voice sounded like a mosquito’s whine, barely audible through the din. “He has to be here somewhere!”
Nathaniel caught her shoulder and pointed. Shards of the dome had begun to funnel downward toward the center of the atrium, siphoned by some unseen force. They exchanged a glance, then looked back to the chaos in front of them. The grimoires were winning—but they needed to be winning faster.
Struck by inspiration, Elisabeth set the Illusarium on the floor and brought Demonslayer’s hilt down on its orb, splintering the glass. Mist gushed from the cracks, enveloping her in a damp, clinging grayness. When the vapor finished pouring out, the container rolled over, empty. She stared at it in shock. Had there been anything inside?
“Ahhhhhhh,” a ghostly voice breathed, emanating from nowhere and everywhere at once. Mist boiled across the atrium, reducing the combatants to shadows in the fog. Fiends lunged toward figures that rose from the mist, only to slump back down and tauntingly reappear behind them. Taking advantage of their distraction, the grimoires set upon them in earnest. Elisabeth watched a goblin attempt to dive out of the mist, then get dragged back in by an unseen force, leaving a silent ripple in the vapors. Yelps and whimpers followed. Then the sounds cut off abruptly, and an eerie stillness fell.
She and Nathaniel dashed forward as the mist began to shred away, catching on the prone, scattered bodies of demons. She could barely believe it. None had been left standing.
“Look,” Nathaniel said. “What are they doing?”
Pages whispered. One by one, grimoires were lifting from the mist. They came together in groups and rose upward toward the balconies in spiraling streams, like flocks of birds taking flight in slow motion. Elisabeth’s eyes widened when she saw where they were headed. Each stream was flowing toward a rift.
Her first stunned thought was that the rifts were drawing them in, attempting to destroy them. But the grimoires weren’t struggling. They were ascending peacefully, purposefully. Every time a book touched the surface of a rift, it flashed and disintegrated to ashes—and the rift’s edges shrank inward ever so slightly, like wounds beginning to heal. Singing echoed throughout the fractured dome: high, clear notes, as pure and silver as starlight.
“They’re trying to close the rifts.” Elisabeth’s heart squeezed like a fist. “They’re sacrificing themselves to save the library.”
There went Madame Bouchard. And there, falling in a rain of ash, the Class Four who had spat ink at the apprentices every morning. Each of those books possessed a soul. Many were centuries old, irreplaceable. And some of them had just now tasted freedom for the first time since they had been created—only minutes of it, after a lifetime of imprisonment. Still they sang as they gave their lives.
Tears stung Elisabeth’s eyes. She couldn’t let their sacrifice be in vain.
The mist was almost gone now; the pall was brightening. As the last few wisps swirled away, she and Nathaniel stumbled into the middle of the atrium, into Ashcroft’s summoning.
A figure stood ahead, shards of glass circling it like planets orbiting a sun. It was taller than a man, slender and luminous, but even when Elisabeth squinted directly at it, she couldn’t make out its features. She had the strange thought that it was like sunlight reflected by a mirror: shifting and intangible, a mere specter of something far greater, radiant and terrible to behold.
Head bent, it regarded the human standing at its feet.
Ashcroft.
He gazed up at the Archon, entranced, bathed in its glow, seemingly oblivious to the battle that had raged around him. Its radiance transformed his features. He looked a decade younger, his expression one of almost innocent yearning. Blood twined down his left wrist, clasped beneath his other hand. A dagger lay forgotten nearby.
Hope leaped within Elisabeth. He hadn’t finished the ritual. The Archon was still inside its circle—a circle formed by the map of the library patterned on the floor in tile, which she had walked over dozens of times, never suspecting its purpose.
“Do you see Ashcroft’s eyes?” Nathaniel murmured. “His mark is gone. He hasn’t summoned Lorelei back.”
Then he can’t use magic to fight us, she thought. Heartened, she raised Demonslayer over her shoulder. The glint of light on its blade caught Ashcroft’s attention. As though he had been expecting them, he spread his arms and gave them a boyish smile.
“Miss Scrivener,” he called out. “Nathaniel! I was hoping you would come. You’ve played such an important part in this, I wanted you to see. Isn’t it