“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 aro
und 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.
Instead the hand came crashing down on emptiness; she had seized him by the arm and dragged him away. As though he were a bundle of rubbish, she tossed him aside.
“Why?” he asked, rolling over, looking at her standing over him much as he had the Archon an instant before. “Why did you—?”
“I wanted to see your face when you realized you were wrong,” she said. “That everything you’ve done, all the people you’ve hurt and killed, was for nothing.”
Behind him, the Archon’s claws raked through the marble. Its light stretched higher, almost touching the dome, blotting out half the atrium as it spread its wings. Dwarfed by its immensity, Ashcroft looked impossibly small. Sweat had broken across his brow; his throat worked. “Are you satisfied, Miss Scrivener?”
Elisabeth had desired this moment so greatly: his confidence shattered, his power stripped away. But now that she had it, she realized it was worth nothing to her at all.
“No,” she said, and turned.
His face contorted. He scrabbled after her, collapsing to a crawl, his eyes blank and unseeing. “You must believe me. I need you to understand. Everything that I did, I did for the good of the kingdom. Please—”
She kicked him, and he went sprawling with an anguished cry.
Not caring what happened to him next, she went to Nathaniel. His eyelashes fluttered at her approach, but he didn’t wake. She crouched, taking his hand, and saw that Silas still held the other, clasped between his own as though it were spun from glass.
Light spilled over Nathaniel, reflecting brighter and brighter from the floor around him. She supposed the Archon would kill them at any moment, but all she could think was that his hand felt terribly cold. “Is he in any pain?”
Silas spoke without looking away from Nathaniel’s face. “No. The end, when it comes, will be swift for you both. I imagined it would be better this way—for you to fight together, and to fall quickly, rather than enduring the death of your world without hope.” He paused to smooth the lapel of Nathaniel’s coat, then to carefully straighten his collar. As though it were an ordinary evening, Elisabeth thought, making him presentable to step outside. “I apologize for taking such a liberty.”
Tears flooded her eyes, and her throat tightened. “What will happen to you?”
He betrayed himself with the slightest hesitation. Finally he said, “It matters not, miss.”
“It does.” She reached out to cup Silas’s cheek. The evening’s trials had left her hand filthy, hideous against his remote perfection. But he held very still, and allowed her to touch him, and she was surprised to discover that he felt human, not like a statue carved from alabaster.
A strange serenity came over her. There was one thing left that she could do. This was the end of the world, and they had nothing left to lose. “Thank you. I just wanted to say that, before . . .”
His eyes flicked to her beneath his lashes. She saw the moment that he understood. She had thought him still before, but now he turned to stone. Though his expression didn’t seem to change, there welled up in his eyes both wretchedness and hope, and a hunger so bottomless she could feel it yawning beneath his skin, like the devouring dark of a night without stars. The light had grown blinding; the Archon was almost upon them now.
“Silariathas.” The Enochian name poured up her throat and rolled over her tongue like fire. “Silariathas,” she said, her voice raw with power, “I free you from your bonds of servitude.”
His pupils swelled, black swallowing up the gold. That was all she had a chance to see before the light grew so bright that she had to avert her eyes. A pulse traveled through the library, stirring her hair, as though a stone had been dropped onto the surface of reality, its ripples flowing outward. She gripped Nathaniel’s hand, waiting to die. But a second passed, and then another—and she felt nothing.
Nathaniel’s eyelids cracked open. The silver had bled from his hair. Groggily, he tried to focus. “Silas?” he managed.
Slowly, Elisabeth looked up. For a heartbeat she thought she had died after all, and was dreaming. Silas stood over them, one arm raised, blocking the Archon’s light. Not Silas. Silariathas. Horns curled from his scalp, white as porcelain, their spirals ending in wicked points. The angles of his face had grown unsettling and cruel, their delicate beauty filed to inhuman sharpness. His ears were pointed; his claws had lengthened, thin and razor sharp.
He did not seem to have noticed the Archon. He was staring down at Nathaniel, black-eyed and starving. “You dare address me so?” he hissed. With a contemptuous jerk of his arm, he flung the Archon
’s hand away. Then he rounded on Nathaniel, bending over him. He was shaking; his hair trembled. He said in a horrible rasping whisper, “Are you aware of what I am—what I will do to your world, as its people flee screaming across the broken earth?”
Nathaniel didn’t look afraid. Perhaps he was too insensible to feel fear, which would explain what he did next: he took Silariathas’s clawed hand and stroked it clumsily, as though Silariathas were the one in need of comfort, in all his immortal glory, and not the other way around. “It’s all right, Silas,” he said.
“Do not speak to me, insect,” Silariathas spat, wrenching free of Nathaniel’s touch. His fingers snapped around Nathaniel’s neck, his claws pricking the tender skin as they squeezed. When a bead of blood appeared, he was the one who reacted, not Nathaniel—a shudder ran through him, all the way down his spine. Nathaniel weakly attempted a smile.
“If you kill me, it’s all right.”
Silariathas froze. His fingers slackened. “You are a fool,” he grated, through lips that barely moved.
Nathaniel didn’t seem to have heard. He was losing consciousness too rapidly. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I know it hurts. I know.” And as he slipped away, he mumbled, “I forgive you.”
The silence afterward was so profound that Elisabeth heard nothing but the silvery lament of the grimoires, rising above them in streams. Even the Archon had gone still; it gazed down, head tilted, as though this was something even it had never seen before.
Silariathas looked up. Elisabeth followed his gaze and saw a grimoire she recognized passing over them, a withered face, the glint of a needle. They watched without speaking as it ascended to burn itself to ashes—a gruesome, tortured, deadly thing, monstrous but not beyond love, capable in the end of this final act of redemption. What Silariathas thought of it, Elisabeth could not tell. There was nothing in his devouring black eyes that she recognized. It wasn’t until he looked back to Nathaniel that she glimpsed a hint of his other self: the being who had watched over Nathaniel as he grew from a boy to a young man, who had put him to bed and tended his wounds and made him tea, fixed his cravat, held his hand through every nightmare. Silas shone through the cold, cruel mask like light flaring behind a glass.
Sorcery of Thorns Page 38