The Archive of the Forgotten

by A J Hackwith

  “Sis.” Probity touched her shoulder, looking at her with all the worship and steady belief of a child reunited with her hero. But they weren’t the eyes of a youth anymore. Probity looked at her with the certainty of hope. “But what if it’s what you are made for? Librarians have always been revolutionaries, right?” Brevity thought of the logbook, of Poppaea’s rebellion and Gregor’s skeptical pragmatism and Fleur’s unorthodox means. She had to nod. Probity smiled. “Maybe this is your revolution. The system is broken; it’s got to change. Maybe you’re the one to fix it.”

  It was an alluring thought, one of stories and quests, but Brevity’s anxiety was quick to remind her of the other way those stories ended. “But what if it breaks instead?”

  “You can’t break something that’s already broken. Stop protecting things you could make better.” Probity’s hand slid down her arm, then dropped, hesitantly. She gave her a slip of a smile to soften her frustration. “Please. Think about it, at least.”

  8

  CLAIRE

  Remake the Library. That’s what they tell me, as if it should be so simple. They tossed out the old librarian, as if chasing off a wild dog, but left all the books. There you go: have at it. Ha! As if books are all that’s needed to make a library. My people, we know libraries.

  Stories are more than ink on pages. Libraries are more than scrolls stacked upon shelves. There is something untold here.

  Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 603 CE

  QUARANTINE, CLAIRE HAD SAID, and she would have sworn it echoed differently against the flat oak shelves of the Arcane Wing. Alone, repeated back to her unsettlingly. It was a small mercy when Rami set about the inventory and Claire could retreat to her desk.

  The Arcane Wing hadn’t had a proper office under Andras. The demon had appeared to enjoy conducting the entire place like a lab. He did any record keeping from the expanse of worktables at the front of the collection. Or, more likely, foisted the more tedious tasks off onto the abominations he called assistants. One of the very first changes the wing had made for Claire’s comfort, after lightening the aesthetic gloom, was developing a small alcove along the back wall, past the empty rookeries. It was a cubby, really, just enough space for Claire’s battered desk, chair, and row of shelves on the wall above that seemed to always hold precisely the record necessary.

  It was a tiny space Claire could feel was entirely her own, in a place and routine that decidedly weren’t. When she turned her chair just so, she could almost imagine she was in the corner of some distant library. It was usually a place to be alone.

  Usually, when there wasn’t a disgruntled-looking giant raven lurking on the back of her chair.

  “Bird.” Claire sighed and pulled a drawer open to scavenge some self-defense bread crumbs.

  Andras had kept ravens—as experiment subjects, as hostages, perhaps both—when he’d been Arcanist. Not just any ravens—Odin’s ravens. Ravens of Valhalla. Ferocious warrior-spies for the Norse realm. Gods knew what Andras had planned. Claire had been happy enough to free them in exchange for help reclaiming the Unwritten Wing. The raven women were welcome allies, and lethal and merciless against Andras’s demons.

  Afterward, they’d left with their leader, back to Valhalla. All except one old, lazy she-raven. She roosted in the rafters and showed up occasionally to peck at Claire and be a nuisance. She delighted in causing chaos. Claire had taken to just calling the creature Bird, since she’d never seen her transform into a human shape. Perhaps she had forgotten how. Perhaps she couldn’t. Perhaps Andras had kept one regular, boring, mortal raven from the human world in the cages, just to have a go at everyone. That would have been his kind of humor.

  Trapped and cornered in a cage, everyone’s the same feral animal, pup. Remember that. The voice in her head was still there, her memory of Andras the Benevolent Mentor, not Andras the Buggered Traitor.

  Claire fed the raven anyway, though she would deign to talk to it only when Rami wasn’t around. He already worried about her sanity, after she’d survived witnessing Uriel face-to-face. He really was a fussy one, for a being that had seen epochs come and go. But he had a good heart, and she’d grown too fond to worry him.

  “No, I haven’t told him yet. And I’m not going to,” Claire said to the reproachful look Bird gave her. She hadn’t said a word about the whispers to anyone yet. It wasn’t that she feared Brevity, Rami, or even Hero wouldn’t believe her. It was just, given her history, the presence of voices no one else could hear after a dramatic event like a near-death staining might raise some alarms. Alarms were fussy things. Claire couldn’t get a smidge of work done with them.

  She found a broken biscuit behind a bottle of ink that satisfied Bird long enough for Claire to reclaim her chair. The sigh that pushed past her lips as she flopped into the dim of the alcove was not entirely intentional. Her stained hand came to rest, palm up, in her lap. It didn’t feel different, besides a perpetually damp, chilly sensation that had her rechecking that she wasn’t leaving wet fingerprints of ink on everything she touched. She hoped she still had fingerprints; it was rather hard to tell under all the black.

  Bird resettled on the edge of the open drawer, biscuit crumbling between her scaly claws. Her feathers were fluffed into a dusty storm cloud that said she had no intention of taking the bribe and leaving Claire in peace. Bird destroyed the biscuit industriously, then set to snapping up a pen cap and rapping it against the desk. At least her random blats and gravel-filled squawks were anchors of solid, weighty things. Real things. Claire put aside the question of whispers and focused on the more productive question of the ink.

  “Back to work,” Claire muttered to Bird and the whispers.

  No two of Andras’s logbooks were the same. Claire drew one down from the shelf at random. The cover was bound in some kind of hide that was too heavy and metallic to be from any creature on earth. She found the index quickly and looked for any log entry dealing with an artifact or speculation of ink. When that came up empty, she broadened her search to any magical liquids, and that got somewhere at least. Claire spent the next three hours wading through Andras’s spidery handwriting and parsing out his thoughts on chimera blood, arcane brews, ifrit tears, aqua vitae, and even the observable properties of holy water. An entry that was brief at best. What she wouldn’t have given to have that in her inventory at any point of her tenure in Hell, Claire thought wryly.

  There were entries on divine paints, dark visceral slurries, arcane potions, cosmic floods, and the blood of every impossible realm creature one could think of. But no ink. There was not a single record of any artifact of ink-like nature passing through the Arcane Wing.

  Claire fell back into her chair and rubbed the grit out of her eyes with her good hand. The utter absence of a thing was nearly as telling as anything else she could have dug up. Telling what, though? A hot feeling threatened to well up in her eyes, and, damn it all, Claire hated to cry when she was frustrated. Crying, in general, was an indignity, but tears that came because she felt powerless to do anything else were the worst kind.

  If she could just find a fulcrum, find a point to stand where the world made sense again, she felt she could manage. But everything had felt wildly askew from true since the Library fire. A slow, festering wound had opened between the Unwritten Wing and the Arcane Wing. And left unattended, it had burst—through the floorboards, through the tentative quiet—into the mayhem and confusion of ink that shouldn’t exist.

  And there was the wound. Claire mentally poked at it. It wasn’t that she desired to be librarian again—she didn’t want the Unwritten Wing back from Brevity—it was simply that she wanted to understand what had happened. It had never made sense, and her lack of understanding was threatening everyone. Everyone expected Claire to solve the riddle. Knowledge was what she excelled at. Yet she hadn’t even been clever enough to keep from touching the stuff.

  “. . . naught is lost.”
r />   Claire sat up in her chair and glanced at the raven. “Did you hear that?”

  Bird gave her a slow blink and released a rain of crumbs into her lap. She squatted into a fluffed ball and appeared to be considering relieving herself over the edge of Claire’s desk. Birds really were awful pets.

  But Claire had heard something. Or she thought she had. It was a bit like when you’d been startled out of sleep and your brain was still rewinding to catch up. It always left Claire with the sensation that she’d been jolted awake by a sound she more remembered hearing than heard directly.

  This particular sound was a memory of a voice, young and with a formal accent that really only existed in Arthurian melodramas. Moreover, it was no voice Claire recognized. She pushed away from the desk—Bird cursing at her for the disruption—and emerged from her alcove.

  The Arcane Wing was not entirely silent. Somewhere, far flung toward the entrance, she could hear the methodical thumps of Rami occupied with his work. She almost went toward the sound, but something, or the memory of something, made Claire turn and squint into the shadows of the rookery.

  A figure crouched against the wall but slowly unwound itself as Claire’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. A flash of brocade made her freeze and imagine for a ridiculous moment it was Andras, escaped and back in his old kingdom. But, no, Andras—or at least the idea of him—was imprisoned in a dagger Claire kept buried in the bottom of her own desk drawer, neglected and ignored. She blinked, and the figure resolved into a lanky blond man in a pit-sweated velvet suit that had been popular on the rock stars of Claire’s youth. Then, just as she’d frowned at that, the figure’s right pant leg blurred and jittered into the hem of a dress.

  She stared, locked in place, as she tried to make sense of the effect. It was as if his—her?—as if their entire body had difficulty staying tuned to the same frequency. Hair buzzed from blond to red to black to pink. A blast of static seared away velvet into a cotton undershirt, a steel-ring cuirass, silk and feathers, some alien and organic armor, a gingham blouse. The figure made no threatening moves, or any moves at all for that matter. Perhaps they were entirely occupied with keeping their body together.

  “Who are you?” The question came out mousy and frail in Claire’s mouth. The figure simply stared at her (with blue eyes, now black, now orange) and began to walk away.

  Hold up. Claire had enough narrative sense to recognize a haunting when she saw one. The whispers, the voice, the creepy dream, and now this every-person person. One did not live this long in a library without understanding the clear markers of Suspicious Nonsense. She was not about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like a complete fool.

  No, she was about to go plodding off after some mysterious force like an aware fool.

  She discounted the possibility of not following it right off the bat. She might have disregarded it, at one time, but she had learned what happened if one ignored a story in Hell: it got worse. She considered briefly the option of hunting down Rami, telling him what she was seeing. But that would have lead inevitably to apparitions that conveniently only appeared to Claire, and she’d rather skip over the unnecessary subplot of questioning her sanity, thank you very much.

  If the figure was real, then Claire needed to talk to them. If it was an illusion, then it was surely a cause of the ink that had stained her hand, somehow connected to unwritten stories. And stories could always be counted on for an inevitable flair for drama. Maintaining a sense of narrative wasn’t just a professional skill in the Library; it was a survival trait.

  So Claire rubbed her stained wrist idly, prepared to be spooked, and marched down the aisle of shadows.

  Floorboards creaked under her feet, and rows of shelves settled with a sigh as she passed by. It was all really a clichéd kind of effect, at least until she happened to glance at the artifacts nearest her.

  Not all the artifacts of the Arcane Wing’s collection were made from routine materials. Mortals were nothing if not innovative. There was a particular subset of items made from ghoulish materials—skin, bone, and other identifiable human parts. Claire kept this collection toward the back of the wing. Not because of any unusual power or danger, but because it gave her the willies. That’s what she’d told Rami. In truth, the lines of finger bones and skulls reminded her too much of the underground tombs of Malta.

  Her eyes skimmed briefly over the top row, where finger bones lay on the velvet in rows, like dead soldiers. Below that, several scrolls and tiny leatherworks—not a speck of cowhide in any of them; each had its own individual cubby. The scroll closest to Claire was a particularly tan shade of brown. The surface shifted just as her gaze landed on it. A trick of shadows, Claire thought, then: Nerves. And then she thought, Oh.

  The tanned hide warped and puckered. A rolling shape rose out of the surface, churning like a fish under the surface until it began to take a recognizable topography. A cheekbone, the hollows smooth as the skin it remembered being. A shifting motion revealed a closed eye, the line of a nose, as if the scroll surface had thinned and something pressed in from the other side. Then: a perfectly shaped mouth. The lips were clear and detailed enough that when they parted around a single word, Claire could almost understand it.

  Bones rattled. Each delicate finger bone shivered in its velvet bed. Shadows streamed across the ivory, words, or possibly images. Claire refused to look closely. A thump made her jump. The drum beside the scroll writhed, and a tiny, fragile hand tried to push through.

  A blat of a cry startled her, and Claire stepped back abruptly.

  Bird hunched over the nearest shelf, scouring her with pitiless eyes that said, Pull yourself together. Below the raven, a figure crouched in the shadow of the shelf, which sent Claire’s pulse up again until she recognized the moon silver eyes.

  “Not that,” Rosia said in a whisper.

  It took a moment to wrest her breathing steady, and Claire cursed herself before focusing on Rosia. “What?”

  “You should be listening, but not to that.” Rosia hopped forward with a birdlike jerk. Claire didn’t flinch, which brought a pleased smile to the willowy girl’s face. “You’re not scared of me.”

  “Why would I be scared of—” Claire caught herself. “You shouldn’t be here, Rosia. Go back to your home. There’s something dangerous in the wing.”

  Rosia’s head tilted and silver-dollar eyes blinked. “Dangerous to you, not me.”

  Claire hated to repeat herself. “What? I don’t think you—”

  “Ghosts don’t scare ghosts,” Rosia said simply before turning on her heel and walking off with a gliding step.

  Claire blinked after her. Rosia was a damsel from a gothic horror—something crimson and spiky in the title, as she recalled. Claire’d hated ghost stories as a child, a fact she was just remembering now in the damning way things were forgotten in Hell. She’d hated ghost stories, always spending the whole story steeling herself for the scare, so that by the end she had given herself a headache. Knowing what was coming in a story wasn’t always helpful. Sometimes it made it worse.

  Still, Claire brooked no fears. She had a responsibility to watch out for Rosia, and at least the girl appeared to confirm what Claire was seeing. It was better than enduring Rami’s skepticism. Onward, then. She did not run after the girl, but she upgraded her pace to a determined stride. Bird kept up with a kind of hopping glide from shelf to shelf.

  The every-person waited for them by the well that the wing had erected around the ink reservoir. A low wood stack lined the edge of the liquid, making it more of a reflecting pool than a traditional well. The wing’s aesthetic choices sometimes confounded even Claire.

  Rosia stood in front of the every-person, hands clasped neatly behind her back as if they were having a polite conversation. The figure continued its static shifting, breaking up and reassembling. If the dead channel of a television could be a person, it might appear
something like this one.

  “Rosia,” Claire hissed for her attention. “Get back from it.”

  Rosia didn’t turn her head. “They just want you to listen.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just wanted someone to listen, too, when I was a ghost.”

  Claire’s mouth formed around several half responses before she shook her head. “This isn’t a story.”

  “Are you sure?” Rosia lifted her hand, and the every-person mirrored. The static of its palm cycled through a number of skin tones and sizes before matching her own.

  “Who are you?” Claire shifted her focus to the unknown threat. She drew to a stop a cautious distance from the edge of the ink. She crossed her arms in front of her uneasily. Not as if the finger bones had unsettled her. No creepy pronouncements from children with haunted eyes were going to get to her: heavens no. Impatience; that was what this was. “Ghost of sins past? Andras’s vengeful shade? Do hurry up, whatever this is about. You’re upsetting my charges, and”—she wiggled a few black fingers—“I’m on borrowed time, in case you haven’t heard.”

  The every-person’s head dropped to the side and briefly flickered to a rather annoyed expression. It turned, knelt slowly beside the pool, and began to extend an arm. Rosia eagerly crouched beside it.

  “I’d really rather you didn’t,” Claire warned, stepping forward. After a moment she added, a bit resentfully, “Please.” It wasn’t as if she knew exactly how she would stop a phantom from touching the ink, but Rosia was her responsibility. Ink had attacked her as a human; who knew what would happen to a book? “It is not an experience I can recommend.”

  The every-person’s eyes flickered to one perfectly arched brow for a moment. The static figure extended its hand over the surface, palm down but not touching. Claire had time only to take another alarmed step forward before the ink below its hand began to shift and roil.