The guard had a familiar accent—raised near Manchester, most likely. His time in Alexandria had covered his English roots a bit, but it was odd, Jess thought, that he might be killed by one of his countrymen, so far from home. Killed by the English, just like Liam.
Once a set of Library restraints settled around his wrists and tightened, he felt strangely less shaken. Opportunity was gone now. All his choices had been narrowed to one course. All he had to do now was play it out.
Jess turned to look at the High Garda soldier. A man with roots from another garden, maybe one closer to Alexandria; the man had a darker complexion, dark eyes, a neat beard, and a compassionate but firm expression on his face. “Am I coming back?” he asked, and wished he hadn’t.
“Likely not,” the soldier said. “Wherever you go next, you won’t be back here.”
Jess nodded. He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them. Liam had faltered on the stairs. Had trembled. But at the end his elder brother had stood firm in his bonds and hood and waited for death without showing any fear.
He could do the same.
“Then, let’s go,” he said, and forced a grin he hoped looked careless. “I could do with a change of scenery.”
* * *
They didn’t take him to the gallows. Not immediately, anyway. And though he half feared he’d never see the shot that would kill him from behind, they reached the end of the hall and the unlocked door without incident. Lucky that Captain Santi isn’t here to see that breach of security, he thought. Santi would have had someone’s head for it. Metaphorically speaking.
And now he wished he hadn’t thought of that, because it added another possible execution method to his imagined deaths.
It was a long march through quite a number of checkpoints, each strongly manned with soldiers and automata; the sphinxes watched him with suspicious red eyes and flexed their lion claws. Of all the automata he’d faced before—lions, Spartans, once a hawk-headed Egyptian god—these were the ones that most unnerved him. Something about the human pharaoh’s face made them especially inhuman. They’d have no trouble tearing him apart in these close quarters, coming as they would from either side.
Jess added it to his preferred ways not to die and was grateful when the route took them through an iron gate and into dazzling sunlight. Dying in the sun was always better than dying in the dark, wasn’t it? He sucked down thick Alexandrian sea air in convulsive breaths and turned his face up to the warmth; as his eyes adjusted, he realized he was being marched through the small ornamental garden that led around to the side of the giant Alexandrian pyramid that held the Scholar Steps. Too brief a walk, one he didn’t have much time to savor, before they passed into the darkness of another doorway near the base of the vast, looming structure.
Then he knew exactly where he was. He’d been here before.
The guards marched him through a long lobby guarded by gods and monsters in their niches and down a hall inscribed with hieroglyphs to a final door. Another, larger sphinx sat in an alcove, and a warning growl sounded until the soldier in charge held up his wrist to show the gold bracelet there. The sphinx subsided, and the door opened.
Jess stepped into the outer office of the single most powerful person in the world.
His guards didn’t follow him in. When he looked back, they’d already turned to walk away, and the door was swinging shut.
There were guards, of course; these wore the distinctive red-slashed uniforms of the High Garda Elite, sworn to the personal protection of the Archivist, and they took custody of him without a word. Jess almost missed his old escort. He’d trained as a High Garda himself, had worn the uniform, had eaten in the same dining hall as those men. The Elites were more akin to fanatics than to soldiers. They had separate quarters. Separate training. And they were dedicated to one man, not to the protection of the Great Library.
The Elites hardly gave him a glance as they formed a tight cordon around him and marched him through the outer office, where an assistant’s desk sat empty, and then through a set of massive double doors decorated with the Library’s seal.
He was escorted to a heavy, ornate chair and pushed into it, and the guards immediately withdrew to stand in the shadows. They went as immobile as automata.
Jess raised his gaze to find that the head of the Great Library wasn’t even bothering to look at him.
The old man looked different, Jess thought. Grayer, but somehow stronger, too, as if he’d taken up a new exercise regimen. His hair had been cropped close now, and his skin had a darker hue than before, as if he’d spent time out in the sun. Sailing, perhaps. He must have a ship or two at his disposal.
The Archivist signed official documents with quick scratches of his pen.
Jess expected to at least have the old man’s attention, but the Archivist said nothing. He simply worked. In a moment, a young woman walked in with a silver tray and put a small china cup of strong coffee on the table next to Jess.
“Can’t drink it, love,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, and twisted to show her his bound hands.
The Archivist sighed without looking up. “Remove his restraints, will you, please?” The order was directed at no one in particular, but a guard immediately stepped forward to press his Library bracelet to the shackles, and they snapped apart. Jess handed them over, and the guard took up his invisibility game again. Jess picked up the coffee cup with a fleeting quirk of his lips at the lovely assistant—she was beautiful—and it was only after he saw the hurt in her eyes that he realized he should have remembered her.
And Brendan Brightwell certainly should have remembered her. He couldn’t forget, not for a second, that he was now intent on carrying on an impersonation of his twin brother, and his brother, God help him, had carried on a secret affair with this very same young woman. Whose name he couldn’t remember, no matter how he tried.
Get your head in the room, he told himself. He wasn’t Jess anymore. Couldn’t be. Jess Brightwell was a dead man in Alexandria; he’d come here to set plans in motion, and he’d done it the only way he could: as his brother Brendan. His life now depended on everyone believing that he was his twin, as unlike him as it was possible to be. Sarcastic, sharp, brash, always ready with a grin or a joke or a knife in the ribs.
He returned his focus to the Archivist Magister, the head of the Great Library of Alexandria, as the old man—still without looking up—said, “Explain why I shouldn’t have your head taken off here and now, prisoner.” He frowned down at the document he was marking and put it aside to take up another.
Jess held on to the brash smile that was his brother’s shield. “In here? You’d be days cleaning the carpets.”
“Don’t be obtuse.”
“Well, then. You’d just be robbing yourself. I’m here bearing gifts. Valuable ones, at that. And I have much more to offer.”