Home > Ash and Quill(3)

Ash and Quill(3)
Author: Rachel Caine

   But he wasn’t taking that without hitting back, and Jess saw that an instant before Beck grabbed the folded robe and flung it into the pyre of burning books. Petty contempt, but it struck Jess like a gut punch. He saw a shiver run through Khalila, too . . . just the barest flinch. Like Wolfe, she lifted her chin. Defiant.

   “Only cowards are so afraid of a scrap of cloth,” she said, clear enough to carry to the stands. There was a shimmer in her eyes: anger, not tears. “We may not agree with the Archivist; we may want to see him gone and better Scholars take his place. But we still stand for knowledge. You stand for nothing.”

   Beck looked past her and gave a bare, terse nod to a guard, and in the next instant, Khalila was seized, yanked back, and forced to her knees. She almost fell, toppling toward Jess. He instinctively put out a hand to help her, and her fingers twined with his.

   That was the instant he understood what she was really about. Removing her robe hadn’t been just defiance; it was distraction. Concealed between her fingers, she held a single metal hairpin—one she’d plucked from under her hijab.

   She knew that in Jess’s hands, a hairpin was as good a weapon as any.

   A vast, cooling sense of relief washed through his chest, and he exchanged a swift glance with her as he slipped the pin between his own fingers. She’s right. Sooner or later, there’ll be locks to open. If we live so long.

   He let go of her and hid the metal inside his shirtsleeve. He’d need to find a better hiding place for it, but that would do for now.

   Beck ignored them. He was busy throwing Wolfe’s robe to the flames. Farther down the line, they had taken Thomas’s robe, and Dario’s. Four robes flung onto the pyre, one by one, while the crowd roared approval. Jess expected the silk to burn fast, but instead the robes smoked, smoldered, shriveled in, and finally turned to gray and began to powder at the edges. Hardly any drama to it at all, which must have been disappointing for Beck’s purposes. A stench of burning hair joined the meaty reek of crisping leather bindings, and for a moment, Jess had the vision again of a body burning in those flames.

   One of their bodies.

   “Now we may start fresh,” Beck said after the silk was nothing but a tangle of ashes. “You are no longer part of the Library. In time, you’ll come to see that we are your brothers and sisters.”

   “If you want to convince us of that, let us stand up,” Santi said, and Jess could hear the ragged edge in his voice. A trickle of bright red blood ran down the sharp plane of his cheekbone from his hairline, but his eyes were clear and intensely focused on Beck. “Let us up and see how fraternal we can be.”

   “In time,” Beck said. “In due time, Captain.”

   Jess swallowed and tasted ashes. Fraternal. He didn’t want to believe that he and his friends—for whom this had started as personal loyalty, personal risk, and nothing they’d deliberately planned—had anything in common with Burners. He loathed them, even though they wanted books to be free and owned by anyone who wanted them. He’d grown up a book smuggler, so by definition he believed in that same ideal.

   But he didn’t believe in indiscriminate murder, either, and the Burners had been known to incinerate the guilty and the innocent alike, just to make their point.

   The Great Library, for all its shining history and high ideals, had just as rotten a heart; it might even be worse. The Archivist Magister might love books just as he did, but that evil old man loved power far more. He and the Curia were part of a system that had turned toxic hundreds of years ago, when a long-dead Archivist had chosen to destroy an invention, and a Scholar, to keep his firm hold on power. Every Archivist since had chosen the same dark road. Maybe now they couldn’t see any other way.

   But there had to be a way. The Library was too precious to let it fall without trying to save what was good at its heart. And if it was just the eight of them who’d fight to save it . . . then that was a start.

   Saving anything didn’t seem very likely. He was on his knees in a ruined arena in a Burner-held city, with nothing but a hairpin. Still, to a criminal like him? A hairpin was enough.

   “I’ll ask you now,” Beck said, raising his voice to be heard in the stands. The echoes came back cold. “Will you swear to join our city? To work for the ruin of the Great Library that keeps its foot on our necks, and the necks of every man, woman, and child on this earth? To do what must be done to prove our cause?”

   He was walking down the line. He stopped in front of Dario Santiago.

   Jess forgot to take in the next breath, because if there was a weak link in their chain, Beck had put his finger directly on it. Dario would do what was good for Dario. Without fail. None of them expected anything else at this point.

   Dario looked tired. He’d suffered some burns—so had Jess—in London, and his normal cocky grace was gone. He looked beaten.

   So it came as a shock when he got to his feet to face Beck and said, very clearly, in as strong a voice as Jess could remember from him, “Really? Do I look like a witless Burner? Don’t insult me with the question.” He followed it up with something in Spanish so fast Jess missed the meaning, but from scattered laughter in the stands, it must have been cutting.

   Beck’s expression didn’t change. He took a step onward. Morgan Hault was next, and just like Dario, she stood up. Not especially tall, not especially strong. Her hair blew wild around her face, and if she was frightened, she didn’t show it as she said, “No.” A clear, firm, unshakeable denial.

   They held Thomas down on his knees, probably worrying that he’d do real damage if they let him get up. He gave his answer with a sweet, broad smile. “Of course not.” He almost seemed amused.

   Glain definitely wasn’t, and since she was held down as well, she contented herself with a rude gesture and a long string of Welsh syllables. Jess knew the gist of it well enough: screw off. Very Glain.

   Khalila got up, too. Like Thomas, she was smiling. “I absolutely will not agree,” she said. “Foolish of you to even ask.”

   Jess stayed down. No choice, really, since the guard behind him whispered, “Stand up and I’ll splatter you all over the ground.” But Beck barely paused to hear his clipped no before moving on to Wolfe.

   Wolfe had been still and calm the whole time, but it was a brittle kind of stillness. His answer came, sharp: “Never.”

   Next to him, Santi bared his teeth in a savage grin. “So say we all.”

   Beck stared at them for such a long, silent moment that Jess started to sweat; that pyre was still hot, and Beck looked like a man who liked to make an example. But he finally shook his head and beckoned a woman of African descent who looked every bit as competent and dangerous as Glain. The woman moved like a trained soldier, though she wore no uniform, only a plain-spun shirt and trousers with heavy boots.

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