Alone, except for a blot of ink, wet upon the carpet.
26
RAMI
Forgetting is its own kind of awful magic. The longer we are down here, the more things melt away. It’s unnerving, but I try to remember that entropy doesn’t apply in places like this. Nothing is really destroyed; nothing is lost for good. It cheers me to think maybe our memories go where forgotten books go. Silent readers to keep the silent books of the Dust Wing company.
It’s a nice story, at least. No one is forgotten, and no one is alone.
Librarian Gregor Henry, 1917 CE
RAMI WAS A MAN used to routine and duty. Two things that had been sadly lacking since they’d returned from the Chinvat bridge. Hero had left him the duty of the Unwritten Wing, but Rami felt ill at home there. Yet, when he’d left, Hero seemed troubled by a private errand. It only felt supportive to make an excuse to stay out of his way. He suspected Hero was seeking out Claire. He understood there was a deeper tie between book and former librarian than he, or anyone, understood. He was glad of it.
But the problem with being an angel—albeit a discredited one—in Hell is that there were few places he actually wanted to be. He was restless. Despite his promise to man the desk, he stepped out and returned a couple of times to the Unwritten Wing, thinking to see if Brevity had returned, update her on their progress. But the Library was quiet when he got there, all as he had left it. Rami had waited as long as seemed polite in the lobby, but when the damsels had started poking their heads from the stacks with curiosity, he’d left.
He’d stopped by Walter’s office and had an uneasy conversation with the gatekeeper about human smoking habits, of all things. It disquieted Rami, knowing what Walter was. He was quite used to dealing with immortal forces and personifications of powers beyond his kin, but usually they were not so affable and obsessed with felines.
So, eventually, he’d run out of excuses and had to return to the Arcane Wing, hoping Hero had finished his business by now. The Arcane Wing had an essential quiet to its nature. Claire tried to soften the hard edges of nothingness with the soft patter of pages and the busy-making sounds of tea preparation, but Rami recognized that, at its core, the Arcane Wing was a place of silence. He knew silence, respected it in all its natural variations.
Perhaps that’s why the moment he crossed the threshold into the wing, he could tell this silence was all wrong. No one was visible up front, among the worktables and paper-stacked desks that Claire maintained.
Claire’s stray raven was picking through some toppled teacups and paused long enough to cock her head at Rami’s entrance. She grackled, low and warning, and took two hops to the end of the table before taking flight. She paused, perching just on the end of one of the shelves, as if making sure Rami was taking note of her path before taking off again.
The silence, between muted beats of feathered wings, was alarming. Rami took another quick look around before jogging down the shelves after the bird.
He found the raven after a few moments, paused between two tall racks of amulets. He heard the muttering before he saw Claire, pacing back and forth with a rather alarming bramble of talismans and arcane specimens in her hands.
“Claire?” Rami tried, carefully.
She looked up, and her cheeks glistened. Tears tracked down her face, fresh and raw, even though her expression was gaunt and empty. She distantly seemed to acknowledge Rami’s presence and shoved a handful of her selections into his arms. “You’re here. Good. Take this and fetch the Persephone seeds.”
“Claire,” Rami repeated, worrying at the way she paced and seemed to stare past the shelves. The raven came to land heavily on her shoulder and bleated in her ear. An action that would have normally caused an aggrieved snarl and shake-off. Instead, Claire’s shoulder just sank under the weight and a small suffering knit between her eyes.
“Claire,” Rami said again. “What’s all this for?”
“An expedition. A mission, a—a rescue mission. A retrieval.” Claire’s voice was cracked and abused, possibly from crying. She waved her hand with a frown twisting up her face, breath coming a little fast. “Don’t ask questions. You’re my assistant; you’ll assist. I don’t keep you around for questions.”
“You keep me around because I choose to stay,” Rami corrected gently. A complicated expression stung across Claire’s face, full of hurt. She turned away abruptly.
“No more questions. We are going to search the realms one by one. We can start with wherever you and Hero went to last.”
“Chinvat?” Rami recoiled at that. The bridge was a place he never cared to visit again, especially not with anyone he cared about. He tried not to get distracted. But a certainty fell like a stone in Rami’s chest, settling in with old intuition. “Where’s Hero?”
“Gone,” Claire said, never quite meeting his eyes. She pulled another rather blood-crusted set of pearls from the shelf and flung them over her shoulder like a bolero.
Every jolt of movement, so alien on calm and measured Claire, wedged deeper dread into Rami’s stomach. He had to ask anyway. “Where? Gone where, Claire?”
Claire’s
