thousands of them shifted and came down in a deadly dive.

One narrowly missed her, burying itself in the sand, and as it did she realized that the beaks were long and sharp, like flying knives . . . and another sliced the skin of her upper arm as it arrowed down.

Next to her, a High Garda soldier was looking up, and a bird buried itself in his eye. He staggered, opened his mouth, and then simply died.

All around her, the birds were falling in a dead rain, stabbing and cutting and killing. And there were thousands more, and thousands more.

They were going to be cut to pieces.

Morgan fell to her knees and pushed. The drug that Gregory had poured down her throat numbed her, and she fumbled clumsily for anything, anything to stop this.

She felt something responding. Something whispering and ghostly, and with an effort that made her gasp and reel, she caught hold of a thin trickle of power, shaped it, and thrust it at the bird hurtling down toward Jess’s unprotected head.

It veered. It spread its wings and flapped to gain altitude. It circled, flitting among its diving fellows. She saw the script now. It was blindingly simple.