The lift slowed and stopped, and Morgan stepped off. She touched the old wood of the bookcase that circled around, and in a moment said, “It’s safe enough. But be careful.”

Thomas moved next to her, facing a bookcase seven shelves high and at least twenty paces wide. “All of this? Surely it can’t all be about what Thomas dreamed up, and Wolfe before him.” Morgan plucked the first book from the bottom corner. “Chinese. I don’t read it—”

“I do,” Wolfe said, and took it to open to the flyleaf. “The Printing of Ink to Paper Using Characters Carved in Wood by Ling Chao.”

“What year?” Thomas asked. Wolfe didn’t answer. “Sir? What year?”

“Translated from the Chinese calendar? Year eight hundred sixty-eight,” he whispered at last. “They’ve robbed us of this for more than a thousand years.” His voice shook, and he thrust the book back at Thomas to turn away and stare at the shelves that marched around the level. “How many? How many times was this created and cut down? They’ve been destroying it over and over, all this time. All this time.”

Santi had walked away, all the way toward the end of the shelves, and suddenly he stopped, backed up, and reached out to pluck a volume out of the rest. “Ah, Dio mio,” Santi murmured, and put his hand on the cover as if trying to hide the title. The name. He turned and looked back at them, and they went to him, as if he’d asked for help. Maybe he had, silently.

Thomas took the book gently and opened it. “On the Uses of Pressed Metal Type and Ink on Paper . . .”

“For the Safeguarding, Archiving, and Reproduction of Written Works,” Wolfe said. “It’s mine. I was told it was destroyed. All destroyed. Everything I ever wrote. But it wasn’t. They kept it.” Santi put his hand on Wolfe’s shoulder and held on, head bowed, but Wolfe didn’t seem to feel the offered comfort. “They kept our work and let it rot.”

“So you see,” a voice rose from far below them. “Every one of these is a life snuffed out. You see the burden I’ve carried, every day since taking my post. I’m the caretaker of a graveyard of ghosts.”

Jess, Glain, and Santi all reacted at the same time, and all with military precision—spreading out, bringing their slung weapons into line to point down. There was nothing obvious to shoot, just the Obscurist Magnus, fragile and alone, standing in the rounded area below, beside the open Codex.

She stared up at them, and from here, so far above, Jess couldn’t read her expression at all. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m alone. Careless of you to leave the door open, though. I would have thought you’d have closed it, at the very least.”

Jess’s fault. He’d been so distracted by what was in front of him that for that one moment, he’d forgotten what lay behind.

“Come here to gloat?” Wolfe’s voice was bleak and empty now, as if something inside him had burned down to the very ashes. “Well played, Mother.”