The Archive of the Forgotten

by A J Hackwith

  It was all going perfectly well, so when Rami’s chin jerked up, it was like a siren. “Hero.”

  It took an extra second of scrutinizing for Hero to see it. To his right, past Rami’s shoulder and caught in glimpses between souls, the far edge of the bridge had begun to dissolve into sand.

  “Maybe it’s someone else,” Rami whispered, and shoved Hero ahead at a faster pace, to place distance between them and the disturbance.

  A shiver, like sand cascading over glass, told him the effect was keeping pace. Hero’s stomach dropped. “Or maybe not.”

  A cry broke out near the disintegrating edge, and a murmur began to spread. Humans saw what they wanted to see, yes, but when presented with an immediate threat, crowds could turn like lightning. Souls began to jostle behind them, and Rami caught Hero by the arm as someone shoved past.

  The disturbance spread. In a blink, Rami had drawn his sword. “We need to move.”

  Hero nodded, and they dove through the crowd that had begun to cluster and back away from the edge. A scrabble of feet behind them said that the bridge was melting away from both sides now, and then there was a scream.

  Hero looked back just in time to see a bramble of humans fighting near the ledge. “It’s her! It’s got to be her!” another woman shouted with a girl in her grasp. The next moment existed in only two things: a puff of displaced mist, a smothered scream.

  “No,” Hero whispered.

  “Holy light, she pushed her.” Rami’s voice was hoarse, then hard. “We need to get out of here.”

  Hero saw what he meant. To either side of his section of the bridge, the edges hadn’t slowed with the sacrifice; if anything, they sped up. Sand spilled away beneath scrambling feet, and the voices turned accusatory. Anger snapped over the crowd like a waiting storm, and another figure slipped over the edge.

  “Back! Get back!” Rami swung his sword in a short, controlled arc.

  Hero winced. A furious man with a sword might have kept panicked souls at bay, but it also drew twice as many eyes. An undertow of accusation hardened through the crowd, until it was just Hero and Rami isolated on the swiftly shrinking section of bridge.

  “Let us through!” Rami swung his sword again with increased desperation. Hero saw the embers of anger on Rami’s face, saw the sand and the bridge unraveling faster, faster. Hero was falling, but Rami—he wouldn’t let Rami fall again.

  “Stop.” He gripped Rami’s elbow as he prepared to swing again. Muscles bunched and jumped under his fingers. The bridge had narrowed to the size of a narrow staircase now, forcing Hero into Rami’s space. “Just stop.”

  “What?” Muscles jumped again as Rami stared at him in dismay. “We can’t give up.”

  “I’m not giving up,” Hero said, and he took Rami’s confusion as an opportunity to step under his guard and shove. Rami stumbled—toward the crowd, toward the section of bridge that wasn’t disappearing. “I’ve just figured out how the game is rigged.”

  The bridge shrunk to the width of a dinner plate. Mist churned, thickening and clinging to the evaporating edges like thorns in wool. Hero refused to calculate how far down it was. There was no wind, but something warm and decay sweet wafted up from the dark. Sweet, perhaps like anise. Gods, let it be anise.

  “What game?” Rami cried. He had one foot on the narrowed plank of bridge, but the other hesitated, anchored on the stable section. He had enough sense to know that he shouldn’t give up the ground gained, probably believed he could pull Hero to safety. Still.

  Heaven appeared to make angels as stupid as heroes. And Hero knew how to deal with those.

  “The trolley problem!” The width of a dinner plate had narrowed to a single plank. Hero rearranged himself sideways and steely kept his eyes off the mists. “Claire told me there’s no real answer, but I think I figured out my own.”

  The plank had become a bar and was headed toward a tightrope. How lucky that Hero had been written with excellent balance. How unlucky that he’d been written desperately afraid of heights. His breath was being slowly squeezed out of his chest. Rami reached out again but Hero held up his hand.

  “The one or the many—it’s bullshit. The only way to play is to declare the game rigged.” Hero tipped his head back, because it was always better to be angry than terrified. “Rigged! I won’t sacrifice myself, and I am through with people sacrificing themselves for me! So, what now, you so-called divine judges? Well?”

  As if in answer, Hero felt the pressure beneath his toes narrow and the edges of his toes flex on empty air. He made the mistake of looking down, and the nausea of panic made him squeeze his eyes shut. “Oh hell.”

  “Hero.” One foot held Rami’s weight on stable bridge, while all the rest of him seemed stretched, attempting to span the space. He looked anguished. “I understand. I respect your answer, and you. You are a singular creature, Hero. The gods are wrong, if they can’t see your—”

  “Don’t start with the sympathy now, or I really will throw myself off this bridge.” Hero’s eyes stung and leaked; it was ridiculous he could notice that seconds from oblivion. His knees swayed out from under him. “Instead of just fall.”

  “That’s the thing about falling . . .” Rami’s voice had a current of calm that made Hero look. Rami had put away his sword. His face was overcome with an intense look of concentration as he appeared to gauge the disappearing bar and take an unsteady step across it.

  “Rami—”

  “That’s the thing about falling,” Rami said again as Hero’s foot slipped off the edge. He just had time for his stomach to do a loop up his throat before he felt weightless. “None of us ever fall alone.”

  Hero caught the impression of arms locking around him tight, cool feathers against his cheek, and a shriek of something slicing free through muscle and sinew as they tilted free of the bridge, and the mist had them.

  21

  CLAIRE

  Myrrh. I wanted to be the one to figure it out. I admit it. Might be why I’ve held on for so long. I’m a foolish old man, and after the first couple of centuries here I thought, hell, this would do it. This was why I was here. I would be the one to kick down this house of questions. The song of the books—I thought if I listened long enough they would sing to me too.

  But my apprentice is here and I’m still no closer to the answer. Smart as a whip, for a Norman. Well, leave the glory to her. I can keep on mulling about it in my cups in Valhalla. They’ll have to allow a doddering old man his thoughts.

  Librarian Bjorn the Bard, 1711 CE

  IN RETROSPECT, CLAIRE HAD never appreciated Brevity enough. This was a fact she was aware of already. It was a given that Brevity was a better, smarter, more loyal assistant than Claire had deserved. But thank gods that, up till now, Brevity’s good intentions had aligned with Claire’s own.

  Because when she put her mind to it, that muse was devious.

  Claire had the ink in an examination tray, under a magnifying glass, before she realized the switch. And she could hardly complain, because a sample of unwritten damsel ink was what she’d been after in the first place. Not that it had revealed much. The damsel ink sample lolled in the clear tray, leaving behind isolated droplets in its wake. It dried—slowly, but it did dry—adhering to paper and fingers and flaking away harmlessly as ink should.

  Claire should have been more concerned about the vial that’d been swapped: the vial of their unwritten ink. It was right that the Arcane Wing should keep account of the ink, at least until they understood it fully. Claire should return to the Unwritten Wing and call for fair play. But every time she collected the intention to do just that, Brevity’s horrified face came back to her. Claire had taken Lucille’s ink and Brevity had looked at her like she was a monster. Brevity, the cheerful woman who had stood by her side through almost thirty years of mishandling the Library. She’d seen Claire at her worst, but Claire had found a new
way to step over the line.

  Claire had been scared and acted rashly; she had. She could admit that much. But she didn’t want to face her again right now. Brevity was the one person who could cause that uneasy, oily feeling of shame in Claire’s head. And there was enough interfering with her thinking as it was. For instance, there appeared to be a soliloquy going on past the open doors, just outside of eyesight.

  “Bird,” Claire said without looking up. The sound of dusty feathers fluffing up and resettling told her she’d been heard. “Is there a Shakespeare knockoff in the hallway, yes or no?”

  Hard claws tapped softly against metal as the raven shuffled along her perch on the back of the opposite chair. She cocked her head sideways, then made a sound akin to a tuba in mid-childbirth.

  “No, that’s what I thought.” Claire sighed, but the phantom sounds faded, as they always did when she had Bird to confirm or deny. If the price of mental clarity was talking to birds, Claire would take it. If the ink eating her arm wanted to communicate, it could damn well just spell it out.

  A new noise replaced the old and increased too quickly for Claire to get Bird’s opinion on the matter. Giant footfalls echoed up the hallway before shoulders large enough to block the light filled up the doorway.

  “Walter?” Claire stood, ignoring Bird as she shot into the air and screeched her displeasure at the racket. The large gatekeeper had to duck his shoulders just so to squeeze through the Arcane Wing’s double doors.

  “Sorry about ta interruption, Miss Claire. I wouldn’t have bothered you but the other one was real sure you’d know what to do.”

  The opportunities for Claire to know the correct thing to do were infrequent lately. She was about to tell Walter as much until he turned clear of the doorway. Hero was cradled in Walter’s scarred hands and unmoving. His face was pale and drawn but Claire couldn’t see any injuries until she caught sight of his foot, smearing ink down the side of Walter’s faded shirt.

  “Sweet harpies,” Claire swore under her breath. “Set him on the couch, Walter. Foot on the ottoman, please.”

  Rami drifted in after Walter, looking every bit a ghost himself. Claire observed him out of the corner of her eye as she busied herself with finding clean thread and needles in the bottom of the drawer. He seemed unhurt, which allowed her to focus her anger at someone at least.

  She shoved a bowl of water and a pot of salve in Rami’s hands with enough force to slosh his coat. “Wash the wound while I try to find something more delicate than bookbinding materials to sew flesh.”

  Walter handled Hero with a tenderness that would have softened Claire’s heart if she had been in a better state of mind. As it was, the giant wisely retreated as she stormed past. Perhaps some surgical equipment was in the worktables. Enough artifacts in the wing were made of flesh and hide that there had to be something.

  When she finally returned with a suture and a suitable needle, Rami had managed to get Hero’s damaged boot off and had cleaned the wound. It was a slice up the side of his foot, shallow but vivid. Rami held pressure with a clean towel and the weight of a hangdog expression. Claire sighed and carefully picked through Hero’s jacket.

  “Explain,” she said into his breast pocket.

  In turn, Rami appeared to address Hero’s foot with a hoarse voice. “We fell afoul of the bridge in Chinvat.”

  “Chinvat?” Claire found what she was looking for, set his book to the side, and glanced up with a frown. “Why would you go there?”

  “We didn’t start there. We started in Elysium,” Rami said, and Claire kept her peace until the whole story had been haltingly reported. Elysium, the Unsaid Wing, Hero’s grand idea to go poking at the muses as if they were an information desk. Claire pulled on a pair of clean gloves—no coming near an open wound with her inked hand, certainly—and resisted the urge to rub her temples.

  “He twisted up his foot in the fall,” Rami concluded quietly.

  Walter had been conducting a very thorough examination of his toes but finally cleared his throat. “Miss Claire, if everything’s ready, I left the office empty—”

  Claire pulled herself together enough for a polite smile. “You can go, Walter. We’ve got it in hand. Thank you for your help.”

  It was true. Hero would be fine. Hero’s book was fine, and that was the extent of her knowledge. Claire was not a surgeon, but the cut seemed worse than it actually was. Rami had cleaned the wound with the expertise of a combat medic. He should have been the one to stitch Hero up, but instead he hovered like a very guilty kind of storm cloud. Claire pursed her lips as she threaded a needle. “You should have taken him to Brevity, you know. She’s the librarian.”

  Rami had the grace to look ashamed. “I know. But . . .”

  “I’m not the librarian anymore, Rami.”

  “No,” Rami said quietly. “But you are . . . to him . . .” His brow furrowed, as if digging for the word and coming up short. He reverted to watching Hero. “He’s yours.”

  “Hardly. He’s Brevity’s assistant.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  The wound closed easily enough with one stitch, maybe two. Claire finished a stitch and held the tension in the thread long enough to meet Rami’s troubled gray eyes. “No, you sweet, stupid angel man. He is not.” Rami’s worry transformed into confusion. Claire hid her smile in an inspection of the stitches on Hero’s foot. The ink had already faded, and the skin was pulling together nicely. He’d be sore for a couple of days, but mobility wouldn’t be an issue. Even outside their books, characters were remarkably resilient. “Hero and I both have a particularly checkered history when it comes to romantic entanglements between unwritten books and authors. I’m not saying the attraction isn’t there. But the pull between an author and a book—even a character—is too messy. I care for him, I will continue to care for him, but I will lay no claim on him. That’s not what love is.”

  Rami was quiet a stunned moment. “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying nothing but that Hero is not mine. At least, he is no more mine than you are. You should see to your own feelings. Ah! No, no use denying it. I see it there behind those atrociously serious brows. Hero has that effect on people.”

  A groan like a rusted hinge forced Claire’s attention from Hero’s foot to his face. He’d regained some color but restrained his glare to the thinnest of squints between closed eyes. “Do I get a say in this?” he croaked.

  “No.” Claire finished trimming the stitches and flicked his big toe gently. “You should really learn not to eavesdrop on private conversations.”

  Hero grunted and groggily rubbed at his temple. “You should learn not to conduct private conversations over my unconscious body.”

  “You should learn to stop swooning like a silly—”

  “You should both learn to stop taking such self-sacrificing risks!” Rami threw up his hands, looking between Claire and Hero as if they were some horrifying new form of torture Hell had devised just for him. His gaze flicked between Claire’s gloved hand and Hero’s foot before he appeared to settle his ire on Hero. “You don’t anger another realm’s gods while you are in the realm!”

  “I learned it from watching her,” Hero mumbled.

  Claire sniffed. “Oh no, you did this one yourself.”

  “He jumped with me,” Hero insisted.

  “I fell with you, fool. You didn’t even know where you would be sent! You had no way of knowing whether falling in that abyss would send you to our Hell or that realm’s equivalent.”

  “I smelled anise! It was a reasonable wager!”

  “Wager! Don’t take that kind of risk on a smell—”

  “Gentlemen!” Claire had to clap her hands to get their attention. She got twin abashed looks in response, one light and narrow, one dark and broad. They really were going to be the death of her. Claire shook her head and began ret
urning her instruments to her drawers. “You are going to have to continue this . . . whatever this is . . . elsewhere. Hero’s obviously recovered enough to be a petulant child, so, Rami: please help Hero up to the Unwritten Wing so he can inform Brevity of his poor choices and the sorry state of things.”

  “I don’t need help,” Hero said as Rami stooped and gently heaved an arm over his shoulder. His color appeared to peak in his cheeks as Rami hoisted him up to as polite a bridal carry as possible. “I don’t need to be carried! This is an insult.”

  “And I don’t need you splitting that paper cut open before it heals and getting ink all over the halls. We’ve had enough spilled-ink problems as of late.”

  “Paper cut? Are you mocking a man wounded in the line of duty, warden?”

  “Always.” Claire made a dismissive wave with her good hand. “You heal like a hero, at least. I don’t want to see you down here again until you’ve earned Brevity’s forgiveness.”

  Hero threw her a dark look, still a bit pink in the cheeks as Rami carried him out.

  22

  HERO

  The best of humanity can be found in Hell. I’ll fight any theologian on this fact. Hell is a place you sentence yourself to, which by necessity requires a solid bit of self-reflection. Or, at the very least, a death’s-bed awareness. Mortality has a way of forcing one to be honest with oneself; none of the frivolous barricades we erect in life withstand it. You find the failures here, but you also find the strivers, the yearners, the eyes open enough to see the distance between where they are and where they could have been. Hell is a place for the dreamers that have woken up, and the books still asleep.

  In both ways, Hell is a place ripe for stories.

  Librarian Gregor Henry, 1933 CE