Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(106)

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.”