Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(6)

Nothing moved in the office, and Jess carefully inched forward and flattened himself against the outer wall at an angle, the better to see into the far, shadowy corners within.

“There’s no one,” he said. He didn’t relax. When Dario tried to move past him, he stopped him with an upraised arm. “Pressure plates?”

“Hmmm.” Dario looked around. There was a statue of a serene Buddha in the corner of the assistant’s office. The Buddha held a heavy jade orb in both hands. Dario went to it and carefully lifted the stone out of the statue’s grasp.

He put the ball down and used his booted foot to roll it into the Archivist’s office. As it reached the center of the carpet in front of the massive desk, the automata in the room came to life. Gods, stepping down from their plinths. Anubis. Bast. Horus. Isis. They stared at the inert orb for a long moment with fiery red eyes, and then stepped back up where they’d been. Inert.

“Their coding is still active,” Dario said, quite unnecessarily. It was clear the automaton gods would cut them to bloody strips if they set foot in the office itself. “Scholar? I think this has to be your job. Since you have the weaponry to match.”

“No,” Jess said, and held his gun out to Wolfe. “Trade me.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” Wolfe said. A frown formed, pulling his brows together. Jess knew that look. It was close to a glare, but lightened with a fair bit of concern.

He felt himself grin. “Don’t worry. I don’t want to join my brother. Someone’s got to explain things to my father, and much as I’d like to avoid that, it should probably be me.”

Wolfe didn’t like it, but he allowed Jess to take the Ray of Apollo, and without hesitation, Jess strode into the office, came to a stop exactly in the center of the carpet, and waited for the automata to react.

They moved fast, but he was faster. He activated the weapon, and a thick, shockingly bright beam of coherent light jumped into being from the barrel; he held the trigger down and sliced it from left to right in an arc, severing Horus at the waist, then Bast, Anubis, and Isis. It took only a couple of seconds, a single heartbeat, and then there were inert mechanical legs and the statues’ upper bodies toppling backward. Useless. By the time he released the trigger, he’d killed four gods.

It felt horribly wonderful. He stared at Anubis’s face. The red eyes were still lit, but as he watched they faded to ash gray. Empty.

For you, he thought to Brendan. Not that any of these had killed his brother, but until he could reach the traitor who had, he’d take what satisfaction he could.

He’d dropped the last automaton in the same spot where Neksa had died here in this room, murdered by a mechanical’s spear just to prove that the Archivist didn’t make idle threats.

I’ll kill Zara for you, brother, he thought. And then I’ll kill that old bastard. For Neksa.

But he didn’t say that. Not in front of Dario and Wolfe, who were stepping into the room and observing the damage. “Well,” Dario said. “That is quite a thing Thomas has made. He frightens me sometimes.”

“He frightens himself,” Wolfe said. “Because he always worries how what he creates can be misused. And for someone with his particular genius, that’s a very difficult trait.” He held out his hand to Jess, and Jess gave him back the Ray. “Feel better?”

That was the moment when Jess’s euphoria snapped, and he realized he’d let himself get complacent. One trap? Just one? No. The Archivist would have more. And they needed to be alert.

“Careful,” he said as Wolfe approached the Archivist’s massive desk. “It’ll be trapped.”

“Oh, I know.” Wolfe dismissed it with an irritated wave. “I know his mind well enough. The old dog never did learn a new trick once he sat his behind in that chair.”

“You hope,” Dario murmured, and Jess echoed the sentiment silently. But he knew better than to stop Wolfe as he moved to the desk, looked it over without touching it, and then began to recite a nonsense string of words. Or, at least, it seemed to be nonsense. Jess kept his silence until Wolfe finished. It seemed like some superstitious incantation to him, and there was no sign that anything at all had changed from the recitation.

“Careful,” Dario said. He’d come to the same conclusion. “Scholar. Whatever you’re doing—”

Too late, because Wolfe was sliding a drawer open and pressing a button. At the first flash of light, Jess whirled, ready to start shooting, but there wasn’t any need. It was just ranks of glows turning on in the high ceiling, casting greenish arcs of light down the walls. “I disarmed his traps,” Wolfe said. “He never changed his security. I knew he wouldn’t. He never knew that I’d heard him recite it.”

“When did you hear this?” Dario asked. Such a carefully neutral tone.

“Six years ago. Before he broke faith with me and stripped me of my honors. Before the prison.”

“Long time,” Dario murmured, for Jess’s ears. Louder, he said, “And you remembered it?”

“I practiced it,” Wolfe said. “Carefully. Yes. It was accurate.”

Wolfe sounded all too confident, in Jess’s opinion. Worrying. “Scholar . . .”

That’s when an alarm tone sounded: a high, thin gonging sound that began to accelerate. They all instinctively looked up toward the lights.