“Well, there,” Johnny said. “Why lie? Why come all this way to lie?”
“Who knows? I thought: Famous scientist wants to dabble in the occult. Stupid, awful kids nowadays. It wasn’t you that convinced me, you know. You, the prodigy. It was seeing all these things. It was seeing everything... thinning out, getting soft, thin. You know the locals finally finished pulling out all the logs in Estaqueria, the circle there? They burn them for charcoal. Tsk. Spell’s broken for good.”
“Forever? Was it weakened after they changed it from a sigil to a circle?”
“Think so, yes. It was good protection. Gone at last. When we needed all we could get.”
“Suspicious timing.”
“Those weirdo people, what do you call them. The Committee?”
“The Ssarati Society.”
“Aren’t they supposed to be preserving those things? Their local chapter. Buenos Aires or such. What were they doing, huh? They knew it was getting weak.”
“I don’t know.”
“What you doing here, anyway? They send you to fix this?”
“No one sent us.” She opened her mouth to say something else, then shut it again. Smart, I thought. Maybe no one else has figured out why she’s involved, but she’d only need to say one wrong thing.
He fell silent, working at the locks. Some of them unlocked with a puff of smoke, or a burst of light, or a hum that set our teeth on edge, or a faint, faraway shriek. Finally, he tried to lift the iron bar without putting the lantern down; I let him struggle for a minute before helping get it off and slot it into the holder next to the door. The door swung open, emitting a surprisingly cold draft, reeking of mould and books.
“I’m going back to bed,” he said. “Be gone by dawn.”
“We’ll be gone long before then,” Johnny said. “We have to get to Iraq before the alignment.”
“Iraq! Good luck with that. Don’t you know it’s a tinderbox over there? Saddam, you know? You don’t know about that? You don’t read?”
“Can’t be helped.”
We crept down the stairs, clay wall to one side, empty air on the other. The lightswitch at the bottom lit a roomful of books with a handful of low-wattage bulbs encased in heavy-duty glass, giving everything a wavery, underwater glow. Akhmetov shut the door behind us—slammed it, actually, with a reverberating thud that I felt in my back teeth.
“What an asshole,” I ventured as we looked up at the towering piles. A path about two feet wide threaded through the books, most of which were unshelved and stacked with the spine in, presenting us with walls of yellowing paper. Sprung traps with desiccated mice in them littered the floor, so that we had to nudge them aside as we walked.
“He’s worried,” she said. “If he’s watching the local news like he said, then he knows how much the reward is, and he knows he can’t turn us in, and he’s sick about it. He’s missing out on more money than he’ll make in twenty years; but what if we’re right? We have to trust his uncertainty.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“He sort of… gives the impression that he trusts yours.”
“He should. Mine’s researched uncertainty.” She skirted a stack of wobbling books smaller than the palm of my hand, and glanced back at me with her sharp-edged smile. “You’re an asshole when you’re worried, too.”
“Yeah, and you just become nicer and sweeter and more accommodating of all these assholes we’re meeting,” I said. “When you start sounding like Shari Lewis, I’m gonna find a bed to hide under.” I ducked under a low arch and followed her into another room of books, this one lit with just a single bulb. “But Saddam, he... they... nothing’s going to happen to us, right?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“I read that the UN said they were going to go look for weapons of mass destruction there,” I said.
“They’re not going to find them,” Johnny said. “Or, at least not the worst ones Iraq has. Because that’s what we’re looking for. Big Man syndrome again. Conventional weapons aren’t what the world needs to worry about anyway. I don’t care what he’s got, frankly.”
“Yeah, pretty sure the Ancient Ones aren’t on the UN list.” We stopped, and I stared around at the endless maze of books. “Jesus, how are you going to find what you need? We’ll be here for days.”
“We don’t have days.”
“Once again, the question is not answered by you, a genius. Thank God you’re not out to take over the world.”