42

HERO

Listen. That’s the part of the librarian’s job that everyone forgets. Listen. Listen to your books, listen to your patrons. Listen to your enemies, even; when they’re maddest is when you know you’re doing something right. A librarian’s job is to listen. A library’s job is to be a place where the hopeless can feel seen and heard too.

Librarian Gregor Henry, 1977 CE

By now, Hero had become familiar with the many ways a soul can be disassembled and reassembled somewhere else. He had traveled by trick, by bird, by boat and bridge, by painful corrosive destruction, by Watcher and will.

By far, his least favorite method was the IWL, at least up until now.

Falling back into the Dust Wing, as if pulled by an overwhelming gravity, was becoming a contender. He felt as if a small black hole had opened up inside his heart and he was being pulled apart from the inside out. He’d kept his eyes on Rami at first. He willed his face composed and unafraid. Unafraid as the ghosts chorused in his head, unafraid as the darkness swam in on the edges until a bone-shaking pop felt like it shattered every nerve in his body and there was darkness. Not the darkness of nowhere roads, where only Rami’s certainty stood out like a beacon. No, this was a darkness he recognized.

He didn’t land in the grisly killing fields of the Dust Wing’s lobby. He didn’t even land on solid ground. He fell, as all the books arriving in the Dust Wing must fall, through infinite darkness. Hero only had a moment to pinwheel inelegantly before he felt, more than saw, the crumbled ruins of the wing rushing toward him.

Hero tucked and protected his head, taking the brunt of the impact with the roll of his shoulder. It helped, if only because Hero felt a tiny crack and blinding pain rather than landing poorly and not feeling anything at all. The momentum carried him down a hard incline, and Hero lost his form entirely, tumbling like a die tossed into the dark. He came to a stop not because he’d run out of momentum but because he encountered something harder than him. A thick chunk of stone caught him in the middle. Hero held on and ran a damage inventory as he tried to remember how to breathe.

At least one broken rib, that was for certain. His ankle throbbed, and there was something distinctly Not Right going on with his shoulder and sword arm. That thought sent him pawing for his scabbard with his one good arm, but that had been ripped away in the landing. Injured, disoriented, and unarmed. That was how he was to face the haunting of a wing that had already defeated him twice. The pain at least quieted the whispers clotting up his thoughts. He gingerly slid off the outcropping and rolled onto one knee with effort. Something hot and wet dribbled into his eye. It was too dark to see whether it was black ink or red blood now. That was a shame. He suspected a number of damsels had good money placed on the answer.

A small valley between the mountains of abandoned books created a path before him that Hero could barely pick out in the dark. He should have asked Rami for a light before he let go. He should have . . . asked Rami many things before he let go. This was the trouble with being a written creature; Hero was realizing how much he relied on subtext.

That sour fact amused him enough to lighten the stabbing pain in his side as he got to his feet.

“Well?” His voice sounded frail in the darkness. He grimaced and tried to correct that. “Speak up!”

The expanse of dust had no answer for him.

“I gathered the stories of every other wing. I read them, each and every one, as they passed through me. Don’t you want to remember what it is like to be read?”

Hero frowned as only his own voice rebounded back at him. The Dust Wing had never been silent, not for him. That was why he’d been certain that he had to do this. Could do this. Doubt began to trickle in. “Answer me!”

It was more silence, but he could feel eyes on him now. The eyes of the Dust Wing souls, of course, but it felt intensely more. He felt the attention like a sentence strung out along a page. Could feel the muted press of paper against his skin. Somewhere, the gods watched him to see what he would do. Somewhere, the gods sipped tea, or idly checked in on his story in snippets of their bigger god lives. He felt it, all the avatars of readers that were here with him now, in this moment. The critic, the curious, the skeptical, the wondrous, the tearstained, and the weary. They were here, and Hero’s heart silently whispered, I see you. You, you.

They said Hero had escaped his story, burned his book, but it was a lie. The truth was they were all stories, human and character, sinners and saints. Every soul a story, and every moment fresh ink on the page.

He was being read, even now. He’d run so far to escape his story, to escape his fate as a character in a set plot. Only to run back here, to realize there was no escaping the page of the greater book. This chronicle of time, the index of souls, this library of lost things.

Freedom wasn’t freedom from the story, after all.

Freedom was making the ink count for a damn.

His injuries were unimportant and drowned in that thought. His pace picked up and drew him deeper into the Dust Wing, past the modern tablets and lost hypertext, past books and paper, past parchment and vellum, slate and stone. Hero knew what he was looking for now.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll come to you.”

He followed the story to the heart of the ghost.