Ink and Bone

The Obscurist Magnus, in her final communication with me, urged me to continue the seclusion of the Iron Tower, for the protection of those within, who are under special threat from Burners and other heretics. I shall honour her request, and I trust you will do the same.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The open ground between the Welsh front lines and the city walls of Oxford was nothing but mud … churned constantly by Welsh assaults, beaten and mixed by the rain that still fell, though it was more of an a

The sickly rotten smell of the battlefield overwhelmed him to the point that he no longer noticed it; he had much more to concern himself with now. On top of the Oxford walls – new walls, strong walls, built of solid granite and reinforced with iron bands – stood English troops, and they pointed their weapons straight at the steadily advancing Library party.

Wolfe had taken a telescoping pole from his pack and attached the Library ba

The Library took no chances.

No one fired on them, but the massive metal gates didn’t open, either. The road that had once brought the city’s trade and travel had been destroyed, and fragments of it were buried in the mud, all too easy to stumble over; more than one of their number went down as they clambered through the rubble, but nobody seemed injured, and the students clustered at the gates behind Wolfe and Santi. Santi’s High Garda soldiers surrounded them in a solid black, heavily armed block.

Morgan looked small and cold to the bone as she stood there, staring up at the city that had been her home. Not a happy event for her, and she seemed very alone even in the middle of their group. Jess moved to stand next to her. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t think she would welcome it, or his pity.

Santi pulled a parade ground voice from deep in his chest and shouted, ‘Open in the name of the Library!’ It echoed and rang from the stone and metal, and with divine timing, thunder rumbled overhead.

Nothing happened. Jess felt as if he were sinking slowly into the mud, and tried to pull his feet out, but it only made him more uncomfortable. The minutes crawled by. Black flies buzzed, and there was a worse stench to the mud here that pushed insistently at his empty stomach: death, blood, rotting flesh. Surely there were fallen men lost under that churn. Jess had a sickening feeling he might be standing on top of one. We could join them, he thought. Under the mud. Forgotten. Just like Warlow said.

He was understanding in an entirely new way what Wolfe had been trying to teach them … that the Library was not just the bloodless work of making vast stores of information available to the masses; it was defending that information against this. Death. War. Destruction. It had all seemed so much easier in the safety of a classroom, smugly discussing the days when the Library had been vulnerable to this kind of chaos, when knowledge had vanished in flames and the cries of fanatics.

It had been unthinkable it could still happen in modern times.

Their party seemed so small, but that, too, was part of the message the Library was sending … that it didn’t need to dispatch an army. Harm any of its people, and the army would surely follow, as Khalila’s recitation of the story of Austria proved. The leaders behind this massive wall must have been weighing those lessons carefully.

Wolfe and Santi waited with patience, and Jess tried to imitate that calm certainty. It paid off at last as a voice called down, ‘Step back from the gates!’

Wolfe turned to them and nodded, and they all backed away to avoid the swing of the huge metal-clad doors as they moved open. They were on some kind of steam-driven mechanism, and behind the doors was a portcullis of steel mesh that slowly cranked upward as the Library party walked forward. As he came even with the gateposts, Jess realised there were soldiers standing on either side of them, arranged so as to avoid any potential crossfire. This was a killing zone.

The gates reversed course behind them and cranked shut with a heavy boom that Jess felt through his bones and boots … but all that faded away – the soldiers, the guns, the mud, the rain, the nerves – because crowded ahead, just beyond the next gate, were the people of Oxford.

There were so many, and they were so shockingly thin.

Khalila, who was pressed at his side, whispered, ‘How long has this siege been going on?’ She sounded shaken, and so was he. The misery was written on their faces, on their shrunken bodies dressed in worn and dirty clothes. The children were the worst of it, and he had to look away, because children shouldn’t be so thin and ill. Even in the worst of London, it hadn’t been so bad as this.

‘Too long,’ Thomas answered. He was on the other side of Khalila, and his expression reflected all the anguish he must have been feeling. ‘Mein Gott, look at them. They’re dying.’

‘No quarter,’ Jess said. ‘They’re all under a death sentence.’

‘Easy for their king to say, safe in London,’ Glain said. ‘He’d be begging for surrender if this was happening in Buckingham Palace.’

‘Stop your chatter,’ Santi snapped. ‘We have a job to do. Stay together and stay quiet.’ He sounded tense, and coming from the always-calm captain, it had the impact of a closed fist.