91
Athanasius and Father Thomas reached the top of the stairs and stopped, listening to the still darkness of the upper mountain chambers. By the time Athanasius had retrieved torches and the key to the staircase Malachi had a five-minute head start on them.
“He’ll get to the library long before we will,” Thomas said through grabbed breaths, “then he’ll lock the reading room door behind him.”
Athanasius nodded. “We should make for the main entrance, it’s nearer. How quickly do you think you can break in?”
“If we’re not worried about tripping any alarms it will be easy.”
“I think the time for stealth has passed,” Athanasius said, and started to descend.
It took them ten long minutes to snake down the stairs and reach the library. Athanasius leaned against the wall, relishing the cold of the rock as Thomas prised the hand scanner off the wall with his pocketknife, bared two wires and touched them together.
The door slid open with a hiss and a puff of air, showing that the positive pressure within the climate-controlled library was still active. It was designed to keep mold spores and other undesirables out of the air surrounding the priceless collection of texts. It would also be an effective way of slowing the penetration of the airborne infection into the library. Malachi was clearly being selective about exactly which parts of modernity he was turning his back on.
Thomas stepped forward and looked up, bracing himself for the shriek of the intruder alarm. “He must have deactivated the motion sensors,” Thomas said when none came. “That’s why the lights are not working.”
Athanasius moved past him, heading into the main collection. It was a strange experience, moving through the library without the usual glow of a follow light. The sweep of their flashlight beams revealed much more than he had ever seen before. The follow lights usually only allowed one to glimpse isolated parts, so seeing it in its enormous entirety like this, the enormous bookcases filled with every great thought mankind had ever had, made him profoundly sad: it was like finding a whale kept captive in a tank when it was used to having the whole ocean to roam in.
“Reading rooms,” Thomas said, shining his torch over to a set of doors up ahead. Athanasius reached the door to the reading room of the Sancti and twisted the handle. “Locked. Do you think he’s passed through already?”
Something clattered to the floor in the distance, giving them their answer, and they hurried after it. The noises continued as they made their way through the library. It sounded like some great creature was lumbering through the dark, bumping into everything as it made its way. They passed into the next chamber and discovered the cause of the noise. There were books everywhere, swept from the shelves by the armful onto the floor. It was as if a horde of vandals had ransacked the place, pulling everything from the shelves and shredding the pages.
“Why is he doing this?” Thomas surveyed the devastation as they moved through it. “No one loves the library more than Malachi. It makes no sense for him to do this.”
“I don’t think he is in full possession of his senses. I think his world has fallen apart and this is a manifestation of it.”
They rounded a corner and saw light up ahead, coming from inside the Crypto Revelatio.
“Malachi!” Athanasius called out. “We just want to talk.” He switched off his flashlight and inched down the corridor toward the light, the room beyond the arch coming gradually into view. It was in even greater chaos than the rest of the library, with books and piles of paper spilling out of the door into the corridor. “There’s only one way out of there, Malachi. It’s a dead end. If you don’t come out then we will come in.”
“Stay back,” Malachi’s voice boomed from the chamber.
“We’re just here to talk. We want to help you but we need to understand what you read in the Starmap that has made you do this to your beloved library, and try and take a man’s life.”
“That is no man.”
Athanasius glanced over at Thomas, who was inching his way forward along the other side of the tunnel. “For mercy’s sake, Malachi, tell us what you read.”
“It doesn’t matter, it’s too late anyway. You should have let me kill it before it becomes too strong.”
Athanasius reached the edge of the arch and peered into the room. It was a riot of mess, the neat order of the library turned into a scene of chaos with shelves half emptied and the floor crammed with paper and scrolls like the nest of a huge rodent. Malachi sat at the center of it behind a desk piled high with more paper and illuminated by a row of guttering candles.
“Tell me what you read, Malachi. Let us look at it together and perhaps we will see something different in it.”
Malachi looked up, his eyes huge behind the pebbled lenses. “You are wrong,” he said, picking up another candle and holding the wick to the flame of the last one. “You have been wrong all along, wrong about modernizing the Citadel, wrong about allowing civilians inside the mountain.” The wick caught and he turned the candle in his hand until the flame grew brighter. “And wrong about there being only one way out of here.”
He dropped the candle into a pile of paper and it erupted in a whoosh of flame. Athanasius leaped forward to try and stamp it out but Malachi stood up fast, heaving the table over as he did so, tipping the row of candles onto more piles of dry paper to create an instant wall of flame.
Father Thomas looked up at the ceiling, expecting the CO2 system to activate and smother the fire. But nothing happened. Malachi had deactivated that too. He grabbed Athanasius and heaved him backward. “We need to get out of here.”
“And you are also wrong to think you have stopped me,” Malachi shouted after them from inside the inferno, smoke rising up around him as his cassock started to burn. “There is more than one way to kill a demon.”
92
Athanasius staggered backward from the entrance, disbelieving the horror of what he had just seen. Already the smoke was thick in the air and the fire was spreading from the Crypto Revelatio, igniting pages from spilled books lined up along the corridor in readiness.
“Run!” Thomas shouted.
“But Malachi…”
“Malachi is gone. He cannot be saved, we must do what we can to save the library.” He kicked a pile of books aside, trying to create a firebreak, but there was too much loose paper lying around and the flames caught them instead and sent burning embers floating through the air toward the tinderbox of the next chamber. “Positive air pressure is feeding the fire,” Thomas shouted above the roaring flames. “Our best hope is to get back to the control room and turn the gas extinguishers on before the whole thing goes up.”
They stumbled away from the fire, feeling the heat at their backs and tasting smoke in their mouths. The main entrance was a fifteen-minute walk away, maybe five minutes’ running, but they were both exhausted and Athanasius was also in deep shock from what he had witnessed. He could not get the image of Malachi out of his mind, eyes blazing in victory, ecstasy almost, as he himself started to burn.