‘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.