Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(67)

She kicked that knee away and then followed that with a boot to his head in the same spot she’d landed the first blow, a stunning impact that jolted all the way up her hips and through her spine and seemed to explode out of her head. It hurt. But it worked. His head snapped sideways, and he toppled to the floor with a dull thump. Unconscious or dead, she didn’t know which; regardless, she grabbed up the fallen knife and cut strips of cloth from his own robe to tie him tightly. Then she dragged him to the heaviest desk in the room and tied him to that as well.

Only then did she allow herself to feel the horror and terror of the attack. She crouched down, panting, face in her hands. She smelled sweat and fear, and blood and tears crowded in her throat, but she forced that away. Tears could come later. Right now, she needed to know why he’d done this.

She found out when she snapped loose his Codex. She could sense the difference in it from standard as soon as her fingertips touched it; he’d rewritten the scripts that powered it, just as she had her own, so that messages went unmonitored and unrecorded.

He was working with someone. She flipped to the messages; he’d wiped most of them away, but a few remained. One was about rewriting codes for specific automata, but they were all referred to by numbers, and she had no knowledge of what that meant. That’s who he is. One of the specialists who retasks automata. It was a trusted position, requiring exacting and expert skills to make automata function properly with changed instructions.

As to who he was working with, that was a mystery . . . at least until she saw a particularly eccentric loop to a letter in a reply, and remembered seeing it before.

The old Archivist. That was his handwriting; she’d seen it on orders. Gregory had brandished those like weapons in front of her many times.

The man she’d felled was the old Archivist’s spy within the Iron Tower, and she needed to tell Eskander, at once. She unsnapped her own Codex and wrote a message, waited for a response, but saw nothing. Her heart sank. Sometimes he ignored Codex messages when he was concentrating on other things. She’d have to go directly to him to get his attention.

There was no going back through the door she’d originally entered, so she’d have to use the newly created exit to the adjoining room. She knew the Tower well enough; there was no real risk of getting lost. She grabbed a glow from the wall and whispered a little power into it, and the light spread beyond the doorway. Just another room, this one thoroughly abandoned except for spiderwebs and husks of insects.

She opened the far door, thinking it would reveal the main curving corridor, but instead she walked into yet another room. This one wasn’t deserted, and she felt such a wave of relief that she nearly dropped the glow. There were four Obscurists here, and a High Garda soldier in uniform, and she said in a rush, “Thank God, I need your help, Annis has been killed!”

None of them seemed surprised.

“Take her,” the oldest one said, and the High Garda soldier advanced on her. Horror turned her cold, but she knew she had to get through. No going back. She showed the knife in her hand then, and he checked his progress and drew his gun. “No, don’t kill her. She’s Eskander’s new pet. We can use her.”

“The Obscurist knows,” she said sharply. “I’ve already told him.”

That rattled their composure, but only a little. “Told him what?” the High Garda asked. He was a big young man, blunt-featured, with eerily clear blue eyes. “About the dead woman?”

“Yes,” she said, and blurred effortlessly into the lie. “And about the messages in the traitor’s Codex. Your plot is being uncovered right now. You should give up before you’re killed.”

They couldn’t know what their colleague had written; reading others’ Codexes and journals was a social sin so deeply ingrained that none of them would have tried. She hoped her bluff would panic them into immediate retreat.

It didn’t.

“If that’s true, we have to move quickly,” the eldest said. “Bring her. Stun her if you have to, but we need her as hostage to be sure we get to the Translation Chamber safely.”

She wasn’t about to go quietly; they knew that. And the ring on her finger knew it, too.

Be at peace, the ring said, which caught her off guard and wasted a vital second, because in the next instant one of the Obscurists had seized her wrist, and another was reaching for her. But the ring just repeated it. Be at peace. You are not in danger.

She let go, and power rolled through her in a massive, warm swell that ignited the air around her with a shimmer. The Obscurists let her loose and backed away; they weren’t hurt, only surprised. But when the High Garda soldier aimed his pistol, it transmuted effortlessly into its constituent parts, rattling in fragments to the floor. “You can’t hurt me,” Morgan said. “And I won’t hurt you if you give up all thoughts of escape. You won’t leave the Iron Tower. Not unless the Obscurist Magnus releases you. You’ve all committed treason against the Great Library.”

“We stayed loyal to it,” one threw back at her. “When you stole it away from us.”

One of them—the biggest of them, the High Garda soldier—came directly for her. He smashed into an invisible shield that threw him backward and into a wall with such force he hit the ground, unconscious.

She wasn’t doing any of this, not consciously; it was the ring defending her. But why now? Why not before, when she’d been about to be killed?