Is he really capable of doing anything after spending all that time in a cell?

Jess lifted one shoulder in a very small, almost invisible shrug.

Because they had no real choice.

Glaudino’s workshop turned out to be a large building, but not well secured. Jess assumed that nobody in their right mind would want to steal from the man who repaired Library lions, though, and so it was an easy matter for him and Glain to slip in the side gate. Stepping inside the building through an open sliding door, Jess came face-to-face with his own worst nightmare: an entire pride of Library lions.

But as Thomas had promised, they were all switched off, frozen in whatever pose they’d had when the button had been pressed. He heard Glain’s sharp intake of breath when she moved in beside him, and felt her shudder as she fought, and conquered, the urge to retreat. “Are they dead?” she asked him.

“They were never really alive,” he said. “And they’re shut off.”

Glain sent him a sharp look. “How did you learn that trick, by the way? I’ve never heard of anyone managing it before.”

“Desperation. Luck. Free exercise of my illegal trade. Take your pick. Come on—I hear voices this way.” Jess followed a clear space between the lions toward the back of the room, to a separate workroom where voices conversed easily in Italian. Stepping through the door, he found three men sitting at worktables and on benches. There was a lion crouched in the middle of the floor, motionless, and it had a pathetic air to it; someone had removed part of its bronzed hide and pulled out bundles of cables that spilled over the floor like wiry intestines. The lion’s face was frozen in a strange expression, as though it didn’t much like what was being done to it.

The oldest of the three men—Signor Glaudino, at a guess—looked up at Jess’s arrival, frowned, and switched from Italian to the more standard Greek that was the common Library language. “She’s not ready yet, this one. Tell your master we will deliver as agreed tomorrow. Yes?”

“No,” Jess said, and raised his gun. Glain stepped in beside him and mirrored the action. “Apologies, signori, but I need you all to move into that closet, please.”

“Why? What is this?” Signor Glaudino was a peppery little man, and he puffed out his chest and stood up to face them squarely. “You are ignorant people, to think you can do this to us! I have a commission from the Artifex himself for my work! The High Garda will hunt you down as soon as I tell them—”

“You won’t,” Glain said. She stepped forward, grabbed Glaudino’s shoulder, and marched him firmly to the open door of the closet. After checking it, she pushed him inside and gestured for his two employees to follow. Neither of them looked ready to put up a fight. “Codices, please. Now.”