The Library of the Unwritten - A. J_ Hackwith Page 0,151
appeared. “Ramiel. I thought Heaven’s warhorse had been tamed into a mule. What are you doing here?”
“I keep my own business.” Ramiel’s words were stilted.
Claire risked a glance. She’d always considered the fallen angel a stiff soldier type, but this was new. He stood ramrod straight, his large, calloused hands clenched at his thighs, with the prey’s instinct that complete stillness was the only way to avoid drawing unwanted attention. Malphas had that effect on longtime acquaintances.
“I see you two know each other,” Claire murmured. She waited until Malphas stopped at the edge of her desk. “If you came for a debrief, we don’t have a final tally on the damages yet.”
Malphas waved that off, as if the domain of numbers and loss was for weaker minds. “I came to see for myself this codex. Something that made Andras finally show his hand must be powerful.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
Malphas caught the flat note in Claire’s voice, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes tightened speculatively. “You’re too intelligent to defy me. Do you mean the pages are already destroyed?”
“Is that what a good librarian would do?” Claire met Malphas’s level gaze. “The Library is secure and Lucifer’s secrets are safe. You can tell the court that.”
“Yes . . .” Malphas’s lips thinned before transforming into a positively terrifying gentle smile as her eyes landed on the dagger, concern forgotten. “Such a compact little prison. Precious.”
Claire stifled a groan at the affectation. The gentler Malphas became, the bigger the ball of dread grew in her stomach. Rami twitched and drew closer behind her. “In a way. I’m not certain on the specifics of how Andras created it, but it captures a being. Just not the one he intended,” Claire said.
“Andras always had a better mind for deception than strategy. I was the one to toss him out the first time, you know.” Malphas plucked up the blade, holding it this way and that. “A useless weapon, but the court will have a trophy.”
“You mean the Arcane Wing,” Claire corrected her, earning a flash of warning displeasure. Malphas was a long-standing, revered general. The War Crone had no enemies, because her enemies were all dead. Claire kept her thoughts from her face. “It is an artifact of the Library’s Arcane Wing and belongs there. That doesn’t change just because there’s a demon in it now.”
Malphas considered. Bony fingers, hard as granite and with blackened nails, tapped along the edge of the blade. “Our lord has ways of dealing with failed rebellions.”
“Failed,” of course, was the key word. Claire knew Lucifer encouraged the plotting and backstabbing in the court as a way to keep his most powerful demons distracted. With a general like Malphas safeguarding his throne, he could afford the chaos. “And if His Vilest would like to come and extract Andras’s soul for punishment, he’s welcome. But until there’s a new Arcanist in place, I’m sure Lucifer would agree that my charge is to guarantee no artifacts wander off the inventory.”
Malphas set the dagger down by the nearest stack of books, losing interest. Instead she focused her full attention on Claire, which felt a queer mix of predatory and maternal. “About that. You have stolen from my army.”
It was a flicker of a moment, a trick of the light, when a shadow melted across Malphas’s features and turned them from wizened to skull-like, then back. Claire held the fear in her mouth rather than swallow and draw attention to her exposed throat. “As you said, I am too intelligent to cross you, Malphas.”
“Yet I smelled the burning from the hallway. Those Horrors and that wyrm were mine. Andras was mine, despite his reassignment. So it falls to me to name a new successor.” The train of thought behind Malphas’s granite eyes was impossible to guess. “There are several well-established demons campaigning for the honor—”
“No demons,” Claire said, more harshly than was wise. “I won’t share the Library with another grasping, plotting viper. There’s too much power in the Arcane Wing. The Arcanist needs to be someone who has no interest or ability to profit from it. Andras was proof enough of that.”
“As you said, you are intelligent,” Malphas mused. She leaned forward, patting Claire’s cheek with sharp fingertips that left cold grit there. Then the crone demon tapped her fingers at her wrinkled throat, making an obvious show of considering. “But if not a demon, then who? That knocks out a sizable portion of qualified candidates.”