He swallowed hard, closed the book, and tried to control his suddenly racing pulse as the carriage clattered for home.
His mother, much affected (or feeling that she ought to be), presented him with a magnificent set of engraved styluses, and his father gifted him with a brand-new leather-bound Codex, a Scholar’s edition with plenty of extra pages for notes, and handsomely embossed with the Library symbol in gold.
His brother gave him nothing, but then, Jess hadn’t expected anything.
Dinner that night was unusually calm and festive. After the half-measure of brandy his mother allowed, Jess found himself sitting alone on the back garden steps. It was a clear, cool night, unusual for London, and he stared up at the swelling white moon. The stars would be different, where he was going. But the moon would be the same.
He never expected that the prospect of leaving home would make him feel sad.
He didn’t hear Brendan come out, but it didn’t surprise him to hear the scrape of his brother’s boots on the stone behind him. ‘You’re not coming back.’
It wasn’t what Jess had expected, and he turned to look at Brendan, who slouched with his arms crossed in the shadows. Couldn’t read his expression.
‘You’re clever, Jess, but Da’s wrong about one thing: you don’t just have ink in your blood. It’s in your bones. Your skeleton’s black with it. You go there, to them, and we’ll lose you for ever.’ Brendan shifted a little, but didn’t look at him. ‘So don’t go.’
‘I thought you wanted me gone.’
Brendan’s shoulders rose and fell. He pushed off and drifted away into the darkness. Off doing God knew what. I’m sorry, Scraps, he thought. But he wasn’t, not really. Staying here wasn’t his future, any more than the Library would be Brendan’s.
This would be his last night at home.
Jess went inside, wrote in his journal, and spent the rest of the evening reading Inventio Fortunata.
Which rather proved his brother’s point, he supposed.
The next day, his father accompanied Jess to St Pancras, and waved off servants to personally carry his case to the train … all without a single word, or change of expression. As Jess accepted the bag from him, his father finally said, ‘Make us proud, son, or by God I’ll wallop you until you do.’ But there was a faint wet shine in his eyes, and that made Jess feel uncomfortable. His father wasn’t weak, and was never vulnerable.
So what he saw couldn’t be tears.
His father gave him a hard, quick nod and strode away through the swirl of passengers and pigeons. The humid belch of steam engines blew towards the vaulted ceiling of the station and intertwined in ornate ironworks. Familiar and strange at once. For a moment, Jess just stood on his own, testing himself. Trying to see how he felt caught between the old world and the new one that would come.
Still twenty minutes to the Alexandrian train, and he wondered whether or not to get a warm drink from one of the vendors in the stalls around the tracks, but as he was considering tea, he heard a commotion begin somewhere behind him.
It was a man raising his voice to a strident yell, and there was something in it that made him turn and listen.
‘—say to you that you are deceived! That words are nothing more than false idols at which you worship! The Great Library may have once been a boon, but what is it today? What does it give us? It suppresses! It stifles! You, sir, do you own a book? No, sir, not a blank, filled only with what they want you to read … a real book, an original work, in the hand of the writer? Do you dare, madam? The Library owns our memories, yet you cannot own your own books! Why? Why do they fear it? Why do they fear to allow you the choice?’
Jess spotted the speaker, who’d climbed on a stone bench and was now lecturing those passing by as he held up a journal. It wasn’t a blank from the Serapeum, stamped with the Library’s emblem. What the man brandished was far finer, with a hand-tooled leather cover and his name on it in gilt. His personal journal, in which he would write daily. Jess had one quite like it. After all, the Library provided them free on the birth of a child, and encouraged every citizen of the world to write their thoughts and memories from the earliest age possible. Everyone kept a record of the days and hours of their lives to be archived in the Library upon their deaths. The Library was a kind of memorial, in that way. It was one reason the people loved it so, for the fact it lent them a kind of immortality.
This man waved his personal journal like a torch, and there was a fever-light in his face that made Jess feel uneasy. He knew the rhetoric. The Garda would be on the way soon.
People gave the lecturer a wide berth, scared off by his passion and his wild eyes. Jess looked around. Sure enough, a knot of red-coated London Garda was heading towards the spot. The Burner saw them coming, too, and Jess saw his face go pale and set under that untidy mop of hair. He raised his voice even more. ‘A man cannot be reduced to paper, to lines and letters! He cannot be consigned to a shelf! A life is worth more than a book! Vita hominis plus libro valet!’
That last rose to a ringing shout of victory. The man reached under his coat and took out a bottle of poison-green liquid, thumbed off the cap, and poured a single drop on the cover of the personal journal he held. Then he threw the book down to the stone floor, and in a second it ignited with a shocking burst of flame that burnt emerald at the edges and bloomed in a towering column straight up into the air. Those closest stumbled back with alarmed gasps and cries of surprise.
‘Greek Fire!’ someone screamed, and then there was a scramble, a full-on rush of people for the exits. It impeded the progress of the London Garda, who were heading against the tide.
‘The Library wants you to live blind!’ the Burner shouted. ‘I die to show you the light! Don’t trust them! They lie!’
Jess should have run, he supposed; he was buffeted on all sides by those with more sense, but he lingered to watch the man with frozen dread and – yes – fascination. The book, burning on the stones, held a ghastly echo for him of helpless fury and horror, as if the pages themselves were screaming for rescue. It was an original work, an only copy, written in ink on paper. It was the man’s thoughts and dreams, and it was … dying. It wasn’t On Sphere Making, but Jess had to fight the impulse to rush to save it, regardless.
‘Out of the way!’ a Garda cried, and pushed him almost off his feet, towards the exit. ‘Get clear! Don’t you know Greek Fire when you see it, you fool?’
He did, and he also realised – all too late – that the Burner didn’t just have the drop that he’d used on the book for his demonstration. The man had a full flask-sized bottle of the stuff, and he was holding it high. It glittered in the dim light from the windows like a murky emerald.
Jess took a step back, and stumbled on his train case. He fell over it, still watching the Burner. I should get out of here, he thought, but it felt as if his brain had gone to sleep, lulled by the mesmerising rush of the fire. He wanted to leave, but his body wouldn’t respond.
‘Cork that bottle, son,’ one of the Garda said as he approached the Burner. He was older, and he sounded authoritative and oddly kind. ‘There’s no need for this. You’ve made your point, and if you want to destroy your own words, well, that’s your burden and no one else’s, sure enough. Cork that and put it down. No harm done. You’ll only have a fine, I promise you.’