Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(8)

Someone was shouting his name. You need to move, he told himself, but his body felt like an unfamiliar doll. He couldn’t remember how to move, but slowly, agonizingly, he folded over and pressed his face to the soft carpet. The air was clearer here, and he gasped it in little bursts, a landed and dying fish.

The voices were coming from the doorway. He crawled in that direction. The mist pressed relentlessly down on him, heavy, so heavy he felt it like a steel wall against his back that weighed him down, and it was too hard to keep moving.

He was choking on the mist. It filled his throat like cement.

I’m dying, he thought. He felt some panic, but it was muted and at a distance. He pulled himself another scant few inches forward. It wasn’t enough.

And then hands were pulling him forward with a sudden jerk, and it seemed like he was flying through the air and landing in a limp sprawl, gasping, spitting, a foul foam coming from his mouth. I’m a mad dog. It almost made him laugh, but then his stomach rebelled and he curled in on himself and tried to breathe. Couldn’t without his throat closing up. Someone pried his mouth open and poured in something that burned; he spit it out. They tried again. This time, it scorched down his abraded throat and all the way to his stomach. He thought it was liquor until the fourth drink, and then he suddenly realized it was just water. Only water. The clear air bathed his brain in oxygen again, and now he could think, if clumsily.

“You stupid fool!” That sounded like Dario, but the voice seemed oddly unsteady. When Jess rolled over on his back he saw Dario kneeling over him holding a pitcher of water, now almost empty. The young man’s hand was shaking, and so was the glass vessel. Dario set it down without comment. “Do you know how close you came? Do you?”

Oh. The Archivist’s office. He’d gone back for the papers. Did he still have them? He raised his hands. No. He didn’t. He felt a vast chasm of despair, and a huge spasm of coughing racked through him, pumping rancid green foam from his mouth again. His head pounded. He ached in every muscle. He shivered all over in convulsive tremors.

He’d failed.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Papers. Lost.”

“Not lost,” Wolfe said. “You held on to them. Somehow.”

Jess looked up once his muscles unlocked again. The Scholar was fanning the documents out on the desk that once belonged to Neksa, studying them with great intensity. He looked pale. Beads of sweat ran down his face, but there was no mistaking the intensity on his face. Or the relief. “You found it,” he said, and glanced over at the two of them. “Thank you. Both of you.”

“Just tell me it was worth what it nearly cost,” Dario snapped. “Because you almost had a second dead Brightwell to explain!”

Wolfe went still, and his expression blanked. Jess remembered a second later—only a second this time, a delay and then a deadly, detonating flash of knowledge—that his brother was dead.

He barely heard Wolfe say, “I’m aware of that, Santiago.”

“What if he’d died getting those and it had turned out to be the Archivist’s grocery list? Think, Scholar. Your stubbornness is likely to get us killed if you don’t!”

Dario is . . . on my side? Jess didn’t know what to make of that. Then he was a bit ashamed of his surprise. But only a bit.

“We should go,” Wolfe said, and gathered up the papers. “Schreiber will need these.”

Jess coughed out another mouthful of foul, green-tinted foam. Couldn’t seem to take a breath without producing more. It hurt. “What are they?” he managed to ask. “The papers?”

That got both of their attention. He wiped his mouth and sat up. That brought on more coughing, but less foam. His lungs felt stuffed with cotton, but at least he was able to breathe now.

“They’re records of the harbor defenses,” Wolfe said. “And the process for activating them. It’s a secret held by the Archivists for thousands of years, and we need it desperately now.” After a short pause, he said, “This is to your credit, Jess.”

“Thanks.” Jess held out a hand, and Dario shook his head.

“Stay down there,” he said. “Until you can get up on your own. You almost drowned in your own juices, fool.”

“Who dragged me out?” Jess asked. Paused for another spate of coughing. “You?”

Dario shook his head and nodded toward Wolfe, who was rolling the papers into a tight scroll that he put into an inner pocket of his robe. “I was holding the damned door,” Dario said.

“Don’t forget your sword,” Jess said. Four whole words without coughing, though he felt the threatening flutter deep in his lungs.

That got him a glare. “That reminds me. You owe me for a new sword. Though where you’ll get enough geneih to pay for it . . .”

Jess shook his head. Didn’t try to reply. He saved his breath for the effort to come, and with grim determination he grabbed hold of Neksa’s desk and pulled himself up to his knees. Then his feet. He clung to the support for a long few seconds and felt dizzy with relief that he was capable of staying upright on his own. Running was a distant dream, but if he could stand, he could walk.

And he had the feeling that they needed to be on the move, without delay. He’d come very, very close to not leaving the Archivist’s office alive, and he thought there was a more than good chance that there were more dangers to come before they were out of this place. “We should be on our way,” he said. Six words in a row. He suppressed the cough.