“What is it? What’s wrong?” Jess sat up and stripped the helmet off. Morgan’s eyes were filled with tears, her hands trembling as she raised them to cover her mouth. When she met his eyes, the tears spilled over. “Morgan!”
She gulped back what seemed like sheer panic, and looked from him to Wolfe as she dragged her hands back down and balled them into fists.
“I’m so sorry. They must have— They must have known we’d try this. I can take you only one place from here,” she said. “Just one.”
“Where?”
“Alexandria,” she whispered. “Into the Iron Tower.”
Wolfe stared for a moment, black eyes gone blank, and then shifted to send Santi a look. “This is my mother’s doing.”
Jess dumped the helmet on the floor with a crash. “We can’t go back to Alexandria. We have to fight.”
“Then we’ll die,” Santi said flatly. “And Glain won’t survive that injury unless she gets help quickly. We can give up, or we can take a chance. The Obscurist isn’t pledged to be loyal to the Archivist. She’s loyal to the Library. There’s a difference.”
“Hairsplitting,” Wolfe said, but then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Nic is right. We must chance it. It’s that, die fighting, or—” He didn’t need to state the alternative. They’d all seen it below in the cells. The torture chamber.
“Not the Tower,” Morgan whispered, and it was just for Jess. “I can’t go back there. Jess—”
He grabbed her hand and held fast. “Yes, you can,” he said. “I’ll be with you. I promise, I’m not leaving you.”
“Jess!” The wordless plea in her face hurt him, because he knew he had no way to answer it. He shook his head and saw the light go out in her eyes. He’d just betrayed her. Again.
“We’re agreed?” Santi asked, and one by one they nodded. Even Morgan, though the pallor on her face spoke louder than words. “Go.”
Jess settled the helmet over his head and felt Morgan’s trembling, powerful hands come down on it. And this time, in bocca al lupo, the lightning came, and struck him apart into pieces and sent him shrieking into the dark.
EPHEMERA
An excerpt from the personal journal of Obscurist Magnus Keria Morning (interdicted to Black Archives)
I have always tried to believe. Always.
When I learned that, as late as three hundred years ago, Obscurists were allowed the same freedom as other Scholars, that the Iron Tower was only a place of work and study, and not our gilded prison, I accepted that these changes were made purely for our own protection.
Then I read in the Black Archives that two hundred years ago, the Library ruthlessly crushed a revolt by the families of those kept here with us—our children, our lovers, our husbands and wives. Those we loved were killed or exiled. The Archivist set new rules. Crueler rules. We could no longer keep our families or even our children, unless the children were gifted as Obscurists.
My great-great-grandmother remembered a time when her husband lived here, and her children. She lost the ungifted in the revolt. It was not so very long ago, this change. This terrible, cruel desperation of our Archivists, striving to cling to power that is slipping away from them.
Maybe if I had not read so much, did not know so much, I wouldn’t see how we live now as a horror. But I think it is just that. The Library, in its terror of losing a grip on us, has crushed us instead. Maybe the dwindling number of children born with quintessence is a sign that the Library’s stranglehold is destroying us, and that the Library’s days are numbered.
For myself, I should have never let them take my son away from me, or allowed them to take all those sons and daughters we still mourn. I hate every moment of my life as the jailor of this prison. I hate even more the necessity to follow these rules or be replaced by someone much, much crueler.
I am resigned to my fate. No matter what it costs, I will try to make it right in the end.
Keria Morning
Obscurist Magnus
In what I pray will be the last days of the Iron Tower.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Arriving in the Iron Tower was not what Jess expected, though he hadn’t known what to expect, really. Guards seizing him? A sphinx pinning him down with a crushing paw? He did not expect to find himself coming awake in a garden of fresh, flowering plants: English roses, tulips from Holland, a blooming cherry tree from Japan gently shading the low, padded couch on which he lay. The rich, gentle scent of flowers and herbs filled the air, and he breathed it in over and over. It settled his stomach and filled him with a kind of calm he hadn’t ever known before.