“Not to me,” Wolfe said. “This one needs Medica. Cobra bite. We’ve given her antivenin.”
Santi gestured, and two of his command stepped out of formation and rushed to take Helva. Some of the pressure in Jess’s chest lifted. She’ll be all right.
Jess expected a barrage of questions from Santi, at the very least, or an outpouring of concern for Wolfe’s safety.
So it came as something of a shock when Niccolo Santi, longtime partner and lover to Scholar Christopher Wolfe, turned to Botha and said, “Put Scholar Wolfe in restraints. He’s under arrest.”
The strangest thing of all was that Wolfe didn’t seem at all surprised.
EPHEMERA
From the personal journal of Scholar Christopher Wolfe (interdicted to Black Archives)
There are mornings when I wake and I am back in the cell, and I see nothing but the dark. Feel nothing but the pain. On those mornings, I am convinced I never escaped that place, and the life I have had since never existed at all, except as a fantastic illusion.
I should leave you, Nic. I know that, because I’m not really here at all. I should vanish and never come back, because one day either I will break and fail you or I will make you break your own vows to the Library to save me from myself.
But I can’t. Leaving you would destroy everything in me that remains true and good. Leaving you means giving up on a better world.
I’m sorry, Nic. I love you more than you can ever understand. I wish I could be strong enough to protect you from my own stupidity.
CHAPTER FOUR
Jess got no answers all the way back to the barracks, where he was put in a waiting room with the rest of the squad. They were all exhausted and confused, drenched with rank sweat, and though they were allowed to strip away their armor and were given food and water, the bare room offered no other comforts but wooden chairs. They had a watchful guard who, when Jess posed a question to Glain, snapped, “Quiet. No talking.”
He leaned back against the cool wall and closed his eyes. At least they couldn’t keep him from resting.
His Codex gave a small, strange tingle, like a tiny shock; it was a sign someone had written him a personal message, and it pulled him out of a slow slide toward dreams. He straightened and fumbled for the book in its case at his side. Every time he opened it, he remembered his parents gifting it to him before he’d left to train at the Library—a rich gift, leather bound, with his name inscribed in gold Egyptian hieroglyphs on the front. It had suffered some from hard use, and the scratched, roughened, battered surface looked nothing like the crisp new thing he’d brought just a year ago to Alexandria.
Felt like his, though. A part of him now.
The first section of the Codex held the standard Library listing of volumes available for reading and research—constantly updated by means of a science that was the secretive work of Obscurists, but that wouldn’t have triggered the shock—and, behind that, the contents of the latest reading he’d requested, which happened to be a history of the ancient Romans in the time of Julius Caesar. For all his faults, the man had put aside his quarrels with Cleopatra and Antony to save the Library. In many ways, the modern world owed its whole existence to him.
Behind his reading, on a separate tabbed page, were messages that came in handwritten directly to him. Normally they were from his family—innocuous questions about his progress and health, deep coded with requests from his father for information about books. Nothing new from family, though. Today, on a new, blank page, a message had come from a nameless source, and he recognized the neat, precise writing immediately as being from an invisible pen moved over the paper on the other end of the connection.
Is Wolfe all right?
He stared at those words hard for a moment as they faded from view. The message was from Morgan Hault, locked up in the Iron Tower of the Obscurists; the girl could not leave and had no chance of escape, and yet every time he saw her handwriting, he remembered the silken feel of her skin and the heat of her body against his. The scent of her hair washed over him in a warm wave. He’d told himself to forget her; she was trapped, and she must still blame him for that. He’d been the one to hand her over. He hadn’t fought to keep her free.
She didn’t ask how he was. Only about Scholar Wolfe. That said volumes. And stung more than a little.
He wrote back, He’s fine. Are you all right?