The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,52

of the canyon-like stone towers, cubbies worn with more age than the neat slab cuts they’d seen so far.

“You have something about the Unwritten Wing here? In the actual archives?”

“Actual archives,” Echo whispered, which Hero thought was rather cheating.

Ramiel exchanged a mystified look with Hero and nodded. “Well, we’ll take a look, then—er, may I?”

“Aye.”

Echo tilted her head back and forth, in a birdlike way that was entirely creepy, then began swanning back the way they came, leaving them in the stacks to presumably find their way out again.

Hero was entirely over the gimmick of this place. “Let’s see what the vulture has for us.”

Ramiel nodded, appearing to remember the task at hand past the wonder of the library. The Unsaid Wing had been cheerily empty upon entry, but as they wound farther back, the quiet lost the feeling of a living glen and took on the qualities of a held breath. Unwritten books were solid, held-together things, awake or asleep. But unsaid words were all fragments, sharp edges, like the shards of stone above their heads. The feeling of a precipice was too great. Hero kept glancing up at the sky, lost in lavender gloom and web work of stone lattice, as if the unspoken words would topple on them at any moment.

Folded sheaves gave way to rolled scrolls, which gave way to older, more eccentric materials. Unlike the words of the Unwritten Wing, these words were never meant for anyone but their intended recipient, so the artifacts felt no inclination to change, to demand to be read. An inherent laziness, in Hero’s opinion. Finally, Ramiel came to an abrupt stop several shelves down.

“Poppaea Julia.” Hero squinted through the blocky lettering on the shelf. “She’s here after all. The librarian that challenged Hell.”

“Supposedly,” Ramiel said. “It can’t hurt to look.”

Hero made a noncommittal sound. This had been his idea, but after catching glimpses of the kind of unsent tripe this library held, he doubted they’d find anything enlightening here now. The first few minutes he spent perusing confirmed his instincts. “This is all human nonsense before the woman had even died. There’s not going to be anyone with unsaid words for her after her death here. Nothing about the Library.”

The complaint didn’t slow down Ramiel in the slightest. He kept methodically examining shelves farther down, touching each scroll lightly, as if it was a treasure, holding it up to the light to read. His expression told the tales—Ramiel was not an expressive creature, but Hero had found himself gaining literacy in the way his arched brows knit in concern, the way the grim line of his generous mouth softened, just at the edges at small things. It was much more entertaining than the scrolls, at least, and Hero had to keep himself from staring.

“Here now,” Ramiel muttered. His brows did a caterpillar dance. Code: astounded surprise in the language of Ramiel’s face. Hero looked down to find the cause. The rolled papyrus in Ramiel’s hand was not yellowed ivory like the rest of the collection. The bleached surface was too white for the human-made papyrus of the day. Fine emerald script, spidery as tattered thread, crossed the scroll in tight, orderly lines.

“What is it?” Hero relented and crowded Ramiel’s shoulder to get a better look.

“Every unsent communication,” Ramiel mumbled with a shake of his head. “They really are thorough.”

Hero had no patience for slow reveals. Ramiel’s hand was blocking the way, but Hero’s eyes jumped to the blocky thick signature at the bottom of the page. “Revka . . . Arcanist?! As in Hell’s Arcanist?”

“It appears so.” Ramiel frowned as he unwound the scroll to read again. “It wasn’t always a position held by a demon.” Hero had a faint memory of Claire saying the same thing once. During one of the many obsessive attempts she’d made to train him to be a proper assistant for Brevity. Hero hadn’t bothered listening, since assisting wasn’t so hard and appeared to be simply doing what menial chores Brevity asked for. But it had been fun to watch the way Claire’s dark eyes had sharpened into storms as she berated him.

Over Ramiel’s shoulder, the text had taken on that wiggling, twitchy quality of library-to-library documents. Hero already felt a headache coming on—not that books could get headaches— but squinted his eyes determinedly until the ink resolved itself into a letter.

Librarian Poppaea,

You are an imbecile. You are a knacker-eared, fecund-brained bastard of ill-cast winds. You are a fool’s fool, a dunce among