Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(7)

The Archivist had already moved on and was taking another book from the stack on the corner of his desk, and a pen. He made swift notes without looking up. “My assistant will take you to more comfortable accommodations,” he said. “For now, you are my guest. A guest with no privileges, and no freedom, you understand. I hold you hostage for your father’s good behavior. And make no mistake, if I see any signs of betrayal, I will kill you.”

Jess bowed slightly. A touch mockingly, as his brother would have. “Of course.”





CHAPTER TWO




He didn’t allow himself to relax until the assistant—what in God’s name was she called?—led him from the office and into the anteroom decorated with ancient friezes from Babylon, where her own desk sat. Less well polished, that wood, and stacked with work. She wore a gold band of service, and, yes, she was lovely; he could certainly see why Brendan had been so taken with her. Graceful as she motioned him to a seat and opened a book on her desk—one that no doubt contained orders from the Archivist that he’d just written out.

He studied her while she wasn’t looking. The rich skin tone told him she was of Egyptian heritage, mixed with something else he couldn’t define; he remembered the thick braid she wore down her back, and the cheekbones and pointed chin. I need to remember her name. N something. Naomi? Nallana?

It came to him with sudden clarity, and he used it. “Neksa, about the way I left—” This was a bridge he needed to test. Carefully.

“You left exactly the way you intended,” she said in a brisk voice very different from the warm one that Jess remembered from their first encounter, the night he’d realized his brother had taken a lover from the Library’s staff. “Without any warning and without a word.” She looked up, and those sharp eyes seemed to cut right through him. “Though I thank you, at least, for a decent note to tell me you regretted it. I wish I could say it lessened the sting.”

Brendan had written a letter? An apology? Clearly, his brother felt more for this girl than had been obvious. “Sorry,” Jess muttered. He wanted to say something else, but it was risky, and the further he pushed Neksa away, the better for both of them. “Had to be done.”

“I suppose,” she agreed. She opened a drawer in her desk and removed something that she extended to him. It was a wooden box, carved with the symbol of the Great Library on the top, and when he opened it, he found a copper bracelet sitting on a bed of soft red velvet.

He shoved it back at her. “I’m not joining your cult.”

“And we wouldn’t have you,” she said. “If you don’t agree to put it on, your accommodations will be the sort that are far less pleasant. Did you imagine you’d be granted the same freedom this time?” That, Jess felt, was a double cut. Probably well deserved, that rejection.

Jess gave her a look he well remembered from Brendan’s childhood—petulant, with a bit of aggression—and plucked the bracelet from the velvet. He slid it onto his wrist and winced when the alchemy embedded in the metal closed the bracelet and shrank it to fit close to his skin. He’d need an Obscurist, or the alchemical key that Neksa probably kept well hidden, to remove it.

“Tight,” he said. “Can’t you loosen it—”

“Of course not,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re brave enough to chop your hand off for comfort?”

Jess was honest enough to admit that he wasn’t. At least, not without far more dire circumstances. He bowed slightly. “After you.”

He followed as she led him through the corridors of the Serapeum. It was jarring to realize that the hallway they entered was not the same he’d passed through to get here, and it preoccupied him trying to make some sense of it. He had the strange, unmistakable sense that the office was no longer where it had been when he’d been brought into it. Was that possible? Or was there some strange, confusing Obscurist field that scrambled his memory of the directions?

The thick sea air closed over him as they passed out into an unfamiliar courtyard, and he felt that strong sense of home again. This place had quickly become something special to him. He’d made his first real friends here. He’d found purpose.

And now this was a hostile environment, full of traps. He needed to remember that.

Neksa took him through the gardens that surrounded the base of the huge pyramid, and Jess looked up at the sun-gilded marble facing of it, the fire of gold at its top. They were on the public side of the pyramid now, where a steady stream of people entered the vast reading and study rooms. On the other side, the side he’d entered before, were the Scholar Steps. Thomas Schreiber’s name had been carved there, and Khalila Seif’s, and Dario Santiago’s . . . if they hadn’t been chipped into oblivion yet. Likely. Jess imagined that would have been first on the Archivist’s list, to erase them from Library history.

Scholar Christopher Wolfe’s name was years gone already. The Library seemed permanent. But the steady, quiet editing of its own history showed its vulnerability.

He concentrated on following the sway of Neksa’s braid out of the shadows, through the lush, blooming gardens, and out to the busy street. That took them past a lounging statue of an enormous sphinx, and the automaton turned its pharaoh’s head to regard them with flickering reddish eyes. Jess’s skin prickled with a flood of adrenaline, but he kept his pace measured and tried to control his heartbeat, too. This was the beast that would be set on his trail if he violated his parole. And while he might be able to disable the thing, it could easily disembowel him with a swipe of its claws, or take to the air with its wings to crush him down. Worse still, that human-shaped mouth hid a nightmare of razor-sharp teeth. Better to never see those, or hear the shrill, eerie scream.