Ink and Bone

It was a clue, Jess realised. This was the first place he’d been in Alexandria that hadn’t been kept utterly spotless. Why leave it in disrepair? It was, as Wolfe said, sacred space.

The smell was familiar.

‘These stains could be torch smoke. Maybe they have ancient ceremonies here,’ said another student. It was a decent guess, but Jess thought it was very, very wrong. A growing tension was gathering in his chest, and his heart was pounding faster. His body understood something that his mind was still trying to work out.

What had been the point of Wolfe’s lecture today? Original books. Original books being destroyed in the looting of the Serapeum of Rayy. The development of the Codex and blanks. Original books.

The dangers of owning books. Smuggling.

Burners.

Jess looked up, because everyone else seemed to be looking down … and saw that a panel had silently opened at the top of the dome, and now, a bulbous glass bottle dangled there, spi

He went cold.

‘Out,’ he said, and shoved at Thomas, standing baffled beside him. ‘Get out now! Go!’

Thomas stared at him. ‘But the Scholar said—’

‘Just get out! Go!’

He made Thomas move by force of shoving as hard as he could, and he grabbed others along the way and pushed them to the exit, all protesting. Dario shook free of him and bared his perfect white teeth. ‘I’m not going anywhere, fool. You may voluntarily fail yourself if you like, but I’m staying. There’s a puzzle, and I’m solving it.’

Jess met his eyes and said, flatly, ‘I already did.’ He pointed up and lowered his voice. ‘That is a bottle of Greek Fire, used by Burners. It could drop any time, and by the smell and state of this place, they’ve dropped it here before to prove a point. Now, help me get them out!’

Dario moved faster than Jess would have given him credit for, and helped chivvy the class on, down the narrow little hall, amid a constant drone of complaints. Jess hurried after him. He could vividly imagine that bottle dropping, tumbling, shattering on the smooth worn floor, and bursting into toxic flame.

But there was no fire.

Instead, when he emerged from the long hallway into the glaring Alexandrian morning, he found the class clustered in the shade of a taller building, while Wolfe and the High Garda soldier consulted a timepiece.

‘All out,’ the soldier said. ‘Not bad.’

‘Not good, either,’ Wolfe said. ‘But I suppose we will call it acceptable.’

Jess stared at Wolfe so hard he thought his eyeballs would burst. ‘You could have killed all of us!’

‘Only the ones too slow to move,’ Wolfe said. ‘I do give you marks for first noticing the bottle, Postulant Brightwell.’

‘How do you know? You weren’t there to see it!’ That, of course, was Dario.

Wolfe gave him a long, silencing look and said, ‘Because I have a report from Santi’s man who was watching from the top of the dome, and don’t try to convince me that you should earn that honour, Santiago. Brightwell. One question: why not shout a general warning to the class to clear them out?’

‘If I had yelled about Greek Fire, with that small exit, it would have been a crush. None of us might have made it out.’

‘True,’ Wolfe said. ‘But then, life is risk.’

Khalila’s face was set and pale, and she stepped forward to ask, ‘Would you have dropped the bottle? If we’d missed it completely?’

‘Not on the first day,’ Wolfe said, in a deceptively pleasant tone. ‘Here ends the lesson: smugglers bite away at the Library a little at a time, like termites on wood, but you must be constantly vigilant for Burners. Some of you come from countries rotten with the heresy; some come from lands untouched by it. It doesn’t matter. The first purpose of a librarian is to preserve and defend our books. Sometimes, that means dying for them – or making someone else die for them. Tota est scientia.’

Knowledge is all. It was the Library’s motto, and they all murmured it in response, as they had from the earliest schooldays.

‘Now. Everyone but Seif, Santiago, Wathen, and Brightwell, draw a tile from the pot. There are numbers in it ranging from one to six.’

The High Garda soldier was holding out a small clay pot filled with numbered tiles. He passed through the ranks of the students. Thomas stared at the tile he drew out in puzzlement, and silently asked Jess for hints; Jess didn’t have any to give.

Then the High Garda man took out a set of ivory dice and tossed them to Wolfe. Wolfe rattled them and cast them on the flagstones. ‘Anyone with two or five, step forward.’

Only two students did, holding up their tiles. One of them was red-headed A

‘You can pack your things,’ Wolfe said. ‘Go home. You’re done.’

‘But—’ A

‘Eminently fair, and random. Only Seif and Wathen had fully formed and correct answers to my questions; only Brightwell noticed the Greek Fire, a threat that all librarians must always guard against at all times. I generously gave Santiago credit for helping clear the room. The rest of you were bystanders, and the fact that I did not dismiss you all is a mark of my generosity of spirit.’

‘I’ll-I’ll appeal! You can’t do this!’

‘Certainly you can appeal. The Archivist Magister is always available to listen to whining, spoilt children who think they’ve been unfairly judged. However, if he finds I acted within my authority, you’ll be fined for wasting his time, your placement fee will be forfeited, and you’ll be paying your own way home. How confident do you feel?’

Jess felt a twinge of sympathy, and a larger bolt of fear, as he looked at the ashen faces of the two who would be leaving on the first day. There but for the grace of God, he thought. And my early acquaintance with the Burners.

Their walk back to the dormitory was all too silent, and Jess couldn’t wait to get back to his room, take out his pen, and fill his journal with how much he genuinely was begi

The first day set the tone. Wolfe was a merciless taskmaster, ruthless in dismissing those he thought were not worth his time. The first week was a brutal parade of failure. Of the thirty-two who’d moved their bags into Ptolemy House, twelve were gone within the first seven days. One left of his own accord, without a word to anyone. Jess understood that. He felt the pressure like a constant weapon pressed to his head, and he knew it would be easy to let it crush his spirit.

But he wasn’t in the habit of failure.

Wolfe did not take them back to the ancient chamber again … not that first week. Instead, he carried out his classes at Alexandria University in a conventional classroom, where he endlessly grilled them, one by one, on obscure points of Library history. After being caught out on the second day, and surviving the resulting dismissal lottery by sheer luck, Jess put himself to work.

So did all the rest of them. Even Dario.

‘This is foolish,’ Santiago complained the next night. It was direly late, and Jess’s whole body ached from it. Apparently, the bells were set to clang every morning at dawn, and classes began before any of them were properly awake, but the amount of study that needed to be done left them with little chance of sleep. ‘I thought he said we’d be learning real skills. He’s doing nothing but stuffing nonsense in our heads. Who cares about the name of the forty-second Artifex Magnus?’

Khalila lifted her finger without looking up from the blank she studied. She had claimed a chair in the corner, while Jess had contented himself with sitting against the smooth white wall near the hearth, legs crossed. ‘Sarenpet.’