The God of Lost Words

by A J Hackwith

  The demon’s clinical expression didn’t change, but Hero caught when his infernal pupils widened with surprise.

  Or perhaps interest.

  “Well, then.” Hero cracked his knuckles and grinned. “Let me elucidate.”

  7

  CLAIRE

  It was my mistake. I thought I had nothing to lose, but there was so much I wasn’t willing to give up. The idea of redemption. The passage of time. Dear, sweet, stony Revka. I couldn’t lose her.

  Malphas knew that from the start. I was doomed to failure, then. Doomed not because of what I lacked but for what I already had and would not relinquish.

  I wish I could say I was sorry.

  Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE

  “Surely my paperwork was in order,” Claire said. Sound was restricted to inside her pen, but worry for the others distracted her. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire could see Brevity fidgeting, and beyond her Hero making some vague gestures. Probably telling the demons where to stick it, knowing him. It was difficult to focus, but fear was a great clarifier when Malphas smiled.

  “Perfectly in order. I would expect nothing less from our dear Arcanist.” Malphas tipped her head. “Which is why you are here.”

  The hair on the back of Claire’s neck prickled with warning. “I don’t understand.”

  “We requested an inventory from the Unwritten Wing as well, of course. Standard practice.” She paused, and her fingers tapped the cuff of one perfectly tailored sleeve. Malphas in a pantsuit was almost more terrifying than when she was enrobed in the leather of her enemies. “What do you think we found?”

  “Really, General, the intimidation of hypothetical questions is a little below you, isn’t it?”

  “Not in this case.” Malphas looked pleased. “I’m honestly interested in your answer. What does the Library contain, Claire? Don’t tell me books. Because the discrepancies I’ve been finding are tantalizing.”

  “I have no idea what you’re going on about.” Claire studied her nails and flicked an imaginary speck of dust away from her skirts. “What possible discrepancies? If the inventory is too complex for a demon to understand I’ll simply have to walk you—”

  “No need to explain the entire Library, girl. Just one book. His.” Malphas pointed a finger, maintaining a steady, smug gaze all the while.

  Claire’s heart bottomed out. She followed the line of Malphas’s finger, though she already knew where it pointed. Hero was in the midst of explaining something to his demon with broad, possibly fruit-related gestures. The demon looked uncomfortable. Hero looked delighted. Completely clueless of the danger he was in, as usual. Claire swallowed her fear before returning her gaze to Malphas. “Hero is no longer in my care. As you should well know, I am no longer librarian—”

  “Indeed you are not. And I am not as young and quick as I used to be. So perhaps you can explain something for me.” At no time, in no reality, could Malphas be described as dull-witted. Her tight-lipped smile widened into what felt like the jaws of a trap. “The Unwritten Wing’s inventory indicated all books accounted for—except for his. An oddity, since I understand there are limits placed on your so-called Special Collections. But I was reassured when Librarian Brevity annotated that the book was in the care of the Arcane Wing for the time being.”

  The air was already cold, but the frost in the realization made Claire finally shiver.

  “Strange, then, how your inventory states everything is in its place. And makes no mention of a book on loan from the Unwritten Wing.”

  They’d accounted for this. In the days of hollow clarity after the ink had disappeared into the Dust Wing and it became evident that Hero’s book was not coming back, Brevity and Claire had devised a simple plan. Falsify the inventory to cover up the loss of the ink, and should anyone inquire about Hero’s missing book, it would be on loan. They hadn’t accounted for Malphas actually understanding the workings of the interworld loan system, and Brevity had been forced to make up an excuse on the spot.

  And they’d never thought Malphas would compare inventories. Stupid. Stupid. The only bureaucracy Hell loved was its own; there should have never been a demon with a mind for the details of paperwork.

  Except, it seemed, Malphas.

  “The Arcane Wing is not a lending kind of library.” Claire prayed her voice was not as unmoored as it sounded to her own ears. She built up her reasoning as fast as she talked. “As well you know—otherwise we would have every upstart demon at our door seeking items of power. Our inventory doesn’t have a line item for items in the wing on temporary loan.”

  Rather than seem appeased, Malphas appeared to have been waiting for such an argument. “Then your curation process is flawed.” She stepped closer to the fence, making the cheap metal screech with one gloved hand. “Whatever shall we do about that, Claire?”

  Claire’s nerves were screaming some very solid advice. To run, to take Hero and Brevity and run. But there was no escaping Hell; of that much she was certain. She’d already tried once before.

  Instead, she heaved a loud sigh and forced herself to saunter closer to the fence herself, as if impatient to have this matter settled. She had to pick among the detritus on the floor. Her toe caught on one of the foil blankets and a soiled diaper tumbled out. Bile rose in her throat. “It’s a perfectly fine system, General. There are merely exceptions—”

  “Claire, dear Claire.” Malphas interrupted her, lowering her voice to force Claire even closer. “There can’t be exceptions. You have always run such a tight operation. Really, I’ve always admired you for it. You could have almost been one of us.” She paused and then shook her head. “You’ve falsified inventory and lied to me. Either you have failed to meet your duty as Arcanist or you stand in treason to Hell. Which is it?”

  “The Library does not owe allegiance to Hell,” Claire said lowly.

  She hadn’t answered, but Malphas acted as if she had. She stepped back, nodding thoughtfully. “We host you, we grant you shelter, we exempt you from the fate of most mortals bound to this realm, and this is how you betray us. With secrets.”

  “Hell thrives on secrets,” Claire snapped.

  “Ah, but the Library isn’t of Hell,” Malphas echoed her softly. “So when power spikes and seeps out from around the edges of your little corner of the fiefdom, we notice. Power, Claire. The power that is only produced by new souls, unbound souls at that. What have you little bookworms stirred up? Failure or traitor, Claire. Which are you claiming to be?”

  Words failed her. Claire remained silent.

  Somewhere a fan had kicked on. As if the chilled and desolate concrete needed any cooling. It succeeded in taking away none of the stench of despair, but it dried out Claire’s face. She was forced to blink first, and Malphas clapped her hands together.

  “We can clear all this up easily.” She made an imperious gesture and the other demons stepped back from the pens. There was a pop and sound returned to the world outside the pen.

  “—and then I’d dribble honey on his . . .” Hero trailed off into the silence.

  Malphas folded her arms. The tailored suit she wore was beginning to melt at the edges. A dark rust brown stain crept in at her cuffs, slowly muddling the pinstripe into bloody leather. “Show us his book. One stab is all it takes, correct? Send our little man here back into his book and that will verify what you say is true, that the book is functional and in the proper hands, and I can let go of more interesting questions.”

  Claire could hear Brevity’s sharp intake of breath. A scuffling sound, as if Hero had stepped back. It wasn’t fear that Claire felt, for just that moment. It was a churning heat, of thirty years of struggle and grief coming to a red-hot head in her chest. Malphas toyed with her the way demons toyed with all mortals. The agony was that Claire had let her. It had been so easy to back her into an unwinnable choice. It would be suicide to refuse
Malphas in her own court, but it would be murder to harm Hero, who was now very much fragile without his book.

  “I will not,” Claire said softly.

  The fans clicked twice more. The churning shadows of demons stirred. Malphas tilted her head back to smile at the ceiling. “Traitor, then.”

  “Brevity! Hero!” Claire raised her voice, feeling frozen in place even as Malphas raised a hand. “Cut a path.”

  “With pleasure.” Hero spun, flicking his sword out and hacking at the locked gate behind him. Sparks flew, and one solid kick sent the cheap metal screaming.

  “I told you once, little Claire. Do you remember?” Malphas was still speaking. Her transformation was complete, again swathed in blood and leather and smoke. Red seeped from her eyes. Grandmother of ghosts, crone of the battlefield, warrior of the damned, general of Hell. “You will know it, when Hell comes for you.”

  A clatter behind her, hopefully Hero freeing Brevity. Claire began to back up, stumbling over the soiled blankets but not daring to take her eyes off Malphas. Her back hit the pen fencing, and it was already vibrating as Hero hacked at the gate and smashed the lock.

  “It’s been an enjoyable game, girl.” Malphas tilted her head. “Try to make it last.”

  Only when Hero’s hand found her wrist did Claire dare to look away. Brevity was already at the door—curiously unchallenged by the guards—and held it open. Hero yanked Claire into a run.

  Shadows turned to shards around them, threatening but distant. “Forget them,” she could hear Malphas mutter behind her. The next pronouncement sent ice through her veins. “Burn it. Spare nothing.”

  8

  HERO

  The Unwritten Wing is not beholden to Hell. Hell is the wing’s host, not its sovereign. But never mistake that for safety, young apprentice. Hell cannot command the Library, but it can do so much worse. The demons know the foundations of this realm far better than we ever will. They have their hands buried deep in the roots from which the Unwritten Wing has grown. It would take so very little effort for them to shake the ground out from underneath us. You asked me once what could possibly make me afraid. Little tremors; that’s what I fear in Hell. Tremors of change.

  Librarian Yoon Ji Han, 1799 CE

  No guards or armored horrors waited for them on their flight from the court. The crumbling courtyard was just as they had left it. Hero didn’t have time to pause and be suspicious. They cleared the pavers at a dead run and hurtled back down the labyrinthine hallways of Hell.

  “Where are we going?” Hero asked.

  “The Unwritten Wing.” Claire stumbled to keep up with his long legs. She was wheezing but stubbornly refused to slow down. “We have to get there before they do.”

  “The books—we need to evacuate the wing!” Brevity shouted over the noise.

  Beside him, Claire’s lips tightened to a thin white line and she ran harder. Hero didn’t need her to state the obvious. There was no way to move everything, even with all the time in the world. They couldn’t just up and relocate through a pond like the Unsaid Wing had. The Unwritten Wing was not just books. It was art and rugs and—

  Hero staggered. “Oh gods. The damsels.”

  “Almost there.” Claire urged him down the hall. Their arrival roused the gargoyle, still grimy from the flower attack. It appeared the Unsaid’s foliage had stayed in bounds since they’d left, but Hero nearly skidded on moss as they rounded through the archway.

  Though he’d expected it, the chaos of green and vines still startled Hero to a standstill. His gaze picked through the noise, automatically landing on Rami, who was bent in conversation with Rosia. Both of them turned at the sound of their entrance. Rami’s hand was on his sword pommel. Rosia simply looked skeptical.

  “They’re coming,” Claire said. Neither she nor Brevity slowed down, continuing their sprint to the desk.

  “Lock down the wing. Rami, Hero—the doors.” Brevity’s voice was surprisingly steady in the face of impending destruction.

  Rami broke away from Rosia, already joining Hero at the entrance. “Who’s coming?”

  “The in-laws. Who else? The demons,” Hero snapped, if only to burn off the terror running high in his veins. He gave an uncertain look at the doors. One was still swaying on a broken hinge, and vines had further wedged themselves up into the locking mechanism. “The doors may . . . be a problem.”

  “Then drag Echo out of the nearest teacup to clear up her mess.” Claire was barely restraining herself from interfering while Brevity flipped frantically through the logbook. Her fingers flexed, and Hero could see the struggle in her dark eyes before she diverted herself to pacing, loading up the nearest book carts with whatever was at hand.

  “No time,” Brevity mumbled into a drawer before she surfaced with three delicate pieces of colored vellum. “There’s the wards; they held up once—”

  Rami was already shaking his head. “That was what Andras managed to cobble together with scraps. The wards will be a mere inconvenience to Malphas’s forces, should she be so determined.”

  Claire sighed quietly. “Oh, she’s determined.”

  Hero had begun to hack at the vines engulfing one of the door’s giant latches, but it was a bit like wrestling a pig. He twisted the blade between the door and the bolt, a move that would have surely damaged a normal blade and made the swordsman in him cringe, but unwritten materials were made of stiffer stuff. “The doors are thoroughly bu—fucked.” He’d nearly said “buggered.” Claire was having a terrible influence on his thoroughly American cursing repertoire. “It’s going to take an hour of work to shut them securely. Which means we’re screwed.”

  “Then we barricade it. The gargoyle will help.” Claire raised her voice. “Buddy!”

  “Buddy?” It took Hero a moment to understand, but when he did, he snorted. “That’s its actual name? You actually named the migraine-inducing stone monster ‘Buddy’?”

  “A man self-named ‘Hero’ has no place to judge.”

  “This makes the raven named ‘Bird’ make more sense,” Rami mused, earning a rare glare from Claire. The sound of grit on marble heralded the gargoyle’s approach, but when no giant wings shouldered the doors open, Hero frowned and stuck his head out into the hall.

  The gargoyle was there, all right, filling up practically the entire width of the hallway. The floor was still mildly littered with ash and greenery, and Buddy had churned it all into a green-gray pulp under his claws.

  “Claire . . . Brev,” Hero called back without taking his eyes off the beast. “You may want to see this.”

  “They can’t be here. Not yet.” Brevity was breathless as she came up behind him. “I thought we’d have more time.”

  It was terribly difficult to gauge the mood and emotional state of a non-euclidean gargoyle. Buddy’s edges kept on twisting and warping at impossible angles, threatening to twist Hero’s stomach contents along with them. The gargoyle’s head was nothing but a static cloud of reality that went Nope. But Hero knew the pacing of a cornered beast, and the howl Buddy made—on several unpleasant frequencies—was agitated and aggrieved.

  Brevity skittered under Hero’s arm into the hall. “Whoa there, it’s been a bad day, yeah, but . . .” She paused, nearly getting clipped by a warped wing when she stopped with her nose in the air. “Wait, do you smell that?”

  Hero thought it was the wrong time to complain about the stench of Hell, but he sniffed gamely. The hallway smelled much as Hell did, overwhelmingly of anise and embers, haunted by smoke. But there was a different feel that clung to the roof of his mouth as he breathed in. Smoke, yes, but it wasn’t the faded, chemical memory of fire that most of Hell was. This was warm . . . present.

  “A fire?” Hero barely echoed the word before he heard Claire make a startled noise behind him.

  “No . . . it can’t be.” He had half turned when Claire collided int
o him, shoving him to the side as she pushed her way into the hallway. She paused, eyes wide, as if confirming something. Then she took off at a run down the hall.

  “What . . .” Hero looked worriedly to Rami as the angel, sensing impending disaster, emerged from the stacks to join them.

  Brevity made a small wounded noise. “Oh . . .” She turned, horrified and pale, to the others. “It wasn’t the Unwritten Wing they wanted to burn.”

  Rami went still as stone. “The Arcane Wing.” He cursed something in a language Hero didn’t know, but it drew gooseflesh up his arms all the same, and then the angel, too, was running.

  If there was one thing, Hero reflected, that Hell’s Library did well together, it was to sprint headlong into disaster when any sensible creature would flee. Hero was still putting the pieces together even as he and Brevity ran after the others. He easily caught up to Rami—long legs, which he would have to make sure to be smug about later—but he barely caught sight of Claire throwing herself down the stairs that led, in a winding way, from the Unwritten Wing to its Arcane counterpart. The smoke hit him in the face as he descended. It was no longer a faint scent on the air but a corruption in the lungs. Coils of oily smoke, thick and searing, flooded the stairwell and landing. By the time Hero reached the landing that should have been the entry hall to the Arcane Wing, he could barely see the steps beneath his feet.

  He made the mistake of looking up.

  The flames that wreathed the doors of the Arcane Wing weren’t red. They weren’t oxygen-gobbling orange. They weren’t any color of a fire that could exist on Earth. The fire burned green, pine and lime and every hellish shade in between. It roiled and licked around the doors, which hung broken on their hinges. Through the choking smoke, it coiled around everything in a way that bizarrely mimicked the green vines of the Unsaid.