39

RAMI

Maybe I was doomed to fail. There are some wings of the Library, after all, that are beyond my reach. Beyond the reach of anyone but a forgotten book. I was never certain if the Dust Wing counted, when tallying the resident souls of the Library. It had been arrogant of me to think that it didn’t. I was too afraid to try. No librarian I know of has entered the Dust Wing and returned. Forgotten books have a right to be hostile to humanity; we’re the ones that failed them.

Librarian Poppaea Julia, 48 BCE

The quality of the Dust Wing was its own particular flavor of darkness. It wasn’t simply the absence of light; it was the oily feel of shadow upon shadow. Even Rami, who had excellent dark vision, thank you very much, could feel the change as they arrived.

The Unwritten Wing murmured of ruffling pages and dreaming books, but that was a whisper compared to the staccato chorus, over and over again, of ripping pages. Hundreds of them. The shallow flat area where Hero and Rami landed was as close to an approximation of a front lobby as the Dust Wing got. Hero had called it the killing fields, last time they were here. Garlands of papery entrails drifted in midair, books caught in the act of self-mutilation. Beneath his feet, the pages were so old they crumbled into a slick slurry as he took a step. The shadows were almost absolute, only stabbed by twists of bone white parchment catching the light.

And everywhere, everywhere, was the muted sound of ripping pages. Forgotten worlds destroying themselves.

“Gods . . .” Hero stumbled, his weight sliding against Rami until he could get an arm around him. “It’s so loud—why is it so loud?”

The tearing-paper sound was unpleasant, but Rami wouldn’t have described it as exceptionally loud. He supported Hero and drew his sword with the other. Even ignited with blue flames, it did little to push back the shadows. Nothing moved. “What are you hearing?” he asked Hero quietly.

“It’s . . .” Hero grimaced, closing his eyes to swallow laboredly before answering. “Loss. Despair. Last time I was here, it was stories, millions of books telling their stories. But now . . .” His fine brow furrowed. Rami disliked how pale it looked in the firelight. “Something’s changed.”

Rami’s sense of alarm was fine-tuned. He scanned the shredded paper forest around them. “Do you want to go back?”

“No!” Hero’s eyes shot open and he shook his head. “There’s nowhere else we can go. It’s our best shot at a home. I have to do this.”

The haunted look in Hero’s eyes did not convince him, but Rami resolved to hold his peace. “Then we’ll do this together.”

Hero flashed him a smile—a mere ghost of his usual spirit—and straightened, composing himself until his hand slipped back into Rami’s. It felt smooth and fragile. “Tag along, then. We ought to head . . . there.” His eyes unfocused for a moment before pointing at a wide break between the cliffs of crumbling books that dominated the “lobby.”

Neither of them moved.

Rami cleared his throat. “As I said, there’s no shame in going back—”

“This way,” Hero bit off, and took off at a grim march. Rami followed. After what had happened last time they were in this place, he certainly had no intention of letting Hero out of his sight.

The chorus of ripping pages gradually faded behind them the deeper they hiked into the crumbling canyons of the Dust Wing. There were no tidy bookshelves and discretely indexed stacks here. Books piled upon codices piled upon slates piled upon stone tablets piled upon even more obscure and rudimentary modes of storytelling. The whole place was a layer cake of history, stratum after stratum of stories written, then forgotten to humanity by neglect or by malice. Somewhere in here were the lost works of Sappho. Unrecorded plays by Shakespeare. And millions of other lesser-known voices, either forgotten or silenced by the march of time. These were books that had been written, once. Had made it to humanity and been read by someone. Seen sunlight, touched a reader’s heart. Instead of lending the memory of life, that somehow made the wing all the more eerie and sepulchral. Which was a worse fate, Rami wondered, the failure of death or the wasted potential of never living at all?

Hero was muttering. Rami wasn’t sure when he’d started. Hero came to a sudden stop at the base of a cliff, a stricken look on his face as he stared into the dark. “Why? You need a reason?”

“Hero?” Rami kept his voice gentle. His hand hovered over Hero’s shoulder, suddenly afraid to land. “Talk to me.”

“Talk, talk, talk . . .” Hero clutched his head as if he’d been struck. “They’re talking, all right. Vile nonsense—What about me? I will tell you about me, you—” He started, twisting around to Rami in horror. Wet tracks streamed down his waxy cheeks. “They don’t want to help.”

“The wing?” Rami inched the tip of his sword up again, eyeing the crumbling artifacts warily. Nothing moved, nothing breathed, for Rami at least. Hero twisted as if he were in the midst of an arguing crowd.

“The bloody entitled—” Hero was breathing shallow and labored now. His fist struck the nearest pile of books, sending a cascade of dust down on their heads. “What’s it to you? To you? You want the whole Library to fall because you got forgotten?” Disgust added to the tears muddying his voice. “And they dare to call me a villain.”

“Can you explain—”

“What makes you better than any of us? I’ve read you, all of you,” Hero seethed at nothing Rami could see. He began to dig through the rubble of disintegrating pages. He pulled out one leather-bound square that was almost holding together. “This? Trite.”

“What are you doing?” Rami asked.

“I’m reading.” Hero shrugged and tossed the “trite” book over his shoulder. “I read all the books last time I was in here. Though I suppose maybe ‘read’ is not the technical word . . .”

“You said there were ghosts.”

Hero sniffed. “I was being generous. Look at these. Boring. Drivel. This one’s got every ‘ist’ and ‘phobia’ covered . . .” Hero crouched down and began to scramble deeper into the debris. Flakes of dried paper and leather began to billow and settle on him in a fine layer of filth. “Dull. Predictable. Hack. And this one? A love triangle? Really?”

There was a moment, when Rami blinked, when he thought it was a trick of the shadows and the dust. A shift in Hero’s pallor, which had been painted gray by the swirl of filth in the air. But it felt like the world shivered, and as Hero’s fingers touched the next book, he . . . changed.

The dust rippled over him in a shiver, leaving a luminescent skin of not-quite-light. Hero was still muttering invectives and commentary, the losing side of a debate that Rami couldn’t follow. But Rami wasn’t truly alarmed until he watched Hero pick up another book, carelessly flick it up with a twist of the wrist, and . . . disappear.

It was only for half a second. Hero didn’t seem to notice, caught in mid-mutter as he stuttered out of existence and then back in. He tossed the book over his shoulder, picked up another, and it happened again. A flicker. This time, Rami was watching closely enough to see that Hero didn’t merely reappear; he filled in. Roiling text scrolled over his skin and then disappeared into his hairline as he returned to reality.

The warning in Rami’s gut hitched up to an alarm. “Hero, stop a minute.”

Another book was discarded and a crumbling scroll picked up. This time Hero phased in and out in some Latin script. He reached out again: a decree in cuneiform, followed by what looked like Phoenician. He’d stopped muttering at some point. Hero had become a dust-covered automaton digging through the rubble, as flickering and insubstantial and gray as the ghosts that surely inhabited this place.

“Hero! Stop!” Rami lunged forward as he saw him reach for a precariously wedged slate that would surely bring the entire cliff sliding down on top of them. He wrapped his arms around him, but hauling him away, he lost his footing. They skidded farther down the rubble.

Hero was still blindly reaching. In the dim light, old languages that Rami recognized—and a couple he didn’t—slid over Hero’s skin like fast-moving shadows. His skin had turned the shade of parchment, his eyes gray as charcoal and fixed straight ahead. Wherever he was, he was not here with Rami. Not for much longer.

Rami was acquainted with loss, but not this. Not this. Not here, and not again. Angels were not supposed to be arrogant. All their action, power, and authority came from the god they served. But it was only Rami who decided, here and now, this would not happen.

“Hold on a little longer,” Rami croaked as Hero shuddered beneath his grip. There was no time for a graceful exit; the edge of the cliff crumbled beneath them and Rami breathed one final lungful of dust and malice as he charted a path home.