Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (22 page)

It was fear he was seeing. No one was quite allowing it to rule them, but all were conscious of the danger.

You’re not guarding the Artifex or a prison,
he told himself.
You’re guarding your fellow soldiers. The Scholars inside the basilica. You’re guarding original books that need protection.
That helped steady him.

Jess remembered his encounters with Burners—sadly, too many in his young life—and began to scan the crowds below. In his experience,
the fanatics had a certain purposeful look to them; it wasn’t easy to work yourself up to self-immolation, and every Burner had to accept that his or her mission would probably end in death. They had a common look.

His gaze swept back and forth, back and forth, and then snagged on something he couldn’t quite identify. He wasn’t even sure
why
he’d noticed that particular group of people clustered together, apparently consulting a map. When he focused, they seemed like typical tourists, attempting to find their way to a landmark.

Then he realized that one by one—and not all together—they were stealing glances at the basilica. After each look, the one who’d taken it would lean in and say something to the others. Then another would take a brief look.

There were five of them, four men and one woman, most older than Jess but not by much. Young, idealistic, and perfectly suited to be recruited to a cause.

Jess’s skin shivered into warning goose bumps, and he heeded it and signaled to Glain, who drifted his way. She covered ground but didn’t seem to move quickly. It was a gift she had that he never could quite master. “What?” she asked him, and stood apparently at ease, though her eyes were never still.

“By the feet of Mercury,” he said. “That group of five. I don’t like it.”

She studied the men and said, “Neither do I. Watch them.”

She moved off, heading for the squad leader.
She is good at this,
Jess thought; she made it seem like a natural stop, just a standard check-in, and neither of them gave away any alarm.

Glain took out her Codex and wrote something, then snapped it shut.
Alerting Santi’s lieutenant,
Jess thought,
that there might be trouble.
He didn’t know if the Artifex Magnus had arrived or if he was keeping Santi waiting; probably the latter. The Artifex had always seemed a man too full of his own importance.

The group of five was joined by more. Seven now. Eight. Each had some kind of carrying pack, and they were careful with them. How
much Greek fire could they have? Too much, if those backpacks were full of bottles and containers.

Below him, pacing in front of the stairs, one of the Roman lions paused and turned its head with smooth grace to stare at the group standing next to Mercury, and Jess saw the articulated body crouch lower.

Behind them, the door into the basilica opened. He didn’t turn to look. All his attention was on the lion, which took an elegant, smooth step down, then another. Others of its pride took notice and began to descend toward the Forum.

“Run,” Jess heard Glain whisper. “Run, you idiots.”

But the group of eight standing in the shadow of the statue of Mercury, very near the golden wings on his sandals, just stayed where they were. Watching the lions come closer.

They’d be slaughtered.

“Something’s not right,” Jess said. “Glain—”

“I know,” she said. “They should have run.”

It was a
plan.

And he sensed it was working.

Jess took it all in at a glance: the lions clustering together as they advanced to circle the eight in the square; the soldiers still on the steps, watching as the pride of automata stalked their prey.

No one was looking anywhere else.

It was only because he turned that he saw the first attack coming: an arcing bottle that came not from the group in the Forum, but coming from
above
, from the statue of Jupiter on the opposite side of the Forum, closest to the basilica. “Greek fire!” Jess shouted, and realized the bottle was tumbling end over end. The liquid bubbled inside the glass as it passed over his head, and he ducked instinctively, but it would miss them by a good margin.

The bottle slammed to the steps twenty feet away, landing where a grouping of others from Blue Squad had been standing just a second earlier. But Jess’s call had done its work, and they’d scattered. Only one was
hit by cast-off drops; he went down, and another of their new squad mates yanked an emergency kit from her pack and dumped powder on the flames before they could bore through his coat.

Remarkable, how cool Jess felt, how focused. He calmly brought up his weapon, thumbed the switch to turn it on, and waited an instant until he felt the shiver of power run through it. The weapon fired in regular mode for closer range, but the bottle-throwing Burner was high up on Jupiter’s shoulder, well out of range of the normal setting of the weapon.

But not for this one. It took a steady hand and good eyes, but Jess had both, and as he sank down to one knee for stability, he aimed the gun sights directly on the man perched on the shoulder of a god, preparing another bottle to throw.

Below in the Forum, the lions were roaring and alarmed screams went up. More guns barked behind him, but Jess had one singular focus: this man. He could see the Burner’s sweating face—reddened from heat and exertion and excitement—and could see the large bottle he had in his hand, ready for a second throw.

Jess’s shot took him in the shoulder. The bottle tumbled out of the Burner’s hand, not toward the Library troops, but down, plummeting past the god’s muscled back and toga-draped legs to smash on the ancient Forum stones. It created a huge green blaze and a wave of sickly black smoke, but no innocents were in the way. They now scrambled to avoid the toxic spread.

The Burner stood up on Jupiter’s shoulder. His right arm was a bloody mess, but he held up his personal journal in his left hand—the same personal journal they all kept. The same as the worn little volume in Jess’s pack. “Tell your precious Artifex! A life is worth more than a book!” he shouted.
“Vita hominis plus libro valet!”

Jess, sickened, watched him deliberately fall backward and disappear into the hissing flames below. If he wasn’t dead from the fall, the Greek fire would eat him to the bones.

“Down!” Glain yelled, and she shoved him forward as she hit the
marble steps next to him. A leaping shadow passed over them, and Jess looked up to see that one of the giant Roman automaton lions had taken a position in front of them, facing the Forum. It set its metallic bronze paws and roared with such volume, it nearly deafened Jess.

When he raised his head, the entire incident was over.

The Forum was deserted—a suddenly blank stretch of old stone littered with belongings and packages that people had abandoned in their haste to be gone. The Greek fire behind Jupiter burned brilliantly, stretching halfway up his legs, and in the flickering, sickly light, it looked as if the god might be melting, but no, it was a trick of shadows. Jupiter was made of hardy stuff.

There were eight bodies near the feet of Mercury across the way, crushed and lifeless. Jess swept the area with a long, straight look, but he didn’t see anyone else who’d been hurt or killed.

“Nine dead,” he said to Glain. “For what?”

“For what it always is,” she said. “A statement.” She was already on her feet and offered him a hand up, which he was happy to take. Strange; he seemed weak and a little shaky now, where he’d been ice-cold and focused before. “They knew the Artifex was coming. This message is meant for him.”

“Thrown right at us, though. Seems more personal than that,” their squad leader remarked, coming up to them. He looked them over. “Good job, new dogs. Didn’t have a chance to acquaint ourselves earlier. I’m Tom Rollison, but most call me Troll.”

“Glain Wathen, sir. Jess Brightwell.” Glain answered for both of them.

“I know who you are. Wolfe’s puppies. Word was you’d be trouble.” He looked beyond them at the blaze of fire behind the statue. “Word was wrong. That was well done.”

“Brightwell’s a better shot than most,” Glain said.

“Not bad,” Troll agreed. He glanced over Jess’s shoulder and frowned just a bit. “Seems you’ve made a new friend.”

Jess turned.

The Roman lion, standing taller than his head while on all four paws,
was
right behind him
, staring at him with unholy red eyes. It lowered its bronze-maned head and seemed to
smell
him, and a low rumble of a growl rattled deep inside the thing.

“Jess?” Glain said, and took a step backward. “Step away. Slowly.”

When he tried, the lion took a step forward.

“What the hell did you do to them?” Troll asked from behind him. Their squad leader sounded unnerved. Jess didn’t blame him. He didn’t dare look away from the lion’s set metallic face, from the sickening red eyes. “Wathen! Get out of the way if it’s malfunctioning!”

She didn’t want to go, Jess realized; she was standing next to him even though every instinct told her to retreat. “Get away,” he told her. “This is my trouble.
Move!
”

She backed away and down five steps to join their squad leader.
If I follow them, I put them in danger,
he thought, though it took everything he had not to seek the comfort of a group. Every cell of his body remembered running from the London lions outside of St. Paul’s. Those had a stone look to them, more muscular and brutal; these Roman lions had a leaner, sleeker build, and a bronze gleam that made their manes shimmer in the sun. Beautiful . . . and deadly.

I could turn it off. If the switch is in the same place.

He desperately didn’t want to have to try.

“More coming up!” called someone from below, and Jess risked a glance to see that the pride of lions that had been down in the square was returning to the steps, flowing up in leaps and bounds past the other soldiers.

Coming toward him. Surrounding him.

This is it,
he thought.
This is how I die.
Somehow that felt like a fate he’d always known was coming.

The lion facing him deepened its low, rumbling growl, and he felt rather than saw the others of the pride moving in around him. He heard Glain shouting something, but she was somewhere outside the closing circle. Jess felt the hot burn of air from the lion’s nostrils as it moved forward and nudged his chest.

It wanted him to run.
Of course.
If he reacted, if he ran, then there’d be an excuse for the slaughter.
They were on high alert during the Burner attack. Unfortunate miscalculation; if only the recruit hadn’t lost his nerve . . .

This was the Artifex’s doing, just like the Egyptian gods outside the High Commander’s office. Jess realized in a blinding flash, like a bottle of Greek fire dropping on his brain, that if he ran, it would all be over.

And the Artifex wanted him to panic.

He leaned down and stared into the lion’s savage eyes and said, “Come on, then, if you’re coming. Take a bite. But if you do, everybody will know it wasn’t an accident
.
”

He heard Glain’s shocked intake of breath and felt that hot, brassy stench of the lion’s insides wash over him as the creature opened its wide jaws to display bloody teeth . . . in a yawn.

It closed its mouth, stared at Jess for another long, horrible second, and then turned and padded away to stroll restlessly up and down the steps.

Guarding the building as if nothing had happened.

Jess straightened. He didn’t say anything because, in truth, he wasn’t sure he could at the moment. Better to look strong and silent than have his voice go as unsteady as his legs.

Troll stared at him as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “I don’t know if you’re mad or lucky,” he said, “but you’ve got brass guts—I’ll give you that.”

Jess nodded and took up his post. One by one the other lions broke off and went about their business. When the last left him, he finally felt a sweet, cold wave of relief.

The Artifex wanted him dead, that much was certain, but he wasn’t quite ready to make it a public execution. Not yet. He needed Jess to give him some excuse, however minor, to explain away the behavior of the automata. Today would have been a fine one, in the chaos of the Burners, and Jess knew if he’d made the wrong move, he’d be another stain to clean up on the steps tonight.

Rome is a trap.
It was too neat, too convenient, that suddenly they’d been dispatched here just after finding the information about the secret prison. The Artifex must have known their plans, or at least strongly suspected them. Khalila and Dario had gone missing. Maybe already locked away.

Disposing of Glain, Jess, and Santi would just be a sensible precaution. Get rid of the fighters; keep the Scholars out of the group who—in the Artifex’s counting, maybe—could be controlled and used. It made a sickening kind of sense.

Below, Medica attendants came to claim the bodies, and a squad of firefighters put out the Greek fire blaze. People began to filter back into the Forum in ones and twos, and then suddenly it was full again, as if nothing had happened at all. Only the blackened chemical stains on the stones behind Jupiter and the bloodstains on those near Mercury showed anything at all had interrupted a normal day.

Troll stopped next to him and scanned the people below with distant, cold eyes. “Seems useless, doesn’t it?” he asked. “They put us out here, and the Burners take their shot at us, and they die.”

“It’s a waste on both sides,” Jess said. “But we can’t let them win. They want to destroy the Library.”

He knew that wasn’t strictly true; he’d been among the Burners once, had spoken to a local leader. They wanted the Library to change, just as Jess did . . . but their tactics were unacceptably violent.

Troll shifted his weight just a little. “Any idea why the lions hate you so much?”

“No.”

“Hmm.” Troll surely didn’t believe it for a moment. “You know I have to report it. Even if I didn’t, there’s another squad leader who will. They might pull you out and try to find out what about you alerts them.”