Paper and Fire (The Great Library) (40 page)

“There’s no time left,” the Obscurist said. “I’ll have to take the risk.”

“What risk?” Wolfe pushed forward, Santi just a step behind.

“I’ll have to send you all at once. If I send you one at a time, half of you won’t make it.”

“You can’t do that! Even you—” Morgan stopped, looking at the others. “It’s too much for anyone. It will—”

“Kill me?” The Obscurist looked around at the beautiful, peaceful garden and sighed. “So be it. I’ll need you all to put your hands on the helmet—”

Jess felt the warning hiss of instincts coming alive, and his head jerked up and around, looking for the threat.

It was all around them.

The Artifex Magnus himself stepped out of the shadow of a spreading plum tree, pale blossoms brushing his long white hair. Behind him, around him,
all around the room
, more soldiers rose from concealment. Aiming their weapons.

Santi trembled on the edge of raising his own gun, then raised one hand, bent, and carefully placed the weapon on the floor by his feet. “Disarm,” he said. His voice sounded flat and dead already. “There’s no point.”

Glain raised her weapon and sighted on the Artifex. “There’s every damn point.”

But she didn’t fire, because the Artifex pushed someone unexpected out into the path of any of her bullets.

Dario.

He wasn’t bound or restrained. He hadn’t been wounded or beaten. He looked rested, well nourished. Well dressed.

And he couldn’t look any of them in the eyes.

“Dario?” Khalila’s whisper was full of stunned relief, and she took a step forward . . . and then he looked up and met her gaze. “Dario.” All the life drained out of her voice. “What is this?”

“Traitor.” Glain’s hands were white around her gun, but she’d lowered it now to stare at the face of their friend.
“Y mochyn diawl
.
”

He opened his mouth, hesitated, and then said, “I didn’t have a choice.”

Arrogant, clever Dario Santiago had sold them out. Of course he had. Maybe he’d been doing it all along; he hadn’t had a chance to report their plans to rescue Thomas at the last moment because they had moved too quickly. But he’d tried to sell them out.

It came to Jess in a cold wave that if they’d actually escaped to London, it would have probably been a trap. Dario would have seen to it. He’d survived in Rome alone because he’d never been in any real danger.

He’d gone to report to his spymaster.

Glain threw down her weapon with an angry snarl.

Jess thought coldly and seriously about putting a bullet in Dario. It would have been murder, absolutely and clearly murder. He very nearly did it, anyway.

Then he bent and put his gun on the floor, and as he straightened, the soldiers rushed in and grabbed each of them. No, not all of them. Not Morgan. Not the Obscurist Magnus. He supposed they’d been told to leave them alone.

Thomas hadn’t said anything at all. Neither had Wolfe. They had identical expressions, Jess realized, as if something had drained out of them. As if their souls had already left their bodies behind.

It can’t end this way. It can’t.
But it had, he realized, for so many others. The Black Archives were full of failures who believed they’d survive.

He’d end up on the shelves, too. All of them would.

“Don’t!” Dario said sharply to a soldier who put his hands on Khalila. “Don’t touch her.”

“I don’t want your protection!” she shouted at him. “Traitor!”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But you’ve got it, anyway.” He held out his hand. “Come with me. Come away from here. You don’t need to see this.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” the Artifex said. “Bring them. All of them.”

“But—” Dario looked confused and angry. A flush deepened the
color of his cheeks, and he rounded on the old man with clenched fists. “You can’t—”

“On orders of the Archivist himself, I can,” he said. “You’re all fools. None of you understand the consequences of what you’ve done.” The Artifex, Jess realized, was angry, and it wasn’t just because of their rebellion. It was something else.

He walked straight to the statue of Horus, pressed the hidden switch, and watched the staircase descend. Then he led the way upstairs to the Black Archives.

“Bring them,” he said. “They should see the price of their meddling.”

B
ack in the hidden rooms, they were pushed against the back wall and held there by the armed High Garda soldiers, who must have been the Artifex’s hand-picked personal guard. Santi didn’t appeal to them for help, and Jess didn’t, either. They stood silently against the rough wall of the Iron Tower and watched as the Artifex stepped out to crane his head up, up, to look at the seemingly infinite spiral of shelves.

“So much,” he murmured. “So much wasted.” He turned to them, and his old, seamed face was grim with anger. “You’ve forced this. All of you, with your pushing and questioning and disbelief. You don’t know how much we’ve saved you from: war, famine, pestilence, a thousand kinds of death. We’ve raised humanity from the mud, and you
still
chase after phantoms instead of appreciating the peace all around you
.
”

“Save us the speeches,” Wolfe said. “Kill us, if you intend to do it.”

“I will,” he said. “But first I have to do what I’ve been ordered. May all the gods damn you for it.”

He took a small leather case from a pocket of his robe and opened it.

A glass globe filled with green fluid rolled into his outstretched palm.

Jess pulled in a breath, but Wolfe was the first to understand, fully, the impossible. “No,” he said. “You can’t.
You can’t.
”

“I don’t want to,” the Artifex said. He was crying. Tears streamed
from his reddened eyes and lost themselves in the canyons of wrinkles beneath. “But
you did this, Wolfe. You.
”

He threw the Greek fire into the shelves of delicate, flammable books.

Jess screamed and threw himself forward, but it was too late, too late. The glass broke, the thick greenish liquid splashed over vulnerable spines and fragile paper, over faded ink and lost dreams.

And then, with the sound of a sickening, indrawn breath, it ignited.

Jess lunged at the soldier in front of him and slammed his forehead into the man’s nose with a muscular
crunch
and a corresponding blackness that radiated through his skull like a ringing bell. He didn’t pause, just put his shoulder into the staggering man’s stomach and heaved up to toss the soldier off his feet.

The restraints tightened around his wrists like snakes constricting, and he felt a hideous whine inside his head. The first shelf of books was fully on fire with licks of greenish-white flame. The second above it smoked, and Jess could see paper blackening and curling at the edges.

Santi had put down a soldier, too. Glain hadn’t; she was hobbled by her bad leg and had fallen herself. Together, he and Santi rushed at the Artifex. Jess didn’t have a clue what the good of it was, but he had to do
something.

They never made it, of course. Jess felt something hit him in the back and pitch him forward, off balance, and fell to the floor hard. Santi fell just a breath behind him, and before Jess could scramble back to his feet, someone was pinning him down.

Jess raised his head and watched the shelves of the first level smoke, warp, spark, and burn. Book after book.

Level after level.

When the smoke became thick and choking and Jess could no longer see for the tears streaming out of his eyes, he felt himself being pulled backward by his legs, out into the sweeter air.

The Black Archives were gone.

And now all that remained was for the Artifex to finish them off.

He was being rolled toward the steps; Santi had already been pushed down them, to roll in an awkward ball. Jess would be next. The others had already been sent down, and he saw Khalila’s stark, blank face staring up. Morgan beside her. Thomas was crouched on the floor in the open space of the garden, beside the Translation equipment they wouldn’t have a chance to use. It would take too long, even if Morgan could operate it. What remained would be a quick, ugly death for most of them, and prison inside this tower for Morgan and Wolfe’s mother. Forever.

Then he was tumbling down the steps, and tucked himself into as tight a ball as he could. He landed badly and cried out when his face hit the tiled floor. Fresh red blood dripped from cuts on his face like tears, brilliant even in the dim light. He coughed and coughed, trying to get the taste of bitter ashes out of his lungs, and between the retching spasms he realized he was still weeping for all the books he’d just seen die.

He felt fingertips brush the restraints holding him, just a quick touch, and the numbing pain of them loosed. Someone was kneeling over him. He heard the Obscurist Magnus say, in a strange and distant tone, “You’ve given me no choice, Artifex. You know that. And I am a very bad enemy.”

“Not for long.” The Artifex was a blur on the edges of Jess’s vision. He turned his head and blinked to clear his eyes. Wolfe’s mother was kneeling beside him, and under the smudge of smoke and ashes, the look in her eyes was something so terrible, he didn’t want to stare at it for long.

“You’ve killed so much of the past today,” she told him. “Generations and generations of brilliance. But you know what you’ll never kill?”

The soldiers of the Artifex were just as affected by the smoke as Jess; they were coughing, their eyes streaming and red.

So they missed seeing Thomas flex his wrists and break the restraints holding him. They missed seeing Dario, who’d been flung to his hands and knees on the tile next to Khalila—still unbound, both of them—pick up the weapon that Glain had thrown down at the edge of the open space, near the bench.

Missed seeing Morgan draw her fingers over Wolfe’s restraints and then over Santi’s. Hers were already loose.

“You will never kill our future,” Wolfe’s mother said, and as if it was a signal, as if they’d planned this, Thomas came up with a roar and lunged forward, taking down three guards at once, and Dario aimed and fired one perfect shot at the Artifex Magnus.

The Artifex fell. Dead or only wounded, Jess couldn’t tell. He ripped his wrists free and grabbed for another fallen weapon, and in seconds he was firing, too, targeting one High Garda uniform after another. It was bloody chaos, and he couldn’t see where his friends were, couldn’t see anything except Wolfe’s mother laying hands on both Wolfe and Santi and somehow,
without the Translation equipment,
unmaking them into a spiraling whirlwind of flesh and bone and blood. She reached Dario and Khalila, and they, too, vanished into a bloody mist. Gone.

Morgan and Glain, gone. It was just Jess and Thomas left, and Thomas had rushed back toward them. The Obscurist touched the piled mess of packs that the guards had left nearby, and that, too, vanished. Jess felt something hit him, but there wasn’t any pain. A near miss.

Keria Morning grabbed hold of Jess and Thomas. The last two.

The one thing Jess was sure he saw was a High Garda soldier taking aim at her, and the ringing sound of a shot, and a vivid red hole in the woman’s chest. A fatal wound.

But not quickly enough to stop what she’d already set in motion.

Jess pitched into a red, shrieking darkness that ate him whole.

Text of a letter from Callum Brightwell to Kate Hannigan, sent in code. Burned on receipt.

We both know we’re on opposite sides of this thing, but one thing’s certain: this oncoming war, and the chaos it will bring, will only help us both. Let the Welsh have the city and claim their victory; the king and his court and all the ministers will be well away before they come. They’ll leave the city to us: the rebels, the criminals, the ones they think aren’t worth saving.

It’s a fat target, and we can both enrich ourselves. Your movement needs money, and I’ve already sent your leader in France a tidy sum in trust—you can check with him if you like. Whatever riches you gather, you keep.

Allies are more important than politics these days, wouldn’t you agree?