The Archive of the Forgotten (Hell's Library #2) - A. J. Hackwith Page 0,94
one that was never going to be written anyway.”
“No!” Brevity felt like she was trembling. “Of course we can’t! These are books!”
“But what if this is it?” Probity began to pace, tugging Verve and Gaiety at the ends of their leather straps. Verve still randomly lunged toward the stacks, and it appeared Probity was edging closer. “What if this is what allows them to gain control of the ink? What if they can eat a book and then write it themselves? We can take the stories from the humans before they can destroy them. We can fix this. We’ll be saving them.”
“Saving them by destroying them.” Brevity stepped back. Probity looked taller, rail thin and pale in her own way, as if the ink was taking hold by proximity. “No, we can’t do that.” She shook her head. “We aren’t stealing stories, let alone trading them for our own.”
“You don’t understand. It’s stories. It’s everything. How can you not understand how important this is?” Probity abruptly veered away from the lobby and across the small expanse of space to the stacks. “Look, let me just prove—”
Verve and Gaiety were a froth of claws at the end of their leashes. Brevity didn’t stop to think; she leapt to her feet and threw herself in between the feral muses and the shelves of books. “No.”
For a moment it felt like Probity wasn’t going to stop. Verve lunged, making a guttural snarl at the end of the leash. Her pale lips were peeled back, and all the color had been seeped away from her gums, making her teeth look elongated and bone sharp. She threw up her hands, now tipped in claws, and slashed at Brevity’s arms. Pain laced up her elbow. Brevity closed her eyes and resolved not to flinch.
Verve’s breath was hot and smelled of boiled rubber. When Brevity opened her eyes, the muses’ claws were an inch withdrawn from her nose, though Verve strained enough to make the leather creak.
At the other end of the strap, Probity had rooted her feet in place and was leaning back to counteract the tension of the two creatures. Her lips were pressed thin, and when she met Brevity’s eyes they were full of a complicated kind of pain. “I want to save them, sis. I want to save you. You shouldn’t be stuck here. You could be the librarian that fixes things.”
“A fix that sacrifices someone is no fix at all.” Brevity held still. She was aware that Probity could release the straps, allow Verve and Gaiety to hurtle into the stacks. She might be able to wrestle one, but she couldn’t keep both of them from the books. She needed Probity to see it. “The humans have destroyed enough books for their own ambition, right? I thought you told me we could be so much better than that.”
Probity flinched, and her voice began to shake. “Don’t compare me to them. Don’t compare what I’m trying to do to the millions of books tossed aside, burned, left to rot in the—” A small gasp stopped her, and Verve’s claws swayed close to Brevity’s cheek until Probity caught control of the leash again. “That’s the answer.”
A foreboding rose in Brevity’s stomach. “Probity?”
“That’s it! There’s a giant supply of books that no one will miss, because they’ve already been forgotten! We protect your treasured unwritten charges and we change the system. And we have humans to thank.”
Probity yanked on the strap with surprising strength and began dragging the ink-maddened muses away from the stacks. Brevity only got a moment’s relief as Probity began to make her way across the lobby to the door. “Probity—where are you going with them? You need to take them back home; perhaps the other muses can fix—”
“I will fix it.” Probity tossed a small smile over her shoulder that was meant to be reassuring. It failed, in part due to the desperate redness of her eyes. “I’ll fix everything, sis. Don’t worry. I won’t make you regret the faith you’ve shown in me. There’s plenty of books for them in the Dust Wing.”
“The Dust Wing,” she whispered, and the dread grew. The Dust Wing wasn’t just a tomb for books; it was a tomb for stories. The Dust Wing had no librarian, because these books were not destined to be curated, cared for, or read. A book only fell to the Dust Wing after an existence on Earth, after the very last copy of its story had been destroyed, the