Smoke and Iron

by Rachel Caine

  I have loved you for years. Half my lifetime now, I have known that there is no one else for me, and never will be. And I know that you are at peace with our life in the Tower, and I will never be.

  But I swore to you long, long ago I would never break the seals of this place, never walk out of these doors and find my freedom . . . not if it meant more pain, more slavery, more destruction to the Obscurists I'd have to leave behind. My freedom would come at too high a price.

  It's strange that I now have to remind you of your own duty.

  Keria, I know you are angry. I know you are raging; I can feel it through the walls of this tower. But no matter how deep your pain, how right your anger, if you strike at the Archivist and lose, imagine what will happen to these Obscurists you now have sworn to protect. Imagine how a shallow, predatory man like that, who values his own life above all others, will react. If you kill him, you might cut out a cancer . . . or simply spread it everywhere. All that holds the Great Library together now is belief. Shatter it, and we are all at risk.

  The Library has been forced to live under bad leaders before. Let him age, and wither, and die. We will outlive him.

  All we can do now is to protect our son, who has been so terribly wounded.

  And to do that, you have to swallow your anger, and wait. Wait until it's time for revenge.

  I read over this, and I realize that though it's all true, I had meant to say this in kinder ways. But you know that I love you. And I love our son, lost as he is to us.

  It's odd to me, of all people, to be counseling you about caution.

  With love,

  Your hermit

  PART FOUR

  MORGAN

  CHAPTER NINE

  Morgan's first mistake was almost her last.

  Being parted from Jess and Wolfe was something she'd expected, but she still hated it; worry about what would happen to them distracted her too much, and when the Obscurist's carriage had come to collect her from the Great Archives, she'd had to resist the urge to fight. She could have easily gotten free, but that wouldn't have advanced their cause. She had to be inside the Iron Tower to do that.

  The last place she ever wanted to be.

  The carriage had been reinforced with scripts to keep her powers blunted, and the first thing the Obscurist who'd come for her had done was lock a golden collar around her neck. She'd felt the alchemical formulae written inside it connect with the power in her, and the collar had sealed itself shut.

  But that still wasn't a mistake. It was an advantage. They believed they had her under control. And in the days since, she'd bided her time and pretended to be cowed. She'd sent a message to Jess, but the Obscurists were slow to trust her again; they kept her locked in a room, and when she broke the wards on the door, her collar shocked her into unconsciousness for several hours. When she woke, the wards were up, stronger than ever.

  They'd also taken away her Codex. There wasn't a writing utensil or scrap of paper left in the room, and apart from a food tray slipped through a slot in the door, she'd been left completely alone for four days.

  On the fifth day, they let her out, but only to meet with the Obscurist Magnus.

  He had her summoned to the lush gardens near the top of the Tower--an entire floor devoted to beauty and growth, and windows that were open to the outside to permit the warm sea breezes. No point in trying to throw herself out of them; they would snap shut well before she reached them. She'd experimented with that more than a few times during her last internment here.

  She took a seat near a pool filled with blooming lotus flowers, and a servant--another Obscurist, but a very lightly talented one--brought a cup of hot tea and sweet pastries. Tea seemed like a miracle to her; they'd denied any to her from the moment she'd been locked away. Morgan poured a cup and took her first sips just as Gregory came into the garden, and the sight of him drove it all home to her in a way the collar and the familiar sight of the garden had not: she was a prisoner here, again.

  And he looked so damned smug about it.

  Gregory had always struck her as a would-be tyrant, and now he wore the robes of the Obscurist Magnus, the second-most powerful (or, perhaps really third) person in the Great Library. Everything about the way he approached her, from the superior smile to the arrogant thrust of his walk and the toadies scurrying in his wake . . . it all showed how much he enjoyed his newfound power. Wolfe's mother had died in this garden. There had been a lot of damage, as Morgan recalled; she could see the repairs now that she looked for them, and the new plants.

  Gregory had commissioned himself a new set of robes. These were far more elaborate than what Wolfe's mother had been content to wear, fine as those were. He was a petty, selfish man. The Archivist had set about raising men and women to the top of the Library who believed more in power than in learning, more in arrogance than in humility. Gregory was only the latest of a rotten breed.

  The smell of blooming flowers seemed overpowering, and her stomach lurched as she realized that if she couldn't leave this place under her own terms, she'd never leave it at all. Worse: she'd be tasked with the job of accepting Gregory's match for her. Bedding a man she couldn't love. Birthing a child that, if sufficiently gifted, would be kept just as much a prisoner--or seeing it taken from her and sent away to the orphanage if not gifted enough.

  To a stranger's eyes, the Iron Tower might seem luxurious. Elegant rooms, fine foods . . . the Obscurists went begging for nothing, except their freedom.

  But it all left a rotten, wretched taste in the back of her throat, and for a perilous moment she was afraid she might spit out her tea. She drank down the rest in a gulp and set the cup aside, came to her feet, and met Gregory as an equal.

  "I knew we'd get you back, Morgan," Gregory said. "All that drama and death, and for what? You end up where you belonged from the beginning. And don't worry. I've learned a thing or two about controlling unruly residents. Keria wasn't willing to face the fact that you represent both a huge gain for us and a huge risk. I am."

  "So you're going to lock me away," Morgan said, and shrugged. The collar felt heavy and thick around her neck. Gregory seemed to waver in the heat--when had it gotten so warm in the garden?--but she was sure his smile grew wider. "Or try, more likely. I've escaped from this tower more than once. I'll do it again." Her voice sounded strange. Hollow, as if she heard it through a long metal tube. Voice communication, she thought. Thomas would be fascinated; she wondered if she should mention it to him. She turned slightly, as if she expected to find him standing nearby, and then realized that, no, Thomas was not here, Jess was gone, their little company of friends and allies was shattered into bits, and suddenly the grief and loneliness overwhelmed her. She wanted to weep. Jess, she thought, and felt empty to her core. Jess. She needed him here. She needed him to tell her that it would all, finally, be all right.

  Nothing seemed right. Not the light, which broke into rainbows around her. Not the heat, which seemed as thick as a blanket on her sweating skin. Not the sound of Gregory's quiet laughter, as much nightmare as reality.

  When he touched her, it might have been gentle, but his fingertips seemed made of hot coals and rough as granite, and she flinched back. What is it? What's wrong with me? She struggled to piece thoughts together; they wanted to fly apart, spin into broken colors and sickening shards. The tea. He put something in the tea. Something to make her vulnerable, make it harder for her to access her power. She felt the suffocating, deadening effects of the Iron Tower, and the collar weighing her down, and for just a moment she felt a gray wave of despair. I can't. I can't do this. I'm going to die in here.

  She reached out. Not for Gregory. Nothing so obvious. She didn't need to destroy him, even if she could manage it. She just needed to be sure she could defeat what he'd dosed her with.

  It hurt like ripping away a piece of herself, and she gritted her teeth on a scream as the pain built, and built, echoing from the walls of the Tower and the collar, and then a fresh red rose blooming
just behind Gregory caught her attention.

  She pulled and felt a hiss of energy flowing from the rose. The bloom faded, shriveled, and the life pulled out of the stem, the leaves. Tempting, to pull more, faster, destroying the entire bush, but she stopped with just the one stem.

  The petals drifted down, wrinkled and dead. Blackened.

  The power she'd taken in broke through the drugs. She was still trapped. Still at Gregory's whims and mercies.

  But she was not helpless.

  Because he seemed to expect it, Morgan allowed her eyes to roll back and let her body go limp. Gregory caught her on the way to the ground, and she felt herself being lifted, carried, and the hissing, buzzing complex web of life inside the garden faded away into iron and stone and the bright, burning shadows of other Obscurists and servants.

  Let go, she told herself. Let him think he's won. Unless he believes it, he'll just put you right back in that locked room. Let him win.

  She rolled into the dark and found it a welcome shelter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Waking was a painful process that came in a rush of headache, nausea, and an ache that went so deep she wondered if she might truly be ill. The light filtering red through her closed eyelids seemed far too bright, and she groaned and rolled over, trying to hide from it. Failing miserably.

  "Oh hush," said a strangely familiar voice. "Open your eyes, Morgan. You're not the first to ever have a hangover."

  The voice had the lingering traces of an accent--Scots, Morgan thought--that gave the woman's Greek a lilting, teasing sound. Morgan didn't respond for a second or two, and then carefully opened her eyes a slit. Quickly shut them again. "Close the window?"

  "No." That voice was far too cheerful. "I like the light. And since we'll be sharing this room, you'll just have to make do, won't you?"

  Annis. The voice finally fell into the proper place, and Morgan opened her eyes wide this time, blinking until the glare resolved into a bright aura around a woman with gray-threaded red hair, a rounded face, and a tilted smile. The lines near her eyes and mouth showed she laughed often and deeply.

  Annis was one of the least-talented Obscurists confined to the Tower--someone who had barely passed the threshold of entrance and was capable of only the most rudimentary of alchemical work. It had never put a dent in her happiness. Born happy, others said of her. She'll laugh when she dies.

  She was certainly smiling, if not quite laughing, at Morgan's pain.

  "I'm not hungover," Morgan said. It came out as a feeble, annoyed protest, which she hadn't meant. "I was drugged."

  One of Annis's eyebrows rose sharply. She was braiding her long hair in quick, efficient swipes, and now she neatly tied off the end and began coiling the waist-long braid into a crown atop her head. She slotted in pins to hold it without so much as glancing in a mirror. It was impressive. "Drugged?" she repeated. "I suppose you drank Gregory's special tea, then."

  "He does this often?"

  "Often enough," she said. Not smiling now, and in no way amused. "When he thinks he might not get his way. Funny thing: give the man all the power he wants, and he still feels weak. Almost as if there's a hole in him that can't be filled." Annis's look had turned sharp now. Assessing. "Feeling better?"

  "Some. Don't suppose you have any headache remedies?"

  "Of course." Annis turned to a cabinet and came back with a glass of water and a single pill. "This should settle you." When Morgan hesitated, Annis made a face. "I'm not one of Gregory's lackeys. I was Keria Morning's friend. And I'll not be loyal to the man who all but jumped into her still-warm shoes."

  Morgan took the pill and chased it down with the water. "Then we might be friends," she said. Through the pain of her headache, she sensed a very definite hiss that defined the presence of alchemical scripts near her. No, around her. She could see them, when she concentrated, though it nearly split her skull in two: bands of symbols that ran in spirals up the walls of this room. Expertly done, but not expertly enough to be hidden from her.

  She concentrated on the one point of weakness: the symbol that relayed the information gathered by the scripts to the transcription automata. She reached out to stroke her fingers over the barely perceptible writing and thought about sending a surge of power through it to disable the connection . . . but no. If she did, that would alert him that she'd recovered her power. And they'd simply repair it.

  Annis, she realized, was talking to her. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

  "I said that you're also not my friend, girl. You're my charge. I'm completely responsible for your behavior. That's a neat trick, don't you think? I'm his most vocal doubter. If either of us steps wrong, we're both in it."

  "He can't kill us."

  "He can't kill you," Annis corrected. "Me, I'm of little enough use to him. Too old to bear another child, and the least of all in this rusty prison. Killing me would be easy. So by all means, factor that into your thinking."

  It was the last thing Morgan wanted to do, honestly. Having another person depending on her choices made her feel claustrophobic. "You were friends with Keria Morning? Really?"

  "Aye. When I came here, she was the first to make me welcome and the last to make me feel inferior. I knew she had a destiny, that one. I'm sorry it had to include dying for her son's folly, but that was as she wished it."

  "You think it's folly to fight for the heart of the Library?"

  "I think the Library is too huge a beastie to turn with the poke of a few spears."

  Morgan almost laughed at that, dire as it was; the image of the Library as a lumbering beast the size of an ancient dinosaur, but composed entirely of books, was too strange. She liked Annis. That was going to make things much, much more difficult.

  The headache pill was already starting to lift the throbbing fog from her brain, and without that to focus on, she began to notice other things: the cool, incense-scented air that tasted just a little bitter on the back of her tongue. The luxurious comfort of the bed on which she rested--only the finest for the Obscurists, of course. It was a fancy cage, indeed. Most accepted it without much protest, though from her previous confinement here, she could name only a few who were truly content.

  Annis, though truly happy, was by no means content. She had a sharp mind, a sharp tongue, and a spirit that would never come to terms with this prison, however sweet it seemed.

  "Annis," she said. "Do you know what's happened to . . . to my friends?"

  The older woman stopped in the act of wrapping a colorful knitted scarf around her neck and turned to stare at her. "No. Why? Weren't you captured alone?"

  "I wasn't captured," she said. "I was--" She remembered the scripts in the walls and held up a finger, then slowly turned it to the wall. "Oh, my head is still making me sick. Do you have another of those pills?" As she said it, she shook her head. Annis looked mystified, but then nodded.

  "Why, yes. Yes, I do." Annis wasn't much for deception; that sounded as artificial as a first-year actor in a play. "Let me get that for you."

  She stood up and then looked around uncertainly and mouthed, What are you doing?

  Changing a script, Morgan mouthed back. Keep talking.

  Annis looked completely thrown by the request, but she found something to chatter about--food, it sounded like, and her favorite dishes--while Morgan summoned up that tiny hoarded store of power from the dead rose and began to examine the complex formulae that surrounded the room. Clever, she thought. But not clever enough.

  It took a single, focused burst of power to rewrite the variable to be switched on and off at will, with a simple voice command.

  Morgan blinked, let the alchemical formulae fade, and said, "Silencio."

  "Did you just tell me to shut up in Spanish?" Annis asked. "Because I'll have you know I'm excellent with Spanish--don't you try to throw me off--"

  "They can't hear us now," Morgan said. "I don't dare leave it off for long, but whenever we want to talk without eavesdroppers, just say that."

  "
Handy," Annis said, and blinked. "You could honestly see the scripts? In here? Weren't they hidden?"

  "Very hidden. But I have a gift for that sort of thing."

  "Obviously." Annis took in a breath and blew it out. "All right, then. What do you want to tell me?"

  "That I came here because I wanted to," Morgan said. "And I warn you, if you go to Gregory, it won't stop me. I'll just find another way."

  "I wouldn't give Gregory the sweat off my back. He was a horrid, power-hungry bully all his life, and he's turning into a monster as fast as he can. Your secrets are safe with me." Annis considered her for a long moment before saying, "Why would you come back here of your own free will?"

  "Because the best place to start taking away the Archivist's power is here, where his power really rests. Without the Iron Tower, he's got very little."

  "He has the High Garda," Annis said. "Which is no inconsiderable threat in itself."

  "If he truly has them."

  "Hmmm. And he may have overstepped, you know. He's called for a Feast of Greater Burning," Annis said. "The public execution of his political enemies. And I've heard that many otherwise loyal High Garda soldiers aren't well pleased to be doing his dirty work."

  "How would you hear that?"

  "My girl, I've made it a point to, ah, intimately befriend the guards when they seem so inclined. And they seem happy to talk under those conditions. Especially since they know I can't tell anyone outside these walls. Oh, don't give me such a blushing look. I've always enjoyed the pleasures of a good bed partner, and heaven knows, we've got little else to do for entertainment." Morgan started to laugh in uncomfortable delight but managed to keep it to a muffled giggle. Annis's grin widened. "So. You're right that if you somehow break the links of the Iron Tower to the Archivist, the High Garda might not be as firm an ally as he imagines. No one likes what he's doing."

  "I like it even less. It's a terrible, cruel waste. And thinking that he might put Scholar Wolfe on that pyre . . ."