Ink and Bone

She didn’t elaborate. He didn’t either.

Until now.

He wouldn’t dare break that trust.

They didn’t speak again. They finished their glasses, and Jess closed his eyes, half-reclining on the couch. I’m daft, he thought. Daft to trust someone who’s done nothing but lie to me from the start. She could go straight to the High Garda. Turn me in. She was probably thinking the very same thing of him.

He didn’t mean to, but he drifted off to sleep. He just barely sensed something like the soft brush of fingers across his face, and then he was off in dreams.

Quiet, pleasant dreams.

He was lying on the couch alone when the bells rang.

Not the usual morning bells. These had a different tone altogether. Jess bolted upright, because these bells sounded like emergency tones to him, and they didn’t shut off. Fire? No smoke, but he supposed it was possible.

By the time he made it to the common room door, others were coming out of their rooms, breathless and just as alarmed. Only some were already dressed for the day. One of them was Morgan, neat and tidy in her pale-blue linen dress, with her hair up.

He looked at her for too long, and she returned it. We should watch that. Someone will notice. But what would that matter? What was wrong with noticing a girl?

Thomas came from downstairs in the basement, rubbing grease from his hands onto his trousers. He looked as if he’d slept in his clothes, if he’d slept at all.

‘Is it a fire?’ Khalila shouted over the alarms, as she ran towards them. She’d thrown on her clothes, but her headscarf wasn’t pi

The bells cut off, and left a deafening silence.

‘It’s not.’ The answer came from the front door of Ptolemy House, where Captain Santi was just entering. ‘It’s a summons. You’re to report to the Scholars’ Reading Room in the Serapeum. Don’t waste time. This isn’t a test.’

Jess believed him. There was something deadly serious about the way he looked at their little group. Serious, and regretful.

‘The pyramid?’ Dario said. ‘We’re going to the pyramid?’

‘Right to the top,’ Santi said. ‘Hurry up. The carriage is waiting.’

Those who weren’t already dressed scattered to remedy that; Thomas muttered something under his breath in German and went to put on something clean. Jess, Glain and Morgan remained in the hall, with Santi.

‘Sir,’ Glain asked. ‘What is this about?’

‘I’m not here to answer your questions. I’m here to get you where you’re going.’

‘Is it – is this where we get our final ranking? Where we get our appointments?’

Santi stared at her in a way that clearly said question time was over, and Glain gave it up. Jess’s pulse quickened, though. She could be right.

This could be Wolfe’s final decision.

He saw Morgan’s face, then, and realised that there was another option, a far worse one.

Maybe this hadn’t come from Wolfe at all. Maybe one of them was about to be found out.

The hissing progress of the carriage carried them past the familiar borders of Alexandria University, and close to the Iron Tower, which dominated almost everything in view, except the pyramid. It doesn’t rust, Jess remembered Thomas saying, and this close, he could see that his friend was right. The iron was black, pitted, and almost unmarked by streaks of dark red, for all its age. Massive. Forbidding. Why iron? Jess wondered. Does it help them in their work? He’d avoided alchemy as best he could; he didn’t care for being shut away in labs, smelling foul chemicals all day, but he remembered that iron was an important alchemical symbol, all bound up with blood and the earth. Morgan would know.

Morgan was sitting beside him, and the backs of their hands brushed. Just lightly, just the backs, but the warm softness of her skin was distracting.

So were her secrets.

The Iron Tower fell behind, and the massive bulk of the pyramid grew and grew. ‘I knew it was big,’ Danton said, staring out the window next to him. ‘I never knew it was this big.’ He sounded awestruck, and Jess thought that maybe he’d been wrong about the boy being a Burner. He seemed impressed, not outraged.

The carriage arrived at the Serapeum. Santi got them all out, and Glain looked around with the same care she’d taken on the street the day before, when they’d been scouting the Burner house. ‘Which way?’ she asked Santi.

He nodded at the steps.

The breath went out of Jess just looking at them. They were endless, straight up, though there were a few landings along the way with benches for those who needed respite. At the top, the rising sun sparked gold from the pyramid’s capstone. It seemed ridiculously far up.

‘Fantastic,’ Dario said grimly, and led the way on the long climb.

Dario’s lead lasted to the first landing, and then Glain’s long, seemingly tireless legs pulled her into the front. Jess was content to let her have it anyway; the steps were shallow, but mindlessly eternal. He looked up and paused for breath … and for the first time, realised that there were automata reclining on the marble on either side of the landing.

Sphinxes.

The statue to his right turned its head and stared at him with flickering red eyes. Jess had to fight the instinctive urge to back away, because these creatures were even more disturbing than the lions of London; the sphinxes had eerily human faces, set off by the ancient Egyptian headdresses of pharaohs. A human face on an automaton was infinitely more disquieting, because it was all the more inhuman.

The flickering red in the eyes continued and grew brighter.

‘Hold up your wrist,’ Dario said from behind him. He sounded as out of breath as Jess felt. ‘Your sleeve covers it, and they need to see the band. Do it.’

Jess did, slowly, showing the statue his Library postulant wristband. The sphinx’s eyes flashed white, and it settled back into its crouch. Morgan was hastily rolling back the sleeves of her gown on the other side of the landing, too, since that automaton was restless as well.

‘Maybe Wolfe’s hoping the creatures will remove a few more of us for him,’ Thomas said. He meant it for a joke, but it was a dour one. Despite all the differences – the gleaming pyramid, the rising Alexandrian sun, the clean, orderly city laid out beneath with its flat roofs and statues of lost gods – Jess felt he was back in grey London, stalked by lions.

Danton had stopped next to them now. He was shorter than most of them, and the steps must have been even more of a challenge, since he was the last one up. ‘What are you afraid of? They’re just automata. They’re on every street in America.’ It reminded Jess of an ancient Greek text he’d read once: The animated figures stand, adorning every public street, and seem to breathe in stone, or move their marble feet.

He’d always found it chilling, not thrilling.

‘If you didn’t have so many Burners in your land, perhaps there wouldn’t be so many statues,’ Thomas said. ‘We have very few in Germany, you know.’

‘Maybe we have so many Burners because the Library keeps adding more automata.’

‘Chicken, egg, omelette,’ Jess said. ‘Stop arguing, the both of you.’

‘And stop talking about breakfast,’ Dario groaned. ‘I’m starving.’

‘Climb,’ Thomas said. ‘You’ll forget.’

He was right. By the time Jess achieved the second of the three landings, food was the last thing on his mind. His legs burnt, and so did his lungs, and he still had hundreds of steps to go. Glain was halfway up the last set, and not slowing. Good for her.

Morgan joined them on the steps, and as Thomas and Dario took the last set upward, she held Jess back to fiercely whisper, ‘Do you think this is a trap?’