Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(107)

“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.”