by A J Hackwith
The lumpy shadow of the minotaur lurched and grew as a gnarled hand gripped the corner of the wall. Stone broke beneath the claws, shuddering down in a hail of rubble and dust that momentarily threw a smoke screen between them and their pursuer. Rami took a sharp intake of air, and abruptly Hero was yanked into a run.
Toward the monster.
He must have made a strangled sound because Rami shouted, “This way,” into his ear before shoving Hero through the crumbling wall. The space on the other side angled upward, and it took Hero a beat to recognize the staircase. He recoiled, running into Rami’s shoulder in the small space. “No, terrible idea—”
“Worse idea is right behind us,” Rami said with a granite streak in his voice that wasn’t going to be argued with or refused. The revealed stairwell that had been hidden behind the wall was tiny and forced them both onto the steps to dodge the claws as the minotaur revenant tried to widen the hole. Hero felt like a mouse cornered by a giant moldering cat. Rami nudged him. “Up we go.”
“This is a terrible idea,” Hero repeated. He allowed Rami to herd him up the steps at a plodding pace since they were safe for a brief moment. The alcove was too tiny to admit the monster that chased them, tiny—and far too convenient. Hero had learned not to trust anything convenient in this place. Convenient merely meant the hungry realm had thought up a new and delightfully innovative method to torture you.
Still, he climbed the steps with a cautious preparedness. The last time he had been here, the labyrinth had taunted him with doorways that appeared to lead back into the world of his story. Places where he’d grown up, people he had loved, and all of it had never existed. Only Claire, with her bloody-minded will, had kept him on this side of the threshold. Still, it wasn’t as if he was going to fall for the same tricks twice. He knew the tricks now. Easy enough to resist. And, a pathetic voice added in his head, your book is gone anyway.
Maudlin brooding would have to come later, when he had more dramatically appropriate lighting and less soggy pants. They emerged from the curving stairwell into a second floor of hallways that shouldn’t exist. The walls terminated a few feet above their heads in crumbled ruin. The sky was sour gray and choked with mounds of stagnant ash-colored clouds. It seemed lower and oppressive, pressing in on them from overhead, as if the entire realm was a trap closing shut around them.
“I am not one to easily admit defeat, but I can gracefully chalk this pit up to a loss,” Hero said. “Why are we not going home now?”
“I want to make sure we’re far enough away from that beast that we don’t take anything back with us.” Rami had sheathed his sword for the flight up the stairs but had the blade out and ignited again. It served only to give every crack and crevice in the lonely hallway a sickly flicker.
“At least our feet aren’t wet.” Hero stopped at the landing and scuffed the atrociously nondescript stone pavers. Time had worn away all color and detail from this place. It was almost like a realm forgetting itself.
“I’ll scout ahead.” Rami strode down the hall with a confidence he had only when there was a weapon hilt in his hand. The movement threw faint, tilting shadows as he stopped to cautiously check every crack larger than a finger’s width, as if the minotaur was just waiting to pop out.
Hero followed at a wary pace. The farther they drew away from the stairs, the quieter the percussive thuds became—too quickly and too quietly for normal acoustics; the air turned silent and it suddenly felt as if they’d been transported to a new and forgotten section of the labyrinth.
The hallway had been endless when they’d entered it, but abruptly Rami was framed by a pool of pristine light spilling around the corner—no, not a corner. A doorway. It was a doorway that had not been there a moment before. Rami half passed it before twitching with a double take. He began to lower his sword.
Hero jolted into a sprint to close the distance. “Don’t look!” But it was already too late for such asinine advice. Rami fully faced the door, and his craggy face smoothed into something softer and, strangely, younger than Hero had ever seen. “Ramiel!”
Rami had been told about the illusions that Claire and Hero had faced; he wasn’t a stupid man. Hero would not fall in love with a stupid man. But that was the way illusions worked—by being attractive enough that reason didn’t matter.
“Oh, Creator . . .” Rami whispered in a gutted, home-hollow voice, and Hero immediately knew what he must see.
Rami took a step just as Hero lunged for his shoulder. Hero caught the hem of his sleeve, which yanked him sideways as Rami stepped through the doorway and the world went sideways. The other side was a fractal of light. Hero squeezed his eyes shut as he was pulled across the threshold. He threw his hand out and said a silent prayer of thanks when his hand found stone strong enough to grip. Gravity tossed them about until Hero was wedged in the doorway, one hand holding on to the threshold by his fingertips while the other clutched Rami’s coat.
“Let go.” Rami’s voice was rough and desperate. His big hands began fighting at Hero’s closed fist, trying to extract himself. “We’re almost there—”
“No, we are not! Wherever you think we’re going, we are not. It’s an illusion, Ramiel!” The doorway was no longer a doorway but a portal, perched above . . . something. Hero didn’t dare open his eyes. Rainbow fractals blinded him even through his closed eyelids, and he knew—he knew—that if he lost hold of the doorway they’d fall into some greater illusion forever.
“Heaven is not an illusion. Hero—Hero, please.” Rami’s struggling changed to begging as his hand found Hero’s wrist. “It’s . . . I can’t describe what it’s like in the place of the Creator. I don’t know why we’ve been given a second chance, but please, let me just show it to you.”
The desire in Rami’s voice shattered Hero’s certainty. It wasn’t desire in the normal, carnal sense as Hero was familiar with it. No, Rami’s voice wrung with the desire for salvation. The painful desire to be whole, the belief that the answer to everything was at hand. “It’s not real, Ramiel. Rami—” Hero kept saying his name, as if he could keep a hold on him through identity alone. “It’s not.”
“How can you say that? Of course the Creator is real. She’s been missing, but now she’s here, Hero. I found her. If we go back with her, they’ll have to let us in. The Creator, she can fix you, Hero!”
“I . . .” Hero said through a strained breath. He found his voice impossibly small. “I . . . am not broken.”
“Oh.” Rami’s voice was rough and hollow, as if he’d been punched. He stopped his struggling momentarily. “No . . .” He drifted at the end of Hero’s reach. “No, of course you’re not.”
“And you’re not either.” Hero could feel his fingers slipping. If Rami started to fight him again, there was no way he would retain his grip. He felt his heart slipping from his ribs. “You’re whole as you are, Rami. You’re not broken, you’re not waiting to be forgiven. You are you . . . you are loved, just as you are.” Feathers slid between the knuckles of his fist. Hero’s stomach lurched. “Please.”
He didn’t dare open his eyes. Hero knew instinctively that this doorway was entirely for Rami alone. If he looked, maybe his mind would shatter like a mortal’s against something divine, or maybe he’d be lost in the same illusion entirely. Either way, that would mean losing Ramiel, so Hero didn’t open his eyes, and he held, with the barest of fingertips, to Rami’s sleeve. He didn’t know what Rami saw in those moments, or what expression he wore when Rami’s rough hands clasped around his wrist again. The angel’s voice was hoarse but real, alive. “Pull me up.”
His hands were rough with calluses and hot as life on Hero’s arm. He pulled. In gratitude, he pulled with every fiber of his being and dragged Ramiel away from the wonders of paradise and back to Hell.
17
CLAIRE
Failure. No, stop. There is always another way, another path. Think, Julia,
think.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE
Claire was not hovering. Of course not. Claire did not hover. However, with one of—no, now two of her people off to try to cajole the god that had tried to eat her, Claire decided to maintain vigilance at Walter’s desk. Vigilance, yes. That was it.
“Ma’am, you’re makin’ the jars jiggle something fierce.” Walter’s howling baritone succeeded in sounding both apologetic and plaintive at the same time. He had one of his massive hands steadying a shelf, and Claire flicked her gaze down to where she was rapping her knuckles on the desk distractedly—and with force, and had been for some time, judging by the pain in her hands.
She clasped her hands together to still them. “Very sorry, Walter. I was somewhere else.”
“This is a place for somewhere elses,” Walter said, shoulders relaxing. He paused to straighten each jar just so on the nearest shelf before dusting his hands off. “I . . . I take it you ’n’ Miss Brevity got yourselves an idea, then.”
“A bad idea, but then most of ours are.” Claire grimaced. “Your . . . judicious inattention was helpful, Walter.”
“Glad to hear it and also don’t have any idea what you’re gabbing about.” Walter put a finger to the side of his nose.
“Of course.” Claire smiled ruefully. “In any case, Hero and Rami are off procuring . . . well, you could say a room of one’s own.”
“Aw, good for them!” Walter slapped the counter, which sent boisterous vibrations rattling the jars again. “I was rootin’ for them . . . and you, of course. Those relate-in-ships you humans get up to was always kinda fuzzy to me, but—”
“Not—not like that.” Claire bit down on her laughter. A shame Rami wasn’t here—she would have paid good money to see the Watcher blush. “I mean a realm. They’re scouting for the Library.”
“Oh.” Walter’s face fell into craggy consideration. “So yer following in Mrs. Poppaea’s path?”
“Of a sort.” Claire smiled ruefully. “Hopefully with more success.”
“You thinkin’ Mister Ramiel and Hero will find a realm?”
“With any luck. Hero could talk his way into London Tower.”
“An’ you . . . figured out the god thing?”
Claire hesitated at the waver in Walter’s deep voice. “The god—”
The jars in the office rumbled with a deafening chime as Rami and Hero returned. Claire felt the nerves that had been squeezing her chest ease and she schooled her face before turning around.
“I presume since you dallied that means you were success—”
Claire stopped short. Hero and Rami were sodden from the waist down and smelled distinctly of algae and bile. They both had the waxen survivor look that places like the dead labyrinth realm tended to impart. But that wasn’t the part that caught Claire’s voice in her throat and pierced her heart.
Ramiel’s feathers were white.
One imagined an angel’s feathers as white: this wasn’t that. Angel feathers were supposed to be soft, immutable white, the pristine, untouched shade of hopeful, holy things. The bits of feather and fluff remaining to poke out ragged between the folds of Ramiel’s trench coat were the white of nothing. Each pinion was a hollow cell, and the barbs of each feather stood out like lace ghosts. His comfortable gray feathers had turned translucent.
“Rami—” Claire started, then stopped again. She looked to Hero, half expecting him to be holding the angel up. Rami was standing on his own strength, much like a body rigors into death. Hero kept a hand and an inscrutably soft gaze on him.
Claire reached out tentatively. Her hand hovered above a clutch of ghost feathers on his chest but was afraid to land. “What happened?” she asked Hero without removing her gaze from those feathers.
“We slipped through one of the labyrinth’s cracks.” Hero’s answer was serious and subdued. It was worse when Hero was serious.
“Ah.” Claire dropped her hand by fractions.
“Heaven.” Rami’s voice was a husk of its former self as he answered the unasked question. “I saw the Creator. She was home. Whole. She looked at me and I—” He stopped short, craggy features appearing to crumble into the shifting sands of grief. He closed his eyes briefly. “I turned away.”
“It was an illusion, love,” Hero repeated softly.
She had sent them on this errand. Beneath Claire’s palm, Rami’s chest was still solid and warm, still as real as his feathers weren’t. She felt him shift awareness. His eyes focused on her, still silver-gray and angelic and perhaps even more heaven-lost than usual. Now was the time he would need her to say something philosophical, something restorative and true. Both of them looked at her like they were waiting for a lifeline of wisdom, a deeper truth to make what they’d seen make sense. But that would just be placing her understanding above their own, giving Rami another god to look to. And Claire felt nothing like a god. Her back hurt too much, for one.
So instead she said, “To hell with them, then. Bugger realms and bugger the gods that made them.” Rami startled beneath her fingertips, and Claire’s smile felt brutal on her lips. “Let’s burn them all behind us.”
18
HERO
I tried reasoning with them. The other librarians, the others on the Sisyphean hill. It was all for nothing. Oh, they listened. The librarian of Xian was sympathetic; Indralok maintained polite disinterest throughout my entire passionate appeal. Even the thrice-cursed Summerlands librarian was kind enough to serve me tea. (Do not drink the tea.) But that is where the professional courtesy ended. Not one of them was willing to risk angering their host realm by supporting my cause. I wasn’t even asking them to rebel with me! All I needed was some symbolic gesture—some crumb of unity to threaten Lucifer with. But no, they were timid as sheep, and twice as stupid. All sympathetic noises and courtesies, right before leaving me in the dust of their doorstep. Even Elysium, a realm I’d dreamed of all my mortal life, was nothing but an echo and empty promise. Not yet, my ass. Big puddle of cowardice.
I get nowhere talking to the librarians, and there’s nowhere else to take my appeals. I am fated to do this alone. Alone in the Library and alone standing before Hell.
No, that’s not right. There’s Revka; I have Revka. I must not forget that.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE
“Well.”
“Don’t start.”
“Start what? Can’t a man feel sentimental? You and me, the open road—”
“Hardly open. I should have been suspicious when Bird agreed to ferry us,” Claire pointed out as she wrung the water out of one pant leg. It was still an odd sight to see Claire in pants. Hero pressed on.
“The open road, which happens to lead through a muddy lake, dragging me along on a ridiculous quest—”
“Technically, if anyone is being dragged, it is me. Brevity asked you to go as the apprentice librarian.”
“Does that make you my assistant? Do you have to do whatever ridiculous impulses fly through my brain for once?” Hero clapped his hands. “Delicious, first—”
“Hero.” If it was possible to sigh his name, Claire did it. He relented, extending a hand to help her up onto the grassy bank. His high boots had kept out the worst of the lake water, but the heels were caked in mud and made the most undignified squelching sound when he moved. Claire’s damned pet raven had indeed ferried them safely through the raven roads to Valhalla but had been less than considerate depositing them in the mud-and-gravel shallows of a mountain lake.
Valhalla had been a logical first choice. A friendly first choice, at the very least. It was the only realm with a former librarian still in active residence, as far as Hero knew. And they’d already allied with Bjorn the Bard once before. If any wing of the Library would be amenable to joining their little rebellion, then the sagas of Valhalla would be it.
Rebellion. A secret burst of e
nergy thrilled through Hero’s bones at the word. Finally, finally, here was something Hero was an absolute expert at. Rebellion was something he knew, down to his bones, down to his book—
No. No book now. The world where Hero had been a rebel hero, then a reviled antagonistic king, was gone. That world lay in ashes on a lonely cliff in the Dust Wing. But Hero was still here. His memory and experience of fighting a rebellion, raising forces, making alliances . . . those still lived within him. This was something real that he could give—to the Library, to Claire, to Rami, to all of them. Hero was determined not to leave until he’d secured their alliance.
Even if he and Bjorn had not . . . exactly hit it off the first time around.
“Are you well?” The sudden, uncharacteristic concern in Claire’s voice brought Hero around to the task at hand. She had finished shaking the mud and bog water from her shoes and had a scrutinizing look on her face. “The raven roads—”
“Are nothing to me, after the Dust Wing.” Hero winced at how quickly his voice went from braggadocio to honesty. He straightened and tried again. “I lost my book, after all. What possible terrors could the raven road conjure to top that?”
“The road is an expert at torturing souls,” Claire said skeptically.
“Still not used to having one of those,” Hero muttered. It was a peculiar watercolor of emotions, having a soul. It felt like the ground dropping out from under you, the stable anchor of knowing your story gone. It felt warm like a kind of love, meeting Claire’s eyes and knowing the undefinable something that made her brilliant also resided in him. He felt seen. He felt exposed. And all the emotional color of it muddled up to leave him confused. He’d thought it would be different somehow. Losing his book. Becoming something else. Having a soul.
But all he’d seen on the raven road were the things he now had left to lose. Rami and Claire, foremost, and the different ways that loss would kill him. Brevity, and her unflagging belief in the goodness of everyone around her. The damsels, the Library . . .