“Here,” Jess said. “Come on.”
“Dario, bring up the rear. Keep watch,” Santi said. He had his weapon ready, and, Jess realized, so did Glain. Jess quickly followed their lead and waited at the opening. “Jess, go right and see to the automaton. Glain and I go left. Dario, Khalila, stay here until we signal.”
Jess ducked through and immediately turned right. The hallway was just as Wolfe had described it in his Mesmeric trance—a long, straight run with windows that overlooked the Forum. Not glass, certainly, because that would make them easy targets for vandals or Burners. These would be made of something harder and unbreakable. No use giving a desperate captive the chance to throw himself out and escape, either.
Jess heard the lion’s rumbling growl before he’d taken three running steps in its direction and slowed to a fast walk. The lion wasn’t waiting for him; it was pacing toward him, the cabled length of its tail twitching side to side and slamming into walls and windows. It left gouges where it hit. The creature was a big thing, the same size as the one he’d faced down in the tunnels. Seeing it coming at him in harsh daylight was chilling indeed.
You know this. You can do this. The problem was that this lion was in motion, and very probably about to break into a run; it didn’t have the same confusion the one in the tunnel had shown, and it was not undecided about the situation. It had been built to respond to intruders, no matter what uniforms they wore.
Jess broke into a run again, closing the distance fast, and ten steps from it, he threw himself into a slide on the slick marble floor. The lion, confused, tried to slow, but momentum wouldn’t allow it to check so quickly. Jess slid right underneath its open jaws, which hit the floor with a heavy clang just as his head cleared the space, and grabbed one of the thick metal legs to stop his slide. At the same time, he reached up for the depression beneath the lion’s jaw, found it, and pressed as hard as he could.
He heard the roar that had been building inside the thing skew to a strange whining noise and die. The lion took another step forward and froze.
Jess pushed himself out from behind it and cut his arm on the tail when he grabbed hold to stand up; the barbed end of it, he realized, was razor sharp. Even standing still, the thing was capable of harm.
The door lay just beyond—locked, as Wolfe had said. Jess never left without his handy set of picklocks—the lesson of a devious childhood—and pulled them out of the pack and set to work as quickly as he could. He heard the sounds of fighting behind him. Wolfe and Glain must have met with resistance.
He’d just pushed the last tumbler in the lock when Khalila dropped down beside him and said, “How can I help?”
“You can get out of the light,” he said. “Are they coming?”
“Yes. Dario went to help them.” She stood up and looked back over the lion’s shoulder. “How did you know to do this?”
“What, lock picking? Comes naturally. I’m a criminal, remember?”
“I meant the lion, Jess.” She was waving now, giving urgent hurry signals. “Get the door open—they’re coming!”
They were. He heard the footsteps. Glain, ever the athlete, chose to throw herself under the lion, as Jess had, and slid neatly through, then rolled back to her feet and leaned on the still metallic body to aim her weapon back down the hallway. She fired, and Jess recognized the sound: stunning rounds, not lethal. She didn’t intend to kill her fellow High Garda soldiers, no matter what their orders might be.
Dario came next, and behind him . . . behind him came Santi, and . . . Scholar Wolfe. Wolfe, like Dario, wore Scholar’s robes, and his shoulder-length hair had been tied back in a tight knot. “Wolfe?” Jess spared a precious, astonished second to stare at him. Khalila jabbed him in the shoulder to remind him to keep working. “How did he get here?”
“Translation,” she said. “Santi wouldn’t leave him alone in Alexandria. That would have been a death sentence. Jess, are you sure you can—”
“Got it,” Jess said, as the last tumbler clicked and fell away. “Is he all right to be here, do you think? Wolfe?” He couldn’t shake the memory of Wolfe’s swallowed screams as the Mesmer tried to calm him. Whatever was buried under that calm, Elsinore Quest had been right: it was poisonous and powerful. Must have been hard to keep it locked away.
“I don’t know,” Khalila admitted, as Jess rose and pulled on the door’s handle. “I can’t imagine how it would feel to . . . go down there. But it’s Wolfe. We can’t leave him behind for the Archivist, can we?”