Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(90)

“Hairsplitting,” Wolfe said, but then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Nic is right. We must chance it. It’s that, die fighting, or—” He didn’t need to state the alternative. They’d all seen it below in the cells. The torture chamber.

“Not the Tower,” Morgan whispered, and it was just for Jess. “I can’t go back there. Jess—”

He grabbed her hand and held fast. “Yes, you can,” he said. “I’ll be with you. I promise, I’m not leaving you.”

“Jess!” The wordless plea in her face hurt him, because he knew he had no way to answer it. He shook his head and saw the light go out in her eyes. He’d just betrayed her. Again.

“We’re agreed?” Santi asked, and one by one they nodded. Even Morgan, though the pallor on her face spoke louder than words. “Go.”

Jess settled the helmet over his head and felt Morgan’s trembling, powerful hands come down on it. And this time, in bocca al lupo, the lightning came, and struck him apart into pieces and sent him shrieking into the dark.





EPHEMERA



An excerpt from the personal journal of Obscurist Magnus Keria Morning (interdicted to Black Archives)


I have always tried to believe. Always.

When I learned that, as late as three hundred years ago, Obscurists were allowed the same freedom as other Scholars, that the Iron Tower was only a place of work and study, and not our gilded prison, I accepted that these changes were made purely for our own protection.

Then I read in the Black Archives that two hundred years ago, the Library ruthlessly crushed a revolt by the families of those kept here with us—our children, our lovers, our husbands and wives. Those we loved were killed or exiled. The Archivist set new rules. Crueler rules. We could no longer keep our families or even our children, unless the children were gifted as Obscurists.

My great-great-grandmother remembered a time when her husband lived here, and her children. She lost the ungifted in the revolt. It was not so very long ago, this change. This terrible, cruel desperation of our Archivists, striving to cling to power that is slipping away from them.

Maybe if I had not read so much, did not know so much, I wouldn’t see how we live now as a horror. But I think it is just that. The Library, in its terror of losing a grip on us, has crushed us instead. Maybe the dwindling number of children born with quintessence is a sign that the Library’s stranglehold is destroying us, and that the Library’s days are numbered.

For myself, I should have never let them take my son away from me, or allowed them to take all those sons and daughters we still mourn. I hate every moment of my life as the jailor of this prison. I hate even more the necessity to follow these rules or be replaced by someone much, much crueler.

I am resigned to my fate. No matter what it costs, I will try to make it right in the end.

Keria Morning

Obscurist Magnus

In what I pray will be the last days of the Iron Tower.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN





Arriving in the Iron Tower was not what Jess expected, though he hadn’t known what to expect, really. Guards seizing him? A sphinx pinning him down with a crushing paw? He did not expect to find himself coming awake in a garden of fresh, flowering plants: English roses, tulips from Holland, a blooming cherry tree from Japan gently shading the low, padded couch on which he lay. The rich, gentle scent of flowers and herbs filled the air, and he breathed it in over and over. It settled his stomach and filled him with a kind of calm he hadn’t ever known before.

Jess rolled off the couch and to his feet, and felt only a little unsteady—mostly from the beating he’d taken back in Rome—and saw an Obscurist sitting on a nearby folding chair. He was an older man, with handsome, sharp features that spoke of Eastern Europe, possibly Russia, and he nodded calmly at Jess. “Put the weapon down, please,” he said. “You may, of course, keep it if it makes you comfortable. Just don’t point it at me.”

Jess was still clutching his weapon in a nervous grip, but the man’s quiet assurance made him feel a little ashamed of that. He angled the gun down. The Obscurist nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Now sit down. There’s tea.”

The garden room stretched high in an arch, but it wasn’t open to the sun; light poured in from windows that circled the round walls, and from them Jess saw the familiar layout of the city of Alexandria—this time from a very great height. The only building that rose higher was the Serapeum, and he could see the tip of the pyramid stretching up another giant’s reach above this place.

The garden around him spread out huge and bursting with colors, and it gave him a sense of the incredible scale of this tower. He’d always known it was huge, but never quite this large.

A city in its own right, surely.

Jess sat down on a bench and poured himself a cup of hot tea from the waiting pot; his hands were steady enough to hold it now, at least. As he drank, Glain came through. She arrived unconscious, and blood leaked in thick drips from the sodden cloth of her uniform’s trouser leg onto the couch. The Obscurist stood up, suddenly very tall and active, and went to her side. He pressed a silver symbol on his collar and said, “I need Medica here in the Translation Chamber. Now.” He picked Glain up—and she was not a light burden, Jess knew—and moved her to a clear spot on the floor, then clamped a strong hand over the wound in her leg to slow the loss of blood. “You’ll need to assist your other friends,” he told Jess. “I’m Gregory, by the way.”