by A J Hackwith
Ink swarmed his eyes and his face went slack. Desperation clawed a whimper out of Claire’s throat. Careless of the ink, she ripped out the sodden page with her gloved hand. But it had spread to the next page, and the next. Parchment began to disintegrate, melting together with the ink.
And when Claire looked up, the same horror had begun on Hero’s face. His high cheekbone, the right one, unblemished by scars, crumpled first, followed by his nose and the socket of one black, unseeing eye. His body caved in on itself. A wordless gulf filled Claire’s chest and somewhere, distantly, a raven was shrieking. Hero’s book, pages, binding, and all, melted into a bleak slurry. Claire clutched it on instinct, but it dripped through her hands with a sharp, cold heat. Used up, it didn’t even appear interested in staining her this time. When she looked up, she was alone.
Alone, except for a blot of ink, wet upon the carpet.
26
RAMI
Forgetting is its own kind of awful magic. The longer we are down here, the more things melt away. It’s unnerving, but I try to remember that entropy doesn’t apply in places like this. Nothing is really destroyed; nothing is lost for good. It cheers me to think maybe our memories go where forgotten books go. Silent readers to keep the silent books of the Dust Wing company.
It’s a nice story, at least. No one is forgotten, and no one is alone.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1917 CE
RAMI WAS A MAN used to routine and duty. Two things that had been sadly lacking since they’d returned from the Chinvat bridge. Hero had left him the duty of the Unwritten Wing, but Rami felt ill at home there. Yet, when he’d left, Hero seemed troubled by a private errand. It only felt supportive to make an excuse to stay out of his way. He suspected Hero was seeking out Claire. He understood there was a deeper tie between book and former librarian than he, or anyone, understood. He was glad of it.
But the problem with being an angel—albeit a discredited one—in Hell is that there were few places he actually wanted to be. He was restless. Despite his promise to man the desk, he stepped out and returned a couple of times to the Unwritten Wing, thinking to see if Brevity had returned, update her on their progress. But the Library was quiet when he got there, all as he had left it. Rami had waited as long as seemed polite in the lobby, but when the damsels had started poking their heads from the stacks with curiosity, he’d left.
He’d stopped by Walter’s office and had an uneasy conversation with the gatekeeper about human smoking habits, of all things. It disquieted Rami, knowing what Walter was. He was quite used to dealing with immortal forces and personifications of powers beyond his kin, but usually they were not so affable and obsessed with felines.
So, eventually, he’d run out of excuses and had to return to the Arcane Wing, hoping Hero had finished his business by now. The Arcane Wing had an essential quiet to its nature. Claire tried to soften the hard edges of nothingness with the soft patter of pages and the busy-making sounds of tea preparation, but Rami recognized that, at its core, the Arcane Wing was a place of silence. He knew silence, respected it in all its natural variations.
Perhaps that’s why the moment he crossed the threshold into the wing, he could tell this silence was all wrong. No one was visible up front, among the worktables and paper-stacked desks that Claire maintained.
Claire’s stray raven was picking through some toppled teacups and paused long enough to cock her head at Rami’s entrance. She grackled, low and warning, and took two hops to the end of the table before taking flight. She paused, perching just on the end of one of the shelves, as if making sure Rami was taking note of her path before taking off again.
The silence, between muted beats of feathered wings, was alarming. Rami took another quick look around before jogging down the shelves after the bird.
He found the raven after a few moments, paused between two tall racks of amulets. He heard the muttering before he saw Claire, pacing back and forth with a rather alarming bramble of talismans and arcane specimens in her hands.
“Claire?” Rami tried, carefully.
She looked up, and her cheeks glistened. Tears tracked down her face, fresh and raw, even though her expression was gaunt and empty. She distantly seemed to acknowledge Rami’s presence and shoved a handful of her selections into his arms. “You’re here. Good. Take this and fetch the Persephone seeds.”
“Claire,” Rami repeated, worrying at the way she paced and seemed to stare past the shelves. The raven came to land heavily on her shoulder and bleated in her ear. An action that would have normally caused an aggrieved snarl and shake-off. Instead, Claire’s shoulder just sank under the weight and a small suffering knit between her eyes.
“Claire,” Rami said again. “What’s all this for?”
“An expedition. A mission, a—a rescue mission. A retrieval.” Claire’s voice was cracked and abused, possibly from crying. She waved her hand with a frown twisting up her face, breath coming a little fast. “Don’t ask questions. You’re my assistant; you’ll assist. I don’t keep you around for questions.”
“You keep me around because I choose to stay,” Rami corrected gently. A complicated expression stung across Claire’s face, full of hurt. She turned away abruptly.
“No more questions. We are going to search the realms one by one. We can start with wherever you and Hero went to last.”
“Chinvat?” Rami recoiled at that. The bridge was a place he never cared to visit again, especially not with anyone he cared about. He tried not to get distracted. But a certainty fell like a stone in Rami’s chest, settling in with old intuition. “Where’s Hero?”
“Gone,” Claire said, never quite meeting his eyes. She pulled another rather blood-crusted set of pearls from the shelf and flung them over her shoulder like a bolero.
Every jolt of movement, so alien on calm and measured Claire, wedged deeper dread into Rami’s stomach. He had to ask anyway. “Where? Gone where, Claire?”
Claire’s knuckles whitened on the string of pearls until Rami feared she would break them. She held still, hunched under the wings of the raven on her shoulder. She slid to the floor, staring intently at nothing through wet eyes. She took a breath that sounded like it hurt and quietly said, “I don’t know.”
Rami’s pulse quickened. “What happened?”
Claire was already shaking her head. “It’s not—I didn’t. I didn’t!” The last came out ragged, on the tail of a hiccupping sound that Rami guessed was Claire’s attempt not to cry again.
Rami fought the urge to push her. He knew Claire’s past, the secret she’d kept from everybody. That she’d attempted to leave the Library with one of her characters, and her mentor had died at her hands in the botched attempt. His fear rose at what that meant for Hero and he felt the ground slipping beneath his feet. He took two slow breaths. He’d had experience with trauma, too much experience, really, both personal and professional during his tenure at Heaven’s Gates. Panic could be felt without being acted on.
“Please, so I can help you,” he said quietly. She tried to stand. The raven launched herself off Claire’s shoulder, and Rami replaced the bird with his hand to steady her before she stumbled.
Claire’s throat worked before she could speak. Finally, her forehead came down on his shoulder, light and then heavy all at once. He caught her as she crumpled against him. “He wanted to be fixed. He was so certain I . . . I was stupid and weak.”
The words came out in a halting tumble, snared between sharp gulps of whatever misery existed between not-tears. When the extent of the loss had been relived, she managed to pull back and rub her face harshly. “I ran to the Unwritten Wing, of course. Hero is stamped; he’s special—he’s in Special Collections. That means Brevity could IWL him if—” If he still exists, Rami’s mind supplied. Claire’s words firmly dodged that. “But Brevity’s not there—no one is—and if I’m not the librarian anymore I can’t recall an IWL
and I can’t face the damsels, so—”
Rami felt gutted as he slowly rubbed her back through another racking shudder of not-panic. Claire was not-crying, not-panicking, not-self-loathing. She was full of nots, which Rami had always known. He admired humans who went on in spite of the nots. She took a deep breath. “So we’ll search the realms one by one. Start with the Libraries, fan out from there. Someone would have to notice if a character . . . or a damaged book . . . appeared without warning.”
“You’re certain he would have been sent to another realm,” Rami repeated, gently but with a point. He wondered if she noticed when his voice wavered.
“Yes,” Claire said immediately, then: “No.” She looked down at her blood-splashed pearls as if the answer would be there. “I don’t know. But he has to be somewhere.”
“But if you leave without permission again, defy Hell once more—”
“The Hellhounds will have to keep up if they want me. Besides, I’ll be about the Library’s business, retrieving books.”
“You are Arcanist, not librarian. What’s more, you’re injured,” Rami said gently, and Claire turned a flinch into a frown.
“I don’t care if I’m Hell’s goddamned janitor.” She narrowed her reddened eyes, which showed too much white and wildness. “I’m going to find him, Rami.”
Rami remembered Hero’s face on the bridge, pale and defiant. Certainty as sharp as the razor edge of bridge beneath him, and the memory cut. Hero didn’t have to be somewhere, but Claire couldn’t operate on that possibility. Rami realized with a searing ache that he couldn’t either. He nodded and released Claire to juggle the baubles in his hands. “What do you want me to do with these?”
Claire already looked distracted with her own thoughts again. She was staring down the aisle. “Take them back to the front table and pack them in the satchel I’ve laid out. Take whatever else you need.”
She strode down the aisle deeper into the collection without looking back. The Arcane Wing wasn’t for looting—Rami knew he should remind Claire. The items in the Arcane Wing were locked away within the control of the Library for a reason. She’d used the Arcane Wing as an arsenal once before, but that was when the threat was in Hell. This would mean taking the artifacts out of the realm, and potentially out of their control.
But if it would save Hero, he’d loot it empty.
He looked down at the items in his hands. A tangle of tarnished chains held together a bramble patch of brooches. There was a dented crown, a scroll sealed with a fang, and at least eighteen ways to inflict death and mayhem between his palms. Rami didn’t like this, but he disliked imagining Hero’s fate even more. He took a steadying breath and carried the items back to the worktables.
Claire’s pet raven was waiting for him, hunched like a vulture over a leather satchel. Rami made a shooing motion as he approached, but the bird continued to worry at the leather strap.
“Off with you.” Rami set down his load and tried to gently scoop the bird into the air as he’d seen Claire do a number of times. She took a stab of his palm for his trouble, which distracted Rami long enough that by the time he finished cursing, the bird had hopped to the other end of the table with the dented crown in her beak.
Time felt as if it were running askew. Rami pressed down his fear and quickly packed the other items into the satchel. “I’m going to need that.”
The bird honked a particularly vulgar response and fouled the chair beneath her.
“Don’t care much for you either,” Rami muttered. He made a move to grab the crown, but the bird hopped to the next table over. Rami sighed, resisting the urge to skewer the bird on the end of his sword, and studied her instead.
The bird was a sullen mess of feathers and terrible attitude, as usual. Her beak clicked as she worked over the thin metalwork of the crown in her jaw. Rami didn’t precisely recognize the piece, but the collection of the Arcane Wing was huge. The crown was a swooping circlet of gold, with a shape that resembled branches, or elk horns. Each crook of metal was crusted with emerald and rose agate, which reminded Rami of Hero’s copper hair.
Rami’s mind betrayed him with the image of Hero in a crown, crooked with that ironic smile that saw all of Rami’s flaws. Hero lived to prod at regrets, which Rami supposed was what drew him to Claire and Rami over Brevity. Early on, Rami couldn’t understand why Claire tolerated him. His first impression of the character had been a boy playing at being a man. His second and third impressions hadn’t fared much better, but Claire had trusted him, so when Hero came to Rami with an audacious request for help, Rami had imagined shepherding the boy out of trouble.
Rami had been quite wrong. It’d been Hero who knew the questions to ask in the library at Elysium, and Hero who’d kept his cool as the Chinvat bridge judged their souls and found them wanting. It was a ridiculous judgment. If the judges of Chinvat had half a level of discernment, they would have tossed Rami off the bridge for all the wrongs his soul carried, instead of focusing on Hero.
The raven squawked again. She flicked her head and improbably tossed the crown across the room. It landed somewhere near the door with a crash that made Rami wince. He shook his head as he went to fetch it. They didn’t have time for this. They never had time, but Hero was lost somewhere in the afterlife and every realm seemed to have a murderous obsession with punishing—
“Souls.” Rami’s fingertips froze above the crown. The realization staggered him like a punch to the gut. He jerked straight and stared at the raven. The bird was watching him expectantly. “Lost souls.”
The raven clicked once, the most approving sound Rami had heard her make. Ramiel, the angel, had been granted certain gifts, gifts he retained even after being exiled from Heaven, retained even here in Hell. Rami was a shepherd of souls. His mind was still reeling when Claire emerged from the back of the archives, carrying a cloak and a particular gray dagger. She looked drawn and resigned as death, but she paused and tilted her head when she caught sight of Rami. “What now?”
“Arcanist . . .” Rami carefully measured each word, uncertain when the idea forming in his head would give out beneath him. It was too fragile to say out loud yet. “What would you say if I thought I could track where Hero’s gone?”
Claire’s fingers jumped along the dagger. Rami prepared for the questions, for the inquisition of Claire’s logical mind that would poke holes in what was surely a false hope, but none came. Instead, Claire considered the crown at his feet before raising her gaze with a hungry kind of certainty. “I’d say, when do we leave?”
27
HERO
There is no library of secrets. Secrets cannot be kept or curated. Secrets have no need for a library, but each library needs secrets. Books are a secret hidden in plain sight. Read me, they say. Look at me. Turn my pages. Touch my spine. Read my words, and content yourself.
Every book is a secret that only readers know.
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 904 CE
HIS TONGUE TASTED LIKE wicked death itself.
Hero’s first awareness was that he was gagging. He coughed, and his lips felt slippery. His body recoiled with the force of his next cough, and he smacked his cheek into the gritty, solid surface beneath him. Everything was black. Everything was black and melting and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear for the screaming in his head. He couldn’t see. It took him several long moments to consider opening his eyes. It took him several long moments to remember he had eyes.
When he opened them, it wasn’t much of an improvement.
It was dark, dark enough that it took a minute until Hero’s eyes began to adjust and pick out the vagaries of his surroundings. Long panels of flat ground stretched out in front of where he lay prone. His arm protested as he reached out, but the surface felt smooth beneath his fingertips, with a dry grain. Wood, perhaps. It had to mean he was at least somewhere civilized. He rolled to his knees, feeling a slick, oily
ache both inside and out.
Civilized, Hero amended, but abandoned. The light was practically nonexistent, but a diffuse glow came off the dust that sifted through the stale air. It painted the space in twilight that was one step above midnight. The light-tainted dust was everywhere, drifting around Hero in spectral blooms. It cast weirdly soft shadows on the dark crags and unidentified shapes that surrounded him. Hero might have thought he was trapped in some deep, stalagmite-strewn cave, if it weren’t for the paneled floor beneath him that reminded him of the Library.
The Library.
Hero’s hand went to his coat. He ferreted over the pockets with rising panic until he located a familiar rectangular lump in an inside pocket. He had his book, safe and sound. But a barb of memory trailed the relief. The pen nib hovering over a blank page, a clot of black on his lips and a rotting feeling behind his eyes, hundreds of voices almost but not quite drowning out Claire’s scream.
The ink. Remembering felt like falling. He could recall it now, the drowning sensation as his throat filled with ink, the eerie warmth as it swept over his skin like a whisper, the whispers, like an ocean surf, washing over him until the question rotted through him inside out.
Who are you? Who are you?
Bile scaled his throat, centering him enough to slow his breathing. The ink hadn’t accepted him at all; it had rejected him and done something to him and his book. Sent him somewhere, wherever here was.
He got unsteadily to his feet and breathed in another luminous cloud that made him cough. The soles of his boots scraped invisible grit against the floor, and it echoed across the space like a growl that was quickly snuffed out. Silence, silence so complete that Hero’s own breath was a bleat in his head.
