The God of Lost Words

by A J Hackwith

  She envisioned and she thought, she imagined and yearned. She pushed every wish, every dream, every hope beyond hope, into the idea of a door. Then, eyes still closed, she reached forward until her fingertips found the wall and could run over the surface.

  Nothing.

  She opened her eyes to verify what she already knew. There was no door. Nothing but stone and the piercing light that splintered into her head like a migraine. She felt like an idiot. Hell didn’t respond to positive emotions. Hope, dreams, survival—these worked in the Library, but they were alien matter to Hell.

  The hope drained out of Brevity. She shoved her fist in her mouth to keep from whimpering. She would not cry, would not. Would not give Malphas the privilege of her fear.

  Even Malphas isn’t watching. This is an oubliette; you’ll never be seen by anyone again. The soft dragon-thought slithered into her head and took up residence. It paused before it added, in a voice that was much like her own, Maybe that’s for the better.

  It wasn’t that Brevity thought she was worthless—she knew by now what she contributed to the Library. But there was a tension in her that never left, the idea that failure was on a knife-edge. That it would be Brevity who slipped up and cost the Library everything. Being here, being forgotten, could almost be a relief. Maybe Malphas had done her a favor when she threw her in a hole, falling through the air so long that she fell beyond reach, beyond memory. She felt like she was still falling; she—

  The stone beneath her knees trembled. It was so brief, so faint, that Brevity could have imagined it. But she’d already been preoccupied imagining falling and . . .

  Oh.

  Imagining the fall hadn’t been a hope. It’d been fear, despair, guilt. Those weren’t Library emotions. Those were Hell emotions, which had power here. Imagination had power both in the Library and in Hell; it was simply a matter of how you felt it. Brevity knew imagination. It was what she was made of—made for. The what-could-be was a tool, a weapon, specifically Brevity’s own.

  It was nearly impossible to force yourself to be afraid of something once you wanted it. How fortunate that Brevity was half-anxious all the time. She closed her eyes and considered the possibility that the stone beneath her knees was paper thin. Hell was old, and reveled in decay. It was feasible that the stone at the bottom of an oubliette cracked, weathered, crumbled away. Perhaps it sat, a spiderweb of cracks that held undisturbed for centuries, only for a muse to fall—at high velocity, oh so fast—all pointed elbows and the weight of guilt, and snap. And where would she fall through to? Who knew, but it was not here, and surely terrible—

  The ground beneath her gave one last shiver that sent Brevity’s pulse rabbiting up into her throat—and that was the fear that tipped it. A deafening crack rippled through the stone, and Brevity fell. She fell, once again. This time into the underside of Hell.

  23

  HERO

  You can be done with a story, but that doesn’t mean the story is done with you.

  Librarian Bjorn the Bard, 1401 CE

  The walk back—through the dark, another soaking under the waterfall, and a miserable, soggy march through the woods and across the meadow back to the longhouse—was completed in terse silence. Bjorn was able to hold his peace until the final click of the door to his study closing behind them, at which point he calmly walked over to his desk, picked up his clay tankard, and hurled it at the fireplace.

  It was mostly empty, so it only succeeded in making a terrible crash and scattering pottery shards over the front of the hearth. Bjorn was rightfully upset, and his accent got thicker and thicker with emotion until his words became simply a wall of heavily glottal fist shaking. He appeared not to be slowing down anytime soon. Hero found it easy enough to tune out the theatrics. His attention was on the fine furrow of thought lining Claire’s forehead.

  Something in the dark had flustered her back there. The Unwon Wing had unnerved her in ways that Hero hadn’t thought the unflappable woman could be disquieted. Hero couldn’t suss it out. Granted, going in, he had expected more of the masculine nonsense along the lines that Valhalla excelled in. He’d expected epics and ballads and war drums, bloodthirsty victory. But instead there’d been only the hollow echo of ends. Claire was dead; death shouldn’t bother her. But she’d been different since the unwritten ink had stained her hand and haunted her mind. Haunted, yes . . . Hero was no writer, but that was the word for it. The unwritten stories had haunted Claire and left her not quite the same after the revelation that they were, indeed, souls. Claire had resisted that, though eventually Hero had learned to not take it personally. She’d said souls should be singular things, embedded in a body as is proper, then ascending (or descending, in Claire’s case) to their eternal reward. She’d said she’d always envisioned them as generally filling up the same space and shape as a human body, just . . . ghostlike. Souls should not be splintered, many-faced things. Should not be sharded and scattered in many places at once. Souls should not be ghosts and songs and letters and stories.

  But they were.

  Considering that Hero was the one being redefined, he’d accepted it almost immediately. He’d never understood the fuss, souls and no souls. He’d always felt human enough, and if humans had souls, then why shouldn’t he? But Claire had survived for three decades in Hell by clinging to a very rigid and precise categorization of the world. Every time that categorization defied her (Hero) or betrayed her (Andras), she struggled to change with it. Sometimes he caught a look in her eye as if she were the one with the fragmented soul. And the shards were sharp enough to draw blood.

  “No right,” Bjorn was saying. His face was red, scrawny muscles clenched. “You had no right to come in here and do that.”

  “It was my understanding that we were welcome in Valhalla—” Claire started to say, but Bjorn moved fast for an old coot.

  “You lot had no right to stir up my wing.” He had a finger in Claire’s face before Hero could stop him. It took considerable restraint to not remove said finger from Bjorn’s purview, but Hero supposed it would be counterproductive. Claire could stand on her own.

  “Your wing?” Claire arched her brow. “Bjorn, I understood you were in Valhalla enjoying your rightful retirement.”

  “Librarians have a hard time retiring.” Bjorn crossed his hairy arms with a pointed look. “You would know that as well as anyone, girl.”

  “Don’t call me ‘girl.’ ” Claire met his eyes for a long, cold moment before turning and beginning to busy herself with heating some water. Bjorn hadn’t offered them tea, which was equal to a declaration of war to Claire. Hero made himself useful by poking around Bjorn’s desk for tea leaves. “We weren’t here to stir anything up, as you put it. We simply wished to speak to the . . .” Claire paused. “What do you call them—ghosts? Deaths?”

  “Stories,” Bjorn said grumpily. “Same as yours. Ends are stories too. Perhaps the most important kind.”

  Claire sniffed, frowning into a battered pot before filling it from a pitcher of water and setting it over the fire. “Not more of that soldierly rot about good ends and honorable deaths.”

  “I didn’t hear many good ends in there,” Hero added.

  “It’s not the winning that makes an end good.” Bjorn had a pained look as he watched Claire take over his hearth, but he reserved the venom of his glare for Hero. Ah yes, there was the tea. Hero fished a small packet of paper out of the back and shoved the drawer closed with his hip. Bjorn slouched into a chair by the fire. “An end that feels right, that’s all a story wants.”

  “No.” Claire shook her head. “You tell a story, you promise a reader something. A story should deliver on that.”

  “Speaking as a . . .” Hero paused. “Speaking as a me, I think you’re both full of rotten shit. Have we forgotten that we’re talking about people’s deaths here?”

  The water in the pot began to boil and captured
Claire’s attention. Bjorn grumbled as he reluctantly heaved to his feet to begin rifling his office for a clean pair of cups. “It ain’t right. You can’t just walk in here and—”

  “I believe,” Hero said, as he moved out from behind Bjorn’s desk, “I have every right. From the denizens of one wing to another.”

  There was a pronounced silence as Hero handed Claire the packet of tea. Her fingers lingered against his as she took it, and her mouth crooked up at one side. It was an apology for losing herself in the argument earlier. Or perhaps a thanks for calling her out on it. That appeared to be Hero and Claire’s language of love, reminding each other not to be monsters. Or villains.

  It was a wonder that Rami could put up with either of them. Claire busied herself with making tea, then obliquely inspecting the pile of scrolls left out on the end table. It was an odd reversal, having played Claire’s backup often enough. But Hero was here as the librarian. The consultations of Valhalla’s stories had shaken him, but this—this he could do. He returned his attention to Bjorn.

  The Norseman still had an expression to curdle milk, but he appeared to be picking up the shards of clay with a singular intensity. Buying time. Hero cleared his throat. “Well?”

  “I reckoned that I had a theory,” Bjorn said slowly. He rested on his haunches and weighed a large shard of cup in the palm of his hand. “It’s not like a clay pot, a soul. You realize that, right?”

  “Well, I’d hope not,” Hero said, as if he had any clue what the old man meant.

  “A sliver of soul, a shard of soul, made of the same stuff . . . that’s just awkward mortal words we clumsily try to slap on fancy immortal things we don’t understand.” Bjorn slipped the jagged curve of clay between his fingers like a claw and held it up. “You ain’t this.”

  “Broken?” Hero supplied mildly.

  “No!” Bjorn made a motion as if he intended to chuck the piece at him but changed his mind. He scowled and shook his head as he finished sweeping up the crockery. “A part, a missing piece. Not whole. Reuniting with your kin, even joining with your author, ain’t going to put it back together again.”

  Air hitched in Hero’s lungs. He’d met his author once. It felt like so long ago, the start of a very sad fairy tale. Isn’t that how it went? Once upon a time, long ago and far away, a story had run away to find his author, the one person who could make him real and whole. Only she hadn’t recognized him—she’d been attracted to him, of course, many were—but even after he’d awkwardly bared his soul to her, his creator, his maker, she hadn’t seen him. Not as he’d wanted to be seen. It’d put him in an awful, vicious mood by the time Claire had hunted him down, and gotten them off on the wrong foot entirely.

  And then, of course, his author, his maker, his other part of his soul, burned him out of his book.

  “No, I suppose it won’t,” Hero said quietly.

  Bjorn read his face and nodded. “Souls aren’t fragments. She might have made you, you are made of the same stuff, but you’re not her. Suppose it’s more like a reflection. Or parents and children.”

  “Oh, bugger to that,” Claire swore reverently from the hearth.

  “Daddy issues?” Hero singsonged, though his voice felt like sandpaper. Yes, damn it, he would latch onto the first distraction that would allow him to flee from that memory.

  “I wouldn’t know—I’ve forgotten, I suppose because they’re long dead. But judging from the depth of my displeasure at the concept, I’d say so.” Claire shrugged. “But to the matter at hand, we’ve secured the support of the Unwon Wing, at least.”

  The tension in Bjorn’s shoulders reasserted itself. He turned away and chucked the broken cup in a basket that must have operated as a trash bin. “Yeh had no right,” he muttered again.

  “The souls in your care have every right to choose.” Hero was unsympathetic at whatever little bruised ego the Norseman was nursing.

  “You can go with us,” Claire said quietly, and obviously more sympathetic. “We’re not trying to steal anything out from under you, Bjorn. You can go with us back to the Unwritten—”

  Abruptly the bin basket slammed against the wall, showering bits of clay and discarded parchment at Bjorn’s feet. His fists were white knuckled at his sides. He didn’t turn, but Hero noted how his hunched shoulders heaved with deep, forced breaths. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough and deep as a rocky seabed. “What, in all of bloody brutal Midgard, makes you think I would want to go back?”

  Claire had risen with the pot of water in hand but held very still. The only movement was the steam rising off the pot, curling and snaking around her like a halo. It was evident they’d stepped into unexpected territory by the caution in her voice. “You don’t?”

  “You’re an idjit to ask that question.” Bjorn twisted around. His eyes were rheumy and wet. He bunched his fists in his beard, as if to give them something nonviolent to do. “I spent over six centuries in that damned place. You’ve spent, what, thirty years? How sick are you of those same walls, girl? I learned every creak in every floorboard, every goddamn dusty corner—”

  “The Library doesn’t get dusty—” Hero said, and it really was a testament to Bjorn’s restraint that the wreck of a man didn’t slug him. The glare Bjorn sent him was violence enough.

  “A mind ain’t made for it!” Bjorn’s voice was raised, shaking with a barely contained slurry of emotions Hero couldn’t identify. “You die, think you’ll get some sky-blasted rest, and they plop you in a dark, windowless tomb of a place in a damnation yeh didn’t even believe in.” Slow breathing had failed. Bjorn crossed his arms over his chest like a ward and tucked his chin. “You don’t starve; you don’t even need to piss—them powers that be think of everything except one. You can sure as hell go mad.”

  “You seem perfectly within your faculties to me,” Claire objected.

  “Mad ain’t a destination, girl. Sanity is a journey that just goes on.” Some of the anger drained out of Bjorn’s wet eyes. He shook his head. “Maybe you’re too early in yer tenure to understand that. You fall in a dark, deep place, you claw yourself out, hand over bleeding hand, but that don’t mean you won’t fall again.”

  “I . . . I understand a little of it.” It was Claire’s turn to look away. She set down the steaming pot of water, all thoughts of tea apparently forgotten. Hero could guess what thoughts crowded it out. Loneliness, temptation, and betrayal, and a handsome woman left behind in a faraway city. Claire’s darkness had come early, and though she’d come so far, opened up so much, it never left. Standing in the light now just meant you cast long, deep shadows.

  “I didn’t stay in the Unwritten Wing; I survived it. Six hundred bloody years, and not even a good battle scar to show for it.” Bjorn appeared to roughly draw himself together. His shoulders dropped, if only by force of will. He sniffed and lifted his head. “Forget how I died. That’s my unwon battle right there. That place.”

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said softly. She glanced at Hero, and he knew what she was asking. He nodded. “You don’t have to come. I didn’t want to do this without you, but I understand. We need the wing, but you—”

  “—go where the story leads me,” Bjorn said ruefully. “I’m a storyteller, Claire. Same as you. Don’t matter what fancy titles they give or take away. You think I could stand not knowing how this plays out?”

  “Are all humans this suicidally curious or just you two?” Hero asked.

  Bjorn pivoted and jutted a finger in Hero’s direction. “You! Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, you sapling. You are a librarian now. The cheek of you going over my head and talkin’ to my charges. Talking to the stories! It ain’t done! If Claire here ain’t going to teach you right—”

  “Brevity’s his mentor, not me,” Claire said.

  “—then I’m gonna hammer some wits into you myself.” Bjorn continued as if he hadn’t heard her. He let out a long b
reath and glared at Hero another moment before turning back to his desk. He dug a ragged gunnysack out of a drawer and dropped it on the surface.

  “You’ll come with us, then?” Hero guessed.

  “Seems like it,” Bjorn answered as he grimly began to sort through the chaos of his shelves. “If you lot are dead set on starting a fight, you’re going to need at least one good Norseman on your side.”

  Hero opened his mouth to argue that, but Claire stepped up and knocked his shoulder with hers. She shook her head, then smiled softly as the old man made quick work of his preparations. “Couldn’t ask for better.”

  24

  BREVITY

  Humans love to make things complicated. Look at belief. They build whole morality and judgment systems on it—who believes what, believes in the right way, believes strongly enough. It’s so unnecessary. Belief, when you get right down to it, is just a powerful story. Tell a story well, and the reader doesn’t just want it to be true—they know it is. Get enough souls to believe in a story, and you can change the world.

  Or make one.

  Librarian Fleur Michel, 1763 CE

  Brevity fell through solid stone.

  She didn’t break through. There was no crunch and snap of rock around her as she fell, simply a curious lack of wind. The stone didn’t give way beneath her so much as it became less real. She fell through a phantasm of solid rock. Strata of countless eons blurred in front of her eyes, so dizzying that Brevity could only distantly wonder what Hell’s geologic record could even be based on. Couldn’t wonder about that, not now, because she had to focus on the terror of the fall.