Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(23)

Jess wanted to say what he knew Khalila would have said, something about mercy being greater than anger, something about rising above . . . but he knew this feeling too well. That growling, crimson rage that stopped him from reaching that high ground again. Because Anit was right. Taking the Archivist alive risked too much, whatever Wolfe intended.

“Fine,” he said. It felt worryingly good to say it. “Then let’s hunt him down. Together.”

Anit said, “Only if you swear on Anubis that you will kill the old man if you can.”

Jess walked over to the statue and laid his hand on the god’s outstretched foot. “Before Anubis’s eyes, and the Christian God, I swear to kill the former Archivist of the Great Library, or watch him die. Send me straight to hell if I lie.”

“An interesting appeal to multiple faiths,” Glain commented, “but since you don’t practice either faith with any regularity, I can’t see it matters.”

“It matters,” Anit said. “Devout or not, no one wants to break such a vow made in the presence of a god.” She turned to Glain. “And you?”

Glain snorted. “I don’t need an oath to want to kill the old bastard. It’s my sworn duty. If you’re done with the theatrics, can we please get on with it?”

He looked up at Anubis once more. There was a stillness here, as if the god stared unblinking into his soul. Is this who you are? A killer? That was his brother’s voice in his head, and for once, it wasn’t mocking. It sounded concerned.

Jess thought of his heart on the scales of Ma’at, a feather balancing it as the gods watched and judged.

I do what I have to do, he thought.

It wasn’t a good answer, but it would have to do.



* * *



—

Anit led them to Red Ibrahim’s house—not the same residence where Jess had originally met her, but another, more modest establishment in a quieter, more provincial part of Alexandria. An unassuming structure, if one didn’t note the sturdy locks and the guards posted at every approach. On a normal day, they’d have blended with the common street traffic; today, they stood out like the uneasy sentries they were. In this quarter, as in so many others, families stayed indoors, awaiting whatever would happen next. Shops were closed, restaurants shuttered. None of the familiar scents of Alexandria, beyond the heavy salt of the sea; no baking bread, no spices, no tang of coffee. It felt like a terrified, breathless town today.

Jess struggled to keep up. Glain could tell, though Anit seemed oblivious; Glain deliberately held the pace back, and Jess felt both frustrated and grateful. Just a little farther, he told himself. Then you can rest your damned lungs.

The double doors of the house opened as they approached, and Anit quickened her stride. Her guards all seemed alert and relaxed, and her pleated dress, bloody crimson, floated in the fitful breeze.

One of the guards stationed near the building didn’t look right, and Jess’s gaze caught and snagged on him. A shorter man wearing a cap and old clothes, but he had the bearing of a soldier. The cap wasn’t his own; it seemed too small, and the haircut beneath it seemed military.

Soldier recognized soldier. High Garda out of uniform, today? That wasn’t good.

“Anit!” Jess shouted, and pointed at the man, who was positioned in a shallow, shaded corner. The soldier’s hand lunged into his sagging coat pocket, and he came out with a glass globe filled with green liquid. Greek fire. He was looking at Jess and assessing the danger, and Jess saw the calculation come to an end. The man’s focus shifted behind him, and he raised his arm, ready to throw.

There was no real defense against Greek fire. Only one way to stop it: keep him from throwing it at all.

Glain ran for the man, and as she did, she tossed Jess’s sidearm back to him without looking. He grabbed it out of the air, aimed, and fired. Three shots, slicing a line diagonally across the target. The first missed. The second hit the man’s elbow, an explosion of blood and bone. The third entered his stomach just left of his liver.

The elbow wound was the kill shot, because the man fumbled the glass globe, and it dropped at his feet and exploded, splashing Greek fire upward to cover his feet and legs. For one flash the man just stared in horror, and then the Greek fire exploded into flickering, ghostly flames that clung and grew like eerie green vines as they climbed his body in a rush.

Glain checked her run and veered away as the man flailed, burning. The would-be assassin screamed once and then stopped, though he continued to stumble forward, a human torch as the fire spread with unholy speed. Jess gagged on the bitter smell of the chemicals, then the sweetish reek of cooking flesh. The man’s mouth still gaped open, but his throat must have been cooked, too ruined to form sound.

Glain looked back at Jess, and he read the order on her face. He took careful aim this time. The shot was fatal, directly through the man’s brain, and he was dead before his burning body hit the cobbles. The reaction hit Jess in the next second, shakes and nausea and horror. He tamped it down quickly. It wouldn’t have been mercy to let him burn to death. He knew that. It didn’t absolve him.

The stench of the Greek fire and the burning body set off a round of coughing that tore at his already-raw throat and aching lungs. He tasted blood, again, and swallowed it down. He wanted badly to resort to that restorative mask, but not now. Not here. His breath came in shallow, liquid gasps.