by Rachel Caine
“No time for that,” Morgan said. “The devices are inside something. Marble.”
“Under the floor?”
“No. Above it. Inside—” She suddenly smiled. “Inside the base of a statue.”
“There are statues of Zeus at the entrance to each of the wings,” Santi said. “In the base of those?”
“Yes.”
“How much time do we have left?” he asked.
Morgan shook her head. “I don’t know. But maybe . . .” She turned her head, as if she was listening. “Break the seal.”
“What?”
“Break the seals.” She blinked and looked at him. “I don’t know what that means. It’s what the ring tells me.”
“What ring—”
Morgan shoved that aside with an impatient gesture. “Just do it. Now! We’re running out of time!”
They were standing in a deathtrap of monumental proportions, Jess realized. And no time to ask more questions. He looked to Wolfe, and Wolfe said, “Nic, go south with Khalila. Thomas, north with Jess. Dario, with me to the east. Glain and Morgan, west. Look for a Great Library seal on the statues; that must be what she means. Go!”
They scattered, moving fast. Jess kept up with Thomas, though he knew it was costing him the last of his endurance, and they spotted a vast archway to the north. Over it was a Latin phrase: Sapientia melior auro. Wisdom is better than gold.
Zeus’s massive seated form sat carved in marble beside that entrance. At any other time the sight might have awed him; the statue stood ten times his height, a breathtaking work of art in perfect marble. But just now he only cared about one thing: the seal of the Great Library embossed in gold on the base of the throne.
He pulled his sidearm and hammered at it with the butt of the gun. It cracked but didn’t break.
Thomas moved him aside and slammed the point of his elbow into the seal—once, twice, three times.
The seal broke, and beneath that lay a lever. Thomas turned it.
The entire statue rolled aside on noiseless wheels, and behind it stood a closed door.
Locked. Jess was too sick to even try to pick it; he shot the lock away, and Thomas swung the door wide.
He could hear ticking the moment the door opened.
The room held a simple metal console with a clock embedded in its surface. As Jess watched, the second hand swept backward. It was counting down.
“Do you see an off switch?” he asked. Coughs were boiling at the back of his throat, and he felt his lungs filling with foam and liquid.
“No,” Thomas said. He pulled a panel from the front of the thing and bent down. “Yes! I see it!” He bent down and tried for it. Grimaced and shook his head. “I can’t. My hand is too large to fit. Jess, here. Here!” He grabbed Jess and pulled him down before Jess could move, and pointed. Jess followed his pointing finger and started to reach for the red valve.
It was too easy. He rested his fingers on it, hesitated, and shook his head.
“Turn the valve!” Thomas shouted.
“That’s wrong,” Jess said. His brain was cloudy, but he pushed that away. Pushed all of it away. He’d seen this before; he’d seen Great Library traps all his life, meant to catch thieves and smugglers. The valve was bait, like a mockup of a rare book left within easy reach. It was there to catch the unwary.
He looked to the other side. There was another Great Library seal, glass cleverly painted to look like metal.
Break the seal.
He smashed his fist into it, ignored the pain as the glass shattered, and found another valve under the shards.
He turned it.
The ticking stopped.
“Mein Gott. Thank you. I should have seen that,” Thomas said. He was visibly shaken. “The others—”
“The others might fall for it,” Jess said. “Go. Tell them.” He couldn’t get up. His mouth was full of foam again. He couldn’t gag down a breath; his lungs felt filled with concrete. He spat the foam out, coughed, and managed to croak out, “Go!”
Thomas looked at him for an instant in agonized indecision, then took something out of his pocket and pressed it into Jess’s hands. “Drink it!” he ordered, then turned and ran as he shouted a warning. Maybe he would reach the others in time.
Jess looked at the lump of tattered cloth that Thomas had handed him, and slowly began to unwrap it. There was a glass tube inside, full of liquid. He tried to remove the stopper. His fingers kept slipping. The air is burning, Jess thought. But it wasn’t the air. He was gasping but getting nothing from the effort. He was suddenly and tremendously tired. I’m dying in a room full of books after all. The biggest collection of all, he thought. And that felt right, even if he was afraid and in pain and angry that it had to be this way, that he had to do this alone, that he wouldn’t get to say good-bye.
He’d forgotten about the vial. It was still in his hand, but it no longer really mattered.
He let it roll away across the floor.
He let his eyes drift closed, and time drifted.
Something’s on my face. He came awake with a gasp, and realized it was his breathing mask; he could barely draw in the next, choked breath, but he tried. It cleared his lungs enough that he was able to manage desperate, shallow gasps.
I think I was dead. Was I?
Khalila. She was weeping, tears streaming down her cheeks.
She was dragging him across the marble floor, and in the next blink Dario was there, too, dragging him faster.
Something was wrong with the light.
The light flickering behind the two of them was green.
The Great Archives were burning.
Dario and Khalila dragged him to the center of the vast chamber. Three of the Archive wings were silent and safe.
The entrance where Morgan and Glain had been working was a hell of green flames. The inscription above that arch said, Scientia ipsa potentia est.
Knowledge is power.
Knowledge was burning.
Wolfe was shouting something, but Jess couldn’t make it out. Nothing made sense anymore. They couldn’t lose. They couldn’t.
Books were burning.
Morgan was standing at the burning entrance with her hands flung wide. The Greek fire inside was trying to break past her, trying to consume everything. Every scrap of knowledge in the entire Great Library.
Glain stood there ashen, helpless, shaking. “My fault,” she said. “I should have known.”
Thomas put an arm around her. “No, Glain. My fault. I should have been faster to tell you.”
“Morgan!” Wolfe shouted. “Morgan, let go! We have to get out!”
“No,” Khalila said, and walked forward. She stood next to Morgan, looking at her, and turned toward the rest of them. There was something different about her now. Something . . . regal. Not Khalila, Jess realized. She spoke as the Archivist of the Great Library. “We haven’t copied everything. We will lose all if she lets go. She knows what has to be done.” She put her hand on Morgan’s shoulder. “We will remember what you do. I love you, my friend. But you are the only one who can accomplish this.”
Morgan looked over her shoulder, directly at Jess. In that moment, he loved her with all his heart and soul. And he wanted desperately to take her place, to let it be him instead. If he’d had the slightest chance of doing what she could, he would have plunged in no matter what it cost.
He didn’t have that power. She did. And he had to let her make her choice, just as she’d let him make his own.
But he could make sure she didn’t die alone.
She saw it in him, somehow. And as he stumbled toward her, he felt a sudden gust of wind push him back, sliding him across the marble floor and right into Thomas’s grip. “No!” he shouted, and tried to fight free. “No, let me—” Coughing caught him again, doubled him over. Blood pou
red out of his mouth in a sick wave. He tasted bitter foam and copper.
“Did you drink it?” Thomas asked him, and yanked him upright. “Jess! Did you drink what I gave you?”
He just shook his head. “Left it.” Thomas dropped him and headed for the shattered statue.
“Jess,” Morgan said, and he focused on her with an effort. “You have to live. Live for me. Tell Glain it wasn’t her fault. I’m the one who turned the valve.” She smiled, just a little. “I’m glad I loved you.”
She stepped forward into the hellish inferno.
They all cried out, Jess thought, all of them, denying what she was doing, but they couldn’t stop her. None of them dared. The blaze wrapped around her, and it started to burn her, and then the fire just . . . stopped, as if it had never erupted at all.
Because she cut off the oxygen that fueled it.
“Morgan!” Wolfe rushed forward, hit an unyielding barrier, and battered against it. Beyond that lay a melted ruin where the wing of the Archives had been, a hellish slurry of melted stone and ash. And Morgan, burned and shaking, who was killing herself along with the Greek fire that sizzled, hissed, tried to burn but was starved of its fuel.
Jess tried to watch, but his eyes had blurred again, and the foam bubbled up from his lungs. Bloody froth in his mouth. He coughed it out and kept coughing. Santi and Wolfe were trying to get to her. But he already knew it was too late. She’d make sure it was too late. She’d only let go when the last of the Greek fire had no chance of reigniting.
The barrier collapsed at last, and so did he, hitting the floor as Santi and Wolfe lurched over the line where Morgan’s power had been. The Greek fire liquid had turned into a thick brown sludge running over the floor, but it didn’t burn now. Harmless.
Morgan had saved the Great Archives.
She lay limp and blackened in Santi’s arms as he picked her up, and Jess whispered, “No,” and lunged forward.
When he fell, it was like dropping through a trapdoor of the world, into absolute darkness.
* * *
—
“Easy,” a voice said. “Jess. Swallow.”
There was an awful metallic taste in his mouth. Liquid. He tried to spit it out but a huge hand covered his mouth, and he had no choice but to swallow it. He gagged and coughed as the hand pulled away, but the taste faded, and what was left was a soothing weight that worked its way down his burning throat and into his chest. Heavy and cool. Comforting.
“That’s the last of it,” Thomas said. “Stay still. It should work soon. You might still need rest.”
Jess licked his dry lips and said, “What is it?”
“The antidote,” Thomas said. “I found it in Heron’s Tomb.”
Jess lay on cool sheets in a brightly lit room, and the lingering stench of Greek fire seemed to cling to everything. His head ached. His lungs burned. He felt tender all over. He just wanted to rest.
Then he remembered.
Morgan.
He pushed the mask aside and tried to get up, but nausea and weakness shoved him down again. I dreamed it. She’s all right. She has to be.
“Jess.” That was Anit’s voice. He looked over and found her sitting at his bedside next to Thomas, and she was holding his hand in hers. “Welcome back to the land of the living, my brother.”
“I—” His throat ached, and it would barely form words, but at least it wasn’t a bloody mess of foam now. He fumbled for the glass of water on the table beside him. Anit held it to his lips and fed him sips. “How long?”
“Days,” she said. “That’s the third dose of the antidote; Thomas made it himself from the sample he brought. The Medica were afraid you’d never wake.”
He didn’t want to ask, but he made himself. “Morgan?”
Anit looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She was badly burned, and she died inside the Great Archives.”
He looked at Thomas and read the truth on his best friend’s face. Thomas didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
It hadn’t been a nightmare. Morgan was dead.
He expected grief, but even so he wasn’t prepared. It hit like a storm, ripping through him in convulsing waves. Gone. She’s gone. Like his brother.
Everything he loved left him.
Despite the pain, he didn’t feel any urge to weep. His eyes burned, but it felt angry, not sad. “She shouldn’t have died for it,” he said. “The Great Library never did anything for her. It took her freedom away. And now it took her life.”
“She chose to save it,” Thomas said. “She could have run. She didn’t.”
He knew he had to honor what she’d done. It had been the bravest thing he’d ever seen.
But he hated himself for not stopping her.
Thomas cleared his throat. “Jess, the Archivist is here. We should let her speak with you alone.”
His brain was sluggish, and for a moment Jess thought he meant the bitter old man he’d left dead in the Serapeum . . . but no, of course it was Khalila. A more serious Khalila, dressed in plain black, with only the crown with the seal of the Great Library atop her hijab to show her status. She exchanged a hug with Anit—when had they become friends?—and claimed the chair beside Jess’s bed. “I’ve prayed for your recovery,” she told him. “Insha’Allah, they think you’ll be back to normal in a few weeks.”
“Weeks,” he repeated. He was glad to see her, but he felt . . . numbed, as well. Oddly distant. I survived. He’d never expected that. Never expected to have to live through all of this.
He’d been chasing down death. He’d actually caught it.
And somehow it had slipped away despite all his best efforts.
“I expect you’ll convince them to make it sooner,” Khalila said. She took his hand in hers. “My friend, I’m so very sorry.”
“About Morgan?” He shook his head. “Thomas says she made her choice.” And I’m angry with her. She should have run. She should have never been there at all.
“She chose to save books that would have otherwise vanished from this earth,” Khalila said. “Her name’s being carved into the Scholar Steps. She’s going to be honored among the highest heroes of the Great Library.”
“I don’t think she ever wanted that,” he said. “I think she just wanted to be free.”
“She was free, ever since the arena; she could have gone at any time. She chose to stay. Obscurists are free now, free to live outside the Iron Tower, to have families, to do anything they wish. I’ve made sure of that, in her honor.”
“I wish it had all burned,” he said, and closed his eyes. “If she was the price of winning.”
“You don’t mean that.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t imagine a world without the Great Library. Without books. Without knowledge at his fingertips when he needed it.
It struck him suddenly that every book he read now would be a gift. A gift from Morgan.
And that was the moment that grief truly broke inside him, and the angry, painful tears came. It didn’t last long, and Khalila just held his hand as the storm passed, then silently handed him a handkerchief. He wiped his face and took a careful breath. It hurt, but it was only a shadow of the pain he’d felt before. “She didn’t have any family left,” he said. “Her da tried to kill her. He was the last of them.”
“She’s been laid to rest in the Necropolis,” Khalila said. “We put her in the old Archivist’s miniature Serapeum, and buried him in a pauper’s hole instead. It seemed appropriate.”
He’d missed her funeral. No.
“Your family’s arrived,” she said. “They asked to see you, and they want to take your brother’s body back to London. I refused to allow any of it until you were awake and I knew what you wanted to do.”
His da, here, in Alexandria. Well, that was a terrible idea. “Brendan would want to go home,” he said. “
He liked Alexandria, but he’d want to be in England. Let them have him.”
“I was afraid we’d have to give them two sons,” she said. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
She took the handkerchief back from him and folded it neatly before slipping it into a pocket of her dress.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wearing plain black before,” he said. “You’re wearing mourning?”
“Yes,” she said. “For Morgan. She was part of my family. As are you, my brother.”
“I’ve already got Anit; you don’t need to adopt me, too.”
“But I want to. And since I’m the Archivist, you really can’t object.” She gave him that charming, slightly wicked smile.
“If you’re the Archivist, you ought to be wearing all the gold robes,” he pointed out.
“I’m a Scholar, Jess. And I’ll continue to act like one, despite my responsibilities.” She added her other hand on top of his. “You did all you could do. You and Thomas, you saved the Great Library, too. And I expect you will keep on doing that in whatever form you choose. Thomas has requested that a new Curia position be opened. He is calling it Liberius. Publisher, I believe that would be. It would oversee the installation of his printing machines, and I think he wants you to be part of that.”
That woke some warmth in places that had gone cold inside. Books. We’ll make books. He remembered the feel of an original, the hand-cut paper, the binding and stitching. We’ll sell them. Openly. To people who want to have them in their homes.
“No more raids?” he asked her. “The books will be legal to own?”
“Legal to own,” she said. “And that promise has made the Burners lay down their bombs, it seems. At least for now.”
“The Russians?”
“Withdrawn, and making peace now that the old Archivist is dead. The Spanish ambassador is petitioning to make a new treaty.” Her smile grew big enough to reveal dimples in her cheeks. “I’m keeping him waiting. A little.”
“That’s strategically wicked of you. I like it.” Books. Thomas had the authority to print real, original books. That . . . that would change the world, surely. It had certainly changed his. “I should get up. Get dressed.”
