Athanasius reached the edge of the arch and peered into the room. It was a riot of mess, the neat order of the library turned into a scene of chaos with shelves half-emptied and the floor crammed with paper and scrolls like the nest of a huge rodent. Malachi sat at the centre of it behind a desk piled high with more paper and illuminated by a row of guttering candles.
‘Tell me what you read, Malachi. Let us look at it together and perhaps we will see something different in it.’
Malachi looked up, his eyes huge behind the pebble lenses. ‘You are wrong,’ he said, picking up another candle and holding the wick to the flame of the last one. ‘You have been wrong all along: wrong about modernizing the Citadel, wrong about allowing civilians inside the mountain.’ The wick caught and he turned the candle in his hand until the flame grew brighter. ‘And wrong about there being only one way out of here.’
He dropped the candle into a pile of paper and it erupted in a whoosh of flame. Athanasius leaped forward to try and stamp it out but Malachi stood up fast, heaving the table over as he did so, tipping the row of candles onto more piles of dry paper to create an instant wall of flame.
Father Thomas looked up at the ceiling, expecting the CO2 system to activate and smother the fire. But nothing happened. Malachi had de-activated that too. He grabbed Athanasius and heaved him backwards. ‘We need to get out of here.’
‘And you are also wrong to think you have stopped me,’ Malachi shouted after them from inside the inferno, smoke rising up around him as his cassock started to burn. ‘There is more than one way to kill a demon.’
92
Athanasius staggered backwards from the entrance, disbelieving the horror of what he had just seen. Already the smoke was thick in the air and the fire was spreading from the Crypto Revelatio, igniting pages from spilled books lined up along the corridor in readiness.
‘Run!’ Thomas shouted.
‘But Malachi …’
‘Malachi is gone. He cannot be saved, we must do what we can to save the library.’ He kicked a pile of books aside, trying to create a firebreak, but there was too much loose paper lying around and the flames caught them instead and sent burning embers floating through the air towards the tinderbox of the next chamber. ‘Positive air pressure is feeding the fire,’ Thomas shouted above the roaring flames. ‘Our best hope is to get back to the control room and turn the gas extinguishers on before the whole lot goes up.’
They stumbled away from the fire, feeling the heat at their backs and tasting smoke in their mouths. The main entrance was a fifteen-minute walk away, maybe five minutes’ running, but they were both exhausted and Athanasius was also in deep shock from what he had witnessed. He could not get the image of Malachi out of his mind, eyes blazing in victory, ecstasy almost, as he himself started to burn.
He turned a corner and felt cool air wash over him as he ran through the snowdrift of torn pages littering the Bible room. He was coughing from the smoke and could hear the crackle and roar of it behind him. He risked a look back. The flames had not made it into the room. He could see the glow of the fire but it was still contained in the corridor beyond. Maybe they would have a chance to stop it spreading.
Just as this thought crossed his mind a figure straight from hell burst through the door, arms outstretched and dripping fire as it ran straight at them, covering half the distance before it stumbled and fell, straight into a pile of torn pages and tortured Bibles that blazed instantly into flame. The whole room was burning in seconds, flames sucking ravenously at the air and billowing thick smoke. They were running now, all thoughts of fatigue banished by pure fear. The fire was almost keeping pace with them, leaping from shelf to shelf and room to room, roaring at their heels like a hungry predator with the scent of blood in its nostrils.
They made it to the reading rooms and hammered on the doors, rousing the few black cloaks still resident there. ‘FIRE!’ They both shouted, pounding on the next door. ‘Run to the exit.’
The black cloaks emerged sleepy and stunned. A few, feeling protective of their