The old man leisurely ripped loose another page. He seemed relaxed now. Sated. ‘Do you understand what I’m doing, boy?’
Jess shook his head. He was trembling all over.
‘I have fellows who spend fortunes to slay the last living example of a rare animal and serve it for a dinner party. There’s no act of possession more complete than consuming the unique. It’s mine now. It will never be anyone else’s.’
‘You’re mad,’ Jess spat. He felt as though he might spew all over the fine leather and brightwork, and he couldn’t seem to get a clean breath.
The rich man chewed another page and swallowed, and his expression turned bitter. ‘Hold your tongue. You’re an unlettered guttersnipe, a nobody. I could kill you and leave you here, and no one would notice or care. But you’re not special enough to kill, boy. Ten a penny, the likes of you.’ He ripped out another page. When Jess tried to grab for the book again, the old man pulled it out of his reach and smacked him soundly on the side of the head with the cane.
Jess reeled back with tears in his eyes and his head ringing like the bells of St Paul’s. The man rapped on the carriage door. The flash servant in his red vest opened the door and grabbed Jess’s arm to haul him out to sprawl on the cobbles.
The toff leant out and grinned at him with ink-stained teeth. He tossed something out – Jess’s rag-picker shirt and vest. And a single gold coin.
‘For your troubles, gutter rat,’ the old man said, and shoved another page of something that had once been perfect into his maw to chew it to bits.
Jess found he was weeping, and he didn’t know why, except he knew he could never go back to what he’d been before he’d climbed in that carriage. Never not remember.
The man in the vest climbed up to the driver’s seat of the carriage. He looked down on Jess with an unsmiling, unfeeling stare, then engaged the engine.
Jess saw the old toff inside the carriage tip his hat before he slammed the door, and then the conveyance lurched to a roll, heading away.
Jess came to his feet and ran a few steps after the departing carriage. ‘Wait!’ he yelled, but it was useless, worthless, and it drew attention to the fact he was half-naked, and there was a very visible smuggling harness clutched to his chest. Jess wanted to retch. The death of people crushed under the paws of the Library’s lions had shocked him, but seeing that deliberate, horrifying destruction of a book, especially that book – it was far worse. St Paul had said, lives are short, but knowledge is eternal. Jess had never imagined that someone would be so empty that they’d need to destroy something that precious, that unique, to feel full.
The carriage disappeared around a corner, and Jess had to think about himself, even shaky as he was. He tightened the buckles on the harness again, slipped the shirt over his head and added the vest, and then he walked – he did not run – back to the warehouse where his father waited. The city swirled around him in vague colours and faces.
He couldn’t even feel his legs, and he shivered almost constantly. Because the route had been burnt into him, he walked by rote, taking the twists and turns without noting them, until he realised he was standing in the street of his father’s warehouse.
One of the guards at the door spotted him, darted out, and hustled him inside. ‘Jess? What happened, boy?’
Jess blinked. The man had a kind sort of look at the moment, not the killer Jess knew he could be. Jess shook his head and swiped at his face. His hand came away wet.
The man looked grave when Jess refused to speak, and motioned over one of his fellows, who ran off quick in search of Jess’s father. Jess sank down in a corner, still shaking, and when he looked up, his mirror image was standing in front of him – not quite his mirror, really, since Brendan’s hair had grown longer and he had a tiny scar on his chin.
Brendan crouched down to stare directly into his brother’s eyes. ‘You all right?’ he asked. Jess shook his head. ‘You’re not bleeding, are you?’ When Jess didn’t respond, Brendan leant closer and dropped his voice low. ‘Did you run into a fiddler?’
Fiddler was the slang they used for the perverts, men and women alike, who liked to get their pleasure from children. For the first time, Jess found his voice. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like that. Worse.’
Brendan blinked. ‘What’s worse than a fiddler?’
Jess didn’t want to tell him, and at that moment, he didn’t have to. The office door upstairs slammed, and Brendan jumped to his feet and disappeared again as he climbed up a ladder to the darkened storage where the book crates were hidden.
His father hurried over to where his eldest son sat leaning against the warehouse wall, and quickly ran hands over him to check for wounds. When he found none, he took off Jess’s vest and shirt. Callum breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the harness sat empty. ‘You delivered,’ he said, and ruffled Jess’s hair. ‘Good lad.’
Approval from his father brought instant tears to Jess’s eyes, and he had to choke them down. I’m all untied, he thought, and he was ashamed of himself. He hadn’t been hurt. He hadn’t been fiddled. Why did he feel so sullied?
He took a deep breath and told his father the truth, from the lions and the dead people, to the toff in the carriage, to the death of On Sphere Making. Because that was what he’d seen: a murder – the murder of something utterly unique and irreplaceable. That, he began to realise, was what he felt that had left him so unsettled: grief. Grief, and horror.
Jess expected his father – a man who still, at heart, loved the books he bought and sold so illegally – to be outraged, or at least share his son’s horror. Instead, Callum Brightwell just seemed resigned.
‘You’re lucky to get away with your life, Jess,’ he said. ‘He must have been drunk on his own power to let you see that, and walk. I’m sorry. It’s true, there are a few like him out there; we call ’em ink-lickers. Perverts, the lot of them.’
‘But … that was the book. Aristotle’s book.’ Jess understood, at a very fundamental level, that when he’d seen that book be destroyed, he’d seen a light pass out of the world. ‘Why did you do it, Da? Why did you sell it to him?’
Callum averted his eyes. He clapped Jess hard on the shoulder, and squeezed with enough force to bend bone. ‘Because that’s our business. We sell books to those who pay for the privilege, and you’d best learn that what is done with them after is not our affair. But still, well done. Well done this day. We’ll make a Brightwell of you yet.’
His father had always been strict about his children writing nightly in their handwritten journals, and Jess took up his pen before bed. After much thought, he described the ink-licker, and what it was like seeing him chew up such a rare, beautiful thing. His da had always said it was for the future, a way for family to remember him once he was gone … and to never talk about business, because business lived beyond them. So he left that part out, running the book. He only talked about the pervert and how it had made him feel, seeing that. His da might not approve, but no one read personal journals. Even Brendan wouldn’t dare.
Jess dreamt uneasily that night of blood and lions and ink-stained teeth, and he knew nothing he’d done had been well done at all.