The Archive of the Forgotten

by A J Hackwith

  “I am a . . . part of the Library, yes,” Hero said instead.

  “An integral part, even,” Ramiel muttered, and Hero was too surprised to glare at him. That he’d chosen now of all times to gain a sense of humor was really impossibly rude.

  Iambe nodded. “You’ll be here to speak to Echo, then.”

  “Echo?”

  “The librarian—our librarian. Of the Unsaid Wing,” Iambe said, and tilted her head. “What brings the Unwritten Wing out of seclusion?”

  “Just Library business,” Hero said. He knew feigned uninterest when he saw it. Gods could only hope that Ramiel hadn’t blabbed the entire predicament with the ink before he’d arrived. “Could we be brought to Librarian Echo, then? Or is there another test to pass?”

  “Test?” Iambe laughed, gaze flicking briefly to the copper-colored cat that shadowed Hero’s steps. “You arrive escorted by a Fury. They saw fit to let you live—how did you pull that off, might I ask? You’re not the typical sort of hero we get around here.”

  “You have no idea,” Ramiel muttered under his breath. Muttering. He’d done a lot of that since they’d got here. Hero ignored him.

  “They ambushed me at the bridge—I didn’t get much time to make an impression.” Hero shrugged. “I wrestled that one, for little good it did me, and the others seemed to back off.”

  “You wrestled Alecto, in her feral form?” That appeared to draw Pallas into speaking again. His eyes widened and became even brighter, if that was even possible. “Alecto is the strongest of the pride—and ceaseless in a fight. She never gives quarter.”

  “Unless she finds something too familiar to her tastes to destroy.” Iambe hummed. Her voice was light and syrupy, but her gaze picked Hero over with new suspicion. “She’s the Fury of rage, did you know?”

  “I didn’t,” Hero said, now uncomfortably aware of the she-beast in his shadow. He wasn’t sure whether he was being escorted or stalked. “Perhaps she just took to my charms.”

  The lioness let out a low sound at that, halfway between a purr and a warning growl. It seemed to confirm whatever suspicion Iambe held. She smiled. “Have a trouble with your darker passions, Hero?”

  The name might have been self-selected in sarcasm, but it sounded positively mocking when the Greek spirit said it. Hero stiffened, but Ramiel raised a hand before he could respond. “Peace, my lady.” He took a half step, as if drawing Iambe’s gaze from Hero. “You said we could be granted an audience with your librarian?”

  “Yes,” Pallas said quickly. He also watched Hero with a new shine, but it wasn’t quite as carnivorous as his sister’s. He leapt to his feet and fluttered a hand over his chiton before motioning to the open walkway that led inside. “Mother will be pleased for visitors.”

  “Yes, she gets so little good conversation these days.” Iambe’s laugh was sharp, as if she’d just made a joke. Pallas spared them an uneasy look as he held aside the curtain and motioned them inside.

  12

  CLAIRE

  The people to the south declared the time before now Jahiliyyah: a time of ignorance and darkness. If this place has really been abandoned and without care since the previous librarian, then that term may be appropriate. I understand enough now to imagine what damage might have come to stories left uncared for during that dark time. Muses abandoned without direction, books corrupting neighboring pages, forgetting themselves. The only reason no books were lost was because the entire wing was locked down.

  Stories need a teller. Books need a reader. These unlived lives are nothing without humanity to anchor them, breathe life into the missing parts.

  Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 609 CE

  BIRD WINGED ALONG THE shadowed passage ahead of Claire, coming to rest on the scarred triple-wheel carving that loomed over the door to the transportation department. Claire hesitated in the shadow of the arch. Granite-heavy footsteps creeped against the floorboards, punctuated by the glittering tinkle of glass jars. Walter resembled a small boulder crouched behind the counter when Claire entered the room.

  “Miss Lib— Miss Claire! Ma’am.” Walter punctuated his greeting with startled movements. He jolted upright, clutched the jar in his hands too tight, barely managing to set it down again before it could shatter. The whorls of nothing in his eye sockets appeared to spin particularly fast as he glanced around the small travel office and said again, “Ma’am.”

  “Am I interrupting something, Walter?” Claire paused at the threshold, hands folded in front of her as she took in the state of the office. The arching walls were peppered with shelves, which were lined with row upon row of clear glass jars full of colored smoke. That was usual. What was unusual was the zigzag of lines through the air. Colors exploded and skidded away from their jars like comet tails, twisting and knotting with others before fading into the gloom.

  Walter’s innocent look was composed of red teeth and bulbous scars, but it was authentic all the same. “No, ma’am. Just doing a bit of tidying up.”

  “Tidying up?” Claire stepped to the side as a spiral of persimmon orange floated toward her head. “Really, Walter, your jars are bleeding everywhere.”

  “Bleed—” Walter straightened so quickly a flight path of lime green had to divert around him in a tight corkscrew maneuver. The void in his eyes slowed nearly to a stop as he stared at Claire. “You can see that, ma’am? You never said ya could—” His gaze tracked down to Claire’s stained hand and stopped. It was a peculiar feeling when something as large as Walter froze in place. “Miss Claire, I reckon you got a story to tell me.”

  A sigh welled up in Claire’s chest, and with it every dreg of exhaustion she’d tamped down since seeing Rosia disappear into the ink pool in the Arcane Wing. Walter produced a stool from behind the counter, and Claire retold the tale with her hands folded carefully on the claw-scarred countertop, ink black over soft brown.

  By the time she reached the argument with Brevity, Walter’s brows had descended to nearly meet his nose. “You got yourself in a muddle.”

  Claire’s lips quirked. “Well, if Death says it’s a muddle, then it must be bad.”

  “I’m being serious. Serious as Sundays.” Walter hunched over, squinting at her hand with an earnest intensity. He gestured to the line of inspiration holding back the black. “That stopgap the others jury-rigged. It ain’t gonna hold forever, ma’am.”

  “And what happens when it doesn’t? Since you seem to know so much about it.” Claire regretted the question as the sorrow sank into the nooks and crevices of Walter’s face. She cleared her throat and moved on. “That’s not precisely why I came to see you anyway. I—”

  “Why don’t you make up with Miss Brevity?” Walter asked.

  Bird made a noise that was akin to a goose being gently murdered, as if she was seconding the question. Claire’s smile became strained. “There’s nothing to make up, Walter. Brevity and I are fine.”

  “If’n you were fine, she’d be here with you,” Walter said with solemnity.

  “The Unwritten Wing has their own affairs, I’m sure. Brevity—” Brevity needed to be protected. Claire could not stand to be the cause of another ghost haunting Brev’s eyes. She just couldn’t. She pursed her lips around the words. “Brevity is too . . . distracted at the moment.”

  It was true, even if not the truth. Claire thought again about the assessment in Probity’s first glance and the way the visiting muse was genial to Rami and Hero but curdled around the edges the moment Claire entered the room. When she’d been stained, it felt as if the visitor had helped against personal preference. The Muses Corps had never been her closest allies, even when she was librarian. But she hadn’t believed she’d warranted that kind of loathing, professionally.

  Which left something personal. Claire simply did not have the time or temperament to deal with the personal. She was not inclined to tease out why some random muse didn’t care f
or her. It appeared she cared for Brevity with a sincere fondness from a long shared history. That was enough. At least it would serve to keep Brevity company while Hero and Ramiel jaunted off on Hero’s half-baked excuse to get out of the Library, and Claire got to the real work of solving the problem of the ink.

  “It is for that reason I am attempting to find answers,” Claire finished, turning the strain in her voice into an overprecise tone that sounded wrong even to her ears. “I should have consulted with you sooner, Walter. I do apologize. Since Andras’s coup attempt I have been . . . preoccupied.”

  “You been hiding.”

  “I’ve been working.” Claire allowed the sharp edge to turn into a prickle now. “As you would know if you and the rest of Hell hadn’t been mysteriously absent in our time of need.”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted me there, Miss Claire,” Walter said solemnly. “Not many people do.”

  “Walter . . .” Claire started but quieted as he raised his beefy hands.

  “Nah, ma’am. I don’t mean it like that. The nature of what I am—” His lips pulled tight, into a small smile that was unintentionally ghoulish. “No one invites me in, if they can help it. I’m glad I wasn’t there.”

  “I understand what you mean.” Claire knew they’d come right up to the cutting edge of losing Hero. Leto. Even herself. But the rows of bodies turned to ash drifted to the forefront of her mind again, like a cloud. “But Death was there, with, or without, invitation. We lost so many.”

  “Oh. I’m not supposed ta take sides,” Walter confided in a whisper. “But I don’t reckon those demon critters consider it much of a loss.”

  “I wasn’t—” Claire frowned. “I was talking about the damsels. The books.”

  “Oh.” Walter stopped and diverted a constipated look at his knuckles. “Right. Right.”

  Giant shoulders strained at the seams of his suit as he abruptly found a jar on the opposite wall that was an inch out of alignment. Walter was not a paragon of subterfuge even at the best of times, so Claire allowed him a full minute of nervous fiddling before she chased after him. “Walter. You don’t know anything about the destruction of the books and this ink that’s turned up, do you? Because we’ve been friends for a long time. I know a friend would tell me if he had information to help.”

  Walter’s shoulders twitched up to his ears. His thumb assiduously blotted a speck of dirt off the jar named Martha’s Vineyard.

  “Walter?” Claire leaned her hands on the counter, precisely where he couldn’t miss her blackened knuckles.

  The narrow bottle next to that was labeled The Isle, and it swirled a sparky gold and cherry blossom pink. Walter tapped the glass and didn’t meet Claire’s eyes when he cleared his throat. “Mind giving me a hand a minute, ma’am? Them lower shelves get dusty and my knees ain’t what they used to be.”

  Walter probably meant that statement literally rather than figuratively, but Claire was intrigued enough to duck behind the counter and join him in the tiny alcove of jars. “These here?”

  Walter passed her a cloth in confirmation. Claire gave him a narrow look before beginning to wipe down jars that had destinations such as Highever, Illeri, Minneapolis, and one labeled, inscrutably, The Corn. Claire knew Walter held pathways to more than just Earth, but she’d never seen these jars before. “Thank small favors that the Library cleans itself,” she said, for lack of anything else. “I might have taken a turn homicidal if I’d had to dust books for thirty years.”

  “Library’s all about preserving. I never minded a bit of dust if it kept things interesting,” Walter said, seeming to relax into the chore. “After a while everything needs a good shake-up.”

  “How long have you been in this office, Walter?” Claire moved on to the next shelf down, which was headed by a primary-color explosion labeled simply P. Town. Claire was almost positive the colors swirled into a smile to wink at her. Next to it, a frosty void of black stayed mostly confined to a jar labeled Terminus Systems. The jars on the lower level seemed less used, quieter. The colors swirled and stayed mostly inside their glass.

  Walter hesitated, because he was either reluctant to answer or reluctant to remember. “Not so long,” he finally said. “Just you Library folk come and go so fast.”

  “Bjorn was here for seven hundred years,” Claire pointed out.

  “Ah yeah. Think he came around for a brew once,” Walter said with a toothy grin.

  Claire wiped down a couple of very old jars—Kingston, Alexandria, Pax—but her blackened fingers hesitated over a squat jar, almost empty, labeled Summerlands. She compared it to the other destinations on the shelf and had a thought that came with a memory of haunted leather and Beatrice’s smile. Impossible things that wouldn’t stay bottled. “Walter, it’s not just colors out of their jars. I’m . . . seeing other things. What is it? Why am I seeing things now?”

  For a moment, the hitch of his shoulders convinced Claire that he was going to shy away again, but eventually Walter wiped his hands with his rag and looked thoughtful. “Artists always got an abundance of soulfulness, ya know? That’s why they got plenty left over, sloshin’ around down here.”

  “I wouldn’t have called myself an artist when I was alive,” Claire said drolly. She hadn’t allowed herself that: a daughter, a mother, a bookkeeper with quiet flights of fancy, yes, but not an artist. She didn’t need a primer on what made librarians in Hell, but she could see Walter working himself up to—or around—a point.

  “Yeh ain’t supposed to be wearing that stuff.” Walter cast a worried glance again at her hand. “It ain’t natural, wearing other people’s ink. ’Tain’t natural at all.”

  “If there is a remedy, let’s hear it.” Claire had to suppress her urge to get testy. She sighed and straightened to standing again. “If this is unwritten ink—the stuff of the stories that we lost—then why attack me? What am I supposed to do with immortal ink?”

  “Immortal?” Walter blinked and abruptly stopped his cleaning. His face formed a brief ravine of worry before he gently nudged Claire by the elbow. “People are always misusing that word around here.”

  “How so?” Claire frowned as Walter produced an empty jar from a cabinet and set it down next to a piece of paper. “Seeing as we’re in Hell, I’d think—”

  “‘Immortal’ is just a word for something you don’t understand the shape of, yet. The boundaries, the end.” Walter smoothed the paper with his calloused fingers. “No one would really want to be immortal. Forever is an awful long time.”

  “I’m not following,” Claire admitted. “Are you talking about the ink?”

  “I’m talking about bloody everything,” Walter grumbled, before looking stricken. He tapped his knuckles together nervously, as if he’d forgotten himself. “Look. Say this piece o’ paper is a bit of a life, yeah?”

  “All right.” Claire attempted patience as Walter folded the paper up neatly and dropped it inside the jar. He screwed the lid on and snapped his fingers, and the paper caught fire and smoked.

  By rights, the lack of oxygen in the jar should have snuffed out the flames, but instead the smoke began to sully up the inside of the glass. Claire shook her head at the flagrant disrespect for physics, but Walter was moving on. “So everything inside that jar, that’s a life, right? Whether it’s paper or smoke or ashes or heat, it’s all what we put in to begin with, yeah?”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “But say we take away the container.” Walter moved with an uncharacteristic swiftness, flicking the jar off the counter with a finger. It slid and shattered on the floor with a crash. Claire flinched back, but the shattered glass evaporated before it could scatter. “Is what was inside gone?”

  “. . . Well, logically, no,” Claire allowed. It was a peculiar thing to be schooled by Death.

  “Then can ye point to where the life is? Or what it is?”

  A si
ngle remaining shard of the jar rocked on the floor, turned dingy gray. The smoke had thinned and whispered away into the air almost immediately, and the remaining smudge of ashes was already getting lost in the floorboards. Claire didn’t bother answering the hypothetical. “You’re saying death is necessary.”

  “Nah, ma’am. Death just is. It’s the container that gives it shape and makes what’s inside important.” Walter shrugged, suddenly seeming shy as he fetched a broom and began to sweep up the ash with surprisingly delicate movements. “Without a boundary that marks beginning and end, what matter would anything have? I reckon life inside a jar is special because of what it is under glass. Break the glass and nothing’s destroyed, but everything changes.”

  “There’s no putting the smoke back inside the glass.” Claire frowned, folding her arms across her chest defensively. “I don’t understand how this applies to the ink. I rather liked it when you spoke plain truth to me, Walter.”

  “I always stick to the truth, Miss Claire. Just sometimes . . . truth ain’t what people want to hear.”

  “I’ve gotten rather a lot of that lately.” Claire folded the cloth carefully between her hands. It remained spotless, no matter how she rubbed her inked palm against it. “If we can’t restore the stories, then why does it linger? What could it possibly want?”

  Walter returned to his place behind the counter, wiping his gnarled knuckles free of soot. He lifted his shoulders in a helpless gesture. “Can’t rightly say, ma’am. I only know life and death. You and your books are the story experts.”

  Claire began to nod, and her mind snagged on the hook of that idea. She let out a soft oath. She’d been hunting ghosts, talking with Death, and staring at colors, when the reality was right there. The answers had been mocking her to begin with. She just needed a point of comparison.

  Claire handed him back his rag and ducked toward the foyer before Walter could question it. “Thank you, Walter! I think I have a new hypothosis to test. You’ve been a brilliant help.”