Smoke and Iron

by Rachel Caine

  "And how many Scribes are there?"

  "Tens of thousands, back in the earliest days," Annis said. "I don't know how many today. Thousands, at least."

  "Pen! I need a pen!" Morgan began pulling open drawers in the copy desks on the sides of the room, unearthing bits of discarded paper, broken nibs, a half-dried bottle of ink . . . and then Annis pressed a working pen into her hand, and Morgan pulled a fresh sheet of paper from a stack.

  "What are you doing?" Annis leaned forward. Morgan, without pausing as she swiftly, confidently sketched out the formula that she was building in her mind, used one shoulder to bump the woman back. She didn't answer. Didn't have time. The reading room had no windows, but she knew the world was turning fast toward morning, and when the sun reached its hottest, highest point for the day, people would die.

  Her pen sketched one last Greek symbol, and then she sat back and ran through it in her mind again. It should work. No one had thought of the Scribes as anything but conduits before, and the Archives as the only real repository of knowledge . . . but the Scribes were the vital link between originals and copies.

  She put the pen down, took a deep breath, and opened herself to the flow of the energy that bound up the world. This was going to require almost everything she had so carefully hoarded, but it would be worth it.

  She touched a finger to the inked symbols, and they exploded into a matrix of swirling, glittering shapes that circled around her in a storm. Moving far too fast. She quickly began to place them in order, until they moved in a tight cylinder around her, and then she closed her eyes and pushed. What she was doing was nothing like rewriting the lion automata, which were individual constructions; the Scribes were all connected, stationary, linked by real mechanical wires and tubes of fluids as well as alchemy. They had been constructed so for a reason: to allow smooth, seamless, mindless action.

  What affected one of them affected all of them. By design.

  She felt, rather than saw, the formula disappearing into the flow, traveling from where she sat to the Archives, and into the first Scribe, who automatically relayed it to the next, and the next, and the next . . .

  She collapsed forward onto the desk, gasping for breath, as the last of her energy trickled away and the insatiable hunger set in. No, no, not now . . . She felt as if she were smothering, drowning in air that was too thick to breathe. Rescue blazed in glowing, strong lights next to her, and all she had to do was reach . . .

  But that was Annis, and if she reached out now, she'd destroy a human life. She wouldn't be able to stop.

  "Morgan? Morgan!" Annis was shaking her, and when Morgan opened her eyes, she saw the older woman's face was tense with worry. "Lass, are you all right?"

  "Yes," Morgan said. She wasn't, she trembled all over, and the emptiness inside her threatened to eat her alive. She pictured locking it away, behind door after door after door, until she could draw a breath. It sustained her body, at least, if nothing else. "Yes. Give me the Codex."

  Annis retrieved the book from the table where they'd been working and opened it in front of her. Morgan picked up the pen. Her hand was unsteady, but she wrote down three words in ancient Greek.

  "That's all?" Annis frowned. "How is that going to get us anywhere? Is that a title?"

  "No," Morgan said. "It's the words for the Scribes to find. Those three, together. That should tell us which book."

  "You're having the Scribes search for it?"

  "Yes."

  Annis sank into a chair. Her mouth opened and closed as she worked it through, and then she said, "That's brilliant."

  "Only if it works," Morgan said. She was still trembling, but less so with every breath. I can keep it under control, she told herself. I won't give in to it. But the other side of that coin was that until she did give in and swallow the energy of other living creatures, she would be as powerless as any normal person walking the streets of Alexandria. Corrupted. That was what she'd been called, back in Philadelphia, and she had to believe that it wasn't true, that it was something she could overcome. Use carefully.

  I will not hurt Annis. I will not.

  Annis had no idea of the danger she was in. She put her hand on Morgan's shoulder, and Morgan flinched at the contact. The power she needed was right there, hovering just beyond her skin . . .

  "Look!" Annis leaned closer to the Codex. "It's writing!"

  A single entry was written in precision-perfect penmanship. Morgan could picture the automaton on the other end making the loops and lines, an unthinking and perfect machine.

  "On the Practical Effects of Advanced, Multiple-Source Familiarity Formulae and the Energy Exchange Principle," Annis read. "My God, you've found it."

  "I hope," Morgan said. "Get it."

  Annis pressed a finger to the title and held a Blank close. As they watched, the empty pages of the Blank filled with cramped, archaic script, a perfect copy of the original volume locked away in the Archives. The product of an obscure, long-forgotten Scholar whose name Morgan didn't even recognize.

  As they turned pages, a glowing corner of a page caught her eye, and she quickly flipped to it.

  There, on the page, was the answer they'd been looking for.

  "The Iron Tower's security keys," Annis said. She sounded quiet, and almost shaken. "Morgan. This is the answer. This is what we need to open the doors, remove the collars. To let us all . . . leave." Annis's eyes filled with tears, and she looked lost now. "I thought--until this moment, it was just an idea, you understand. A puzzle to solve. But this . . . this is real. This is . . ."

  Morgan heard the footsteps approaching before Annis did, and quickly wiped the Blank and cleared the Scribe's writing in the Codex. The other books weren't incriminating, but this one . . . this was.

  "Oh, hello," said Bjorn, a lean older man with a sharply pointed face. Morgan knew him slightly, but he wasn't someone she came into contact with on anything like a regular basis. Maybe it's nothing, she told herself. Bjorn's energy flooded the room, far brighter and more compelling than Annis's, and she felt the locks breaking on her resolve. If I just take a little . . .

  No. As desperate as she was, as empty, she knew she wouldn't be able to siphon just enough. She had no idea how it would feel to another Obscurist, but she thought it would be painful. Agonizing, very possibly. And she couldn't do that, not to an innocent person.

  "Hello," Annis said. She, at least, seemed instantly at ease. "Well, if it isn't my favorite musician. I haven't heard you play in weeks. What on earth has kept you away? Please tell me it's not a new lover."

  "You know you're the only one for me," Bjorn said, and winked at her. His smile seemed wrong to Morgan, but then, everything did now. She was fighting her own darkness, and it seemed to crowd in from everywhere. "No, I've been on a special project, my crimson witch. The new master wanted something special done." He shrugged. "Some sort of new flying automaton. Don't really see the point, honestly."

  "Flying?" Morgan forced herself back into some sort of focus. "Is it a new model completely?"

  "Don't know and don't care. My part of it was just the gravitational formulae. Devilishly tricky, by the way. I must have destroyed a hundred scrolls before I got it right, and then it had to fit with all the others."

  "Others?"

  "Navigational, and some kind of fire formula. Specialist work, all of it. Oh, Gregory supplied a rough master formula, but believe me, it took weeks to get the details--"

  A new automaton, just in time for the Feast of Greater Burning. Morgan felt sick and dizzy and most of all, out of time. She looked half-desperately at Annis, who couldn't have understood the half of what was going through her mind, but Annis was, if nothing else, emotionally perceptive. She walked to Bjorn, took his arm, and said, "Why don't you tell me all about it, my love, over a tall glass of something that will make the evening better?"

  "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.

  "I'm ready," she said.

  "No, child. I don't think you are."

  She didn't even have time to draw breath or brace herself before a wave of agony hit, so intense that it seemed to burn her from the inside out, combust everything inside her and char it black, reduce it to ash and reduce the ashes to nothing. He's killing me, she had time to think, in that endless, torturous limbo of pain.

  For a moment she floated, anchored to her body by only the thinnest fraying cord of light . . . and in that moment, the power racing through Eskander exploded out and through her, tracing an intricate web of paths through her body. As each channel snapped to life, another lightning-hot spasm of pain raced through her, but it was a different frequency of pain that resonated more and more strongly inside her, until with a hissing snap, she was . . .

  Incandescent.

  When she opened her eyes, the glow remained, a brilliant golden whisper over her skin that only gradually faded, and with every blink, she saw the pulse of the world around her--not only living things, but everything, lit in energy and structures like crystalline castles. And below her, around her, the whispering opalescent power that coursed through the air, the ground, stretching through the sky to brush the stars.

  Eskander let her go and stepped back. She stared at him in wonder, at the brilliant flare of him, until the effect finally faded and he was just a man, and this just a room.

  She felt . . . new. Completely new.

  "What--what did you do?" She could barely get the words out. Eskander picked up the book that he'd set aside and flipped to the marker she'd put inside. He read the passage rapidly and nodded. Turned the page and nodded again, then walked to his desk, where he sat and took out pen and paper.

  He wasn't going to answer her, she realized, and she tried again. "Sir, how did you . . . how did you fix . . ."

  "I didn't," he said. "I destroyed. I rebuilt the nerves and pathways that your own life force depends upon into their proper structure. You were like a tree struck by lightning; some part of the tree still lives, but the trickle of life isn't enough to sustain it. Neither completely dead nor completely alive. Now you are alive again, and an Obscurist completely. Don't mistake me: you're not indestructible. The power you have must be carefully measured and portioned, and you must learn when, and how, to use it without destroying those paths again."

  "But--I only did what I had to do to save others--"

  "You are not a god," he interrupted her. "Saving lives is something all men and women must do when called on, but never think you alone can do it. I'm accounted the most powerful Obscurist in a thousand years. Do you think I can save a hundred lives at a time? A thousand? A city? Of course I can't, because Obscurists are just humans with a better view of the world, and a larger lever with which to move it. Others can act, and must. We are not the saviors of the world."

  It set her on her heels, and in the next moment, she felt angry. Angry that he wasn't willing to step into the full responsibility of his power. "So that's it? You're not going to help save those people who are going to die? My
friends?"

  "Morgan, if the power we wield was the answer to every question, the Obscurist Magnus would be the Archivist, wouldn't he? But Obscurists are forbidden by law to hold the post. I know this is a disappointment to you, but I'm not the savior you're looking for." He never stopped writing while he spoke--quick, certain strokes of his pen, and now he sat back, took the page in his hand, and pulled the symbols off the page and into the representation she was familiar with--glittering, spinning symbols surrounding him. But the ones he'd created were not chaotic. They already had a smooth, humming, complicated path, interweaving and interlocking like gears in a precision machine. "However, I can help, and I will. The Iron Tower is the fragile point where the Library rests its weight; we always have been since the first Obscurist created the Codex and the Blanks. Could the Library have survived without us? Yes. But not in its current form. It depends on us for almost everything, and that must continue in some fashion. The Codex, the Great Archives . . . these things must remain intact, even as we plan some better future for them. The Translation Chambers I will block once the moment is right. Be careful until then. The Archivist will still have an easy avenue of escape."

  "But--you said--"

  "I said I wasn't your savior. I never said I wouldn't do what I can." He banished the formula he'd written with a wave of his hand. "I can open the doors of this tower. Remove our collars. I can stop Gregory, or at least make him run to the safety of his master. But I can't force any one of these Obscurists to follow you out into the world. Most of them have never set foot out there; like me, they've been caged so long they've forgotten the smell of free air. And none of them are combat ready. We're house cats, not tigers."

  It was a shocking dose of cold water, and for a moment Morgan didn't know what to say to him. He'd said it with such dispassion, such lack of concern . . . as if all this, even the deaths clicking relentlessly toward them, were academic exercises.

  "And what about your son?" she asked.

  Eskander turned toward her. There was the ghost of Christopher Wolfe in the shape of his face, the bitterly dark eyes. "My son must save himself," he said. "As must we all. There is no single person who can stop any of it. Gregory must be overthrown, and I'll have to step into his place to keep order. My place is here looking after these people, not out there fighting."