Smoke and Iron (The Great Library #4)(96)

“Well, that’s a better option than reading myself to sleep,” he said. “Which was what I was about. And after the drink?”

“Depends on whether or not you’re at all awake,” Annis said. She walked him to the entrance. “And whether or not you put me to sleep with the boring details of your project.”

As she pulled the door shut, she sent Morgan a last look, with a roll of her eyes. The things I do for you.

Morgan felt the dusty stirrings of a laugh, but it died quickly, and not even a ghost stayed on. She quickly restored the Blank’s contents, found the page, and marked it with a scrap of paper before she slipped out of the reading room and down to Eskander’s private suite.

When she knocked, he answered. “In,” he said. “Quickly. Were you seen?”

She shook her head. “No. I was careful. I found—”

He was already taking the book from her hands, and when he did, their fingers brushed, and the incandescent power of the man broke through every lock, every door, every semblance of control she had in her. She was trembling with emptiness, and he had so much life in him, so much to spare. The dark hollows inside her where her power had been echoed with the screaming need to be filled.

She’d take only a little.

She grabbed his wrist and began to draw his life away.

“No.” Eskander wrenched free, and she felt the flood of power break with a crystalline shock. “This only makes your problems worse. Don’t you see that? The more you siphon from other living things, the more narrow and twisted your pathways become. You’ve already damaged yourself. Don’t finish the job. You’ll end up blackened, like Gilles de Rais. Mad and murderous and dangerous, or don’t they teach the warnings anymore?”

Morgan didn’t answer. She wasn’t certain she could.

Eskander finally sighed. “We’re so tied to the Tower now that few have the chance of ever expending their power to the level of real damage. You’re the first I’ve ever seen who’s capable of it, other than Keria.”

“And you,” Morgan said. Her voice was barely a thread.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And me. I was so desperate to escape this place, to save Keria from it . . . and we almost achieved that. We came so close, before—before the child was born. But I pushed too far. I broke the wards, but in doing so, I burned myself black inside, just as you have. It’s why I walled myself away. I could feel the life burning in everything around me, whispering to me to claim it. It was driving me mad.”

His image blurred, and she realized that her eyes were burning with tears; she knew exactly what he was saying, exactly how it felt to be so empty, so desperate, so broken. She’d felt it in Philadelphia, and though she’d tried, she had never fully healed. She didn’t know how.

“I don’t want to be this,” she whispered. “I don’t want it.”

“Did you want to be an Obscurist?”

“No!”

Eskander’s wavering image smiled. She blinked and felt the heavy slide of tears down her cheeks. He reached out and wiped them away with his thumbs, then fitted his hands around her cheeks. “Neither did I,” he said. “But where you are now, that is worse. That will lead you into madness.”

“I don’t know how to stop it!” She heard the desperation in her voice, and the fear, too. “How—how did you?”

“I had help,” he said. “I had Keria, who scoured the Archives for treatments and came here even though I told her to leave me alone. I was afraid for her, but I think she was more afraid to lose me. She showed me how to become myself again.” Eskander paused. “There are two ways. One is slow and gentle. The other—the other is fast but painful.”

“Fast,” Morgan said. Wounded as she was, damaged, broken, she could do great harm to their enemies . . . but she could do it to those she loved, too. She knew the stories that Eskander had referred to; she’d looked them up in the Codex after coming here. Stories of madness and murder. At a certain point, an Obscurist severed from the natural flow of energy in the world was a parasite . . . and predator. She could feel those urges inside her, begging her to survive at any cost. “I want to be healed, and there isn’t much time. How can I do that?”

“I can’t show you,” he said. He took both her hands and said, “What I will do is remake you. This is not alchemy, Morgan; this is not potions and incantations and phases of the moon. This is pure, elemental power. And it is going to hurt.” He smiled, but there was no warmth in it now. “It certainly hurt me when Keria did it to me. I won’t lie to you; it might not work, and if it doesn’t, you will be . . . less than you are now.”

“But if it works?”

“Then you will be restored. More than restored; I sense the potential in you to surpass me, in terms of your power. You will be a force to be reckoned with, either way. But only one of those outcomes means anything good for you.”

Morgan drew in a breath. This, she sensed, was a huge risk, but she didn’t see any other direction to go but forward. “Yes,” she said. “Please. Do it.”

She felt the incredible power seething in the man, and now she could also hear the whisper of the Tower itself, containing and muting all of their talents, their powers. What would Eskander be outside these walls? She couldn’t imagine.