Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (39 page)

“So you see,” a voice rose from far below them. “Every one of these is a life snuffed out. You see the burden I’ve carried, every day since taking my post. I’m the caretaker of a graveyard of ghosts.”

Jess, Glain, and Santi all reacted at the same time, and all with military precision—spreading out, bringing their slung weapons into line to point down. There was nothing obvious to shoot, just the Obscurist Magnus, fragile and alone, standing in the rounded area below, beside the open Codex.

She stared up at them, and from here, so far above, Jess couldn’t read her expression at all. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m alone. Careless of you to leave the door open, though. I would have thought you’d have closed it, at the very least.”

Jess’s fault. He’d been so distracted by what was in front of him that for that one moment, he’d forgotten what lay behind.

“Come here to gloat?” Wolfe’s voice was bleak and empty now, as if something inside him had burned down to the very ashes. “Well played, Mother.”

“Not gloat,” she said, and without anyone’s command, the iron lift glided back down to her level and she stepped on. It carried her all the way up to where they stood, and as she walked toward them, Jess saw the pallor of her face, the strain. “All my life I thought I knew the Library and what we were. What we stood for in the world . . . until I was passed the key to this room. For the past three hundred years, every Obscurist Magnus has been shown this place, and it breaks them. It broke me. The weight of all this waste . . . it’s too much.”

“And yet you did nothing,” her son said. “
Nothing.
Even when—”

“Yes, I did nothing! What can any one person do to stop this?” The Obscurist pulled in a breath and looked away. “When
your
book came here . . . I knew. I knew I couldn’t continue this way. I tried to save you, you know. I tried to protect you.”

“
Protect him?
Do you have any idea what was done to him?” Santi
crossed the distance to her in three long strides, and Jess didn’t know what he would have done—hit her, flung her over the railing—but he didn’t have the chance, because Wolfe caught up and got between them. Santi checked his rush forward and stared into Wolfe’s eyes, and whatever he saw there, he turned away.

“I don’t blame you for your anger, any of you. This is a horror. It’s the worst sin of all the Library’s many evils. I did my best to minimize it.”

“You mean, your least,” Wolfe shot back. “Your best would have been to say no to all this. To stop it!”

“I couldn’t stop it. Not without risking the punishment of everyone I hold dear. But you can, my son. You all can.”

Jess couldn’t keep quiet any longer; his anger boiled over and he heard himself saying, “You’re the most powerful woman in the world, by all accounts. We’re just outcasts. Criminals.
Traitors
. They’re likely to kill us today. Why would you think we can change
anything
?”

“Because you’ve already started.” The Obscurist had always looked mysteriously young to Jess’s eyes, though clearly she was old enough to have a son Wolfe’s age. But just now she looked every year of her true age, if not older. “I spent most of my life
believing
that I could change things eventually; I would never have been able to continue as I did if I hadn’t. I gathered up the power I could, and I forced the Archivist to take some of what was stored here and let it out in the Archives, bit by bit. But I sacrificed”—her gaze fell on Wolfe and held—“too much. I told myself that things would change eventually, that I could make it happen. But I know the truth. The Library can’t be changed from within. We’re all too . . . too afraid. Or too cynical.”

“All you have to do is dump all of
this
into the Archive Codex!” Khalila said. “You have the power to do it!”

“No. I don’t.” The Obscurist touched her collar, the thick gold traced with alchemical symbols. “There are things even I can’t change, or I would have done it when I was young. When I was still brave.”

“So you want us to do it,” Glain said. It was the first thing she’d said,
and she was absolutely white with rage. “You coward. You ask us to bring down a giant with a—a pebble!”

“The Jewish king David did,” Khalila said. “Or so the stories tell us. Goliath fell to a slingshot and a stone. And the Library is a lumbering giant, dying of its own arrogance; it has to change or fall. We have the tools. The will. The knowledge.” She nodded to the book Wolfe still held in his hands. “We’ll have your printing press.”

Of all people, Jess had never expected
Khalila Seif
to propose such a thing. It was such a radical betrayal of the Library that Jess’s head spun from the whole idea. “Well, we couldn’t do it here, in Alexandria,” he said. “Certainly not here in the Iron Tower. And we’re out of time. The Archivist is coming, isn’t he?”

“He is,” the Obscurist agreed. “My delays in handing you over have already been noted; that will lead to my demotion, most likely today. Gregory has been wriggling to make himself the new Obscurist, and he’ll get his wish, for all the joy it will bring him. No, it’s inevitable. It’s already done,” she said, as Wolfe started to speak. “But I
can
get you out of here. Sending you on your way is the last gift I can ever give you, Christopher.” Her voice dropped lower, to a pitch Jess hardly even heard. “Except my love.”

Wolfe said nothing. He stared at her as if she were a stranger, and maybe she was.
Families so often are,
Jess thought. The silence stretched, and then he said, “What you’re suggesting we do—it’s like cutting loose a wild tiger. All this unchained knowledge will cause chaos and destruction, and what will happen can’t be managed. I can’t guess what will come of it. Can you?”

“No,” his mother said, and looked around the room. “But it will be better than this sad place.”

“We’ll need a safe haven, somewhere to build these machines,” Morgan said. “Allies to hide us and help us distribute the books we print. Most of all, we’ll need
these
.” She gestured at the Black Archives, the forbidden knowledge. “With the right books, we can change everything.”

“Then take them,” the Obscurist said. “Take as much as you can
carry. I’ll erase them from the records, and no one will ever know they disappeared. You’ll have to carry them with you, and you can never come back here. Not as long as the Library controls the Iron Tower.”

“Go where?” Jess asked, but then he answered his own question. “London.”

“Yes. Your family—blood and bonded by trade—is powerful and wealthy enough to hide you,” the Obscurist agreed. “You’ll need more than that, but it’s a start.”

“Did you
plan
this?”

“I’m not gifted with so much foresight. But when I saw you together the day I came to get Morgan, and saw how much you all cared for one another, I hoped you would be the ones to finally,
finally
have the skills and the courage to do this. I knew you wouldn’t let Thomas just vanish into the dark. You’d poke and dig, until you found him, and . . . this.”

Thomas’s eyes were bright now, and very strange as he stared at the older woman. Was it anger? Jess couldn’t tell, but it unnerved him. Badly. “You didn’t want them to have a choice, did you? Betray the Library or die. So you let them take me away. To motivate my friends.”

“I did what I needed to do,” Keria said. “I always have.”

Wolfe was still between Santi and his mother, but in that moment, he looked like he might go for her throat himself. “I thought I understood how cold you were,” he said. “But there’s no calculation for that.
Mother.
”

“Perhaps not,” Keria Morning said, and turned away. “Choose the books you want to take. You won’t get another chance.”

Text of a letter from the Artifex Magnus to the Archivist Magister, secured and coded at the highest level of security. Destroyed upon reading.

Are you sure you want to take this step? I don’t normally question your directives, but this is a thing we can’t undo. It crosses a boundary that we have never before broken. If anyone learns what we’ve done . . . You understand that it will destroy not just us, but everything we have given our lives to build and protect.

I must ask you to verify that this is
exactly
what you want. That there will be no last-minute changes of heart. No reprieves. Because once the thing is begun, it can’t be stopped, and it can’t ever be repaired or replaced.

What we’re doing . . . I have a strong stomach.

This, I will tell you frankly, sickens me.

I need your order here on this paper. I need proof.

Reply from the Archivist. Destroyed upon reading.

I don’t order this lightly. I have agonized over this decision. The weight of generations of my predecessors, who avoided it, rests solely on me, but we live in a far more dangerous world than any of them ever did. A world of increasing risk. Increasing dissent.

You have your orders, and I want them carried out to the letter.

Destroy it all.

T
his is like old times,
Jess thought, stuffing illegal volumes into packs, and once the packs were full, into thick canvas bags that the Obscurist brought from somewhere in a storage room. He’d been born running rare, valuable books. The only difference was that this smuggling was done much more clumsily and more openly than he’d prefer. And was vastly more important.

Jess left the others to the frantic work of choosing what to take—arguments, he saw, were fierce and passionate between Wolfe, Khalila, and Thomas—and went instead with Morgan to a small table in a corner. She’d borrowed a Codex from the Obscurist Magnus, and now she placed it on the table between them.

“What do we need that for?” he asked her.

“You’ll need to let your father know what happened and that we’re coming through soon,” she said. “The Obscurist can send us all to the London Serapeum, just as we originally planned. He’ll have to help us get free of the guards there.”

“My father’s not going to fight the High Garda! My father doesn’t fight anyone. He’s a smuggler, not some mercenary captain.”

She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “You’re his son. He’ll fight for you, Jess.”

“No,” he said grimly. “He won’t.”

That froze Morgan for a moment, but she shook her head. “Then we have to offer him good reason. Surely what we’re carrying will be enough of an incentive.” She used a thin-bladed knife that Wolfe had given her to carefully slit the endpaper of the Codex and peel it back; beneath that lay inked symbols that shimmered like metal in the dim late-afternoon light. She touched them and lifted her fingertips, and a three-dimensional column of symbols appeared, floating on the air as if they were made of burning fragments of paper. She studied them for a moment, then reached in and pinched one of them between her thumb and forefinger. As she pulled it out of the column, it dissolved into ash and smoke. She put her hand over the top of the shivering column and pushed it back down until her palm lay flat against the backing.

When she took her hand away, it looked exactly the same. “That takes care of anyone trying to read anything written in this particular Codex,” she said. “Now I’ll link it directly to your father’s. Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a link to your father, but you do. It’s necessary for it to be a personal connection.”

Jess shrugged and held out his hand, and before he could blink, she’d drawn that sharp little knife across his finger. The cut was shallow and he hardly felt it at all, but a line of blood welled up. Morgan grabbed a quill and dipped the end into the red, and he frowned at her as he sucked the wound closed. “Shouldn’t do that,” she said as she wrote a line in a blank page of the Codex—more symbols, then his father’s name:
Callum Brightwell.
“I might need more blood.”

“Make do with that,” he said. “Have you ever heard of vampires?”

She gave him a wild sort of smile, put down the quill, and reached for a bottle of silvery ink she’d brought with her. She shook it, then uncapped it and dipped the quill into it. “What I write here, only your father will see. By using your blood, I’ve mirrored this Codex to his. The ink will disappear in about a minute after I write, and it’ll leave no trace on either book. So tell me what to say.”

Jess sank down beside her on the small bench. “Say it’s me. Tell him no one else can read it. It’s safe.”

She did, writing quickly. There was a short delay. What if his father didn’t answer? Would the message wait or disappear? Disappear, apparently, because as he watched, the letters began to fade away.

Then, suddenly, his father’s pen moved in response, writing out words.
This isn’t my son’s handwriting. How do I know he’s even there?

“Does it matter who writes?” Jess asked her.

“Yes. I have to hold the pen or it doesn’t work. Sorry.”

“That’s inefficient. All right. Tell him . . . Tell him I still have nightmares about the ink-licker. He’ll remember.”

He must have, because as soon as she wrote it, his father’s response came fast.
Is Jess all right?

Yes,
Morgan wrote.
Jess is here. None but the three of us can see this exchange. My name is Morgan. I’m his—
Her quill stuttered a little, and then she wrote,
friend.

This must be important,
Callum Brightwell wrote.
Got yourself in trouble, Jess?

“He assumes the worst,” Morgan observed.

“He’s usually right,” Jess said. “Tell him what we need.”

She wrote quickly, in pieces, explaining first that they were wanted by the Library, and next—at Jess’s suggestion—that they were bringing incredibly valuable rare books with them. Last, what they needed as far as safe passage and hiding places. It was quite a bit for his father to take in, Jess thought; maybe too much for even native greed to overcome. The page went blank. Nothing appeared. After a moment went by, Morgan looked over at him and tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ears. “Should I try again?”

“No,” he said. “Let him think.”

It took a torturously long time for Callum’s words to appear again. When they did, it wasn’t about Jess’s needs at all.
Your brother is here,
the
words read.
Word’s been put about in Alexandria that you and your friends died in Rome. You understand my concern.

“Concern?” Morgan frowned at the page and raised her voice, as if his father could hear her. “
Concern?
He thought you were dead, and he takes it so calmly?”

“I told you,” Jess said. “He’s not sentimental.”

She gave him a disbelieving look. He pointed at the page where more words were written.
Your brother’s nickname. Now. Or we disappear and you won’t reach us again.

“He means it,” Jess said. “Write
Scraps.
”

“What?”

“Scraps. Leftovers. You know. Just write it.”

She looked mystified but obeyed. Another blank space, and then Callum wrote,
He still hates that name. He says to tell you that. I’m glad you’re all right, son.

“That,” Jess said, “is probably all the sentimentality you’ll ever see from my family. Cherish it.”

Morgan refreshed her quill and frowned at the level of ink left. She wrote,
Message back when you have everything arranged. We won’t have much time.

Done,
his father wrote, and Jess could almost hear the clap of the book closing. His father would be on his feet now, tugging down his expensive silk waistcoat, pacing the thick Turkish carpet of his office. Brendan would be slouched in a chair nearby, listening to every word. He felt curiously reassured by that vision, and by knowing that though he wouldn’t trust his family to save his life, he could trust them to see the profit in what he was bringing them. His life was just part of the deal.

Morgan capped the ink. “I’ll need more before we go,” she said. “It’s the one thing I can’t make any other place.” She wiped the quill clean on a scrap of cloth and tucked it in the holder on the side of the Codex.

“You’re taking the Codex? Won’t they miss it?”

“Hardly anyone here bothers to request new books. We get almost
everything mirrored to our Serapeum downstairs as it is.” She hesitated, stroking the cover of the Codex, and asked, “Are you sure we can trust him? Your father?”

He wished he could say yes. More than anything, he wanted to believe he could. But what he said was, “You can trust he’ll see the profit in rescuing us
and
the books. Once he realizes the opportunities of building the press, I doubt he’ll have a second of hesitation in throwing the full weight of the black markets behind this.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That sounds like a harsh kind of love.”

It was a perfect description for his childhood. He’d not known anything else until he’d come here to Alexandria, and now he could look back on it and see how dry and arid it was.

But useful nevertheless.
I might be just as bad,
he thought.
I can’t see my brother and father as anything but tools to be used. I should be better than that.
He’d not even spared a moment to think about his mother—not that he wasn’t fond of her in the abstract, but she’d never been present for him. Would she have cried over his death? Probably. But he had the awful feeling that it would have just been for herself and not for him.

“Don’t,” Morgan said. She turned toward him and put her hand on his chin to turn his face toward her. “Don’t go into your head and leave me. I’m just as frightened as you are, you know.”

“You? The girl who defies the Iron Tower and wins? I doubt you understand what fear means to the rest of us.” He removed her hand from his chin, but only to raise it to his lips. He kissed the soft skin while looking into her eyes and saw her shiver. Felt her skin rise in chill bumps under his touch. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

He pointed to the Codex. “For reminding me there’s more to life than what I grew up knowing.”

Wolfe, Khalila, and Thomas were still arguing. Morgan sighed and tilted her head in their direction. “I suppose—”

“That we should help? Yes. We’ll be out of time soon.”

Morgan proved to be a calming influence, and Jess interrupted arguments when it became clear both sides had points, and within another hour, they’d scraped together a good deal more than a hundred volumes. Too many to carry. Jess and Santi took charge of weighing the bags and removing what couldn’t be taken, though every one they abandoned put a cut on Jess’s heart.
It’s all right,
he thought.
Maybe we can come back later for more. She’ll help us.
She’d said she couldn’t, but Jess was seeing quite a bit of Wolfe in his mother’s character, including the steel-hard stubbornness.

Keria Morning hadn’t survived all these years as an enemy of the Archivist by giving up, giving in.

The Codex that Morgan carried must have changed, because she quickly drew it out and opened it. Then she frowned.

“Is it from my father?” Jess asked.

“No,” she said, and went to the Obscurist. She showed her the entry. “It’s from Gregory, to you.”

The Obscurist read the message, closed the book, and nodded. “We’re out of time,” she told him. “The Archivist’s guards have entered the Tower. Gregory let them in, and I’m being ordered to surrender you all immediately. You must Translate to London. Now.”

“My father’s not sent back a reply yet,” Jess said. “Until we know it’s safe—”

“It won’t be safe here,” she interrupted him. “They’re coming. Now.”

Silence settled in with grim weight, and Santi said, “Then we go.” It sounded like a death sentence. Jess swallowed hard.

Thomas silently took Glain’s pack and added it to his own. She didn’t say she was grateful, but Jess could see she was. Her leg was still painful and no doubt would slow her down in a running battle, but she bore the pain stoically. He expected nothing less. Glain would always do her best, until her best wasn’t good enough.

Jess found himself missing Dario; the Spaniard’s sharp humor would have been a nice addition just now. Khalila was steady and calm and as
cheerful as she could be, but there was no doubt she understood this was a one-way step into total darkness. What they’d find on the other side . . . none of them truly knew. Jess certainly didn’t.

The Obscurist stopped at the iron door and said, “Morgan. I can do one last service for you, at least.”

Morgan flinched as Keria reached out and brushed her fingertips in a line across the gold collar circling her throat.

It unlocked with a sudden, dry snap.

Morgan gasped and reached up to pull it off. Once she had, she stared at it as if she had no conception of what it was, until suddenly she let it fall to the floor with a heavy
thud
. The skin beneath was pale and moist. She didn’t seem to know what to say, but finally she whispered, “Thank you.”

Wolfe’s mother nodded. She seemed very calm. Very . . . resigned. “They would be able to track you through it if you’d kept it on. Morgan, I’ll leave it to you to remove any tracking scripts that they try to link to the Library bracelets the others wear. It might help to leave them on for now. People hesitate to kill librarians.” She hesitated and closed her eyes. “I’ve failed you in many things, Christopher. I won’t fail you in this. You must trust me now.”

It was a leap Jess thought might be impossible for Wolfe, but he stared at her for a long moment and then crossed to her. He took her hand in his. “I do,” he said.

“I don’t deserve that, do I?” Her smile was broken and beautiful and very real. “A mother should always protect her child. And I haven’t.”

He stood for a moment holding her hand, and then suddenly pulled her forward into an embrace. It was fierce and fast, and then he turned away, head down. The Obscurist blinked away tears, took a breath, and said, “It’s time to go.”

She summoned the spiral stairs, and they descended quickly. The garden seemed deserted as they arrived, but Jess heard the sound of shouting echoing up from below. The Archivist’s troops must have already arrived. They were searching.