"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."
"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."
EPHEMERA
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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
This 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 f
elt 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?"