Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(38)

And the streets were awash with people staring out into the bay. Khalila realized that the last of the merchants who’d been waiting had pulled anchor and was sailing away; it was a mass exodus, leaving the docks ominously empty. More than thirty ships all heading away from trouble, as fast as possible.

The crowd thinned as people drifted away. Khalila shook herself and remembered her business.

A sailor in a Phrygian cap sat on the stoop of a closed business, whittling, and she went to him and tried to regain her calm. He squinted up at her. “Scholar,” he said. “What do you want with the likes of me?”

“Have you seen a very tall young man pass this way? Blond hair?”

“The giant? Yes.” He pointed down the road. It curved out of sight. “He seemed to be heading somewhere important. You might have to run to catch him.”

“Thank you,” she said, and bowed a little. He touched his cap with a grin. He was whittling a clever little sculpture of a dolphin jumping from a wave, she realized. Odd, she’d thought him a drunk who was just wasting time, but here he was, creating beauty. People were so unpredictably wonderful. “I like the dolphin!” She shouted that over her shoulder as she ran for the curve in the road, and heard him laugh, and then it was just the damp sea wind on her face and the feel of her feet on the cobblestones. She jumped a puddle and kept running, and finally spotted a blond shock of hair in the distance. He’s so fast! Her lungs were burning, her legs trembling, and she thought with chagrin that she’d allowed herself to get soft. A turn or two around the High Garda training track wouldn’t go amiss.

Finally, she was close enough to shout for Thomas to stop . . . but she couldn’t gather enough breath to do it. She skidded to a halt, gasping and nearly sick to her stomach, and picked up a loose rock from the gutter. She threw it, half expecting to miss him, but it landed squarely in the center of his back. Not hard, of course, she had no real strength left, but it brought him to a stop, and he turned to look for who’d thrown it.

She waved, then braced herself with her hands on her thighs as she tried to slow her breathing. Thomas strode back to her. “Khalila? Are you all right?”

“Chased you,” she gasped out. “Sorry. Catching my breath.”

“Yes, so I see. Do you need to sit?”

She managed to shake her head and pull herself upright again. “We’re out of time,” she said, and managed to keep her voice more or less steady this time. “War’s about to be declared, if it hasn’t been already. Those enemy ships out there will be trying to enter the harbor any minute now, and we need to stop them. Can you do it?”

Thomas considered that, and his face settled into an expression she was all too familiar with: determination. “Yes,” he said. “I can do it. But not alone. I need Morgan to bind me to an automaton as we agreed.”

“I don’t know where Morgan is!” Khalila said. “Is she at the Iron Tower?”

“I don’t know. She was summoned away by Scholar Wolfe. You’d better send a message to him. He’ll tell us where she is.”

Khalila had already taken out her Codex. She unsnapped the attached stylus and wrote as quickly as she could, underlining the urgency. It would appear in Wolfe’s Codex within seconds, and hopefully he would not ignore it. “Why didn’t you answer my messages?” she asked Thomas as she closed the book and put it back in the case on her hip.

“What messages?” He looked startled, then chagrined, and clapped a hand to the pocket of his brown coat. Unlike her, he wasn’t prone to wearing his Scholar’s robes, though he was fully entitled to them; he simply found them annoying. His plain worker’s clothing was better suited, she supposed, to the physical work he often did at forges and worktables. “I left it behind in the Iron Tower. I’m sorry, Khalila. That was careless.”

Before she could ask him what he’d been doing in the Iron Tower, her Codex shivered to alert her to a reply, and she opened it to see Scholar Wolfe’s neat, precise calligraphy. “She’s not there,” she said. “She left an hour ago, and he doesn’t know where she’s gone . . .” Her voice faded, because Thomas was looking beyond her with a warm smile. “She’s behind me, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Morgan said, and when Khalila turned she saw the young woman walking toward them. She was dressed in a plain outfit, like Thomas; she’d put away the Obscurist’s robes, and now that she’d gotten rid of the collar that Obscurists had previously had to wear, there was no sign of her affiliation at all. That’s something for us to consider, she thought. Obscurists needed to be offered the same structure as all others inside the Great Library: the choice to join for a contracted period of time as a copper or silver band, or to join for a lifetime as a gold band. Each came with benefits, of course. But Obscurists had been virtual hostages within that tower for so long that no one had even thought what would happen when they were free to come and go as they liked.

Khalila hugged her. It was impulsive, but it felt right. There was a sadness in Morgan’s eyes, and in the shaking breath she took. “Are you all right?” Khalila asked quietly.

“Yes. I’m fine. Glain was badly injured by a sniper. Scholar Wolfe summoned me to care for her.”

“How is Glain?” Thomas asked it before Khalila could, with a sharp edge to his voice, and moved to stand closer.