by A J Hackwith
“What?” The fog—desperate, longing fog—cleared in her head. Brevity stepped forward, aghast. “We can’t do that. You realize what this is? It’s not just ink. It’s—”
“Some kind of residue left over from the unwritten books we lost in the fire, yes.” Claire pronounced the words the way you’d describe an unfortunate deathbed that needed cleaning up. But this wasn’t unfortunate; it was a gift. Brevity could see that even as Claire shook her head and turned away. “After the coup, it probably pooled and drained to the Arcane Wing as the nearest reservoir of magic. It’s not books anymore, so it couldn’t stay in the Library, but I suppose enough remained to call out to the damsels and attract them.”
Hero had taken on a particular shade of white as he came to help Brevity to the desk. They were talking about bits of books as body parts. She would have time to worry about him later. For now, the horror of what Claire was saying took all her attention.
All her thoughts felt knocked into free fall. She missed things being simple: unwritten stories being books, not pools of dead ink; her friends being her friends, not estranged colleagues; Claire being a friend she called boss instead of a former boss she still tried to call friend; the Library being the vast yet total edges of her concern. It still should have been, since she’d been named head librarian. But instead of feeling more focused, she was drowning. The world was a library she could never really read.
“How are these not books?” Brevity asked. “You saw it just like I did. Of course those are books, stories—”
“Only in the way a clipped lock of hair is human.” Claire’s brow knit; then her expression hardened. “That ink is the former lifeblood of those books that died because of us. Formerly pure and full of life, now corrupted and muddled. It couldn’t even establish itself on the page, Brevity. Think it through. Obviously, the ink of a hundred books has mixed and commingled until it doesn’t even know itself. There’s nothing to salvage.”
“We can certainly try, at least.” The memory of all those books destroyed, the stories crumbling into searing ashes between her fingertips, struck at her like a lash. “The Unwritten Wing can try.”
A flinch, like ice frosting over, occurred on Claire’s face. She plucked the pen from Brevity’s hands and crossed her arms over her chest. “I can’t allow it.”
Brevity distantly registered they were slipping into a fight, slashing open old wounds along the way, but she couldn’t help the way her brow arched all the same. But it was Probity who broke the pause with a soft, curious: “Allow?”
“The reservoir of ink resides in the Arcane Wing and is therefore under Arcanist care,” Claire said.
“That’s not fair.” Hero had recovered from his shock enough to step up next to Brevity and Probity. It felt nice, having support. “These are obviously the sacred remains of books of the Unwritten Wing; therefore—”
“Sacred?” Ramiel objected. “We’re in Hell.” The stoic angel had remained quiet up till now, but he gave Hero a dismissive look, up and down and then away. He gestured broadly to the shadows of the Library stacks. “Nothing sacred or holy about this place.”
“There is no place more sacred than stories,” Probity said lowly.
“Profane remains, then.” Brevity took up Hero’s argument and he flashed her a grateful smile. “Doesn’t matter either way. Those are what remain of books of the Unwritten Wing. We have a duty to try to repair them.”
“There is no repairing that.” Claire’s cheeks had turned sallow and taut. She retrieved the vial from its resting place and cradled it against her chest, clutched in a blackened hand that trembled. “You saw how it behaved. Books are potential, Brev. Potential is power. And demons crave power. Whatever remains of those in that ink is lost and is essentially distilled power. That’s a heady drug. We can’t repair it; we can’t use it. Just its existence is a risk to the whole Library.”
“The whole Library? Or just you?” Hero snipped.
“Uncalled for. Watch your tone,” Rami growled under his breath.
Hero smiled. “Make me.”
“It’s too great a risk,” Claire repeated. “If we learned nothing else from Andras, we should have learned that.”
Brevity shook her head. “It’s a book—”
“It’s not,” Claire snapped. “It’s just ink. It’s a thing.”
“Fond of dismissing anything you find threatening as a nonhuman thing, aren’t you, warden?” Hero said with a sudden chill.
“Don’t,” Claire gritted through her teeth. “Don’t. Start.”
Hero’s shoulders stiffened. A wild protectiveness rose in Brevity. Hero was her assistant, just as Brevity had been Claire’s. What’s more, he was a character, a book of the Library, and he was hers. He was hers and the Library was hers and the books—the books were hers. “Claire. Don’t be mean.”
“I’m not!” Claire threw up her hands. “This is just . . . parts! Pieces! Bone and blood! Ink doesn’t make a story any more than paper does! This thing—”
Ink, ink and blood and the flare of a fire that destroyed everything she cherished. Andras’s laughter, and the dry slide of wyrm scales against crushed pages as the acrid smoke seized her lungs. Blocks of soot black as the Library burned. Heat washed up Brevity’s face, and the memory choked her. Probity was staring at her, suddenly full of concern. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the anger slipped out from her lips. “You don’t get it. You never got it. You don’t even see them!”
Them, the colors. The color of a story, the light that slips through the cracks of all stories. The cracks where the lights slipped out and the reader slipped in. She saw the colors in the books and the colors in the ink. Bile crept up her tongue. What they’d let happen to the books, what Claire wanted to do—to shut them away like they never existed—
A rumble shivered through her feet. The air splintered and groaned. Brevity’s eyes snapped open in time to see the faerie lights detach from the stacks and whizz in a frenzy overhead, stabbing light and shadow down on them. One whipped near enough to Claire’s face to graze a cut across her cheek. In a distant row, something toppled off a high shelf and the impact echoed. The pause frothed with the sound of ruffled pages, disquiet books.
Brevity. Brevity had done that. She’d gotten upset and the Library had responded. She gasped. “I’m sorry—”
“No.” Claire held perfectly still, a stricken look in her eyes. She waited until the air quieted again to speak, voice thin and controlled as a scalpel. “We can speak more of this when—when you’re less . . . emotional. We should go.”
Claire glanced at Rami with a brief nod that was stiff enough to shatter, then turned and strode purposefully toward the doors. Ramiel’s colorless silver gaze skipped over Probity to trace Brevity and Hero with a mournful look, but, ever the soldier, he followed at Claire’s back. The doors of the Unwritten Wing closed behind them, quiet as snowfall.
It felt as if the air deflated out of the room with them. Brevity fell into her chair and looked to see Hero sagging against the desk with a lost look. They both sat heavily in the silence, clinging to the desk as perhaps everything else felt unmoored. “What . . . what just happened?”
6
RAMI
Characters. Boss says “they’re just characters” when I press her about the damsel suite. As if characters are a “just”-ish thing to be. They’re people! Essential, intense, emotional lives, scrubbed down and stripped away and honed to a cutting edge. That’s how you fascinate a reader. Characters are more real than real. That’s what fiction is. Why else do stories make them suffer or make them change? They’re mirrors and foils. Every muse is taught that. We fall a little in love with every character we meet. Maybe the story of humanity is learning to be brave enough to be the character in their own story.
Apprentice Librarian Brevity, 2016 CE
RAMIEL HAD TAKEN TIME over the last half a y
ear to become familiar with the confounding mortal who had upended his chance at eternal rest, and the only thing he’d ascertained for sure was that Claire had precisely two forms of walking. One was purposeful, when she had a destination in mind—and she nearly always did. Back straight, chin forward, heels clicking, long, swift strides that sent the torn edges of her skirts frothing like waves.
And then there was this walk. Claire had barely paid attention to the gargoyle as they’d exited, and now she took the stairs in a silent flutter. No less swift, no less decisive, but it was as if the space she’d taken up had narrowed. Shoulders tugged in, feet placed one in front of the other as if walking on an eternal tightrope. Narrowed, focused, but drifting all the same.
It was her thinking walk. Not when Claire was just thinking—the infernal librarian was always thinking—but when she was thinking without resolution.
It’s not as if Rami knew the resolution to . . . Hell, he wasn’t even sure he was clear about what had happened. They’d discovered an anomaly, Claire had been injured, and in the librarian’s infinite illogic, that meant they’d tested that anomaly in the Unwritten Wing and everything had gone . . . askew.
Ramiel wasn’t used to disorientation. He’d worked in several dimensions of existence, after all, before the Fall. He liked to think he had a reasonably flexible perception of reality. But when Claire had placed the blackened pen point to the page, all hell (to abuse the term) had broken loose.
“Quarantine,” Claire said softly to herself. Rami waited a polite moment to confirm that she was actually addressing him before clearing his throat.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes? Oh yes, Rami. I do not like the idea of leaving a pool of that malicious ink open to the air, but we’ll need to section off that area until I can convince the wing to repair itself,” said Claire as she dropped her pen case on the worktable near the door. “And I’d feel better if we locked up the more . . . porous . . . curio items until this is all settled. Anything cloth or paper should be moved, at the very least.”
“Arcanist.”
“As part of the Library it’s going to be difficult to keep damsels out, but I think we can whip up a ward that will discourage them at the very least. Of course, it would be much easier if the Unwritten Wing had the sense to lock down and turn away visitors, but I don’t suppose we should hope for that much wisdom right now. It is our duty to crack on. We should also take care to watch the door—”
“Claire.” Rami put just enough sharpness in his voice to finally halt Claire’s tightrope pacing. She glanced up at him with an affronted look, which Rami tried to mollify with a raised hand. “What happened, up there? You’re rattled.”
“I didn’t—” Claire bit her lip before speaking further. She very carefully looked anywhere but down at her hand. “I hadn’t expected it to work. It shouldn’t have worked. Unwritten stories aren’t supposed to last beyond their books, Rami. That’s the point of the Unwritten Wing—maintaining and caring for the books. Take Hero, for example; he’s stuck as he is because his book’s been damaged. If some part of a story can survive the destruction of its book, then what really are stories made of? The repercussions . . .”
Claire trailed off. Rami waited, but she didn’t continue, instead stared distantly at the fountain pen on the table as if it were a viper. It was a sentence she wasn’t prepared to finish—or couldn’t finish—and Rami knew better than to press her. Instead, he placed it in a context that was safe for both of them. “And the responsibility of the Arcane Wing in this scenario?”
Claire snapped back to herself. “Safeguard artifacts of power. You’re right—of course you’re right,” she said, though Rami really hadn’t said anything clever. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever this is, it’s too dangerous to experiment with. Hell has always been obsessed with the Library, and if they find out about this, they’ll turn their eyes on the Arcane Wing as well. And we’re not nearly so well warded as the Unwritten Wing.”
“When are we not under threat from demons?” Rami muttered. “But Brevity and Hero seemed to think—”
“Brevity will come around. In the meantime, we have to protect them from their incorrect assumptions.” Claire diverted her eyes again and began to fiddle with a stack of papers.
“Your hand?” Rami made a placating gesture as Claire glared at him. “I only ask because it’s my duty as your assistant to understand if you are working under any . . . diminished capabilities.”
“Do I look diminished to you?” Claire’s chin jutted up, and it was such a clear echo of Hero’s pride and mannerisms, as much as she faulted him for them. A distant fondness in his chest surprised Rami, but he pressed it down. He almost missed that she’d avoided answering the question.
“You know you look never less than a force of nature to me, ma’am.” He’d discovered quickly that accurate observations, spoken as plainly and earnestly as possible, toppled Claire’s defensive airs fastest. “My concern wasn’t for your ability to keep up appearances.”
“I—” Claire stopped herself and seemed to weigh the question. Her voice was softer when she spoke again. “I will let you know, when I know myself.”
It was subtle, and shocking, but only if you understood Claire well enough. Rami thought he did. Thought he knew what a free fall it would be to feel uncertain about your mind, especially for one so certain and capable as Claire. But Rami’s nature was to guide, not press and poke. He waited, giving her the silence to say more if she chose. But the woman just met his eyes and shook her head, ever so slightly.
“I’ll be in the back. Get those artifacts isolated,” she said over her shoulder, and Claire made a tactical retreat into the depths of the collection.
* * *
* * *
“POROUS” WAS A LOOSE attribute when one’s collection of curiosities numbered in the tens of thousands. Rami had hit a snag when he’d started cross-indexing with an item’s composition material. Paper and cloth were obvious, but now he was into the leathers. A stack of waxed dragon hides mocked him from the worktable, and the furrow in his brow deepened as he considered them. Yes, ink could stain leather, but what about variations? Waxed leather? Scale and aquatic varieties? There were too many variables, and Rami was shit at making these kinds of judgment calls.
On reflection, it should have been no surprise that he was a failure as an angel.
The great doors of the wing creaked on their hinges. Rami glanced up only long enough to frown at Hero’s face before focusing back on his work. “Don’t you ever have real work to do?”
“Watcher! Look at you, so industrious. Just the man I wanted to find. Odd thing, isn’t it?” Hero said as he approached, as if he hadn’t heard Rami. As if Rami was the kind of person Hero frequently sought conversation with. “Bits of book existing—surviving—that the librarians knew nothing about?”
“Not really.” Rami eyed Hero as the character made a circuitous route of the worktable. “A travesty like Andras’s failed coup has never been attempted before.”
Hero paused, leaning down to inspect some petrified fingers that lay on a bed of velvet on a side table. “Perhaps not on that scale, but surely books have been lost before. Mishandling, accident, all those distinctly human errors.”
The finger bones had a paralytic curse attached to them, Rami recalled. He should really warn Hero. “Are you trying to make a point, or simply enjoying the sound of your own voice?”
“Better than your endless stoicism. I swear, it’s like a dull blade against stone.”
He definitely wasn’t going to warn Hero. The fingers were only a little paralytic, after all. Rami shrugged. “How else do you keep a blade sharp?”
Hero’s fingertips paused over the artifact and surprise tugged at the arch of his brow. “Repartee? I didn’t think you had it in you, old boy.”
“Don’t call me boy,” Rami grumbled. “I’m older than you
r maker’s maker. You have a point, don’t you?”
A clever look bloomed on Hero’s face. “Why, yes, I do. Cheeky of you to ask.”
Rami stared for a beat until the salacious edge of Hero’s smile sank in. “You . . .” He needed to clear his throat. “Save it for the damsels.”
“Not when I know it irritates. I’m quite aware how repellent I am to you.” Hero hummed. Rami steeled himself for another round of endless nattering, but instead Hero braced his hands on the table between them and leaned forward. “Never mind that. As I was saying . . . it raises the question, what else does the Library not know? What really are unwritten books?”
Nonporous; that decided it. The dragon hide was scaly, and coated in enough dark magic that it could fend for itself. Rami sniffed. “You are one. You should be able to tell me.”
The lightness dropped from Hero’s face in increments. “You would think so, wouldn’t you? I could tell you every inkblot and footnote about my story, of course. But my book itself? Contrary to the poetry the librarians spout, the medium is different from the message. At least in this case.” His face flickered before settling into something uncommonly serious. “I have a right to wonder about what I am, don’t I?”
Rami shifted, folding his arms in front of himself for lack of something to do. As much as he liked to discount Hero’s behavior for plots and antics, there was something disconcertingly earnest about him just now. And Ramiel always did have trouble ignoring earnest appeals for help. “Then shouldn’t you be assisting Brevity with her research?” It’s what he was supposed to be doing himself right now. For Claire. Yes, that was something safe to do. Rami abruptly grabbed the inventory log and walked toward the rows of storage.
Hero’s footsteps followed behind him. Rami tried not to notice how much less springy and more purposeful they sounded now, soft, solid clicks against the hardwood. “With the Unwritten Wing and Arcane at odds, I don’t think an answer is set to be found. Not here.”
