The drive to DC took twelve hours.
Two days at the Library of Congress with little success. Scraps. References. Nothing concrete.
London was worse.
The British Library had nothing they couldn't find online. The museums had artifacts Yosef identified as Tartarian, bells, fabrics, ornate metalwork, water vessels with no moving parts, but nothing anyone else would see as proof.
"Stockholm's next," Lyra said on their last day in London.
"Maybe we'll have better luck there," Yosef said.
They flew to Stockholm two days later.
The National Library of Sweden felt different the moment they walked in. Quieter. Older. Like knowledge itself had settled here and refused to leave.
Lyra approached the desk and asked to see periodicals from 1850 and older.
The librarian was an impossibly old man. The kind of old that looked exactly like somebody's grandfather, soft eyes, slow movements, a cardigan that had seen better decades. But there was something underneath it. Something you felt rather than saw.
He smiled, pushing his false teeth down into his gums with his bottom lip.
"I bet you would like to see the restricted pieces as well?" he said.
If you would like to know what happens you can read the rest of the story, chapters 13 and 14, right here: https://www.patreon.com/cw/ABRAXAS369