by A J Hackwith
Claire’s laugh was so sudden and sour that it stopped them both. “You think she’ll stop at the Unwritten Wing?” Her face was a twisted echo of misery. “Her ambition is greater than that, Bjorn. She’s a demon, the ranking demon in Hell. She’s not coming for the Unwritten Wing, old man. She’s coming for the Library.”
Bjorn straightened up from the fire at that. “What? No, the realms keep their own.”
“Mind isn’t what it used to be, by the end,” a frustrated voice muttered to their right. “The children wear each other’s faces. It’s not fair . . .”
“It’s not as if Hell doesn’t have a history of meddling,” Hero said dryly.
“She can’t.” Bjorn looked ready to dig his feet in. His beard jutted mulishly. “Lass can try, but ’tain’t no one who can invade Valhalla.”
“But the wings of the Library are not of Valhalla,” Claire said gently.
“And are but merely hosted here,” Hero finished.
“Valhalla protects its own,” Bjorn insisted. He threw his hands up and took a step back from the fire.
“Yes, that must be why the wing is annexed here, out in the woods, behind a waterfall, in the dark.” Hero stood as well, stretching his back as he made a dramatic turn toward the ocean of disembodied voices and fires in the dark.
“I was a soldier once,” a young man’s voice said.
“We only survive if the Library works together, Bjorn. The Unwritten Wing needs its allies,” Claire said. She hadn’t risen, and to Hero’s eyes she suddenly seemed to wear every single one of her years—lived and unlived—there by the fire. She stretched out her legs to allow the volume of her pants fabric to dry. She looked tired, and even knowing their goal, their plan, Hero faltered and wanted to go to her again.
“Everyone’s here, even little Jane . . .” a voice like brittle paper whispered.
Bjorn shook his head as his shoulders hunched and crept toward his ears. He began to pace around their small circle of light. “No, lass, no. I’m sorry, it can’t be done. The Library only exists in parts; it’s for the best. We can’t risk the safety of every wing for one. I want to help you, you know I do. I was in your place once—well, your past place. I’ll put in the good word for you here, vouch for you with the longhouse. But to put all the Unwon at risk and join a resistance? Against Hell? My answer is no.”
Claire turned wordlessly to Hero, and the absolute confidence in her gaze made his stomach flip, just for a moment. He made a show of straightening his courage and his jacket.
“You’re certain, Bjorn?” Claire said, without removing her gaze from Hero.
To his credit, Bjorn at least did have the grace to sound regretful, perhaps even a bit ashamed. “Final answer, lass.”
“I see. It seems we have just one small problem, however,” Hero said, studying his toes, then purposefully raising his gaze beyond Claire, beyond Bjorn, far beyond to the blurry forest of shadows past his shoulder. “It was never you we were here to petition for aid.”
An absence descended on the cavern with absolute quiet. It was an absence of thousands of voices, the ceaseless cirrostratus veil of whispers that had been crashing over them like a tide since they entered the wing. Each point of campfire burned steady, but it was as if the entire wing had taken a thoughtful breath.
Bjorn spun, uneasily trying to follow Hero’s gaze into nothing. “What trickery are you up—”
“Souls of the Unwon Wing!” Hero clenched his hands in his pockets, where hopefully no one could see them shake. He wasn’t sure what would happen next, but he only hoped his voice would not be remembered for wavering. He stepped fully away from the fire and felt the dark wrap around him with cold fingers. “I am not just a librarian; I am your brother—a story. You have heard our argument. The Unwritten Wing calls for aid; it’s time for the Library to rise together. What do you say? Will you join us? Or will you allow Valhalla to protect you as you cling to your last story, here, in the dark?”
The air grew thick, thick enough that even the flames appeared to slow, churning through the dark to cast shadows thick as molasses. It sank into his lungs, making it hard to breathe. Bjorn was sputtering; Claire was saying something. Hero didn’t dare glance over his shoulder, dare to check on Claire, or challenge Bjorn to interrupt. They were peripheral to this moment, spectators to the question mark that hung over the fate of the Library.
It hung, and it hung. A sword of Damocles would have been kinder. Hero trembled with the effort of holding still. This—it all started or ended with this. Either the wings would join together, starting with this one, or they would all fall alone. The Arcane Wing already had. The Unwritten would be next, and once the demons confirmed the souls in the books, their armies would turn ravenous. Every wing would fall. And the story would end, for good. All stories would end.
Would Hero end too? Caught as he was now, somewhere between the read and the reader? If so, was there a point to going on without a new story?
The fingertips that brushed at his wrist nearly sent Hero through his skin. And when his hands spasmed out of his pockets, an unseen set of fingers laced with his. It was not Claire’s, for it was too cold. It wasn’t Bjorn’s—too soft. The gentle pressure of its grip grew more solid, and another unseen presence took Hero’s other hand. He shifted, unable to really feel the forms of what gathered around him in the dark, but the warmth was that of a thousand fires. The strength of a thousand fires that had held back the night for eternity, and would do so again. Soft, solid hands rested, one by one, on his back, his shoulders. A whisper, one he’d heard before but softer now, repeated itself in the dark. “I was a soldier once . . .”
“Thank you.” Hero’s cheeks felt wet in the dark, though his skin had dried off long ago. He blinked furiously, unable to wipe his face. He took a ragged breath, staggered both by relief and by the enormity of what this meant he had to do next. “Thank you.”
21
RAMI
I wish I were human, sometimes. Is it okay to admit that here? Boss said the logs are private. But Boss also says the librarians of the Unwritten Wing have to be human. There’s never been a nonhuman librarian of the Unwritten, not once. So what am I doing here? I know the corps exiled me, but I thought at least I could be useful.
Humans are weird in the best ways. They’re brave and contradictory and terrible and lovely. It would make sense that something special like a human would be needed to contain all the unwritten stories. I’m not any of those things. Boss acts like I’m an inconvenience. I think she wishes I’d leave. Says I don’t know anything. But there’s one thing I do know: she’s lonely.
I think I’ll stay.
Assistant Librarian Brevity, 2007 CE
The last three books on the cart were stymieing Rami. There was no discernible reason why they should. They were not particularly unruly books to classify. Two were literary works, the kind of unfinished navel-gazers with titles stolen from Shakespeare—it was always Shakespeare, Brevity confided to him once—and the third was a perfectly average urban fantasy featuring two brothers and a muscle car. But every time he picked up that volume it would take him into the depths of the fantasy collection and past the shelves where Hero’s book should have resided.
It had been logical for Claire to accompany Hero to Valhalla. Hero represented the Unwritten Wing and could speak to the books; Claire had a previous friendship with Bjorn. Rami had only ever visited Valhalla as an interloper. He’d let them go with little objection. Still, it left him with an uneasy feeling. They were careful as they’d left, gentle even, a behavior even Rami had to admit was suspect in Claire and Hero. They were worried about him.
It was no secret that the others thought of Rami as the anchor of their group, the stabilizing influence of the Library. It was normally a role that Rami enjoyed. But it was an illusion. The Library was populated with runners. There was Hero, who took his running away
literally, greasing the way with false bravado. There was Claire, who ran to the safety of books and processes when threatened. And Brevity’s flight was the width of a smile, quick as a shadow behind her eyes.
Everyone forgot the fact that before Rami ran, he fell. Falling from a perfect Heaven was not something one forgets. And as Hero clutched the sleeve of Rami’s coat, as Rami dangled above a great divine, the illusion of possibility that was there—that felt so immediate and there—he’d nearly fallen again. He’d been willing, for just a guilty moment, to abandon all he had for the possibility of something else. The yearning for home that ate in his chest. That feeling had steadily decreased since joining the Library, but the labyrinth had ripped the scab away. Heaven was nothing but an illusion to torture him now. Even the color of his feathers had fled out of reach. It had been his choice, a choice he would make again, every time, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still hit him like a slug in the gut.
Please. He heard Hero’s voice in his head again. His hand stuttered over the book he was shelving. And there it was, a fact that was important and had been rolling around in his mind. Rami held on to it like a drowning man.
This time, when he fell, someone caught him.
The accompanying swoop in Rami’s gut was disorienting enough to propel him away from the book cart. He started down an aisle picked at random. The formerly tidy stacks were clogged with new residents. Scrolls spilled from the upper shelves, catching randomly on vines that trailed and pooled into verdant tripping hazards on the floor.
He was forced to slow and pick his way—destination nowhere in particular—deeper into the stacks until he found himself at the mouth of a dim corridor.
It was one of the many crooked alcoves, doglegs of shelving that the Unwritten Wing seemed to sprout and move around at random. Gloom had settled over this particular stretch, as if the Library had neglected to take the lights in the last reshuffle.
Shadows danced at the far end of the aisle, thrown by something erratic flickering just around the corner. Rami approached slowly, not drawing his sword but giving the corner a wide arc as an old caution rose in his mind.
The sight of a campfire stopped him short. It could be nothing else: a little circle of rocks and a hut of tinder crackling quietly in the middle of the otherwise abandoned aisle. Fire didn’t quite raise the instinctive terror in him that it did in other Library inhabitants, which allowed Rami to approach with caution. The hallway seemed abandoned, nothing else casting shadows on the rows of books besides himself.
“Hello?” His voice was clipped short by the shadows, seeming to be muffled the moment the words left his lips. It was different from the Library’s usual silence. Rami cleared his throat and tried again, without response. He shook himself and approached to kick out the flames.
“I told them,” a small voice leaked out of the air. Rami spun, but his eyes told him he was still alone.
“Hello? Rosia, is that you?”
“I told them, but I fucked it up. I fucked up everything.” It was the thin voice of a teenager, sapling green timbre threatening to break under distress. “Mom called it a sin. Said I was too young to know what I want, that they could fix me. Dad . . . Dad . . . he was silent. That was so much worse.”
Rami fell to sudden silence. All angels could recognize the shattered edges of a confession.
“Mom, she was talking about some church program, and Dad wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t look at me and I just . . . I ran. I don’t know what I was thinking. Em lives three states away and I’m broke. It’s snowing, and I’m cold. I can’t go back. There are people passing on the street but no one will make eye contact. No one looks at me. Maybe I want to disappear. I . . . I’m sorry, Em.”
The voice broke into soft, wet sounds, and faded. In the following silence, Rami could hear other whispers, other dead stories, hidden between the crackling of the campfire. Souls. Stories. This was another wing of the Library. Claire and Hero must be finding success in Valhalla. He put it together silently and took a slow breath before whispering into the fire, “Welcome home.”
The whispers paused, and maybe a trick of the eyes made the fire appear to flame brighter, if only for a second. Rami retreated slowly, but he found himself reluctant to draw entirely away from the fire.
A watercolor memory came over him, fragile and muddled, of another teenager, in a cluttered bedroom. Perhaps it was the desperation in the ghost’s voice that reminded Rami of Leto, the lost soul—and the Library’s teenager turned demon—that he’d last seen departing for Heaven in the aftermath of the coup attempt on the Unwritten Wing. Leto had been haunted, and lost. He’d called himself broken. He’d been condemned to dark places but had still found his way to the Library and found the resources to draw his own path. Humans were like that. Building new connections. Stronger than any angel or demon or spirit, in that way. Put a human in darkness, and they’d start building a fire. If Rami was lost in the dark again, lost in the way he was before he came to the Library, he’d want a human to find him.
It had been a human that’d found him, now that he thought about it.
“Sir?” Rami started out of his thoughts and he realized with surprise that the fire had disappeared and the glow of the Library was at his back again. One of the damsels stood at the end of the aisle, hesitant to intrude. She cut a strong silhouette against the faerie lights—strong jaw and a warrior braid, wearing a rough weave like armor. Rami fumbled for a name.
“Katharina.” Rami straightened, realized he was still holding a book in a death grip, and relaxed his hands enough to set it back down on the cart. He cleared his throat. “Can I help you?”
“Well . . .” The woman appeared to hesitate, then held up the square clutched in her hand. “It’s my book.”
As she approached, Rami could see the thread frayed from the top of the binding. Books were miraculously well-preserved in the Unwritten Wing, but the damsels had a tendency to carry theirs around, subject to the little daily wear and tear. No character liked having their book repaired, but they were generally responsible about reporting damage to the librarians. Which Rami was not. “Miss Brevity will be glad to take a look at it, I’m sure,” he demurred.
“That’s just it,” Katharina said, fidgeting with her book. “I went looking for the librarian and I can’t find her.”
“Can’t find . . .” A cold lump began to form in Rami’s stomach. He shook his head. “Surely she’s just in the back sections—”
“Brevity is not within the stacks of the Unwritten Wing.” Rosia materialized at his elbow, and had Rami’s hands not already been empty, he’d have dropped more books. She clasped her hands in front of her and had a grave look, which with her ghostly eyes felt quite literal. “The librarian has abandoned the Unwritten Wing.”
22
BREVITY
Hell operates on forgetting, on fear. Fear can make mortals do the most terrible things; forgetting is what lets them live with it, and do it again.
But fear is present during the best things too. Ask any hero, and they’ll tell you they were afraid. Fear is not antithetical to heroism.
It is the prerequisite.
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 820 CE
Brevity fell like a star.
Not bright or shooting like a star, no. She fell so long that the air rushing past her face chapped and turned her skin red. Until the air itself became an abrasive weapon she was being driven through. It numbed her body and her mind, so much that when she landed she barely felt the impact. Brevity pushed her cheek off cold stone and assessed. She wasn’t injured—Hell would never make its tortures that easy. The crevice in which she’d landed was no more than a meter wide, barely enough room to kneel, let alone recline. The stone was smooth and bone white underneath her fingertips. She was at the bottom of an incalculably long shaft, the opening not even visible overhead, but instead of darkness, the stone
was its own light.
Not a shadow to be found—or stepped through—anywhere.
The air was the nothing flavor of Hell. Anise and absence made it hard to breathe. Brevity tried to extend her arms but found the wall before she even got them halfway up. She was at the bottom of a long, long shaft dug into the foundations of Hell itself.
Hell is for forgetting, Malphas had said. And suddenly Brevity knew what this was, and she collapsed to the ground.
Malphas had left her in this oubliette with the expectation that Brevity’s mind would torture her better than any demon ever could. Her thoughts could be a weapon used against her—Brevity already knew that. She’d spent hundreds of years understanding the dragon-like thoughts that surfaced from seemingly nowhere to gnaw on her mind relentlessly. Trapped and unmoored, Brevity’s muse imagination would spin out her worst fears, and in an oubliette, where the skin of reality, unobserved and unremembered, rubbed thin, her fears would become reality.
Malphas might not even bother to return to pick up the pieces.
Brevity pressed her fingers against the stone until the tips went white. Think. No one knew she was here. Even if Rami suspected Malphas’s hand, it wasn’t as if they could find her here. Hell was vast and wide, and Brevity had no idea where forgotten things were consigned. No one was coming to rescue her. Brevity would never leave this hole in the earth.
Not unless she saved herself.
Her thoughts could be a weapon, it was the truth. But Brevity refused, desperately and completely refused, to accept that there wasn’t a way to wield them. Her fears could become real here in the oubliette. Could her hope? Brevity squeezed her eyes closed.
For a while she tried to imagine her way out. She thought about a secret door in the stone in front of her, easily missed. She conjured up how the hidden seam would feel, smooth and dust crusted under her fingers. She imagined the grinding growl and hollow thunk as she slid the door back and light spilled out to a corridor that went . . . well, anywhere at all. She wanted to go back to the Library but didn’t fancy the notion of imagining a shortcut from Malphas’s torture chamber to the Library lobby. She’d settle for anywhere with shadows that she could use to shadowstep home, far, far away from here.
