Sorcery of Thorns (51 page)

Rallied to action, grimoires cascaded from the balconies in waterfalls of gilt and multicolored
leather. Dust clouds rose as they spilled onto the tiles from three, four, even five stories up. A flash of peacock feathers came from the direction of the catalogue room, and Madame Bouchard’s operatic wail sent fiends writhing and pawing at their ears.

“We need to find Ashcroft!” Elisabeth yelled. Her 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 splendid?”

Behind him, a section of balcony disintegrated, the shattered railings and bookshelves floating in midair around the rift. The grimoires were slowing the destruction, but they couldn’t overcome the Archon’s power.

“You have to
stop the ritual!” she shouted back.

He laughed. “
Stop
the ritual?”

“You’re going to destroy everything. The library is falling apart!” She thrust Demonslayer at the slivers of Otherworldly sky twisting above them. “If this is what the Archon is doing already, what do you think is going to happen when you let it out?”

“Oh, Miss Scrivener. If only you understood.” His blue eyes shone with sincerity.
“Watch.” He unclasped his wounded wrist and tilted it until a droplet of blood splattered onto the tile. The blood vanished instantly, as though it had never existed. He extended his arm, showing her that the cut on his wrist had healed, leaving the skin unscarred.

“Do you see now?” he urged. “Once I’ve bound it, leashed it to my command, anything will be possible. I will change the world.”

There was no reasoning with him. Nathaniel seemed to have had the same thought. His whip snapped out, the flame crackling and sputtering. Silas crouched lower on his shoulder and closed his eyes, as though concentrating on lending Nathaniel all of his strength.

Ashcroft laughed again. This time, there was a hint of mania to the sound. He swept his arm through the air, and an arc of light sliced
toward them, growing wider as it came.

Impossible
. How—?

She didn’t have time to think. She threw herself down on one knee in front of Nathaniel, raising Demonslayer above her head. The sword hummed as it sheared through the light. When she rose, its blade glowed red-hot, the leather grip uncomfortably warm and sticky in her grasp, as though it had begun to melt. Shaken, she realized it might
shatter if she tried blocking another spell.

A second arc of light flew toward them. They dropped to the floor, watching the beam pass inches above their noses, near enough to slice several fine white hairs from Silas’s tail. It sailed all the way across the atrium before it sizzled out of existence. For a moment Elisabeth thought it hadn’t struck anything. Then a statue slid sideways and crashed
to the floor, severed cleanly at the ankles.

To create the spell, Ashcroft hadn’t even spoken an incantation.

“How is he doing this?” Elisabeth cried.

Nathaniel’s jaw was clenched, his face glistening with sweat. “The Archon’s power must be bleeding into him. Even without a bargain, it’s overflowing like a fountain.”

And before long, it will drown him.

They rolled apart, barely avoiding another
arc as it carved a hissing groove through the floor between them, parting the marble as smoothly as a knife slicing into a pat of soft butter. Then another, sending them scrambling back. Nathaniel didn’t have time to cast a spell, even if he had the strength for it. The attacks came without pause, too relentless for them to do anything but react.

“Silas—” she began, but the look in his yellow
eyes silenced her. He couldn’t transform without leaving Nathaniel helpless. One of these arcs, dodged a fraction too slowly, would leave Nathaniel dead before he struck the ground.

It was up to her, then.

Within the circle, the Archon’s light had grown brighter, spilling out over the tiles. It seemed to have grown several feet taller. And its outline was clearer, now: she could make out the
shape of wings, and a corona around its head that might have been a crown. More debris drifted toward its orbit, fragments
of bronze and marble from the balconies joining the sparkling river of glass that encircled its body. Piece by piece, the library was coming apart.

Heedless of it all, Ashcroft wore a blissful expression, his eyes clouded by a glowing white haze. The light seemed to burn
within him, blazing from the inside out. When Elisabeth ducked beneath his latest attack and sprang upright, her face hard with resolve, he smiled—not at her, at the Archon—and raised his arms in a gesture of supplication.

She started forward. Beams of light shot from above like falling stars, splashing on the tiles around her feet. The missiles darted down as swiftly as arrows, too quick to
follow, impossible to dodge. She could only keep running. For a moment she felt breathless, invincible. Then, behind her, a sound that made her heart stop: a cry of pain.
Nathaniel
.

“Keep going!” he shouted.

His whip licked past her and wrapped around one of Ashcroft’s wrists, wrenching him off-balance. She slammed into Ashcroft a split second later, knocking him to the floor so forcefully that
his head cracked against the tile. Before he could regain his senses, she shoved him onto his stomach and yanked his arms behind his back. Remembering the shackles Nathaniel had worn in Harrows, she drew her greatkey’s thick-linked iron chain over her head and knotted it around his wrists, tightly, without any consideration for his hands, which would redden and swell in moments. Then she hoisted
him up by his collar, pressing Demonslayer to his throat.

He shuddered as the glow faded from his eyes. Then he blinked, dazed, trying to focus. “You cannot kill me, Miss Scrivener.”

“This time, I will.” She barely recognized her own voice,
thick with fury. Nathaniel’s cry still rang in her ears. “If I have to—if that’s what it takes.”

“Ah, that isn’t what I meant, I’m afraid.” His eyes rolled
up toward the disintegrating dome. “Unless I bind it, we’re all going to die together.”

Automatically, she looked to Nathaniel. Her mouth went dry at the sight of him sprawled on the tile, clutching his knee, his teeth bared in a grimace. Blood darkened his trouser leg. Silas had returned to human form, and had yanked off his own cravat to tie it as a tourniquet around Nathaniel’s thigh, but
there was something about his movements—the way his fingers paused, and his gaze lingered on Nathaniel’s face—almost as though he knew. . . .

No
. “What is he saying?” Her heart threw itself against her ribs, frantic, painful, again and again. She turned back to Ashcroft. “What do you mean?”

“The Archon’s summoning can’t be revoked. Not upon my death—not by anyone. It isn’t an ordinary demon;
there is no going back. Now do you understand? You must let me finish. You
must
allow me to bind it.”

No. That couldn’t be true. He had to be lying.

Because if he wasn’t—

She remembered the way Silas had looked at Nathaniel as they’d run toward the Royal Library.
We shall try
, he had said. She wondered if he had known—known that their cause was hopeless since the moment the summoning began.
Her gaze shifted back to Silas, and their eyes locked. He had never looked more ancient or more stricken with regret.

“I am sorry, Miss Scrivener,” he said.

The Archon’s light pulsed. Discordant, inhuman laughter reverberated through Elisabeth’s mind, driving splinters through
her thoughts. Cracks erupted across the floor and split the tiles. The highest tier of balconies—the only one left now—sagged
like an unraveling ribbon, its railing and ladders lifting away. Above them, the Otherworld’s constellations had engulfed the dome, but grimoires still ascended in endless streams, committing themselves to ashes. So much loss, so much sacrifice. How could this be the end?

Her mind reeled. When Ashcroft wrenched in her grasp, her numb fingers released him. As though from a great distance, she
watched him heave himself toward the circle, awkward on his knees, and raise his face to the light.

“At last, it is time. Great One, I would make a bargain with you.”

Another peal of laughter shook the library. The Archon blazed higher, stretching above the second story balconies. Elisabeth was no longer certain that the corona of spikes around its head was a crown. Now, those shapes were beginning
to look more like horns.

Ashcroft groaned and slumped forward, shaking his head to clear it of the awful sound. A hint of confusion clouded his face as he looked up again. “I don’t understand. Do you speak to me, Great One? I cannot hear your voice.”

“You will never hear it, Chancellor,” Silas whispered. He sat clasping Nathaniel’s limp hand. “You are but an ant, striving for the surface of
the sun. To hear its voice would burn your ears to cinders, and turn your mind to ash.”

Ashcroft never took his eyes from the Archon. “No. I am different—this is my birthright. For three hundred years, this has been my destiny. My father, and his father—we have devoted ourselves to nothing else. I am worthy—” He grew hoarse.

The Archon tilted its unearthly horned head this way and
that, inspecting
the confines of the circle, not paying him any attention whatsoever. Grayness stole over Ashcroft’s features. He looked down at the circle, at the tiles that had cracked, breaking its pattern.

A giant luminous hand pressed against the air, and pushed. A stench of burning metal filled the atrium as the claws warped, coming up against an invisible membrane, and then drove through, reaching outside
the circle. Ashcroft rocked back, eclipsed by the light stretching above him. When the palm descended, he didn’t try to move, only sat gazing up, waiting for the end, and Elisabeth had to admit she wouldn’t mind it, watching Ashcroft get swatted like a fly.