by A J Hackwith
Leto couldn’t help but twitch every time she did that: refer to Lucifer with a horrific pet name. It was disrespectful. Undignified. Not done. He’d begun to suspect that was why she did it.
Walter reached the counter and paused to pat delicately at his suit pocket. He whipped out a pocket square the size of a bath towel and wiped the counter before carefully placing two waxy candles on it. He then heaved one of the large glass jars filled with colored fog and set it next to them on the counter. “Modern-day Seattle area, aye? Where you want t’ be set down, Miss Brevity?”
Claire answered instead. “City center is fine. Space Needle, if you need a landmark.”
“The base of the Space Needle, this time,” Brevity added with a scrunched-up face.
“Oh yeah, sorry ’bout that . . .” Walter furrowed his brow and twisted the jar sharply, once, twice, three times. Each time, the swirling mist inside changed color slightly, darkening from sky blue to navy, brightening from forest green to spring. The colors settled into a slate blue and lime swirl, and the eyeless creature seemed satisfied. “That should do it.”
Brevity stood on her tiptoes to reach over the counter and inspect each white candle before sticking them in one of the many pockets of her cargo pants.
Leto eyed the swirling jar and edged another step toward Claire. “Pardon me, Miss Librarian, but I don’t think I’m authorized to travel. I was just supposed to—”
“Deliver the assignment and assist with completion. This is assisting.”
“I don’t think I’ll be much help—”
“It’s just a summons, Leto.” It was the first time the librarian had bothered to use his name, and the demon felt irrational heat in his cheeks. She offered him a trace of a smile. “A summons to a relatively boring time and place on a relatively boring errand. If you’re new, it’ll do you good to learn how these things work. I imagine that’s what High Grump had in mind. Unless you want to return to him to check?”
“No! No. I mean, if . . . you’re sure, ma’am.”
“You have matches?” Claire asked her assistant, and Brevity nodded.
“And spares.”
“Right. Walter, whenever you’re ready.”
The giant nodded, rubbing his gnarled palms on his pants once before twisting the lid off the jar. Leto caught what sounded like a whisper of seagulls as Walter set down the lid with a clang. The giant took the oversized jar carefully in two hands, leaned over the counter, and upended the jar over Brevity’s head.
The mists swirled out, not so much in a downpour, but like roots seeking purchase. They snaked around the muse’s head and swiftly raced around her, thickening as the room filled with the smell of briny sea and petrol, concrete and rain.
The navy and lime fog seemed to envelop her and then constrict, squeezing the girl-shaped fog into unhealthy proportions. Leto gasped, but Claire set a placating hand on his shoulder. The fog rippled and, in the next second, neatly withdrew back into the jar Walter held. There was a faint smell of ozone and sulfur, and Brevity was gone.
“Thank you, Walter. Now comes the unpleasant part.” Claire stepped toward the clear space in the center of the lobby. The giant nodded and set to screwing the jar closed and bustling with things under the counter. Walter seemed to make a point of averting his eyes, which did nothing for Leto’s nerves.
“Unpleasant?” Leto stayed close to the librarian and began to wonder why he couldn’t have traveled with Brevity instead.
“Well, unless you really love roller coasters.”
Claire straightened and locked her shoulders back. The air around them began to take on an odd quality. Leto frowned as the floor tilted under his feet. A heavy sensation pressed on his collarbone.
“What’s a roller coas—”
And then the world dropped through his skin.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
LETO HAD NEVER HAD his liver pulled through his ears, but he could now imagine the experience. It was as if a force had reached through the walls of the little room, through his skin, through every atom in his body . . . and ripped. Not up, not down, but betwixt, shouldering aside reality as it went. Leto’s vision faded and his equilibrium reported movement in one direction, then another, before giving up entirely.
Something hard bit into his knees, and fresh air hit his face. Rather than helping, this reminded his innards that he was no longer dying, and Leto felt the peculiarly mortal need to lose the contents of his stomach.
“He’s okay! Too much excitement.” A voice chirped to his right. “We’re okay—thanks! Have a good day.”
Leto forced open one eye and saw Brevity waving off a cluster of humans. The group was clad in loud nylon jackets and showed polite, if flimsy, concern before shuffling off. Tourists. Leto found the term in his mind, though he didn’t know where the word came from.
They stood in a large outdoor space, paved with concrete and studded with a line of round marble shapes. Milling humans cluttered the area around glass sculptures and souvenir stands. Behind them, dull metal struts rose to form a towering, spindly landmark that disappeared into an eternal gray.
Leto gripped a marble sphere and slowly wobbled to his feet. “Shouldn’t we be worried someone saw us?”
“If they did, they’d just as quickly forget,” Claire said. “Summonings are tough to remember. Wouldn’t be a useful means of transit otherwise.”
Leto turned and saw the librarian had fared the summoning just slightly better than he had. She leaned on a concrete bench. Her skin, normally a rich nut brown, was waxy around her flushed cheeks. Her dark hair, once full of tiny and impressively complicated beadwork, was now a thatch of simple braids tied away from her face. Her complex layers of clothes were also simplified into a vaguely Bohemian mix of a blouse, thick skirts, and sneakers.
Brevity, too, had undergone small mortal changes. Her skin no longer held a propane blue glow, her gold eyes were a plain brown, and roiling tattoos had resolved to a generic knotting pattern up each arm. Her hair, Leto was surprised to note, was still pastel green.
Leto glanced sharply down at his own hands but saw little change. Running fingers over his head revealed a long tide of faintly curled, mostly tangled dark hair, less oily and thornbush-like than it was in Hell, and his pointed ears were blunted to fleshy circles.
He also felt clammy and smelled vaguely of meat.
“Don’t worry—it’s not permanent.” Claire brought him out of his self-inspection.
“I don’t know if I like being this . . . squishy,” Leto said. It brought thoughts to mind, disquieting feelings, mortality, flashes of laughter and starlight and loss no longer felt. It was uncomfortable, like wearing someone else’s suit, but also faintly familiar in the way all the worst things were.
“Confusingly squishy. That’s humans in a nutshell.” Brevity shooed off the last concerned bystanders and held out a small object to each of her companions.
Leto took the small plastic canister. It was blue, with metal workings on top, and translucent. Inside, a delicate flame, no bigger than a speck but brighter than it had a right to be, bubbled in a clear liquid.
“Your ghostlight candles. They’ll last about a day. Don’t lose ’em,” Brevity said as she saw Leto’s puzzled look. “We can’t exactly carry lit holy candles around here. Basic camouflage. Candles down below turn into cigarette lighters up here. But don’t let anyone borrow a light. It’s kinda your passport while you’re here.”
“You do not want to get caught outside of Hell without your ghostlight. Very bad things happen. Now, then, about that book . . .” Claire tucked her ghostlight into a skirt pocket without looking at it. She paused to dig the tiny calling card out of her leather bag. “We’ve got some ways to walk.”
“Ooh, taxi?” Brevity squeaked. “I’ve always wanted to ride in one of those!”
“You’re a muse�
�you always want to do everything,” Claire said. “If it will save time, I suppose I can fold enough for a cab. Let’s go.”
To Leto’s surprise, the taxi driver paid no attention when what appeared to be a brightly colored rave kiddie, a dreadlocked hipster, and a malnourished teenager in an ill-fitting mortuary suit crawled into his cab. Nor did he blink as Claire spent the entire ride industriously ripping strips of paper out of an ancient-looking notebook and making complicated folds. One more oddity in an odd human world, just passing through.
Claire frowned at the card before directing the cab to drive “downtown” and not stop until they lost “the smell of fish and commerce.”
The driver squinted into the rearview mirror, probably rethinking his fare. “Uh, Pioneer Square?”
Again, the librarian consulted the tiny card. “Sure, close enough.” Over her shoulder, Leto was surprised to see the neatly printed type moving and shifting across the tiny square card, reorienting with new (poetically vague) directions each time the cab turned.
As the cab pulled up to a curb, Claire finished her folding and held the slips of paper out to the driver. “Keep the change.”
The driver frowned. “What the f—”
“You dreamed of a big house.” Claire’s voice dropped, odd and strangely formal, as Leto slid out of the car after her. She leaned through the window of the cab and caught the driver with her gaze. “With a big porch and a fireplace in the bedroom. Hearth, heart, hurt. You want to take her there and kiss her in the kitchen at the end of the day, food cooking, fire inside. Secure, solid, someday. Steps. This is your first.”
The driver watched Claire’s face and blinked slowly; then a fragile smile slid over his rough features. “Yeah, the house . . .” He nodded and tucked the slips of ragged paper in his pocket. “Thanks for the tip, ma’am. You have a good day.”
Claire straightened and tucked the notebook back into her bag.
“What—” Leto began.
“A story.” Claire watched the cab pull away. “I paid him in a story, his story. It’s all most souls want, really, so it’s easy for them to accept.”
It didn’t sit right with Leto. “But we cheated him. It’s a lie.”
“A lie. A dream. Good stories are both,” Claire dismissed. “Is it so bad? He’ll remember the story, turn it over carefully in the back of his mind, feel the edges of it like he would a lucky coin. A story will change him if he lets it. The shape and the spirit of it. Change how he acts, what dreams he chooses to believe in. We all need our stories; I just fed him a good one.”
“But he’s got bills to pay. His tally will come out wrong. The money—”
“It doesn’t do no harm.” Brevity nudged Leto. “Besides, don’t get boss started. If there’s one thing librarians know, it’s stories.”
“Still doesn’t seem right.” But Leto let it drop.
They were no longer in the gleaming tourist center of the city. All around them crowded old brick giants, thick buildings with drooping rows of narrow windows, papered with faded posters of all kinds. The main street maintained an infestation of shops, windows displaying discounted baubles or closeout-sale signs. There were fewer people down here, but there was enough foot traffic that no one seemed to pay their trio much mind.
Claire scowled at the calling card before handing it to Leto. “It’s getting vague. Keep an eye on that, and let’s look around.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
WHEN THE SCRIBBLES ON the calling card finally changed, they evolved into . . . nothing. An inky, irregular period filled the tiny card under the title information. Leto held the card out to Claire for her to see. She nodded and paused on the sidewalk, then began turning slowly in a circle. “It’s nearby.”
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Leto asked.
“A leather-bound book, like the rest of our collection. It’ll think it’s being sneaky, but it should stand out pretty clearly against modern-day paperbacks.” Claire frowned into store windows as they wandered a few yards up and down the sidewalk. “Or since it is awake and manifested, it could be a person.”
“A person?”
Claire frowned into a coffee shop window. “They look like anything, but you can tell by the . . . oh, hell and harpies.”
Both Brevity and Leto turned and peered over the librarian’s shoulder. The shop was a popular spot, filled with an assortment of creative and business folk jostling for table space and power outlets.
Leto didn’t see what had caused the librarian to utter increasingly dark and esoteric oaths under her breath until Brevity pointed. “There. We got ourselves a hero.”
Leto followed the girl’s finger to a table by the window where a young and attractive couple perched. The woman sipped at a tall glass while she flicked animated, slender hands around in her conversation with what Leto assumed, from the smitten look on the man’s face, was her boyfriend.
He was a composition of fine tailoring and good genes. He leaned conspiratorially over the table and offered the woman a practiced smile. The man’s fingertips rested artfully at his temple, where bronze hair ruffled in a nonexistent breeze. Leto was no judge of such things, for many reasons. But even he could tell in a moment that the hero was, frankly, perfect.
“Is the woman the author?” Claire had finally exhausted her cursing. “Brev, grab me the photo from the author profile.”
Brevity ruffled around in the librarian’s bag before flipping open the file. “Yeah, looks like Miss McGowan to me, boss.”
Leto suspected, from the stormy look that crossed Claire’s face, that the author’s presence was a very bad thing.
The librarian heaved a sigh. “Why couldn’t it have been a damsel? This is going to make things significantly more difficult. We need to corner it and keep the contact with the author to a minimum.”
“Wait—I thought we were here for a book,” Leto said.
“We are. He is the book.” Claire’s explanation was peevish as she scanned the shop. “When unwritten books get too wild, too loved, or just too hungry, they get it in their fool heads to be real. They leak into the world, usually in the form of one of their characters. They aren’t the most creative lot on their own. That guy is obviously the hero—did you see those cheekbones? All he’s missing is a sword and a white horse. That’s our character.”
“And he’s talking to his author?”
“Violating every rule unwritten works have. When I get that book back to the wing . . . Bugger. Why’d it have to be a hero?”
“What’s wrong with heroes?”
“Everything.”
“Boss ain’t exactly fond of characters that decide to wake up, ’specially heroes.” A thoughtful look flickered across Brevity’s face. “He’s just a representation of the story, of course. The physical book still exists. He can’t stray too far from the rest of his book, so it must be close.”
“Hopefully, Mr. Nightfall here is fool enough to keep it at hand, and we can wrap this up easy,” Claire said. “All right, a plan. Brevity, I’m going to need a distraction that gets the author’s attention.”
The former muse positively glowed. “Wild, public display of drama? That I can do. What did you have in mind?”
“Let’s keep this classic.” Claire turned to Leto with a smile that made him gulp. “Leto, time to earn your keep.”
3
RAMIEL
I’m glad I’m here! I’ll be the last librarian, for all I care. Think of it: what is more boring than paradise?
Apprentice Librarian Brevity, 2013 CE
The realms of the afterlife are long-lived, but not static. Realms function off belief, and will change as beliefs change. Realms can die if starved of souls, but more often they morph into something closer to legend than to religion. Eternity bends to the whims of mortal imagination.
I wonder what we
would do if we knew we held such power when we were alive. It’s an opportunity.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 51 BCE
THERE’S A FIRST QUESTION that anyone who lived a good life hears after they die. It’s a simple question. And it was Ramiel’s duty to ask it.
“Anything to declare?”
“What?” The soul was a thin man, his hairline meandering that border between middle-aged and elderly. He was confused, as they always were, wobbling slightly as he stood before the massive gates of Heaven’s inbound processing. The Gates, as they were called, stood as representation of Ramiel’s own personal angelic duty. And torment.
Rami pinched the thick nub of his stylus between his even thicker fingers and leveled his gaze at the man over the edge of the desk. He did not look at the line of souls stacked beyond him, a shimmering line of heads in every shape and color that twisted as far as he could see into the light.
He did not do a silent calculation of the amount of time the souls would take to process.
Did not feel a cramp in his calloused hands, joints much more accustomed to holding something colder and harder than a stylus.
Did not consider how many ledgers he had yet to fill with notes for judgment.
Instead, the angel took a slow breath and tried again. “Do you have anything to declare, sir? Secrets taken to the grave, yearnings never realized, visions, prophecies, perhaps?”
Rami did not anticipate much of an answer. Souls carried the baggage of their lives under their skin. Undeclared, unacknowledged, and therefore none of his concern. The rare soul ended up in front of him with some deathbed vision or prophecy. In which case, Rami dutifully recorded it for the judgment.
“No, nothing like that. I am an accoun—wait, was. Was an accountant.” The soul tapped gnarled knuckles together. Rami began marking the log when the voice interrupted him on the downstroke.
