by Rachel Caine
“I’ll aim to damage the wings,” Jess said. “They’re the most vulnerable at the joints,” Jess said, and took his rifle from his shoulder.
Glain cast a lightning-quick look at Wolfe. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not in fighting shape, but I’ll try.”
“Leave it to me,” he said. He readied himself and then looked up, directly at the sphinx. “Come on, if you’re coming,” he said. “Theo.” He knew the old Archivist was looking at him. Could feel that. And the use of his first name—a name Wolfe hadn’t used in ages—would goad him.
The sphinx glided closer and caught the light in an elegant, terrifying metallic shimmer. It let out its unsettling war cry.
Jess’s shot hit its right wing just at the joint, and though it didn’t come off, it flopped loose and out of control. The sphinx tumbled toward them and managed to land on its lion paws. Snarling.
“Scatter!” Wolfe shouted, and grabbed Jess, who was trying to fire again but had begun to cough uncontrollably. He shoved the young man into a corner between two tombs and stood in front of him. “Glain!”
She knew what to do, and peppered the flank of the thing with rapid gunfire. It turned, snarling, and Wolfe lunged forward for the switch beneath its jaw.
He was too slow.
It caught his arm between its sharply pointed teeth, and its red eyes blazed as if with joy. He had on an armored jacket beneath his shirt—Santi’s insistence—and the teeth did not quite penetrate. The crushing pain was breathtaking. An instant later Jess was there jamming the butt of his rifle between the teeth and levering up to provide some temporary safety. “Hurry!” he shouted. His voice sounded raw and stark. The rifle wouldn’t take the strain long, not from the inhumanly strong clench of those jaws.
Wolfe groped for the switch one-handed. He still couldn’t free his arm, not until Jess’s rifle was out of the way, but the rifle was keeping him from serious damage. It was an awkward stretch, and he felt a sharp twinge in his shoulder that warned him he was neither as athletic nor as limber as he’d once been, but his fingers found the button and pressed it.
Nothing happened.
He pushed again, harder. And again. The sphinx clawed at him with a razor-tipped paw, and he turned to avoid it. The claws caught in his jacket and ripped it from neck to waist. “It’s not working!” he shouted to Jess and Glain. “They’ve disabled the fail-safe!” The jacket’s mail had protected him thus far, but for how long? If those paws caught him on an exposed limb, a major artery . . .
“Can’t use Greek fire,” Glain shouted back. “You’d both be burned!”
“I have an idea,” Jess said. He sounded oddly calm. “It’s risky.”
My arm is in the mouth of a sphinx that’s only a moment from ripping it from the socket. Risky sounds quite safe, Wolfe thought, but he didn’t say it. Too many words. “Tell me!”
“Work your arm free,” Jess said. “Run. Make for the Minotaur. If you can make them fight each other—”
Risky wasn’t the right word for it. Suicidal was far more on point. But Jess was right; it could work. If he was fast enough. If he was lucky. If, if, if. He liked certainty. It was rare enough in life, but completely absent now.
The sphinx shook its head, trying to dislocate his arm; he grabbed hold of its neck with his free arm and rode the motion, though it made him dizzy and sick with the pain. Jess’s rifle slipped, and he jammed it back in. His face had gone taut with effort, his eyes black with concentration. No room for fear here. None at all. The boy was the runner of the three of them, but he couldn’t do it this time. He simply wasn’t capable.
It’s up to me.
Wolfe took a breath and pulled at a hard angle. He scraped an inch of arm free, and the sphinx screamed and tried to claw him again. Shreds of cloth flew from his jacket, and the thing narrowly missed his right leg. Don’t think about the arteries that might have been sliced. Now or never. He set his teeth and pulled, hard, and got himself free. Jess jammed the rifle in harder, holding the sphinx in place.
Wolfe ran. He was no athlete like young Brightwell, no trained High Garda like Glain, but he’d survived a long time in a dangerous world, and he knew what was coming. Stay alive. Stay alive for Nic, if not for yourself.
Dying in a graveyard seemed like the most ignominious end of them all. He wasn’t having it.
Run, don’t think. He heard Jess’s raw shout behind him and hoped to all the gods that the sphinx hadn’t turned on the boy, but there was no time to check. He twisted around a looming gravestone, ducked beneath a low, carved arch. The path was clear but hardly straight; it wandered between stark monoliths and carved monuments, miniature temples and houses full of the dead. The reek of this place seemed almost familiar now, but it was tainted by his own fear. His desperation. He heard the Minotaur’s dull bellow; it was ahead and to the left. The path turned again, and now he heard the metallic crunch of the sphinx’s paws on the path behind him. It couldn’t fly, but it could leap if it chose, if he left it an opening. If it landed on him, it would sever his spine with one bite.
The path twisted right. He plunged on left, weaving between narrow spaces he knew the sphinx’s bulk couldn’t manage. This was a risk, a huge one; in spots the tombs and monuments were thick as teeth, and if he got slowed down, caught in that trap . . . He dodged a thicket of cenotaphs and around a looming statue of Anubis, whose palms held eternally burning lamps. Did it just move? Could it? He had no time. He ran in the direction of the Minotaur’s frustrated cry.
The sphinx had kept to the path, and as he burst out ahead he saw it just coming around a turn. His lungs burned, his legs felt light and fragile, but he forced more speed from his body. The Minotaur couldn’t be far. On his right, mirrors flashed at the center of the spiraled array, and he averted his eyes from the glare.
He nearly missed the Minotaur’s approach as it blundered out of a blind alley of tombs with its thickly muscled arms scything the air. Searching for a victim. He ducked and avoided it, rolled clear, and right on cue, the sphinx shrieked as it came on after him.
The Minotaur turned toward the sound, and the sphinx leaped past it to get to Wolfe. Well, tried to.
The Minotaur’s searching hands brushed a wing, grabbed, and tore. It smashed the sphinx out of the air midleap to roll on the ground, and as the wounded automaton scrambled to get up, the Minotaur grasped it by the neck.
As Wolfe caught his breath, it struck him that the Minotaur was treating the sphinx like an intruder. Why, if it’s on the side of the Archivist? And then he realized that the Minotaur wasn’t, or at least, wasn’t anymore. Jess’s bullet must have damaged something in it more than its eyes. It had reverted to base instructions: kill intruders.
And the sphinx wasn’t meant to be here.
The battle was horrific. The sphinx gouged long, ragged scrapes into the Minotaur’s metal skin, severed cables, bit at exposed tubing. One of the Minotaur’s legs stopped moving—frozen in place. The fight was a blur of claws, teeth, battering fists, and then the Minotaur finally got a good grip with both hands on the sphinx’s neck. It applied brute strength to twisting the sphinx’s shrieking head relentlessly around until the noise stopped, and then ripped it completely away from the body in a spray of pale fluids and snapping cables.
The bull-headed monster raised the head in one hand as the sphinx’s red eyes faded to black. It bellowed its defiance in a shocking roar.
Wolfe backed away slowly, careful to make no sound as the Minotaur tore pieces away from the metal corpse. He finally felt safe enough to run again, and wove through a thick forest of memorials to where the path came clear again. Walked the rest of the way as the fear subsided, and shock began to sink a chill into his skin. His arm ached, and when he stripped off the jacket he found a hand-span red bruise starting to ripen. Lucky bones hadn’t shattered.
Lucky in general.
Jess and Glain were coming
down the path, which didn’t surprise him; they saw their duty as his guardians, and he saw his going in the opposite direction. Good they could meet in the middle, he supposed.
Glain, always reserved, stopped and nodded after giving him a thorough sweeping glance. “It worked,” she said.
“Must have,” Jess said, “since he’s not dismembered.” But Jess looked tired and worried. “Did it? Really?”
“More or less,” Wolfe said. “Word of advice: in a battle between those two automata, do not bet on the sphinx. Now let’s leave this palace of bones before one of us ends up staying.”
Coming out of the main entrance of the Necropolis—not the massive marble gates cranked open only for grand funerals, but the smaller side door that locked from the outside and required a Codex authorization to open—felt like being reborn, and Wolfe thought about Orpheus emerging from the underworld. Had Orpheus also emerged into darkness, rain, and slashing lightning? Perhaps he had. By no means am I looking back and tempting the Fates. He ushered his two young High Garda ahead of him, just for superstitious certainty, and as Glain had promised there was an armored High Garda carrier on the road, with two armed soldiers standing next to it in rain gear. The downpour was breathtaking in its intensity and chill, and Wolfe was sodden and cold in half the distance.
One of the soldiers skimmed back his hood and stepped forward. Lieutenant Tom Rolleson. Troll, to his friends. “I see you’ve had adventures,” he said. “Tell me all about it, Scholar.”
“Not here,” Wolfe growled, as he watched Glain help Jess into the carrier. Then finally accept help herself. Walking wounded, both of them. “What news?”
“Didn’t you see?”
“See what?”
For answer, Rolleson pointed toward the harbor, which was barely visible from this spot on the hill. Lost in darkness until a bolt of lightning shot across the sky, and Wolfe realized what was missing. “Poseidon?” He felt a real stab of alarm. “The fleet?” He tried to look out to sea, but the rain was slanting from that direction, and he could make out nothing but mist and waves. “What’s happened?”
“Poseidon went to war and died for it,” Troll said. “The fleet’s dispersed. We’re safe at the moment, thanks to the storm. Inside, Scholar, this rain isn’t doing either of us good.”
He was right, of course. The relief of the warm interior of the carrier unleashed a wave of weariness that Wolfe pushed aside. He leaned forward and fixed Troll with a stare. “Why did Santi summon me back?”
“Sir, I don’t know,” Rolleson said, which Wolfe sensed was at best half-true. “But I know he wants you there now.” He banged on the partition, and the driver in front began to move the carrier on at a high rate of speed. The Necropolis was a fair distance from the Serapeum, but Wolfe supposed there would be little traffic. Who’d be foolish enough to be out in this rain?
No one, apparently. He slid back a window cover and looked out at the city as it flashed by. “Did the fleet attack again? Is that why Poseidon left position?”
Rolleson shrugged. “They tried to destroy it, and it took issue. We’ll have a job of recovering bodies from wrecked ships tomorrow. It was a shocking sight. I imagine the survivors will remember it a long time.”
“I imagine,” he agreed, and closed his eyes. “Quite a cost for all of us.”
“Still better than our supposed friends taking control of our city. You know that once that happens, we’d never get it back.”
Wolfe nodded. He knew. But he also knew what a balance this was. How delicate and imperfect. The Great Library seemed so ancient that few in modern times could imagine how the world would look if it fell . . . not even those who wanted it to fall. But it was always, always poised on the knife-edge of goodwill and strength. Disaster and daring. It was the gamble of it he loved, more than anything else: the pure will of those ancients who’d understood that without knowledge, there could be no truth.
He would die for the Great Library. Despite everything it had done to him, he would, without question. He just asked that it be as many years away as possible. He’d come very close the last few days. He could still hear the strangely gruesome crunch of the Minotaur twisting the head of the sphinx away from its body. The almost plaintive cry of the dying automaton.
Could have so easily been him, and he suddenly wished for peace, for the days and nights he’d spent traveling with Nic on the way to some dire crisis or other—days they spent talking, or not talking, making love or just lying together, reading. Playing a nightly game of chess, or Egyptian sennet, or the board games of ancient Ur. Something with history and meaning.
He’d underestimated how much peace meant to him. Never Nic, but the still, quiet moments . . . those seemed precious to him now.
Wolfe shook himself out of his musings and forced himself back to attention. The city seemed quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful. The storm battered at walls and towers and the sides of their carrier. The Serapeum, as they approached it, seemed to be a flowing fountain of water down all sides. The street was a river. Rain was rare here, and flooding nearly unknown, except for ocean-driven tempests like this one. Storms always shut the city down.
The carrier went underground to the High Garda’s stronghold below the Serapeum, and from there, Wolfe, Glain, and Jess took the main tunnel up to the garden level. He ordered them both off to the Medica and made sure they actually went before he proceeded with Rolleson. Security was tight, and their identities were checked, and checked again, at every level they passed. The grim silence of the sentries made Wolfe’s skin prickle.
Wolfe was directed to a conference room, and as the two of them entered the room he found Nic was there, gazing blankly into the distance. The sight of his lover’s face was like a beacon back to home, and he basked in it for an instant before he noticed the rest of those assembled.
That included the full Curia, or as many as could be spared; he didn’t see the Artifex Magnus, who must still be manning the Lighthouse. There was no sign of Archivist Murasaki, which was . . . curious. Only Khalila, her assistant, who stood silently at the corner of the long table. Slowly, the Curia rose to their feet. Wolfe stopped, staring at the scene. It made no sense to him.
“Nic?” he asked. His voice seemed odd to him. He was aware there was something in this room, something heavy.
“Archivist Murasaki is dead,” Santi said. His eyes were bleak. Shattered. Wolfe felt a real jolt of horror—not so much for Murasaki as for the pain he could feel radiating out of his lover like fever. “I failed in my duty.” He didn’t elaborate, which wasn’t like him; he just stated the fact and stepped aside with his head bowed. It was terrifying. Santi did not fail. Not like this.
“Dead,” he repeated numbly. “How? What happened?” Why the hell am I here? The question had real dread, real weight.
Khalila stepped forward, such a small young woman to hold such a dense gravity of purpose. “Scholar Wolfe, the Archivist was assassinated by traitorous High Garda soldiers,” she said. Her voice was steady, but he saw the tears glittering in her eyes. “Men bought off by the exiled traitor. Her last words were that you must take the post until a new Archivist can be elected and confirmed by the Curia. We cannot be without a leader. And she asked for you.”
He stared at her. His eyes burned, and for a moment he thought it was with tears, but no, no, it was anger. He couldn’t speak. Could hardly breathe for the pressure of fury building in his chest.
He turned to Nic, but Nic would not meet his eyes, or even look up.
Christopher Wolfe stood alone, the center of the world, and he hated it.
He finally found his voice. “Surely the Curia has a better suggestion.”
“We don’t,” said the Litterae Magnus—Carole Vargas, a large, dour South American woman with a breathtaking instinct for language and a deadly gift for insult. They’d come up in Ptolemy House together as students. They’d never bee
n friends. “As difficult as this is, none of us wants the role, not in these dangerous times. You were named. You must serve.”
“As what, your sacrificial goat?” Wolfe snapped. “No.”
The head of the Medica branch said, “Archivist Murasaki named you for a reason. You know the old man, after all. You’re his bitter enemy. Who better?”
“That’s exactly why I’m not the right choice,” he said. His tone was hard as diamond, and it cut deep in his chest. Carried to every corner of the room. “By all means, give me orders to chase after him, run him to ground, bring him to justice. But don’t ask me to sit on a throne and decide the fate of nations. I can’t lead. Too many wounds, too many scars, too many enemies. You know that. Half of you only want me in the role because you think, like Murasaki, I’ll end up slaughtered; the other half will start the next hour scheming how to remove me and replace me with a more palatable choice. No. Let’s save each other time and energy by naming someone else now.”
“You have to be the one.” Khalila held something, a folded pile of cloth, that glimmered in the light. Archivist’s robes. “Please, Scholar Wolfe. Please do this. She trusted you. I trust you.”
He hesitated, then took what she offered. The weight was astonishingly light for something so important. Cloth of gold, woven so finely that it felt like silk. He held the robe by the shoulders and let it shimmer in front of him in the light, and for a brief, disorienting moment he imagined himself in it, sitting on the Archivist’s throne in that great hall.
The Archivist and Pharaoh of the Great Library.
It made him want to laugh, but he knew it would come out as half a sob. What a sour joke this was, that the same colleagues who’d looked the other way when he was dragged off in the night, when his work had been scrubbed from the shelves and his body broken in the cells in Rome . . . those same colleagues now wanted him to be their shelter. Their scapegoat. Their great and fearless leader.