by A J Hackwith
The courtyard transformed. Through the eye, the world became a wash of milky shadows, but it also became a world of doors. Claire turned a slow circle. Everywhere she looked, narrow gates lined the walls. And the pillars—the pillars. Each pillar held a series of tiny, physically impossible doors that hinged off the pillar like wheel spokes off an axle.
The courtyard became a crossroads.
“But no signposts. Which one?” Claire muttered. The orb responded by pulsing brightly and Claire nearly dropped it in surprise. When she brought it back to her eye, she saw that the doors were colored now. Each gate now held a door front decorated with unique lines and painted one of a multitude of colors, more than she would have believed existed.
She considered the one in the wall nearest her. It was ivory with metal inlay, every detail gilded. A flock of chubby-cheeked infants frolicked across it, each bearing wings and a golden horn, while some frankly terrifying figures watched from above, borne up by greater wings. Claire could guess the destination for that one, and she chuckled as she stepped back.
Hell would be easy to find. But she couldn’t just drop into the Library in the middle of an invasion and expect a solution to present itself. Claire pivoted as she considered the gallery of pathways around her, a tickle of a plan beginning to form in her head.
38
RAMIEL
The inhabitants of Hell are not the most welcoming neighbors, but a smart librarian will never be adrift for resources. Remember the other libraries, other realms, other paths. Build good fences, make good friends, and keep your laundry indoors. Leave just enough doubt in their minds to make yourself not worth the trouble.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1982 CE
HELL WAS A SERIES of hallways.
It was monotonous and maddening, and Rami still couldn’t believe it. The door had been open. The old paths into Hell, paths Rami hadn’t walked since he’d abandoned Lucifer’s upstart rebellion so long ago, had still been open. The way between worlds had still risen to appear when Rami willed it. No tricks, no force, no begging needed.
It was as if Hell had been waiting for him. In the eons, ages, millennia since then, Lucifer hadn’t shut him out. Uriel’s mad plan had turned out to be right. For some reason, even as a Watcher presumably working for Heaven, Rami was welcome in Hell.
The prospect, and the possible reasons why, disturbed him deeply.
Leto, however, experienced no such concerns. The boy brightened up considerably once they’d reached these interminable hallways. He behaved as if he wanted nothing more than to hug each pillar they passed.
Thankfully, he kept his arms at his sides and carefully walked in the center of the hall, per their agreement. Leto was a purified soul, and if he could stay that way, he could still pass the Gates. But souls were grasping things. The slightest encounter with the wrong influence here could corrupt and damn him all over again. Just walking the grounds was dangerous enough, and Rami had insisted that the boy stay two steps behind him when trouble presented itself and touch nothing besides the floor beneath his feet.
He allowed Leto to take the lead once they passed the trials of the anguished in the outer ring and approached the Library. The boy appeared to have blossomed, rather than being drained from his trials; he glowed. His ears stayed rounded and his skin stayed youthful and warm. He toyed with his messy coils of hair absently. How had it been possible that Rami had ever mistaken him for a demon? Leto hummed a tuneless pop song under his breath as he guided Rami past hallways drenched in the sunsets of alien stars, down grand staircases falling into disrepair, through ballrooms that still contained the last strains of music.
They encountered no one, which just set Rami more on edge. It was very quiet for an invasion. Either they were quite late, and the battle was done, or the opposition had been so weak as not to warrant a defense. Neither possibility boded well for the Library. It left Rami considering what he would do should they even reach the doors.
He was so busy chasing these thoughts around his head, he nearly ran into Leto. The teenager was frowning at a large alcove. A low, empty platform grounded the otherwise empty space, and it was this platform that seemed to concern him.
“The gargoyle should be here,” Leto said.
“A gargoyle?”
“Well, a headache in the form of a gargoyle. I really should have asked its name. . . .” Leto trailed off as he looked down the hallway. “Oh! There he is!”
The teenager took off toward a large form that stood frozen at the far end of the hall. A chill of alarm shot up Rami’s back, and his hand drifted to his sword as he ran. “Leto! Stop!”
He caught up with Leto as he stumbled to a stop near the unmoving form. It was a statue of dull, jagged stone and with a great head and wings that brushed the hallway’s tall ceiling. It appeared to be caught in midattack, arms and wings extended, muscles bunched. It didn’t move but still seemed to shift and twitch, never quite fully in focus. When Rami cautiously circled the statue to inspect its face, a disorienting pulse of pain bloomed in his head.
Rami looked away with a wince. “This is your gargoyle?”
“Yes. But when I knew him, he moved around more. . . .” Leto’s brow furrowed in concern. He reached his fingers out toward one frozen wing before catching himself. “Something’s wrong with him.”
“Perhaps he’s best left as he is.”
Leto shoved his hands in his pockets and paced around, then back up as if to get a better view. On his third step backward, the air crackled a warning. Rami’s shout was too slow.
Violet light filled the hall and shot at Leto’s back. The next moment, the teenager flew across the marble floor, and the light briefly coalesced into a wall before fading away.
Leto crumpled against a wall. Rami felt relief when he let out a breathy groan as he reached him. “Are you all right?”
“For the record, I did not touch anything. I swear.” Leto accepted help sitting upright, and he rubbed his shoulder with a wince. “What was that?”
“A ward.” Rami stood and approached the space where the wall had formed.
“That’s good, right? That means Andras and the other bad guys haven’t gotten in yet.”
“No.” Rami inspected the air. He brought out his sword and held it just over the space. Black and violet light arced between his blade and the ward, though it didn’t shock again. He sighed and put his blade away. “This is a temporary ward. Strong but hastily formed, not tied to anything. It isn’t anchored to the Library.”
Leto’s face fell as he looked down the hall. Beyond the invisible ward, they could see the great double doors that Rami assumed led to the Library. Muffled shouts and thuds could just barely be heard. But a full-scale resistance, a successful resistance, should have been much louder, producing sounds of fighting that could be heard even at this distance. Rami worried what they would find. They could be merely walking into an enemy encampment.
“So how do we get past it?” Leto asked.
“We can’t.” Rami stepped back to inspect the lines of power that were just visible now, crisscrossed through the air. “I said it was hasty, not that it was weak. Whoever constructed it has got something powerful feeding it, supplying energy. We would need something even stronger to disrupt it, even for a moment. We would need nothing short of a miracle to bring it down.”
“I might be able to manage that.” A voice came from down the hall. “But you’re not setting foot in my Library.”
Rami’s sword came to his hand as he pivoted, low in front of Leto to shield the human soul from whatever was coming.
But down the hall was a familiar figure. Claire was in a filthy state, braids wild and skirts torn, brown skin dusted with grit and something redder, but her glare was as fierce as ever.
“Peace, Librarian.” Rami lowered his sword.
“Oh, no. No peace,” Claire spit out the words ov
er what sounded like an increasing mass of birds in the distance. “I told you I would make you pay for—”
“Claire?”
Leto poked his head around Rami’s shoulder. Rami watched the fury fall from her face, replaced with shock. Leto stepped out from behind Rami, and the librarian’s eyes broke with a kind of hopeful light. The words that fell from her lips were so vulnerable they pulled in his chest.
“Leto . . . that can’t— You were— You’re here, oh god . . .”
And then she was running toward them. Rami realized she was hobbling, favoring one knee with a twitch of pain on her face every time she stepped. Her skirts were stiff with blood, and she wore multiple amulets slung around her neck and bound around her wrists. She was also barefoot, which struck him as perhaps the most odd.
Rami remembered himself and took two steps to lift a broad arm to bar the librarian’s path.
Claire skidded to a stop, and the murderous look was quick to return as she snarled at him. “Get out of my way, or I’ll remove your arm for you. I have a bauble for just that.”
“Apologies. You can’t, Librarian. Do you notice anything different about our young friend?”
Leto held still with a sheepish blush for the inspection. Claire’s brow furrowed. “He looks fine. More than fine, he’s whole. He’s here, he’s . . .” She stopped. “He’s human. Not a demon. Oh, Leto. You’re human.”
“He is. And his soul is bound for Heaven as long as nothing here corrupts him. Nothing touches him.”
“Including me.” Bitterness and fresh loss flickered across Claire’s face and then were gone. “Did you remember, then?”
“I remembered.” Leto flushed with embarrassment, voice a little shy. “I was . . . Matthew. Matthew Hadley.”
The smile froze, half-formed across Claire’s face. Her voice dropped to a strangled whisper. “Hadley?”
“Yeah . . .” Leto rubbed his arm. “Uh, but please, I’m still Leto.”
A complicated pain struggled across Claire’s face, and it took Rami a moment to put it together. He’d read the brief on the librarian before all this started.
Claire Juniper Hadley.
Born 1944, Surrey, England. Married in London, 1965. Died 1986. Survived by a husband and one daughter.
A daughter who hadn’t married but had moved to America to raise a child of her own.
Rami risked a glance between the two. The wiry, coiled hair, the dark eyes, the stubborn jut of the chin. Claire was a darker brown, Leto’s eyes more amber, but it was there, yes. If you squinted and allowed for two generations of genetic muddling, which humans were good at. But the way Claire was looking at Leto, like a mirage in the desert, made Rami’s heart clench in sympathy. He knew what it meant to see the familiarity of a home you thought you’d lost.
And he knew what it was for that home to be just out of reach. Which made what he said even harder.
“Leto . . . has been through quite a lot of shock today. His soul is fragile,” Rami murmured to Claire. With considerable effort, she shook herself, and only Rami noticed the mist trembling at the corners of her eyes.
She dropped her gaze to her feet a moment before drawing a hard breath. “Right. Right. It just explains . . . Never mind.” She looked to Rami. “You saved him?”
Rami inclined his chin. Rather than expressing gratitude, Claire nodded, jaw clenching into a hard line. “Nothing is going to lay a hand on him.”
“Are you okay?” Leto approached as Rami dropped his arm, but they kept a wide gap between them that spoke much. “You look . . .”
“It’s been a . . . rough day since you left.” Claire’s lips twitched. “Turns out, I’m shit without my assistants.”
“The blood . . .”
“Not mine.”
“The knee?”
“Mine,” Claire said with a wince. “But it’s fine now that I’m back in Hell. Phantom pain.”
Leto and Claire looked at each other, and it seemed to Rami that Leto had to read the tension welling in the space between. Finally, Leto coughed and pointed. “Something’s wrong with the gargoyle, I think.”
“Right.” Claire embraced the diversion. She approached the gargoyle and ran a motherly hand over one flank as she murmured, “Oh, my friend. What did those bullies do to you . . . ?”
It was the first opportunity that Rami had to watch her work. Claire circled the giant stone statue once. She stopped and ran a hand up and down one shoulder, as if working her fingers along a seam. Then she nodded to herself and began sorting through the beads bound to her wrist. When she found what she was looking for, she hauled herself up one side of the creature, bare feet braced on the gargoyle’s haunch, and twisted a large colorless bauble and rapped it along the stone.
On the third rap, the creature shuddered to life.
Rami and Leto had to dodge as the gargoyle’s wings swept around. The creature released an infuriated howl that had been caught in its throat, and its dimensional flickering increased. Claire had to hang on to the curve of its shoulder to keep from being displaced. “Easy, old friend.”
The gargoyle seemed to calm with a few more murmured words from the librarian, though Rami could not look directly at its face to see what specific effect they had. After a moment, it crouched to gently allow Claire to clamber off. She patted its haunch and straightened her muddled skirts.
Rami eyed the collection of jewels that hung around Claire’s neck. When he looked at them just so, the air filled with whispers. “Are those what I think they are?”
Claire turned to him with a sour smile. “I made a supply run before coming here. Picked up a couple things, made a few friends. The Arcane Wing is shockingly unattended right now.”
“Are they strong enough to bring down the ward, then?”
She shook her head. “Not nearly powerful enough.” Claire reached into one skirt pocket and withdrew her hand, closed over something. A cruel smile twisted at her lips. A smile that suddenly spoke less of heartache and more of dark, vengeful things.
“But this is.”
She opened her fingers and a crumpled scrap of paper, pillowed by cloth, drifted on her palm. A familiar scrap of paper. A scrap of paper that glimmered with dark green script and whispered of destruction and had started this whole mess.
Rami’s eyes widened, and so did Claire’s wicked smile. “I’d hoped to save it for Andras’s traitorous face, but this will have to do.” The sound of beating wings and dark tidings rushed closer, and a gust of air stirred them from around the corner. Claire canted her head up, a gleam in her eye. “Will you join us, Watcher?”
39
BREVITY
Stories can die. Of course they can. Ask any author who’s had an idea wither in their head, fail to thrive and bear fruit. Or a book that spoke to you as a child but upon revisiting it was silent and empty. Stories can die from neglect, from abuse, from rot. Even war, as Shakespeare warned, can turn books to graves.
We seek to preserve the books, of course. But we forget the flip side of that duty: treasure what we have. Honor the stories that speak to you, that give you something you need to keep going. Cherish stories while they are here.
There’s a reason the unwritten live on something as fragile as paper.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1974 CE
A CHARACTER’S COLORS FADE when its book is destroyed.
Brevity stared at Aurora’s unmoving face, her heart a fist in her chest. If you were human, and if you closed those eyes, she might just be napping. Sleeping anywhere—balanced on books, on the couch in the suite— as she was prone to do.
If you did not look down and see the jagged holes that had been carved through her thin cotton jumpsuit and the tiny chest beneath. If you did not see the flurry of shredded, ink-stained paper that littered the character’s body. If you were not a muse who could see the absence of light where col
or should have bloomed.
Brevity knelt and picked up a scrap of paper that eddied by, rubbing her thumb over it. She tried to catch her breath, to hold on to the idea of how they’d gotten here; the fall had been so fast.
Not all the damsels had chosen to fight. Some had retreated into their books, but enough had decided to stay that Brevity and Hero felt they could mount a proper defense. Hero had a mind for fighting dirty, and Brevity had been surprised at his fierce, determined plan. He’d moved swiftly between damsels, helping one locate books on swordsmanship and combat before moving on to the next one.
“Why in damnation aren’t there any unwritten guns in this place? Or unwritten grenades, flamethrowers?” Hero had complained early on.
“First of all: fire. Library. No. Second . . .” Brevity shrugged. “Weapons stopped being art. Fickle human progress.”
Hero had grunted and bent to help with another barricade.
They moved the damsels into position, loose groups of three that at least gave them a fighting chance. They readied a stockpile of weapons and projectiles—pilfered, again, from anything in the collection that was not nailed down—around the reinforcements.
And they had waited. Tension strung through the Library in different ways. A princess with cropped raven hair cried quietly, even while holding her sword up with a determined grip. The moll in the flapper dress had cracked jokes and produced a pack of smokes from nowhere. (Not allowed, but Brevity hadn’t had the heart to confiscate them.) A severe nonbinary mechanic with overalls and greased hair had surprised Brevity by moving quietly from group to group, shushing the teary and comforting nerves.
Instead of feeling anxious, Brevity felt moved to help. Hero found her at the front barricade when he came to kick her out.
“He needs you.” Hero emptied his hands of the last of the weapon supply. Brevity’s eyes wordlessly drifted to the door as it shuddered again, and Hero fiercely shook her shoulder. “If Andras wants to take the Library, he’ll need to confront and defeat the acting librarian, yes? That means you.”
