Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(33)

I could write one symbol down, pour power into it, and kill everyone in this room, she thought. For just a moment, she could feel the trembling possibility of it in her fingertips, a dark power like shadows brushing her skin. I could take all this away from the Archivist. Every one of his Obscurists. It seemed so simple in that moment, so breathtakingly easy, that when she realized what she was thinking of doing, she flinched and ruined the script she was copying. The Master Copyist—a nasty little beetle named Fratelli—looked sharply in her direction, and she disposed of the ruined paper in a bin beneath her desk and pulled another slim scrap onto the copy surface.

She wasn’t here to kill anyone. She was here to save them. Her power had been twisted and came from darker places now, but that didn’t mean she had to give in to the impulses it fired in her mind.

She copied the script. Flawlessly. And the next, and the next, until the Master Copyist’s attention wandered away.

Then she began to alter the scripts.

It would have taken a sharper eye than his to realize what she was doing, and fooling the older man who sat beside her to double-check her work was even easier. All of the scripts appeared to work perfectly; when he brushed his thumb across the inked symbols, they rose from the paper in glittering images.

But there was one tiny difference in the scripts from the standard she was supposed to be duplicating . . . and each script stored a single letter into a message she was composing. It took a great deal of concentration, and more than two hours to do even the brief message she intended, but at last, she wrote the final symbol, and imbued it with the last piece of punctuation. Then she tapped pen to paper, a seemingly innocent gesture, and all the scripts flared into power at once in a single burst.

Somewhere in Alexandria, there was a Codex that Brendan Brightwell had been assigned, and if she knew Jess, he had already picked it up and read through it, and some of his essence had marked it. Her message sought that essence and directed itself not to the Codex—which was sure to be monitored—but to the nearest Blank to it.

She indulged herself by wasting a total of seven letters at the end to say I love you.

Unnecessary, but she couldn’t resist. She felt a wild, sudden yearning for him, for his easy smile and the clarified light in his eyes when he looked at her. She needed to feel his arms around her, and to hear his voice tell her that however unlikely it seemed right now, it would succeed. Her breath seemed to swell in her chest, like tears, and she closed her eyes for a moment and imagined herself somewhere else, far from here, with him in a place of sunlight, silence, warmth.

A hand rapped sharply on her desk, and she opened her eyes. “Stop lagging,” the Master Copyist snapped. “Keep writing.”

Morgan bit back the impulse to suck the life out of him in one convulsive, wonderful pull, and put her pen back to paper to draw the same symbols, over and over and over.

The day was almost done when a hand fell on her shoulder, and she looked up into the face of the Obscurist Magnus. Gregory. Her skin tightened, and she resisted an urge to strike his grip away. Did he know? Is he better than I thought?

But there was no awareness in the Obscurist Magnus’s face that she’d been slowly, carefully manipulating the simple task she’d been set. No, this was something else.

And she felt needles of alarm sweep through her at the sight of the cold focus of his gaze.

“Come,” he said. “Walk with me.”

Across the room, Annis was just rising from her copy desk; the older woman caught sight of Gregory, and there was no mistaking the alarm on her face, but she did nothing but avert her gaze and hurry off. No help from her.

No help from anyone, as the room quickly emptied, and Morgan debated whether it was time to mount a resistance. Not yet. Of course not yet.

She silently stood and joined Gregory as the Obscurist walked out of the copy room and down a winding set of stairs that wrapped around the vast walls of the Tower. It was dizzying, this method of descending, and she tried not to look down. She’d always had a hidden fear of heights, though she knew there were alchemical barriers in place beyond the railings; after the first few times Obscurists had hurled themselves from the highest floors, precautions had been put in place. If she were bent on suicide, she could have easily unraveled them, but she wasn’t. Though pushing Gregory over was an interesting thought.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked him.

“To meet someone,” he said. “Someone special.”

She almost, almost bolted then; Gregory took an unhealthy interest in the darkest secret of the Iron Tower: the breeding of Obscurists. She’d accepted when returning here that they would assign her a partner in the hopes of producing a talented child to add to the thinning ranks of the Obscurists. She’d accepted that they’d try to force her into it.

She never, ever intended to cooperate . . . though the fact that Gregory had so easily drugged her on arrival was worrying. She’d need to develop defensive scripts to repel any other attempts. I should have done that already, she thought. She felt cold and alone, descending these steps.

Gregory stopped on the landing for the seventh level, which held the Obscurists’ opulent library. An entire wall of Blanks waiting to be filled with requested content, and an array of Codexes to use to select it. But more than that, the Obscurist library also contained an entire wall of original volumes and scrolls, some so ancient and fragile that they were kept in cases with alchemical formulae designed to slow their destruction.