by A J Hackwith
Probity was a beat behind her. Perhaps it had been because they’d been reminiscing, but a pang of familiarity struck Brevity as Chiara led the way into the stacks. Running here and there, Probity behind her like a loyal pastel ghost. It left Brevity with a kind of vertigo, feeling like the memory of two people at once. Brevity the cocksure muse, ready to inspire the world. That’d been easier than Brevity the librarian, hesitant and unprepared for whatever emergency had the damsels so upset.
The path they were taking was familiar; they were headed to the damsel suite. The thought of another threat there made her heart bottom out. Brevity glanced to her side, but Probity kept pace with fierce determination, not even breathing hard as she nodded. “Whatever you need. I’ve got your back.”
That helped both versions of herself solidify together, if only for a moment. Brevity took a breath and followed Chiara through the suite door with determination. She could handle this, any situation; she was prepared; she could handle this just as well as—
“Claire!”
Brevity felt it like a strangling kind of montage. Scalpel pressed to a bleeding wound on a thin arm. Lucille’s resigned way she stifled a flinch at the pain. Claire’s expression as she turned, some kind of dull pragmatism. And the ink. The ink seemed to drown out everything, smeared across paper-fragile skin, welling at the incision, smudging Claire’s fingertips, dripping . . .
No, not dripping or smudging; that was a different memory, a different time. Brevity sucked in a breath. “What are you doing?”
Claire was occupied with the vial of gore in her hands, stoppering it with a calm that sparked rage in the pit of Brevity’s stomach. Claire looked up. “I’m doing my job. And you?”
There was a guarded reserve there, a waver that said she knew, she knew, she was doing something wrong. It was too familiar: the stiff line of Claire’s back, the distant, flat look as she lifted her chin. Brevity knew that look, knew. It was the way Claire always looked when she felt it necessary to do something cruel.
Brevity steadied herself by application of her nails into the palms of her hands. “Step away from Lucille, Claire.”
Claire flinched as if slapped but drew herself up and took half a step apart from the older woman. “I have what I need, in any case.”
“And what would that be?” Probity asked lowly. She’d brushed up to Brevity’s shoulder, a small gesture meant to be supportive. A soft horror colored Probity’s soft voice, and her eyes were wide. “What use does a librarian have for blood?”
“Ink,” Claire corrected sharply. “It’s Library business.”
“Library business is not attacking people!” Brevity hadn’t meant to shout, but the sick feeling bubbled up through her throat. Many of the damsels stood in their places, still as stone. Becca was already helping Lucille wrap a clean towel over her arm. Lucille was too stubborn to return to her book to heal, but she’d be fine—Brevity knew this, but the fact was too quiet to drown out the recoil that Claire had bled a character. She’d damaged a book. Even now, after all that had happened. Probity laid a steadying hand on her shoulder and Brevity remembered herself. Yes. She was the librarian now. “We should talk about this, Claire. Outside.”
Claire opened her mouth, then closed it. Her lips paled into a fine line and she busied herself with wiping the ink off her fingers onto her skirt. “This is quite unnecessary,” she muttered as she swept up the vials in one hand and strode to the door.
Probity made a show of stepping aside with a sad shake of her head. “That’s the librarian’s call, not yours.”
If Claire’s footsteps faltered, just once, she covered it by turning stiffly back to Lucille. “Thank you for your cooperation.” And she swept out the door.
Brevity made to follow but hesitated. Lucille was being tended to, and the other damsels only cast her a reproachful look before slowly drifting back to their small groups. Brevity deserved their judgment, she supposed. She was responsible, for all of them. It had never felt like such a weight until today.
Probity caught her gaze and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You are the rightful librarian,” she said quietly. There was a fervent belief in her voice, one Brevity couldn’t find in herself. She clasped onto it and strode into the darkness of the stacks.
* * *
* * *
CLAIRE WAS WAITING FOR her, leaning up against the wall under a silver section placard that read MODERN NONCANON TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS. Her arms crossed like a shield in front of her chest, her head turned upward, studying the bobble of the faerie light. Brevity had always found the silvery way it lit the shelves enchanting, but now it painted Claire’s face like frost, making her seem like a cold, removed thing.
“What happened?” Brevity asked, tight and controlled.
Claire blinked placidly at her, though a nervous energy twitched her ink-stained fingers. “Nothing to alarm yourself about. I am following a line of inquiry that needs a sample, and Lucille volunteered—”
Heat rose in a spike in Brevity’s chest. “She didn’t volunteer. They never volunteer!” She bit down hard on her lip as Claire’s expression dropped. Brevity shook her head. “No books volunteer for your scalpel. Especially not the damsels; they know the risk of being shelved. Whatever Lucille did—”
“You think I attacked her?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time!” Brevity threw out her hands. “Boss—Claire,” she corrected her slip. No, Brevity was the librarian now. She had to do her job. Protect the books, even from Claire’s misgivings. She was keenly aware of the weight of Probity’s worried gaze on the back of her neck. Guarding, also judging. “I kinda thought—Hero and all—you’d come around. Figured some stuff out.”
Claire flinched as if she’d been struck. “I don’t need to figure things out.” She pulled two vials of ink from her pocket, wielding them like a key. “I know unwritten books; don’t presume to chide me just because now they call you librarian—”
“I am the librarian.” The words surprised Brevity, the sureness with which they appeared on her lips. But it was true; it was true. The books looked to her; Probity came to her to collaborate on behalf of the Muses Corps, not to Claire. No one expected Claire to protect the books, to fix the gaping empty spaces in the shelves of books lost in the fire. And when she failed, it wasn’t Claire who would suffer the painful silence of the Library. Brevity drew herself up. “And as the librarian, I require you to explain your . . . ‘line of inquiry’ and why damaging one of my books without permission was necessary.”
My books. Without permission. She sounded like Claire had sounded as librarian. Those were cruel, unnecessary barbs. Brevity had known that when she’d said it. Claire stared at her with an alien expression. Loss, Brevity realized too late. As long as Brevity had known her, Claire was a creature of certainty, even when she was dead wrong. She never looked lost, adrift. Even as her expression shuttered, reassembled into something more familiar, it felt wrong.
All of this felt wrong.
“It should be obvious enough to a librarian.” Claire’s words were clipped and sharp as glass. She held up one vial in one hand, then the other. “This ink is of unknown origin and had a . . . peculiar response when applied to the logbook. You yourself argued for experimentation, if you’ll recall. A sensible course of action is to compare it to the primary source of ink we understand: the wounds of unwritten characters.”
“Understand” was an overstatement, in Brevity’s opinion. Librarians knew how to correct corrupted text, how to herd the text around the page of an unwritten book to help maintain the integrity of the story. But that was curation. That was editing. Ink unattached to a book felt like a tool of creation. Or destruction. Ink could be both, to written words. Brevity saw the potential—it was why she argued for experimenting to understand if this substance could restore lost books—but the hard look in Claire’s eyes said she wasn’t thinking abo
ut creation.
Brevity couldn’t hold that gaze. It hurt too much. She diverted to the vials in Claire’s hands. Just ink to Claire. But Brevity saw the colors. Lucille’s familiar tangled skein of tawny gold and violet spilled light from the right vial, twining like lazy mist between Claire’s fingers. Unwritten books always reached for Claire, for humans. The left vial was different. The colors that reached from the mystery ink were numerous, like a rainbow put through a blender, chopped into static.
Probity had an intent expression at her side. She could see it too. Carefully, Brevity reached out. Claire’s eyes narrowed, and she half expected her to snatch her hands back, but she allowed Brevity to carefully pick up each sample. She held Lucille’s up to the light, as if to examine it. The threads of color still wisped through the air, back to Claire. No interest in Brevity’s nonhuman touch. It’d been that indifference that had troubled Brevity during her time as a muse too. Humans created; muses only inspired.
But Probity thought that could change.
Her stomach fluttered at the thought, so Brevity quickly switched to studying the ink from the Arcane Wing. The static cloud of color flickered when she held it up, and Brevity half expected it to lash out. The spectrum churned and subsided, drifting like a fragmented cloud around the glass.
Not reaching.
“Slight differences,” Brevity said carefully, as if just admiring the sheen of the ink. She brought her hands together. The glass vials had begun to warm against her palms, along with a quiet, persistent treachery of an idea.
“They are different,” Claire allowed. There was an intensity in her eyes as she tried to catch Brevity’s interest. “I know you want to try to restore the lost books, but until I can fully test these inks, it’s too dangerous—”
“Tests.” Something like emotional vertigo tilted through Brevity. She wanted answers; she wanted redemption; she wanted hope. But if it was Claire’s job to experiment and understand unknown artifacts now, it was Brevity’s job to preserve the books first. It felt like a mirror of their previous argument, and wrong. “The damsels are not here for you to test on.”
Claire sighed. “Brev, I don’t mean it like that. You know I wouldn’t—”
Brevity clenched her hands together around the vials. “I know you’ve stayed away from the Unwritten Wing for months”—leaving me to pick up the pieces—“and now you finally return, only to damage one of the books in my care. The books aren’t here for your whims, Claire. Not any longer.”
Too far, too far. Claire’s cheek twitched and her back straightened. Her voice dropped to a strange softness. “You don’t have to remind me of my failures, Brev.”
“No,” Probity spoke up, just as soft, backing Brevity. “But she does have a duty to protect the Library from them.”
Wrong, this was all wrong. But Brevity had only one way forward—Claire had only left her with one way, no matter how much she hated it. “The Arcane Wing has claimed jurisdiction over the unbound ink. But Lucille’s ink is part of her book. I can’t allow it to leave the Unwritten Wing.” She rolled the vials in her hands before stiffly holding one out. “Any further ideas you have should be run through me. But in the meantime—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Claire interrupted lowly. She snatched the vial back and shoved it into her pocket. “I won’t be needing any further help from the Library in this matter.”
You’re the Library too. Unwritten and Arcane against Hell, remember? Stop. Think this through. Misery welled up in Brevity’s stomach as Claire strode away, disappearing into the shadows of the stacks as quickly as if she could shadowstep.
17
BREVITY
Myrrh. When the log revealed these entries, I knew Fleur had to have taken leave of her senses. Any logical person would—there’s no need for a fanciful conspiracy when a god-demon has absolute control over the realm. I set about disproving Fleur’s conclusion with hard application of facts.
I couldn’t. There are irregularities that make no sense. The pages of the Library’s books have no detectable composition or construct. Books exist on the shelves with text already on their pages. Should one try to annotate or correct an unwritten book with any ink other than its own, the ink wicks away into the paper like water into a sponge. Nothing stays but what the book was born with. This explains the difficulty of repairing damaged books, but not why. Stories change and are changed by the reader. What are unwritten books made of or connected to that resists exterior alteration?
Could Fleur actually be right? How is that possible?
Librarian Yoon Ji Han, 1801 CE
PROBITY MAINTAINED HER SILENCE the long way back to the librarian’s desk. It was a sympathetic kind of silence, the kind of quiet meant to soothe and shore up. The wrongness stayed with Brevity, but at least with Probity here she didn’t feel alone. It allowed her to go through the motions of checking in on the damsels, reassuring them that they need not worry about scalpel-wielding former librarians for the rest of the day, and withdraw. The damsels had knit a community out of their limbo status in the Library, and it was tight as a fist. As cordial as Brevity was with the residents of the Unwritten Wing, she knew there was a distance she could never cross as librarian.
The desk was lit in a sleepy puddle of lamplight, like always. A teapot sat on a warming stone, a convenient magic as old as the Library. She’d brewed strawberry and rose hips this morning and likely still had half a pot waiting for her. The urge to shake off the unease was so strong she nearly called for Hero before remembering he was away. Instead, she reached the chair behind the desk and all but fell into it.
“You did the right thing.” Probity had come to perch just on the edge of the desk, right where Brev used to sit to check up on Claire.
Probity was more graceful than she was; the stacks of paper didn’t shift or become displaced. But it served to remind Brevity of the ache beneath the ache. “Did I?” Brevity said, and sank back with a sigh. “It doesn’t feel right.” The levels of not-right ground at her frayed edges.
“That woman had to be stopped.” Probity was somber with her certainty. She chewed on her lip a moment, and it was such a familiar habit that Brev almost smiled before Probity spoke again. “You made it sound as if she had done such a thing before.”
Brevity grimaced. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have subjected you to that . . . discussion.” The Library certainly had not put on a good show since Probity arrived. It wasn’t the impression she wanted the muses to have. It wasn’t the impression she wanted her friend to have. “You’re aware Claire was the librarian before me. She was a great librarian, and I learned everything from her. She just . . . ran the wing with a firmer hand than I can do.”
“Abuse should never be in a librarian’s repertoire.” The censure in Probity’s tone was streaked with horror. “To cut into a book like it is some kind of . . . kind of melon. It’s grotesque. Books are to be treasured, not dissected.”
It was, perhaps, a very good thing that Probity had not perchance visited while Claire had been in charge. When she put it that way, it did sound awful. “It wasn’t like that,” she insisted quietly. The urge to defend Claire was innate, and righter than the rest of the muddled thoughts in her head. She picked at the threadbare seam of the armchair as she searched for the words to explain it. She’d replaced Claire’s rickety old seat with something comfier, but not without some guilt. “Humans and their stories . . . it’s a complicated relationship.”
“An abusive relationship.” Probity hugged herself absently, as if she could ward off the thought. “It is a good thing you’re the librarian. I miss you terribly, but seeing you here . . .” She trailed off, suddenly looking small and earnest.
“This is where I’m supposed to be.” It was true. Was it possible for the truth to comfort and wound at once? Brevity rubbed her eyes. “This has turned into such a mess, sis.”
Probity’s distan
t look melted a little. “I was wondering if you were ever gonna call me that again.”
A clot—of emotion, of exhaustion, of longing, of worry—formed in Brevity’s throat that she couldn’t get words around, so she just smiled wearily. “Normally I’d have Claire to ask for advice, or Hero at the very least to suggest the worst possible option so I could rule it out. But he’s gone and—”
“The book is gone?” Probity interrupted.
“Off researching what we can about the ink from our end. He co-opted Rami, said he might get lost in the stacks for a few days, but . . .” Brevity waved her hand. “I suspect he’s found a loophole to sneak out again to other realms. Don’t tell Claire. Hero will come back; I think he’ll always come back now.”
“I won’t.” Probity had a troubled look. It seemed to take some effort to shake herself to focus again. “I mean, of course I wouldn’t tell that woman anything. Do you think she’ll try—”
Brevity was already shaking her head. “No. I think I . . . Gods, Probity, I hurt her. I was just so upset that she could do that, after all this time. After everything—” Brevity stopped herself. No good trying to explain Claire’s winding history with the unwritten books of the Library, not now. “There was something weird about her too. And instead of fixing it I messed it all up.”
“We can fix things,” Probity promised. Brevity shook her head.
“Humans are complicated. There’re these emotions and it’s . . . tricky.”
“So we don’t fix the humans,” Probity said quietly.
There was a thread of intensity that tugged Brevity’s head up. Probity was still sitting on the edge of the desk, hands folded in her lap. Still small, still soft, but more somehow. Burning with an intense certainty, the kind of look Claire got when there was trouble. When the solution would be the kind of insanity that Brevity had trouble saying no to.