'Mostly to yourself,' she said, and paused. Her tone changed, just a little. 'Santi says that she's all right. Angry at everyone, but all right. She'll make it. She's strong.'
It sickened him that even Glain, the least sensitive of all of them, could read him like a blank. 'I knew he was coming for her,' he said. 'She could have escaped. I made sure she didn't.'
Glain didn't immediately reply to that, and when she did, her voice was even softer and more guarded than before. 'She wouldn't have made it. I spent time drinking with the Toulouse brigade. If Morgan got free, they were to hunt her down by any means necessary and send her back by Translation. If we got in the way, they would have killed us.'
He turned to look at her. She seemed all too serious. 'Bollocks!' Although he didn't think it was, not really.
'It's not bollocks. They'd just say the train fire had no survivors. Letters to our families, so sorry, problem solved. And Wolfe is a problem for the Artifex, you know. You heard him at dinner last night.'
'He was drunk.'
'He was honest.' Glain met his eyes squarely, for once, and it wasn't an angry glare. It was almost kind. 'It wasn't your fault. She'll know that, eventually.'
She patted his knee in a strange, awkward way that he realised was her version of affection, and got up to rejoin the others.
He stretched out across the seat again, and shut his eyes. It was his fault, no matter what Glain said. And even if Morgan forgave him, some kinds of guilt had to be carried, for ever.
The convoy travelled far, camped, and Morgan wasn't seen again. Not by anyone. Glain was as good as her word; she told the others, quietly, and by that evening, no one mentioned Morgan to him at all.
No one, not even Thomas, knew what to say, so they pretended it was all fine, that going back to Alexandria was a relief, that everything would be back to normal once they slept in their own beds at Ptolemy House. It was gallows cheer, and Jess was the silent ghost at the table.
He couldn't avoid Thomas the second night, because the big German decided that Jess needed company on his walk through the camp. The elite men and women from Alexandria weren't taking any chances. They had set picket lines, sentries, heavy armaments.
'It's good to stretch my legs,' Thomas said. 'Not much space for them in those small carriages. Are you all right?'
The question surprised Jess, and it broke through his black shell enough to make him throw a look at his friend. 'No.'
'I didn't think you were. Everyone wants you to be. That must be worse, that they just think you should be ... fine.'
Thomas wasn't ignoring his pain, and he wasn't poking at it, either. He was just quietly understanding it. Jess let out a slow breath and stopped to look at him. 'She's in a cage,' he said. 'I put her there.'
'You didn't. I know you better.'
Jess shook his head and started walking again. He wished he could walk all the way to Alexandria. Crawl. Maybe that pain would help clear his head.
'What are you looking for out here?'
'Nothing.'
'Jess.' Thomas sounded disappointed. 'Lie to the others. Please don't, not to me.'
'I'm looking for her,' he said, and it was the first time he'd even admitted it to himself. 'Glain told me she was in one of the carriers, alone. I want to find where it is.'
'You can't get her out.'
'I know that. I just need to see it.'
Thomas shook his head, but he walked along, limiting the length of his strides to match Jess's. 'How can you tell? She won't be at a window.'
'The guards,' Jess said. 'Most of these are empty at night. Hers will have guards around it. Not many. They won't want to make it too obvious.'
'They'll be warned about you, you know. You won't get close.'
Jess nodded. It didn't matter. They walked on, and he studied every carriage they passed. None of them looked right.
'I've been thinking,' Thomas said, 'that I should go ahead and show you what I was working on before we left Alexandria. Would you mind? Maybe we could work on it together when we are back.'
'I'm not much for engineering.'
'You need to work. Using your hands helps make things clear.'
'You don't need to invent something else. The chess machine is brilliant. You should apply for a Library patent and sell it. I know the Library gets most of the money, but it'd make you a rich man.'
'I'm not interested in being rich,' Thomas said.
'Rich lets you buy more bits of junk.' Jess's mind wasn't on the conversation. Where are you, Morgan? Even if he found the lorry, even if by some strange miracle he could speak to her, what would he say? It had been said already. You said stay.
He couldn't take it back.
'Let me show you what I mean,' Thomas said. He pulled out a worn personal journal and handed it to Jess. Pages and pages of intricate drawings, schematics, German writings. Thomas flipped to a diagram, very finely drawn and lettered. Complicated. Jess had no idea what he was looking at.
At least he didn't have to worry about warning Thomas not to ever tell secrets in his personal journal. Thomas was far too focused on his machines to be writing anything about feelings.
Jess handed it back. 'Is it another of your dancing automata? Didn't you get enough of that in Munich, paying your uncle's bar bills?' That had too much of an edge, and Jess was immediately aware of it. 'Sorry, Thomas. What is it?'
'I had the idea long ago from watching an inkman who copied out some documents for my father. It took so long, even though that was his trade,' Thomas said. 'I thought, what if it could be done at the simple press of a button?'
'A letter-writing automaton.'
'No, no, that is a carnival trick. This is something that could change everything. You see, here, this is a matrix on which you place precut letters ...'
Jess's attention zeroed in on a carrier two down from where they were walking. They passed a large tent that smelt like dinner's leavings; the clatter of pots and pans said that the mess crew was still on duty. Everyone else inside the perimeter was settling down to bunking for the night, but not around that one carrier. At least a dozen heavily armed soldiers were crouched around it. They didn't look like they were specifically guarding it, but then again, they seemed vigilant. Too vigilant. 'It looks like a children's letter game.'
'No, no, nothing like that. You see, you spell out sentences and load the lines from bottom to top. You spell backward, because it will reverse. Then this reservoir here--'
Thomas was pointing at the diagram, but the words blurred into nonsense. Jess couldn't focus on it, even though he understood the kindness Thomas was offering. He was a bad friend, but he'd been worse to Morgan, and he felt a fierce desire to ... to what? Make it right? He couldn't.
Maybe he just needed to know that he couldn't, by seeing it with his own eyes.
Thomas was still trying to explain something about ink and blocks and paper. Jess didn't pay much attention because he knew with a sudden visceral jolt that Morgan was in the carriage just ahead. Locked away, maybe still in iron shackles. She was right there, wondering how to escape, and damning him for every moment of her captivity.
He could feel it.
'Well?' Thomas asked, and nudged him. 'Would you like to help me? When we get home?'
Home. Alexandria. Where Thomas would almost certainly be made a Scholar ... and Jess was still the son of a smuggler, with a nasty rumour of Burner sympathy trailing him now. 'Sure,' he said. 'When we get home.' There was nothing left in Alexandria for him. How was he supposed to stare at the Iron Tower every day and not think about what he'd done?
Thomas grinned and clapped him on the back.
As they approached the carrier, two of the High Garda troops, both women, rose and wandered in their direction without seeming to react directly. One of them - a small Indian woman, with her black hair knotted into a complex design at the crown of her head - gave Jess a casual nod and smile. 'Good evening, sir. Having a nice walk? It's good weather for it.'
&nb
sp; 'It helps to stretch all the kinks out,' Jess said, and smiled back as charmingly as he knew how. 'Hard travel for you? You came up from Alexandria to get us. That must have been tiring.'
She exchanged a rueful grin with her companion, who was taller, broader, and had more of an east Asian cast to her features. 'Tiring's one word for it,' she said. 'But we go where the Library needs us. Say, I heard there was a card game coming up on the other side of the camp. You're headed back, aren't you?'
'Of course,' Jess said. 'Just heading back to the tent. How about you, Thomas? Legs sufficiently stretched?'
'Yes, I feel better.' Thomas gave him a look that, Jess suddenly realised, was all too perceptive. 'And you? Feeling better?'
'I believe I am,' Jess said.
'Good,' the little Indian woman said, and strode along beside them at a pace that even Thomas's long legs found hard to match. She seemed to give off wild bursts of energy. 'I am Rijuta Khanna. And you are with Scholar Wolfe's party.'
'The big one's Thomas. I'm Jess. And your friend?'
Rijuta nodded at the other woman, who had a friendly sort of manner, but watchful pale eyes in a sharp-featured face. 'That's Yeva Dudik. Don't mind her, she's not as chatty as I am.'
'Ha,' Yeva said. It wasn't a laugh. 'I've met drunken parrots who weren't as chatty as you.'
'It passes the time.'
'Someday, someone will shoot you over lost sleep. It could be me.'
Jess wasn't fooled. They were excellent at their job, and their job was to misdirect, misinform, and at all costs, move any of Wolfe's party who got close away from that carriage. Jess didn't care. He'd found out what he needed, because all he had to do was note the number marked on the side. He'd be able to find her now, even among all of these identical vehicles.
He couldn't free her from a locked carrier. He couldn't help her get away. But he knew where she was, and that almost seemed like alchemy an Obscurist would understand: knowing where she was seemed to put them closer.
The Doctrine of Mirroring. As above, so below.
They parted company near their sleeping quarters with Rijuta and Yeva, who continued on to their likely imaginary card game. Thomas was talking some nonsense about the saturation properties of ink on paper, but he fell silent when Jess stopped replying.
Jess stretched out on his camp bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep to the dancing visions of ink blots that left bruised echoes nothing could erase.
EPHEMERA
An urgent communication from the Obscurist Magnus to the Artifex Magister:
Our monitors have reported new information has been added to Thomas Schreiber's personal journal. His drawings are very close to a working model, and a more efficient working model than we have ever seen before, even the one developed by Scholar Wolfe that led to his confinement. Action must be taken to secure his notes and any working models that he might have developed.
Reply from the Artifex Magnus to the Obscurist Magnus:
And so, again, we are at a crossroads.
This is a consequence of allowing Wolfe to live, instead of simply killing him outright as well as destroying his work. If dangerous ideas are a disease, he is the very definition of an infectious carrier.
You must stop protecting him, Keria.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Arriving in Alexandria was a messy affair. The High Garda force crossed the border in a long convoy, speeding along empty roads, but as they reached the city's precincts the progress slowed, and the last hundred kilometres took hours more than Jess had expected. By the time the carrier finally hissed to a stop on a huge field of evenly paved stones beyond the High Garda barracks, night was already falling on the city, and the day's warmth was chilling fast.
Jess hopped down, groaning from stiffened muscles, and turned to offer Khalila a hand. She didn't need it, but she accepted with a dimpled smile. It didn't move him. The girl Jess was interested in wasn't in this carriage.
He looked up and down the rows, and Glain caught his shoulder as he started to move off. 'Careful,' she said.
'I know.'
'I mean it.'
He shook free and walked to the front of the vehicle. The other carriers were parked neatly side by side, with well-practised precision. The troops were disembarking and forming into lines, but he and his fellow students weren't expected to be so orderly ... at least, he hadn't yet seen Wolfe appear to order it. So he dodged between forming ranks of soldiers and tried to keep himself hidden from sight as he moved from carrier to carrier, checking identification codes ... and there, ahead, was the one that he knew held Morgan.
The door was unlocked as he came to a halt, and three armed guards emerged. A beat later, Morgan appeared in the door.
It didn't look like her, except for the silky fall of chestnut-brown hair. She was a pale shadow, drawn and very, very weary. One of the guards - Yeva, Jess realised - offered her a hand, and Morgan accepted it. As her foot touched the stone flagging, she looked up.
She saw him.
He didn't know what he expected from her, or himself; he hadn't thought beyond the simple, visceral need to be there to see her. He hadn't quite imagined what it would feel like to be seen by her in turn.
The girl he'd kissed in the dim sanctity of his tent was gone, and the one who stood there watching him was a stranger.
The small guard - Rijuta - saw him, and crossed to him with all the crackling energy he'd seen in her before. No smiles now. Nothing but business. 'Go back,' she said. 'She doesn't want to see you. You will only make it harder for her.'
That was probably true. Jess nodded. He cast one more look at Morgan - the last look he would ever have, he thought - but she wouldn't meet his eyes at all.
He turned to go.
A gleaming black carriage was steaming towards them, fast. No ordinary carriage. Definitely not High Garda. It had ornate brightwork, and Jess had a strange vision of the carriage he'd climbed into when he was ten years old, and a man ate a book in front of him.
This was the conveyance of someone important.
The carriage rolled to a smooth halt, hissed a white cloud, and a sharply uniformed footman came around to open the passenger door.
The Artifex Magnus stepped down, and after him, a woman with a gleaming gold collar around her throat. It was intricately, expensively engraved with symbols that flowed together in a surprisingly elegant design.
It couldn't be anyone but the Obscurist Magnus.
Jess heard an intake of breath from the High Garda around him, and spines straightened. But she never leaves the Iron Tower. Obviously wrong. Here she was, and walking towards them, surrounded within a single stride by a walking armoured shell of six guards. She was a tall, bronze-skinned woman with sharp features and back-swept dark hair that fell nearly to her waist, liberally streaked with silver. She was old, at least fifty, but still very striking.
She wasn't coming towards him, after all. She was walking towards Morgan. Jess was merely in the way, and at a commanding glower from the Artifex, he moved. Not far, though. And not willingly.
'Stay still,' said a voice at his shoulder. Jess looked back to see Wolfe had joined him. He'd donned a flawlessly clean Scholar's robe. His dark hair was down around his shoulders, and his expression was flat and empty as he tracked the progress of the Obscurist. 'Stay absolutely still. They'll kill you if you move without permission. Don't meet the Obscurist's eyes directly.'
He had the feeling Wolfe wasn't glad to find him here, but he couldn't help that. He'd done what he had to do.
The Obscurist Magnus stopped a few steps from Morgan, and bowed just the slightest degree. 'I am pleased to find you well, Miss Hault,' she said. 'I trust your journey here has been smooth.'
It was absurd, how socially correct it was, after all the blood and death and anguish. Jess wondered how Morgan managed not to fling it in the Obscurist's face, but then again, Morgan had better survival instincts. 'Very pleasant,' she said. Her chin rose just a little. 'Please don't expect me to
thank you.'
'Thank us for saving you from a lifetime of running and hiding and unending fear? No, I don't expect that yet. But someday, when you see more clearly.' The uniformed footman that had ushered them from the carriage now stepped forward with an ornate golden box, ornamented with the old, traditional inlay of the goddess Nut, wings spread, ankhs of eternal life in both hands. He opened the box and presented it with a formal bow to the Obscurist.
On a cushion of black velvet inside lay a silvery engraved collar, like the one that the Obscurist Magnus wore. She took it in both hands, and a soft orange glow formed where she touched it. Formulae, made visible and real. The talent of the Obscurists. Morgan's talent.
The collar separated at an invisible seam.
No. Jess could read that clearly in Morgan's eyes, in the shudder that ran through her body. But she didn't try to run from it now.
There was nowhere to go. No one who could help.
The Obscurist Magnus stepped forward and spread the metal around the girl's throat. It gleamed, rare and beautiful, and as she made a graceful gesture with one hand, the symbols hovering around it whirled, spun, and snapped inward.
The collar shut with a tiny, singing sound, and Jess saw Morgan lurch as if physically stung by it. She bit her lip on a cry, and tears welled in her eyes. She raised her hands to touch the thing, and Jess realised no one had removed her shackles.
The Obscurist realised it at the same moment, and glared at the guards. 'Take those off,' she ordered. 'There's no need to be cruel.'
Yeva came forward and unlocked the irons. Beneath them, Morgan's wrists were red and abraded. She slowly lowered her hands to her sides and with a visible effort blinked away the tears gathered in her eyes and took a slow, calm breath.
'Good,' the Obscurist said. 'The worst is over now. You'll be well cared for. Your work will be for the betterment of the Library, and all of mankind. It's a great honour.'
'I'm a slave,' Morgan said.
In answer, the Obscurist touched a fingertip to her own collar. It had the feel of a ritual motion, somehow. 'We are all slaves to our duty. Is that not so, Scholar Wolfe?' The Obscurist suddenly turned to face him, and Jess, and her dark eyes seemed as dead as a corpse's. 'You, of all people, should know how deep our duty goes.'