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

Jess held on to the brash smile that was his brother’s shield. “In here? You’d be days cleaning the carpets.”

“Don’t be obtuse.”

“Well, then. You’d just be robbing yourself. I’m here bearing gifts. Valuable ones, at that. And I have much more to offer.”

“Heretics and criminals have nothing to offer me,” the Archivist said. He still hadn’t given him real attention.

“You must not have read my father’s message.”

“Your father is a heretic and a criminal. Did you miss my point, boy?”

Jess drank the coffee. It was strong, and familiar as home. “Not at all,” he said. “But we’re both aware the Great Library has dealt with far worse than my da to get what it wants.”

“And what do you and your book-dealing father imagine that to be?”

“The thing that will destroy this place.”

The Archivist finally put his pen down and looked at him directly—a cold stare, empty of pity or mercy. This was a man who’d sentenced Scholar Wolfe to torture once, and Thomas, too. Who’d killed countless innocents who’d stood between him and the Library’s goals, and showed no sign of ever caring.

“Go on,” he said.

“The Library has rested for nearly four thousand years on the supremacy of alchemy, and the Obscurists who practice the highest levels of it. Everything you do rests on some aspect of their power: the automata who keep cities in fear. The portals you send your armies through. But most of all, the books. When only the Library is the source of learning and knowledge, you have a stranglehold on the world.”

“I might argue with your sinister interpretations, but not your facts,” the Archivist said. “The Library is the source of learning and knowledge. The automata help keep order. The Translation Chambers are an efficient way to move our people from one point in the world to the next. And your point is . . . ?”

“That one simple invention brings it all down,” Jess said. “Something so blindingly simple that it ought to have been invented thousands of years ago, if it hadn’t been deliberately and continuously suppressed by the Library. And you.”

The Archivist sighed and made a point of going back to his papers. “If you insist on talking in riddles, then this conversation is over, and I’ll send your body back to your father for a proper burial. It’s the least I can do.”

Jess sat back and smiled. “We have a working model. In fact, it’s churning out copies of things that have been secret for a thousand years—you remember the Black Archive books my brother and his friends stole from you? At this very moment, your power is being eroded one page at a time. If you’d like to ignore that, please yourself.”

The old man was good at this, Jess thought; not so much as a flicker, a flinch, a twitch. But the card had been played, and he’d done it as well as he could do it, and all he could do now was sip coffee and pray that he hadn’t just signed his own death warrant.

The Archivist put down his pen. “I’ll do you the honor of acknowledging that this is of some interest to me. It is of advantage to the Library, long may it survive, to take control of this machine so that it may be properly administered. It’s to no one’s benefit to unleash such a technology on a world unready to handle it responsibly. Surely even your father can see that?”

“My da’s not one for social responsibility,” Jess said, and showed teeth. “He’s more interested in the financial benefits. What do you offer for him to destroy it? Has to be more than he stands to gain, mind you.”

“Blackmail?”

Jess shrugged. “You’re the learned man. I’m just conveying the offer. For a price—and a very, very large one—my father will destroy his press, shut down all operations, and hand over the plans and the man who drew them up.”

“Thomas Schreiber.”

Thomas’s name from those bloodless lips made Jess want to abandon this plan and kill this old lizard now, before more harm could be done to his friend. He spent a pleasant few seconds thinking of how to accomplish it. It was thinly possible that he might be able to lure a guard, snatch a gun, and put a bullet in that evil head before anyone could stop him.

Assassination was always possible if one didn’t care about getting away with it. Or surviving.

He held himself still, smiling, though the hate that surged in him physically ached. The old man was tapping his fingers silently on his desk, and whatever he was thinking, none of it showed in his face until he said, “What’s your father’s price?”

That was it, then. Jess had been balanced on the edge of a cliff and now a bridge had appeared in front of him. Narrow, death still very much a possibility at any misstep, but a chance. A chance.

“Oh, it’s very high,” Jess said. For the first time in his life, having an identical twin was proving to be a good thing. A lifesaving thing, in fact. He copied Brendan’s brash grin and loose, easy posture and crossed his legs. Took in a deep breath of familiar air. He’d missed Alexandria down to his bones, and it helped steady the shaking anger he kept tightly locked. “It might ruin a medium-sized country. But you’ll pay it, because it will bring an end to this business once and for all. I already brought you one Scholar you wanted so badly, and the Obscurist, too, for free. As a sign of good faith.” Wolfe’s betrayal was a burden he’d have to endure for a lifetime. The desperate look in the man’s eyes . . . The Library’s dungeons had broken him before, and only time and love had put him back together again. This time? This time there might be no repairing what Jess had done to him.