For answer, Jess reached out and tipped the book, then back in.
They all heard the click. Soldiers fanned out, but Jess didn't move. He knew where it was. No point in helping them, though. They'd surely work out that this house didn't have space for any hidden rooms of any size.
Not unless they were below.
He bent and pulled back the rug. Even with the cover gone, it was cleverly done; the sides of the trapdoor were almost invisible, flush with the wooden floor. There was one piece of wood of an odd size, as if it had been added as a replacement or fit; he pushed on it, and one end flipped up to form a handle.
"Ready?" he asked softly.
The captain formed up the troops and then gave him a brisk nod.
He pulled the trap up in one fast motion, and the soldiers plunged down the steps. They went quietly, and the quiet remained for two or three heartbeats . . . until the sound of shots exploded. Shots, cries, shouts, screams. Flashes of light. Jess stepped back as the battle intensified and the sharp smell of gunpowder and blood hit the air. He had no High Garda armor, and putting himself in the thick of it would do no one any good. Besides, it seemed from the slowing gunfire that he wasn't needed.
In the brief pause between one spate of shouting and the next, he heard the unmistakable soft click of another latch being released.
Jess stepped back, careful to be as silent as he could, and angled to see into the next room. A bedroom, with a small, flat bed that was swinging silently upward. Clever. He had no weapon, but he took a heavy soapstone statue of Horus from the bookcase and waited.
The Burner who emerged stopped and took a bottle from her pocket. Greek fire, sloshing in her shaking hand. She shouted, "A life is worth more than a book, you Library ghouls!" and tossed it down the steps. Jess heard it shatter and knew the captain would order her people back out through the other trap.
The Burner turned to run and saw him blocking her path.
She was older than he was, but not by much. A year, maybe two. African extraction, with a sharply triangular face and skin as dark as burnished ebony.
And she didn't hesitate to attack.
He saw her lunge and draw the knife at her belt in the same motion, and he used the statue to deflect the stab that would have surely gutted him. "Stop!" He tried to keep it as low as he could. "Stop, I'm not your enemy!"
She didn't believe him, and why would she? He'd come here with the High Garda. And, truthfully, he was no friend of the Burners, either. She came at him again with the knife, and this time she scored a shallow cut along his ribs with it before he swung the statue and connected hard with her head.
She dropped. Not out, but not conscious enough to escape, either, and now it was too late even if she'd had a planned exit; High Garda troops were coming up through the other trapdoor at a run, and the captain spotted him. "You! Brightwell! With me! You two, get that Burner and put her in with the rest we've got."
Jess set the statue down and went to the captain as the Burner was dragged to the front door and out toward the troop carriers. More of her companions were being led up or carried from the rooms below. Jess counted a dozen of them before the last was out, and the captain grabbed his shoulder and shoved him toward the steps.
"I'm not going down there," Jess said. "She's thrown Greek fire."
"It's out," she said. "We have suppressant. Go on. I need your expert opinion on what I'm looking at down there."
"Expert?" he asked, brows arched. "Really?"
"Shut up and move."
He descended carefully. The room was smoky but lit by still-burning glows, and though the acrid, thick mist made him cough, it didn't seem to be actively dangerous. The ceiling was higher than he'd expected; it had taken a lot of work to dig out this large room. Multiple exits, too. He spotted at least three other trapdoors, all open. "Did anyone get away?" he asked.
"We don't think so, but it's possible," said one of the other soldiers. "There's a tunnel in the back we're following. This place is a warren. It's dug under half the houses on the block."
Including Red Ibrahim's? No, not bloody likely. He'd avoid that, at all costs. And what possible alliance could he have with Burners?
But he knew the answer to that the instant his eyes fixed on the structure that had been built in the center of the room. It was crude, and poorly aligned, but the plan of it was familiar. Stacks of raw paper sat against the walls, ready for pressing. Jess thought of the flyer he'd used as notepaper to send to the Spanish ambassador. It had almost certainly come from this press.
"You know what it is?" the captain asked. "It seems to be some kind of . . . ink machine."
Jess looked around and found a printed page in a corner; it was smeared and poorly aligned but legible. He handed it to the captain and watched the stages of realization hit in turn. Confusion first. Then dawning wonder. Then unease, as she realized the implications. He could tell that this captain wasn't someone who tended to think of the immense possibilities . . . only the dangers. But then, that was why she'd risen to her current post . . . and likely no further.
"It prints duplicates," Jess said. "Ink on paper. No Obscurist required."
"It's a machine that makes Burner lies look true." The captain crumpled the paper up and threw it with force against the wall. It bounced and rolled, and she stomped it flat. "And they can blanket the street with them. It's obscene."
"It's a tool," Jess said. "And it can do a great deal of good, in the right use."
"Good? If anyone can decide what is right and wrong, then we are lost, Brightwell! No unity, no sanity. It's an abomination."
Jess imagined that was what the first Archivist to destroy one of these machines had said. It had been the excuse for cutting the throat of the Scholar who invented it, too. "Perhaps," he said. "But just think for a moment what the Library could do with it."
"If even one of these things exists, there is no Library, don't you understand that?" The captain turned and walked back to the steps. "Gold Squad! Get down here. I want this thing destroyed. Not one scrap of it should remain when you're done--do you understand? Make a list of all the materials that go into it. We will want to track purchases."
A swarm of High Garda came down into the basement and began dismantling the press with hands, hammers, iron bars--anything they could find. They'd make short work of it, Jess thought.
But it didn't matter. It wouldn't be the only one in Alexandria. If the Burners had discovered how useful it was, and they obviously had, then Anit would have built several of them; this one, she'd sold to the Burners, but there would be bigger ones. Better ones. Red Ibrahim had access to money and talent that the Burners couldn't dream of, and he would see the astonishing possibilities where the High Garda captain would only see the threat.
Not that he was wrong, of course. There was no more dire, direct threat to the Great Library's power than the machine the soldiers were so busily dismantling. But the jinn was long out of the bottle by now; print machines were being thrown together in all corners of the world. The revolution was disorganized, but it was inevitable. The Archivist was riding a blind horse toward a cliff, and someone had to stop the inevitable disaster.
That wouldn't be done by destroying this machine, or any of them, or all of them. It would be done by remembering what the Library was, at its heart: a defiant outpost of courage, built by those who made knowledge something to be cherished, not destroyed.
People like this captain--who saw only danger from progress, while paying lip service to a tradition they didn't understand--were the largest obstacle to that goal. For generations, they'd placed all their worth and trust in the Library being the only source of knowledge. And they'd cling to that with everything they had.
But being the only source had never been the Library's founding purpose. Only preservation and protection.
Jess didn't argue; the captain wouldn't listen and saw him as hardly better than a Burner, anyway. Jess sat deep in thought on a barrel of ink, paging through th
e records of what the Burners had already printed and distributed--a shockingly high number of leaflets--when the captain snatched the notebook from his hand and stuffed it into her own pocket next to a personal journal. I miss my journal, Jess thought, and was strangely surprised to feel a little pang of grief. He'd not written down a thing that had happened in his life for such a long time; he'd broken the habit and custom without a glance backward the instant he knew the Library might be reading the contents. But he was surprised to realize that he missed it. Maybe, once this was over, he could write about what had happened. That might help this strange, gray mood that had taken him over.
You can take it apart, but you can't destroy the idea, he wanted to tell the captain, but he'd be wasting his time.
"Well?" the captain snapped. "Are you staying here to wait for the Burners to come back and tear you apart, or are you going with us? Either way is fine with me."
He couldn't help but ask, "You mean, you'd let me stay?"
The woman shrugged. "Stay if you like. But it'll be the end of you if you do."
"What are you talking about?"
"I was told to withdraw. You should do the same, if you want to live."
"Captain?"
The woman walked away, and Jess trailed her up, through the house, to the street.
"Last time," the captain said. "Are you coming or staying?"
"Staying," Jess said. Since he'd been given the choice, which was baffling. The captain stepped into the carrier and it sped away, leaving a cloud of white steam behind it. The next two carriers followed close behind.
And then they were gone.
They'd left him behind. Free. That hardly seemed right, and he was trying to decide what the hell was happening when he heard the alarm sound from the Lighthouse.
It was legendary, that sound: an eerie, shrieking rise and fall that pierced the ear and woke a deep, anxious terror inside. Monsters screamed like that. The alarm at the Lighthouse had last sounded two hundred years ago, when a huge storm had threatened the city; it hadn't been activated on a clear day, like this one, in hundreds of years before that.
Jess stood rooted to the spot, listening, and saw people stepping outside of buildings and homes around him. Red Ibrahim's door opened, and a cluster of servants came out, nervously wiping their hands on aprons. No sign of the man himself.
"What is it?" asked a large, square woman in a white head scarf. A chef, he thought, pulled away from the morning's food preparations. "Do you know?"
Jess shook his head. "A test?"
"I've never heard it tested before. Wouldn't they announce it in advance?" She rocked back and forth, silent for a moment, then burst out, "I wish they'd shut it off!"
She'd had to speak loudly to be heard over the wailing, and as soon as she said it, as if she'd wished it done, the shriek of the alarm cut off. Echoes rolled through the streets, and a profound, uneasy silence settled. Nothing moved--nothing except speeding troop carriers, moving out from the High Garda compound. Dozens of them, spreading out to different parts of the city.
And with them, the loping, shining forms of automata.
Jess felt sickness curl deep inside. Something is happening. Something bad.
Then the amplified voice of the Archivist rang out. What Obscurist magic it was, he couldn't fathom, though Morgan likely would have known, but the voice of one man reached an entire city, and it was clear and eerily calm.
"Citizens of Alexandria, this is the Archivist of the Great Library. Be it known to you now that no Burner shall be left alive in our great and ancient city. No criminal smuggler shall be left alive to deal in forbidden books. No quarter will be given those who seek to destroy the safety and security of thousands of years. We have been merciful. I tell you now, we will not be merciful again.
"To that end the High Garda is now marching on hidden sites in our city to rout Burners and criminals from their holes and destroy utterly any trace of their existence. There will be damage. There will be innocent lives lost. But we believe in the greater worth of the Library. Knowledge is all!"
As Jess heard those around him devoutly repeat it, he saw that one of the troop carriers, with a phalanx of running automaton lions, was heading in their direction.
He turned to the servants. "Get out of here!" he shouted, and grabbed the chef's arm as she started to obey. "Wait. Where's Red Ibrahim?"
"Who?"
"Don't waste my time, woman. Where is he?"
She gave him a long look, and he felt something sharp prick his stomach. He looked down to find a wickedly well-used knife resting there. "Take your hand off me. The master of the house is gone. There's only us inside."
"Then, leave," he said. "And warn him. Tell him to go to ground, now--"
The words died in his throat, because he caught something from the corner of his eye and turned his head to look. There was still a knife threatening to gut him, but in that moment, it no longer mattered. Cold filled his veins, froze his spine, and he heard the chef whisper, "What in good Heron's name is . . ." She fell silent, then let out a scream, backed up, and ran.
Jess didn't move. Couldn't. His brain struggled to make sense of the size of it, the eerie beauty of it, as the sleek, serpentine shape rose on beating wings. That isn't possible.
They'd built a dragon.
The entire city was screaming. He heard the panic coming in waves as the dragon rose and circled in lazy spirals, banking and turning. It was a nightmare. It was deeply wrong. It was beautiful.
And then it came down.
The part of his mind that was frozen, clinical, trying to understand . . . it noted that this monster descended like a hawk, a swift, brutal, eerily silent descent. It had claws and talons, and it landed on the street at the end of the block. And the scale of it . . . He had never imagined anything could be built so large, so vividly and horribly swift. A snakelike neck stretched up as high as a three-story building to support a head shaped like that of an ancient, brutal dinosaur, if such had been made of clouded steel. Spiked, razor-sharp teeth. And the body: a hissing, whispering marvel of interlocking-plate scales, iridescent in the bright sunlight.
Its eyes glowed dark yellow, and there was no mercy in them. No thought.
Everyone near him was gone now, running for their lives. Houses had emptied. And the dragon's talons clashed on stone as it lowered its head and breathed down a thick, green fog into the street.
Jess had time to taste that bitter, poisonous tang in the back of his throat before his lungs convulsed into coughs, and he found himself falling to his hands and knees trying to find clearer air. That's the stench of Greek fire. He'd seen that mist build up in Philadelphia, clouding the air until it all ignited at once . . . and then he realized that the Library had taken note of it, too. First the mist, then the fire, he thought, and lurched up to his feet again to run. He couldn't see where he was going; the rancid fog stung and blurred his vision, but he knew he was still on the road, feeling cobbles under his feet. He could hear the metallic hiss and clank of the automaton behind him, but how far, where . . .
Instinct told him, Run, just run, it doesn't matter, run!
Jess ran, blinded, as fast as he could go, until he tasted clearer air, and then he dashed a hand over his eyes and tried to see where he was.
He'd come dangerously close to falling over a curb and impaling himself on an iron fence, but he was near the farther end of the street now, and he dared to slow down and try to look back.
Just as he did, a spark ignited in the cloud, and for an instant he'd never forget, the fog of Greek fire glowed like a beautiful, fragile network of green lace, suspended in the air . . .
. . . and then everything in it exploded.
The houses. The street. Fences. Fountains, weeping flames.
A green bubble of hell.
Stones melted. Houses collapsed. If anything lived inside that fog, it was incinerated to the bones. The servants? The chef? What about the others on the street--did they get out in time?
Jess let out a raw scream, because he was in Philadelphia again, seeing the bombs fall and lives lost, and it was happening here, in Alexandria, and for what? For what? To punish the Burners? Red Ibrahim?
No. To terrify. To show the city that the Archivist would not allow any opposition.
The wail of the alarm started again, and from inside the inferno came a chilling, answering roar, and the dragon launched itself up. It trailed streamers of fire behind it, nightmarish curls that writhed and twisted into black smoke. The automaton was streaked with soot and ash, but it was intact. Eerily alive.
It circled the sky over the city, and the threat was as clear as the sun in the sky: you are all one breath away from death now.
Jess found himself sitting now, clinging to the iron fence; it felt hot, and he realized that his clothes were giving off little curls of wispy smoke. His skin felt dry and hot, and he wearily got to his feet and walked on through falling ash and the eerie wail of the alarm until he saw the troop carrier that had been headed toward his street.
It was parked at the top of the hill, and four automaton lions waited, pacing.
Nowhere else to go, he thought, and kept walking. He coughed and tasted the bitter aftertaste of the fog. Spat out a thick mouthful of greenish phlegm and nearly collapsed with the force of another convulsive series of coughs.
When he finally straightened, the lions had surrounded him, and as one, they growled and showed teeth when he tried to move forward.
"I wouldn't," said a light, calm voice. "You're Jess Brightwell, are you not?"
For a split second, he nearly answered yes, but he caught it just in time and said, "For the thousandth time, no. I'm his twin, Brendan, and for God's sake, can't you get that into your thick skulls? What the hell was that thing?"
"Take him," the voice said. "He's the one we want."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jess didn't bother to ask where he was being taken. He assumed that he would be taken back to his cramped little prison, to wait there on the Archivist's pleasure, but he couldn't shake the horror of what he'd just seen. War was one thing; it was horrible and brutal, but there were rules, or at least there should be. He'd been trained as High Garda. Where was the duty and honor in what had just happened? Where was the benefit to knowledge? Had any of those people ever threatened the Great Library? This was the Library's own city. The Archivist was making war against his own people.