Sorcery of Thorns (43 page)

He paused, taking in her expression. “I will accompany you as far as the road. That should be safe enough, as long as I am not seen.”

They recuperated for a few moments longer before Silas vanished into the trees. Elisabeth thought she glimpsed where he had gone: a trembling branch, and a flash of white that might have been a cat’s fur. She helped Nathaniel back to his feet,
shooting him a worried glance when he stumbled. Her own dizziness had worn off, but she had only experienced Prendergast’s magic secondhand. Nathaniel shouldn’t even be out of bed in the first place.

A springy mat of needles cushioned their steps as they picked their way down the hill, passing gnarled pines and stones that thrust from the earth like broken bones. Above them, the jagged range
of the Elkenspine rose to soaring heights, the summits stark white and imposing against the night sky. Snow streamed from the peaks like pennants, blown loose by the wind. Elisabeth shivered. The wind tearing through the branches seemed to howl forth the landscape’s loneliness and isolation; her ears had already begun to sting from the cold.

Lights glittered ahead, winking between the heaving
boughs of fir trees. That was the first glimpse Elisabeth received of the Great Library. When they reached the road and the view opened up, they both trailed to a halt.

They had to tilt their heads back to see the entire structure. It rose skyward like a black citadel, carved straight from the
base of the mountain. Lamplight glowered behind its tall, arched stained glass windows, their panes
locked away behind iron grilles. Torches guttered along the rampart that circled it in front, so high that Elisabeth couldn’t make out anyone patrolling the top, though she knew the wardens had to be up there, watching.

Warily, they pressed onward. Barricades had been erected on the road, studded with metal spikes facing outward. She and Nathaniel traded a look. The barricades weren’t designed
to keep grimoires in—they were made to keep people out. The library was equipped to withstand a siege.

As they finished winding through the barricades, the sound of their footsteps rebounded forbiddingly from the wall. Elisabeth saw no evidence of a gate or doorway in the riveted iron sheets that made up its exterior, towering high above them.

“Hello?” she called up. “Is anyone there?”

Her
voice echoed, bouncing back and forth between the high crenellations, a thin and desolate sound. For a moment, all was silent. Then a rumbling, clanging, grinding cacophony answered her—the friction of gears, the awakening of some immense machinery buried within the wall. The ground trembled. A motion at the top of the rampart caught her eye: cannons, swiveling down to aim at them. On second thought,
cannons
seemed like an inadequate word. The mouth of each gun was wide enough for a person to crawl inside.

She tensed in horror. “They aren’t going to fire on us, are they? Nathaniel?”

His eyes were closed, his face calm, lips moving soundlessly beneath the clamor of the gears. Her ears popped as the air grew heavy with damp. She looked up to see the sky above the Great Library boiling with
clouds, their underbellies lit a menacing shade of green.

Figures leaped away from the cannons as a bolt of lightning forked over the rampart, barely missing them. The machinery ground to a halt. A slot slid open above their heads, and a pair of eyes glared down at them. A warden.

“Identify yourself, sorcerer!” he called down.

“Excellent,” Nathaniel said cheerfully. “I’ve gotten your attention.
I am Magister Nathaniel Thorn, and this is Miss Elisabeth Scrivener. No doubt our reputations have preceded us. We come with an urgent warning for the Director.”

If their names had any effect on the warden, he showed no sign. In fact, he still looked as though he’d prefer killing them to talking to them. “No one’s allowed in or out of the library. Magisters aren’t an exception. Leave, or we’ll
fire.”

“Wait.” Elisabeth tugged on the chain around her neck and pulled out her greatkey, lifting it to the light. She thought back to the conversation she had overheard between Mistress Wick and the Royal Library’s Director. “I promise Director Hyde will want to see us.”

The warden’s eyes widened at the sight of the greatkey, and even further at the mention of the Director’s name. As she had
guessed, that name was only known within a select circle. To most people, he was just “the Director.” With luck, the warden would assume she was here on the Collegium’s authority.

Before she could lose her nerve, she continued, “We know the saboteur plans to strike tonight. We’ve come to stop it from happening.” Further inspiration struck. “I carry Demonslayer, the sword of the former Director
of Summershall.”

“Show it to me.”

Elisabeth folded her coat aside, allowing the torchlight to glitter on Demonslayer’s garnets. She hoped Irena would understand it being used this way.

The warden’s eyes flicked between her and Nathaniel. Then the slot slammed shut. Gears began rumbling again. But this time, it wasn’t the cannons that moved. A sheet of iron slid aside, revealing a portcullis
hidden at the base of the rampart.

“Step inside,” the warden’s voice commanded.

After a hesitation, they obeyed. Colossal wheel-sized cogs churned behind them as the wall rolled back into place. Now they were trapped between the wall and the portcullis, in a sort of outdoor prison cell. The space reeked of machinery grease and was large enough to contain a coach and a full team of horses. Judging
by the signs of wear on the flagstones, it often did so. Anyone entering or exiting the Great Library had to stop here first for an inspection.

Past the bars, torchlight lapped across a grim courtyard. The flagstones were crusted with a white rime of what she first mistook for frost, but then realized must be salt.

They waited for several minutes, shifting from foot to foot to stay warm. Finally,
the warden appeared on the other side of the portcullis.

“The Director will see you. But there are conditions. No weapons, and you have to wear shackles.” His eyes traveled to Nathaniel. He lifted up a clinking bundle of chains and cuffs. “Iron shackles.”

Nathaniel grimaced. “They’ll keep me from using sorcery,” he explained to Elisabeth under his breath. More loudly he said, “Fine. We accept.”

If Nathaniel was willing to bear having his magic taken away, she wasn’t about to make a fuss about handing over Demonslayer. But she nevertheless experienced a purely physical resistance when she tried. At first her hand wouldn’t release the blade, and the warden had to tug on it, sending a twinge of
pain through her injured palm, before her fingers allowed it to slide free. He handed their belongings
off to a second warden, who vanished into the shadows. Then Elisabeth and Nathaniel turned around and allowed him to put on the shackles, binding their hands behind their backs.

The portcullis rose with a squeal.

“Follow me,” the warden said.

Their shackles’ chains clinked as they passed between the two grim obsidian angels flanking the door. The wind cut off abruptly when they crossed the
threshold, replaced by a dusty silence filled with papery groans and mutterings. A handful of oil lamps did little to dispel the library’s oppressive gloom. Most of the light entered through high stained glass windows, decorated with scenes pieced together in doleful shades of gray and crimson, which cast splintered pools of moonlight on the tall black shelves. A dour-faced librarian glanced their
way, then shuffled off into the warren of corridors, his stained robes flapping around his ankles. Elisabeth had heard rumors that librarians considered an assignment to Harrows more of a punishment than a privilege. Now, it wasn’t difficult to see why.

There was no atmosphere of warmth or welcome to indicate the presence of friendly, well-treated grimoires. Instead a clammy sense of watchfulness
prevailed, and the air stank of wood polish and mildew. Unlike the other Great Libraries, no grimoires sat out in the open; every bookcase was enclosed behind an iron grate. Hisses of fury rang out from the shelves as they passed. She felt as though they were walking through a darkened courtroom, enduring the censure of its unseen judges.

“No grimoires lower than a Class Four here,” the warden
explained, seeing Elisabeth’s expression. “High-security texts only.” He sounded proud.

Without warning, a shudder traveled through the marble tiles beneath their boots. More gears, she thought, until a muffled howl rose up from the floor—a sound that was neither human nor machine.

Nathaniel drew in a sharp breath. “What was that?”

“Captive Malefict in the dungeon. Class Eight.” The warden
gave him an unpleasant smile, clearly enjoying the rare opportunity to enlighten a sorcerer. “It guards the entrance to the vault. Sometimes, we use it for practice.”

The remark disturbed Elisabeth, but she dared not offer her opinion. They ascended a narrow, spiraling stair, lightless and creaking, and emerged into a similarly narrow and dreary hall, at the end of which the warden rapped on
a door, opened it, and stepped aside.

As they entered, the warden touched her arm. She tensed, but he only muttered, after a hostile glance at Nathaniel, “The Director is hard of hearing. Helps if he can read your lips.”

He pitched the advice for her ears alone. It took her a moment to understand why. Nathaniel was a sorcerer, an outsider, untrustworthy. She couldn’t explain the rush of anger
she felt toward the warden in response. Not so long ago, she had believed the same as him. But she did not want to be this man’s ally and confidant, even in his own mind, leaving Nathaniel the odd one out.

A fire burned low in the room ahead, gilding the heads of the deer, wolves, and boars mounted on the walls, their plaques taking up almost every available inch of space. The figure who stood
facing the fire resembled a beast himself: tall and broad, with a thick fur draped over the shoulders of his warden’s coat. Wind rattled the loose casement of his tower window, letting in drafts that ruffled the papers on his desk.

She and Nathaniel stood in the doorway like children summoned to a schoolmaster’s office, waiting for Director Hyde to turn around. Nathaniel shifted, unable to conceal
his impatience.

Finally, the Director spoke. His deep, rumbling voice reminded Elisabeth of a bear. “The Great Library of Harrows has never been breached, by man or by grimoire, in the three hundred years since it was first carved from the mountain. It has weathered tempests and broken every siege brought to its gates. You say there is going to be an attack tonight. How would you come to know
such a thing, and why should I believe you?”

Before she could stop Nathaniel, he took one long stride toward the desk. “Sir, no doubt the warden has told you our names. Given the Chancellor’s attempt on our lives, and Miss Scrivener’s previous involvement—”

A floorboard squeaked as Director Hyde turned. Nathaniel fell silent, and Elisabeth froze. Hyde’s face was more scar than skin, lacerated
by brutal claw marks that Elisabeth would not have thought survivable. Peering out from this landscape of ravaged flesh, his eyes were bright, hard, and above all—suspicious. His gaze raked across Nathaniel’s mouth. He had turned quickly enough to hear, or see, the end.

“What’s this about the Chancellor of Magic?” he growled.

At first the question made no sense. Then, making a quick mental calculation,
Elisabeth’s heart sank. She turned to Nathaniel. “No wonder the warden didn’t recognize our names,” she said under her breath. “They haven’t heard the news. The Collegium must have dispatched a rider to all the Great Libraries right away, but the message won’t reach Harrows until later tonight.” Uneasily, she looked back to Hyde. “They don’t know about Ashcroft.”

“Damn it all. I didn’t think
of that. If only we’d brought a
newspaper with us . . .” Nathaniel cleared his throat and continued in a louder voice, “Director, allow me to explain. Chancellor Ashcroft is a traitor. The night before last, he was unmasked as the saboteur.”

Hyde glanced back and forth, taking in the ease of their exchange.
We’re being too familiar with each other
, she realized. No respectable librarian would
ever speak to a sorcerer the way she had, much less a magister. As if he were a friend—an intimate. But surely that didn’t matter as much as the news they carried. Surely Hyde was taking them seriously. . . .

At last he said, “Scrivener. I know your name. You’re from the Great Library of Summershall.”

She nodded, setting her jaw against a quaver of foreboding. “The Chancellor took me captive
in his manor,” she explained. “While I was there, I overheard his plans. The rest of the story is complicated. But Nath—Magister Thorn is telling the truth. A rider will arrive from the Collegium to verify everything.”

“Everything, including the imminent attack on this library?”

Nathaniel shot Elisabeth a look before he answered. His expression had become increasingly guarded. “No, we discovered
that ourselves and came directly. We didn’t have time to alert the Collegium. The Chancellor is sacrificing the grimoires as part of a ritual. I assure you I’m not exaggerating when I say that the fate of the entire kingdom is at stake.”

“Please, Director,” she broke in. “Harrows is the final step in the Chancellor’s plan. You already knew that the saboteur was likely to target this location
next, given the pattern of his attacks. He could be infiltrating the library even now.”

That seemed to be the wrong thing to say. Hyde stepped around the desk, the floor creaking beneath his weight. His shadow fell over her, as frigid as the draft from the window.
When he next spoke, his voice was dangerously quiet.

“And how is it that you’ve managed to reach Harrows more quickly than the Collegium’s
fastest riders? Not you, Magister Thorn. I want Scrivener to answer me.”

She swallowed. “Magic,” she said, her voice trembling only slightly. “We used magic.”

His face darkened. “Are you saying you have dabbled in sorcery, Scrivener?”

She couldn’t take it back. She raised her head, meeting his eyes. “Yes. And I would do it again if I had to.”