Falling is not one of them.”
He held out his hand to help her up, and Kate saw that he too had not come away unscathed. His wrist joint looked misaligned, and the bones cracked loudly as they straightened themselves again, making him wince with pain.
“I wish mine would do that,” she said.
“You are not badly hurt,” said Silas, pulling her to her feet. “Your body will heal itself just as surely as mine, given time.”
Kate looked around. The cavern was long and narrow at the bottom, shaped like a long wave carved into the earth, but there was no sign of a library, or anything else. It was hard to see past the chunks of stone on the chasm floor and the dust thrown up by their feet as they negotiated a path around the edge. It looked like the grave robbers had thrown anything of low value onto the cavern floor, littering it with broken pottery, pieces of wood, and loose dirt and bones excavated from the tombs.
Silas tested every raised stone in the wall in case it was a handle of some kind, and while the two of them hunted for hidden doors, Kate dared to ask him something.
“If we do find the library down here,” she said, “will you help my uncle?”
“You will be safe for as long as I need you,” said Silas. “The same applies to him.”
“Could you help him escape?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“You were the one who brought him to Fume. What if . . . what if I promise not to try and escape again. If I get you the book, whatever it takes, will you help him then? Will you protect him from the wardens? Help him stay alive?”
“You will find the book simply because I demand it of you,” said Silas. “Your promises mean nothing to me.”
“I’m just asking you to let him live. Please. You’ll still have everything you want.”
Silas lowered his scarred hand from the wall and turned to face Kate. “You are not responsible for his life,” he said. “We all live and die alone. You will learn that in time.”
“He is family,” said Kate. “We look after each other.”
Silas turned back to the wall. “That is something I know nothing about,” he said. “Families lie. They leave and they forget. We do not have time for this. As long as you obey me, the bookseller will live. Now do as I say and find this door.”
Kate did not know how Silas expected her to find a door down there. It was pitch black and the spirit wheel’s directions had not been very specific. The fire-glow from the grave robbers’ swinging oil lamps flickered like stars above them and Silas’s lantern light reflected from tiny pieces of rough gemstone embedded in the walls, making them sparkle and move as he hunted for anything that looked out of place.
They had walked more than a thousand steps and searched only a tiny fraction of the cavern when Kate stopped. Everyone who had ever searched that cavern would have done exactly what they were doing now. They were going about it the wrong way.
She stood still, letting Silas wander ahead, and as the light of the lantern moved farther away, she tried to put herself in the place of the people who had built the city below. Kate guessed that the library had to be easy to find if Artemis had found it so quickly. Maybe people with the blood of the bonemen just knew where it was. What if she had not been receptive to the clues?
Kate closed her eyes and concentrated on finding the door. Nothing happened. There was no sudden pull. No sign to point the way. She opened her eyes again and found Silas standing right in front of her.
“This cavern is old, isn’t it?” asked Kate.
“One of the oldest.”
“What did it look like before the grave robbers came?”
Silas touched the wall and a fragment of blue gemstone broke off under his hand. “Most of it was lined with lapis before they stripped it away,” he said. “This lowest section is supposed to have been decorated with a mosaic of an ocean, with fish and other useless things set in precious stones across the floor and the walls. I never saw it for myself. It had all been chipped away long before the High Council got here.”
Kate tried to picture it as Silas had described. “What about light?” she asked.
“It is a tomb cavern,”