by A J Hackwith
“Look,” Rosia breathed.
The helpless steps Claire had taken had brought her close enough to see it clearly. The ink wasn’t moving; something was moving across it. Movement spiraled out from the shadow the hand cast on the surface. Claire caught figures and shapes. Then she caught a flash of blond and velvet that she’d seen earlier and gasped.
The figure was still, but the surface of its skin was in constant motion. The static flux of its appearance had picked up speed. Claire began to pick out a pattern in what had seemed random noise before. She caught a glimpse of the gingham-print dress on the figure’s shoulder. It flickered and blinked, replicating all over its torso before slowly sequencing down the extended arm. The hand became slender and pale for a moment, and a new image spiraled out across the ink surface. A tall woman in a prairie dress strode purposefully through moonlit fields of grain, sickle in hand.
“Oh, how nice,” Rosia whispered.
The stranger wasn’t stirring up the ink; it was communing with it. Making some kind of transfer of . . . data? Memory? Claire didn’t know what, but she needed it to stop right now. Rosia leaned ever closer to the pool’s edge in the flickering shadow the every-person cast. Bravery and foolishness go hand in hand, and she was already displaying one of the two, so—
“Stop!” Claire pulled Rosia back with one hand and shoved the every-person by the shoulder to create space. She was half-surprised when her hand didn’t pass straight through. The figure only straightened to its feet, so smoothly that Claire forgot to remove her hand. The constant change of texture beneath her fingers was alarming, but she gripped and twisted them around to face her. “Who— What are you?”
The every-person’s arm lowered and it resumed its random jittering, but for one brief moment a single face resolved with dipped brows and begging eyes. Pleading, then hurt, then angry.
“They are us,” Rosia whispered with a bereft note. “You’re still not listening.”
“They haven’t said anything!”
“I’m listening,” Rosia continued. “They’re alone, sad. They want to be more. They are more, but everyone’s forgotten. I’ll remember, I’ll listen—I’m more too.”
“Don’t touch—” A flicker of movement started in the corner of her eye. Claire focused on where her ink-blackened hand had gripped their shoulder. Armies of figures twisted and raced across the stain—across her skin. It was hers—it was hers—wasn’t it?
Claire released her grip, flinching to stumble back and away from the shifting flow of strangers. Her breath was coming in gasps, so there was nothing left in her lungs when the every-person held its hand out to Rosia, who took it without hesitation. The every-person looked at Claire sadly, wrapped a protective arm around Rosia, and pulled them into the bottomless pool of ink.
“Ros—”
There was no splash, no ripple, not even more phantom figures dancing across the surface. The ink parted, creating a gap of space around Rosia as they passed, and closed over her head without a sound.
Claire rushed to the edge of the pool, heedless of the roiling way the ink churned as she approached. That was the only movement in the silence that followed as Claire tried to process what had happened. The space where Rosia had fallen was still as a mirror. No thrashing, no struggle of life. Rosia was gone beyond reach.
She’d failed to protect another damsel, another book. The sound that cracked up Claire’s throat was a delirious giggle. The panic and terror were a film on top of giddy exhaustion, like soap on a bubble, held at bay until everything popped. She couldn’t let it pop. She couldn’t.
The ink had drawn away from Rosia. Claire replayed what had just occurred again in her mind to be sure. She forced the memory to advance, frame by frame. The every-person had seemed protective, and the ink had seemed to align with that. Rosia had been certain, and then she’d been gone.
Maybe not gone. Claire held on to that idea like a lifeline. Rosia was in there; she would get Rosia back. Because the alternative was failing, again.
Claire straightened from the pool as she recalled Rosia’s words: It wants to be more. More what, then? More than a ghost?
It was then that Claire remembered that ghost stories usually had unsatisfactory endings. She had loss but no closure. She had an unsettled fear but no answers. She did, however, have a pool of questions. She would stop hiding from them.
Ghosts, Rosia had said. If it was time to hunt ghosts, she first needed to put her own to rest.
9
RAMI
I have the wing to rights, as far as I understand it. The books sleep; the demons stay at a distance. Even Revka, the stone woman, seems to approve. Everything makes sense, except why this place should exist at all. And why in a place of suffering? The logbook is no help; it shows me words just cryptic enough to increase my questions.
I am in a world of damnation. I should not borrow trouble. But my mother taught me the viper that one doesn’t follow to its hole is the viper that bites you.
Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 602 CE
IT’D BEEN UNUSUALLY EASY to explain his absence to Claire. He’d found the Arcanist near the front of the wing, staring with some indecision at the doors. She’d jumped when Rami cleared his throat.
“Rami. Right,” Claire said briskly, though Rami hadn’t said anything that required agreement. “I have a task for you.”
“Ma’am?” Rami had been gearing up to explain his absence, but Claire disappeared down the aisle at a brisk pace. Rami had to lengthen his stride to catch up. “Has something happened?”
“No!” Claire responded immediately and, if possible, quickened her pace even more. “No, of course not. It just occurred to me that there was an artifact overlooked that should go in quarantine.”
Rami grimaced. “The waxed dragon scales? I apologize, ma’am, but it seemed like an edge case—”
“I’m not—” Claire paused outside her private alcove and gave Rami a querulous look. “I wasn’t talking about the dragon scales. Not your fault at all. This one isn’t on the official inventory, after all.”
“Not—” Rami caught his breath as Claire pulled a key from her skirts and opened the bottommost drawer. Six months of disuse made the unoiled rails screech, and Bird complained from somewhere in the rafters above them. At the bottom of the drawer, the tip of a small blade poked out from beneath a tower of discarded paper scraps, like the fang of a viper. “Claire, are you sure? You said the safest place for that . . .”
“Was out of sight, forgotten. I know.” It had to be the dimmer light in the alcove that made Claire look abruptly pale. Her gaze flicked around nervously before she appeared to remember herself. “But if this ink is a lingering threat from the coup, I want him secured far away from it.” Claire studied an indefinite point on the desk. “And me.”
“You?” Rami considered his accumulated observations and the nervy tension in Claire’s face. “You mean you are afraid to touch it.”
“Really, Rami! I hold a cautious misgiving about touching it, with my stained hand,” Claire corrected, a shadow of her imperious self shaking her mood. She sniffed. “As if I would grant Andras the gift of my fear. He’s unworthy.”
“I agree.” Rami stepped forward to take the dagger artifact that contained the essence of their fallen enemy—once friend, as Rami had understood it, though he had been no friend of any demon. Claire stepped back, knocking the arm of her chair against the wall. She hid the moment she flinched in a grimace.
“I’ll wrap it and place it in the very back of the vault,” Rami said slowly. The exposed blade was chill in his palm, but no colder than any polished metal. He hesitated at the alcove entrance, but Claire didn’t meet his gaze. “Andras is gone and can threaten no one now. He’s dead, Claire. Or as good as dead.”
“Yes, well . . . the dead do have a way of making a nuisance of themselves when it comes to me.” Claire
’s smile was too tight to avoid being a grimace.
“It only seems that way,” Rami soothed as he tucked the knife away, watching as Claire visibly relaxed once it was out of sight. “I think we do the haunting to ourselves. Death keeps its own secrets.”
Claire sighed, nodding defeat if not agreement. “We do. And Death—”
Her chin froze midmotion and her gaze sharpened enough to send a prickle of alarm up Rami’s neck. “Claire?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Just a passing thought to consider.” Claire straightened, and she appeared so much more her old self that Rami didn’t dare question it. She made a shooing motion. “Get that in the vault, if you please.”
* * *
* * *
IT WAS A CAREFUL matter storing what was effectively the Arcane Wing’s most notorious prisoner in the archive vaults. Rami was grateful for it. It gave him time to formulate the careful way he would broach Hero’s proposed lead with Claire.
“I’d like to look into some things,” Ramiel said after finding Claire near the ink reservoir. She appeared to have gathered her calm again and had convinced the wing to repair the floor to something resembling a small—if incredibly gothic-looking—reflecting pool for the ink. She stared into it with what appeared to be expectation—as if the ink could talk to her. Abruptly, she nodded and took off for her alcove.
Rami followed and began to wrestle with the fear that now was a poor time to leave the mortal woman alone with her thoughts. “Claire?”
Claire looked up from the prodigious stack of books with which she had fortified her desk. For all Andras’s duplicity, he’d kept exacting notes on every artifact in the wing, which Claire had only begun to sift through. “Things?” she said, as if no time had passed. “You’ve run across something like the ink before?”
“No,” Ramiel said truthfully. “Whatever this is, it’s unique to the Library.”
“Then what do you hope to find that you can’t share with me?”
“We intend to make discreet inquiries into the other libraries.” Ramiel saw no reason to lie. Which was good because he had been told, repeatedly, that he was terrible at it. He had accepted it as a flaw of being burdened with a divine nature in Hell.
“And the last time I left the realm it was a minor scandal,” Claire said with the grace of an understatement.
Rami smiled. “It was a minor scandal on our end too.”
“Everything is a scandal to Heaven.” On another’s lips, that word might have made Rami flinch, but Claire had a clear-eyed way of looking at him that steadied him. Contentment, to be here of all places, was a radical novelty in Rami’s life. Claire had no idea of the miracle that was. Instead she made a sour face, which was so familiar it dispersed Rami’s previous concerns. “I have no idea how paradise realms can even get anything done with that much inefficiency.”
“I believe it’s viewed as ethics.”
“Inefficiency.” Claire straightened the books in front of her before a thought occurred to her with a sharp glance. “You said ‘we.’” She squinted. “Hero’s dragging you along.”
“For the sake of my dignity, let us say it’s more of a strategic escort.” Ramiel didn’t think he made a face, but Claire snorted a withering kind of amusement. At least it served to center her. Her face took on a more present kind of focus. She gestured, and Rami handed her the teapot to refill her empty cup; then she offered him a clean one. The air filled with the metallic drift of Darjeeling—perhaps with a Ceylon blend? Rami had never developed the taste for it, but he knew his teas now, evidently. Claire’s personality was of such force that education on such things came with her acquaintance. “From what I understand of his logic, it is sound. I believe his intentions are in earnest.”
“And has he gotten permission from Brev for these earnest intentions?”
“Not in so many words,” Ramiel admitted. The teacup was pleasantly warm against the calluses on his palms. He took a tentative sip—yes, still tasted like old water to him—while he fought the ridiculous urge to defend Hero. “He could have run before now, if that was his intent.”
“True.” Claire’s mouth executed a brittle twist that wasn’t entirely without fondness. “If I was still librarian, I’d be concerned.”
“And as the Arcanist?”
“I’m recreationally skeptical,” Claire admitted behind the rim of her teacup. “Be careful. Hero isn’t nearly as hard as he plays at being.”
Rami sighed. “No, he’s quite a bit sharper.”
“He grows on you. Like a barnacle.”
“A lesion,” Rami suggested helpfully.
The laugh surprised Claire enough that it diverted into a cough. Once she had regained her composure, she set her tea down. Her expression turned thoughtful as she appeared to search his face for insight. “I’ve grown to care about him, nonetheless.”
Rami looked down into his mostly full cup. It would not be very angelic to scuff his shoes, no matter how much the dip in his stomach told him to. “I know.”
Porcelain on wood clicked as Claire shuffled her undrunk tea aside to select a book from the stack. A patently false gesture, as Rami knew Claire never kept her tea on a reading surface for fear of spilling it. It distracted him from her next words. “Just as I care about you.”
Rami startled. “I beg your pardon?”
He had no idea what his face was doing in that moment—Claire had a way of dipping around his guard. But whatever Claire saw made her lips quirk. She nodded smugly to herself. “All right. You may have it.”
It wasn’t proper. The thousands of years of etiquette Ramiel had on Claire escaped him in a confused noise.
“My pardon, I mean. For whatever foolishness you and Hero are about to get up to.” Claire settled back into her chair, flipping through the initial pages of her book without reading them. “In return, I want both of you to come back. No heroics, and I expect you to ensure that you present yourselves again in one piece. Both of you.”
Rami felt like he was missing an important undercurrent of the conversation. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Humans were always evolving new ways of not saying what they meant. He had thought he knew most of them, until he met Claire. “Ma’am? I mean, Claire—are you feeling—”
“You’re always so straightforward, Ramiel.” Claire’s smile was soft with exhaustion and, perhaps, fondness. “It makes it easier to return the favor. Let’s just say this most recent threat has left me feeling inconveniently impulsive and tired of my own games. It has left me irresponsibly open to considering what I want.” Claire slumped back into her chair. Two black fingers toyed with the tattered edge of a page. It drew attention to the ink stain against paper the color of old bone. She pulled her fingers away as if they’d been burned. “Perhaps you should consider the same, Rami.”
“What I want?” Rami echoed.
“Don’t look so confused. You’re not trying to get into Heaven anymore. You’re surrounded by mortals and books and gods know what else. You’re allowed to want things now. Give it a try; you might find it grows on you. Like a barnacle.”
There was a precise conversation Claire was having, and there were the words Rami was hearing. He felt the two were rather removed from each other. Some vital part of his brain had gone into free fall, so he only managed an eloquent nod.
“Good.” Claire turned her attention back to her desk. “Go. Be careful and bring both of you home.”
“I’ll see to it,” Ramiel promised with some relief. And he did—promise. Hero might have been an ass with overconfidence in his charms, but Rami had sworn to protect all the residents of the Library. That included stunningly perplexing dead women and insufferable men with broken books.
10
HERO
The Library is hiding something. I’m certain of it. But an immortal secret is not going to be solved by one soul. So I put
forth the charge to you, future librarians: discover the secret of the Library’s existence. Take what I’ve learned and add your own under the log index entry Myrrh. In my time, it was that which was sought after for medicine, knowledge, and purification. Knowledge purifies. We serve no one with ignorance.
I believe this little logbook can hold our secrets secure. And maybe one day, it will hold the truth as well.
Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 603 CE
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING made from a book, Hero had decided, was that everyone thought they could read you. The firmly held belief that they could look at you, read you once, and know the entirety of your contents for eternity. That a book was simply the sum of the text on its pages.
It certainly felt like more than that, from the inside. Hero resented the simplification of it. The way Claire and Brevity nattered between them, dissecting terms with important capitalizations like Narrative and Story and Point of View. As if as a character his thoughts were prescripted, and he was merely a composition of cogs and bits to be taken apart and reassembled.
Granted, they never talked about him in specific in this manner, but being the exception was no comfort. It felt condescending, like a hall pass. At his heart he knew he was still a story. A story with a broken book, but a story.
He didn’t know where that left him anymore. Not immutable but also not a cold assemblage of parts. Perhaps he was a draft, half-born but unfinished. Unruly and unfixable. Yes, Hero could definitely be that.
It was in this particularly sour frame of mind that Hero found Rami skulking around the entrance to the Arcane Wing.
“About time.” Hero barely paused midstep to stride past the doors and down the hallway. He was gratified to hear Rami scramble to his feet behind him. Claire had done that trick enough to him. “I’ve bought some time, but if Brevity recalls me in the middle of an inquiry it’ll be disastrous. We should get moving.”
