Ink and Bone

‘I know,’ Santi said. ‘I just wish you weren’t so bloody brave about it.’

Wolfe hugged him. It was a sudden, fierce move, and Santi embraced him back. Jess knew what he was looking at, because he’d felt it.

Love, and the pain of knowing that love wouldn’t be enough.

‘I’m coming,’ Santi said. ‘And don’t argue with me about how you can’t protect me, I know you can’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m coming.’

Wolfe smiled. It was too private a thing, and Jess looked away from it. ‘Then get dressed,’ he said. ‘We won’t have much time.’

Ptolemy House was silent when they arrived. The whole street was quiet, though in other houses glows burnt here and there. Not in Ptolemy. Even the light that always burnt over the door was gone, and the household gods shrouded in darkness.

‘Who’s still inside?’ Santi asked. Jess told him. All the occupied rooms were on the ground floor now, and he named off the room numbers, and occupants. ‘Check Schreiber’s room first. If you find him, bring him out. We’ll get him to safety.’

‘Safety where?’ Jess asked. ‘This is Alexandria. The Library owns every inch of it!’

‘We’ll deal with that once we find him. Go. I’ll cover the street. Chris …’ He handed Wolfe a pistol, and Wolfe nodded his thanks. ‘Watch yourself.’

Santi stepped back into shadows and nearly vanished as Jess and Wolfe slipped inside Ptolemy House.

All the glows had been extinguished, and when Jess tapped the first one, which should have raised the rest, they stayed dark. Glows didn’t fail often, and this seemed convenient timing. Jess knew Ptolemy House well enough to navigate it in the dark, and he led Wolfe down the hallway, counting doors. Thomas was at the end, on the left.

‘Wait,’ Wolfe whispered. He got a small portable glow from his pocket and shook it to the lowest setting. Then, as Jess eased open the unlocked door, he bent and rolled it into the room, where it cast golden-green shadows on an unmade bed, a pile of unwashed clothes, a blank that had fallen to the floor beside the bed.

And something that looked black and wet on the bedding.

Jess stepped forward, and stopped, because he knew what it was. He could smell the sharp metallic tang of it, like a newly-sharpened blade.

Blood.

‘Easy,’ Wolfe said. ‘Check the wardrobe.’

Jess slid back the door to and found nothing but folded clothes and tools on the shelves. Boxes of gears and parts. He checked beneath the bed. There was nowhere else in the room for Thomas to be.

Not dead. He can’t be dead, that’s not much blood. They’d all bled more than that in Oxford, hadn’t they?

‘Downstairs,’ he said. ‘He could be with the press.’

‘Check the other rooms first,’ Wolfe said, and handed him a second small glow. ‘Careful. Try not to wake them if they’re asleep.’

Jess nodded and stepped out. Across the hall was Khalila’s chamber. Empty. Her bedclothes were disarranged, but there were no signs of violence.

Dario’s room was likewise empty. So was Glain’s. The four of them were all gone.

His heart was hammering fast in his chest, and he checked his own room, simply because he half-thought he’d find himself lying peacefully in his bed, asleep and dreaming all of this … but it was just as he’d left it. Nothing out of place.

The empty rooms were all still empty.

The basement, then. Jess’s nerves were stretched to breaking point, and when the front hallway door opened as they headed for the steps to the cellar, he flinched. If he’d had a gun, he’d have shot Santi dead as the man eased inside.

That might have been why Santi hadn’t given him a weapon.

‘Hurry up,’ Santi said. ‘Something’s not right out there.’

‘There’s blood in Schreiber’s room,’ Wolfe said. ‘We’re going downstairs.’

Santi nodded and locked the front door. ‘They’ll know we’re here.’

Santi seemed relaxed now that things were in motion as he led them down the stone steps into Thomas’s workroom. The glows were out here, too. Jess brightened the one Wolfe had given him, and tossed it over the railing into the centre of the space.

The basement seemed empty. Undisturbed. No signs of blood, or his friends. Thomas had cleaned up the scrap metal that had been littering the floor.

And then Jess’s eyes fell on the ancient old door in the far wall. The one he and Thomas had locked.

There was no longer a lock on it.

Santi and Wolfe let him move down the stairs, to the door. He took hold of the cold iron ring, and pulled.

There was nothing inside. No bodies. No device. Nothing but fresh scrapes along the walls where the machine had been dragged away. He showed Santi and Wolfe.

‘Tagged, most likely,’ Santi said. ‘Sent to Archive. They didn’t carry it out of here up those steps without breaking it apart. The room’s too clean for that.’

‘Where did they take everyone?’

‘Let’s go find out,’ Wolfe said. He turned and led the way up the steps, snuffing the glow with a press of his fingers as he reached the main hall door. He’d forgotten that it was locked, Jess thought.

Except it wasn’t locked, though Jess had seen Santi do it. The knob turned easily in Wolfe’s hands, and the door swung open.

‘Halt!’ said a voice behind them in the dark of the hallway, and overlaying it was another from outside on the doorstep. Santi whispered a low, vicious curse that only Jess heard, and then raised his hands. ‘Drop your weapons! You are arrested by authority of the Library!’

There wasn’t any choice. Santi and Wolfe both disarmed, and then Jess found himself pushed face first into the wall. A framed portrait, unseen in the dark, broke loose and fell with a crash. He hoped it was the Artifex Magnus’s likeness.

His hands were quickly bound behind him, and he was pushed outside onto the street. Wolfe and Santi were restrained too, and an unmarked black carriage had pulled up to the kerb. One by one, they were loaded inside by what now in the moonlight Jess could see were High Garda troops. Not Santi’s men. He’d never seen these faces before.

The rear of the carriage had been fitted out with metal benches. They were all boosted up into it. Jess took the right side, Wolfe and Santi the left, and in a matter of seconds the doors were shut, locked, and the carriage lurched into motion. The box smelt of sweat and fear and a lingering odour of sick. There was only a small barred window above their heads to admit fresh air, and on this still night it didn’t do much good.

‘Where are they taking us?’ Jess asked. The other men didn’t answer.

‘I’m sorry, Nic,’ Wolfe said.

‘I’m not,’ Santi said, and crossed his booted feet. ‘It was worth every moment of what comes next.’

Wolfe turned his face away, and in a flash of passing light from outside, Jess saw that there were tears streaking his face.

That, finally, was what made Jess really afraid.

As much as he hated being trapped in the moving cell, he dreaded what might come next, and when the carriage rolled to a stop, Jess tensed himself for a fight. He wasn’t sure how much he could do, given his bound hands; escape was impossible, given the trackers. But he wasn’t going quietly.

‘Stay calm,’ Wolfe said. He sounded calm, at least. ‘Jess. Are you listening to me?’

‘What if they’re dead?’ Jess asked. His voice was shaking, and he couldn’t seem to control that.

‘They’re not,’ Santi sounded sure of it. ‘Maybe they’d have killed them outside the city. They won’t do it here. Don’t lose faith.’

Faith. Faith in what? He’d believed in the Library, the ideal of it, anyway. He’d believed that it was doing good, and more, that it wanted to do good. But now he’d seen the dirty underside, and he couldn’t hold on to his faith much longer.

The doors opened, and Jess blinked in the sudden light of glows turned to their maximum brilliance. ‘Out,’ a voice in shadow said. ‘Santi, then Brightwell, then Wolfe. Go.’