Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (38 page)

Eerily quiet here.

“They might already know we’ve come here,” Wolfe said. “Morgan, see if you can use the Translation equipment.”

It was immediately obvious she couldn’t; as she came close to the helmet and couch, a low humming sound rose and spiked, and a harsh blue spark stabbed out toward her. She yelped and jumped back, rubbing at the spot on her arm where it had struck. It left a burn.

“And that’s our answer,” Santi said. “Work quickly. Spread out. Find anything that might be a concealed staircase, a switch.”

They’d all been well trained in how to suss out hidden alcoves, floor tiles, concealed safes and shelves. Common practice among those who possessed book contraband to hide it from view. Scholars and soldiers learned how to pry those secrets out early in their training.

But Jess had experience at
hiding
things, not just finding them. The Brightwell family expertise lent itself to a search like this, and instead of doing what the others were, he stood very still, looking around the large round room.
Those who built this place weren’t trying to hide something completely. They’d want it accessible. No Obscurist is going to want to grub around in flower beds, looking for a switch or a panel.

He let his eyes unfocus and wander, and suddenly, he was looking at a statue. The largest statue, in fact, in the room: an image of hawk-headed Horus, from whose bowl flowed a continuous stream of water that snaked among the flowers and plants.

Horus, God of Scribes. Patron of the Great Library.

Jess grabbed Thomas as he passed and pulled him over to the statue. “Look for any kind of switch,” he said. They both began running hands over the cool marble, and then Jess felt a scarab ornament on the arm of the statue give to his touch. “Here! It’s here!”

He pressed it, and above them something hissed. What had seemed like just another part of the ceiling proved to be a plate—the bottom of a black iron staircase that screwed down from the ceiling, turning so smoothly that
it must have been powered by steam or hydraulics. The whole thing was silent enough that it seemed as eerie as a dream.

“Incredible,” Thomas murmured, and ran his hand over the smooth black railing. “We go up?”

“We go up,” Santi said. “But I go first.”

Jess hung back to take rear guard. The staircase turned in a tight spiral around a central iron core, and above him Thomas said, reverently, “Look at this. It’s the same as the Iron Tower! No one remembers how this metal was created; it has the same properties as the Iron Pillar of Delhi, but—”

“You must be feeling better,” Glain said from just below him. “Since you’re lecturing again.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, don’t be. I’m happy to hear it.”

At the top of the steps, Santi paused and said, “There’s a door. No lock and no handle, so I assume it takes an Obscurist. Morgan?”

She squeezed her way past the others to the top. Jess craned his neck, wishing he’d put himself farther ahead, so he could see what was going on.
Someone has to bring up the rear, scrubber.
He could almost hear Dario’s mocking voice. When had he started missing Dario, of all people?

It seemed to take forever, and Jess faced outward, toward the garden room. How long before someone—Gregory, perhaps—came looking for them? How long before he realized they’d gone missing and began to search? Not long, surely. He wasn’t the trusting sort.
I should be up there,
he thought.
I’m the one who’s good with closed doors.

But Santi did know best, after all. Above there was a hollow
clunk,
and Santi said, “We’re moving!” Khalila, just ahead of Jess, glanced over her shoulder at him and gave him an encouraging smile.

“Come on,” she said. “At least we can brag to Dario later that we saw something he didn’t.”

Jess backed his way up the winding stairs, training his weapon on the room below until the last twist hid it all from view. Then he turned and
hurried up after Khalila, across a shallow landing, and toward a black iron door that stood open.

Behind him he heard another hiss, and looked back to see the staircase moving again, this time spiraling back into the ceiling.
Counterweights
. It had been only their weight on the staircase that had kept it down after the initial descent. The design reminded him of Heron of Alexandria and all the marvelous bellows and gears that had driven the wonders of the temples in the early days of the Library.

Khalila had stopped in the doorway, and Jess stepped up beside her and stopped as well. He couldn’t help it.

A vast, circular Serapeum spread out in front of them, but not like any he’d ever seen before. The Library’s daughter facilities were always, always
orderly
, clean, well maintained.

This was like the ghostly wreck of one.

The Black Archives rose in a hollowed-out tower within the tower, ring after ring of shelves and cabinets crowding every available level, with an ancient, dusty flat lift on a track that must have been designed to spiral up from one level to another. The number of books, scrolls, tablets . . . it was
staggering
and chaotic. The smell of the place overwhelmed him—old paper, mold, neglect. A thick, choking patina of dust.

It made his father’s warehouse of contraband in London, the largest that Jess had ever heard of, look like a modest rural shelf. There had to be tens of thousands of volumes here—no,
hundreds
of thousands, if not millions. The books had long ago overflowed the shelves, and towering stacks of them leaned against corners and tottered atop the bookcases themselves. The shelves, Jess realized, were thickly stacked with multiple layers of volumes, too.

Without even meaning to, Jess took a step inside the hidden tower, then another, as he tilted his head to look up. The levels of shelves reached up and up, spiraling to what seemed like infinity.
This isn’t the Archives,
he thought.
This is something else.

Wolfe’s voice was hushed as he said, “The Black Archives. I don’t
know what’s worse—the number of things they’ve kept from us or the incredible hubris of the idea.”

The Black Archives.
A story, a rumor, a fable. The place where the Library kept everything too dangerous to circulate, too damaging to allow out to the public.

How could so many books be
dangerous
? And by whose standards?

Khalila walked to a shelf, reached for a book. Morgan got there fast and grabbed her wrist before she could touch the leather spine. “Wait,” she said. “There could be traps or alarms. Before you touch
anything
, let me look first. That goes for everyone.” In truth, she looked shaken. So did Wolfe, for that matter. Even Santi kept turning in place, staring in shock and a mixture of wonder and horror.

Traps.
The word finally penetrated Jess, and he swallowed. There could be traps on books. Jess tried to comprehend that and failed. The scale of the place continued to overwhelm him.
So many
books
abandoned here.
Criminal works walled up to die.

They waited while Morgan made the rounds of the shelves, looking, occasionally brushing her fingers across a shelf or a case. Finally, she said, “It’s safe. You can touch them now.”

Khalila took the book from the shelf. Her voice trembled as she read the title. “
Generation of a Magnetic Field by Use of Electric Currents
,” she said. “Hans Christian Ørsted, 1820.” She put it back and pulled another. “
The Law of Reciprocity of the Magneto-Electric and Electromagnetic Phenomena and Applications for the Reversibility of Electric Generators
. Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz, 1833.”

Wolfe moved around the shelves, not touching, just looking. He said, “This whole level has to do with applications of electrical fields. Heat, light, machines—all powered by electrical fields. These are things that I’ve only seen here within this tower. I thought it was an Obscurist’s trick, powered by alchemy. It isn’t. It’s something engineers discovered centuries back. And they kept it from us.”

“But why?” Thomas’s eyes had gone very wide. He went to Khalila’s
side and pulled more books, searching the titles. “Why would they keep these amazing things from us? Can you even imagine how bright the world would be if we had these lights? What about using this electromagnetic phenomenon to power trains or carriages? Could it be better than steam? Why would they—”

“Because someone, when this work was first submitted to the Library, decided the very idea of it was dangerous. Uncontainable.” Wolfe’s voice sounded weary, and angry. “They looked into that future and decided it couldn’t be controlled, and, above all, the Library wants
control
. Look around you. Look at what the Library
kept from us.
We all knew it was true. Thomas and I, we both have experience of what they won’t allow to be known.”

“The press,” Thomas whispered.

“The what?” Khalila asked it absently, still fascinated by the titles of the books on the shelves, all the knowledge that they had never seen. Never imagined.

Wolfe was the one to answer. “He means a letterpress, ink blocks arranged in letters and pages. It allows books to be easily reproduced. The Library can’t allow that, because then all this—all this
banned knowledge—
could be distributed without having an arbiter of what is good or bad, dangerous or helpful.” He clutched the book he was holding in both hands, and the line of his jaw was so tight, Jess could see the bone beneath it.

“And the authors?” Khalila asked. “What would have happened to these authors?”

“Dead,” Wolfe said. “Silenced. Either when their work was placed here, or soon after. The Library would have seen to that. A candle can make a bonfire. So it’s snuffed out quickly.” The silence hung heavy with the smell of old paper and leather, dampness and neglect. “This is the graveyard where they buried our future.”

Khalila pulled in a breath and carefully, reverently replaced the book she’d removed. These were, Jess realized, not just forbidden works; they
were the only remaining memories of brilliant people—Scholars, librarians, maybe even just amateur inventors—who’d discovered things the Library wanted to keep hidden. There would be no personal journals celebrating their lives in the Archives. No scholarly papers. No record of their births or deaths. They had been erased.

These books were all that remained of a vast collection of lost souls, and instead of being cared for, being loved, they were jumbled and rotting like a child’s abandoned toys. Jess felt it like a hot spear through his chest.

Then he got
angry.

Thomas cleared his throat. “All this is only for the development of electricity,” he said. “What
else
is there?”

“There must be a Codex,” Wolfe said. “Even the forbidden needs to be cataloged.”

“Here,” Santi said. He moved to a vast book, thick as a builder’s block, with pages large enough to hold a thousand entries each. The book was chained to a podium with links of the same black iron as the staircase and the tower itself. It sat open to the center. Morgan moved her hand over it and nodded. Santi flipped pages to where in a normal Codex there would have been a summary of categories and coding. He stared, then slowly looked up at the stacked levels upon levels of books. “It’s—it’s as long as the Codex for the Archive. Inventions. Research. Art. Fiction. Printing—”

“Printing,” Wolfe repeated, and he and Thomas exchanged a sharp look. “Where?”

“The seventh circle,” Santi said. He seemed shaken. “It’s an entire
section.
I thought—”

None of them wanted to finish that sentence.

They all crowded on the flat lifting device, and a blank panel rose out of the iron plate. Morgan hesitated, then pressed her palm down to it. She gasped a little, and Jess moved toward her, but she flung out a hand to stop him. “No. No, it has to be me. This place, it only obeys Obscurists.” She closed her eyes and focused, and the lift lurched into movement on the track. It rose as it circled, level upon level, and Jess tried not to look
down.
So easy to fall from this thing,
he thought. The thin railings bordering it were no kind of reassurance at all.

The lift slowed and stopped, and Morgan stepped off. She touched the old wood of the bookcase that circled around, and in a moment said, “It’s safe enough. But be careful.”

Thomas moved next to her, facing a bookcase seven shelves high and at least twenty paces wide. “All of this? Surely it can’t all be about what Thomas dreamed up, and Wolfe before him.” Morgan plucked the first book from the bottom corner. “Chinese. I don’t read it—”

“I do,” Wolfe said, and took it to open to the flyleaf. “
The Printing of Ink to Paper Using Characters Carved in Wood
by Ling Chao.”

“What year?” Thomas asked. Wolfe didn’t answer. “Sir? What year?”

“Translated from the Chinese calendar? Year eight hundred sixty-eight,” he whispered at last. “They’ve robbed us of this for
more than a thousand years.
” His voice shook, and he thrust the book back at Thomas to turn away and stare at the shelves that marched around the level. “How many? How many times was this created and cut down? They’ve been destroying it over and over, all this time.
All this time.
”

Santi had walked away, all the way toward the end of the shelves, and suddenly he stopped, backed up, and reached out to pluck a volume out of the rest. “Ah,
Dio mio,
” Santi murmured, and put his hand on the cover as if trying to hide the title. The name. He turned and looked back at them, and they went to him, as if he’d asked for help. Maybe he had, silently.

Thomas took the book gently and opened it. “
On the Uses of Pressed Metal Type and Ink on Paper 
. . .”

“
For the Safeguarding, Archiving, and Reproduction of Written Works
,” Wolfe said. “It’s mine. I was told it was destroyed.
All
destroyed. Everything I ever wrote. But it wasn’t. They kept it.” Santi put his hand on Wolfe’s shoulder and held on, head bowed, but Wolfe didn’t seem to feel the offered comfort. “They kept our work and let it rot
.
”