It made his father’s warehouse of contraband in London, the largest that Jess had ever heard of, look like a modest rural shelf. There had to be tens of thousands of volumes here—no, hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The books had long ago overflowed the shelves, and towering stacks of them leaned against corners and tottered atop the bookcases themselves. The shelves, Jess realized, were thickly stacked with multiple layers of volumes, too.
Without even meaning to, Jess took a step inside the hidden tower, then another, as he tilted his head to look up. The levels of shelves reached up and up, spiraling to what seemed like infinity. This isn’t the Archives, he thought. This is something else.
Wolfe’s voice was hushed as he said, “The Black Archives. I don’t know what’s worse—the number of things they’ve kept from us or the incredible hubris of the idea.”
The Black Archives. A story, a rumor, a fable. The place where the Library kept everything too dangerous to circulate, too damaging to allow out to the public.
How could so many books be dangerous? And by whose standards?
Khalila walked to a shelf, reached for a book. Morgan got there fast and grabbed her wrist before she could touch the leather spine. “Wait,” she said. “There could be traps or alarms. Before you touch anything, let me look first. That goes for everyone.” In truth, she looked shaken. So did Wolfe, for that matter. Even Santi kept turning in place, staring in shock and a mixture of wonder and horror.
Traps. The word finally penetrated Jess, and he swallowed. There could be traps on books. Jess tried to comprehend that and failed. The scale of the place continued to overwhelm him. So many books abandoned here. Criminal works walled up to die.
They waited while Morgan made the rounds of the shelves, looking, occasionally brushing her fingers across a shelf or a case. Finally, she said, “It’s safe. You can touch them now.”
Khalila took the book from the shelf. Her voice trembled as she read the title. “Generation of a Magnetic Field by Use of Electric Currents,” she said. “Hans Christian ?rsted, 1820.” She put it back and pulled another. “The Law of Reciprocity of the Magneto-Electric and Electromagnetic Phenomena and Applications for the Reversibility of Electric Generators. Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz, 1833.”
Wolfe moved around the shelves, not touching, just looking. He said, “This whole level has to do with applications of electrical fields. Heat, light, machines—all powered by electrical fields. These are things that I’ve only seen here within this tower. I thought it was an Obscurist’s trick, powered by alchemy. It isn’t. It’s something engineers discovered centuries back. And they kept it from us.”
“But why?” Thomas’s eyes had gone very wide. He went to Khalila’s side and pulled more books, searching the titles. “Why would they keep these amazing things from us? Can you even imagine how bright the world would be if we had these lights? What about using this electromagnetic phenomenon to power trains or carriages? Could it be better than steam? Why would they—”
“Because someone, when this work was first submitted to the Library, decided the very idea of it was dangerous. Uncontainable.” Wolfe’s voice sounded weary, and angry. “They looked into that future and decided it couldn’t be controlled, and, above all, the Library wants control. Look around you. Look at what the Library kept from us. We all knew it was true. Thomas and I, we both have experience of what they won’t allow to be known.”
“The press,” Thomas whispered.
“The what?” Khalila asked it absently, still fascinated by the titles of the books on the shelves, all the knowledge that they had never seen. Never imagined.
Wolfe was the one to answer. “He means a letterpress, ink blocks arranged in letters and pages. It allows books to be easily reproduced. The Library can’t allow that, because then all this—all this banned knowledge—could be distributed without having an arbiter of what is good or bad, dangerous or helpful.” He clutched the book he was holding in both hands, and the line of his jaw was so tight, Jess could see the bone beneath it.
“And the authors?” Khalila asked. “What would have happened to these authors?”
“Dead,” Wolfe said. “Silenced. Either when their work was placed here, or soon after. The Library would have seen to that. A candle can make a bonfire. So it’s snuffed out quickly.” The silence hung heavy with the smell of old paper and leather, dampness and neglect. “This is the graveyard where they buried our future.”
Khalila pulled in a breath and carefully, reverently replaced the book she’d removed. These were, Jess realized, not just forbidden works; they were the only remaining memories of brilliant people—Scholars, librarians, maybe even just amateur inventors—who’d discovered things the Library wanted to keep hidden. There would be no personal journals celebrating their lives in the Archives. No scholarly papers. No record of their births or deaths. They had been erased.
These books were all that remained of a vast collection of lost souls, and instead of being cared for, being loved, they were jumbled and rotting like a child’s abandoned toys. Jess felt it like a hot spear through his chest.