Paper and Fire (The Great Library, #2) - Rachel Caine Page 0,131

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.

Then he got angry.

Thomas cleared his throat. “All this is only for the development of electricity,” he said. “What else is there?”

“There must be a Codex,” Wolfe said. “Even the forbidden needs to be cataloged.”

“Here,” Santi said. He moved to a vast book, thick as a builder’s block, with pages large enough to hold a thousand entries each. The book was chained to a podium with links of the same black iron as the staircase and the tower itself. It sat open to the center. Morgan moved her hand over it and nodded. Santi flipped pages to where in a normal Codex there would have been a summary of categories and coding. He stared, then slowly looked up at the stacked levels upon levels of books. “It’s—it’s as long as the Codex for the Archive. Inventions. Research. Art. Fiction. Printing—”

“Printing,” Wolfe repeated, and he and Thomas exchanged a sharp look. “Where?”

“The seventh circle,” Santi said. He seemed shaken. “It’s an entire section. I thought—”

None of them wanted to finish that sentence.

They all crowded on the flat lifting device, and a blank panel rose out of the iron plate. Morgan hesitated, then pressed her palm down to it. She gasped a little, and Jess moved toward her, but she flung out a hand to stop him. “No. No, it has to be me. This place, it only obeys Obscurists.” She closed her eyes and focused, and the lift lurched into movement on the track. It rose as it circled, level upon level, and Jess tried not to look down. So easy to fall from this thing, he thought. The thin railings bordering it were no kind of reassurance at all.

The lift slowed and stopped, and Morgan stepped off. She touched the old wood of the bookcase that circled around, and in a moment said, “It’s safe enough. But be careful.”

Thomas moved next to her, facing a bookcase seven shelves high and at least twenty paces wide. “All of this? Surely it can’t all be about what Thomas dreamed up, and Wolfe before him.” Morgan plucked the first book from the bottom corner. “Chinese. I don’t read it—”

“I do,” Wolfe said, and took it to open to the flyleaf. “The Printing of Ink to Paper Using Characters Carved in Wood by Ling Chao.”

“What year?” Thomas asked. Wolfe didn’t answer. “Sir? What year?”

“Translated from the Chinese calendar? Year eight hundred sixty-eight,” he whispered at last. “They’ve robbed us of this for more than a thousand