Текст книги "Ink and Bone"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

‘I can’t.’

‘Morgan.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You won’t make it.’

‘Jess, it’s all right. I can do this. See this?’ She held up her wrist, and the golden twist of the restraint. Passed her palm over it, and a whisper of symbols floated up from it. Shimmering orange and red, twisting like sparks from a fire. She stared hard at them, and the swirl of symbols paused and held. ‘Right there. If I change that one symbol, from gold to iron, I transmute the property of this wire without setting off the alarm. I won’t break it, and the seal doesn’t change. I will just make it something else. I’ll slip it off my wrist, they’ll be chasing a ghost. And once I’m at the—’

He closed his hand over hers, and the sparks of symbols flew away, collapsing back on themselves. ‘Don’t try it. And don’t tell me any more. Please.’

‘I have to try it, you know that. I know you don’t want to keep my secret any more, but I know you wouldn’t betray it, either.’ Her voice was soft. She believed he wouldn’t hurt her. Somehow, horribly, he’d made her believe that. ‘Believe me, I’m sick of secrets. Sick of playing by the rules other people set for us, of being trapped and robbed of choices. I’m sick of it all, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. And he was, rotten with secrets all the way to his core. But if he let them all go, who was he? He’d never known life without them, the way someone like Thomas lived it. What would that be like, to have that single, unshakeable faith in the world, to not see all the shadows?

‘It doesn’t have to be this way. You could … you could come with me.’ She said that last in a rush, as if she was afraid to say it, and the high colour that flooded her cheeks made him feel even more like a villain. ‘You don’t have to stay here. This is good. We’re good. You’re good.’

‘I’m not,’ he said. The clean, crisp smell of her hair made him want to hold it heavy in his hands, but he somehow resisted that. ‘I’m not good. You know what I am.’

She shook her head. Hair moved over her forehead and draped across one eye, and he gently moved it back. She turned her head away. ‘I know. Jess, I want you to come with me. I didn’t want to go to the Iron Tower before, but now … I can’t let them put a slave collar around my neck and breed me like a prize mare—’

He hadn’t heard that right. ‘What?’

‘Obscurists are rare,’ she said. ‘Why do you think they want me? I’m a new bloodline to add to their stock. I won’t leave the Iron Tower. My children will never leave. Once I go inside, I have no freedom left. Not even that.’

Jess felt a massive emptiness inside, and then a sick surge of anger. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That can’t be true. It goes against everything the Library believes.’

‘The Library isn’t a person. It doesn’t have a conscience, or a heart, or a soul. It does what it has to do to survive!’

‘You sound like a Burner.’

‘Maybe they make sense. You’re smart, Jess. You’ve never hidden from hard truths. You know the Library’s not what it once was … what we were told it was, from out there.’ She wiped tears from her face angrily with the back of a hand, and he caught her damp fingers and held them. ‘Please, come with me. You know I can’t stay.’

There was nothing left of hope now. Only this moment, he thought. He put all his longing into the kisses he placed on her hands and her shoulders and her throat, until they were both breathing raggedly with desire. He’d lied. He’d betrayed her, though he’d never meant to do that. Losing her had made him desperate. It had made him a liar, instead of lying to her with words, he was telling lies now with his body. With kisses and promises. Just tell her. Tell her that you can’t save her, you can’t go with her, there’s no chance for her at all.

But he was a coward, and he couldn’t.

When Niccolo Santi stepped inside the tent, Jess felt a surge of fury and bitter disgust. At Santi. At himself. At all the dreams breaking into pieces.

Morgan didn’t see Santi. She saw Jess’s face. He was a good liar, had been one his whole life, but he couldn’t hide how he felt in that moment. One look, and she knew. She backed up a step, eyes wide, and whispered, ‘No.’

Behind her, Santi said, ‘Morgan. Please don’t make this more painful than it has to be.’

‘No,’ she said again, this time a little stronger. ‘Jess, you knew.’ The disappointment in her, the look in her eyes, the wounded betrayal … it was like knives cutting pieces of him away. ‘You said stay.’ It was simple, those three words. It was the world cracking open between them.

She lunged at him. He captured her in his arms and held her so tight that she couldn’t hit him, couldn’t struggle, until Captain Santi pulled her away.

Santi pulled out a pair of iron shackles, and he fitted them over Morgan’s wrists. They were a favourite of the London Garda. No Obscurist tricks. Just a key. She went still as she felt the locks click shut, and her face, God, Jess would never forget that look as long as he lived. Her stare was as cold as a winter river. She’d have ripped his throat out if she could, and there was no changing it. No going back.

If he’d warned her the second she’d walked into his tent, if he’d told her to run then, maybe it would have been different.

But he’d asked her to stay, and she would remember.

Santi’s face was remote and still, as if he was a stranger to both of them. ‘I know it doesn’t help,’ he said, ‘but I’m sorry.’ He walked Morgan towards the tent’s exit. Gentle, but firm.

Morgan dug in her heels long enough to give Jess one last, look. ‘You told me there were always choices. When did you stop believing it?’

When I didn’t have any choice but to love you, he wanted to tell her. But he didn’t have the right to say it.

He was the reason she was in chains.

‘You’re damned quiet,’ Dario said the next morning. He’d taken the seat beside Jess in the armoured carrier – this one had real seats, with padding, which was a vast improvement from their last conveyance. The Library had dispatched what seemed half an army to accompany them home, and yet Jess felt very, very alone.

‘Tired,’ Jess said. He had his eyes shut. There was nothing to see, and he didn’t want to join in his friends’ chatter.

He felt, rather than saw, Dario bend towards him. ‘I heard Morgan is in the other carriage. What’s wrong, she come to her senses and want nothing to do with you?’

Jess opened his eyes and stared Dario down at very close range. He didn’t know how it looked, but he knew he was a hair’s snap from punching the boy in the throat.

‘Not today,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

Dario lost his grin and faced forward. He seemed suddenly very interested in the story that Thomas was telling about a bar in Munich where he’d made a dancing automaton puppet in exchange for his uncle’s unpaid bill. It was a good story.

Jess wished he cared.

Khalila was both smiling at Thomas’s story, and watching Jess in concerned little glances. Her sympathetic, questioning gaze was impossible to bear. Wolfe and Santi hadn’t told anyone of Morgan’s detainment, and Jess … Jess didn’t have the stomach.

He rose and shifted farther back from the others to an empty row, where he stretched himself out across two seats and pretended to sleep. He hated the sound of his friends’ laughter; it felt like a whetstone scraping his soul open. He wanted to be somewhere else. Gone.

‘Shove over,’ said a voice from over him. He took his arm off his eyes and frowned up at Glain. Her head wound had healed, but there was an angry scar cutting diagonally across her forehead that would probably be with her for life. She was proud of it. Battle scars.

‘Plenty of seats up there,’ he said, and put the arm back in place. She took his legs and pushed them over, and he came upright with something that felt and sounded like a snarl trapped deep inside his chest.

She dropped into the seat beside him. ‘It’s tiring, isn’t it? Pretending it’s normal. I know about Morgan.’

One less person he had to break the news to, then. ‘Tell them, not me.’

‘If you want.’ She let a second or two slip by before she said, ‘Wolfe’s afraid you’re going to be accused of Burner sympathies. Makes sense. You went off with them after the train blew.’

If she’d been intending to prod him into real anger, she succeeded. He slowly sat up, staring at her. ‘I didn’t go off with them. I was taken.’

‘Then they just let you go free, with hardly a scratch on you that couldn’t be explained by the train explosion. Look, I don’t say I believe it. I’m telling you that it’s easy to paint you that shade. The Artifex sees infiltrators behind every column in Alexandria. You should take care he doesn’t see you that way, too. You’ve already got enough marks on your record.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I mean your family, yn fytyn. I didn’t know before Oxford, but now we all do. You don’t think the Artifex knows? Even if he doesn’t, don’t you think Dario would use it if you came up against each other for a placement?’

‘Or you would,’ Jess said. Glain sent him a sideways glance. ‘We’ve never been friends. You’d shove me over the cliff for what you want.’

‘We don’t want the same things, so that doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I’m not well suited to be a Scholar, but I intend to be Garda Magnus one day. So I’m no threat to you. Nor you to me, I think.’

‘I’m a threat to everyone right now.’

‘Mostly to yourself,’ she said, and paused. Her tone changed, just a little. ‘Santi says that she’s all right. Angry at everyone, but all right. She’ll make it. She’s strong.’

It sickened him that even Glain, the least sensitive of all of them, could read him like a blank. ‘I knew he was coming for her,’ he said. ‘She could have escaped. I made sure she didn’t.’

Glain didn’t immediately reply to that, and when she did, her voice was even softer and more guarded than before. ‘She wouldn’t have made it. I spent time drinking with the Toulouse brigade. If Morgan got free, they were to hunt her down by any means necessary and send her back by Translation. If we got in the way, they would have killed us.’

He turned to look at her. She seemed all too serious. ‘Bollocks!’ Although he didn’t think it was, not really.

‘It’s not bollocks. They’d just say the train fire had no survivors. Letters to our families, so sorry, problem solved. And Wolfe is a problem for the Artifex, you know. You heard him at dinner last night.’

‘He was drunk.’

‘He was honest.’ Glain met his eyes squarely, for once, and it wasn’t an angry glare. It was almost kind. ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’ll know that, eventually.’

She patted his knee in a strange, awkward way that he realised was her version of affection, and got up to rejoin the others.

He stretched out across the seat again, and shut his eyes. It was his fault, no matter what Glain said. And even if Morgan forgave him, some kinds of guilt had to be carried, for ever.

The convoy travelled far, camped, and Morgan wasn’t seen again. Not by anyone. Glain was as good as her word; she told the others, quietly, and by that evening, no one mentioned Morgan to him at all.

No one, not even Thomas, knew what to say, so they pretended it was all fine, that going back to Alexandria was a relief, that everything would be back to normal once they slept in their own beds at Ptolemy House. It was gallows cheer, and Jess was the silent ghost at the table.

He couldn’t avoid Thomas the second night, because the big German decided that Jess needed company on his walk through the camp. The elite men and women from Alexandria weren’t taking any chances. They had set picket lines, sentries, heavy armaments.

‘It’s good to stretch my legs,’ Thomas said. ‘Not much space for them in those small carriages. Are you all right?’

The question surprised Jess, and it broke through his black shell enough to make him throw a look at his friend. ‘No.’

‘I didn’t think you were. Everyone wants you to be. That must be worse, that they just think you should be … fine.’

Thomas wasn’t ignoring his pain, and he wasn’t poking at it, either. He was just quietly understanding it. Jess let out a slow breath and stopped to look at him. ‘She’s in a cage,’ he said. ‘I put her there.’

‘You didn’t. I know you better.’

Jess shook his head and started walking again. He wished he could walk all the way to Alexandria. Crawl. Maybe that pain would help clear his head.

‘What are you looking for out here?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Jess.’ Thomas sounded disappointed. ‘Lie to the others. Please don’t, not to me.’

‘I’m looking for her,’ he said, and it was the first time he’d even admitted it to himself. ‘Glain told me she was in one of the carriers, alone. I want to find where it is.’

‘You can’t get her out.’

‘I know that. I just need to see it.’

Thomas shook his head, but he walked along, limiting the length of his strides to match Jess’s. ‘How can you tell? She won’t be at a window.’

‘The guards,’ Jess said. ‘Most of these are empty at night. Hers will have guards around it. Not many. They won’t want to make it too obvious.’

‘They’ll be warned about you, you know. You won’t get close.’

Jess nodded. It didn’t matter. They walked on, and he studied every carriage they passed. None of them looked right.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Thomas said, ‘that I should go ahead and show you what I was working on before we left Alexandria. Would you mind? Maybe we could work on it together when we are back.’

‘I’m not much for engineering.’

‘You need to work. Using your hands helps make things clear.’

‘You don’t need to invent something else. The chess machine is brilliant. You should apply for a Library patent and sell it. I know the Library gets most of the money, but it’d make you a rich man.’

‘I’m not interested in being rich,’ Thomas said.

‘Rich lets you buy more bits of junk.’ Jess’s mind wasn’t on the conversation. Where are you, Morgan? Even if he found the lorry, even if by some strange miracle he could speak to her, what would he say? It had been said already. You said stay.

He couldn’t take it back.

‘Let me show you what I mean,’ Thomas said. He pulled out a worn personal journal and handed it to Jess. Pages and pages of intricate drawings, schematics, German writings. Thomas flipped to a diagram, very finely drawn and lettered. Complicated. Jess had no idea what he was looking at.

At least he didn’t have to worry about warning Thomas not to ever tell secrets in his personal journal. Thomas was far too focused on his machines to be writing anything about feelings.

Jess handed it back. ‘Is it another of your dancing automata? Didn’t you get enough of that in Munich, paying your uncle’s bar bills?’ That had too much of an edge, and Jess was immediately aware of it. ‘Sorry, Thomas. What is it?’

‘I had the idea long ago from watching an inkman who copied out some documents for my father. It took so long, even though that was his trade,’ Thomas said. ‘I thought, what if it could be done at the simple press of a button?’

‘A letter-writing automaton.’

‘No, no, that is a carnival trick. This is something that could change everything. You see, here, this is a matrix on which you place precut letters …’

Jess’s attention zeroed in on a carrier two down from where they were walking. They passed a large tent that smelt like dinner’s leavings; the clatter of pots and pans said that the mess crew was still on duty. Everyone else inside the perimeter was settling down to bunking for the night, but not around that one carrier. At least a dozen heavily armed soldiers were crouched around it. They didn’t look like they were specifically guarding it, but then again, they seemed vigilant. Too vigilant. ‘It looks like a children’s letter game.’

‘No, no, nothing like that. You see, you spell out sentences and load the lines from bottom to top. You spell backward, because it will reverse. Then this reservoir here—’

Thomas was pointing at the diagram, but the words blurred into nonsense. Jess couldn’t focus on it, even though he understood the kindness Thomas was offering. He was a bad friend, but he’d been worse to Morgan, and he felt a fierce desire to … to what? Make it right? He couldn’t.

Maybe he just needed to know that he couldn’t, by seeing it with his own eyes.

Thomas was still trying to explain something about ink and blocks and paper. Jess didn’t pay much attention because he knew with a sudden visceral jolt that Morgan was in the carriage just ahead. Locked away, maybe still in iron shackles. She was right there, wondering how to escape, and damning him for every moment of her captivity.

He could feel it.

‘Well?’ Thomas asked, and nudged him. ‘Would you like to help me? When we get home?’

Home. Alexandria. Where Thomas would almost certainly be made a Scholar … and Jess was still the son of a smuggler, with a nasty rumour of Burner sympathy trailing him now. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘When we get home.’ There was nothing left in Alexandria for him. How was he supposed to stare at the Iron Tower every day and not think about what he’d done?

Thomas grinned and clapped him on the back.

As they approached the carrier, two of the High Garda troops, both women, rose and wandered in their direction without seeming to react directly. One of them – a small Indian woman, with her black hair knotted into a complex design at the crown of her head – gave Jess a casual nod and smile. ‘Good evening, sir. Having a nice walk? It’s good weather for it.’

‘It helps to stretch all the kinks out,’ Jess said, and smiled back as charmingly as he knew how. ‘Hard travel for you? You came up from Alexandria to get us. That must have been tiring.’

She exchanged a rueful grin with her companion, who was taller, broader, and had more of an east Asian cast to her features. ‘Tiring’s one word for it,’ she said. ‘But we go where the Library needs us. Say, I heard there was a card game coming up on the other side of the camp. You’re headed back, aren’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Jess said. ‘Just heading back to the tent. How about you, Thomas? Legs sufficiently stretched?’

‘Yes, I feel better.’ Thomas gave him a look that, Jess suddenly realised, was all too perceptive. ‘And you? Feeling better?’

‘I believe I am,’ Jess said.

‘Good,’ the little Indian woman said, and strode along beside them at a pace that even Thomas’s long legs found hard to match. She seemed to give off wild bursts of energy. ‘I am Rijuta Khanna. And you are with Scholar Wolfe’s party.’

‘The big one’s Thomas. I’m Jess. And your friend?’

Rijuta nodded at the other woman, who had a friendly sort of manner, but watchful pale eyes in a sharp-featured face. ‘That’s Yeva Dudik. Don’t mind her, she’s not as chatty as I am.’

‘Ha,’ Yeva said. It wasn’t a laugh. ‘I’ve met drunken parrots who weren’t as chatty as you.’

‘It passes the time.’

‘Someday, someone will shoot you over lost sleep. It could be me.’

Jess wasn’t fooled. They were excellent at their job, and their job was to misdirect, misinform, and at all costs, move any of Wolfe’s party who got close away from that carriage. Jess didn’t care. He’d found out what he needed, because all he had to do was note the number marked on the side. He’d be able to find her now, even among all of these identical vehicles.

He couldn’t free her from a locked carrier. He couldn’t help her get away. But he knew where she was, and that almost seemed like alchemy an Obscurist would understand: knowing where she was seemed to put them closer.

The Doctrine of Mirroring. As above, so below.

They parted company near their sleeping quarters with Rijuta and Yeva, who continued on to their likely imaginary card game. Thomas was talking some nonsense about the saturation properties of ink on paper, but he fell silent when Jess stopped replying.

Jess stretched out on his camp bed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep to the dancing visions of ink blots that left bruised echoes nothing could erase.

EPHEMERA

An urgent communication from the Obscurist Magnus to the Artifex Magister:

Our monitors have reported new information has been added to Thomas Schreiber’s personal journal. His drawings are very close to a working model, and a more efficient working model than we have ever seen before, even the one developed by Scholar Wolfe that led to his confinement. Action must be taken to secure his notes and any working models that he might have developed.

Reply from the Artifex Magnus to the Obscurist Magnus:

And so, again, we are at a crossroads.

This is a consequence of allowing Wolfe to live, instead of simply killing him outright as well as destroying his work. If dangerous ideas are a disease, he is the very definition of an infectious carrier.

You must stop protecting him, Keria.