22

BREVITY

Hell operates on forgetting, on fear. Fear can make mortals do the most terrible things; forgetting is what lets them live with it, and do it again.

But fear is present during the best things too. Ask any hero, and they’ll tell you they were afraid. Fear is not antithetical to heroism.

It is the prerequisite.

Librarian Ibukun of Ise, 820 CE

Brevity fell like a star.

Not bright or shooting like a star, no. She fell so long that the air rushing past her face chapped and turned her skin red. Until the air itself became an abrasive weapon she was being driven through. It numbed her body and her mind, so much that when she landed she barely felt the impact. Brevity pushed her cheek off cold stone and assessed. She wasn’t injured—Hell would never make its tortures that easy. The crevice in which she’d landed was no more than a meter wide, barely enough room to kneel, let alone recline. The stone was smooth and bone white underneath her fingertips. She was at the bottom of an incalculably long shaft, the opening not even visible overhead, but instead of darkness, the stone was its own light.

Not a shadow to be found—or stepped through—anywhere.

The air was the nothing flavor of Hell. Anise and absence made it hard to breathe. Brevity tried to extend her arms but found the wall before she even got them halfway up. She was at the bottom of a long, long shaft dug into the foundations of Hell itself.

Hell is for forgetting, Malphas had said. And suddenly Brevity knew what this was, and she collapsed to the ground.

Malphas had left her in this oubliette with the expectation that Brevity’s mind would torture her better than any demon ever could. Her thoughts could be a weapon used against her—Brevity already knew that. She’d spent hundreds of years understanding the dragon-like thoughts that surfaced from seemingly nowhere to gnaw on her mind relentlessly. Trapped and unmoored, Brevity’s muse imagination would spin out her worst fears, and in an oubliette, where the skin of reality, unobserved and unremembered, rubbed thin, her fears would become reality.

Malphas might not even bother to return to pick up the pieces.

Brevity pressed her fingers against the stone until the tips went white. Think. No one knew she was here. Even if Rami suspected Malphas’s hand, it wasn’t as if they could find her here. Hell was vast and wide, and Brevity had no idea where forgotten things were consigned. No one was coming to rescue her. Brevity would never leave this hole in the earth.

Not unless she saved herself.

Her thoughts could be a weapon, it was the truth. But Brevity refused, desperately and completely refused, to accept that there wasn’t a way to wield them. Her fears could become real here in the oubliette. Could her hope? Brevity squeezed her eyes closed.

For a while she tried to imagine her way out. She thought about a secret door in the stone in front of her, easily missed. She conjured up how the hidden seam would feel, smooth and dust crusted under her fingers. She imagined the grinding growl and hollow thunk as she slid the door back and light spilled out to a corridor that went . . . well, anywhere at all. She wanted to go back to the Library but didn’t fancy the notion of imagining a shortcut from Malphas’s torture chamber to the Library lobby. She’d settle for anywhere with shadows that she could use to shadowstep home, far, far away from here.

She envisioned and she thought, she imagined and yearned. She pushed every wish, every dream, every hope beyond hope, into the idea of a door. Then, eyes still closed, she reached forward until her fingertips found the wall and could run over the surface.

Nothing.

She opened her eyes to verify what she already knew. There was no door. Nothing but stone and the piercing light that splintered into her head like a migraine. She felt like an idiot. Hell didn’t respond to positive emotions. Hope, dreams, survival—these worked in the Library, but they were alien matter to Hell.

The hope drained out of Brevity. She shoved her fist in her mouth to keep from whimpering. She would not cry, would not. Would not give Malphas the privilege of her fear.

Even Malphas isn’t watching. This is an oubliette; you’ll never be seen by anyone again. The soft dragon-thought slithered into her head and took up residence. It paused before it added, in a voice that was much like her own, Maybe that’s for the better.

It wasn’t that Brevity thought she was worthless—she knew by now what she contributed to the Library. But there was a tension in her that never left, the idea that failure was on a knife-edge. That it would be Brevity who slipped up and cost the Library everything. Being here, being forgotten, could almost be a relief. Maybe Malphas had done her a favor when she threw her in a hole, falling through the air so long that she fell beyond reach, beyond memory. She felt like she was still falling; she—

The stone beneath her knees trembled. It was so brief, so faint, that Brevity could have imagined it. But she’d already been preoccupied imagining falling and . . .

Oh.

Imagining the fall hadn’t been a hope. It’d been fear, despair, guilt. Those weren’t Library emotions. Those were Hell emotions, which had power here. Imagination had power both in the Library and in Hell; it was simply a matter of how you felt it. Brevity knew imagination. It was what she was made of—made for. The what-could-be was a tool, a weapon, specifically Brevity’s own.

It was nearly impossible to force yourself to be afraid of something once you wanted it. How fortunate that Brevity was half-anxious all the time. She closed her eyes and considered the possibility that the stone beneath her knees was paper thin. Hell was old, and reveled in decay. It was feasible that the stone at the bottom of an oubliette cracked, weathered, crumbled away. Perhaps it sat, a spiderweb of cracks that held undisturbed for centuries, only for a muse to fall—at high velocity, oh so fast—all pointed elbows and the weight of guilt, and snap. And where would she fall through to? Who knew, but it was not here, and surely terrible—

The ground beneath her gave one last shiver that sent Brevity’s pulse rabbiting up into her throat—and that was the fear that tipped it. A deafening crack rippled through the stone, and Brevity fell. She fell, once again. This time into the underside of Hell.