by A J Hackwith
Probity’s face was tear streaked, and she looked stricken. “It’s—it’s like the ink took them, all of them. Sucked them dry. Why would it— It shouldn’t have been able to do that.”
“Seems like that shit is doing lots of stuff it isn’t supposed to be able to do lately.” Brevity thought again of Claire and blanched at the thought of Claire without a face and leached of color. It almost seemed a blessing now that the ink had stained, giving rather than taking.
“This . . . we can fix this, though. Right?” Probity looked at her as if she had answers instead of an armful of rabid muse.
Verve bucked again beneath her, spitting her anger and forcing Brevity to pin her shoulders down. “It’s like they turned feral.”
“Not feral . . .” An idea brightened Probity’s reddened eyes. “Not feral, hungry. The ink drained them, and now they’re struggling to fill themselves back up. They’re hungry for what we’re all hungry for.”
“Human stories,” Brevity supplied. She looked toward the stacks worriedly. Liquid tendrils of color still washed out from the books, but they seemed to recoil from where Verve writhed on the floor, staying out of reach. The books knew danger as well as Brevity did. “But we don’t eat stories! Muses transport stories and inspiration to humans all the time. Look, she’s already gnawing on the rug.”
“Maybe it’s not about what a muse wants, but what the ink wants,” Probity mulled it over. “If they can get enough to satisfy what they’ve lost, then perhaps they can get control over the ink.”
“No part of this is in control! Probity, please, listen to me.” Brevity’s hold on Verve was slipping. Probity came over without being asked, expertly twisting the other end of her strap around Verve’s neck until it appeared she had two feral ghosts on a leash. Brevity backed up onto her knees, aware of every muscle in her arms screaming. “Listen. The experiment failed; this was a terrible idea from the start. Muses aren’t made to control stories. That was my mistake when I tried to take inspiration for myself too.” Her hand went self-consciously to her bare forearm again. It still felt naked and raw. “We can appreciate stories, protect them, help them get written, honor them even. But we’re not human. Muses are conduits. If we try to hold on to them, we’ll just hurt ourselves.”
Trying to steal the inspiration gilt and bind it into her skin had hurt, but being driven out of the Muses Corps had hurt worse. She almost felt an empathy for the husks of Verve and Gaiety. She’d had everything ripped away once, and felt that emptiness, the overwhelming ache to fill it with something, anything.
She’d been sent here, to Claire, and the Library. Learned how vulnerable and fragile stories are. It wasn’t enough to have inspiration. It took a special kind of alchemy to bring a story into existence, and that was so easy to destroy. Brevity shook her head. “We have to get them out of here before they hurt a book.”
“Yes,” Probity said slowly, but she made no move to drag her captives away. “But . . . what if we gave them one?”
Brevity pivoted, mouth agape. “What?”
“What if we gave them a book? Just one.” Probity was warming to the idea, scanning the shelves thoughtfully. “There are so many. We could pick one that was never going to be written anyway.”
“No!” Brevity felt like she was trembling. “Of course we can’t! These are books!”
“But what if this is it?” Probity began to pace, tugging Verve and Gaiety at the ends of their leather straps. Verve still randomly lunged toward the stacks, and it appeared Probity was edging closer. “What if this is what allows them to gain control of the ink? What if they can eat a book and then write it themselves? We can take the stories from the humans before they can destroy them. We can fix this. We’ll be saving them.”
“Saving them by destroying them.” Brevity stepped back. Probity looked taller, rail thin and pale in her own way, as if the ink was taking hold by proximity. “No, we can’t do that.” She shook her head. “We aren’t stealing stories, let alone trading them for our own.”
“You don’t understand. It’s stories. It’s everything. How can you not understand how important this is?” Probity abruptly veered away from the lobby and across the small expanse of space to the stacks. “Look, let me just prove—”
Verve and Gaiety were a froth of claws at the end of their leashes. Brevity didn’t stop to think; she leapt to her feet and threw herself in between the feral muses and the shelves of books. “No.”
For a moment it felt like Probity wasn’t going to stop. Verve lunged, making a guttural snarl at the end of the leash. Her pale lips were peeled back, and all the color had been seeped away from her gums, making her teeth look elongated and bone sharp. She threw up her hands, now tipped in claws, and slashed at Brevity’s arms. Pain laced up her elbow. Brevity closed her eyes and resolved not to flinch.
Verve’s breath was hot and smelled of boiled rubber. When Brevity opened her eyes, the muses’ claws were an inch withdrawn from her nose, though Verve strained enough to make the leather creak.
At the other end of the strap, Probity had rooted her feet in place and was leaning back to counteract the tension of the two creatures. Her lips were pressed thin, and when she met Brevity’s eyes they were full of a complicated kind of pain. “I want to save them, sis. I want to save you. You shouldn’t be stuck here. You could be the librarian that fixes things.”
“A fix that sacrifices someone is no fix at all.” Brevity held still. She was aware that Probity could release the straps, allow Verve and Gaiety to hurtle into the stacks. She might be able to wrestle one, but she couldn’t keep both of them from the books. She needed Probity to see it. “The humans have destroyed enough books for their own ambition, right? I thought you told me we could be so much better than that.”
Probity flinched, and her voice began to shake. “Don’t compare me to them. Don’t compare what I’m trying to do to the millions of books tossed aside, burned, left to rot in the—” A small gasp stopped her, and Verve’s claws swayed close to Brevity’s cheek until Probity caught control of the leash again. “That’s the answer.”
A foreboding rose in Brevity’s stomach. “Probity?”
“That’s it! There’s a giant supply of books that no one will miss, because they’ve already been forgotten! We protect your treasured unwritten charges and we change the system. And we have humans to thank.”
Probity yanked on the strap with surprising strength and began dragging the ink-maddened muses away from the stacks. Brevity only got a moment’s relief as Probity began to make her way across the lobby to the door. “Probity—where are you going with them? You need to take them back home; perhaps the other muses can fix—”
“I will fix it.” Probity tossed a small smile over her shoulder that was meant to be reassuring. It failed, in part due to the desperate redness of her eyes. “I’ll fix everything, sis. Don’t worry. I won’t make you regret the faith you’ve shown in me. There’s plenty of books for them in the Dust Wing.”
“The Dust Wing,” she whispered, and the dread grew. The Dust Wing wasn’t just a tomb for books; it was a tomb for stories. The Dust Wing had no librarian, because these books were not destined to be curated, cared for, or read. A book only fell to the Dust Wing after an existence on Earth, after the very last copy of its story had been destroyed, the last lines from its text forgotten. Humanity had buried almost as many books as it had never written. The Unwritten Wing was the largest annex of the Library, but a close second, its shadow twin, was the Dust Wing.
Brevity’s heart stuttered, but Probity was waving a hand, grasping clots of light from the lamps she passed by as a nonsense scent of cardamom binaries and ripe hope rose in the air. She whipped it around her and the leashed muses like a cloak, once, twice. She glanced to Brevity, and a kind of vulnerability flickered in her eyes. “Will you come with me?”
Brevity sucked in a breath, unnerved by the sudde
n silence only punctuated by her own pulse in her ears. She was trembling, unable to process the horror chasing relief in her veins. The Dust Wing. Probity’s desperation to hope. The horror of the desiccated muses behind her. The threat to the books. Her past and her present collided in front of her, spiraling out into a dozen different directions and taking a different piece of Brevity’s heart with them. It all came down to one question, in the end. Was she a muse, or was she a librarian?
“Please,” Probity whispered to the floor. “I don’t want to do this alone.”
Brevity stumbled forward, pulling on her own puddle of light with one hand while taking Probity’s with the other. Her sister muse smiled, shy and soft. Probity stepped into a false sunbeam, dragging Gaiety and Verve with her, and they were gone.
25
CLAIRE
The Library is a misnomer. Think of the wings: yes, there is the Unwritten Wing of books, but then there’s a wing of sagas, unsaid words, poems, songs—and the cursed Arcane Wing on top of that! It makes no sense. What is the mission of a library? We’re not a lending library, so it must be a mission of archiving and preservation. What, then, is the common quality shared through out the entire catalog? What makes books, scrolls, letters, songs, worth the attentions of eternity?
What, precisely, are we preserving?
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 900 CE
THE ARCANE WING CURATED books. Not nearly as many or as varied as the Unwritten Wing, but a few leather-bound manuscripts from the world of humans managed to find their way there. Letters poisoned with crude curses, folios with victims pressed between the pages, and a handful of bleak spell books that had somehow stumbled on actual power between the folklore and nonsense. If the Unwritten Wing was humanity’s potential, the Arcane Wing was humanity’s shadow. Anything that grew dark enough, weighty enough, eventually succumbed to the gravity that the Arcane Wing held at its core.
It made for dreadfully dull reading material, but it also meant the Arcanist was kept supplied with a steady selection of bookbinding materials. Claire selected a dip nib and blotter but also gathered extra pages, paste, and thread out of an abundance of caution. The ink hadn’t damaged the logbook during their first experiment, but she wasn’t willing to take any further chances with Hero’s book.
Hero was ready by the time she returned, arms full of supplies. He’d laid his book precisely under Claire’s work light, and an oiled shine rolled off the edges of the emerald cover. Claire had a memory of rebinding with that color. She’d simply chosen green to match his irritatingly bright eyes. And then Malphas had interrupted. That book had been her last official act as librarian.
And now she was going to tamper with it again.
The cover had taken on a well-loved burnish, worn at the edges where it rode around in Hero’s breast pocket daily. There were discolored segments in the leading edges of the parchment, just the width of a thumb, where Hero had obviously paged through his own book more than once. Claire could imagine him, brows furrowed, trying to make sense of the writhing text. Trying to force it into familiarity. Trying to read his way home.
Claire knew that ache.
Hero hovered to her right, shifting from one foot to the other with an uncharacteristic restlessness. Lining up the supplies within reach was a simple task, but Claire made it a methodical process in order to take her time. “You’re certain?”
Hero grimaced, then nodded. “Yes, and please don’t ask me again.”
“As you wish,” Claire said. She found the first blank page and slipped the corners under the page rests. A small pot of the unwritten ink was secured in the inkwell, and she unstoppered it carefully. Her gloved hand trembled as she set down the cork, and Claire forced herself to pause and close her eyes until she felt steady.
“I trust you, warden. You should know that.” Hero’s voice was quiet; when she opened her eyes he had finally come to lean on the edge of the worktable. His longer fingers were splayed on the surface, a breath from hers. He looked at her reverently until she met his eyes, then nodded. He turned his face resolutely away from the book as if bracing himself. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Claire polished the nib of her pen. It shivered under the light, sharp as a blade. When the point touched the surface of the ink, the channel flooded with unnatural ease. The pen drank up ink and when Claire pulled it away from the well, a bleak teardrop clung to the tip like blood on a fang.
No lasting harm to the logbook. Claire kept repeating that in her head, which was the only reason she was able to shake off the loose ink and dread. The palm of her right hand itched, as if the stain could sense the nearness, anticipate what she was about to do with it. Claire took a deep breath and lowered the tip of the pen to the blank expanse of parchment.
Writing was a chemical dance between the ink and the surface. Cheap paper would suck the life out of an ink, leaving a flat, feathered line. The materials used in the Library were both infernal and divine, in that the paper was a smooth and faultless cream that embraced ink gently, letting it dry and sheen to perfect brilliance. Which was what made ice shiver up Claire’s spine when the ink slid across the page as if a plug had been pulled. Claire lifted the nib, trying to break the flow, but black lines writhed across the paper. Corkscrew shapes twisted, then lifted away from the sheet, creating tiny black ribbons in the air.
A gasp broke the silence, but Claire couldn’t spare a glance for Hero. She acted fast. Three decades in the Unwritten Wing taught one to take unruly words in hand before they spiraled out of control. She snagged one escaping serif with her nib, pinning it back to the page. She abused the tines of her pen, pressing until they began to separate, but it forked the ink in two. That weakened it, allowing her to carefully, so carefully, drag the squirming text back to the top of the page.
It was a chapter page. Claire knew the general shape of it from the rest of Hero’s book. A chapter heading. The ink didn’t fight her as she draped it into position, trying to coax it into taking shape. A thrill thumped once in her chest as the ink snagged on the page and began to form the graceful arch of a drop cap. A T. It squared off, then crested into another symbol, h.
“There was . . .” Hero’s voice creaked, as if he was afraid to say it. Claire looked up. He had his hands braced on either side of where he leaned on the table, concentration lining his face. “There was . . .” he said more certainly, and as he said it, Claire saw the ink snag and shape the words on the page. Hero bolted upright, hands in the air. “There was! That’s how it starts! Claire, I know how my story starts!”
The unrefined joy was like sunshine in Hero’s voice, no snarl, no sharp, cutting end of his humor. Just triumph. His smile was effervescent. He let out a whoop and spun around in place. “It’s working!”
A tangled kind of relief spooled out with Claire’s breath. “You mean, I am working,” she said, instead of the lingering worry she had. She couldn’t constrain her matching smile, however. “Now, focus, Hero. One sentence does not a book make.”
She brought her attention back to the page with a surge of confidence. She dragged the ink precisely over the words, and Hero was a kinetic celebration out of the corner of her eye, unable to contain his delight.
“There was a . . . Oh, do keep going, warden. We’re getting there! I knew it would work!”
He sounded giddy as a child. Claire bit down on her grin as she refreshed her nib in the inkwell and brought it back to the page. The a went down easily, and the ink even appeared to settle into the page, calming into a dry sheen that didn’t twitch and jerk out of alignment. A w appeared, then an h.
“There was a man who . . .” Hero’s voice faltered. “Who. Who are you?”
The flurry of activity out of the corner of her eye had stilled. Claire looked up. Hero stood by the table, one hand still raised in mid-celebration. A startled look of alarm was on his face, but it slowly drained as she watched, and all color was lo
st from his cheeks.
A breath caught in Claire’s throat. “Hero?”
Emotion melted off Hero’s face, smoothing even the small lines around his scarred cheek. His eyes were blank when they met hers. “Who are you? Who? No.” A tear blinked down his empty expression, watery and faintly smoke-colored. “Who?”
Ink was flowing in the corner of her sight. Her knuckles went white around her pen as Claire looked down. The ink had continued writing, line after line of neat manuscript text appearing, growing more jagged and irregular as it went. Claire clutched the pen to her chest, nowhere near the paper, but still the words kept repeating over and over: There was a man who who are you who are you who are you who who who who who.
It occupied every line on the page, and then the serifs of each letter turned jagged, as if spawning their own contributions, written at an angle. All repeating the same word, who who who. Ink began to sop the page, puddling in the work light.
Hero made a gagging sound. Black sputtered across his lips, as if he was spitting up blood. But it was so much worse than blood. The liquid was black and staining, spiderwebbing down his chin and across his skin.
Her heart roiled into her throat. Claire threw the pen away from her and grabbed the blotter, already loaded with a sheet. She slammed it down on the surface of Hero’s book, but when she lifted it, the blotter was dry, and black crept across the page like mold. It began to soak into subsequent pages.
“Who, who, who . . .” Hero’s voice was a gurgle between gasps for breath. Black consumed his neck, turning his clothes sodden with ink. His hands grasped at Claire’s shoulders until the infection reached his elbows and he yanked back. Hero shrank to his knees, holding a hand up to his face. One emerald eye melted to pine, then tar. The remaining eye teared up, and his gaze flicked to Claire for one flickering moment. “A choice, ward—”
