The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,39

part of his brain had gone into free fall, so he only managed an eloquent nod.

“Good.” Claire turned her attention back to her desk. “Go. Be careful and bring both of you home.”

“I’ll see to it,” Ramiel promised with some relief. And he did—promise. Hero might have been an ass with overconfidence in his charms, but Rami had sworn to protect all the residents of the Library. That included stunningly perplexing dead women and insufferable men with broken books.

10

HERO

The Library is hiding something. I’m certain of it. But an immortal secret is not going to be solved by one soul. So I put forth the charge to you, future librarians: discover the secret of the Library’s existence. Take what I’ve learned and add your own under the log index entry Myrrh. In my time, it was that which was sought after for medicine, knowledge, and purification. Knowledge purifies. We serve no one with ignorance.

I believe this little logbook can hold our secrets secure. And maybe one day, it will hold the truth as well.

Librarian Madiha al-Fihri, 603 CE

THE PROBLEM WITH BEING made from a book, Hero had decided, was that everyone thought they could read you. The firmly held belief that they could look at you, read you once, and know the entirety of your contents for eternity. That a book was simply the sum of the text on its pages.

It certainly felt like more than that, from the inside. Hero resented the simplification of it. The way Claire and Brevity nattered between them, dissecting terms with important capitalizations like Narrative and Story and Point of View. As if as a character his thoughts were prescripted, and he was merely a composition of cogs and bits to be taken apart and reassembled.

Granted, they never talked about him in specific in this manner, but being the exception was no comfort. It felt condescending, like a hall pass. At his heart he knew he was still a story. A story with a broken book, but a story.

He didn’t know where that left him anymore. Not immutable but also not a cold assemblage of parts. Perhaps he was a draft, half-born but unfinished. Unruly and unfixable. Yes, Hero could definitely be that.

It was in this particularly sour frame of mind that Hero found Rami skulking around the entrance to the Arcane Wing.

“About time.” Hero barely paused midstep to stride past the doors and down the hallway. He was gratified to hear Rami scramble to his feet behind him. Claire had done that trick enough to him. “I’ve bought some time, but if Brevity recalls me in the middle of an inquiry it’ll be disastrous. We should get moving.”

The transport office neared, then flew past them. Rami’s heavy steps picked up.

“Don’t we need to return to the Unwritten Wing?” Rami asked. “Or wherever this secret exit is that you found?”

Hero stopped and pinned him with a baffled look. “Dear gods, you think it’s a literal door, don’t you?”

Rami had too much dignity to blush, which was a pity, but Hero rather appreciated the way his glare turned self-conscious. “The warding of books was not a Watcher’s concern in my day.”

He said “warding of books” not quite the way one would say “mucking stalls,” but it was close. Hero’s lip curled and he leaned in. “It’s entirely all right. I’ll make sure you can keep up.” He started off again before Rami could entirely respond. “Wards don’t have physical weaknesses; they have logical ones. What we’re looking for isn’t a secret door; it’s a secret loophole.”

The loft of his lecturing air was not lost on Rami. “So, you cheat.”

“Of course I cheat. Dear gods, what am I, a real hero? No.” Hero waved away the absurd insinuation. “It’s more about obeying the letter of the law than the spirit. Entirely appropriate. We’ll use the Library’s own processes, even.”

“Definitely cheating,” Rami muttered.

Hero suppressed a burr of irritation. He was being incredibly clever and his audience couldn’t even appreciate it. Claire and Brevity had tried for hours to wheedle this secret out of him, and here he was, just handing it to the damned man and he couldn’t even pretend to be impressed. Angels, really. And yet, Hero needed him for this next part.

“Voilà.” Hero withdrew a small strip of paper from his jacket and flourished it under Rami’s nose. “A hold.”

“A what?” Ramiel snatched the paper out of Hero’s hand with surprising dexterity.

“A hold request, for the IWL,” Hero said, then helpfully clarified, “the interworld