by A J Hackwith
Brevity wrestled it back, biting back a yelp as the stained muse spun around and turned his claws on her. The sound drew the first lurch of movement, though everyone but Hero seemed too busy to notice. Only Hero saw as the black statue that was Claire twitched her limbs. Her head tilted at a sharp, mechanical angle, while the rest of her appeared to move with the sinuous nature of the ink itself. When her head turned its bleak gaze in Hero’s direction, his skin chilled surely as if a naked blade had scraped along it.
“Help us,” Hero whispered. To himself, to Claire, to gods he didn’t believe in. None, at least, would hear and answer prayers in the darkest corner of the afterlife.
The ink that had subsumed Claire appeared to shudder in its depths and gave a slow blink. She turned its attention to the feral muse wrestling with Brevity on the floor. She stretched out one arm, garnering everyone’s attention. Hero half expected the ink to drop from her fingertip, but she opened her mouth and spoke.
“You.” It was Claire’s voice, but splintered and shadowed by something else. The presence of something else was heavy in the air, but it felt like the shadow of an eclipse. Not a single entity, but crowding nonetheless. Like a swarm of blackbirds. It clotted the air and made it difficult for anyone to move as the ink-stained Claire took one step, then two. Black pools bloomed beneath her feet, as if the ink was spreading, but always retracted as she stepped away again.
Hero had an irrational urge to reach out and touch her, to grab for the footfalls of ink. What would happen now, Hero wondered, if that ink touched him again? Nothing good seemed to come of it, but would he be stained like a human, or bleached like a muse? What was the wick of a story, when you’ve already burned your book?
Brevity had the feral muse by the shoulders and was struggling valiantly to pin his arms back, but the creature outweighed Brevity by at least a stone, and it almost lurched free as Claire stopped in front of it.
Claire appeared to study it, its bleak, expressionless face like a statue carved out of ebony. “Listen,” the many voices whispered. A black fingertip pressed to the middle of the pale creature’s forehead. The ink-bleached muse began to shriek.
“You’re hurting him!” Brevity attempted to pull the muse she’d just been wrestling back, but Rami lurched forward and stopped her.
“No, she’s not. Look.”
The point where Claire’s finger brushed the muse’s forehead had begun to darken, as if bruised. Hero followed the shadow beneath the muse’s bone white skin and drew a breath. Like ink dropping through water, the muse’s natural coloring was returning. Orange skin, sunrise red hair. Slowly the color seeped in, pushing the white and black ahead of it like a wave. Ink pooled at the point of contact and hesitated at the surface of the muse’s forehead for just a moment before the surface tension seemed to break. The ink flew up Claire’s finger in a veiny line, black on black, and the muse fell backward.
“Gaiety?” Brevity startled as she grabbed him, as if he was lighter, less weighed down with snarling muscle and hunger. A perplexed look crossed her face as she hesitantly lowered the muse to the ground, but he didn’t rouse.
“What did she do?” Probity dropped to the other side, checking over the unconscious muse with an urgency that bordered on mothering. Brevity let her take Gaiety out of her arms, and for a moment Probity clasped her hands. It struck Hero as almost like an embrace, or a good-bye.
“Dear god . . .” Rami breathed the words like a curse, or a prayer. It took a moment in the dim spectral twilight to see what he meant. Ink wept from Claire’s eyes, skidding down her cheeks briefly before being absorbed again by her skin. Her lips parted, and liquid, viscous and darker than blood, tumbled over her lips.
She’d taken in Gaiety’s ink, but this was even more than that. Ink had stained, then soaked Claire, and now she was suffused with it. She didn’t blur and turn pale like the muses. She didn’t absorb and rot into nothing like a book. She was human—the paper of her soul was primed for stories. But she was trying to hold on to too much of it.
“Claire.” Brevity shoved to her feet but was stopped by Probity’s grip on her arm.
“Don’t,” Probity said firmly. There was sympathy there, but at a remove. The kind of look you gave when someone lost their goldfish. “You can’t help her.”
Brevity twisted her arm free. “I have to do something.”
“She’s a lost cause!” Probity struggled, not able to keep hold of Gaiety’s body and Brev both. Her voice threaded with pleading. “But you’re not.”
Brevity stopped, and the moment held its breath around her. Hero’s voice felt stopped up in his throat. Claire was dying, or worse, behind them. But Brevity’s sibling muses were here, alive, not drowning in shadow. He had a deep, wounded familiarity with being a heart caught in two places. He couldn’t bring himself to pull anymore. There was a coin-flip moment of doubt as he watched Brevity’s eyes, but the coin landed true.
“If I don’t help her, I am.” Brevity shoved to her feet. She didn’t look back, despite the twist in her expression. Hero began to breathe again, but tides of ink writhed and sank like eddies across Claire’s frozen form. Brevity ran and threw open her arms.
Her fingertips slid into Claire’s palm, and their hands closed as if on instinct. For a moment Brevity glanced to Rami and Hero, wide-eyed, until ink began to invade across her knuckles, beading across her skin and leaving colorless flesh behind. She stifled a gasp.
“Sis! Stop!”
“I’m not letting go.” Brevity’s lips moved around the whisper, words falling slightly out of sync with the sound. Propane blue began to wither and dry to cornflower on her cheeks.
“We have to do something,” Hero whispered, and the helplessness that raged up in him threatened to burn him up whole. “Anything.”
Rami’s head came up, a thoughtful expression on it. “Okay.”
He started forward, sending a spike of terror through Hero’s chest. “No! No, no, no. That ink messes up everyone it touches.”
Rami shook his head, gently taking Hero’s hand off his shoulder and holding it in his. “Not me. I figured it out. Didn’t you?”
“What?”
“Souls,” Rami said, a gentle smile breaking over his features before he let go of Hero’s hand and ran toward Claire and Brevity. He swept something up off the ground, something that glimmered thin and blue. Only after he slapped it on Brevity’s arm did Hero recognize it as the inspiration gilt that had protected Claire. It was a thin thread, but Rami returned it to Brevity’s forearm like a talisman.
Then Rami dropped to his knees in front of the two women, pressed his hands to each of their cheeks, and appeared to begin to pray.
35
BREVITY
Myrrh. Myrrh. MYRRH, sod it! Souls. That’s what they didn’t want me to know. Librarian Poppaea rebelled in order to acknowledge and free the fragmented souls of books. It didn’t work, obviously. Perhaps Old Scratch thought we librarians would be more compliant if we thought it was just books and magic. The devil obviously has never met a bibliophile. Rebellion is in a reader’s blood.
Stories are slivers of us, all of us. What makes a story real is the soul of the author. We’re humanity, splintered into the stories we tell ourselves. I doubt the old demon would be pleased to know I’ve rediscovered this. I’ll need to feign ignorance; perhaps we all will. But future librarians need to know.
The logbook keeps a librarian’s secrets, until they’re needed. Well then, old book. It appears we have work to do.
Librarian Fleur Michel, 1782 CE
THE BRUSH OF RAMI’S palm on her cheek had been the end. Or perhaps it had been the words, echoing long after her sight faded. Guttural, heart-piercing prayers, colliding like wayward meteors in the dark. Maybe the end had been long before that. All the paths led to here and now.
When she could see again, the Dust Wing was gone. Everyth
ing was gone, replaced with . . . color. Not the rainbows-and-unicorns kind of color. No, the miasma that swam around Brevity and clogged her throat was the spectrum of light off the surface of something dark and deep. There was no breaking the surface here. This was oil slicks and crystalized lava. It was like breathing bismuth, with its rainbows of geometry shaped by very old, old things.
Brevity floated in a world of specters and in a sea of ink.
A darker blot loomed, growing larger like a whirlpool that the world turned around. Brevity let the current pull her, for lack of another destination. The shadows grew, and eventually she could make out a solid thing, a sliver darker than ink at the core of it. The piece at the axis was fragmented and melting. It was a kernel of an idea, an unfinished shape that lost edges, gained edges, until it was nearly impossible to discern what was underneath the roiling black.
Nearly.
The air felt punched from Brevity’s lungs. “Claire.” A familiar jut of stubborn chin gave way to long braids that dripped and melted like candle wax. Brevity tried to swim forward through the air, but it was harder now. As if the colors were swirling through her, not around her. A furious dog paddle drifted her in the right direction. The effort sent little eddies that ate away at and disseminated what was left of a shoulder. “Oh, boss.”
The kernel of Claireness rotated like a tumbling asteroid in the void. Her face was carved out of obsidian, cold nothing instead of warm, beautiful brown. Only the shifting ridge of eyelashes told Brevity that her eyes were opening.
Brevity let herself drift, afraid even the slightest current would carry more of Claire’s core away. Never mind the way her limbs felt increasingly light and gauzy, as if she herself was being erased. “What have they done to you?”
“A gentle colonization.” Brevity flinched and just barely stopped herself from twisting at the voice. Rami stood as if on solid ground. If solid ground were at right angles with any sense of up and down that Brevity’s brain had. The ink swirled around him, ruffling his feathers like a breeze, but didn’t appear to sink in. He studied her for a long moment, face growing graver. He held out a hand. “They’re being less careful with you.”
Brevity reached out and trembled with the certainty that her fingertips were not going to stop at Rami’s palm, but he clasped around her wrist with a precise kind of confidence and pulled. Brevity fluttered toward him as if she weighed nothing at all, and when he set her feet gently to the ground—his ground—it felt more like sticking to the filmy surface of a bubble than standing.
The puddle that made up Claire, thankfully, did not stir at all. She didn’t appear to notice their presence, or if she did, she simply chose not to care. Brevity swallowed down the feeling of impending grief. “I can see the ink, but . . . the books like me. They wouldn’t do this to us. What is this?”
“Souls,” Rami said quietly. “The heart of any story is a little, tiny sliver of an author’s soul. That’s how any story is made.”
“What?” Brevity blinked rapidly, trying to hold on to that thought. It felt important somehow, the way dream revelations felt important right before disappearing upon waking.
“Later.” Rami’s voice was hard and grounding. “All you need to understand is that the ink is slowly taking over Claire, piece by piece. Trying to bury her under its own existence. We need to anchor her before I—before I try what I’m going to try. Otherwise we could lose her too.”
“Okay.” Brevity took a deep breath and held a little tighter to Rami’s hand. “Right. Claire?”
With Rami’s anchoring influence, the black core appeared to be turning in a slow orbit. Claire’s face began to turn away without stirring.
Right, it wasn’t just Claire in there, and it certainly wasn’t Claire in control. Brevity needed something the ink would respond to. Something that would get its attention, and also Claire’s.
“Do you want to hear a story?” Brevity breathed, through searing tears that felt like they were flooding her throat. “I promise it’s a good one.”
There was no color inside the ink that had smothered Claire; too much was going on beneath the surface. But there was a ripple, however faint. The wax-wasting drip of her hair slowed, as if cooling.
“A story. A soul for a story, and a story for a soul.” Rami’s voice was thoughtful and he was nodding when Brevity glanced back. “Try it again.”
Brevity swallowed and focused on Claire, the familiar outline she could still pick out through the black. “This is a story of a woman who lived in a library.”
The edge of the puddle had a questing tendril that stayed reaching toward Brevity even as the center turned. She chewed on her lip. “There was a woman who lived in a library, not because she was a great reader. Not because she was a great writer. Not because she was anything special at all, but because she’d lost the way of her own story.”
Claire didn’t stir, and with the melting slowing, she looked more like a statue wrought in ebony. She was drawing out the ink, not Claire. Rami shook his head, and Brevity grasped desperately for something to separate the two.
It wasn’t fair. Claire was the storyteller, not Brevity. The only story Brevity ever had, she stole. This was all on her shoulders, and they would all die here in the ink because Claire wouldn’t listen. “You’re so stubborn,” Brevity hissed through clenched teeth. A watercolor of frustration took on the bold strokes of anger and Brevity let it. “She was so stubborn, this woman in the library. She was selfish and mean and lashed out at anyone who tried to help her. She wielded a blade against books and words against everyone else. She was so wrapped up in her own self-pity, so certain of all that she’d lost, that she couldn’t see all she had gained. All of us that were right there, right there in front of her and hurting and confused and scared just as much as she was! We were right there!”
Brevity’s eyes were full of tears. Perhaps that’s why she couldn’t make sense of the way the ink moved over Claire’s skin now, rippling, shifting, almost drying into black scales. Half-fractured and curled in on herself as she was, Claire looked like a dragon’s egg ready to hatch—or rot away. Brevity held on to her anger; it felt solid in her chest. It was the only thing that kept her pinned here—wherever here was—besides Rami’s hand.
“She was selfish and cruel, and she acted like it was because she was smarter, stronger, than everyone else. But she wasn’t. She was just stupid. So stupid she couldn’t see the friends that surrounded her, the women who were not her enemies, prisoners, or rivals, but friends. She was so stupid it took the deaths of hundreds—hundreds of goddamn wonderful people—to realize it. It was your fault, Claire! Okay? I’ll finally say it. It was your fault, and none of this would have happened if you had just talked to me! And not—”
A shiver, starting somewhere distant and rolling right through Brevity’s chest, stole her breath. Black scales began to flake and peel. Beneath, just beneath, were the tiniest freckles of brown skin. Distantly, Brevity realized Rami was praying. It seemed fitting, trapped in her own confessional. “I blamed you, Claire. I said I didn’t but I did. And then when there might have been a way to fix it, you just—you just gave up. When it was no longer your job to care, about the books, about me, you just gave up.” The world spun, as if she’d lost touch with the ground again. Which was strange, because Brevity couldn’t even feel her toes. She was fairly certain it was her turn to melt. “I’m here to make you decide, right now, whether you are giving up on yourself or not. You’re not a story, Claire. You’re a human; you’re my human. And if you end, I’m ending with you.”
She couldn’t feel Rami’s hand. Everything was color. That’s what black was, wasn’t it? All color, all the potential color of the world together, minus light. Everything and nothing at once. There was no wall between the air in her lungs and the air without. Only the low, steady pulse of Rami’s prayerful words in some angelic tongue. The ink was ignoring her now, passing throug
h her the way she herself passed away, in favor of drifting along the currents of Rami’s words. Black peeled away to reveal a brown cheek. Claire was under there, surviving and wonderfully human in every way Brev was not.
Brevity would never be human; she was a muse. So as the language of the spheres rolled through her head, she did what muses do. She let go of the allure of story, let inspiration and ink fall through her fingers, and fell to Earth.
36
HERO
Going mad is an excellent defense. Nothing is so discounted, dismissed, as an eccentric woman speaking the truth.
Librarian Fleur Michel, 1792 CE
“NO, NO, NO, NO . . .” A keening sound shook Hero out of his shock and pulled his gaze away from Rami. Probity rocked on the ground, holding Gaiety to her chest, but her attention was only on Brevity. She took sobbing breaths and straightened. “No. I can fix this. I won’t let her do this.” Probity abruptly lowered her unconscious younger muse to the ground. She started forward with intent in her wet eyes.
Hero drew in a breath and had Rami’s sword raised and leveled at Probity’s throat before he exhaled. The muse’s reddened eyes narrowed. “Get out of my way, book.”
“I don’t have one of those anymore.” Hero’s quiet admission startled a reaction out of Probity. Hero hardened his jaw and kept himself and the blade between Probity and the others. “I don’t think I get to be a story without a book. Then again, I haven’t been sure what I am for a while. I’ve tried and thought I was winging it, you know.” His smile was a snarl, but it wasn’t directed at Probity. “I was a loyal assistant for Brevity. I was a clever rival for Claire. I tried to be a questing hero for Rami. An angel that needs a hero—imagine that.”
Probity made an impatient noise and tried to brush past the blade. Hero twitched his wrist. It was a tiny movement, but just enough to flick the tip of the sword into the soft of Probity’s palm. She drew back with a hiss, and Hero waited. He waited calmly, silently, until Probity raised her chin and met his gaze with glittering hatred in her eyes.