Ink and Bone

That was a High Garda trooper, no doubt about it; the tone was one Jess had become familiar with on the road. Jess followed the orders, though he found it harder than he’d expected to step out of the high bed of the carriage with bound hands. He ended up jumping. He heard Wolfe’s boots hit the ground behind him.

The glows turned lower, and his eyes adjusted to pick out the soldiers arrayed around them. Six of them to three bound men. At least they had a healthy respect for their captives.

‘Brightwell. Come this way.’

He hesitated, but Wolfe nodded sharply to him. A guard took him by the elbow and led him away while the other two were taken a different way. He tried to get his bearings, and finally it struck him just where they were: the Alexandria Serapeum, but on a side of it he’d never seen before. A heavily fortified, highly secured side.

This was the face of the pyramid that held the offices of the Artifex Magnus, and – somewhere in that warren – the other Curators, and the Archivist himself.

‘Where did you take Scholar Wolfe?’ he asked his guard, who was only a little younger than his own age, by appearance. No answer, and the pace picked up as they strode through an ornate outer chamber lined with rare original volumes set behind glass. From there, hallways spread out like spokes, and each had a traditional Egyptian hieroglyph inset with gold atop the lintel. He should have been fascinated, any other time – awed, by walking halls that the greatest minds of the world had inhabited through the ages.

Instead, he could only feel sick anger, and fear – and then, a wave of relief almost as strong, as he caught sight of the party coming towards him from the hallway marked with the Medica symbol.

Khalila was the first to reach him, and she threw her arms around him with shaking strength. ‘Thank Allah you’re all right! We looked for you, we thought you’d been taken too … where have you been?’ Her happiness faded as she realised that his hands were pi

Dario and Glain were right behind her. Khalila had pulled on a thick, striped robe, and her hijab, but he could tell that she had been pulled from her bed. Dario was wearing a loose shirt and linen trousers that had probably served him for nightwear. Glain had on only a plain nightgown, her feet stuck in the same mud-stained boots she’d worn to Oxford.

‘Where’s Thomas?’ Jess asked. His throat ached with tension.

They exchanged looks. Dario put his hands on Khalila’s shoulders. ‘They told us he was injured in a Burner attack on Ptolemy House. First we knew about it, we were being dragged out of bed and brought here.’

‘But you’re all right?’

Glain nodded firmly. ‘We’re all right.’ But even Glain’s eyes were bright with what looked like fear now. She didn’t like this. None of them did. ‘We asked why Thomas wasn’t with us. They didn’t say.’

‘I’ll find out,’ Jess promised, and his guard pulled his elbow to tow him onward. ‘Find Wolfe and Santi!’

His escort took him down the hallway that was marked with the name of the Artifex Magnus, and he had to turn his attention forward, because all too soon his friends were out of view.

This area of the Serapeum smelt like sandalwood and oils, and at this hour of the night it seemed deserted. There were rooms off to the sides of the halls that held desks at which people must have worked, but Jess had only time for glances as he was marched relentlessly to the end, where a large, ornate door was decorated with the goddess Nut spreading her golden feathers. It stood partially open.

And in the room behind it stood the Artifex Magnus. He paced in front of a large golden desk, in a pale-yellow room decorated with old Egyptian gods in the classic Alexandrian styles. Except for the desk and a few chairs, the only other thing the room held were books. Not blanks, original ancient volumes, scores of them, all uneven in size and shape. The room smelt of old paper and leather, overwhelming the rare wood of the hallway.

The guard stood Jess in the middle of the room and, to Jess’s surprise, cut his bindings loose. The Artifex nodded to him. ‘You may go,’ he said to the guard. ‘Close the door.’

It shut with a heavy boom, and Jess heard a lock engage. No escape that way. No wonder they didn’t need the bindings here.

‘Where’s Thomas?’

‘Let’s set the ground rules now, Brightwell. I ask the questions, you answer, because if you do not, this will go spectacularly wrong for you. Then, if I choose, I will answer one of yours. Understood?’ The Artifex’s voice sounded calm and cold, and Jess unwillingly nodded. ‘Now. Why did you go off in the middle of the night in search of Scholar Wolfe?’

Jess wanted to ask about Thomas again, but he knew that wouldn’t help. ‘I needed to ask whether or not he was going to recommend me for a posting.’

‘You don’t strike me as particularly anxious about your future at the Library. Ah, correction. Didn’t. You have good reason to be anxious now.’

‘I can’t go back home if I fail here. I needed to know for sure that I wouldn’t be sent away.’ The best lie, Jess’s father had taught him, was always mostly truth. In fact, this one was completely true, and Jess heard the tremor in his voice as he said it. ‘Wolfe found out something about my family I didn’t want known. I thought he was going to reject me for placement.’

The Artifex picked up a marble ball from the top of his desk and rolled it restlessly in his gnarled fingers. ‘I see. Even if that is true, why did Wolfe and Santi come back with you to Ptolemy House?’

‘I was drunk and angry. Wolfe didn’t want me on my own, so he and Captain Santi took me back. That’s all.’

The Artifex Magnus clasped his hands behind his back and stared at him. An old man. An old face. Eyes as sharp as chips of ice. He doesn’t believe me, Jess thought.

‘We have reason to believe that in addition to young Guillaume Danton, may his soul rest in eternal peace, there was another Burner acolyte in your class. One conducting dangerous experiments under the cover of night. Were you aware of this?’

‘No,’ Jess said, and only then realised with a sickening drop in his stomach that the Artifex was talking about Thomas. ‘What sort of experiments?’

‘The sort that result in chaos, blood, and death.’ The Artifex’s pale lips twitched in the cover of his white beard, but he didn’t answer directly. ‘It seems very odd that you were absent from the house when our men arrived. I would have thought you, like your fellows, would have been longing for bed after your … adventures.’

Adventures. That was one word for it, Jess supposed; the kind of word used by someone who kept his murder at a distance. ‘I’ve answered your questions enough. Where’s Thomas?’

That earned him a long, long stare, as if the old man was weighing him. Like the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, weighing a man’s soul against a feather. ‘I regret to inform you that the young man succumbed to injuries he sustained at Ptolemy House. Evidence suggests that someone struck him on the head as he lay asleep in his bed. Perhaps his attacker removed the body before it could be discovered. Perhaps we are still searching for it.’ Those cold, cold eyes froze him from the inside out. ‘And then, of course, the attacker came back, with accomplices, to clean up after himself. Shall I spell it out for you? I should think you are clever enough to work out the narrative.’

‘Thomas is dead?’ Jess no longer felt clever. He couldn’t understand even that one simple fact, though he’d feared it since he saw the blood in his friend’s room. ‘He can’t be dead.’

‘You killed him,’ the Artifex said. ‘Or so the story might go. A drunken fight that got out of hand, perhaps … common, in all the wrong and sad meanings of that word. Then you panicked. You ran to Scholar Wolfe, thinking he would help you hide your crime. But unhappily for you, young Schreiber survived just long enough to send a message for help to the Garda. They removed the others from the house, for their own safety, of course. Sadly, your friend Thomas expired before he could receive help.’