Sorcery of Thorns (50 page)

There
. That was where the shelves had sprung open, revealing a secret passageway. Unsure whether there had been any specific action on her part that had triggered it, she flattened her palm across the grimoires and pressed her forehead to the spines.

“Please,” she gasped. “Let me in.”

Warmth pulsed through the leather touching her skin. A rustle ran through the grimoires, as though they were
whispering to each other, carrying a message outward. She stepped back, and the panel swung open.

Nathaniel laughed in amazement. When she looked at him, she found him watching her, his eyes shining. It was the same way he had looked at her at the ball, when he had seen her in her gown for the first time.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I knew you talked to books. I didn’t realize they listened.”

“They do more than just listen.” The floorboards creaked as Elisabeth stepped inside. She breathed in and out, tasting the dust in the air, then closed her eyes, envisioning the Royal Library as though it were her own body, its lofty vaults, its secret rooms and countless mysteries, the magic flowing through its halls.

“We’re here to stop Ashcroft from summoning the Archon,” she declared to the
walls around her, feeling far less foolish than she’d expected. She knew, somehow, that something was listening. “What he’s doing—it will destroy all of us. I know it’s already tearing you apart. Can you take us to him?”

She had never tried that before: speaking not to just one book but to all of them, petitioning the library itself for aid. She had no idea if it would work. A breeze wafted past,
stirring a cobweb against her cheek like the caress of an insubstantial hand. And then—

A shiver ran through the floor. Her eyes flew open as the wood of the passageway creaked and groaned. Around them, the boards rippled like pressed-on piano keys, warping the shape of the walls. The transformation swept forward, dislodging clouds of dust, opening a path that hadn’t been there before. The passage
was rearranging itself. Showing them the way.

She set off at a run. “Come on!”

Beside her, Nathaniel conjured a weak flame to light their steps. Worry lanced through her at the flame’s feeble appearance, but other than that, Nathaniel seemed fine. Whatever Silas was doing was working.

The passageway reconstructed its shape continuously before them, sending them careening around so many corners
that Elisabeth couldn’t guess where they were headed. She wasn’t certain if it was her imagination making her feel as though the library’s magic coursed through her body, too, propelling her steps and expanding her lungs, an exhilarating sensation, as though she had become something more than human.

Finally, they reached what appeared to be a dead end—but she kept barreling forward, and sure
enough, the wall swung outward before she collided with it, opening the way. It was the
back of a bookcase; they had reached the passageway’s other side.

They stumbled out into mist and silence. Dimmed lanterns made hazy blobs around them, like dozens of moons glowing through a thick fog. It took Elisabeth a moment to figure out where they were. The bookcase that had opened for them groaned as
it swung back shut, a deep, quavering, almost subterranean sound, ending in a click that echoed from the high ceiling. Whispers scattered after it, scurrying through the mist.

“We’re in the restricted archives,” she said, surprised. Though the mist pressed against her face like a veil, somehow she knew which direction to go. “This way.”

“Why would the”—she heard Nathaniel struggling to wrap
his mind around what had just happened—“the library let us out here?”

“I’m not certain.” It would have been much faster to take them directly to the atrium instead of leading them through the Northwest Wing. She forced herself not to reach for Demonslayer’s hilt as she stepped forward. Despite the malevolence of this place, she was certain the library didn’t wish them any harm.

Toward the middle
of the corridor, the vapor thinned. The bookcases became visible, towering around them, mist lapping against their lower shelves like fog breaking against seaside bluffs. They seemed to be far deeper in the archives than she had ventured last time.

Without warning, a huge, white shape reared into the lamplight high above her, and she lurched back in alarm—but it was only a whale’s skull, its
skeleton suspended from the ceiling by thousands of wires, stretching far into shadow. She again had the unsettling feeling that the archives wasn’t as straight a corridor as it appeared. That a person could get lost here, turned
around inexplicably, wandering into sections of the hall that hadn’t existed a moment before.

As they moved on, Nathaniel’s question continued to nag her. Why
had
the
library let them out here? Around them, the grimoires were silent. It felt as though they were listening, waiting. Holding their breath. As though they expected something to happen . . .

Her steps faltered at a flutter of motion nearby. The mist, eddying in a draft.

“Watch out for illusions,” she said over her shoulder. Nathaniel jerked at the sound of her voice; he had been frowning at a book
whose cover was inlaid with human teeth. “The grimoires might try to trick us.”

“Not you, dear . . .”

Elisabeth whirled around. The voice had slithered from the mist, its source impossible to identify. She scanned the shelves, but saw no hint of which grimoire had spoken.

From the opposite direction, a different voice said:
“And I suppose we can make an exception for the other humans—”

“Special circumstances, you see,”
whispered another.

“We won’t harm a hair on their heads. We promise.”

“Well? Aren’t you going to get on with it, girl? We’re waiting.”

Helplessly, Elisabeth spun from one bookcase to another, chasing the speakers in vain. “What do you mean?” she appealed. “What do you want from me?”

But the voices had fallen silent.

Nathaniel stepped forward, reaching out as though
to touch her shoulder until he stopped himself, uncertain. It was obvious he hadn’t heard the grimoires. “Elisabeth?”

She shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

Frustration gripped her as they started forward again, the
shelves flowing past. It wasn’t nothing. They had been brought to the archives for a reason. But she didn’t see what could be more important than reaching Ashcroft and stopping his
ritual as quickly as possible. If they even
could
stop him, just the three of them, with Nathaniel’s magic spent—

Oh.
The answer dawned more beautifully than a sunrise. Without a second thought, she turned on her heel and rushed toward the shelves.

Nathaniel sounded dismayed. “What are you—Elisabeth?”

The grimoires didn’t hiss or rattle or spit ink at her approach. They merely waited, expectant.
She stood on her toes to unhook the chain running across the nearest shelf. She yanked it free, then turned to him, its end dangling from her hand as the books unfolded their pages behind her, rising up. “The library wants to fight back.”

THIRTY-SIX

N
ATHANIEL FOLLOWED HER as she dashed from shelf to shelf, throwing open cages, tearing chains away. This went against everything she had ever been taught. But she felt no guilt, no shame, no hesitation. She felt as though
a dam had burst inside her, the waters roaring forth to overcome every uncertainty in their path.

Cries of jubilation filled the air. Grimoires that hadn’t tasted freedom in centuries unfurled wings of parchment and took flight. Others toppled from the shelves and scuttled across the floor, joyfully riffling their pages. The corridor’s somber gloom gave way to chaos.

“Wait,” Nathaniel said.
“Are you sure you should be doing this? The library was built by Cornelius. It was meant to summon the Archon from the very beginning.” He sidestepped as a grimoire went flopping past his boots. “What if this is some kind of . . .”

He trailed off, but she knew what he meant to say. A trick. A trap. She didn’t blame him. But at last, she understood.

The library no more belonged to Ashcroft and
his plot than Elisabeth belonged to the unknown parents who had brought her into this world. It possessed a life of its own, had become something greater than Cornelius had ever intended. For these were not ordinary books the libraries kept. They were knowledge, given life. Wisdom, given voice. They sang when starlight streamed through the library’s windows. They felt pain and suffered heartbreak.
Sometimes they were sinister, grotesque—but so was the world outside. And that made the world no less worth fighting for, because wherever there was darkness, there was also so much light.

This was Elisabeth’s purpose. Not to become a warden in the hopes of proving herself to people who would never understand. She wasn’t a wielder of chains; she was a breaker of them. She was the library’s will
made flesh.

She felt it, now—the library’s consciousnesses sweeping past her, through her, like a swift-flowing current. Hundreds of thousands of grimoires, coming together as one.

She didn’t have words to explain any of this to Nathaniel. Not yet. Instead she looked into his eyes, and said, “Trust me.”

Whatever he saw in her face drew him up short. He nodded. And then, as though he could hardly
believe what he was doing, he turned to the shelf behind him and began to unhook the chain.

Together they ran down the hall, freeing as many grimoires as they could reach. With every chain she tore down, her courage blazed brighter. Ashcroft had made a mistake. He had come to her library.
Her
home. This time, he wouldn’t escape the consequences.

She reached a familiar cage and halted, momentarily
forgetting the noise, the paper flying through the air. A withered face
floated in the dark, its needle-tipped ribbon glimmering amid the shadows.

“Will you help us?” Elisabeth asked.

The many-toned voice sounded amused.
“Is he handsome, this Ashcroft?”

“Very.”

“How delightful. Just show us the way, dear.”

She didn’t have a key that would open the cage, but she didn’t need one. She wedged
Demonslayer between its bars and twisted, bending the old, brittle iron until it curved enough for the grimoire to flutter free. Then she snatched up the Illusarium’s glass ball and ran onward. An illusion ghosted to life at her side: the Director, Irena, her molten red hair flowing into the mist. Pride illuminated her wan features as she gave Elisabeth the faintest of smiles. Before Elisabeth could
call out to her, she was gone, subsiding back into vapor.

Nathaniel made a choked-off sound. At first she thought he had seen Irena, too. But when she looked at him, his head was turned toward a different spot in the mist, where the figures of a smiling woman and a small, grave boy in a suit were swirling away. Silas gazed in the same direction, his eyes as bright as gemstones. The Illusarium
had shown Nathaniel something else—his family. She freed one of her hands and sought his. Their fingers intertwined, squeezing tightly.

Moments later, they burst through the gate. A tidal wave of grimoires swept after them, tumbling into the Northwest Wing at their heels. Leading the expanding swell of parchment and leather, they flew past the skeletal angels carved into the archway and careened
around the corner, straight into an army of demons.

Her heart nearly stopped. Scales and horns and wattles filled
every inch of the atrium. Rifts spiraled up the tiered bookshelves, rising toward the dome, whose indigo glass had begun to shatter, the suspended shards glinting against the Otherworld’s sky. More fiends leaped from the rifts every second. Imps scampered across the railings, and
goblins loped along the balconies on all fours. There were hundreds of demons. Possibly even thousands of them.

But Ashcroft’s forces were still outnumbered.

An imp stopped gnawing on a bookshelf to glance in their direction. Then, slowly, it looked up. Its black eyes widened, reflecting a swarm of specks, each shape growing larger by the second. A shadow stretched across the atrium as the grimoires
came crashing down.

Elisabeth braced herself. An instant later, her world dissolved into a maelstrom of pages. She and Nathaniel stood hand in hand, their hair whipped by the wind, Silas digging his claws into Nathaniel’s coat, everything blocked out by a seemingly endless cyclone of parchment that battered them like thousands of wings. The smell of ink and magic and dust choked her nostrils.
For a moment, she couldn’t breathe. And then, as abruptly as a flock of birds whirling past, the torrent ceased and their surroundings cleared.

For every demon, there were a dozen grimoires. A goblin keeled over, engulfed by a throng of books that surged over its body like a school of piranhas, gnashing and snapping their teeth. An imp squawked as pages snapped shut on its long ears, lifting
it into the air. Nearby, a withered face rose above a pair of fiends, evaluating them like a professional seamstress. A needle whipped expertly between them, and they toppled to the floor, laced together with thread. Across the atrium, demons foundered, howling at paper cuts and blinded by wads of ink.