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.”
Back 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.