Chapter Forty-Nine Nina
I slipped through the doors as a surge of Artisans exited.
There was a scream, and it was difficult to tell which direction it came from.
It seemed the Artisans were being shepherded out by Scribblers, all of whom wore stark expressions, their eyes wide and fearful.
One called to me as I barreled past. I ignored them and fought my way through the confused horde.
And then, the stacks, the dim oppressive light, the close air and the smell of a thousand pages. Normally comforting, but now, an omen. Another scream—a woman’s.
There were sounds of protests from behind, and I turned to see Patrick, so patently out of place, skirting around the sea of Artisans flooding the exit.
“Hey!” shouted an officer, trying to funnel toward him. “You can’t be in here!”
The moment he got close, Patrick pulled a gun from his coat and held it to the man’s gut. “You’re gonna scare all the swanks, lad,” he said. “Get out of here while you can.”
The officer swallowed once, seemed to consider Patrick’s size, then turned on his heel and left with the remaining visitors.
My back was pressed against the first row beside a rolling ladder, and Patrick met me there, his eyes icier than ever. “Well,” he murmured, looking around the corner, down the empty aisle. “That was a fuckin’ choice, wasn’t it?”
My heart pounded. “We can’t let him just take everything,” I whispered, sweat beading over my forehead. “It can’t all have been for nothing.”
Patrick swore beneath his breath, then held his gun up to me. “Not a single bullet in the chamber,” he breathed. “Do you understand that? Not a single fuckin’ one.”
“I’ll rip the ground up around us if I have to,” I told him.
“Lord almighty,” he growled quietly, looking up to the ceiling. “We’re outnumbered, Scurry girl.”
But I hadn’t lost everything only to lose this, too. I’d kill Lord Shop here, in this very library. It didn’t matter who else I had to bury with him.
“Please,” I said to Patrick, the void in me yawning wide. “Let me do this.” He must have seen the desperation leaking through, the shake in my breath.
Seconds passed, and then he growled and looked away. He took my wrist in his hand and held it tightly. “Have mercy,” he said. “Stay behind me.”
Backs hunched, we slunk down the aisles, listening for voices. The vaulted ceiling only fed us the sounds of someone’s whimpering. It was almost impossible to tell from which direction it came. Adrenaline swarmed me.
Patrick pulled me down the maze of aisles, stopping every so often to listen. To redirect. Eventually we could hear boots squeaking off the marble. The whimpers had turned to gasps. We stopped at a corner and looked around its edge.
There, down the end of the row. A study corner with desks and lamps built in among the shelves. Black-inked pages strewn across the floor. Two steel-eyed soldiers. Between them, Theo, their forearms encasing his.
Two fire Charmers stood with balls of light hovering above their palms. They stood before a woman with a flurry of unbound black curls and an expression so despondent, she might have had her neck on the edge of a sword. Polly.
A voice came. It was a voice I could have recognized in my sleep, or on the brink of death.
I felt it like a long-fingered hand gripping my spine.
Lord Terrence Shop stepped out of the gloom, his cane glancing off the tiled floor, his expression somehow more severe now, the fire sharpening every angle of him.
He bent to retrieve the pieces of parchment from the floor and perused them.
“You can come out, Miss Clarke and Mister Colson,” he said easily. “Unless you’d rather retreat. In which case, I wouldn’t fault you. There are far too many things in this building to set alight.”
Patrick groaned in my ear, then gave me one pleading look.
We stepped out into the open.
Polly’s chin trembled at the sight of us. Theo pulled against his restraints.
And I couldn’t understand it, how Lord Shop could know to come to this exact city, to this building on this very day. “You brought them here?” I asked Polly. For who else could alert the House so quickly? Why would she stand unshackled and peaceful while Theo fought his captors?
A tear ran the course of her cheek. She made to speak.
“Her father, actually,” said Lord Shop. “Mr. Prescott has an… understanding with the House.” I noticed that he stood behind his fire Charmers.
“Welcome,” he said genially, nodding like any good gentleman. “I assure you the Scribbler is not to blame.” Shop continued, his sights now sliding over Polly. “In fact, she is much less cooperative than her father suggested.”
It was only then that I noticed the shake of Polly’s hands, the way she swayed where she stood. The skin of them looked strange in the dim light. When the firelight glinted off them, I saw that the skin had been melted away. Something horrid dripped from her fingertips.
Lord Shop held up the ruined pages in his hand. Each piece was sodden with ink, as though someone had overturned well after well over them. Just like the Artisan children had done so in school. The ink dripped from the pages onto the marble, blacker than they were white.
“I can just imagine the very important information you must have been trying to hide,” the Lord said, grimacing at the parchment, and then discarding it.
It slapped wetly off the marble. He went to the only desk with a lit lamp and picked up the two books upon it.
One was The Stewards’ Testament, still open to its last page.
The other was a heavy tome—the cypher, I presumed.
“At the very least, all is not lost,” Lord Shop mused. “We persuaded her to stop drowning the texts eventually. I was concerned she might let us burn her to ash.” Indeed, it seemed as though the books themselves were unsullied. Polly hadn’t gotten to them in time.
A sob escaped her then, and her head dropped down as though it had grown too heavy for her neck, and I imagined her Scribbler hands being incinerated by fire, while she bled every last drop of ink from herself, until she couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” Polly moaned, and the misery was too much to bear.
Patrick pointed his revolver straight at Lord Shop, over the gap between his men’s shoulders. I imagined his face splitting apart around a bullet we didn’t have.
“Ah now,” Shop tsked. “Fools rush in, Colson. And fool though you may be, even you can guess what happens next.”
Patrick’s eyes reflected fire. “If it involves a hole in your head, I’m all ears.”
“You’ll attack with poor results,” he said calmly.
“Our side will retaliate. John will arrive from wherever he is hiding—an alley, perhaps? It will end in bloodshed on both sides, Mr. Colson, and the whereabouts of the Seam lost somewhere in the middle. Neither of us wins then, do we?” Shop tucked his hands behind his back, his chest an open target. “I’d sooner make you a deal.”
I spat on the floor like a miner, and Patrick gripped my wrist tighter. “I don’t make deals with monsters.”
“Then we’ll call it… an offering,” Shop reiterated. “Theodore and the Scribbler will come with me. And you’ll leave here peacefully.”
I scoffed, sounding deranged. “And how many of your army will we find waiting on those steps?”
“Not a single one,” he said. “I’ve come on rather short notice, so you’ve found me woefully ill-prepared. You may slither away.”
But there was something else in his expression. Some hidden strain beneath the surface.
Patrick clicked his tongue, considered Shop for a moment. “Nah,” he said. “I’m thinkin’ you’re terrified Nina will tear the ground up and pitch you into hell at any moment, eh?”
A flicker of something passed over Shop’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Patrick said. The gun did not lower. “You’ve lost some sleep to it, I’ll bet. Watchin’ Tanner spit dirt and go under. She scares you.” It made Patrick smile malevolently.
Lord Shop did not balk, but I thought I saw his lips thin. “So, then, it’s an impasse, Mr. Colson, because you see, we both have too much to lose.”
There was a scuffle from behind them, and two more men came into view.
One was a fire Charmer, by the glowing red of his hands.
The other was John, the side of his face badly burned.
A rope of fire wrapped around his neck, not yet touching his skin, but slowly burning it.
John’s face was mottled red and suffused in sweat.
It dripped into his eyes and stained his shirtfront.
He sucked breath through his teeth. “Teddy,” he heaved, lengthening his neck to keep his chin from the fire.
“Don’t suppose you got any water handy?”
The barrel of Patrick’s gun swung instead to this new fire Charmer, an older man, his hand held lazily in front of him with the arrogance of skill and decades of practice. He did not flinch at the revolver pointed at him.
“Let him go,” Patrick said evenly.
“In just a moment,” Lord Shop said.
John panted, moaned in pain. The skin on his neck glowed.
“You’ll be on your way,” Lord Shop said. “The Scribbler and her books come with me. And I’m sure”—here he looked toward Polly and her ruined hands—“that she’ll be amenable in rewriting the translations.”
“You have no use for me,” Theodore said, pulling uselessly at his arms. The officers tightened their grip. “And I won’t go back.”
“You’re right, in one regard at least,” Shop said. “I’d rather have the Alchemist instead, but I doubt Nina would make the trade.” He was inquiring me now, his brow lifted. Waiting.
A trade? Patrick for Theo? My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I said nothing.
John groaned. Polly wept.
Shop nodded knowingly. “I thought as much. I daresay, Theodore, that you’ve rather outstayed your welcome.”
Theo looked at me for a moment, and something in my expression must have solidified this, because he stopped struggling. He looked down at the marble floor.
I felt suddenly subsumed by guilt. The walls distended.
John cursed loudly. “Patty!” he begged.
“Let him go,” Patrick said. “And we’ll be on our way.”
Lord Shop nodded to the fire Charmer, who curled his fingers inward, and the rope of flames around John’s neck vanished.
“I suspect we’ll see each other again soon,” Shop told Patrick, the ghost of a smile touching the corners of his mouth. “When the time is right.”
Patrick pulled me back, and I resisted, my eyes latched on to the book and the cypher. “You won’t reach the Seam,” I said, teeth gritted. Idium undulated within me—thin but ravenous, stretching veins and expanding my mind. “Not without me.”
“Perhaps,” Lord Shop said, nodding, as though this were a meeting and he was examining the facts.
“But I believe in innovation. In progress. Where one door refuses to open, another can be carved.” He stepped around his officers, close enough to stand inches from Patrick’s gun, as though he knew the chamber held no bullet.
“In the meantime, I suggest you dig yourself a hole deep enough that even the worms cannot find you, or summon the courage to put his gun in your mouth and fire. Because there are plenty of ways to break ground, girl, and the day you outlive your usefulness to me will be the end of this war.”
He looked faceless in that moment. He could have been a Crafter or Artisan, the devil himself. Futility descended, spirals of it circling my entire being until my fingers curled in and my rib cage folded.
He must have been stark raving mad if he thought I’d blow myself away and not bring him with me.
“Nina, we have to go.”
In the square, the clock tolled, the hole in me widened, everything toppling into it.
Patrick had hooked his arm around my chest and was hauling me away. No matter how hard I fought, I couldn’t seem to break free. Theo and Polly, the cypher and the translations, they were becoming further from reach.
“Don’t do it, Nina,” Patrick begged.
Shop had the audacity to smile from a distance. “Get my son out of here,” he ordered his Charmers.
But not soon enough. In my veins, the idium exalted, and I felt the earth beneath all that marble awaken. The ground heaved. Marble cracking. A titanic groan shook my middle ear, and the great labyrinth of shelves teetered.
The first seemed to wobble and overcorrect, and Patrick froze in his bid to drag me out. They each stilled and watched in horror as the shelves swayed back and forth, and then, finally, they fell, crashing into the next row. Hundreds of books rained down.
“RUN!” John bellowed.
We escaped down the labyrinth, the party of us scattering in different directions, John, Patrick, and I one way, Theo and Polly dragged in another.
The giant walls of shelves toppled at our backs, one into the other, gaining momentum, a landslide of books crashing and filling the corridors.
The thunderous crunch of wood as it collided and splintered.
A heavy volume struck my shoulder as we ran.
John expelled pieces of broken timber falling overhead, just barely holding off the weight of them long enough for us to pass through, to turn the corners, to sprint down the aisles.
Books crashed into my shoulders, my head, caught the backs of my legs.
But Patrick had my arm, hadn’t let it go once, and he pulled me onward faster than my legs could manage.
“Don’t look back!” he shouted, and I ran harder than my lungs could tolerate.
We spilled out into the main foyer as the last shelf fell, buckling in an earsplitting crash, and we didn’t stop. We rushed to the doors, feet pounding off the cracked marble.
We ran out into the briny air, a small crowd of Artisans in the square watching on in horror. Pieces of the clock tower were now strewn on the ground, the cobblestones cracked. Several members of the crowd approached as though they meant to offer help, faces stark in the approaching night.
We barreled through them all, past the limp coppers with their gaping mouths and half-raised batons, past the buckled coach and its frantic horses.
I tripped on my skirts, my legs failing me now, my heeled shoes slipping on the debris, and then Patrick’s arm was around my torso, lifting me off my feet.
I was carried past the gawkers who were just now realizing they knew my face, and Patrick’s. That fugitives, escaped war criminals, had been among them. My limbs went slack in Patrick’s hold. The darkness of an alley closed in.
But my eyes stuck to the library doors until they were out of sight.