Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(18)
He leaned back against the cool wall and closed his eyes. At least they couldn’t keep him from resting.
His Codex gave a small, strange tingle, like a tiny shock; it was a sign someone had written him a personal message, and it pulled him out of a slow slide toward dreams. He straightened and fumbled for the book in its case at his side. Every time he opened it, he remembered his parents gifting it to him before he’d left to train at the Library—a rich gift, leather bound, with his name inscribed in gold Egyptian hieroglyphs on the front. It had suffered some from hard use, and the scratched, roughened, battered surface looked nothing like the crisp new thing he’d brought just a year ago to Alexandria.
Felt like his, though. A part of him now.
The first section of the Codex held the standard Library listing of volumes available for reading and research—constantly updated by means of a science that was the secretive work of Obscurists, but that wouldn’t have triggered the shock—and, behind that, the contents of the latest reading he’d requested, which happened to be a history of the ancient Romans in the time of Julius Caesar. For all his faults, the man had put aside his quarrels with Cleopatra and Antony to save the Library. In many ways, the modern world owed its whole existence to him.
Behind his reading, on a separate tabbed page, were messages that came in handwritten directly to him. Normally they were from his family—innocuous questions about his progress and health, deep coded with requests from his father for information about books. Nothing new from family, though. Today, on a new, blank page, a message had come from a nameless source, and he recognized the neat, precise writing immediately as being from an invisible pen moved over the paper on the other end of the connection.
Is Wolfe all right?
He stared at those words hard for a moment as they faded from view. The message was from Morgan Hault, locked up in the Iron Tower of the Obscurists; the girl could not leave and had no chance of escape, and yet every time he saw her handwriting, he remembered the silken feel of her skin and the heat of her body against his. The scent of her hair washed over him in a warm wave. He’d told himself to forget her; she was trapped, and she must still blame him for that. He’d been the one to hand her over. He hadn’t fought to keep her free.
She didn’t ask how he was. Only about Scholar Wolfe. That said volumes. And stung more than a little.
He wrote back, He’s fine. Are you all right?
The words faded, and there was no immediate reply. He hated that she didn’t tell him what was happening to her inside the Tower. Still, she had to be safe enough: Obscurists were rare. Valuable. Necessary to the continued operation of the Great Library and the entire system of the Codex, and Serapeum. They’d have no reason to hurt her. And surely she wasn’t yet old enough for them to be demanding a child from her, to continue the Obscurist line. That would be in her future, but not yet. Surely not yet.
At long last, as he watched, a pen moved over paper somewhere in a room far away. Does that matter?
As simple as that was, it ripped a piece of his soul away. She hadn’t forgiven him.
Of course it matters. Are you?
Is anyone? she replied. As long as the Library rules us?
She was right, of course, but he wished, futile as it was, that the Library could be what he’d always believed it to be as a child: the light of knowledge, the protector of science, arts, history—a force for great and eternal good.
The terrible truth was that the Library still was all those things. It was a force for good. It did protect what would otherwise have been lost in wars and chaos and disasters. It did encourage scholarship and knowledge across the world, across religious and national lines. It did set knowledge and learning in a place of honor above all other considerations.
It was just how it went about it that turned his stomach and made it all wrong.
The Library will change, Morgan wrote, and he could hear the whisper of her voice saying it, too. It has to change. We must make it change. Is that still our bargain?
As if they had the power to do that. Jess’s optimism had guttered out months ago, and whatever embers remained were fast losing their heat. He took up his pen and hesitated. He knew what he needed to write to her; it was the same information he needed to give to Glain, and to Wolfe, about Thomas. But, as with Glain, he couldn’t think of the words.
Morgan’s pen moved one last time, to write, I will have more information soon. Look after Wolfe.
He wrote, Don’t take unnecessary chances.
She didn’t reply to that last, only marked down a final X to let him know she was finished, and then the words vanished from the page as the Codex scrubbed any trace that she’d ever written to him at all.
He didn’t understand how she could do this—cover her traces so thoroughly from other Obscurists who should have been watching them both. Morgan was clever and resourceful; she’d concealed her abilities as an Obscurist for most of her life without being detected. Still . . . he knew it was a risk every time she sent him a message, and yet he still craved any contact from her like a drug. One day, she’d let something slip, some sign she was letting go of her anger and bitterness.
One day in the distant future, she might even forgive him.
He returned his Codex to the case on his belt and saw Glain looking at him from across the way. She might have suspected Morgan was still in contact with him, though he’d not been completely forthright about it. Glain knew too many of his secrets as it was.