Ash and Quill(120)

"Sir, this is the rebel Scholar! Christopher Wolfe!"

"This one's the missing Obscurist," said another, farther away.

"Alive?"

"Both alive, sir."

Jess tried to swallow the wave of relief. He waited. His heart was pounding itself to bits against his ribs, and he wanted desperately to wage a fight he knew he would lose, but he did nothing. Seconds ticked by, and then the High Garda straddling him stepped off to the side and said, "Get up, you. Slowly."


      ///
       
         
       
        

Jess kept his hands raised and struggled to his knees, then-as instructed-slowly to his feet. "I'm here to make a deal," he croaked. "I've brought you two of the traitors in good faith. Shoot me, and you can explain to the Archivist how you lost ten thousand original books."

He finally risked a look at the others. Wolfe was flat on his stomach, and a High Garda woman knelt on him as she put his hands behind his back in restraints. Morgan looked barely conscious. He kept his face still, body loose, as he watched her being flipped over and cuffed, too.

Wolfe had raised his head at a painful angle to look at him. "You fool," he said. "What do you think you're doing? Your own brother's going to slaughter you. If Santi doesn't get you first!"

"I don't think my fate's your problem, Scholar," Jess said, in a croaking approximation of Brendan's careless, chilly tones. "Seems to me you've got bigger things to worry about. Like prison bars."

"And her? You think Jess is going to thank you for putting her back in the Iron Tower? You know what's going to happen to her, you cold bastard?"

"I don't know and don't care, because I'm not my weak-livered brother. She's not my concern." Jess wanted to take the fear from Morgan's eyes, the pallor from her face, but he had to play this out, had to. He looked at the soldier who faced him, and slowly lowered his hands and put them behind his back. "Take me to the Archivist, if you want to live to see the morning."

"Whatever you think you're doing, it won't work!" Wolfe shouted. The soldier with him dragged him up to his knees, and loose graying hair fell around his face. It didn't disguise the urgent fire in his eyes. "Brightwell! It won't work!"

For an eerie moment, it felt like Wolfe was talking to him. To Jess, not to Brendan. But Wolfe didn't know. They'd taken great care to leave him out of all of this. Wolfe, Dario had argued, could break. Would break. But in that second, Jess wondered if Wolfe knew. Had maybe known the entire time.

"Sorry, Scholar," he managed to whisper. Brendan's smile on his lips. Brendan's voice. But inside, his soul was tearing itself apart. "There's no turning back now."

And that was the moment when the door of the entry hall of the Archive of the Great Library opened and the Archivist Magister walked in. Oh, not alone. Not by half. He had a dozen High Garda elite guards around him. He wore a rich, thickly embroidered robe of midnight blue, and a crown with the eye of Horus rising like the sun from his forehead. Gold and rubies, and worth a king's ransom. 

He had an old man's face, worn and seamed and burned by years in the hot Egyptian sun, but his eyes were young. They missed nothing. Not the state that Jess was in, or the relatively undamaged captives.

"I met another Brightwell, once," the Archivist said. "He looked a great deal like you."

Jess spat blood onto the marble floor and grinned. He knew he looked half-savage. Didn't care.

"Yeah, well, I'm nothing like my fool brother," he said. "And you're going to want to keep me close, Archivist. Because I'm bringing you everything you ever wanted. Brendan Brightwell, at your service." He managed a mocking bow.

The silence rang for a long moment. Thomas, Jess thought, had done him a favor damaging his voice. Nothing about him would seem familiar now, not even that.

The Archivist considered all of it for what seemed far too long, and then nodded.

"We'll see," he said. "Take Scholar Wolfe to the cells. The girl goes back to the Iron Tower. And you, Brendan Brightwell . . ." The Archivist paused for so long that Jess had to ready himself for the end, for the sound of High Garda guns to be the last thing he heard. "You come with me."

They walked out of the vast hall of the Great Archives, into the heat of an Alexandrian day, and the smell of the only place he'd ever felt at home, and Jess thought, Now all we have to do is play the game.

But he had the eerie feeling that this game was barely even begun . . . and that it wasn't chess at all.