Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(54)

The smell of the place overwhelmed Khalila for a moment with helpless longing. Books. The crisp, lightly spiced smell of pages, as constant in the air here as incense. The entry hall was immense and rose in a rounded, organic bubble. It was topped with a huge blue curved window with gray that spiraled in like smoke. Gorgeous and odd. This entire Serapeum was a delight.

I can’t let this be destroyed. We have few enough things to feed our souls.

“Clear,” the soldier said, and stepped back. He was a blond young man who topped her by a head and twice over in breadth. Unlike the angry man in Philadelphia, he hadn’t insisted on the removal of her hijab, but then, Spain was a deeply cosmopolitan country, with seeds of the culture of Islam in its arts, architecture, and food. She felt more at home here than she ever had in the Burner camp.

“Is she the one with Obscurist powers?” asked a dark-skinned woman wearing librarian robes. She sounded anxious, and she was hiding in the back, behind the row of weapons. As if I might bite, Khalila thought.

“I am not,” she replied. “My friend Morgan Hault is the Obscurist, and she has been taken to the Iron Tower in Alexandria. Scholar Wolfe is, we assume, in prison and awaiting execution. You have nothing to fear from me, I assure you. I come only to talk.”

“About what?” That brought someone else out of the shadows: a tall, scarred man with shockingly red hair shaved close to his skull. One of the scars ran a white ridge through the left side of his head. No librarian, this one; he wore High Garda armor and uniform, and command like a mantle. “Because if you’re here to talk to us about giving up the Serapeum for the Spanish to loot, you know better.”

There was something of an opening in what he said, she realized. He didn’t simply condemn her and order her arrested. He was listening.

So was Scholar Murasaki. The gravity of the situation suddenly descended on her, freezing her in place, and she took a moment to compose her thoughts. Think. What will convince these two very different people?

“I have never been here before,” Khalila said. “To Spain, or to Cadiz or this Serapeum. Yet the moment I stepped inside, it was familiar to me. It was home. I look at you, and I don’t see enemies. I see those who value what I do: the preservation and distribution of knowledge. The delights of discovery and the honor of guardianship. You are the Great Library; you are its heart and soul, spirit and blood. And I would rather die than see you, and this place, desecrated when I can prevent it.”

They didn’t say anything at all. There was no reaction. And Khalila closed her eyes. “There is a rot at the heart of what we love. It is not the knowledge or the preservation of it. It is the notion that only we can decide what is worthy, what is not, what is progress, and whether or not it should proceed. For thousands of years, the Archivists have told us that all we have here is all there can be. But it isn’t. I saw. I know.” She turned to Murasaki, whose face was thrown into stark, aged lines by the light cascading in from above. “Do you know the poet Murasaki Hiroko?”

“I do not. There is no such poet.”

“But there was,” Khalila said softly. “I saw the manuscript, Scholar. She wrote poems to her lover, but her lover was another married woman, and at the time the Curia deemed them unfit for distribution. When she protested, they told her to destroy the work. She refused, and wrote more poems calling for the end of censorship by the Great Library. I read them. They were rotting in the Black Archives. If you don’t know of her, it is because she was simply . . . erased.”

She felt the shift of tension—the wrong way. “Nonsense,” the red-haired captain said. “No such thing. The Black Archives are a fable told to frighten children and interest conspiracy-minded crackpots.”

“It was vast,” Khalila said. “Story upon story of shelves, all filled with works the Library deemed seditious or dangerous. Confiscated from the Scholars who wrote them. Locked away, to rot in darkness and silence, all those books silenced. I saw it. I was there. I read Murasaki Hiroko’s poems, and they were—” Her voice faltered and broke, and she took in a gulp of air. “They were searing and angry and brilliant. They were beautiful. And now they’re gone.”

This time, the silence felt heavy, and it lasted a second too long before Scholar Murasaki said, “Gone. But you claim they were in the Black Archives.”

“They were,” Khalila said. She had tears in her eyes now. “Where they’d been kept for almost five hundred years. But once we had been there, seen them, the Black Archives were no longer secret. And the Archivist ordered them all destroyed rather than let them see the light of day.”

“You’re lying,” the captain said. “The Library does not destroy books. We’re not Burners.”

“But we are,” she said, and let the tears come, the grief cascade out of the locked box she’d kept it in. “We are. That is the ugly, filthy truth; the Library decides, in secret, what should be read and what shouldn’t. What should be destroyed if it poses a danger. I watched those books burn. Hundreds of thousands of books, row upon row, all turning to ashes . . .” She couldn’t speak. She tasted tears and struggled not to cry. “We saved what we could. It wasn’t enough.”

“What you’re alleging is heresy,” the Scholar said. For the first time, she sounded shaken. “Heresy at the highest levels of the Great Library.”