by Rachel Caine
"They were never really alive," he said. "And they're shut off."
Glain sent him a sharp look. "How did you learn that trick, by the way? I've never heard of anyone managing it before."
"Desperation. Luck. Free exercise of my illegal trade. Take your pick. Come on--I hear voices this way." Jess followed a clear space between the lions toward the back of the room, to a separate workroom where voices conversed easily in Italian. Stepping through the door, he found three men sitting at worktables and on benches. There was a lion crouched in the middle of the floor, motionless, and it had a pathetic air to it; someone had removed part of its bronzed hide and pulled out bundles of cables that spilled over the floor like wiry intestines. The lion's face was frozen in a strange expression, as though it didn't much like what was being done to it.
The oldest of the three men--Signor Glaudino, at a guess--looked up at Jess's arrival, frowned, and switched from Italian to the more standard Greek that was the common Library language. "She's not ready yet, this one. Tell your master we will deliver as agreed tomorrow. Yes?"
"No," Jess said, and raised his gun. Glain stepped in beside him and mirrored the action. "Apologies, signori, but I need you all to move into that closet, please."
"Why? What is this?" Signor Glaudino was a peppery little man, and he puffed out his chest and stood up to face them squarely. "You are ignorant people, to think you can do this to us! I have a commission from the Artifex himself for my work! The High Garda will hunt you down as soon as I tell them--"
"You won't," Glain said. She stepped forward, grabbed Glaudino's shoulder, and marched him firmly to the open door of the closet. After checking it, she pushed him inside and gestured for his two employees to follow. Neither of them looked ready to put up a fight. "Codices, please. Now."
All of them handed over their Codex volumes, which she stacked neatly on the nearest table, and then she searched each of the men with quick, efficient slaps. Glaudino squawked like a plucked chicken, but he was no match for Glain, who shoved them in one by one.
Glaudino began banging on the door almost immediately. She sighed and shook her head. "I tried to be nice," she said to Jess, and then hit the outside of the door hard enough to make it shiver on the hinges. "Shut up, or I'll tie you up and feed you to your lions!"
That got them blessed quiet. Jess fetched Morgan and Thomas, who'd been waiting in the shadows, and when he walked them into the workroom, Thomas's blue eyes burned as if someone had lit a lamp in him. "Yes!" he said. "Perfect! You poor, lovely thing. What have they done to you, now?" He sat down on the bench, leaning over the lion, and Jess crouched down with him. Morgan took a seat nearby and watched with fascination as Thomas put his hands on the metal skin, very much as if he were petting a very live, friendly animal. "We will make you well. No, better. Much better."
But then, in the next few seconds, the muted joy drained out of Thomas's eyes and he began to shake. He sank down to sit next to the lion, put his head in his hands, and began quietly to cry.
"He needs to work," Glain said, but at least she had the decency to mutter it to Jess, not to Thomas.
"He will," Jess said, and sent her a warning look. "Leave him alone."
"Do something," she whispered back. But Jess felt helpless. He put one hand on Thomas's shoulder and felt him shiver at the contact, then relax. Morgan took Thomas's hand. Neither of them said a word, and Jess listened as Thomas's ragged, labored breathing slowly steadied. He lowered his hands from his face but didn't look up at them.
"Sorry," he whispered. "I-- Scheisse. I didn't think I would do that. Why did I do that?"
Morgan started to speak but then couldn't seem to find the words. She looked up helplessly at Jess, and he finally nodded and crouched down until he and Thomas were on a level. "I've never been through what you have, but I've been in the dark a few times. Sometimes the light's just too bright."
"What if I can't--"
"Can't adjust? You can. You will." Jess nodded to the lion. "Even in the dark, you dreamed about your automata. They're nothing to be afraid of."
Thomas sucked in a slow breath and then quietly let it out. He nodded and opened his eyes, and put his hand back on the lion's metal skin. It seemed to steady him this time. "All right," he said. "All right. I just wish I had more references."
Jess unbuttoned his uniform shirt and pulled it off. Beneath was his smuggling harness, dark with sweat. It had practically molded to his body, and he unbuckled it and peeled it off with a relieved sigh. The cool air on his damp skin felt as good as a bath.
They were all staring at him with varying degrees of fascination. Thomas finally asked, "What are you doing, Jess?" He had opened the skin of the lion through latches Jess would never have seen, and was now restlessly running a length of cable through his fingers, testing it for flaws. "Put your clothes on."
"I will," he said, and opened the smuggling pouch and took out the book and the folded translation sheets that lay inside. The book felt cool and dry, and he handed it over to Thomas. "Here. This might help you."
Thomas dropped the cable and began to leaf through the book--slowly at first, then with increasing eagerness as he compared the translations to the contents. Jess strapped the harness back on and put his shirt on again.
"What is that?" Morgan leaned forward to watch Thomas read, and glanced at Jess for the answer when Thomas didn't seem to heed her at all.
"It's research notes from someone--someone with inside knowledge," Jess said. "A mechanical study of the automata--parts, how they work, all the details the Library never wanted out. I expect this is all that remains of the poor sod who wrote it down. They wouldn't want him spreading this particular word, would they? Thomas? Can you use it?"
"Yes," Thomas whispered, and then again, stronger, "Yes! And you see here, the metal ball, the container? That Morgan will need to open; it is an Obscurist's creation. You know how to write scripts, yes? They taught you that?"
"I--" Morgan blinked, and then nodded. "Well, yes. But I'll need some starting point. There should be a script inside there. If I can retrieve it and alter it--"
"Exactly. It's simply a matter of--a matter of--" Thomas, who'd been doing so well, stuttered like an automaton powering down and dropped the book from suddenly clumsy hands. He was trembling, Jess saw. No, not trembling. Shaking. Badly. His teeth chattered and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut.
"It's no use," Glain said quietly. "Part of him's still in that prison."
We don't have time to let him recover was left unsaid. They all knew it. Thomas was doing his best, with all his good heart, but he'd been through a horrible ordeal.
"Then we help him," Jess said, and looked at Morgan, who nodded. "Thomas. I've read the book; I translated it. Let me do this, and you just rest and tell me what to do. Can you do that?"
Thomas said nothing, but after a long moment, he finally nodded in a movement so abrupt it must have hurt him. More like a convulsion, Jess thought, than agreement. He seemed pale as milk now, and the bruises stood out like fading tattoos on his cheeks.
Morgan yanked a thick blanket down from a shelf and wrapped it around Thomas's trembling body. He huddled into the warmth, and she rested her hands on his shoulders and looked at Jess.
"I'm sure they have scissors somewhere in this workshop; I'll find some and cut his hair. Then I'll find him something better to wear. Jess. Be his hands."
When Thomas opened his eyes, he whispered, "Thank you," and Morgan bent to gently kiss his forehead.
"I still have the little automaton bird you gave me," she told him. "It still sings. It kept me singing, too, Thomas. You helped me. Let me help you."
He managed a smile for her, and Jess avoided looking at him too closely as he knelt down next to the huge Roman lion. There was some similarity, he suddenly realized, between this machine and his friend. Both had damage.
Both needed to be healed.
Maybe by helping to repair one, he could fix the other.
Jess
had mechanical aptitude, but next to Thomas, he was a rank beginner; he had to work slowly, laying out parts according to the book's instructions, and just over an hour into the work, he caught a glimpse of a closed bronze sphere where the heart of a normal beast would have been. It was the size of Thomas's fist and looked seamless, held in place by a complex series of clamps and a net of something that looked like gold. By that time, when he looked back to ask Thomas how to proceed, Morgan had succeeded in clipping back the hedge of Thomas's unruly blond hair, and with it trimmed closer, his face looked leaner and older than Jess remembered. She trimmed his bushy beard, too, which helped make him less of a Viking from the old stories. From some closet she retrieved a pair of workman's oversized pants and a shirt that was too large even for him. He undressed beneath the blanket--shy with the girls, even now--and once he was out of his prison rags, he seemed . . . better. Not himself, exactly. It was possible he wouldn't be the Thomas Jess remembered, but any Thomas at all would be better than none.
"I think I've found the container for the script," Jess said. He reached in, and Thomas's hand flashed out to grab his arm and hold it back.
"Don't. It would kill you," he said. "Glaudino would never touch it himself. Only Obscurists can open those containers. Work around it for now, and loosen the clamps. Be careful."
Jess nodded. He didn't like the idea of working near something that might kill him with a touch, but he liked the idea of Thomas's unsteady hands in there even less. He worked the clamps loose until he heard the ball shift inside the flexible mesh net, and then sat back. "Morgan? I think this is your job now."
She squeezed in beside him, and he showed her how to unfasten the clamps before moving back. She loosened the fastenings and the ball dropped into her hands, wrapped in its mesh net, which she peeled away and put aside. It looked harmless in her hands, like a shiny toy, but there was a shimmer to it that made him move well back. Morgan turned it in her fingers curiously, but she wasn't looking for a seam--wasn't looking at it at all, he realized--and the heat-wave shimmer on the ball suddenly leaped off the surface and into a haze around it, with shadowy shapes forming. Not letters he recognized in any language he knew, or even numbers; these were alchemical symbols and figures that only Obscurists knew. She stared at the swirling orb of symbols and slowly reached out to pluck out a few.
Jess moved closer again, but not too close, and paused when he saw her warning glance. "It looks like magic."
"It isn't," she said. "Well, not exactly. Alchemy is a science, but a science that acknowledges certain principles of magic. This . . . this is a mathematical expression of quintessence, Archimedes' fifth element, which binds all things together."
"It's glowing letters hanging in midair!"
She laughed a little breathlessly. "Think of it this way: alchemists of old relied on the energy provided by tides, the moon, sun, planets in alignment. Every experiment was delicate and had to be balanced just so, or there couldn't be a proper result. Obscurists have an inborn talent to provide that energy from within and not from the world around us; we are born with quintessence. And the letters are only glowing in front of you because I'm cheating. I like to see what I'm doing."
"And what are you doing?"
"This ball has a seal on it. It is a code of structures that must be passed through quintessence and altered, in order. This is how I read the code."
"But--"
"Jess. Let me work! This isn't like solving a child's puzzle."
He sat back, watching as her slender hands touched, spun, and changed symbols in the air. Finally, she took in a breath and said, "There. That feels right," and pushed her hands together. The letters vanished, and she reached out to place her fingers on the ball.
The ball seemed to vibrate and then folded back with a sharp hiss. Jess expected to see a tangle of wires and cables and gears, but it was empty except for a small rolled scroll of paper.
"What is that?" Glain asked. She seemed as fascinated as Jess.
"The script," Thomas answered. "The instructions that set the boundaries for the lion and give it the rules it must follow."
Morgan nodded. "Exactly. What do you want the lion to do?" She reached for a pen that Glaudino had left on a stack of papers on the table.
"I want it to be our champion," Thomas said.
It took another hour to puzzle out how to put the lion back together, but they managed. Jess was proud of his handiwork--or Thomas's, really; he'd just donated his hands to the job. He sat back on his heels and looked at Thomas, Morgan, and Glain, and said, "Ready?"
"Ready," Thomas said. "Let's see if she works."
Glain's head suddenly turned in the direction of the outer workshop, and she took a step toward the door, then back. "Santi and the others," she said. "They're coming in."
Jess nodded and reached the switch beneath the lion's jaw just as the others crowded into the small workshop.
"What in the hell are you doing?" Wolfe asked. He sounded exhausted and, of course, irritable. He would be. They'd been a long time getting here, and no doubt there was a story to it Jess wanted to hear . . . but not now.
Wolfe was probably shocked when Thomas turned to him and shushed him, but Jess didn't look up. He was sweating and feeling uncomfortably close to this creature now that it was no longer in pieces. "Here it goes."
He pressed the switch and quickly backed up to stand next to Thomas and Morgan. "This will work, won't it?" he asked Thomas. "A little reassurance would be nice. We don't have room to run in here."
Reassurance didn't come from Thomas, but from the lion. The dull eyes took on a shimmer, then a baleful red shine. It turned its head to fix those unblinking eyes on Jess, and . . . made a sound low in that metallic throat that sounded almost like a purr.
Jess was used to hearing them growl, but he'd never heard that sound before. Before he could ask Thomas if that was a good sign, the lion's head pushed forward and pressed against his chest, and the mechanical purring grew so loud, it vibrated through Jess's body. He awkwardly patted the thing's head. His whole body still felt tight and nervous. "Good girl," he said. "Is it a girl?"
"Jess," Thomas said. "It's a machine. But I think I will call her Frauke. Do you like that name, Frauke?"
"It's an automaton. It can't like--" But the lion was turning from him to nudge her nose against Thomas's chest now. Purring. It seemed beyond odd.
Morgan came next, and she smiled when the lion's massive nose pushed at her. "Frauke," she said. "It means 'little lady,' doesn't it? It suits her." She stroked the metal ears.
"If you're finished making a pet out of this monster--" Wolfe said, and stopped as Frauke's head snapped in the direction of his voice and the purring switched to a low, ominous rumble.
"No, no, Frauke. He's one of us." Thomas gestured to Wolfe, who looked back as if he thought they'd all gone mad. "Come, Scholar, she needs to learn who you are."
Wolfe didn't like it--at all--and that didn't change even when Frauke's growls changed to purrs. He suffered the nuzzling with a bitter expression of distaste before he moved well back, and pushed Santi forward in his place.
"Brilliant," Santi said, and patted Frauke on the head. No hesitation there; he clearly liked the creature. Santi stepped aside to let Khalila crowd forward, and then Dario. "She'll not only confuse our enemies, but confront them, too. No one questions a party of Scholars and High Garda walking with an official lion as escort, do they?"
The only one Frauke hadn't nuzzled was Glain, who still watched the door. When they all turned toward her, she shook her head. "I'm not coming near that thing."
Morgan tried. "Glain. It's safe. You saw--"
"It's wrong. It's wrong that you just . . . changed it. Is it just that easy for you? Just rewrite a killer into a pet?" She glared straight at Morgan finally. "It's Obscurists who make all this possible, you know. Without them, things would be different, wouldn't they? Without the automata, the Translation Chamber, the Library wouldn't have nearly the advantage, an
d we'd be fighting fair."
"I'm trying to help!" Morgan said. "And you know I never wanted this! I never wanted to be--"
"Whatever you wanted, you're one of them. Doing this proves it more than anything else you've ever done," Glain said. "And that's why we shouldn't trust you. How hard would it be for you to give us away?"
"She won't," Jess said, and got the full, scorching weight of Glain's scorn.
"Says someone who can't ever be rational on the subject of Morgan Hault. We shouldn't do this. What if some other Obscurist rewrites this creature into a killer again?"
"It can't be done without the same process I went through," Morgan said. "It doesn't work that way. You can order them to do a limited number of things by Codex commands, but not change their loyalty--"
"I don't trust you," Glain said flatly, and looked Morgan right in the eyes. "I have no idea what happened to you in that tower. What might have been done to you. All I know is, you've shown up here and we've all just accepted that you're safe, like this lion. You aren't. You're even more dangerous."
Santi stepped in the way, facing Glain, and said, "Glain. She's given you no reason to distrust her, has she?"
Glain didn't want to answer that, but she finally muttered, "Not as yet."
"Then the matter's settled. Keep your eyes open and not just on Morgan, all right? We have enough enemies without inventing more." She nodded but didn't change her position from the door. "Go introduce yourself to the lion. That's an order."
She looked at him for so long, Jess was afraid she'd refuse, but then she pushed past him and stood in front of Frauke to be nudged and cataloged like the rest of them. She didn't touch the lion. Didn't stand it for one second longer than she was forced to before she stalked away.
Frauke tried to follow, then checked herself as Thomas said, "Frauke. Stay." She padded back to Thomas's side and sat down, as obedient as a dog on a leash. "Frauke, you obey our commands now, yes?"
Hard to tell if she understood that, but Thomas had been right: there was an eerie simulation of thought in these creatures. Even intention. It was impossible, looking at Frauke now, to see the relentless killing machine she'd been before. Glain was also right: Morgan had, with a few simple, powerful strokes of the pen, made a killer into a pet. That kind of power shouldn't exist, and it made him cold to think what could be done with it in the service of the Archivist. This is how they've kept power. Frighten us with monsters. Kill us when all else fails.