“If you try to use this information,” she said, “you’ll be killed. I would hate to see that happen. It’s a fool’s bargain, Jess. My father paid a great deal to get this book, and it’s cost us more than it could ever be worth. I’m only giving you fair warning.”
His throat felt suddenly tight, and he forced a smile as he said, “I’ll be back with the Blake in an hour.”
She nodded. “I will be waiting.” Somewhere in the back of the house, a bird began to sing loudly and musically, and Anit turned her head toward it with a smile. “It’s our pet skylark,” she said. “My younger brother built a house for it. The song is so beautiful, isn’t it?”
Jess held the bloodstained book in one hand and said, “It is.”
If this ended badly, at least he could enjoy the bright, familiar song of a bird he’d grown up hearing back home.
EPHEMERA
Text of a message from the Artifex Magnus, head of the Artifex school of the Great Library, to an unnamed recipient
Greetings and fair wishes, brave soldier. You have already been made aware of your mission, and I know you have doubts of the morality of such an action. You need have no fear. In firing this shot, you will remove from the ranks of the Library one of our most difficult and dangerous traitors, one for whom there is no cure but death.
I do not give this order lightly, and I know you do not take it so. The Burners cry that a life is worth more than a book, but we know the truth: knowledge lives on. No single life can claim so much.
And so a man who threatens knowledge must be dealt with—by persuasion, by force, or, if all else fails, by death.
Blessings upon you from your god or gods, and from the hands of the Archivist Magister himself, who has approved this action.
HIS SEAL.
CHAPTER THREE
By the time he’d retrieved the Blake from his personal stash of rare books and delivered it to Anit in exchange for the cipher, it had been well into the dark hours of early morning. Then Jess spent hours poring over the contents of the book, writing out a translation page by careful page.
The results were startling, and he’d ached to keep going, but by the time his clock showed three in the morning, his eyes were too grainy to focus, his brain too numb to think. Jess finally admitted defeat and fell into bed, where he slept the sleep of the dead . . . until a pounding on his door resurrected him.
“Mup,” he mumbled, and rolled sideways off his bunk. He desperately wanted to flop down again and die; his body felt nine kinds of sore from the trauma of the exercise the day before and the night’s adventures. He hadn’t had nearly enough sleep. The book, he thought, and grabbed for it and the sheaf of translated pages. He stuffed it into the smuggling harness, which was getting a good deal too crowded for safety, then threw on a robe to answer the summons.
Glain stood there, crisply uniformed, and she said, “Unplanned exercise. Get ready. It’s our last one. Thirty minutes.”
“Glain—” But she was already moving on to knock at another door. He’d hoped to find a moment to talk. But this wasn’t the right one. Maybe that was better saved for after, when all this was done, and he could guide her more gently through the levels of shock, grief, and anger that he’d already experienced.
Dressed and fortified with a cup of sweet Egyptian coffee, he jogged with his squad to the training grounds and their assigned place to form up on the field. Other squads were coming, too, but none, Jess saw, had beaten them there.
Glain hadn’t made the run with them.
She isn’t here.
He realized that only as they formed their rank and stood at attention. It wasn’t just unusual for Glain to be missing, it had never happened, and he exchanged a sidelong glance with the young man to his right—Tariq, who’d shot him the day before—without moving another muscle. Tariq seemed calm, but he was already sweating. The loud morning tone sounded from the top of the High Garda watchtower, and . . . Glain still didn’t appear. Other squads were inspected and dismissed. Jess’s group stood silent in the hot sun, at attention. If the others worried as much as he did, they were too well trained to speak.
Finally, Jess saw one of the Garda’s armored carriers speeding across the ground; his eyes tracked it as it approached them. Glain Wathen jumped out almost before the hissing steam-powered vehicle came to a halt. She was followed by someone Jess recognized only slightly: High Garda Captain Feng, who was smiling this morning, though his eyes were like chips of cold black ice. Feng had never appeared on the parade ground before. Never interacted with their squad at all. He had quite a reputation as a hard man to please.
From the rank behind him, Jess heard someone take in a startled breath, but he concentrated on staying as still as he could. Feng’s gaze—cold and impersonal—swept over each of them as he walked the rank. He gave Jess exactly the same assessment as the others, no longer or shorter, and said nothing until he reached the end of his inspection and returned, with Glain, to stand before them. He and the young squad leader were silhouetted by the merciless glow of the rising sun. It effectively hid their expressions.
“Scores,” Feng said to Glain. She briskly unhooked the small waterproof box on her belt and snapped it open. Inside lay a Blank, a book connected to the Great Library’s vast archives, though this was one whose cover shimmered with the Library’s gold seal and the feather of Ma’at—her recording journal, which copied itself daily into a mirroring Blank on the shelves somewhere in the distant bowels of the High Commander’s offices. Military issue.
Glain presented it to Feng with both hands, and he took it the same way—a sign of respect for the book itself, not for her. He paged through, reading her reports and notes, and then handed it back with the same care. “Well done, Sergeant Wathen,” he said. “Well done, squad. Take ease.”
That was a relief, and Jess heard a quiet sigh as they all spread their feet and relaxed their spines a bit. That was a mistake, as Feng continued, “You lead the roster in points, and, as such, we have decided to issue you a special test today, one that will challenge you to the level we wish you to achieve. Are you ready to excel, recruits?”
“Yes, sir!” they all responded at once and as one. Nobody had to feed them that response. Every member of Glain Wathen’s squad was driven to excel, and their gods preserve them if they weren’t. Glain added her own voice. She stood even taller, even straighter. She was in her element here.
Jess envied that. Right now, he desperately missed the quiet comfort of his books. This, he thought, is going to be hard. Feng hadn’t set up a special challenge for them for the fun of it, and Jess had no doubt at all that it was going to be a brutal affair.
“Squad!” Glain called, and they all gave back a deep-chested “Sir,” in response. Even Jess. “We lead by two points in the rankings. This is not enough. We will bring in this exercise with a comfortable five-point lead, and we will finish with the top score! Is that understood?”