Ash and Quill(48)

Santi's smile started small, then grew. "You two," he said, and it sounded like affection. "You have an alarming talent for destruction."

"Learned from the best," Jess said, and grinned back. His whole body ached, but he couldn't deny that seeing Santi alive and relatively well had done wonders for his spirits.

He also didn't miss the worry that Wolfe was trying hard to conceal. As usual, Captain Santi was pushing himself. And Wolfe was trying to hold him back, for his own good. That sounds familiar.

Thomas wiped sweat and smoke from his face with a rag that was already well sooted. He looked, Jess thought, like the ancient Greek god Hephaestus, stripped to a bare, ash-streaked chest, with a heavy hammer in his hand.

"Too bad you can't demonstrate it for me," Santi said. "I'd have liked to see it print something."

"I'd have thought Scholar Wolfe would have demonstrated the one he built to you . . . ?" Thomas asked.

"I was away when he was working on it," Santi said. "Training a new High Garda company in Belgium. I knew he had an important project, but not the specifics."

"That ignorance saved your life," Wolfe said. "They'd have killed you if you'd ever laid eyes on it."

"Most likely," Santi replied mildly. "When I returned from my assignment I found Chris gone, with all his work. You know the rest."

The rest: imprisonment, torture, erasure from the records of the Library-for a Scholar of Wolfe's caliber, it was the assassination of immortality, the burning of a life's work, and for what? For being brilliant. For being exactly what the Library stood for in the first place. It gave Jess a hot ache in the back of his chest, like an unvoiced shout. Such a waste. It was all such a waste.

He still couldn't come to terms with the harsh, awful fact that it had been going on this way for hundreds of years. The Archivists, generation after generation, eliminating anyone who threatened their hold on power-like Thomas, and Wolfe. Two examples that a thousand years earlier, the Library would have elevated and celebrated.

Santi's calm acceptance of that left Jess chilled, even in the heat of the forge.

"When will you be ready to demonstrate?" Wolfe asked. Thomas exchanged a quick look with Jess and raised his eyebrows.

"I don't know. Two more days?"

"Tomorrow," Wolfe said. "I'd rather you soothe Master Beck's anxiety sooner than later. The more nervous he becomes, the more he'll want to grandstand for his people." That was all true, but Jess thought there was the tiniest hint in Wolfe's expression, in the way he avoided meeting Jess's eyes, that it was more than that. Wolfe was playing his own game. Again. 

"We can manage it for tomorrow," Thomas said. "If you're sure of the timing."

"He's sure," Santi said, and gave them a small, determined nod. "I'd best go get some rest now."

They were speaking around the subject, for the benefit of the female guard sitting in the corner. She was, unlike Diwell, all too alert.

"Yes," Wolfe said. "Come, Nic. We'll leave them to work."

Thomas slid his goggles back on and silently returned to the forge, but Jess watched in silence as Wolfe helped Santi up. The captain's weakness was alarming. Tomorrow's too soon. But there were reasons that Wolfe wanted the timeline to be set just this way, and Jess felt the sick foreboding inside spiral up into real dread.

Tomorrow, everything was going to change.



They got nothing at all for dinner that night. The guards got nothing either, and said-with barely concealed anger-that as a precaution against inclement weather, rations were being cut. For the present, only the ill, elderly, and very young were to be fed.

It was horribly late when Jess was able to stagger, half-hobbled, back to his bed, but the letters had been carved, the molds made, and the metal poured. Now they had two long, neat rows of letters and numbers in English and in Greek, and his muscles felt as if they were coated in Greek fire. He was unconscious and uncaring for four hours before something-he wasn't quite sure what-brought him groggily back to the world. When he tried to sit up, the muscles that had been hot and painfully tight had hardened into poured concrete, and moving seemed like a terrible idea.

Morgan stood looking down at him, and as he got enough awareness to identify her, he also saw the stark exhaustion on her face. She sank down to a sitting position when he didn't get up, and leaned against the frame of the bed.

"God," he whispered, and sat up. "What's happened?"

"Don't," she whispered back. "Please." Her hands were shaking, even as they rested in her lap. He saw tears glisten faintly in her eyes. It was blushing dawn outside, and the new light should have been kind to her, but it only made her look more broken. "It had to be done. It had to be. But the cost, oh, Jess-"