Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2) - Rachel Caine Page 0,130

hid it all from view. Then he turned and hurried up after Khalila, across a shallow landing, and toward a black iron door that stood open.

Behind him he heard another hiss, and looked back to see the staircase moving again, this time spiraling back into the ceiling. Counterweights. It had been only their weight on the staircase that had kept it down after the initial descent. The design reminded him of Heron of Alexandria and all the marvelous bellows and gears that had driven the wonders of the temples in the early days of the Library.

Khalila had stopped in the doorway, and Jess stepped up beside her and stopped as well. He couldn’t help it.

A vast, circular Serapeum spread out in front of them, but not like any he’d ever seen before. The Library’s daughter facilities were always, always orderly, clean, well maintained.

This was like the ghostly wreck of one.

The Black Archives rose in a hollowed-out tower within the tower, ring after ring of shelves and cabinets crowding every available level, with an ancient, dusty flat lift on a track that must have been designed to spiral up from one level to another. The number of books, scrolls, tablets . . . it was staggering and chaotic. The smell of the place overwhelmed him—old paper, mold, neglect. A thick, choking patina of dust.

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 Ørsted, 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