by A J Hackwith
Praise for
The Library of the Unwritten
“This book is so much fun, and you should be reading it. Trust me. Stories about story are some of my favorite kinds. This book definitely makes the list. I am so glad I read this.”
—Seanan McGuire, author of The Unkindest Tide
“A muse, an undead librarian, a demon, and a ghost walk into Valhalla. . . . What follows is a delightful and poignant fantasy adventure that delivers a metric ton of found-family feels and reminds us that the hardest stories to face can be the ones we tell about ourselves.”
—New York Times bestselling author Kit Rocha
“The Library of the Unwritten is a tiered dark chocolate cake of a book. The read is rich and robust, the prose has layers upon layers, and the characters melt like ganache upon the tongue. A saturated, decadent treat. An unforgettable, crave-worthy experience. A baroquely imagined and totally unexpected original take on such well-worn topics as Hell, libraries, and the difference between what never was and what never will be.”
—Philip K. Dick Award–winning author Meg Elison
“The Library of the Unwritten is a story about stories: ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others, and the ones buried so deep we hope no one ever finds them. Hackwith has artfully penned a love letter to books and readers alike and filled it with lush, gorgeous prose; delightfully real characters; a nonstop, twisty, and heart-wrenching plot; and an explosive ending that gave me chills.”
—K. A. Doore, author of The Perfect Assassin
“A delightful romp through Heaven, Hell, and everything in between, which reveals itself in layers: an exploration of the nuances of belief, a demonstration of the power of the bonds that connect us, and a love letter to everybody who has ever heard the call of their own story.”
—Caitlin Starling, author of The Luminous Dead
“The Library of the Unwritten is like Good Omens meets Jim Hines’s Ex Libris series, a must-read for any book lover. Hackwith has penned a tale filled with unforgettable characters fighting with the power of creativity against a stunning array of foes from across the multiverse. The Library of the Unwritten rocks!”
—Michael R. Underwood, author of the Stabby Award finalist Genrenauts series
“The only book I’ve ever read that made the writing process look like fun. A delight for readers and writers alike!”
—Hugo Award winner Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
“A wry, high-flying, heartfelt fantasy, told with sublime prose and sheer joy even at its darkest moments (and there are many). I want this entire series on my shelf yesterday.”
—Tyler Hayes, author of The Imaginary Corpse
“Elaborate world building, poignant and smart characters, and a layered plot make this first in a fantasy series from Hackwith . . . an ode to books, writing, and found families.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Hackwith builds her world and characters with loving detail, creating a delightful addition to the corpus of library-based and heaven-vs.-hell fantasies. This novel and its promised sequels will find a wide audience.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
BOOKS BY A. J. HACKWITH
Novels from Hell’s Library
The Library of the Unwritten
The Archive of the Forgotten
ACE
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2020 by A. J. Hackwith
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hackwith, A. J., author.
Title: The archive of the forgotten / A. J. Hackwith.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ace, 2020. | Series: A novel from hell’s library ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2020002015 (print) | LCCN 2020002016 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984806390 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781984806406 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Adventure fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.A254 A89 2020 (print) | LCC PS3608.A254 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002015
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002016
First Edition: October 2020
Cover images by Shutterstock
Cover design by Faceout Studio/Jeff Miller
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Cover
Praise for The Library of the Unwritten
Books by A. J. Hackwith
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To the families we make
1
CLAIRE
This is my last entry in the Librarian’s Log. I don’t know why Brevity insists; I never wrote in here as often as I should have. I did, at first, and I have reviewed the entries from my apprenticeship to confirm how rotten they were. I was. I can’t believe this damned book even kept them. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I’ll be glad to be rid of this log: the nattering of the dead.
That’s not true. I suppose I should aim for the truth, now that there is so very little worth hiding. Let us try again.
I am Claire Juniper Hadley, librarian of the Unwritten Wing. Like any proper storyteller, I have lied. I have plotted and hurt and lied, so many lies I can’t even recall. And with those plots, lies, and little hurts, I tried to do right by the Library. However, the performance of my duties has been found wanting, so I hereby resign my post to my highly qualified replacement, Brevity. Who will, no doubt, blot out my troubled service with her brilliant care.
Treat
her well, old book. Or I’ll come back and burn you too.
Librarian Claire Juniper Hadley, 2019 CE
THE ARCANE WING WAS a cabinet of curiosities. Libraries have a tradition of maintaining a curio, a house of mathoms, oddities, trinkets, artifacts of inquiry. As curators of obscure and sometimes undervalued things, librarians attract the unusual and misplaced. Hell’s Library was no different.
If one was to be accurate, Hell’s Library was slightly different. What Hell would find curious, others might classify as weapons of gibbering terror.
Claire, for one, found it a refreshing break from books and authors. The objects of the Arcane Wing each had their own story, in a straightforward way. This dented crown was part of a dictator’s deal with a demon, with its spot where his blood rusted through the false gold, stained when his people came for him. These ruby seeds, held under the tongue of a desperate child as she braved the underworld to find her lost brother. One is missing, accidentally swallowed, and turned the child to malachite. A sliver of her pinkie finger is cross-indexed three shelves down.
Each item held a story, but the story was done. The End. The Unwritten Wing hummed with unstarted beginnings, while the Arcane Wing was sepulchral with artifacts of untold ends. It was quiet; terrible and quiet. And it left Claire feeling like one more artifact. Like her story was done and told. Here, the disgraced former librarian of Hell’s Unwritten Wing. See her shadowed eyes. And here are the cracks in her soul, flaws in her craftwork where all the purpose has sifted out. See how she moves in endless circles to avoid collecting dust.
Claire could have settled, and accepted her ignoble denouement, if she were not constantly being reminded of her ending.
The newest reminder sat cross-legged in a puddle of lamplight between tables. She was in the back of the Arcane Wing, which had been Andras’s prison for Valhalla’s ravens. When Andras had been Arcanist, the back wall had been a row of cages. Because libraries reflected their owners, that had all been smudged out of existence when Claire took over. Now, instead, smart hickory drawers lined the wall, each identified with a shiny brass nameplate.
Most bore some variation of tea leaf. Even a dead woman was allowed her vices.
Beneath the tisane collection, a damsel girl sat cross-legged, a mop of dark curls curtaining her face. She was a spry and striking shadow, dark as teak and fragile as blown glass right to the tips of her pointed ears. The romper she wore might have once been a pale gothic dress but had been efficiently stripped and tied above her knobby knees. She was a ghostly creature of bony edges, as if peeled out of a nightmare softened into dream.
“Rosia.” It was helpful that the latter half of the damsel’s name was mostly composed of a sigh. Claire rubbed her forehead. “This isn’t the Unwritten Wing. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I got lonely.” Rosia didn’t look up; all of her concentration was focused on prying the edge of her thumbnail along the dark varnish of the floorboards. Thin curlicues of flaking varnish next to her toe were the only sign of progress so far.
“How can you be lonely? You have an entire suite of other damsels. And Brevity. Talk to your friends,” Claire said with as much patience as she could muster. She tried to keep her voice soft, a feat it wasn’t used to performing. Once, she would have known how to handle a wandering character. A warning, a scalpel flick, and stories would fold back into the books that confined them. Back when they were simply that—books to be shelved—and she was simply the librarian.
Nothing was that simple anymore. Claire had been shocked out of her decades of denial when a runaway book had forced her to divert a demonic coup and face the cruelty she’d inflicted in the past. Books, and the characters that awakened from them, might not be human but were worth a little humanity.
Rosia’s twin moon eyes blinked a momentary eclipse before she turned back to toying with the flooring. “I am.”
Nothing could ever be that simple anymore. “I beg your pardon?”
“I am with friends. They’re so hard to hear, though,” Rosia went on without acknowledging the question. “We play hide-and-seeks. They always win.”
Claire glanced behind her, but she was patently alone. Damsels were not typically solitary characters, even ghost girls like Rosia. They were the hearts of stories that had woken up and had been allowed to remain as they were in the Library, instead of being shelved into their books again. It’d been a small mercy that Brevity had persuaded Claire into allowing when she’d been librarian. Now, under Brev’s purview, the damsel suite seemed to have grown to an annex. It was a suspicious population growth, even accounting for the number of damsels and books lost during the siege.
Claire couldn’t say she approved. There was very good reasoning for keeping unwritten books asleep on the shelves. Woken up, personified, characters risked changing, and change was transformative to their books. They could warp away from the story they were intended to be, or just go a little funny in the head.
Claire suspected Rosia of the latter, but it was hard to be harsh with a girl who was part moonbeam. She crouched down, attempting to be less of a, as Brev put it, “boogeyman for books.” “This is the Arcane Wing. Characters don’t belong here—”
Rosia’s face crumpled, and she rapidly turned from eerie ghost princess to plaintive child. “But you’ll still take care of us, right?”
“I—” Claire faltered over the ache that knotted in her chest. Her voice was unsteady when she found it again. “I’m not the librarian of your wing.” Anymore. It made the pain worse to say that, so she didn’t.
Rosia, if possible, fluttered with even greater distress. “But you’ll take care of them? You have to.”
“Who—” Claire bit off the question as heavy footsteps creaked on the boards behind her. Ramiel came around the corner, clapping the dust off his work-hardened hands.
His rumpled trench coat was a shade grayer than normal, a result of a morning spent moving the heavier of the Arcane Wing’s residents around in the archives. He stopped short as he spotted Rosia. The pepper-colored feathers peeking from beneath the collar of his coat bristled into a disgruntled ruff. He had the perpetual look of a toy soldier sent one too many times through the dryer. Rami frowned in a way that sent his stony olive-tan features rumbling to concerned peaks. “Again?”
Claire rose to her feet and ignored the judgmental tone in his voice. “Please help Rosia back to the Unwritten Wing.”
“Will you be speaking with Brevity?” Rami asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Rami was an angel of few words but a whole catalog of looks. The one he sent her now was worth an hour of chiding in itself. His expression softened as he offered a hand to Rosia, crouching down so his broad shadow didn’t seem quite so imposing. “Up, on your feet, little soldier.”
Rosia took his hand and reached down to pat the floorboards fondly before allowing him to guide her out. Her fingers danced along the shelves as they passed, but it appeared even the Arcane Wing’s dangerous artifacts knew better than to harm one of her damsels.
Brevity’s damsels, Claire amended with sour impatience for her own brain. She followed Rami down the row and tried to amend his judgment. “I am sure Brevity has her own people in hand. It’s really not necessary.”
“I’m a people now? Why does no one tell me when I’ve been promoted? We could have thrown a party.”
The voice was too droll, too full of self-amusement, to mistake. Hero lounged against a table, having shoved a jumble of half-assembled (now utterly unassembled) bone relics out of the way to make room for the tail of his velvet coat. Claire hoped they’d cursed his ass in the process. Out of habit, Claire’s attention went to the light scar whorling across his left cheekbone. It was a new blemish that Hero tried to downplay in his vanity, but it was healing nicely into a feature that humanized his otherwise eerie perfection, much to Claire’s disgruntlement. Hero’s assessing ga
ze flicked toward her for only a moment before settling on Rami with a light of interest. “Well, look at you. So paternal and domestic.”
Rami didn’t respond, but Claire could imagine the pained tightening of his stoic face. Hero delighted in having that effect on people. She brushed by Rosia to shoo Hero off the table. “Book.”
“Warden.” Hero managed to stand and make it look like his idea. He picked imaginary dust from the velour of his jacket. This one was dyed a royal blue that matched the fine seams of his ridiculously tailored fantasy breeches and set the red tones in his bronze hair glowing primly. Hero always looked one breath away from delivering a bon mot or challenging someone to a duel. “Rumor has it you’ve borrowed a damsel. We’re not a lending kind of library, as you would know.”
“‘Borrow’ is not an accurate term.” Claire twirled her hand impatiently, but Rosia seemed in no hurry to let go of Rami’s hand. “This is the fourth time in two weeks, Hero. Your stunt has obviously set a bad precedent for the damsels.”
“I’m certain the women of the Library were fully capable of independent mischief before me, if your example is any to go by,” Hero demurred.
“Yes, you just help it along,” Rami muttered to the floor.
The smile Hero sent Rami was magnificent, shameless, and wasted, for Rami refused to look at him. “In any case, my many charms are not why I am here.” Hero turned no less a devilish look to Claire. “Brevity’s asked for you.”
“No, she hasn’t,” Claire said automatically. She’d made a purposeful—painful but purposeful—withdrawal in the weeks following the coup that had led to the Library’s shake-up. She’d stopped visiting, stopped answering questions, stopped having a say in the welfare of books. Brevity would never fully accept the mantle of Unwritten Wing librarian if Claire didn’t provide the breathing room for her to do so.
Of course, Brevity, the best-natured soul in Hell, had wanted the exact opposite. Claire had been forced to use brusque methods and harsher words before the Unwritten Wing had gradually stopped trying to pull her back in. Brevity got the message eventually.