Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(105)
“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.”