Ash and Quill(83)

"What's he doing?" Brendan asked. Jess turned him away again. "Jess, enough with his tinkering. We need to go. Now. They'll be following up with worse; you know that. That Scholar must have reported in. High Garda will be on the way here. The lions, they sent on ahead."


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"If they're coming out of New York, they have a long way to go," Jess said. "And Boston's a hotbed of trouble. They haven't dispatched High Garda out of there in a year. We've got time to get aboard. Assuming your ship's still there."

"It's there," Brendan said. "Already checked."

"Then we wait until Thomas is done," Jess said. He plucked the gun from his brother's holster, ignored his objection, and walked over to Captain Santi. "Sir. Show me how you dropped that lion. If we're going to do this more often, we'll need to know how to hit them from a distance."

They buried the Scholar's body before they left, and planted the banner as a marker. Wolfe wrote something on the back of the message and shoved it into the snarling open mouth of the bronze lion.

Jess checked. The message said, We will see you in Alexandria.

Thomas finished the last of the camouflaged lions and closed the skin back up. He activated them, one by one, and Jess waited with a sense of creeping horror to see if Thomas had made a mistake-or worse, if Morgan had.

But the lions gave a soft mechanical purr when Thomas stroked their heads, and followed him placidly when he walked.

"Quickly," Morgan said. "Jess, say, ‘I am your friend.' The rest of you, do it in turn."

It felt stupid, but Jess said it, and as he did, he saw the lions turn as one to look at him. Remembering him, he realized, for later. All of them did it, even Brendan. His twin looked like he didn't half believe it, and Jess didn't blame him, but the lions ignored them all as Thomas sent them coursing out in a box formation around them. Their own nearly invisible metal army, to escort them back to the coast. Broken and reprogrammed.

They had a pack of their own now.

As he passed close, Dario said, "The Archivist is right, you know. We are dangerous."

"We'd damn well better be," Jess said. "Or we're all dead."



Somehow, he wasn't surprised to find that the ship moored in the secluded cove flew a familiar flag: that of the Great Library of Alexandria. The golden eye of Horus flapped and hissed in the strong breeze, and it seemed to blaze even in the cloudy light.

But it wasn't a Library ship. Jess knew that, because he recognized the girl standing on the beach, surrounded by a small army of hard men and women of no particular uniform. "Cousin Anit," Brendan called brightly, and swept her into a twirling hug. "Good to see you!" 

"Put me down." She was stiff in his arms, and her voice was chilly, and Brendan let her go and stepped back. Well back. "I'll pretend you didn't do that." She ignored him and shifted her gaze. "Cousin Jess."

The girl was Egyptian to the bone, and of no blood relation to him; she was a cousin in business, though, and those ties counted for nearly as much. Her father-implied, he thought, by those red stripes on the ships-was Red Ibrahim, one of the most powerful smugglers in the world . . . and the book smuggler of Alexandria, which was precisely the most perilous and impossible place to practice such a craft. Not one to be underestimated, her father . . . and young Anit, for all her demure prettiness, was just as dangerous and clever. She was apprenticing in the trade and was well on the way to mastery, all as barely more than a child.

"You're joking," Jess said to his brother. "You got her to help us. All the way from Alexandria?"

"I wasn't in Alexandria," Anit said. "I delivered a shipment of goods from Egypt to a port in Mexico and retrieved some new things. Diverting here was little trouble. But it will cost you." She smiled-at Jess, not Brendan. "My father does nothing for free."

No mistaking it-she didn't care for Brendan much. She looked older, Jess thought . . . taller, and rounder beneath her practical trousers and jacket. Armed with both a gun and a knife, though the knife looked almost ornamental. She wore her dark hair up in a no-nonsense twist, and as she bowed slightly to Jess, he mirrored it, just a little lower.

"Didn't you make the deal?" he asked his brother. Brendan raised his eyebrows. A familiar gesture. An irritating one.

"With what? You're lucky I arrived here, trading on favors, in time to save your sorry skin. Da didn't pour his fortune in my pockets. You want passage, you make the deal."