by Rachel Caine
As he sat, his two guards piled in on either side. It was a tight fit.
“Sorry, sir,” the one on his right said. “We’re ordered to stay with you.”
“Fine,” he said. “Don’t jog my elbow.”
He was already jotting down notes in his Codex as he spoke, and he called up three books for reference and checked his assumptions as he sketched out the design. He was heavily absorbed in planning, so it was a surprise when he glanced up and realized that he didn’t recognize the street they were on.
“Driver? Where are you going?”
No answer. He started to rise and rap on the ceiling.
The High Garda soldier to his right produced a sidearm and jammed it into his side. A second later, he had another gun pressed to his left flank.
“You make a large target,” one of them said. “I’d be very careful, Scholar Schreiber.”
He stayed very still. “I really don’t have time for whatever you are doing. It’s important that I get to the forge. Why would the Lord Commander prevent me—” He stopped himself as a grim realization settled in his stomach. “You aren’t High Garda.”
“Smart boy,” the one on the left said. “Sit your clever ass down.”
“What do you want?” The driver, he realized with a sinking feeling, must have been in on it as well; the carriage was still clattering along at a high rate of speed. Taking him . . . where?
“You,” the soldier said. “And I’d like to keep you alive, but if that can’t be done, then I’m just fine with the alternative. Are we understood?”
“You’re very clear. Who do you work for? Not the Archivist, surely.”
“Not the one you call Archivist, no.” The man who was talking now had a cruel smile on his lips. The uniform made him anonymous, but Thomas memorized his face: long, narrow, pale. A vulpine sort of shape, with clever dark eyes and very dark hair. An accent that implied Russia, or one of the Slavic countries; it was difficult to say, since the man was speaking accented Alexandrian Greek. “Stay compliant and stay alive, Scholar. We have a long trip ahead of us.”
“I don’t have time for your games,” Thomas said. “Please don’t make me kill the two of you.”
The two soldiers exchanged looks past him and laughed. “Scholar. Don’t be stupid.”
Must be fast, Thomas told himself. He mapped his movements out before he executed, the same way he planned an intricate machine, this, then this, then this, and by the time his hands moved with a snap he was already at the end of the equation, in which two High Garda imposters lay unconscious or dead.
But humans were not machines, and calculations were no guarantee of success, and he didn’t anticipate that the men would have such fast reflexes. Or the instant agony that tore through his body, a shock like a lightning strike that left him utterly limp and helpless. Move, he begged himself; only sluggishly did his brain inform him that he couldn’t. For a horrible moment he thought he’d been shot and was dying . . . but no.
He’d been hit with two High Garda stun rounds.
The men didn’t waste time. One took out restraints and snapped them on Thomas’s unresisting wrists. They tightened like constricting snakes, and as the man checked the fit, Thomas glimpsed a flash of gold from a Great Library insignia. It seemed to be embedded in the man’s skin on the inner side of his forearm. He’d never seen that before, and even panicked and helpless as he was, he couldn’t help wondering what it was, how it worked. It was definitely an emblem that would not be removed. A lifetime commitment, like a gold band, but . . . different.
“No games, Scholar,” the soldier said. “Next time we use lethal force. I’ll give you one rebellion. Not two.”
He couldn’t speak. Could hardly breathe against the continuing waves of agony that convulsed his muscles. All his size and strength meant nothing; he was being taken as easy as a rabbit in a bag. Think, he ordered himself. It was all he could do . . . but even as the pain subsided, he became aware that moving his hands caused the restraints to dig in deeper. And they had teeth, it seemed, because as he struggled to sit up and moved his hands, he felt sharp, biting pain under the metal. He winced.
“The more you fight, the more those cuffs will dig in,” the other soldier said. He was a taller, darker man with shimmering dark hair and clever eyes entirely empty of sympathy. “I’ve seen them saw open veins. Not a pretty death, Scholar. Stay relaxed and you won’t injure yourself.”
“Who are you?” Thomas hardly recognized his own voice; it came out in a low growl, but it sounded vulnerable at the same time. Weak. “Not High Garda, though you wear their cloth.” When they both ignored that question, he tried again. “Why do you want me?”
“Stop asking questions. The next time you open your mouth, I’ll shock it shut. Be a shame if you bit off your tongue.”
Thomas wished he could ask Jess what manner of soldier had access to High Garda equipment and also wore a Great Library symbol embedded in their skin. He wished Jess was with him for other reasons, too; his friend had a gift for twisting his way out of tricky situations. Thomas did not. He was large, solid, and occasionally lucky, but just now he was as trapped as a bull in a cage. So what would Jess think about? Not directly attacking, that much was certain. And when Thomas closed his eyes, he could almost hear his friend whisper, Use your advantages. But what advantages did he have? He was handcuffed, barely able to move. Wherever they were traveling, gravity had shifted him back in his seat. They were going uphill now, at a fairly sharp angle.
Then the steam carriage rocked a little as it passed over a bump in the road, and it came into his mind as clearly as if it was written in fire: Schwingung. Vibration. Oscillation. It was a common complaint that steam carriages, because of the height of their cabs above the ground, and the weight of their steam engines, were inherently vulnerable to toppling in high winds, especially on steep grades of roads. But how to take advantage?
First, get both the men on this side of the carriage.
Thomas was not an actor by nature, but he remembered how the stun round had woken convulsions in his muscles, and he did his earnest best to feign a relapse. He rolled his eyes back in his head and began to twitch and flail; he was careful about his hands, though he used his legs in the effort. One of them shouted at him to stop, but Thomas kept it up, seemingly unhearing, lurching and flopping and crowding the soldier to the right against the far wall. The other one finally moved from his left to take the seat opposite Thomas, shouting at him to calm down. He was over the centerline of the carriage, if not next to the window. It would have to be enough.
Thomas braced his legs against the opposite seat and stopped twitching and moaning, and tried to look very, very unconscious. He didn’t flinch when one soldier leaned forward and checked his pulse. He was waiting.
The carriage hit another bump, a hole that rocked it from side to side as it rumbled forward, and Thomas came upright fast, throwing his weight in the same direction as the carriage’s tilt, then quickly back, then up again, a motion that confused and surprised both soldiers, and in the few seconds it took for them to realize Thomas was doing something, the carriage’s wheels began to bounce and twist. Thomas felt the entire vehicle shudder as it leaned. If the soldier on the far side of the carriage had the sense to move back to balance the load—
But he didn’t; he tried to grab Thomas and hold him still.
Mistake.
Thomas timed his next move precisely. At exactly the height of the unstable side-to-side motion, he threw his entire weight to the right, and it sent the soldier tumbling as the carriage’s oscillation passed the point of no return.
The driver yelled in alarm and jumped free as the carriage crashed over on its side, landed hard, and began to slide. The impact bounced Thomas’s head off the steel frame as they landed. All the glass shattered, covering the three inside with sharp fragments. The boiler, Thomas thought. The ri
sk was that in an accident it could explode; there were gruesome examples of such disasters, though the compartments were supposed to be shielded for that reason.
But he couldn’t worry about that now.
It hurt—badly—but he rolled over the glass and on top of the stunned soldier nearest to him—the Slav—and brought his cuffed hands up and down in a precise slam that impacted the side of the man’s head. He was careful. He didn’t crush the man’s skull. But he doubted the fellow would be objecting to anything else for a fair few minutes. The impact cost him as well; sharp teeth sank deeper into his flesh, and blood slicked his wrists and dripped down his hands. As much as he tried to move them in tandem and not twist or struggle against the bonds, he could feel the things digging. Vile things. He hated the engineer who’d designed them.
The soldier he’d hit was out and limp. The other one was bleeding badly from a head wound, also unconscious. Thomas quickly skinned back that one’s uniform jacket sleeve and saw what he’d glimpsed before: a Great Library seal, but instead of being set into a bracelet, this was somehow grafted directly into the man’s skin. Interesting in an intellectual puzzle, but disconcerting in the real world. Thomas gritted his teeth and touched the shackles to the man’s skin seal, and felt the biting teeth of the restraints retract. The manacles clicked open.
Thomas used them on the soldier, who was starting to come around, then thought about that seal. No, better not to chance the restraints at all on him.
“Kiril!” That shout came from outside. The driver, coming back. “Are you all right?”
Thomas didn’t look at his own wrists, though they were still bleeding; he assumed the flow of blood would be far worse if he’d severed veins. He grabbed both guns, stuck one awkwardly in his waistband, and checked the settings on the one he still held. He changed it to lethal.
While he was about that, the driver looked into the window.
Thomas aimed right at her face, and the woman flinched and dropped out of sight. Hopefully, she’d run away.
Time to go, Thomas thought. He shoved the pistol in his waistband and stretched up to grab the sides of the window. Glass crunched under his palms, and on the left side there was enough left to slice. He hardly felt it at the moment. No time. He heaved himself up and out, rolling off and down to his feet. He was not as fast or as graceful as some of his friends, but he was fast enough; the driver backed away, her niqab rippling in the strong breeze.
She was holding a gun.
“Don’t make me,” Thomas said, and he drew one of the pistols from his belt—the lethal one—and aimed. She hesitated, then dropped her gun to the ground. “Where were you taking me?”
Thomas stepped away from the carriage. The boiler’s hissing seemed unlikely to result in explosion, but better to be safe.
The woman didn’t respond, but she warily backed away from him.
He heard the scrape of footsteps behind him. More than one set. Several.
“Drop the pistols, Scholar,” a calm voice said. “How exactly did you destroy the carriage? I’d like to know, for the future.”
He slowly bent and put the weapon on the ground, dropped the other one still in his waistband, then turned to face her. “Zara Cole,” he said. “The traitor.”
Zara didn’t seem nearly as tired or stressed as she should have been, he thought. Her fine dark eyes were clear, no shadows beneath or in them. Her hair lay in a neat, straight cap around her face. She wore a dark red uniform with gold embroidery on the shoulders: a High Garda Elite uniform. That settled, for him, the identity of the men in the carriage, and likely the driver as well. “I think we can debate just who’s turned traitor at some other time, Scholar,” she said. “You’re going to help us take back what you helped steal.”
Thomas’s numb surprise vanished in a flash of rage. “No. I’m not going to help you. You killed Jess’s brother.”
“In all fairness, I thought I was killing Jess,” she said. “But all book smugglers have an automatic death sentence. I only carried out a lawful execution in defense of my Archivist.”
He calculated the odds of killing her. If they’d been even close to reasonable, he would have tried; she deserved that many times over. But she had a full squad of Elites filling in behind her, all heavily armed, and another carrier parked on the side of the street—they were on a street, he realized, but one full of derelict buildings, and no help of any kind in view. He realized with a sick churning in his stomach that he’d waited too long to escape. Five minutes earlier, and he’d have made it away.
“On your knees,” Zara said, and nodded to her squad. Three of them moved toward him, and Zara’s aim never wavered. “Twitch and I’ll kill you and find another engineer. Understood?”
“You chose me because it would hurt Wolfe,” Thomas said. “Correct?”
She shrugged. “Let’s call that a bonus. Is that bitter old fool still alive? I’d thought he would have died in the arena.”
“We’re going to win,” Thomas said, as another set of restraints settled and tightened around his wrists. “And you’re going to die.”
“That last is a certainty for everyone. But winning?” She gave him a slow, secret smile. “I think that’s going to be harder than you think, Thomas. Much, much harder.”
He lifted his head and fixed her with a look; she stared back, completely at ease. “I won’t work for you.”
“No,” she said. “But I think you won’t be able to resist this job.” She paused, then shook her head. “And all of this is your fault, you know. You are the root of all this evil. You and your printer.”
“Tota est scientia,” he said. “Knowledge is all. It either is, or it isn’t; you can’t say some knowledge is evil because it’s inconvenient for you. And anyone who claims differently has no understanding at all of what the Great Library represents.”
“We’ll debate this another time,” she said, and looked at her soldiers. “Get him. The Archivist is waiting.”
The Archivist.
Thomas swallowed a ball of fear that mixed poisonously with rage.
He would wait until they underestimated him.
Eventually, someone would.
* * *
—
The ride was short, and all Thomas could think to do was to bide his time, observe, wait, no matter how much that grated on him. He was surrounded by enemies, and not just people he disagreed with, but ones who had actively harmed him. Put him in prison. Tried to murder his friends. He had to be very, very careful.
He was also horribly aware that time was running out. If he didn’t gain his freedom and build that casing . . . the whole situation at the Lighthouse would quickly become a disaster. How long before anyone realized he’d gone missing? Hours, probably. Far too long.
There were no windows in the steam carriage, so he had no idea where they’d gone, and before the doors opened Zara slipped a heavy canvas bag over his head. Hands grasping his arms moved him into what sounded like a hallway—one just barely wide enough to accommodate his bulk, plus minders on either side—and he was almost certain it was made of stone. Low ceiling; he felt his head brushing against the top. It certainly hadn’t been made for someone of his size. His forehead hit the top of a doorway, and he staggered and stooped to fit underneath. When he straightened again, he felt he was in a larger chamber. He heard the echoes of the room. Underground? He couldn’t tell. There was a damp coolness to the air, and a smell of earth.
But when the canvas was pulled from his head, he realized he wasn’t underground. Just in a large, cavernous old building, a deserted space that must have once been used as a warehouse of some kind. Part of the roof was gone, and pigeons roosted in the rafters, murmuring.
There were at least a hundred High Garda Elite gathered here. Or, at least, he assumed that was what they were; only some of them were in the distinctive uniform. Many wore the outfits o
f laborers, but their bearing was pure military. There were some in Scholars’ black robes—surely those weren’t actually Scholars who’d followed this dark, ugly path? He didn’t recognize any of them, but it was a horrifying possibility.
“What is this?” he asked Zara.
“A staging ground,” she said. “Not our whole force by any means.”
They had automata as well. Many of them. They have an Obscurist. Must have. He supposed that shouldn’t come as a surprise, if Scholars had come over to the old Archivist’s side. Surely one Obscurist would turn sides. “Staging ground for what? You can’t take the Serapeum. You know that.”
“No,” she agreed. “Nor the Iron Tower. Nor the Lighthouse, not immediately. It won’t be a short battle, or a bloodless victory, but I will put the Great Library back in the hands of the man who’s guided it for half a lifetime.”
“He’s a devil!”
“No. He’s a leader. People like you, people like Wolfe . . . you all think that governance is clean and fair. It can’t be. Dissent is chaos, and it must be controlled. Knowledge is all; that’s our guiding force. And sometimes, knowledge must be protected at the cost of lives.”
“Innocent lives?”
“If necessary,” she said.
“The old saying is that knowledge is power. But power has thoroughly corrupted the man you follow now. You have to know that.”
“You’re a dreamer. You believe you can make the world. You can’t, Thomas. The world makes you.”
She was a cold one, Zara Cole. Ruthlessly good at her job, but Thomas didn’t understand her any better now than he had the first moment he’d met her. He was mostly glad of that. “What do you want from me? You know I won’t cooperate.”
“Oh, Thomas. I know you will. Because you’re a good servant of the Great Library. Follow me. Make any move to attack, or escape, and I’ll have you hamstrung.”
He believed her. And followed without tempting fate. But he was taking it all in: the soldiers, the configuration of the warehouse, the positions of guards. The stocks of supplies and weapons.
