I’ve set her to work, supervised, on the boring task of transcribing official messages into the books, but I don’t dare put anyone with her for long. The little criminal can be quite disarming. I realize that giving her access to some of the messages might be dangerous; she still retains her allegiance, as far as I can determine, to Scholar Wolfe and all her fellow students. But, believe me, she’ll do far less damage with pen and paper than with alchemical preparations.

And for the love of Horus, keep her well away from anything to do with translation. I shudder to think how we could hold on to the girl if she was able to translate herself away from here.

She continues her resistance to the rules of the Tower, but I have determined, through the proper charts and analysis, that her ideal time for propagation will come soon. I have not warned her of this. Gods know what she would do to avoid doing her duty.

I know you are sensitive on this subject, Obscurist, so forgive me for my frankness, but I still feel you give the girls too much freedom in this matter, allowing them three refusals before they undergo the compulsory procedure.

She has, of course, already used up all three of these refusals.

Your faithful servant, Gregory

CHAPTER TWO

The Alexandrian black market had two obvious faces. The more public one, known as the shadow market, sold illegal but harmless copies of common Library volumes—punishable, at worst, with fines and short prison stays. It catered to those who wanted a book purely for the criminal thrill of it, even if the book was shoddily transcribed and incomplete, as they often were.

A smuggler called Red Ibrahim presided over the darker, more private end of the trade, and he was legendary well beyond the city; his reputation was spoken of even in Jess’s house back in London. He was a cousin, someone in the trade you could rely on in a pinch and for a price. Jess had actual blood cousins in the trade, but the main tests to becoming a trade cousin were long-term success and a certain ruthless loyalty to fellow smugglers. They were bound—pun intended, he supposed—by the business of books, of history set in leather and paper.

Forbidden fruits.

For months, Jess had steadily dealt with a succession of Red Ibrahim’s subordinates—he had a network of at least thirty—and found them all cold-eyed and capable. His Brightwell bona fides had been checked again and again at every stage; he was, after all, a High Garda soldier, wearing the copper band of service to the Library, even if he was a smuggler by birth. Reconciling that and earning trust, even with the Brightwell name, had been a tricky job.

Tonight, as he walked, his initial directions wrote themselves out into his Codex in the Brightwell family code, and he immediately erased them. He visited a market stall, where he was told verbally to go to another shop, and then to a third, a darkened bar where sailors cursed at one another over dice games and a proprietor slipped him a paper note. The route took him halfway across the city, and his legs were truly aching by the time five words scribed themselves in his Codex: Knock on the blue door.