The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,32

chair.

“Bird.” Claire sighed and pulled a drawer open to scavenge some self-defense bread crumbs.

Andras had kept ravens—as experiment subjects, as hostages, perhaps both—when he’d been Arcanist. Not just any ravens—Odin’s ravens. Ravens of Valhalla. Ferocious warrior-spies for the Norse realm. Gods knew what Andras had planned. Claire had been happy enough to free them in exchange for help reclaiming the Unwritten Wing. The raven women were welcome allies, and lethal and merciless against Andras’s demons.

Afterward, they’d left with their leader, back to Valhalla. All except one old, lazy she-raven. She roosted in the rafters and showed up occasionally to peck at Claire and be a nuisance. She delighted in causing chaos. Claire had taken to just calling the creature Bird, since she’d never seen her transform into a human shape. Perhaps she had forgotten how. Perhaps she couldn’t. Perhaps Andras had kept one regular, boring, mortal raven from the human world in the cages, just to have a go at everyone. That would have been his kind of humor.

Trapped and cornered in a cage, everyone’s the same feral animal, pup. Remember that. The voice in her head was still there, her memory of Andras the Benevolent Mentor, not Andras the Buggered Traitor.

Claire fed the raven anyway, though she would deign to talk to it only when Rami wasn’t around. He already worried about her sanity, after she’d survived witnessing Uriel face-to-face. He really was a fussy one, for a being that had seen epochs come and go. But he had a good heart, and she’d grown too fond to worry him.

“No, I haven’t told him yet. And I’m not going to,” Claire said to the reproachful look Bird gave her. She hadn’t said a word about the whispers to anyone yet. It wasn’t that she feared Brevity, Rami, or even Hero wouldn’t believe her. It was just, given her history, the presence of voices no one else could hear after a dramatic event like a near-death staining might raise some alarms. Alarms were fussy things. Claire couldn’t get a smidge of work done with them.

She found a broken biscuit behind a bottle of ink that satisfied Bird long enough for Claire to reclaim her chair. The sigh that pushed past her lips as she flopped into the dim of the alcove was not entirely intentional. Her stained hand came to rest, palm up, in her lap. It didn’t feel different, besides a perpetually damp, chilly sensation that had her rechecking that she wasn’t leaving wet fingerprints of ink on everything she touched. She hoped she still had fingerprints; it was rather hard to tell under all the black.

Bird resettled on the edge of the open drawer, biscuit crumbling between her scaly claws. Her feathers were fluffed into a dusty storm cloud that said she had no intention of taking the bribe and leaving Claire in peace. Bird destroyed the biscuit industriously, then set to snapping up a pen cap and rapping it against the desk. At least her random blats and gravel-filled squawks were anchors of solid, weighty things. Real things. Claire put aside the question of whispers and focused on the more productive question of the ink.

“Back to work,” Claire muttered to Bird and the whispers.

No two of Andras’s logbooks were the same. Claire drew one down from the shelf at random. The cover was bound in some kind of hide that was too heavy and metallic to be from any creature on earth. She found the index quickly and looked for any log entry dealing with an artifact or speculation of ink. When that came up empty, she broadened her search to any magical liquids, and that got somewhere at least. Claire spent the next three hours wading through Andras’s spidery handwriting and parsing out his thoughts on chimera blood, arcane brews, ifrit tears, aqua vitae, and even the observable properties of holy water. An entry that was brief at best. What she wouldn’t have given to have that in her inventory at any point of her tenure in Hell, Claire thought wryly.

There were entries on divine paints, dark visceral slurries, arcane potions, cosmic floods, and the blood of every impossible realm creature one could think of. But no ink. There was not a single record of any artifact of ink-like nature passing through the Arcane Wing.

Claire fell back into her chair and rubbed the grit out of her eyes with her good hand. The utter absence of a thing was nearly as telling as anything else she