by A J Hackwith
He reached the outcrop in a breathless pain that had nothing to do with the air in his lungs. He made sense of the tableau he saw in pieces. The muse creature was near a crumbling ledge, hunkered over an empty space that had been a book. It raised its head sluggishly at his approach and its eyes were eerie, whiter than white. They were the white of snow on fire and made the black on her cracked lips more profane by comparison. She licked the ink off her pointed teeth with a delicate air.
The ignition of flames along his blade made her pupils shrink. Rami hadn’t been aware of the moment he’d drawn it, but he was entirely in possession of the moment he decided to use it. The muse snarled, pale eyes streaming. Fissures formed along her skin, a colorless kind of wrongness revealing her fault lines. She lurched, but a full belly made her languid and slow. The tip of his sword caught her under the collarbone. Rami drove it home. She exhaled a long, relieved breath in his face, tickling his nose with the scent of leather and new paper enough to sting his eyes.
When she fell, she’d changed from snow and bone to a paleness the consistency of spun sugar. Rami didn’t care to watch her melt away. He sheathed his sword and turned to the shadows that clumped on the opposite side of the ledge.
Hero had fallen on his side. The sight made the remaining strength in Rami’s legs fail him, and he reached the limp body on his knees. His velvet coat was torn, and the ragged edges were muddy with ink-dampened clay dust. It made a stiff kind of death shroud that cracked when Rami turned him and pulled him into his lap with shaking hands.
A well of despair narrowed his focus. For a moment he didn’t see, couldn’t see, Hero’s face. He saw ink stains on chapped, feral lips. An attack made sluggish by story. A pale concave belly that would fade and rot and take the mashed remains of a book with it.
Hero’s hands were cupped, reaching. Always goddamned reaching, he was. For more, more, more. That should have been Rami’s first hint, shouldn’t it? That he was more than paper and ink and unreal dreams. The desire; the desire to know more, more, more. To be more. Hero had been screaming it, with every moment and every breath, but Rami hadn’t seen it. It’d been so much easier to pretend to judge him.
“You didn’t know, you didn’t even . . . get to know.” Rami wasn’t sure what he was confessing, to Hero’s forehead. There was a multitude of truths that Hero hadn’t known, and several Rami hadn’t had the time or the courage to say. And it wasn’t just. He could whisper them now, into a dead man’s hair, but what good would that do? Would it end anywhere that mattered? Would another letter appear in the Unsaid Wing to be forgotten, sniggered over by some later souls?
Souls. The word made Rami bleed inside. One thing, then; one thing he had left that he could do. The prayer for a soul’s rest was cracked on his lips, and each word tasted like ash. He folded Hero’s arms one over the other and crossed them gently over the wounds on his chest.
The prayer was all he had left to hang on to, and Rami was so lost in it that he almost missed the pained gasp. He nearly dropped Hero when cold arms flinched under his own, and a different prayer was answered.
“God’s tits, that hurts.” Hero’s voice was thin and broken. It appeared a momentous effort to curl his fingers away from the wound at his shoulder. He dragged in another lungful of air without opening his eyes.
“Hero.” Rami was dumbstruck with the obvious. He froze, wanting to reassure himself by touching Hero’s face but not certain the hallucination would hold up. “Are you—you can’t—your book—” Rami glanced over his shoulder in the bizarre impulse to confirm that the muse hadn’t died and kindly reassembled Hero’s book in the process. There was only ash swirling across the ledge.
When he returned his gaze, Hero’s eyes were open and he made a small groan. “My book again. Claire’s going to kill me. I—” Finally, the realization appeared to catch up with him. His eyes widened, glossy with shock, and his dry lips made a speechless moue.
“It’s okay.” Rami curled his fingers gently and prepared to reassure him. That his book was still gone and he was still here was a miracle, if an angel ever saw one, but it would be a shock and any normal man would reel to make sense—
“Oh gods, I kissed you,” Hero whispered.
“That’s what upsets you?” Rami struggled not to shove the man out of his lap, if only because he was afraid to let him go.
“Well, I didn’t even ask, and that’s really unacceptable. I’m a villain, not a coward.” Some of the color came back to Hero’s eyes as they ticked over Rami’s face. “Though I didn’t anticipate you’d be this upset, or that I’d be here to see it.”
“Hero . . .” Rami searched for what came next and came up empty. It took effort to leave a several-millennia-old immortal speechless, but damned if he didn’t manage it. Rami swallowed and finally allowed his fingertips to touch the familiar scars on Hero’s cheek. “Your book.”
“Oh,” Hero said, closing his eyes, then opening them again suddenly. “Oh.”
He struggled to sit up, so Rami braced his arm beneath the injured shoulder until Hero could turn himself around. He surveyed the ash-smeared clay with a lost expression. “She took it, ate the book—”
“I killed her.”
Hero balanced on that fact until it became too heavy for him. He sagged against Rami completely. His weight was welcome and grounding for Rami, honestly. Someone that heavy was not going to fade away on him, not yet. “It’s gone,” Hero said faintly.
“It seems that way.”
“And I am still . . . here.” Hero held up his hand and inspected it, though Rami knew he didn’t have the dark vision that Rami did. Hero’s fingertips squeezed over his eyes before hesitating at his own lips. “I’m still here.”
“You are,” Rami repeated firmly, and would repeat until they both believed the impossible fact. “How do you feel?”
“I feel . . .” Hero’s thoughtful expression did a complicated kind of acrobatics. “I feel it. There’s a . . . an empty space, but then there’s so much noise.” He risked a guilty glance at Rami. “She took the book and there was— I fell. And then I . . . I listened. To the books. It was so loud, and then everything turned black; I heard whispers and my bloody hand hurt. And I got mad.” He paused, running a thumb along the deep scratch that Alecto had given him, what seemed like several disasters ago to Rami. Hero looked rueful. “Mad enough to get lost in the stories. I may have gotten into a spot of haunting before you showed up.”
“That would figure.” Rami measured Hero with caution. There would be quiet, later, when losses came back to a man. Hero would need to be watched. But they could be there for him. Rami could be there. “Are you feeling able to move? Claire ran off to face another one of those things, I think.”
That brought Hero’s head up. He nodded quickly. “My shoulder hurts like murder, but I’ll manage.” He accepted the hand Rami held out and pulled to his feet lightly. He pretended to dust flecks of clay from his coat, but Rami caught the way his gaze slid uneasily back to where the muse had died. “Claire’s here? How? How did you even find me?”
Rami hesitated. It wasn’t the time, it wasn’t the place, but damn if he was going to withhold truth from Hero again. “I tracked your soul,” he said simply.
“My—” Hero did a double take. It was really a wonder his head didn’t twist off. His confusion stirred a quiet fondness in Rami’s chest. “I have one of those? I can’t! I’m a—” His gaze flickered back to the ashy ledge uneasily, and he whispered in a more subdued tone, “I didn’t think I had one of those.”
“I think you do,” Rami said, letting all his faith and certainty warm into the words. “I know you do.”
A small knit appeared between Hero’s brows and a ghost of confusion, a mere slice of the shock and the shifting of self-identity that Rami knew would come later, came into and went from his eyes. He followed Rami down off the ledge and slowed to match Rami’s heavie
r pace with an uncharacteristic sedateness. He would have a lot to think about, Rami supposed.
“One thing . . .” Hero muttered as they reached the bottom. Rami braced himself for existential questions he could not answer. “It happened, didn’t it? I kissed you?”
Surprise was another thing an old immortal was not used to. Laughter bubbled up in his throat, riding on a wave of his remaining fear and relief. He didn’t laugh, but he turned to hide the softness of his smile. Hide the way his cheeks warmed. Thank goodness Hero couldn’t see in the dark.
“Yes,” Rami said with as much dignity as he could muster. “I believe that did happen. Right before I kissed you.”
Hero joined him on the ground, landing with more agility than any near-death survivor had a right to. He was smiling when he looked up, searching Rami’s face before nodding once. “Claire. Brevity.”
Rami nodded. “Let’s go get them.”
32
CLAIRE
The secret isn’t about books at all. It’s about people.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1942 CE
CLAIRE’S WORLD HAD NARROWED to pale claws and void-like needles of teeth. The creature snarled and spit in her face as its claws passed narrowly over her skin. The glove covering her inked hand was slippery, and it was difficult to keep her grip. Claire stumbled backward, and her foot shifted unsteadily against the slide of books. To keep her mind from panicking she tried to understand what she’d seen. Brevity, Probity, and two pale creatures on leashes. The monsters appeared vaguely humanlike but devoid of color. As if someone had reached down and merely sketched in a black-and-white negative of a person in their place.
They had been mutilating—no, eating—the books. The horror of that was all that Claire’s mind had been able to take in before Probity had unleashed her pets. Claire had only the foggiest speculation of what they were, but from the way they’d swallowed pages whole, she suspected nothing good would come of the monster discovering the ink beneath her glove.
The creature had nearly succeeded in catching the hem of her glove with a razor finger when it was ripped away. She heard an inarticulate howl of rage wherever it had landed; then Brevity was there, pulling her to her feet. Horror, or regret, had paled her features almost as much as the other creatures’.
The similarities occurred to Claire all at once. “Those are muses?”
“What’s left after the ink,” Brevity said in clipped tones, as if already bracing herself for the worst. Claire hadn’t been the only one driven to experimentation, and she had neither the time nor the inclination to judge. The beastly muse had gained his footing again before he lunged, clawing at Claire’s hand.
The back of Claire’s glove had torn, exposing the ink-stained skin to the air, and the muse zeroed in on it as if he could smell it. Claire backed up to put space between her and the creature, and he leapt an inhuman height through the air. Paper fronds of the dead books snagged and curled around his limbs like seaweed, but the muse had no interest in lesser snacks now that he’d found a prime source.
“I knew it,” Probity said more to herself than anyone.
Brevity was somewhere to Claire’s right. “Knew what?! Probity, we have to stop this!”
“Stop it? Sis, don’t you see? This is an opportunity! We have something better than an unwritten book or the dead things of the Dust Wing. This is justice.”
Claire couldn’t spare the attention to see what she was doing. It was just enough distraction that she was too slow when the ink-bleached muse moved again. Claws snagged the fabric of her skirts and pulled Claire to the ground. Claire had a moment of enough awareness to shield her ink-stained hand against her chest before the feral muse was on her.
Torn and moldered books slid underneath her. A torn chain of paper caught on her throat, and Claire had to writhe it off so she could breathe. At the very least, the creature seemed to have no interest in mauling the rest of Claire—just her hand. He grappled with her, trying to flip her onto her back, and screeched his frustration in her ear. His breath was fouled with an acrid mix of pulped paper and the sour sweetness of rotted fruit.
There was arguing going on above, and a fretting sound she assumed was Brevity struggling to reach her, but the creature was a weight that ground Claire’s cheek into the rubbish of books beneath her. The leather of an ancient and moisture-ruined cover stuck to her skin and delaminated away from its book like a bloated corpse. The most Claire could do was keep her hand curled, tucked beneath her breast as the muse’s claws pierced their way through the skin and muscle of her back.
“Claire!” A familiar voice cut through the haze of pain and replaced it with the cold shock of alarm. Hero’s voice and the clatter of footsteps confirmed Rami was with him. But Hero was a character with an unwritten book in tow. It’d be like introducing blood into shark-filled waters. Claire writhed but couldn’t twist enough to see more than the muse’s claws.
“Stay back!” Her voice sounded hoarse and small, smothered into the floor. She felt choked on dust. “It eats books!”
“Claire—” Hero’s voice sounded closer. She felt the weight shift on her back, as if the monster was about to take note of the same fact.
No. A wild protectiveness seared the exhaustion out of her veins. Not him. Not if we got him back. She shoved against the floor, dislodging the muse off her shoulders at a moment of imbalance. She ripped her glove off as she stood and exposed her stained palm to the air. “You can’t have any of them.”
The pale creature had skidded to his knees, ripping the tangling fronds of books with his teeth. He had half turned toward the direction of Hero’s voice, but he caught sight of Claire’s arm and froze. Claire was close enough to see the way a shiver passed over the surface of his featureless face.
“You can’t have them,” Claire repeated again. “But it’s the ink that’s done that to you, isn’t it? Developed a taste for it?” Claire shakily raised the scalpel to her arm and slashed down. “There’s plenty here. Come, then.”
The blade bit into her skin, precisely severing the thin floss of blue that hemmed black in. Claire barely registered as the inspiration flaked away from her skin and fluttered to the ground. Line of inspiration tourniquet broken, a cold flooded up her arm. Claire didn’t want to see, but she looked down anyway. Bleak, inky liquid swarmed up her biceps and disappeared up her sleeve. She felt the odd kind of frost-prickled warmth slam into her ribs, ripping the breath out of her as it spread. It swept up her shoulder and chased goose bumps up her neck. Claire felt it when the ink seeped, a film of taint, into her eyes. Her vision went blurry, then dark and buzzing with multicolored serpents of shadow smothering everything.
Everything except the cold that seized her as the ink wrapped around her brain, and her heart, and she lost herself in a scream.
33
????
ONCE UPON A TIME.
No. That’s not how the story began at all.
Start again.
From the beginning?
Or the end. It matters not to us.
Who is us?
Once upon a time . . .
. . . Something is missing.
Something is missing. Once upon a time. Something is missing. Once upon a— Something is missing. Something is missing. Once upon— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Once— Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is missing. Something is—
Do you want to hear a story?
34
HERO
Myrrh.
Huh. Well, that just figures, doesn’t it?
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1941 CE
HERO RAN INTO A charnel house of horrors. Books were flayed everywhere he looked, paper entrails twisting suspended in the air as if from butcher’s
hooks. Many of the dead of the Dust Wing rested, content with their tombs and dust, but not here. Here was where stories had gone destructive and turned on their corpses instead.
He had hesitated at the sight when he and Rami had broken through into the clearing where they’d tracked Claire and Brevity. He’d hesitated, and that’d been enough. Claire had shouted, the scalpel had impossibly cast one sliver of light in the dark, and then the corpses around him ceased to matter.
Hero dived into the viscera of paper and gore. Bile rose in his throat every time he crushed a brittle spine under his heel, but he hurtled himself forward. He tore at the paper skins that tangled him. He would tear at his own skin next.
Ink swallowed Claire, between one breath and the next. No, “swallow” was too natural a word. It absorbed her, leaving behind a bleak Claire-shaped figure stained so dark it was impossible to make out against the darkness. The sight stopped him cold, just a step away. Her warm brown skin swallowed shadows, until even the ruffle of her uneven skirts and the small clasps at the tips of her braids turned pitiless black.
He lurched into motion again but was stopped by Rami’s hand at his hip. “It’s ink,” Rami reminded him. As if Hero could forget, forget the feeling of his own skin decaying and crumbling in on itself, the feeling of drowning in ashes, smothered and lost. As if he could forget the way Claire had screamed, which was why he needed to reach her right now—
It was a testament to how weak he was that Brevity broke past Probity first. The ink-bleached muse had fallen and struggled to get to his feet. Brevity scrambled across the bowl of shredded parchment but was still too far away when the muse zeroed in on Claire. It sniffed the air and clacked its teeth. Brevity lunged, tackling it around the ankle and dragging it to the ground with her. The muse fell, outstretched claws passing within a whisper of Claire’s unmoving obsidian face.