Текст книги "Ink and Bone"

Автор книги: Rachel Caine

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

EPHEMERA

An excerpt from a work entitledOn Press-Printing: A New Beginningby Research Scholar Christopher Wolfe, submitted to the Artifex Magnus for peer review and brought by him to the Curators of the Library. Marked as SEDITIOUS CONTENT and sent to the Black Archives by order of the Archivist Magister, for his eyes only.

… foundation built in those early days, when the Library was at its most vulnerable, was flawed by one thing: the relative scarcity of the Obscurists themselves. It is a skill which can be taught only to a point, and then there must be a real spark of talent with which to bring the alchemical theories into active life.

Fewer of these rare, bright talents are born now than ever before, and even within the Iron Tower itself, there is a growing knowledge that so few Obscurists cannot long sustain the massive burden of the Library, which calls on them for mirroring, for translation of books, objects and even people, and for many more similar demands.

Without the Obscurists, the Library falls … unless another method of purely mechanical duplication of knowledge is put in place.

I propose the immediate and widespread use of a device I call a press-printer, which uses a system of movable letters that may be arranged into any grouping to form words, lines and pages of text. Once inked, these letters are then pressed by means of a mechanical arm upon an individual sheet, which may then be bound up into books.

By this means, we can distribute the knowledge of the Library in reproduced form, endlessly, in a way that removes the burden from the fragile shoulders of the Obscurists.

I have included full schematics of this press-printer and a sample page produced from the prototype device. I look forward to demonstrating this device to you at your convenience.

An annotation from the Artifex Magnus to the document:

The pernicious heresy that began with Gutenberg once again appears among us, as if some great and sinister force insists on destroying the greatest institution of learning mankind has ever known. That it should spring from the mind of one of our most valuable and well-regarded Scholars, one so closely connected to the Iron Tower itself, makes it even more disturbing.

As with Gutenberg and all others who have followed, we must destroy this heresy immediately and completely. We have no choice.

A following annotation from the Obscurist Magnus to the document:

The work that Scholar Wolfe has done must be destroyed, there is no question of it, but I cannot and will not agree to the destruction of the man himself. All his research, even that unrelated to this heresy, can be interdicted from the Codex and sent to the Black Archives. He can be effectively erased without the need of his death.

He should be taken to a place of questioning and there made to see the error of his beliefs. Once he has been so instructed, he may then be useful to the Library again, but only under the close and constant watch of the Artifex Magnus.

He must, of course, be made to understand that this extraordinary mercy will not come again, and he lives on the sufferance of the Archivist and Curators.

I leave this in your hands, Artifex.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ptolemy House went from claustrophobic to uncomfortably empty, with only the nine of them left to rattle around inside. That included a few Jess wished had dropped by the wayside, like Santiago and Portero and Glain … but the addition of Morgan to their ranks made up for it. Jess enjoyed her company. More than he should, he knew. With nine of them left, three would have to leave by the end, and they would all be fighting for the six spots left.

On the morning of the third day after the false lottery, Jess was up before the bells, but he found Khalila there ahead of him, already sipping coffee and reading a blank. She was always reading now. It was probably why she would survive them all in the cut-throat world of the Library.

‘What is it?’ Jess asked, as he poured his cup. She shrugged. ‘Khalila, you’re never early. You sleep until the last moment, and arrive exactly on time. You’re precise about it.’

She shut the book. ‘I wanted to talk to you in private, and you get up early.’

‘Talk about what?’

She gave him a significant look.

‘If you’re waiting for me to guess, I haven’t got a clue,’ Jess said, and handed her a piece of pastry he knew she particularly liked. It had raisins. He loathed them, but she bit into it with enthusiasm.

‘You should be more careful,’ she said.

He froze cold inside. She knows. She knows about my family.

But that was proven wrong when she continued, ‘I assume you already know better, but anyone can see that you’re paying far too much attention to the girl.’

‘Glain? Well, she’s very tall. She’s hard to ignore.’ Khalila only sighed in response to that, so Jess conceded the point. ‘You mean the new girl? Morgan? All right, I like Morgan. At least she isn’t Glain.’

‘Glain is all right. She’s just very direct.’

‘And what do you think of Morgan, then?’

Khalila considered him over the lip of her coffee cup. ‘She is a mystery, and mysteries are dangerous, especially here. You should remember that. This is not a time to be distracted.’

‘I like mysteries.’

‘You like challenge, Jess. And I assure you that she is well aware of it. She’s very clever. Too clever by half. Maybe you cannot see that, but I do.’

‘So you don’t like her?’

‘Oh, I do, very much. I just don’t trust her, and neither should you. The rest of us, we’ve spent time together. Sweated together. Failed together. She …’ Khalila tapped a fingernail on the heavy pottery of her cup. ‘She is a blank, and until we see what’s on her pages, I would keep my distance.’

‘There are only nine of us left. Three of us are leaving anyway. Maybe I should be worrying more about the devils I know.’

Khalila conceded that with another shrug, and a rueful half-smile. She was different now, Jess thought. More mature. More comfortable in her skin, and with her own brilliance. Here, among people who respected her, she shone like a diamond.

He might have also been drawn to her, except that she had made it all too plain to everyone that she was not available. Only Dario pursued her, and she found it, Jess thought, flattering and exasperating, in turns. But he didn’t think she would ever return Dario’s affections. She was too aware of the same advice she was giving him. Three of us will leave.

She didn’t want to be one of them … or have to give up someone she loved. And she didn’t want distractions.

They ate without talking more about it. He enjoyed Khalila’s ability to say what she meant and move on. Efficient.

Portero was the next one in, yawning and surly; he grunted a greeting to them and loaded his plate up before taking a seat far away. Dario settled for coffee, and a spot with Portero. Glain avoided them all, still, and sat solitary, at least until Morgan arrived with Izumi, and both infringed on her space. Glain suffered it, though not happily.

Thomas was almost late, and as he reached out for a pastry, Izumi – back at the food, which was remarkable for such a slender girl – slapped his hand away. ‘Wash your hands before you touch anything, Thomas,’ she said. ‘You’re filthy.’

He was. His fingers were dark with grease, and he blushed a hot red and left the room. When he came back, his skin was scrupulously clean, and he retrieved a light breakfast before crowding into a seat beside Jess and Khalila. ‘Guten Morgen,’ he said. ‘Will we survive the day?’

‘Depends,’ Jess said. ‘We don’t know what Wolfe’s got for us. What were you working on down there?’ Thomas had established his own space downstairs, in a corner of an old storage room, where he rebuilt things that he rescued from dumps and market stalls. How he found the time was a mystery, given the work Wolfe piled on them, but Thomas insisted it was soothing.

‘Something amazing,’ Thomas said, and the delight in his face had a sly cast to it. ‘I think you will especially like it, Jess. You see, I’ve been thinking about how the Codex functions.’

‘The Codex functions through the Obscurists, and Wolfe made it very clear that the details of just exactly how it functions remain the secrets of Obscurists,’ Khalila said. ‘Thomas, I thought you would know all this by now.’

‘I do! But only imagine if we could make all that unnecessary!’

‘Make what unnecessary?’

‘The Codex. Obscurists. All of it.’

‘Unnecessary? Thomas! It’s the basis of the Library!’ Khalila had lowered her voice, and Jess saw the flash of worry on her face. When he tried to speak again, she gestured for him to speak more quietly.

Thomas’s version of quiet was a hoarse whisper, and Jess didn’t know that it helped much. ‘It’s inefficient, yes? Obscurists are rare. It is an unstable resource, you said that yourself in class. Safer to find another method. What if we could eliminate the need for the Codex?’

‘You’re barking mad,’ Jess said. ‘The Codex is necessary. Always will be.’

‘What if I could show you something else? Something better?’

‘You’d be the bloody Archivist Magister in a day. If it worked.’

‘It will,’ Thomas said, with complete confidence.

‘Then show us.’

‘Not yet. It isn’t finished. But when it is, I will be able to make the Codex obsolete.’

Khalila was still frowning. ‘Thomas, I don’t know about this. It sounds like heresy to me. Be careful, will you? Please?’

‘I am not a Burner!’

‘I said it sounded like—’

Jess’s Codex flashed and hummed. He pulled it free, and all the others buzzed as well.

From Wolfe.

It had an address listed, and nothing more. No instructions other than that, but it was clear what Wolfe wanted from them. Jess drained his coffee, and around him everyone else was doing the same.

‘Come on,’ Glain said. She was the first to the door. ‘It’s a long walk. We’d better hurry.’

The heat beat down from a shimmering molten sun, with no hint of clouds; the ocean breeze didn’t help much, since it came weighted with moisture. Jess was getting used to the climate, but in the half-hour it took to follow Glain’s long, fast strides to the address Wolfe had messaged them, he began to really miss the bone-chilling days of a London winter. The light cotton shirt he wore stuck to his skin in uncomfortable patches, and the crown of his head felt as if someone held a hot metal plate to it. When Thomas took a swig of water, his face brick-red from the exertion and heat, Jess remembered to do the same.

‘Up there,’ Glain said, and indicated a nondescript shop on the street. She paused, and when Dario would have pushed past her, she grabbed his shoulder to pull him to a stop. Unlike the rest of them, she didn’t seem tired, or even overly warm. Jess wasn’t even sure she was sweating. ‘Wait. This seems wrong.’

‘What do you mean, wrong? Wolfe sent for us. He gave us this address. What are you afraid of?’ Dario pushed her hand away and kept walking.

They all followed him. Jess watched Glain, because she positioned herself near the back of the group, and he thought, she’s using us for cover.

She really did sense something. He had no idea what, but it woke a stinging prickle of alarm on the back of his neck.

Dario had almost reached the front of the shop when Guillaume Danton said, ‘Wait!’ Dario came to a halt and looked back, frowning.

Guillaume drew in a sudden, sharp breath, and said, ‘Step back, Dario. Carefully. Now.’

‘Don’t be stupid, there’s nothing …’ Dario looked down, and his voice faded away to nothing.

His leg was just touching a thin, almost invisible, silver wire that stretched across the doorway. Guillaume moved forward and crouched down, face close to the wire. He straightened up. ‘I can’t see where it attaches. It may be an alarm, or something worse. Burners sometimes rig up Greek Fire to fall using this method.’ When they all looked at him, he shrugged. ‘I never said my family didn’t know things.’

Dario took a very careful step back from the wire.

‘We should go back,’ Khalila said.

‘Wolfe gave us the address,’ Thomas said. ‘I think he means for us to go inside.’

Izumi sighed. ‘Why does he insist we do these things? Why can we not just learn – learn how to run a Serapeum for a change? I came to be a Scholar!’

‘Haven’t you paid attention?’ Glain snapped back. ‘That isn’t why we were chosen. If they’d wanted us to be librarians, we wouldn’t be here; we’d be taking training in our home cities and signing one-year contracts for a copper band. If you want to be a Scholar, you have to be better. You have to be able to handle yourself, out in the world.’

Glain was right. Absolutely right. Jess knew Thomas was right, too; retreat from this would mean a black mark. Wolfe wanted them inside.

‘We have to go,’ Jess said. ‘You know we do.’

‘By all means, go,’ Danton said, and backed away. ‘I’ll be waiting out here. Better failure than funeral.’

‘Coward,’ Portero said. Danton raised his eyebrows and folded his arms with no evidence of caring. ‘Fine, stay here. I’ll take the lead.’

‘Wait,’ Jess said. ‘Not through the front. There’s another way.’

That got all their attention, and Dario said, ‘How do you know?’

‘Because there’s always another way.’ He hadn’t lived his entire childhood running from one thing or another without learning something. ‘Stay here. Let me scout it.’

Jess spotted the alleyway only when he was almost past it; it was hardly wider than his shoulders, and the walls converged into an optical illusion that was hard to distinguish unless you were looking for it. He kept his eyes open as he moved that way, but there were no tripwires below, no traps dangling above. The alley led around to the back of the shop, and he backed up and gestured for the others. They followed him to the small courtyard in the back.

The shop’s door was shut. ‘Now what?’ Khalila asked. She was, for once, out of her depth. This wasn’t a problem that would be solved by anything in her experience.

Glain turned to Jess. ‘Locked. Can you open it?’

‘Yes. Probably.’

She searched around and helped him locate pieces of wire, which he stripped and bent to the necessary angles. It was a simple lock. His da would have been disappointed in how long it took him to crack it, but the others seemed suitably impressed. When he started to open it, Glain caught hold of the latch and shook her head. ‘Step back,’ she said. ‘Everybody. Back and to the sides.’

She was right. Glain kicked the door open with a sudden, violent movement and darted off to the right, and a glass bottle that had been balanced inside crashed down on the stone floor inside. The chemical reek of it hit Jess an instant before he saw a single, vividly green flame flare up. Greek Fire, but the bottle had been almost empty. It wouldn’t have killed anyone, but it would have left a scar.

Glain swept the glass fragments aside with her boot and stepped inside … and froze.

‘What is it?’ Jess asked.

She let out a fast, huffing breath, and stalked into the room to glare at Scholar Wolfe, who was sitting in a chair, calmly enjoying a hot cup of tea. ‘Slow, but acceptable,’ he said. ‘Glain, well done.’

‘Greek Fire?’ Glain stood right in front of the Scholar, and glared. She had a fairly magnificent glare, Jess had to give her that. ‘What kind of test was that?’

‘An hour ago, it wasn’t a test at all,’ Wolfe said. ‘Santi and his men arrested a nest of Burners in this shop this morning, and defused a series of traps, many of which they have left in place for you to discover, though they rendered them relatively safe. You did well in avoiding the tripwire in front, and the Greek Fire at the rear door. Now join Postulant Danton and search the rest of the shop.’

‘Danton?’ Jess turned, and saw that Guillaume was behind them, already going through boxes. ‘I thought you were staying outside.’

‘I waited to see if you died back there,’ Guillaume said. ‘You didn’t. So I thought it was safe enough to come in.’ He lifted a box from the pile next to him and carried it over to put it in the centre of the room. ‘I found this: copper igniters. Burners use them for large Greek Fire containers. They might have been planning something big.’

‘They were,’ Wolfe said. ‘I leave it to the rest of you to work it out for yourselves.’

They gathered up anything they found that seemed out of place; the shop was supposed to be a pottery-making enterprise, but it had been closed up for months, and any trace of clay or wheels was long gone. Jess found a box of what looked like loose papers, but he realised, with a sickening jolt, that they were the interiors of books … ripped out of their bindings and tossed in sheaves into a pile. Not rare works; he knew most of the titles, and checked the rest on his Codex. Common black market copies, every one.

Why destroy them? Burners burnt books in protest, as statements. It seemed strange to destroy them in private.

It was Thomas who put the puzzle together, from scraps of metal and paper, leather and glue. He looked at everything they assembled in the centre of the shop and said, ‘They built Greek Fire containers into the covers of hollowed-out books. Why would they do that?’

Wolfe rose from his chair and looked at the tangle of clues, and nodded. ‘You bait a trap with what the creature you’re hunting likes best. Scholars love original books. The firebombs would have been layered under real ones, inside of containers. All they have to do is arrange for the lot to be confiscated and tagged back to storage.’

Khalila put a hand to her mouth. ‘If Scholars had sent them to the Archive …’

‘The Archive might have been damaged,’ Wolfe finished for her. ‘It’s always a goal of the Burners, though it’s very rare to find such a plot within Alexandria itself. They usually target outside the city, but this knot of snakes seems unusually venomous. I wanted you to see this. Reason it for yourself.’

Jess remembered with sudden, vivid clarity the dark, smoky scars and gouges left on the steps of the London Serapeum, the day he’d run from the lions. The Burners had been going after St Paul’s for years, long before his birth; they’d killed hundreds in that particular attack when he was nine. He’d been a long way off, and still seen the smoke rising up, heard the distant screaming. It had been the worst attack anywhere, except the assaults that went on constantly in America, where the Burners had succeeded in shutting down four of the largest of that country’s daughter libraries. Technically, those Serapeum remained open, but no one dared to visit.

‘They’re getting bolder,’ Glain said. ‘Every year, more attacks. Why can’t the Library stop them?’

‘We try,’ Wolfe said. ‘They’ve learnt to avoid the Codex; when they make plans, it’s through paper message or messengers. Never anything an Obscurist can track or see.’

‘Sir?’ Thomas looked up from his contemplation of the pile in front of him. His face was set, and very serious. ‘How close did they come?’

‘Not close this time.’ Wolfe looked around at them, and for the first time, Jess felt he was treating with them as genuinely worth his effort. ‘And yet, they are here, and that is troubling. Some of you may have grown up in places where the Burners are tolerated, even encouraged, but believe this: if you wear the band of the Library, you are their enemy. That is why we are putting so much time into training you to be vigilant.’

‘Scholar?’ Izumi raised her hand, a little hesitantly. She waited for his nod to continue. ‘Isn’t it the job of the High Garda to pursue them? Not Scholars?’

‘It was,’ Wolfe said. ‘Now it’s ours as well. I don’t like it either, but that is the world in which we live. That is the world I am training you to enter.’ He walked towards the door, only looking back to say, ‘Mind the tripwire. It still has a bite.’

They had a silent, grim walk back to Ptolemy House. Jess could still smell traces of alchemical compounds from the Greek Fire, a ghost of the man burning in St Pancras Station. That is the world I am training you to enter. Jess had grown up a smuggler, understanding that books were a precious commodity, understanding that his family catered to a basic human hunger.

He didn’t understand the Burners. He didn’t want to understand them. He wanted to go back to a safe place where he didn’t have to think about these things any more … but he was honest enough to know that there were no safe places. Maybe never had been.

And maybe that was why his father had sent him, to learn that lesson, as much as anything else.

Jess dreamt of automaton lions running at his heels, but when he turned in the dream, slow and weightless, it wasn’t lions after all. It was a young man carrying a bottle of Greek Fire, who upended it over his head, screaming.

It was his own face.

Dario stumbled in drunk in the middle of the night, and set to snoring. He sounded like a broken chain being beaten on metal, and it didn’t stop. Jess thought wearily about smothering him, but that seemed imprudent, so he dressed in the dark and slipped downstairs.

The common room sofa would do just as well for tonight. Tomorrow, he’d move his small chest of belongings to one of the empty rooms. Should have already done it, he thought. Dario would be pleased to have his private room again.

When he got to the common room, the door was closed. He tried the handle. Locked.

He put his ear to the door, but it was silent as the grave on the other side. Someone might have locked it by mistake; it had happened more than once, but if Portero had brought one of his girlfriends back, they were going to get a nasty surprise. Jess didn’t intend to let anything stand between him and the few meagre hours of rest he had left.

He stretched up for the key on the ledge above the door. After the first few times of being locked out, Thomas had provided a key, which had come in handy more than once.

The door opened without so much as a creak. He expected to find the room empty.

Instead, he found Morgan Hault.

She was dressed in a thick Egyptian dressing gown, and her brown hair was plaited into a rope that hung over her left shoulder. He hesitated in the doorway. Her back was turned to him, and as he started to say her name, something made him stop.

There was a strange, buzzing feeling in his head. He recognised it. It was the same feeling he had when one of the Archive tags was activated, and drew energy away from him in the process. The same as the drain he’d felt when using the map to track Santi, only that had been so much worse.

‘Morgan?’

She turned, fast, and he saw something he couldn’t comprehend. It didn’t make sense. She was holding a blank, but the letters were not on the page of the book. Not ink on paper, the way that the Codex mirrored them from the original book in the archive. The ink was there, but ghostly. Shimmering.

The letters were floating in gold and orange, sparking and turning, twisting in slow, fluid patterns. Rows and columns, cubes of them, all shifting and whispering and moving as much as a foot above the blank, and the storm in his head reached a sudden horrible intensity just as Morgan dropped the book.

As the blank slid free of her fingers, something followed it – a kind of string, was how he thought of it, except that it was a string of strange, pulsing light. Almost like a static shock, but too delicate, too lingering.

A string of orange light that broke just as the blank thumped to the carpeted floor.

She didn’t say a word. Her eyes had gone wide, but then they narrowed in calculation, and she backed slowly away.

He staggered and braced himself against the doorway. Just breathed for a moment, and then reached over and closed the common room door. Then he locked it and pocketed the key.

‘What was that?’ he asked, and when she didn’t answer, he pushed free and stepped forward. She backed up. ‘You’re not leaving until you tell me.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said. He could see her trembling. ‘The blank must be—’

‘Don’t try it. The blank isn’t defective, and I’m not a fool.’

‘Jess—’

‘I can only think of one explanation for what I just saw, and that is that you’re an Obscurist,’ he said.

‘I’m not!’

‘Don’t lie to me again.’

He saw her whole body go tense and still. She was considering whether or not to come at him for the key, and whether or not she’d win if she picked that battle. It lasted a long few seconds before she took in a breath and said, simply, ‘Yes.’

Now that she’d admitted it, the shock rolled over him. Obscurist. But they weren’t supposed to ever leave the confines of the Iron Tower. What was someone like that doing here, disguised as a student?

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s another test, and we’re supposed to find her out. ‘Does Wolfe know what you are?’

She snapped the answer back too quickly. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

‘Bit of advice, if you’re going to lie, learn to do it better.’ Jess’s pulse was racing, but it was as much with adrenaline as fear. I’ve seen an Obscurist at work. That seemed as impossible as petting a unicorn. ‘Relax. I won’t hurt you.’

That made her frown, and her voice turned firmer. ‘Do you realise how arrogant that makes you sound? If I’m an Obscurist, do you really think you have the ability to hurt me?’

‘Probably,’ he said. ‘They don’t keep you in the Iron Tower because you can easily defend yourselves, now, do they? You’re not some sorcerer out of a story. What you do is alchemy, not magic. You’re not going to throw a spell at me. Alchemy requires preparation.’

‘I wasn’t talking about magic,’ Morgan said. ‘I can look after myself. And, if you push me, I will.’ She had a knife now, and he hadn’t even seen her draw it. From the way she held it, he could see she was comfortable with the weapon … and she would be, if she’d actually survived a war to get here.

But there really would be no advantage in fighting, for either of them. He held up his hands. ‘Good point. Maybe I should just call the High Garda and have you escorted to the Iron Tower.’

He’d hit a nerve. A big one. She took a tighter grip on the knife, and he saw the flash of panic in her eyes. She didn’t want to go there. Not at all.

‘All right,’ she said, and tried to make it sound casual. ‘Wolfe knows all about me. Happy now?’ He might not have believed her if he hadn’t just seen her lie, but that, surprisingly, was the truth. Though why Wolfe would help an Obscurist was another thing entirely.

‘What are you going to do?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know.’ He nudged the blank on the floor with his foot, but it was back to just a plain volume, no different than any other he’d ever held. ‘Is this thing dangerous?’

‘It’s a blank. Why would it be dangerous?’

‘Because I just saw it do something I’ve never seen a blank do before.’

‘That’s not the book,’ Morgan said. ‘It’s just simple manipulation of the formulae behind the mirroring. I can do that with any blank. They’re all connected to the Codex, by their nature; it’s the principle of similarity. As above, so below. It’s what the Doctrine of Mirroring is based on. I was finding a way in.’

She said it as if that was self-explanatory, which maybe it was, to her; it was the same offhand way Thomas talked about engineering, or Khalila about dizzying levels of mathematics, as if anyone ought to be able to see how it worked.

It made him feel stupid, and annoyed by it. ‘So you’re an Obscurist who came here to pretend to be one of us,’ he said. ‘Why? Is this another one of Wolfe’s bloody stupid tests? Are we supposed to discover your secret? Then I think I win. Though it was stupid of you to be down here doing this.’

‘It’s not a test! I wish it was. That would be so … simple.’ The flush was fading from her cheeks now, and she walked over to the fire to warm her hands. ‘And I didn’t do it here by choice. The blanks work best when they are near each other. Principles of similarity, the sympathetic energy grows stronger. I locked the door. What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for sleep,’ he said. ‘Which I’m not going to get. If you’re not here to test us, why are you here? Shouldn’t you be in the Tower?’

‘I’m not going to the Iron Tower,’ she said, very quietly. ‘That’s the whole point of this. They were looking all over England for me by the time I made it past the border. I won’t be here long. Once I have what I came for, I’ll be on my way again.’

‘Khalila was right. She told me not to trust you,’ Jess said. He sat down on the divan, because he didn’t think he had the strength to keep standing; too many surprises today, and not enough rest. ‘What are you after?’

‘What do you think? I want my life! I want to erase any trace of … what I am.’ She wrapped her arms around her body, as if she was chilled to the bone, despite the fire. ‘I was coming here, you know, that wasn’t a lie. I’d already been accepted for training when I first accidentally opened up formulae; Scholar Tyler in Oxford saw me do it when I was reading a blank at the Serapeum. He told me opening the formulae leaves a kind of … record that the Obscurists could trace back to me, eventually. I had to destroy my record in the Codex itself if I didn’t want to end up in the Iron Tower.’

She paused, but Jess didn’t say anything. Her voice had the ring of truth. More, it had the ring of desperation.

‘I could open formulae, but actually altering it was impossible to do from Oxford, and even from the London Serapeum; I tried. Scholar Tyler told me that the closer I could get to the Iron Tower, the better chance I had of changing it. I already had an opening here in the training class. It was my only choice, they were looking for a stray Obscurist in London by the time I left.’ That struck some kind of thought in her, and she looked at him with sudden, real distrust. ‘Did someone send you here to find me? Did you suspect me?’

‘Not me. I was just looking for a quiet place to kip. You should have put a sign up. No entrance, alchemical sabotage in progress.’

‘Was that a joke?’

‘Not a very funny one.’ Jess still couldn’t quite take it in. An Obscurist. He’d come to think they weren’t real, or if they were, that they were incredibly old, with beards that stretched to the floor. He’d never imagined one his own age. Or a girl, for that matter. ‘You said Wolfe knows. How did he find out?’