by Rachel Caine
After checking in every busy workstation, Morgan was even more concerned. Why would Annis be hiding? She wasn’t ill, or in her rooms, or anywhere else she ought to be.
Morgan set out to look in the unlikely places.
It was in the twelfth room that she found her: a dusty old laboratory that had been long abandoned. It was crowded with old and broken equipment, discarded furniture, trunks of personal belongings from long-dead Obscurists.
Morgan heaved a sigh of relief when she caught sight of Annis’s flood of curling red hair from the back. It looked as if the older woman was bending over to look at something on the floor. “There you are,” Morgan said, and came into the room. “I was worried, you know.”
No answer. And no reaction. Annis’s hair swayed a little in the cool breeze from a fan vent above, but otherwise she was completely motionless. Why would she be standing in that awkward position? What—
It all came together for Morgan in a terrifying, frozen moment. Annis was upright because she was tied to a strong wooden post. The only things that stopped her from collapsing to the floor were the ropes wrapped around her body and the ones securing her wrists behind the post.
“Annis?” Morgan’s voice had gone soft and strange. “Annis?” She felt robbed of breath, of energy, until it all returned to her in a terrific jolt of fear. Her heart, which had hardly seemed to beat, began to hammer painfully, and she fought against a wave of instinct to run from this place. She couldn’t. Her friend needed help.
But she knew she was too late. She knew even before she carefully pulled back Annis’s hair and saw her death pallor, the gaping wound in her throat. The blood that had soaked down the front of her Obscurist’s robes and pooled thickly around her feet. Strange that she hadn’t seen the blood until after the wound, as if her mind simply wouldn’t allow her to notice.
Morgan pressed trembling fingers to her friend’s throat.
Her pulse was quiet.
If I scream, no one will hear me in here, she thought, and then dismissed the thought because fear was useless; fear was a distraction. Annis had been murdered. In the Iron Tower. Why? By whose hand? Why?
She heard the door swinging shut, but when she whirled to look, it was moving on its own. No one there. But she felt the aura of power, and saw it next, a shimmer like glitter dropped from the air to cluster around the edges.
Then a burst of raw energy, and the door changed to a wall.
She was trapped.
She turned as another sunburst of power ignited behind her, and saw a doorway being created this time—a stone arch, darkness behind it. And an Obscurist stepped through it.
She recognized his face—how could she not, as scarce as the Obscurists were these days, barely a few hundred in this vast tower—but she didn’t know him. He was ten years or so her elder, a thin, balding man who was utterly medium in all aspects. Medium brown hair. Medium skin tone that could have been traced to fifty different ethnicities. A forgettable arrangement of features, eyes the color of dried, dark mud. Even his height and weight were average.
But one thing about him seemed exceptional now. He’d concealed his power. She’d never had the impression of real force from him in the small interactions they’d had, but it took expert manipulation of quintessence, and prewritten formulae, to reconfigure walls. Especially in the Iron Tower.
He didn’t speak to her at all. He just came for her, and she backed up quickly, glancing around for a weapon and finding none . . . but as she dodged his grasping hands, she remembered that Annis commonly carried a knife strapped to her forearm, even at home. She’d always claimed it was for cutting fruit and trimming threads. But the important thing was that it was sharp, and it was here.
Morgan lunged for her friend’s body and ripped her sleeve in her haste; she had a wild urge to apologize, a flash so out of place it nearly blinded her, and her fingers grazed a leather sheath. She grabbed for the knife.
It wasn’t there.
It was in the hand of the nameless Obscurist, who was lunging at her.
She slipped in Annis’s blood and fell backward, and it was a lucky thing; the knife cut air half an inch from her throat as she lost her balance. Morgan fell into a stack of glassware and sent it crashing around them, but one thick vase-shaped vessel—alembic, her mind automatically supplied—rocked but stayed on the table. She grabbed it by the neck, turned, and shattered it against the man’s head with as much force as she had in her body, and he staggered sideways and dropped to one knee.
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?
Because you did not need the help. But you are outnumbered now, the ring said. And so, I help.
Morgan forced a smile. “Anyone else want to try?”
No one seemed to, but then she felt a little shiver, a waver in the power in the ring. It had only a limited reserve. It would refill itself from the latent power of quintessence floating in the air, but not quickly.
She couldn’t wait here.
Before the Obscurists could move, she dashed for the doorway, threw it open, and ran out into the corridor. Deserted. She made for the long spiral of stairs, heading down toward the more occupied levels. She tried to shout, knowing it would echo through the central corridor, but one of the Obscurists had managed to dampen sound around her. It was a simple enough prewritten code; they probably had an entire volume of them, all designed to keep themselves safe and undiscovered. But Annis had discovered them, and they’d killed her trying to find out how. Or she’d chosen that death instead of telling them. That would have been more like her.
Grief burned, and Morgan found herself gasping against tears as she plunged on down the steps, feet silent, not even her sobs making a sound.
She missed a step and almost fell, and forced herself to slow down. She saw people moving two floors down. If she could reach them . . .
Something hit the wall beside her, raising a puff of dust and an explosion of sharp fragments. It made no sound, but when she looked back she realized that one of the Obscurists had found another gun and was firing it at her. They no longer wanted her alive. They just wanted to stop her from telling anyone else.
A clap of sound so loud it deafened her brought her to a sudden stop; she felt as though her skull had shattered. Am I shot? Am I dead? She didn’t know until she lowered her hands from her head and saw no blood . . . and then saw the shape striding up the stairs toward her. The thunderclap had been an internal Translation within the Iron Tower.
And the man coming toward her was Eskander.
She opened her mouth to scream at him to take cover, but though she felt the strain of trying, the sound just . . . vanished. She didn’t know how to dismantle the effect, and there wasn’t time to try.
But Eskander didn’t need her warning. He plunged past her on the stairs, heading up, and she felt him slashing at the altered reality in a way she couldn’t even grasp as he moved.
Sound snapped back into being. His footsteps on the stairs. Her breath heaving in her lungs. “They’re armed!” she shouted, and a fraction of a second later she heard the shot. It seemed to echo through the Iron Tower like a scream, and she caught her breath as she saw Eskander stagger and miss a step.
No. No, that could not be.
He went to one knee.
Go, the ring told her with a decisive snap. She lunged forward and reached for some line of defense, something, anything, and the ring’s whisper said, Be calm. Feel the air.
The air.
She shifted the density of the air in front of Eskander into a thick block, a shield made of nothing, and as the second shot rang out, she saw the bullet hit the block and slow. It was as if it moved through thick gelatin, and when it finally tunneled its way through, it simply dropped to the stairs and rolled away, all its force spent.
Morgan pushed that shield back as she ascended the stairs. She extended it and formed it into a bubble that trapped the Obscurists inside, battering uselessly at the milky barrier. Will it hold? she asked the ring, and felt a warm pulse of approval. The power had come from the walls of the Iron Tower, from the generations of powerful Obscurists who’d been born, lived, worked, and died here. The barrier was anchored in that power. It would not break, and it wasn’t likely these traitors had the skill to rewrite their formulae to remove it.
She went back to Eskander. He’d gotten to his feet, and he was a little shaken, but when she said, “Show me,” he pulled his hand away from his side to show her the wound. “How bad is it?”
“It missed anything vital,” he said, and groaned. “Not entertaining, but I’ve had worse in my youth.” He smiled at her briefly. “Sorry I didn’t read your message immediately. It’s a busy day.”
The smile vanished as he looked at the Obscurists she’d trapped on the stairs. There was a dangerous light in his eyes. “They killed Annis.”
“Yes. She must have found them doing something they wanted to keep hidden.” She took in a deep breath. “They’re working with the exiled Archivist. I think they’ve been sabotaging our control of the automata and hiding the changes. We’ll need to do a full review of all of the machines to be certain what’s been compromised, and what it means.”
“I was already aware of some of these changes,” Eskander said. “But I’d asked Obscurist Salvatore to investigate.” He pointed to the eldest of the trapped people. “That is Obscurist Salvatore.” He sounded angry, but she thought it was mostly frustration with himself. “I chose the guilty to investigate the crime.”
“You couldn’t have known—”
“It’s my business to know,” Eskander said. “Now more than it’s ever been for any other Obscurist in history. And I’ve failed. Annis is dead because I did.” She saw the flash of real grief in his face, but like her, he had to put it behind him for now. “Your job is to take Salvatore’s place and review the entire inventory for compromise. Test them all.”
“Sir, that might take days,” she said quietly. “We might not have days.”
“Start with the ones that pose the most threat and work down. But we don’t have time to waste.”
Shouts had broken out below them, and both Obscurists and High Garda soldiers were rushing to the rescue. Good. As the first High Garda met them, Morgan said, “The Obscurist Magnus has been wounded. Find someone to take him to the Medica floor. Go up three floors; you’ll find another High Garda who’s knocked unconscious. Arrest him for treason.”
The soldier—a t
all, capable-looking young woman—hesitated only an instant before looking to Eskander for confirmation. When she got the nod, she began issuing orders to those arriving. Morgan wasn’t good at reading rank, but she thought this woman must have been a sergeant, at least. She had the bearing and authority.
Two Obscurists and two High Garda were assigned the task of taking Eskander to the Medica. He paused before leaving. “Start now,” he told her. “We’re out of time already.”
She bowed her head, and swallowed her worry as she descended the stairs. She was halfway down when the High Garda sergeant called, “Obscurist Hault? We can’t get through this—barrier.”
Without pausing, Morgan raised her hand and pushed the air back to normal density. She heard a sharp pop and felt the rush of wind ripple past her, but she didn’t look back.
She had work to do.
* * *
—
Obscurist Salvatore had his own office on the fourth floor. The entire level was dedicated to automata control; there were more than fifty Obscurists working constantly on monitoring and rewriting commands, but Salvatore’s office had only two others in it, both assistants.
Morgan didn’t know them. And couldn’t trust that they hadn’t also turned traitor. “Out,” she snapped to them, and when the middle-aged man began to protest, she looked at her High Garda escort, and without a word spoken, they were both taken away. “I’m going to need food, water, and Obscurists Chowdry and Salk. They’ll be assigned here for now.” She knew both of them, and they were competent, solid, loyal people. “Take the Codexes and journals off both of those two who were just taken out of here. Review them for any signs of disloyalty or deception.”
“Yes, Obscurist,” the sergeant said. She’d joined Morgan after seeing to the arrests, and from her posture she intended to stay.
“What’s your name?” Morgan asked her.
“Sergeant Mwangi,” the woman said.
