5

BREVITY

The Librarian’s Log keeps its secrets. I’ve observed myself how I can read a page five times and discover new entries every time I return to the page. So I’m asking you a favor, book of mysteries. Hide these words. I’ll not index this; I won’t even assign it a code word. I’m attempting a thing no librarian should, and I am doing it alone. Alone except for you. I need somewhere to write these thoughts. Indulge me in this, old book, and don’t bother my future heirs with the nattering of an old woman.

I’m off to interrogate a demon.

Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE

Brevity knew color, breathed color, saw colors, wherever she went. But now she stepped into a place colors fled. The cotton toe of a child’s sock, gray from filth from the floor. Vomit, hours or days old in the corner. The shred of a foil blanket crinkled under her shoes. If this had been the worst of it, Brevity might have been calmer. But the colors of the place were all wrong. The places of children were some of her personal favorites. Kids were like little books in that way. Stretching and reaching in all directions with colors they had not yet been told were impossible. Imagination, budding and feral, radiating off their little minds. Kids were the closest humans ever came to the world of muses, of color and possibility. Brevity liked kids. There was a kinship there.

The colors that lingered in this cold room were the furthest thing from the colors of freedom. The whole place was washed with a light the color of bile, and the gray concrete spotted with so many dark stains that Brevity couldn’t tell what was physical and what was manifested by the horrors it had seen.

It was a room where innocence went to rot.

Malphas was still speaking in cool undertones she couldn’t decipher, to which Claire was responding in kind. Claire stood ramrod straight in the middle of her pen, and the debris at her feet might have been a stack of books rather than bits of inhumanity. Only Brevity could see the way her knuckles whitened into a fist behind her back.

A wrongness screamed in Brevity’s head. The one time she’d accompanied Claire to Hell’s court, it’d been a posh affair. Some Italian manse snipped out of time a moment before a massacre. Tables upturned but still gilded and pristine. She’d been there to be introduced as the Unwritten Wing’s newest assistant librarian. The demons had embellished themselves in kind, as courtiers and nobles of an indeterminate era. Well, courtiers with horns. Her relationship with Claire had been so strained, she’d been worried she’d use the wrong fork and shame the Library.

This room was the furthest from a noble court. The evils here weren’t gilded; they were as blatant and bare as exposed iron.

“Eyes forward, spirit.” A figure separated itself from the gloom and approached the fencing. The demon was dressed as some kind of authority figure, designed to intimidate. Clad head to toe in modern riot armor—Brevity could discern nothing more than that. A flicker of white on their shoulder caught her eye, an armband with three letters stenciled in bone white paint. They slapped a baton against the chain link before Brevity could decipher it.

Brevity was too tense to flinch. She was mildly proud of that. She unclenched her jaw enough to swallow and find her nerve. “Librarian. My title is librarian.”

“This isn’t the Library,” the figure barked.

“No,” Brevity said quietly, “it is not.”

“Answer truthfully. Date and time of your most recent inventory.” The demon guard barked it like an order, not a question. Brevity felt ill as she answered. Thank god she’d had just enough time to review the log before they came.

“The results?” the demon asked next.

“All books accounted for.” She’d been able to answer truthfully so far, and Brevity was of a naturally hopeful nature. Perhaps they could talk their way out of this yet.

All that hope shattered on the rocks of the next question. “Irrelevant.” The helmet tilted as the demon paused a moment, studying her. “Define ‘books.’ ”

“What?”

Her interrogator took a step closer to the fencing that separated them. “Define ‘books.’ What, precisely, Librarian, are the books in your care? Surely you can tell me.”

Ice crept into Brevity’s gut, and a hollow kind of ring echoed in her ears. They know. They know. The sour air of the pen suddenly seemed too thin, chain fencing too close. She couldn’t breathe.

They know. Her thoughts hammered and the panic set in.