by A J Hackwith
“I still got my bets set on you.” Bjorn raised his voice to be heard as the boat drew out into the lake. His grin was a spark of white against the dark.
They cleared the shore, and Claire snapped up the second oar, earning a surprised nod from Hero as she bent in to row. They fell into a quick rhythm and were nearly to the mists when a noise rose up from shore.
Two figures—one tall and vengeful, one short and stony—appeared at the rise. Andras was nowhere in sight of the shore, which Claire hoped meant he’d escaped according to plan. The tall angel, Uriel, gave a cry and stormed down to the shore. Bjorn flourished a longbow from the weapon stand on the sand.
“Does the old kook really think he can fight a . . .” Hero’s murmur turned to a squawk when the tip of the nocked arrow caught fire. “Wait. He’s going to fire on us! Us!”
Claire redoubled her rowing and kicked Hero’s ankle for him to do the same. “Technically, he’s only supposed to fire on the boat, but I suppose it depends on his proficiency.”
“You knew he was going to . . . to what end?” A yellow flare arched through the air, and Hero yanked Leto back with a grunt as the arrow struck the bow of the boat. The boy’s eyes widened, and he flailed away from the flames.
“At least there’s no kindling to . . .” Hero trailed off as the fire caught, leaping from arrow to boat hull with an unnatural ease. “I’m beginning to have a grievance with your plan, warden.”
“Duly noted,” Claire said. She shoved Leto behind her and grimaced as the fire began to lick around the edge of the boat. Cheerful green paint curled into smoke. “Just keep rowing.”
“You’re mad.” Nonetheless, Hero turned his back on the fire to pole his oar into the water.
“The logic of most of these realms is that the way out and the way in are usually the same.”
“Oh. A pyre at sea.” Leto paled.
“Someone was listening during history class. Yes. A Viking burial. Full marks.” Claire cast a quick glance to the shore. Through the smoke, she could see that the angels had waylaid Bjorn, and there was a furious argument under way.
Uriel had a great glowing sword out, and Bjorn stood, lean and proud, arms crossed over his chest. Ramiel, his squat and gray outline just barely visible next to Uriel’s incandescent form, appeared to be trying to keep the calm.
But Uriel’s shoulders were thrown back and even at this distance, the threat was visible and strumming. Claire had not expected the concern that gripped her chest. Be careful, old man.
“Will it hurt?” Leto asked.
“Hmm?” She pulled her attention back to the fire that was quickly eating at the sides of the boat. “Oh no, we’re not required to burn, necessarily. If we can reach the mist by the time the boat goes, and I can keep hold of that trace, we should theoretically—”
“Claire,” Hero interrupted. “Your skirts.”
“Bother.” Claire stamped her hand where scorched edges threatened to catch fire. The act scalded her palms, focused her attention. The heat was seeping through her shoes, and with a calm she did not feel she directed Leto to move toward the middle of the boat.
Hero eased his rowing as they reached where the fog grew thick at the center of the lake. “To think I’m beginning to miss the ravens . . .”
“What—” Leto’s question was drowned out with a rush of air.
The fire consumed the boat whole in a flare of magical heat. Claire had just enough time to squeeze her eyes closed before the wood turned to ash under her feet and glacial water rushed over her head.
And for the second time in a day, Claire began to drown.
19
BREVITY
A library without its librarian in residence is vulnerable as a bleating lamb. Librarians serve as the readers the unwritten books never had. It anchors them, quiets them, and assists in keeping them asleep in their binding. Walk careful in the long shadows of abandoned stacks, for you walk footpaths of restless dreams.
Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 991 CE
THE DOORS OF THE Unwritten Wing were not as foreboding as the Arcane Wing’s. The Library veered away from Gothic wrought iron, and instead toward polished brass and light oaks. Brevity hadn’t often had occasion to see the doors closed, though, and they loomed over her. Her hand hovered over the brass pulls, but she couldn’t quite bring it to land.
The ravens had deposited her in the transport office, startling Walter into nearly dropping a jar. He’d been too flustered, and too kind, to ask questions, but she’d seen the way his gaze shifted over her shoulder, searching for Claire to appear behind her. The real librarian, not the clumsy excuse for an assistant. Claire wouldn’t be coming—not for a while at least—and the tasks she’d hoisted on Brevity along with her books now felt like iron weights pressing on her ribs.
Brevity began to feel the cracks. Open the Library, run the Library, protect the Library. That’s what she needed to do. That’s what she’d done with Claire for years, but it was always with Claire. Claire had no idea what she was asking. Muses enabled, supported, inspired; they didn’t act.
But muses also didn’t stand around hallways looking foolish and green at the gills. At the corner of her vision, the gargoyle had begun to stare. Brevity pushed open the doors.
A locked-down library was a space of ink and whispers. The darkness was absolute; the blue glow of the inspiration on her wrist barely lit the gloom in front of her face. The light from the hallway behind her was immediately drunk up by the shadows pooling at her feet, so tangible that Brevity nearly tripped as she made her way in.
“It will listen to you. It will listen to you. It will listen. To you.” Repeating it enough tamped down the flicker of apprehension in her chest. Brevity let the door close behind her and raised her voice. “Lights.”
Even to her own ears, her impersonation of Claire’s confident command felt quailing and swallowed up too fast in the dark. Brevity clenched her fists and tried to make her way to where she knew the front desk was. “Library . . . lights.”
Her hip collided with a hard corner. A stack of books avalanched past her shoulder. “Oh, tit-eared motherfuck.”
Muses didn’t act, but they could cuss with the best. She continued her grumbles as she crouched to grope for the books. “C’mon. Lights . . . please? I know you can hear me!”
With an almost sullen slowness, a dim glow blossomed in the table lamp. It eased, unfurling light until it spread to the next sconce, then slowly began to light up the stacks. The Library responded with a resigned sigh, fluttered pages and sleepy shadows.
“You don’t gotta be a jerk about it, you know.” Brevity finished scooping up the books and surveyed the facing stacks. The light was too grudging to be bright and cheery like it was for Claire, but the glow was enough to make out the books still on their shelves, muted and sleeping, their trails of color dim and still.
The Unwritten Wing was a world of color to Brevity. Each book a whipping, seeking coil of light when it was awake. As a muse, she could see them. Books desperately wanted to be written, and were constantly sending out tendrils, hoping to catch and find purchase in a fertile mind. It had been nearly overwhelming when she’d first arrived, rejected and unwelcome. Claire had resented everyone back then, and she had been open about her feelings toward her new assistant. To be honest, the years hadn’t made her much less brittle. Brevity often wondered, if Claire could see the books like she did, would she have more sympathy for the stories in her care? Brevity tried to care enough for them both.
Asleep, the books were withdrawn, tucked within their borders and emitting only dull pulses as Brevity passed. She picked a row at random and slowly walked the stacks, checking as she wrestled with her unease. These were books. She was a muse. This was the Library. This was home, or as near as Brevity could make one. She’d thrown her whole heart into making this home. There was no reason for the hairs on her neck to
prick, for the inspiration gilt on her skin to coil and flutter anxiously.
But shadows gathered a little too deep in the corners of shelves, and books slept fitfully under her fingers as she ran them along the spines. Dust hung suspended in the light thrown by sconces, as if someone unknown had just passed through and left the Library unsettled in her wake. The gloom increased as she ventured farther into the stacks. The air became so still it suffocated. And as she turned a corner, cold hands landed on her goose-bumped skin.
A shriek, and probably several years of her immortal life, escaped Brevity. She spun, hands in front of her face though they couldn’t quite decide whether to make a fist or shield. It took a moment for her heart to restart when she recognized the blue-skinned girl in front of her. “Aurora! Are you trying to kill me?”
Aurora was a damsel from a space thriller—likely from the late 1960s, if you judged by the skimpy miniskirt and midriff that she had arrived in. She’d built up more of a wardrobe over her years in the damsel suite, and now she worried at the edge of her cotton jumpsuit nervously. She’d been mute at first—probably some author’s idea of a doe-eyed-alien reward for his space hero—and while she’d learned to speak over the years, she still kept words to herself like rare pearls.
Her response was to look penitent, then curl her arm around Brevity’s. Her hair was a mass of white curls, studded with silver tentacles, which twitched just at the ends. Brevity sighed and allowed her arm to be captured. She drew a soothing palm over Aurora’s knuckles. “What are you doing out here? Did you hear something?”
A nod. Brevity tried to ignore the way it fed the disquiet in her gut. “It was probably nothing. Just me stumbling around. Or the Library reorganizing.”
“No.” The certainty was enough to warrant a word. Aurora’s voice was less human and more synthesized bells. It sent a chill down Brevity’s spine. The book-heavy shelves swallowed the sound, but Brevity had to resist the urge to hush her. She thought she heard a shuffle, which could easily have been a painting relocating, a rug fluffing itself, or a book turning in its sleep.
But it didn’t feel like it was. Aurora’s nails were filed down from sharp claw ends to rounded little fingers, but still managed to scratch as they tightened on Brevity’s arm. She winced, found she had been leaning into the damsel unconsciously. She extracted herself and tried to think. Perhaps the Library was just trying to test her, perhaps she was letting her fears get the best of her sense, or perhaps something really was wrong.
In any scenario, hiding in the damsel suite until Claire returned was not the way for a librarian to behave. But that didn’t mean Brevity was going to make any moves without good reason. Aurora was watching her with skittish silver eyes. Brevity sighed and headed back for the front desk. She wasn’t surprised to hear the clip-clop of Aurora’s space-fawn feet shadowing behind her.
Nothing seemed disturbed on the desk. Brevity let Aurora keep a wary eye on the stacks as she located the midnight blue ledger at the bottom of a drawer, buried under gnarled thread and tea cozies. Claire pretended to be rigidly organized, but really she just hid her clutter well. She dropped open the book on the table and cleared her throat. She placed one finger to the blank page.
“Execute inventory: full.”
If there was something out of place in the Library—or something missing from it—she’d know soon. Or, if she was lucky, the others would return before she had a chance to screw this up. Nerves singing, Brevity clutched an empty teacup to her chest as the book began to hum.
20
CLAIRE
We expect books to attempt to force change, but not the librarians. Dead things are not supposed to change, to grow. But here I am, a century into this role, and . . . I don’t recognize myself anymore. Maybe it’s best to say I don’t recognize the Library. Not knowing what I know now.
I wonder if there are other places for us. But I won’t abandon my charges.
Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE
CLAIRE WOKE AS THE sun began to bake the moisture off her skin. She opened her eyes to a dazzling world of sunbaked dust and aquamarine. She also woke choking on seawater.
“Ma’am? Oh, thank . . . well, ah. Thank somebody. You all right?” Leto crouched on the stone, a trembling hand on her shoulder as she coughed her lungs clear of the taste of old glaciers and burning pine.
She wiped her watering eyes. They were in an alley paved with pale squares. Sandstone, Claire decided, feeling the grit under her fingers as she pushed herself up. She waved off Leto’s concern and took a moment to orient herself.
It was Earth. Claire could tell that just from the air. The air in afterlife realms like Valhalla and Hell was thinner, brighter almost, each lungful colored with the realm’s spirits. Valhalla had smelled of wildflowers, ice, and steel, while Hell left the taste of ash and anise in her mouth.
But Earth was not so simple. The air was weighted by the contradictions and messy complexities of its inhabitants. She could smell stone and warm earth and a dozen trace scents of a living, breathing city. And the sea. The faint salty and green notes of the water in the quay stung her nose. They were in an old port city, then. Hopefully in Malta.
The codex. Alarm jolted her fully alert, and Claire furrowed her brow, trying to call the narrative song of the book to mind like Bjorn had taught her. She rifled around in her soggy skirt pockets until she came up with a pale scrap of parchment.
It was small, smaller even than the codex remnant they had. It was the remains of a calling card—the calling card that Bjorn had destroyed . . . except for this ashy tendril of paper. She closed her eyes to listen. It was not an entirely unfamiliar sensation, Claire had decided.
It was like when she’d been alive. Whenever she read a book in a binge, cover to cover in a day with little break, she always found it stuck in her brain like a haze. The narrative voice stuck with her, and for a bit after, it was always like a waking dream, living someone else’s thoughts. The book haunted like a ghost in her head, coloring moods until she shook herself from it.
Tracking a song, like Bjorn had taught her, felt like that. Only instead of a vague feeling, it was a pulse she could hear if she listened close enough. The codex’s song was not a pleasant one. Dark and bottomless and splintered, broken glass and tremors in the deep, like corrupted Latin and whale song. But it was there, stronger now that they were on Earth, and she could trace it.
That, at least, was reassuring. She brought her attention back. Leto was staring at her with wide brown eyes. He did look rather puppy- dog-ish as a human, all teenage gangly. She remembered, abruptly, his rough trip to Valhalla. “Are you all right?”
Leto blinked, then rubbed his nose, not quite meeting her eyes. “Oh. Yeah, that one . . . wasn’t— It didn’t feel as . . . real.”
Drowning, apparently, was preferential to whatever he had seen on the raven road. Claire sighed and started wringing out her wet skirts, grimacing as she touched her tangled hair. “Andras will be along soon, if all went well. Where’s Hero?”
“He was going to go look for a towel and something to eat.”
Claire stopped midtwist. “You let him leave, alone, on Earth, with his book?”
“Yes?” Leto suddenly looked uncertain. “You weren’t waking up, and we were worried, so—”
“Oh, I’ll bet he was worried.” Claire struggled to her feet and spun in place. They were in an alley. “Which way did he go?” Leto pointed and Claire ordered him to stay put before she pelted into the street.
The roadway connected to the alley was wider but not by much. The thick walls, built to hold back the ocean and the invaders that traveled it, were composed of sedan-sized blocks of sandstone, as were the dust-choked streets. Many of the older buildings rose out of the same sandstone, though she could see newer constructions, bright plaster and steel cobbled and clinging to the parapets of the thick walls like barnacles on a pier. Everywhere, t
he architecture blended the most outrageous features of a dozen cultures together to spit out medieval walls and minarets with fairy-tale abandon.
The street was busy and forced Claire to waste time weaving between pedestrians. She shouldered her way downhill toward what looked like a port. The nearest form of transportation was a good bet for a book on the run, and Claire cursed herself for giving up her tools. She couldn’t easily locate, let alone call, an IWL outside the Library. That had to be what Hero was banking on. She would chain him to his shelf if he . . .
The road dumped into a square plaza. Claire had to boost herself up on the edge of a fountain to see over the crowd. She zeroed in on a flash of bronze on broad shoulders and dove into the throng again.
She found Hero at the back of a line for the taxi stand. He was slouched into his jacket, but said jacket was velvet and satin in a sea of denim, so it did little to hide him. Claire cleared her throat. “Food and towels? Really?”
Hero startled, but when he turned his head, he already had an innocent smile on his lips. “I am simply being solicitous about your health. I have it on good authority that the next village over has positively the best kebabs. . . .”
His face was handsome, symmetrical, and enticingly punchable at the moment. “Your consideration is overwhelming. Taxis, really, Hero? I’m insulted,” Claire said. “I thought when you decided to abandon your word, you would be a little more creative.”
Hero crossed his arms and looked down his nose to consider Claire. “Taxis are too simple, I agree. Let’s revise. What if I’d decide to run? How’s your stamina, warden?”
Claire was already winded from the run over, but she attempted to bury that fact with a deep sigh. “You’re already IWL’d.”
“And you’re without your tools of office. How long would it take you to get back to Hell with the little errand you’re on?”