The Archive of the Forgotten

by A J Hackwith

  THE CEILINGS OF HELL were an underappreciated bit of architecture. All the shadows and mismatched beams—wood, stone, was that an arch of bone there?—blurred into a smear beyond Ramiel’s chin. Which Hero had a very good view of. Because he was being carried. Like a child.

  “She is being vindictive,” Hero pronounced, and plucked irritably at one of the feathers that cushioned his cheek.

  Rami’s steps didn’t slow, even when he jostled his elbow up to shift Hero away from his chest. “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Don’t get cute with me,” Hero muttered without heat.

  “Then stop with the feathers. That tickles.”

  “Tickles? Angels are ticklish?” Hero took any opportunity to be delighted, especially since it distracted from the hot throb in his twisted ankle. “Who would have guessed? Wait until I tell the demons.”

  Rami slanted him a look, which from this angle was heavy with long-suffering tolerance. “As I’ve told you before, I’m technically a Watcher.”

  “Angel, old-as-dirt proto-angel . . . I fail to see the distinction.” Hero startled as Rami stopped abruptly and was forced to clench a hand in his trench coat for balance. “Except possibly a proper angel wouldn’t be flinging me about—what’s that frown for?”

  “The doors.” The frisson of unease in Rami’s voice made Hero crane his head around. The ceiling had been all very much the same, so it was some surprise to see they were in the foyer of the Unwritten Wing. Rami had stopped near the gargoyle, who was napping by evidence of the snore that emanated, in a couple of frequencies adjacent to reality, from his alcove. If Hero twisted his head further, he could make out the upside-down curve of the Unwritten Wing’s doors.

  Which were nearly closed.

  “That’s peculiar.” Hero wasn’t alarmed, not yet. He was, however, getting a crick in his neck. “Put me down, will you?”

  Rami hesitated, which gave Hero the opportunity to flop back against his chest a little too heavily and pin him with his best royal disdain. “I twisted my ankle; I didn’t lose it. And I can already tell the scrape is healed closed. I’d rather not fall on my head while you’re wrestling with the doors with your hands full. Put me down and stop acting like a nursemaid.”

  Rami relented, which allowed Hero to almost forgive him for the way he nonsensically set him down as if he were made of blown glass. Hero thumped his bandaged foot down to prove a point and hid the grimace of discomfort as he turned toward the door.

  He cleared the small distance at a limp but hesitated with his hand above the silver curve of the door pull. Doubt flickered in his stomach. He silently willed the doors to swing on their hinges. There were many reasons why the wing might close its doors, but only one reason to lock them.

  A shift of movement signaled Rami coming up behind him, cautiously, likely one hand on the pommel of his sword to charge in and save the day. It was a ridiculous thought, and enough for Hero to grasp the silver handle and yank with more force than necessary. The door parted open on silent greased hinges, and Hero thrust it aside to hide his relief. “There. The doors probably closed on a breeze by accident. Let in some fresh air, Brevity?”

  His voice thudded into the well of quiet as heavy as a stone dropped in a pond. The lights were on, and across the expanse of the lobby Hero saw the productive kind of clutter that the librarian’s desk had when she was working. But a chill kind of quiet frosted the air without a response, and no one stirred from the stacks.

  “Librarian?” Hero tried again at a louder volume. A feather-soft touch brushed his elbow and nearly sent him out of his skin. His injured ankle filed another complaint, which he focused into a glare.

  Rami raised his thick brows in apology and pitched his voice low. “Did Brevity have external business when you left?”

  “Not that I knew of. She was chattering away with that traitorous muse. The stacks have been quiet and she’s been so preoccupied I wouldn’t think—” Hero’s gaze fished over the long shadows of the Library. It was possible Brevity was on some errand deep in the stacks, so deep she hadn’t heard Hero call. But he trusted the instinct that told him that wasn’t the case. The wing wasn’t just quiet. Quiet had a mild flavor, a pause. Vacancy, abandonment, was heavy and deep. The back of Hero’s neck prickled. “I should check on the damsels.”

  He made it two limping steps before Rami caught his elbow and used his momentum to spin him away from the stacks. “No, I’ll check on the damsels. Perhaps Brevity left some kind of note in the logbook.”

  “I am the librarian here,” Hero objected in a mostly confident tone. Assistant librarian. Technically.

  “And only librarians can make sense of that grotto you call a desk,” Rami said simply. He had that implacable Watcher look; that I’ve waited millennia; what’s another one? placid stare that made Hero want to dig in his heels. If one of his heels didn’t hurt right now.

  Hero straightened his shoulders toward the desk, chin too high in the air to notice when Rami was satisfied enough to disappear between the rows of books. His ankle was a brittle complaint by the time he reached the desk, and Hero flopped down in Brevity’s armchair gladly and let out a slow, measured sigh.

  The quiet was less forbidding, just knowing Rami was there among the aisles. It was funny, how companionship did that. Like how just knowing there was a campfire to return to made the night feel less dark, even when you were far from it. Hero had spent enough cold nights stumbling around in the dark to know. Or had he? He’d been a rebellion leader, and then an ill-prepared king, then a bad one, in his story. Did it count? Were those memories any fainter, less accurate, less painful, for having happened between pages he could no longer return to? Just because something—supposedly—didn’t really happen didn’t make it less real.

  It wasn’t worth consideration, as things stood now. And Hero prized his consideration highly as a means of survival. He straightened and reached for the logbook, even as he kept an ear tuned to the quiet of the stacks. Certainly he would hear a scream or whatnot if something was amiss. A barrel-chested brute like Rami would have to have good lungs and all.

  Leather scraped against wood as Hero pulled the logbook into his lap. It was heavy, heavier than its size suggested. Heavy with ink and paper and an eon of librarians. Hero still felt like an impostor flipping the cover open, and he resented it. Why shouldn’t he read the nattering chicken scratch of librarians long dead? Sure, they were human, but he was a character, which counted for something. He hoped it counted for something, beyond the fraying thread of doubt in his gut.

  The most recent entry had been Brevity’s, reporting the existence of the ink and the arrival of Probity. It went on, but Hero stopped reading when the paragraph started to be peppered with “I” statements. It was the habit of the librarians of the Unwritten Wing to empty their hearts to the logbook. It was also the habit of the librarians not to pry into the entries of their contemporaries. Hero had scoffed at that, until he happened to read Brevity’s first entry after the destruction of the books during the coup. He hadn’t been able to meet her eyes for days.

  He might be a villain, but he wasn’t a sadist to anyone but himself.

  Instead his index finger tapped at the blank of the page, where an explanation, an answer, should have existed. There was no one around to judge him when he put his feet on the desk. Brevity hadn’t closed the Library and hadn’t recorded a reason for her absence. That either meant it was too trivial to note or it’d come upon her so suddenly that there hadn’t been time.

  Hero would assume the former, at least until the next disaster.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Rami emerged from the stack depths, but not alone. “The damsel suite is as it should be,” Rami reported before stepping aside. “Mistress Lucille offered her help—”

  “Oh, delightful,” Hero muttered, tilting the logbook up in order to better slouch behind it. The damsels had made overtures
after he returned to the Unwritten Wing. He was supposed to feel a kinship, a commonality with them, other characters who had woken up from their books. Other unwitting residents of the Library. But the line from them to their books was unbroken and secure. Hero’s wasn’t. He wasn’t book enough, not really. The damsel suite felt like a pantomime in a foreign land that he was supposed to call home. A language that was supposed to be in his blood but felt borrowed on his tongue. Too much a book to be a person. Too much a person to be a book.

  “Hero,” Lucille said in the tone of wearily beset older relatives everywhere. Hero crept a glance over the top of the book. She had narrowed her gaze onto where the heels of his boots rested on the desk.

  “Auntie!” Hero rearranged his expression and trilled with a wiggle of his toes. “So good of you to be concerned about my welfare, as always.”

  “I understand you were injured.”

  “Only a bit twinged. Nothing the restive embrace of the Library won’t fix.” Hero twisted his heel again, just to see the crow’s-feet around Lucille’s eyes deepen. Paper crunched beneath the friction. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen our librarian recently? Puppy-dog eyes, terrifying with a returns cart, blue all over?”

  Lucille’s lips thinned. “Not since she chased her predecessor out of here.”

  “What would Claire be doing here?” Without us, Hero said in a glance toward Rami.

  “Taking her pound of flesh, so to speak.” Lucille’s fingers tapped at her forearm. “Up to her usual tricks, without her assistant to keep her in line.”

  The furrow in Rami’s brow deepened and— Really, only Hero was allowed to cause that dismay in him. Hero frowned. “Ramiel is much too smart to try to herd that woman. Claire makes her own decisions.”

  “At the expense of the Library,” Lucille said, dropping her eyes to Hero’s heels on the desk again. “I wonder how much longer we can afford it. Or you.”

  She had the mortifying power to continually make Hero feel like a scrawny farm bumpkin again. As if he were twelve years old, mud on his face and pig shit between his toes. Hero’s feet hit the floor with a thud, and he stood to make it seem like his idea.

  “An inventory would be appropriate.” Lucille sat herself down on the edge of a divan, looking for all the world as if she were preparing to order a cup of tea. “And would ease my concerns.”

  “I was not aware that your concerns extended beyond your little island of misfits.”

  “No one is an island. Especially here.” Lucille folded her hands, and the faint rasp of her aging paper skin sent a chill up Hero’s neck. She pinned him with a placid stare. “Stories have a way of entangling.”

  Rami interrupted the silence with a grunt before Hero could conjure a response to that. “An inventory would be prudent,” Rami said to the floor. “If the acting librarian agrees?”

  It took effort to keep the snarl from his lips. Rami was trying to be supportive, in his way. But under Lucille’s gaze the reminder of his supposed authority felt wrong, like a sliver wedged under his nail. Hero flung the logbook back onto the surface of the desk and flipped through the pages until he hit the inventory page. The pen was already flourished in his hand before he had a chance to hesitate with the nib inches from the page. The flutter in his gut was a nuisance. He’d written in the logbook before; he’d do so again. He’d never commanded the Library before.

  And he could think of no sensible reason why it would listen.

  Self-irritation acted as the best kind of lubricant to movement. Hero scratched out the order swiftly, dotting the period at the end with a vicious flourish. His hand cramped around the pen, which he found he couldn’t quite put down until, after an insufferable pause, the book began to hum with a rustle of paper. The opposite page began to fill up and scroll through an impossibly long list of titles.

  “There.” Hero flung himself back in the chair and lifted his chin to Lucille. “Happy, Grandmother?”

  “As happy as you are.” Lucille smoothed the thin polyester of her housedress over her wide hips and got comfortable. “Oh, my dear. I appear to have forgotten my tea.”

  “I’ll see what I can find, ma’am.” Rami straightened and made an awkward scan of the desk before heading back into the stacks.

  The tea caddy, the silver cart that Brevity kept overflowing with sachets and chipped cups, was three paces behind the desk, in the alcove with the sleeping tapestries. It was not among the shelves. Hero could have told him, were it not for the way Lucille’s gaze sharpened on him like a whetstone. “The elderly are so absentminded,” Hero tsked over the hum of the logbook running inventory.

  “That boy is older than most of the damsel suite put together.” Lucille pinned him with a weighted glance. “You should leave the Arcane Wing well enough alone. Come back to the Library.”

  “I’m the assistant librarian. And part of Special Collections.” Hero dropped his head back with a dramatic flourish. “I couldn’t be more entrenched in the Library if I tried.”

  “You can’t, though. Try.”

  Lucille was watching him when his head snapped back up. “I beg your pardon,” Hero said in his most I absolutely do not beg your pardon tone.

  “You can’t try,” Lucille repeated simply. “I’m sorry, child; it’s not as if you have a choice in the matter. Is that why you make everything you do seem as if it’s both the largest imposition and also done at your forbearance? Fancy way you have with that.”

  It took Hero a beat longer to arm his words than it should have. “As if you have room to speak, damsel.”

  The wattle of aged skin on Lucille’s throat shivered as she chuckled. “Oh yes, heaven help you if you thought you were one of us. But rest assured—you’re not. You’d be welcome with us, of course, but . . . well, we have chosen to stay in the suite, instead of going back to our books. It’s a slim choice, but a choice all the same.”

  “I make my own choices. I’m a librarian, aren’t I?”

  “If that’s what gives you purpose, my dear.” Lucille hummed gently. “It is all right, is all I’m saying. We all understand you do as you must.”

  A sharp poke at his thumb interrupted Hero’s thoughts. He hadn’t put down the pen, and the tines of the tip prodded into the flesh of his thumb with a smear of black. A moment, just a flash really, of another time came over him. Claire being swallowed by black. And then, before that, a damsel bleeding and turning to ash. Tasting ink on his tongue and dark at the edge of his vision.

  Hero shook it clear, but instead of feeling better it made him feel precisely too aware. Aware of the walls, suddenly too close; the air, a little too warm. “I could . . . I could run.”

  “Only as far as they let you, sweetling.” Lucille sighed, and her earnest pity was worse than her scorn. “So you’ve convinced yourself you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to.” The ink wicked along the fingerprint of the broad side of his thumb. He rubbed it, only succeeding in smearing it larger as it began to dry, leaving his skin feeling tight. No matter. It would wash away as if it’d never been there. “I chose to stay. To help.”

  As soon as he’d said them, the words took on a familiar echo from Chinvat bridge. The wind had dragged its nails through his coat and across his skin. He’d balanced on his toes, terror in his throat, and told himself he would not play their game. He’d spite the gods; he wouldn’t play their game, and he’d choose to fall.

  As if anyone chooses gravity.

  “You are a help,” Lucille said while precisely not saying a thousand other pitying things. “But when someone stays with you because they don’t have any other choice, that’s not a kindness. The damsel suite is always open to you, when you need a home.”

  It was strangling; it was falling; it was enough ripping sensations to tear Hero apart. His ink-smeared fingers clenched under the desk, but just then the logbook chimed a reprieve. “I’ll make
my own way, thank you,” Hero said with every bit of acid stored up in his throat. He bent over the desk and studied the inventory with far more scrutiny than the single line—all books accounted for—required. It gave him the moment of privacy he needed to stop the twisting fear building in his chest.

  “Nothing missing?” Lucille said after the silence turned awkward.

  “None. Does that satisfy you?” Hero drew himself up to his full height. It was so much easier looking at people from the narrow parapet of his nose. “Rami!” he called, without turning to look.

  After a few moments, he could hear the familiar heavy trod of angelic work boots. Hero tried to not let the relief play on his face.

  “I couldn’t find the tea cart,” Rami apologized as he left the long shadows of the stacks.

  “You’re a sweetheart for looking. Never you mind.” Lucille rose slowly with dignity, playing up her age in a way that made Hero strain to not roll his eyes. “There will be a kettle on in the suite.”

  “Oh . . .” The heavy brows on Rami’s olive face did a complicated twitch as he stepped aside for Lucille to leave and glanced at Hero. He was canny enough to step carefully over the frost in the air. “But the inventory?”

  “Satisfactory.” Lucille patted the angel’s arm as she passed. “The rest of it is no business of mine, of course. You boys tell the librarian I’d appreciate a visit when she gets back.”

  Hero’s lip was curled. It took an effort to straighten out his expression as Lucille left and Rami turned a questioning gaze back to him. He took a tentative step on his injured foot and was pleased that only the rotation of his ankle twinged in protest. He could work with that. “Rami, I do hate to be a bother, but—”

  “What can I do to help?” Rami asked, as Hero knew he would.

  Hero rewarded him with a warm smile that was shockingly earnest. Some of the doubts Lucille had left in his chest began to recede. Choices, and the power to make them—Rami lived his life so effortlessly that way. It would be impossible for Hero to keep up, at least as he was. His smile brightened. “Could you do me a favor and mind the desk for a bit—in case Brevity comes back? I would hate to miss her in the hallways.”