Sword and Pen

by Rachel Caine

  “Thank you, Sergeant Mwangi.”

  Mwangi inclined her head just the slightest bit and left the room for a moment. Morgan opened the cabinet in the corner of Salvatore’s office and found more than fifty volumes shelved there; each had the classification of automata on the spine. There were seventeen volumes just for sphinxes, ten for lions. More than twenty for Scribes.

  This would take a long time, and she already felt the ache building behind her eyes. She pulled the first volume and carried it to Salvatore’s desk. He had a bookstand, and she placed the volume there. The entries were orderly, but it was the wrong order for what she needed, and she requested them differently; the contents revised, and she had groupings of sphinxes in the highest-risk spots in Alexandria, starting with the Serapeum.

  She started with the first and pressed her fingers to the entry. She felt an answering tingle of connection. Storeroom in the Serapeum. She called up the complex formulae that formed the basic program for this type of creature and overlaid it on the code she called up from the patrolling sphinx. It fit perfectly. No meddling.

  She placed a verification code on the entry and moved on.

  Ten entries on, she felt rather than saw the two Obscurists she’d asked for take their places, and she paused to instruct them on how to proceed. They didn’t need oversight, which was why she’d requested them; both had written countless scripts for automata. They understood how to find even clever digressions. She had Salk take the lions, and Chowdry the less common models: Spartans, gods, monsters of all types.

  She found her first compromised sphinx nearly a hundred entries on, blocked the malicious commands, and marked the automaton as compromised. That one patrolled the Serapeum’s gardens, but so far, no one had activated its more sinister functions. She continued, moving faster, and located two more before her headache and exhaustion forced her to pause for food and water and to rest her eyes. She put up a map of Alexandria on the wall and marked where she’d found compromised machines; the others added their own discoveries. She found only two tampered with at the Serapeum, but there were six inside the Great Archives. Six inside the Lighthouse. All the sphinxes inside the Greek fire facility, but those had been discovered and their malicious commands erased by someone else. Eskander, most likely.

  She finished the first volume and went to the second.

  She wasn’t even certain how far she’d gone when something odd dragged her out of her iron concentration. Her brain wouldn’t put it into the right box, since it was so fixed on the problem in front of her . . . and then she knew what had distracted her.

  Screaming.

  She looked up. Sergeant Mwangi was still in the doorway, but she was writing in her Codex, and as Morgan focused on her the sergeant said, “I’m locking you in here for safety.”

  “No!” Morgan jumped to her feet and ran out. “You two, keep working!” She crossed the threshold, and Mwangi locked the door behind her. From the corridor, she could hear the sounds more clearly. “What’s happening?”

  “An attack,” Mwangi said. “Companies are responding.”

  “What kind of attack?” And how had anyone gotten into the Iron Tower? Obscurists could enter and leave, but anyone else coming in required specific credentials. She hadn’t checked the Iron Tower, but she knew Salk’s list would have covered the automata downstairs at the ground level, and there were none higher, not here.

  Or were there? She couldn’t remember if Gregory had installed one in his opulent office, the one that Eskander had refused to use. But if so, that door was locked and couldn’t be opened by anyone except the current Obscurist Magnus.

  “What’s happening down there?” Morgan asked, but she asked it on the move, running for the stairs; it would be faster than the lifting chamber. “What kind of attack?”

  “Obscurist, stop!” Mwangi ordered, but Morgan didn’t obey. She kept running. “There are two traitor Obscurists! Please stop, I can’t let you go down there!”

  Morgan came to a sudden halt at the landing and looked down. There were two of them; they had already set the sole automaton guardian ablaze with Greek fire, and it was melting into a horrifying skeleton as she watched. The High Garda were shooting, but the two Obscurists—young men, both of them—had some kind of alchemical protection in place. She caught her breath as she saw one of them throw a glass bulb toward the sheltered High Garda soldiers. They saw it coming, but there was nowhere for them to go.

  Morgan reached out her hand and hardened the air around the globe. She lowered it gently to the flagstones, then, with a puff of air, rolled it quietly back toward the Obscurists. The one who’d thrown the globe was still staring where it should have landed, waiting for the virulent green flames to erupt and set the soldiers alight . . . and he didn’t notice that the globe he’d thrown was bumping toward him until it bumped his boot.

  He drew back his foot to kick it away toward the High Garda.

  Morgan couldn’t let him have a second try at killing more people. She quickly denatured the components inside the globe, and by the time his boot hit it, it was filled with nothing more than sludge that would leave a stain but couldn’t burn if they put a match to it.

  But there was something else; she could feel it. Something shrouded in Obscurist formulae, something not right here.

  Then she saw it, an apparently abandoned bag sitting in the exact center of the floor on top of the mosaic seal of the Great Library. It looked anonymous, but inside . . . She struggled to understand the complex whirl of formulae waiting to be triggered. That one would create a violent updraft of wind, something strong enough to reach through the central open space of the Iron Tower all the way to the top. The layer entangled with it ensured that fire burned hotter, a simple enhancement used in Artifex forges.

  Beneath that was a bundle of Greek fire bottles waiting to be broken.

  The last layer, the trigger layer of commands, was a single word that would crush the bottles.

  Morgan realized with a wave of sick horror that what was intended here was mass murder. With a single spoken phrase, these two rogue Obscurists would unleash a whirlwind of Greek fire that would spiral up through every floor, trapping innocents in an inferno from which there would be no escape. The High Garda’s denaturing powder wouldn’t be enough.

  She had to stop it before it started.

  One of the two men opened his mouth, and she saw the feverish light in his eyes. This was it. He was going to ignite the bomb.

  She used the same trick they’d used on her. She had no prewritten scripts to help her, but she didn’t need them; she’d spent years perfecting the ability to hide, and that meant hiding any sounds that might betray her, too. She could play the same games.

  He shouted, “Tota est scientia!” The motto of the Great Library, used as a weapon.

  But she’d already stilled the air around him, and the sound never left his lips. He was effectively mute.

  He tried again, and again, looking desperate now, and when he realized it was useless he fixed on her with pure hatred.

  He threw another Greek fire bomb at her, and she fought the urge to panic. No. Stand. You have to keep him silent!

  While maintaining his imposed silence, she reached out to catch the glass globe as it fell toward her.

  It was the only thing she could do, and it was a horrible risk; if she fumbled, she’d burn. If she cracked the glass in her terror, she’d burn.

  But she caught it like a dropped egg and held it in her trembling palm for a long few seconds until Sergeant Mwangi rushed over, grabbed the innocent-looking thing, and lobbed it with deadly accuracy back at the two Obscurists.

  They were not prepared. One of them attempted the same catch, but it fell between his outstretched hands, struck the pavement at their feet, and splashed liquid in a thick pool around them.

  Then they burned.

  “Put them ou
t!” Mwangi shouted, and turned to Morgan as the squad rushed over with denaturing powder. One of them seemed like he might live. The other, by the time the powder was applied, was a blackened, burning nightmare.

  She realized with a flinch that she was still imposing silence on him, but when she released her hold on the air, he didn’t scream.

  His throat was too seared to make the sound.

  “Obscurist?” Mwangi grabbed her arms as she wavered. “Obscurist, are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, but it felt awful and hollow. She turned away to avoid Mwangi’s glance. Tears burned in her eyes, but she fiercely blinked them back. I did what I had to do.

  The ring said nothing. But as the burned man lay dying on the floor of the Iron Tower, the ring began to gather the quintessential fluid rising from his body.

  “Bomb,” she managed to tell Mwangi. “In the bag. Be careful, it’s deadly. I can make it safer, but I need time.”

  Mwangi looked doubtful, but she nodded. “What do you need?”

  I need the Obscurist Magnus, she wanted to say, but Eskander had already saved her once today. He needed to rest.

  She took a deep breath and said, “Time.”

  Then she set to work unraveling and erasing the work of madmen.

  * * *

  —

  It took the better part of an hour before she was certain all of the tricks the Obscurists had built into the bomb were disabled, and she was covered in sweat and exhausted when she finished . . . but the bag was safely removed, and the Iron Tower secured under heavy guard.

  “They intended to kill as many as they could,” she told Mwangi as they took the lifting chamber back up to the office where they’d left her assistants. “Maybe even destroy the entire Iron Tower; I’m not sure even this structure could hold up under that kind of Greek fire attack from inside.”

  “But why would they?” Mwangi asked. She was very shaken, underneath that professional calm. “Surely not even the old Archivist would want to destroy the very foundations of the Great Library!”

  “I think he wants to destroy as much as he can, and build from the ruins,” Morgan said. “Wars have casualties. And he knows we sided against him.”

  “He took an oath!”

  “And as he probably sees it, he’s keeping it,” she said. She was so tired she wanted to weep. “I hope this is the worst he tries.”

  But somehow, she didn’t think it was.

  When Mwangi unlocked the door, both Chowdry and Salk were crowding at the threshold, talking at once. Mwangi pushed them back with a frown. “It’s all right,” she said. “The crisis is—”

  “Morgan, there’s a pattern,” Chowdry shouted over her. “We know who was behind the ring of traitors here. It was Vanya! Vanya Nikolin!”

  She frantically tried to remember the faces of the Obscurists who’d been caught or killed. Vanya hadn’t been among them; she would have remembered. Eskander had given him important tasks. I trusted him, too, she thought with a sinking heart. I should have been more careful. He always did favors for Gregory. Leopards hardly ever change spots.

  “Is he still inside?” Even as she asked that, she checked her Codex. “The record says he is, but—”

  “He’s not,” Salk confirmed. “Chowdry saw him leave in a hurry earlier, and while you were gone we noticed that he had altered the records. He’s also removed his collar, so we can’t track him with any accuracy. But that doesn’t matter. We know where he’s going, we think.”

  “It was the Spartans and the gods that tipped us off,” Chowdry added. “Those are the ones that he’s positioned to guard a particular path.”

  “What kind of path? To where?”

  The two men looked at each other and said at the same time, “We think he’s found the Tomb of Heron.”

  EPHEMERA

  Text of a letter from prior Archivist Alfred Nobel to his Curia, interdicted from the Codex

  Scholars Magni,

  Since the French rebellion that cost so many lives and precious volumes, I have given much consideration to the preservation and protection of the Great Archives themselves. The Archives structure, while unquestionably secure and almost impossible to breach, still represents the single greatest attraction for potential enemies and would-be conquerors in the city—perhaps even the world. As long as our enemies believe it is possible to seize our wealth of books and control it for themselves, the Great Library exists in constant peril.

  I would much prefer to install within the Great Archives a fail-safe, one that will make even the most audacious and power-mad ruler pause.

  We would never use this system, of course, but it would act as a great and terrible deterrent. The secret of the system should be kept rigorously, and a threat to use it issued only in the event of an upstart kingdom or country vowing to take the Great Archives by force.

  I believe that the threat of wholesale destruction, of worldwide intellectual suicide, will cause any would-be intruders to retreat and leave us in peace.

  Obviously, this secret must stay in the hands of the Archivist; no other, not even the Lord Commander of the High Garda, should be entrusted with its activation key. It is a responsibility so great, and so terrible, that I would never put the burden on another.

  The only option is to make any attack on us so costly to the entirety of humanity that war itself becomes unthinkable.

  Should you concur, we may start construction of this system within the month.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KHALILA

  “Hello, my desert rose.”

  Khalila straightened but she didn’t turn; she had just put down her Codex on the small table that she was using for a desk. “Dario.” Her tone was carefully neutral. “Are you all right?”

  “You heard.” His hands touched her shoulders, but he didn’t try to turn her around. Good. She was still angry with him, and perhaps he could sense it. “No well done or you were so brave? You break my heart, beauty.”

  She did turn after all, because she wanted to see his face. On seeing it—the not-quite-right smile, the bleakness in his eyes—she abandoned all effort at anger and silently came into his arms. She felt him take a sudden, deep breath that seemed more like a shudder, and then he relaxed against her. Heavy in her arms. He smelled like death and alcohol, but she ignored that and pulled him closer. She put her lips close to his ear and said, “Well done, my prince.”

  “You know what happened?”

  “I was told,” she whispered. “Oh, Dario. Why didn’t you tell me Santi—”

  “There wasn’t time. From the moment that Santi found that the Elites had taken the Greek fire facility and had control of the automata, the clock was spinning. His forces were already stretched thin. He needed a . . . creative solution.”

  “And that was you.”

  “I am good at deception,” he said. “Growing up in my world, that’s considered quite a strength.”

  She pushed him back a little and met his gaze. “You don’t fool me,” she said. “It was worse than we were told, wasn’t it?”

  “If it was, do you think I’d ever tell you? However would I maintain my image as—what was it Jess called me once—a right bastard?”

  He had his defenses up, gilded and sharp. She decided not to test them. She kissed him instead, and his response seemed desperate to her. As if he couldn’t quite believe it was real. His lips tasted bitter for a moment, and then bittersweet as heartbreak and moonlight. But warm, so warm. So wanting. Her fingers trembled against his face, and she thought she might break from longing. Today of all days, she needed to feel love.

  And so, very evidently, did he. She could feel the feverish longing in him, and something else, something so desperate it took her breath.

  “Easy, querida,” he whispered when they separated just enough to breathe. “I don’t want to forget my promi
ses. Or your duty.”

  There was such a terrible bitter weight on the word duty. She felt him trembling. “Dario,” she said. “You can tell me what happened. You know you can.”

  He shook his head. His smile seemed desperate to her, and then it crumbled like a falling wall. He caught his breath on a sob that took him by surprise, and it took all his strength to try to hide that pain again.

  “No,” she whispered, and put her hands on his face. “My love, there is no shame in tears for a terrible thing. However necessary it might have been.”

  He almost let go. Almost. But then that glittering, feverish smile rallied. “Ah, querida. I will weep when this is done. For now, I will move to the next moment, and I want to spend that with you, not bad memories.” He took a breath. “If I’m honest with myself, I want to spend every moment with you.” No jests now, no defenses. “I asked you to marry me. I truly was not joking, Khalila. Choose the day, and I’ll write the marriage contract.”

  He was so serious, so vulnerable, that it frightened her. She kissed him again. And again. And when she felt that wound in him had sealed a little, she whispered, “I would say today, if I could. You know that.”

  “But soon, yes?”

  “Soon,” she confirmed, and smiled. “And what will you give as a meher?” She was teasing him, really. The meher was an ancient practice, tradition and symbol now instead of the bride’s compensation as it once was.

  “My heart, for the token,” he said. “And half my wealth, if you’ll have it.”

  He wasn’t joking. She had to check twice to be certain of that. “Dario! I don’t need your money. Surely you don’t think—”

  “I don’t. But what is mine is yours, flower. And always will be. Marriage contract or not. Formalities or not. That’s what I believe.”

  She kissed him again. Gently this time. “Soon.”

  “Name the day.”

  “Quiet, you,” she said when they finally parted, and led him to a padded sofa someone had dragged against the wall. It was serving as her catnap spot; she couldn’t imagine having a full night’s sleep anymore. Not as things were. “Sit and rest. Have you eaten?”