Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(45)

In that moment, he remembered something. It came in a sudden rush of light, color, sound, smell . . . as vivid as if he were there again, standing in Thomas’s filthy cell beneath the streets of Rome. Drawings etched on the walls and on dirty scraps of paper.

A beautifully detailed automaton.

Thomas designed this thing. His plans.

And a circled notation with two words.

It might be nothing. It might be everything.

Jess gasped in a breath and whispered, “Pax Romana.”

The sphinx blinked its red eyes, stopped, then pivoted and soared up to a perch at the highest point in the workshop, on a stout wooden scaffold. It perched and settled with a hissing ruffle of metal wings.

The light went out in its eyes.

“No!” the Scholar cried below, the one who’d set the thing in motion. He was only a few years older than Jess, but in that moment, terror made him sound like a child. “No! He has to die! Why—”

He picked up a sharp knife from the bench beside him and ran, but it was a useless effort. Whether he was on the attack or running for his life, it didn’t matter; he was shot dead in two steps and collapsed heavily to the floor. There was a hole the size of an apple in his head, and when Jess looked up, he saw one of the High Garda was lowering a rifle.

The Archivist was pale and sweating, and as Jess turned toward him, the old man stumbled and caught himself against a wall, then slid down it. That was the face of a man who’d seen his own death, and clearly, and didn’t care for the warning.

Jess crouched beside him and tried to check his pulse, but the Archivist struck his hand away. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Jess said. He hoped that the Archivist, in the press of the chaos and fear, hadn’t heard the whispered words. From the wonder in his eyes, he hadn’t. “I thought it was about to gut me like a fish. Thing must be broken.”

“Broken,” the Archivist repeated, and looked past him at the now-still automaton. Its eyes were dark and empty. It might have been an inert statue, and perhaps now it was, after those words. Jess’s heart felt like it was exploding in his chest with every fast beat, and he smelled the rank, burning stench of his own sweat now.

“Yes, yes, of course, you’re correct. It was malfunctioning.” The old man gulped in several shallow breaths, and some color crept back into his face. “It couldn’t defeat the safeguards I had put in place. There was no real danger. It could never have actually harmed me.”

Jess felt a bitter burn of a laugh deep in his throat, but he swallowed it. “Didn’t know that,” he said. “Thought I’d best look after my family’s interests.”

“So you did, lad. So you did. Whether there was any risk or not, you showed extraordinary courage. I won’t forget it.” The old man held out his hand, which was trembling, though his voice had taken on its veneer of calm again. Jess grasped it and pulled him to his feet.

If he expected more effusive thanks, he was disappointed; the Archivist turned and stalked to the High Garda soldier who’d put the bullet in the Scholar’s head, snatched the rifle away, and flung it into the corner. “You. What were you thinking?”

The soldier was a young, muscular woman who had the look of South Asia to her features, and she clearly didn’t expect to be attacked for what she’d done. She took a half step back, shot a wide glance at her commander, then raised her chin and snapped to attention. “Sir, I acted to prevent the danger from reaching you.”

“The danger? That idiot was half a room away. How do you think we’ll learn anything from a man with half his brain on the floor?”

“Sir—,” the High Garda captain began. It was a mistake. The old man hated having seen his mortality and his own fear. Would have been far wiser to keep out of his notice.

“Quiet!” The Archivist’s shout was full throated and vicious, and the captain froze. All the soldiers went to attention, instinctively. “Is that how you train your best soldiers? Because these are the best, are they not? Or are you trying to have me killed as well?”

“No, sir.” The captain’s face was rigid, his eyes glassy and narrowed. “I would give my life to—”

“I only saw one life being thrown in the way of that thing, and that was a criminal’s. You’re demoted, Captain. Get out of my sight.” The Archivist spun toward the woman who’d fired the shot. “You have an hour to depart the city, or I set a sphinx to hunt you down. Get out. I won’t have you in that uniform. Go back to whatever backwater province the Library found you in.”

Whatever resentment they felt, whatever shock, the soldiers took it without expression now. Both nodded and left through the door Jess had entered.

Another soldier took a solid step forward. He briskly opened his Codex and wrote inside it. “We will escort you out of here, sir.”

“You will not. Get another team in place to take me home. You’re all sent back to the High Garda. If any of you had been fit to be Elites, you would have prevented this from happening at all.”

It was a breathtaking, petulant show of power. The Archivist had just destroyed the careers of a dozen people who had risen through the ranks and were accounted the cream of the High Garda Elites . . . for what? The worst of it was a failure to wound, when all their training had been instructing them to instantly kill anyone who raised a hand to him. The whole thing was petty and brutal.