Once inside the columned entrance, Callum Brightwell led his sons to the left, where a statue of Queen Elizabeth in battle armor stood guard. There was no obvious entrance, and Brightwell gestured impatiently for Morgan to catch up. Just beyond them, Khalila and Dario had gone into the Reading Room, and Dario had already picked up an original volume to add to a small crate. Khalila passed him another. Her hands, Jess saw, were shaking badly.

Glain and Thomas hovered at the corner, watching over them in case of trouble, but so far, the room was much too busy for them to be noticed. Black-robed Scholars hurried from one table to another, stacking books with haste that spoke of real fear, while a second set in sand-colored librarian robes brought over more crates and helped with packing. It looked like barely controlled chaos.

He froze as he saw a face he knew, one eerily familiar to him. It was a librarian named Naomi Ebele, who had not so very long ago been head of the Oxford Serapeum. She’d barely escaped with her life, along with the rest of them that day. He liked her. She was a strong, good woman, with a devout belief in what she was doing.

She’d recognize Dario and Khalila.

Just as he realized it, she did look up, and her eyes locked on Khalila and Dario and widened. She put down the crate she was packing and immediately walked in their direction.

Jess couldn’t guess what they would have done or could have, but it didn’t matter in the next moment, because Naomi never quite made it. There was a strange sound outside, like an impact on the roof overhead, and everyone looked up. Movement stopped.

Jess heard hissing and smelled the unmistakable reek, and as the first Scholar screamed it out, he realized what had happened.

Greek fire.

The Serapeum was burning.

There was no greater sin in war than to destroy a Serapeum. The Welsh would later point fingers at the Burners or claim it was a mistake; Jess knew that. The Burners would be happy to claim a victory for their side whether they actually did the job or not. But St. Paul’s was burning. He saw the first licks of fire clawing at the ceiling above the Scholars’ heads.

“Save the books!” Naomi Ebele shouted, and began slapping Translation tags on the boxes. She touched one and activated it, and the script buried inside it—like the scripts inside the lion, Jess realized now—drained a little energy from her to activate itself and dissolve the crate of the books, to reform in the Archives in Alexandria. Safe.

Khalila looked at Dario, face gone far too pale, and reached for one of the tags that Naomi held out. Around the room, Scholars were dumping books into crates, attaching Translation tags, and hurrying them to safety.

Dario took a handful of tags from the table and began attaching them to boxes. Khalila put one on the box that they’d already filled.