by A J Hackwith
So when the fractal shard of shadows took them, it felt like being split in two. The transition from light to dark was a wallop, and threw her from Rami’s grasp. She hit the ground at a roll, surface flexing and sliding beneath her until she came to a stop. Claire sucked in a breath and came up coughing.
“Claire!” Rami’s hand landed heavily on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
A serpent of dust and decay had coiled itself around Claire’s throat. She gagged, forehead pressed against her palm as she tried to force a breath. She finally could croak, “Nothing about that was all right, but thank you.”
“I’m just glad you held on.” When Claire looked up, she could make out the dimmest distinct blur that was Rami, against the dark. Somehow, light was seeming to drift and settle on his outline, at least enough to see that his wings were gone, folded back into his trench coat or his subconscious or wherever fallen angels kept their wardrobe these days. “Those paths aren’t made for humans.”
“So I gathered.” Claire grumbled again, in order to clear her throat. “The poets continue to get everything about Heaven and angels wrong.”
“They do.” Rami sounded infinitely relieved to be complained at. He stayed crouched by her until Claire was drawing somewhat regular lungfuls of dusty air. “We are here, though I can’t say where here is, precisely.”
“That would require being able to see,” Claire muttered.
“I’m managing,” Rami admitted mildly. Why, yes, of course an angel could see in the dark. She sniffed.
Claire finally managed to get her feet under her and try to assess their surroundings. It did not bode well that a being as old as Rami didn’t know where they were on sight. From the slip and shuffle of the material under their feet, they had landed on a great heap of something or other.
Similar monstrous bulks were just barely illuminated in the gloom. The dust floating through the air appeared to be its own light source, well dispersed but utterly insufficient for the task of lighting their surroundings. Claire held on to Rami’s offered hand for balance as she turned her attention to the ground. She reached down and ran her hand over the slippery bits beneath her feet.
Leather, scuffed and rotted at the edges enough to come away with her fingertips. And then paper, fragile as ash and torn just as easily. Claire took in a sharp breath. “It’s a library.”
She couldn’t make out Rami’s expression in the dark, but the gentle snort was unmistakable. “It’s in shambles. Who would allow a library to reach such a state?”
“No librarian or book lover, that’s for certain.” Claire was preoccupied with trying to chart the slope of the pile they were on top of. It seemed to stretch on forever, but a downward slope grew slippery until her feet hit a puddle of damp. A familiar bloom of mold and mashed pulp hit her nose and Claire gagged again. “Oh gods, the poor books.”
“Hero has made you empathetic,” Rami said quietly, and Claire was coughing too much to deny it. She shook her head until she could breathe again.
“Water, dust, mildew, time. Gods, this should be Hell’s Library. It’s torment for books.” She fished a mostly dry page out of the pile and squinted with futility. “Rami, grab the opal from my bag; it’s crusted to a finger bone—don’t ask. Catholics are weird about their relics. There you go—that’s better.”
Claire pinched the dry bone between her fingers so she could bring the gem welded to the end up to her eye. Her vision illuminated, as if someone had turned on a dim light, though everything was narrowed to the pinpoint of a single pane of cut stone she could manage to see through.
The page was like tissue in her hand, and Claire held it up, trying to make out the words. The ink on the page was old, and the language something full of sharp joining lines that Claire could only guess was Assyrian. It didn’t change for her. Claire took a breath and bent down to grab a different sample, this one a mostly complete scroll. She unwound it, struggling to be careful as a dread rose in her. The text on the scroll ran top to bottom, possibly an ancient form of pinyin, but that was Claire’s wildly uneducated guess. In her wing, books translated themselves.
The scroll dropped out of her suddenly nerveless fingers. She lowered the gem from her eye, dropping the curtain of shadows around the room again. It hurt to breathe.
“Claire?” Rami’s voice was soft at her side. “Do you have a guess where we are?”
“We don’t have to guess.” Claire’s voice was unsteady. “Though I’m not surprised now that you didn’t recognize it. No one comes here; no one should be here, least of all Hero. Rami, this is the Dust Wing.”
The understanding registered as a startle of breath in Rami’s otherwise solid-as-stone presence. He shifted, and Claire supposed he was uneasily scanning the half dark, trying to catch any movement. “Hero is here?”
He sounded uncertain, as if he suddenly wanted to doubt his own tracker skills. That would surely be a more comfortable thought than the idea of Hero here, injured or dying or lost in a mausoleum of forgotten books.
Claire didn’t allow herself any such comforts. Concern was raw in her throat. “Of course he is. Your abilities led us here, so here is where we will find him. We will find him.” She repeated it, mostly to herself, despite the way it undercut her certainty.
Water soaked through the toe of her sneakers. Claire straightened, squinted against the dark until she could be certain she wasn’t about to walk off a cliff, and strode off in a random direction. “Get your little feather out, angel. We are going to find him.”
* * *
* * *
THEY MADE THEIR WAY in the dark, stumbling over gullies of shredded parchment, swamps of rotted paste, led by the slender waft of the feather in Rami’s palm. Rami said nothing, but Claire’s head was filled with an unending scream.
“The trail leads this way,” Rami said, starting up a precarious-looking slope. Claire took a step to follow but halted as a shiver came over the air. A thunder of falling books rang out behind them, accompanied by an unholy screech. Abruptly, the ground beneath them shifted. It didn’t move, not in the physical sense, but the books beneath them shivered, throwing the accumulated dust up into the air and painting the dim world in an incomprehensible fog.
Perhaps it was a matter of familiarity; perhaps it was an instinct honed after three decades in the Library; perhaps it was a sympathetic echo between unwritten writer and unremembered books, but Claire knew in an instant that there’d been a loss. A book of the Dust Wing had been further disgraced, dismantled, destroyed. She pivoted, wheezing and straining to see through the dust, but nothing else moved.
Until the scream. It was wordless, cut off, but it was also, undeniably, Brevity’s voice.
Claire spun to Rami, wide-eyed with alarm. “That was Brev.”
Rami didn’t question it, didn’t ask how she could possibly be certain. And for all that, for his stoic, buoyant belief that held her up like a life raft, Claire loved him a little more. He nodded and measured the drift of the feather in his cupped palm.
“Go. Find Brevity. Do your duty.”
Claire’s heart jumped, and she felt torn in two. “But Hero—”
“I’ll find our wayward man,” Rami said with a gentleness that seemed to expand his care for the entirety of the Library. “He can’t be far. Go. You need to do this. I’ll find Hero and we’ll find you.”
If the soft gravel of Rami’s voice had been an ounce less certain and made of stone, Claire couldn’t have done it. If his eyes had been a smidge harder and not full of love—for her, for Hero, for what horrible mistakes had brought them here in the darkness—Claire couldn’t have trusted it. But he touched her face in the light-limned dust and she impulsively went to her toes, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and flung herself down the bleak, slippery incline.
29
BREVITY
A reader doesn’t mark his life by day
s but by memories. A book doesn’t mark its life by pages but by readers. We are made up of those whom we touch.
Librarian Claire Juniper Hadley, 2017 CE
THE WIND AND WEFT of light left them suddenly, and Probity’s grip on Brevity’s hand twitched her forward a moment before Probity’s magic swept closed at their backs. Goose bumps immediately pricked at Brevity’s bare shoulders.
It wasn’t dark. No place that held stories could be dark to a muse, but it was dim. Dimmer than it should have been. The books beneath her feet were quiet as pavers. Instead of lashing auras of color, they merely glowed, weak. The light of their story barely dribbled over their surfaces. Brevity hadn’t thought stories could wither, not like this.
But then she looked up and realized all she had thought was wrong.
They were in a forest, of sorts. Everywhere, books lay open on the floor and their pages were unstitched, folded and torn until wafts of barely connected paper drifted up in a fine column, freed of the sensible logic of gravity. Every couple of feet, another mutilated book bloomed paper that drifted in place like a sea of kelp on an ocean floor. Brevity gasped, and the nearest frond shivered. Against the dark and the dim glow, it was like standing in a forest of ghosts and bone.
“Is this the Dust Wing? Who did this?” Brevity turned and found Probity watching her. The ink-bleached muses were animated since they stepped through, straining at the ends of their makeshift leashes to lunge for the nearest drifting tendrils of paper.
“No one’s allowed in the Dust Wing, of course,” Probity said, completely ignoring the contradiction in her presence. She hesitated, then covered the hesitation by yanking on the leashes impatiently. “The books do this to themselves.”
“No way.” A frond of shredded paper drifted close enough to brush Brevity’s hand. She startled away. “It’s mutilation. No one would do this to themselves.”
“Not even a character who woke up to find themselves entombed in the dark for the infinite reaches of time? Even books can go mad with enough isolation; you know that.” Probity gave her a sad, pointed look.
The idea refused to sink in, then settled on Brevity like a layer of cold iron. Books can go mad, like anything sentient, Claire had told her once. It was why every wing of the Library required a librarian. Not just to keep the books from escaping, but to curate, and attend.
No one could tolerate oblivion alone.
“Why?” Brevity whispered brokenly. The book at her feet had split in two, pages lost long ago.
“Because humans are agents of decay,” Probity said. Her voice had been soft, gentle, but hardened to steel. “I’ve been trying to tell you since I arrived, sis. Humans are the reason the Dust Wing exists. We gave them the power of creation—something only gods have—and they spit on it. They don’t deserve it. It’s time we take it back.” And Probity let her hold on the leash go slack.
Gaiety and Verve stumbled and appeared to pause, noses in the air—well, one nose, since Gaiety’s face was blank—before lunging. They tore into the nearest fronds of damaged paper with a gluttony of violence. The sound of shredding and chewing covered Brevity’s cry, and Probity held up a hand when she started forward.
“Careful, now, best not get between them and their meal.”
“They’re not meals; they’re stories. We’re supposed to protect them.”
“Humans sealed their fate long ago. They’re not stories; they are just corpses.” Probity’s eyes glittered in the twilight as she intently watched the pale muses rip shreds of paper and bring them to their faces. Verve swallowed greedy mouthfuls whole, but Gaiety made a grating noise of frustration as his hands encountered his ink-erased face. Probity stepped forward, a scalpel suddenly in hand, and sliced across Gaiety’s blank chin. A gap appeared in a bloom of black ink, and scissored razor teeth beyond. Probity stepped back, satisfied. “It’s a worthy sacrifice if it shifts the power in the right direction.”
“Your direction,” Brevity clarified. She shook her head, feeling helpless as Verve followed the frond of paper and began to try to gorge herself on the book whole. “Prob, this is against everything we are.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Probity said, anger inching an edge into her voice. She broke her intent study of the ink-sopped muses to frown at Brevity. “Didn’t they say the same thing when you took a stand and kept a line of inspiration for yourself?”
“That wasn’t a stand! That was—” Brevity clasped her bare forearm. A vile feeling roiled up in her throat, but it was all pointed inward. “It was an act of desperation. A mistake.”
“It wasn’t. Don’t you dare say that!” Probity yanked the leashes as she turned, entreating, toward Brevity. “I can’t believe she made you believe that! This is all because of that old librarian; she’s human, Brevity! She’s not your friend!”
“I can understand the doubt. All appearances seem to indicate otherwise,” a gravely amused voice came from behind her. A waft of paper parted, and a silhouette struggled through the darkness, taking care not to step on fractured books. “Yet here I am, for some reason.”
“Claire!” A tangle of contradictions flooded Brevity. Relief, worry, then abject horror that Claire was here, at the center of Probity’s ire.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Probity’s tone was streaked with ice.
“None of us should,” Claire said pointedly. “But I’m trying to atone for my mistakes.”
“Atone? Your sins are many, human. Valiant of you to try.” Gaiety and Verve lurched on their leads again, having shredded and consumed every book within reach. Probity tilted her head, considering for a moment. “How about I lend you a hand?”
The leashes fell from her grasp, and the cold that rushed Brevity’s veins seemed to slow time. Gaiety torpedoed in the direction he’d been pointed—straight at Claire. Verve, however, still had eyes and a hunting instinct. The feral muse darted away and quickly disappeared through the forest of dead books. Gaiety crashed into Claire, claws out. Claire barely managed to grapple at his wrists. Protect the books; protect the human. Brevity had a moment, just a moment, to decide what to do.
30
HERO
I’ll explain this once, and only once, because just writing this down gives me the willies, frankly. The Unwritten Wing is where stories exist before humans know them, but there’s a wing for after as well. A wing for after, when stories die. When the last copy of a book is burned or the last fond memory of a folktale fades from an old man’s mind. When pages are used for scrap and fodder. When gold embellishments are ripped off as bounty of war. When the light on all possible pages of a story goes dark, that’s when a book’s life ends.
But like humans, that’s not the end. The afterlife for a lost book is quiet, and final. An eternal sleep in the Dust Wing, never to be read again. No books wake up there; nothing stirs. It is perhaps the most final kind of death in all the afterlife realms.
The death of a forgotten book.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1974 CE
HERO HAD NEVER BEEN a reader. Not in his own story, not outside it. Naturally, he could read, but he saw it merely as a convenient conveyance of information, a transportation device for the skills necessary to operate in the world. This opinion had only been reinforced upon waking and realizing he could scan any book other than his own and acquire skills that would have required years of mastery otherwise. It was handy, sometimes, being a creature of creation.
But it meant he had never understood reading. Not in the way Claire and Brevity seemed to revere it. He revered being read as a character of an unwritten book. Quite a lot. Though evicted from his book, he knew the singular awareness of life he felt being seen, being experienced. But he’d never been quite sure what the reader got out of it.
He came to an understanding in the Dust Wing. He was lost in a sea of dust and decay. Staying here would surely mean drowning, but stories reached out and o
ffered him a life raft.
It was not like taking skills from a book, as he had before. Nor was it like as he remembered living his own story. It was not even reading, not with his eyes. Stories filled him like water into a sponge—first he absorbed; then he overflowed. As he listened—as he received—story after story. Each one passed through him, yet left something behind. A suspicious voice, a desiring ache, a fierce demand, a lungful of bittersweet victory.
It was like recalling well-loved music; it was like training swordplay into your bones. It was like the meditative wistfulness of hunting. It was like the euphoric agony of running. It was like everything and like nothing, and it seeped deep into Hero’s bones. He was the first reader the Dust Wing had had in—well, perhaps ever, and every book that hadn’t yet withered to the point of madness stretched out to him, eager to be known.
It overwhelmed him. Hero had always made a point to avoid other books—he would never be caught in the damsel suite. He’d always held the uneasy fear that the presence of other characters, from unwritten books like him, would only remind him of what he could not do, could not have, could not be. Perhaps the ink had weakened him and poisoned his resistance, but he found the opposite was true. The Dust Wing poured its stories into him, and he felt nourished, not washed out.
Claire had tried to explain what listening to a book’s song was like, the lingering sense of possession even after a book was closed, but this wasn’t that at all. Hero wrapped the stories around him like armor, not to become someone else but to see what he recognized in the mirror.
The only thing he lost was time. When he came back to himself, he was midway through a close-cut ravine of tablets and clay. The light-giving dust was thick enough here that he could see a couple of feet around him, and dust was like a thin layer of muted slate gray snow beneath his feet. The sharp cliff face of tablets to either side was jagged, not worn down by time. Hero supposed that was only logical; no natural formations of time and weather held sway here. It looked more as if a towering pile of tablets had grown until breaking under its own weight. It had split and crumbled, creating walls of jagged and tumbling artifacts that reached over his head.