Sorcery of Thorns (28 page)

When she looked down, a gleam of metal caught her eye. Another object lay at the bottom of the wrappings, where it had been concealed beneath Demonslayer. Master Hargrove had sent her more than
just a sword. Slowly, she set Demonslayer aside. She reached into the wrappings and lifted out a chain. She ducked her head and drew the chain over it, feeling the weight of her greatkey settle against her chest: cold, but not for long. Then she ran her fingers over the grooves, so familiar they were a part of herself, designed to open the outer doors of any Great Library in the kingdom.

“Silas,”
she said slowly. “If I got us inside the Royal Library after hours, would you be able to open the gate to the restricted archives?”

He paused. “There is a way.”

She looked up at him, gripping the key. “Help me.” The storm within her had stilled. “You’ve taken lives. Now help me save some.”

He gazed down at her, beautiful again, an angel considering a mortal’s petition from afar. “Is it that
simple, Miss Scrivener?” he asked.

“It must be,” she replied. “For it’s the only thing to do.”

TWENTY-ONE

A
GREAT LIBRARY NEVER slept, even after all the people had gone to bed. Voices echoed through the atrium as Elisabeth crept along, keeping to the curve of the wall, where her white cloak blended in with the marble. Some
of the grimoires snored, while their neighbors made disgruntled noises at them for snoring too loudly; others whispered, and laughed. One lone grimoire sang a piercing lament that soared high above the rest, a sound that lifted past the shafts of blue moonlight spilling through the starry dome, and rang unearthly in the firmament, like music played on a crystal glass.

Whenever a lantern bobbed
into view, Elisabeth hid and waited until the warden had passed. The Royal Library was even more heavily patrolled at night than she had expected. She envied Silas, strolling along beside her as a cat. After one particularly close call—the warden came near enough that Elisabeth was able to see her green eyes, and count the number of buttons on her coat—Silas transformed back into a human, and caught
her shoulder before she emerged from hiding.

“I must tell you something before we continue,” he murmured. “The wardens wear too much iron for me to influence them. If they spot you, I cannot make them turn away and forget what they have seen.”

She suspected she knew what he was getting at. “And if that happens, you’ll leave me to face the consequences alone?”

He inclined his head, the faintest
hint of regret etched across his brow.

“I understand,” she whispered. “You owe your loyalty to Nathaniel, not to me.”

As they moved on, Elisabeth wondered if her own proximity made Silas uncomfortable. She wore her greatkey, and there was also the thin layer of iron that lined her cloak. Demonslayer, slipped through her belt, formed a reassuring weight at her side. But if it did, he would have
to tolerate it. She couldn’t enter the archives unprotected.

They passed several more patrols before they reached the entrance to the Northwest Wing. The skeletal angels carved around the archway stared down at her, their eyes hollow pits, bronze skulls agleam, and the hair stood up on her arms as she imagined them turning their heads to watch her go by. But none of them moved. They didn’t need
to. Far worse things awaited her ahead.

She and Silas slipped past the velvet rope. Mist spilled over her boots and lapped at the hem of her cloak. It was thicker now than in the daytime, no doubt a magical emanation of one of the grimoires inside the archives. Silas, a cat again and only visible as a swirl of movement within the mist, headed toward the gate. Elisabeth forced herself not to take
in its looming presence, still fresh from her dreams. Instead she focused on what Silas had instructed her to do before they’d set out. It was going to take
both of them, working together, to sneak inside undetected.

She pressed herself into an alcove in the wall and waited for a warden to pass, his lantern floating eerily through the mist. Then she darted back out of hiding. They had about a
minute until the next warden came by.

Silas already stood inside the archives, having squeezed between the gate’s bars before transforming back into his human shape. She followed his gaze as he nodded upward. There, above the gate, some fifteen feet off the ground, hung an iron bell. She set her boots against the ironwork and began to climb.

She soon wished that she had brought a pair of gloves.
Her sweaty palms found little purchase against the bars, which were already slick with moisture from the mist. It took her more than twice as long to scale the gate than she had estimated—long enough that the next patrol came walking past while she clung to the ironwork high above. She held her breath, her shoulders aching with the effort of remaining still, but the warden didn’t look up. His
silhouette faded into the mist.

Freeing a hand, she retrieved a wad of cotton and piece of twine from one of her belt pouches. She wrapped the cotton around the bell’s clapper, and used her teeth to help tie it in place. When she was finished, she slid back down and landed with a bone-jarring impact on the flagstones. Silas reappeared opposite the bars. He had taken off his jacket and now used
it to protect his hand from the iron as he turned a latch on the gate. It swung open silently on well-greased hinges.

“The gate is designed to open from within,” he had explained earlier. “It is a fail-safe, so no one is able to get trapped inside if their key is taken from them. But there is, of course, a mechanism in place to alert the other wardens should such an event occur.”

Above them,
the bell swung frantically back and forth, but barely made a sound. Elisabeth’s tampering had succeeded. She slipped inside, aware the most dangerous part was yet to come.

If their key is taken from them,
Silas had said. Not if they
lost
their key, for no warden would be foolish enough to misplace their key ring.

The restricted archives stretched down a long corridor, lined on either side by
towering bookshelves that rose from the mist and spanned upward into darkness. Lanterns hung from iron posts at regular intervals, creating a path down the center. She had the unsettling feeling that the lanterns were meant to keep people from getting lost, even though the hallway appeared to travel forward in a straight, unbroken line. Her gaze wandered to the shelves, then darted back ahead. Most
of the grimoires were chained to the bookcases. But the most dangerous ones had their own displays, raised up on pedestals or locked away in cages. During her brief look she’d caught sight of a manuscript bound with stitched-together human skin, imprisoned inside a cage studded with spikes like a medieval torture device. Another had teeth embroidered along the edges of its cover, restrained by
an iron bit shoved between its pages. All of them were silent, watching her. Waiting to see what she would do.

She turned to speak to Silas, but he was nowhere to be seen. He had vanished into thin air, leaving the gate open behind him. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but his abandonment stung all the same. Perhaps he was trying to reinforce his message from the other night: that he was a
demon, and not to be trusted.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. She had only needed him to get inside. The rest, she could do on her own.

As soon as the gate clicked shut, the muttering began. Voices of every description crept and slithered and hopped along the
corridor. Her skin crawled; she could almost feel the voices reaching from the mist and grasping at her like hands. She drew her iron-laced
hood over her head, and the sounds faded to a distant, sinister mumbling.

She set out down the corridor, following the path of lamplight through the center. The Codex’s call number indicated that it was shelved about halfway down the archives. Now it was only a matter of finding it, removing it from the shelf, and sneaking back the way she had come. The hardest part would be climbing up the gate
again to fix the bell after she escaped. She didn’t know what to expect from the Codex—whether it would cooperate with her like the copy in Ashcroft’s study, or whether it would fight her all the way out of the Royal Library.

Without warning, a tall, pale form rose from the floor nearby. Elisabeth whirled around, sweeping her cloak aside to grip Demonslayer’s hilt. Nothing was there—only an eddy
in the mist, and a display pedestal made of white stone. She had glimpsed the pedestal out of the corner of her eye and mistaken it for a person. Cursing herself, she turned back ahead.

And like a scene from her nightmares, Chancellor Ashcroft stood before her. He looked just the same as she had last seen him, but waxen, his handsome face devoid of expression, both the blue eye and the red one
staring straight through her. His golden cloak seemed to be spun from lamplight and mist. With a choked-off cry, Elisabeth yanked Demonslayer from her belt and swung it through the air.

Ashcroft stepped out of range. The faintest of smiles tugged at his mouth. She swung once more, and again he retreated, her sword missing by a hair. That slight, taunting smile suggested that he knew precisely
why she was here.

This time, she had no doubt that he would kill her. Even
armed with iron, she was no match for his magic. But he appeared content to toy with her first, and she wouldn’t go down without a fight, not if there was even the slightest chance of stopping him. They moved through the archives in a silent dance: Elisabeth slicing the mist to ribbons, Ashcroft backing toward the shelves.

Then he failed to step quickly enough, and her sword slashed through him.

He dissolved into mist.

More figures emerged from the shadows, advancing toward her. Warden Finch. Lorelei. Mr. Hob. Even the man who had cornered her in the alley—and he wasn’t the only dead person among them. The Director also rose from the mist, her spectral face grim with disappointment. They drew closer and closer,
but Elisabeth didn’t step back, even though the Director’s expression made her stomach curdle. The figures weren’t real. Whoever had conjured them, on the other hand—

“Whatever you are, you’re showing me my fears,” she declared, surprised by how steady her voice sounded. “You’re trying to trap me, aren’t you?”

She sheathed Demonslayer and turned. A large, ornate display cage stood directly behind
her. Had she taken even one more step, away from the illusions, she would have run into it. As soon as she realized that, the figures subsided back into the mist.

A woman’s pale, withered face gazed out at her from within the cage, mere inches away, floating in the darkness. Or it would have gazed at her, had the eyes not been stitched shut. And the face didn’t belong to a person, at least not
any longer: it had been sewn onto a grimoire’s cover, which levitated opposite Elisabeth amid a swirl of vapor. A black ribbon twirled through
the air around the grimoire, a silver needle gleaming on its end.

“Smart girl.”
The grimoire spoke in a hissing, multitudinous voice: men, women, and children all speaking in chorus, each one as dry as sand whispering over bone.
“We’ve taken three wardens with that trick, now that we’ve convinced the Illusarium to help us. Too bad. Such an interesting face you have. Not beautiful, but bold.”

The grimoire was unusually thick and heavily bound, filled with—
more faces
, Elisabeth thought in horror, as the binding creaked and the cover lifted, flipping past page after page of human faces, Enochian script simmering across them like freshly laid brands.
At last it settled on an empty page and lovingly caressed the bare vellum with its needle.

“We have room for you, if you ever change your mind.”

“No, thank you,” Elisabeth said, inching away.

“Our stitches are neat. It would only hurt a little. . . .”

Elisabeth squared her shoulders and wheeled around, mindful not to bump into the white stone pedestal she had seen earlier, situated just a
few feet away from the cage. A plaque beneath the pedestal read
THE ILLUSARIUM, CLASS VII
, and atop it sat a glass sphere like a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. So much mist poured from the sphere that she couldn’t make out the shape within. If this grimoire possessed a voice, it chose to remain silent. Perhaps it could only communicate using its illusions.

She forced herself to keep walking and
not look back, even though she could almost feel the first grimoire’s needle scratching between her shoulder blades. When she drew near the section numbered on the catalogue card, her steps slowed, and her head tilted back. She swallowed.

A ladder ascended over three stories into the gloom, mist lapping at its bottom rungs. The call number suggested that the
Codex was at the top, where the lamplight
barely reached. She steeled herself and placed her boot on the lowest rung, ignoring the spiteful jeers of the grimoires on the shelves. As she began her ascent, they rattled their chains with enough force to make the ladder bounce and tremble. Wads of ink flew past her into the dark.