A Hackwith - The Library of the Unwritten

“Not exactly. I… probably can’t say any more.”

“I see.” Claire sighed, skittering back toward a pillar as Walter appeared to square up. “But knowing that, a hero could escape this place?”

“You’re no hero, ma’am.” Walter was mournful as he said it.

“As this realm keeps on reminding me.”

“I’m awfully sorry about this, Miss Claire.” His clear eye was watery, even as he stamped his hooved feet and angled his horns down.

Claire reached a pillar and felt for the curve of it behind her. “Apology accepted, Walter. These things do happen.”

Walter opened his mouth and the booming howl that came out was much less mournful and much more horrifying than it had been from a distance. He charged.

Claire spun behind the pillar and stumbled back as Walter’s impact sent several man-sized stones tumbling from the top. She regained her footing, turned, and ran.

Hurtling headfirst into stone did not slow a minotaur much. Walter shook his head once, then charged after her. Sharp red claws that had not been evident a moment before gouged the wall as he went. Claire ran for the exit, but the junction where she’d entered the courtyard was nowhere to be seen.

The Greeks always loved their tragedies. She shoved the grim thought from her mind as she caught sight of a flash of yellow. One of the pillars’ ragged flags hung lower than the other. At Walter’s next charge, Claire took the moment of disorientation as he hit the wall to run toward the pillar. She grabbed it and scrambled her feet against the stone. Bare feet worked to her advantage for once. Her toes found the small holds between blocks, and she hauled herself to the top.

Walter circled the wall with a snarl but paused as he looked up. “Don’t be a silly wiggins, ma’am. This will go faster if you come down here.”

“I prefer not to.” Claire ran her hands over the top of the pillar, looking for something, anything, to slow down the minotaur. She shoved a hand in her pocket, and her fingertips hit paper. She took a breath as she drew it out. The ragged end of the Codex Gigas’s calling card fluttered in her palm.

The text, as usual, was mostly illegible from the tear, but Claire saw the beginning of a word where the location would be: “Hell, Unwri—” Andras was already at the gates of the Library, if not past the wards.

The calling card was not the codex , merely an artifact of the Library. But it was tied to the book, and the book held ancient destructive power. Books tended to bleed and wander, especially old ones. There was a chance, a remote one, that the card had some residual enchantment of its own.

Claire had hoped to save that chance for later, but later was gravely in question now.

Walter quit pacing and began to back up, stamping the earth with his head down.

Claire fumbled back in her pockets and withdrew the ghostlight candle. She quickly squeezed, warming the wax with her hands, and crumpled the calling card remnant around it, making a projectile that would be easy to throw. It stuck, but just barely.

Walter charged, canceling any other preparation she could make. The entire pillar rocked as he hit, and the minotaur dug ruts in the stone as he continued to press his full weight on the displaced stone. Claire held dearly to the top flagstone; it began to pitch.

She clutched the candle to her chest and kicked away as she fell through the air. But something clamped over her right leg and squeezed like a vise.

It arrested her fall sharply enough that her hip jolted, sending fire up her side. Her knee shrieked and Claire screamed along with it.

Pain watered her eyes when she opened them. Upside down, Walter’s knotted face looked like a rotten potato. He held her aloft in one hand, as easily as one would dangle a mouse by the tail. He regarded her with sad, bloodshot eyes and lowered his jaw wide.

Claire got a glimpse of daggerlike incisors and wide, flat teeth made for grinding bone and flesh. Her fingers clenched the candle, and as Walter drew her chest toward his gaping lips, she swung back and let the fistful of paper and wax fly.

She’d meant to aim for the eye. She hadn’t forgotten what Walter had said.

But Walter dropped his head back and squeezed his eye shut as he brought her near. The ghostlight arced through the air and pinged dully on a great black tongue before it hit the back of the minotaur’s throat.

Walter gagged and snapped shut his mouth out of reflex, latching down on the papered candle. A perplexed look crossed his face. A muted rush of air sucked his cheeks.

Then a sharp burst of blue and green flame lashed out through his nostrils, out shaggy ears, past his lips, even from beneath heavy eyelids. Walter’s grip loosened as his good eye went glassy, and Claire had a moment of terrifying free fall before they both hit the dirt.

A limp, meaty arm, covered in thick red-brown fur, broke her fall. Claire scrambled back to get out of reach, but the arm and the clawed hand attached to it remained still.

Her breath was ragged and loud in her ears. It took another moment before she could process that Walter wasn’t moving. She slowly shoved to her feet, wincing as her knee shrieked in protest. Likely torn ligaments there. If she could get back to Hell, they could be tended to. First things first.

Walter’s barrel chest shivered, barely moving, muscles twitching under heavy scars. The air held a sizzling sound, and the smell of charred meat suggested that the calling card was still working on the poor creature’s insides.

Claire leaned over and caught sight of the iron key askew on his neck. As she reached for it, a great clawed hand came down on her wrist and made her heart skip a beat.

But the claws did not tighten, did not tear. Claire looked up and saw Walter’s good eye just cracked open. Sluggish blood trailed from every opening on his face. Walter made a weak snarl that was intended to be a smile, and released her to point a trembling claw at his bone-white eye.

The eye was the key.

Claire swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded. “I’m sorry, Walter.”

The minotaur didn’t speak but closed his eye with a smile that seemed almost proud. A final gout of flame trickled over his lips, and his chest stilled.

Claire extracted herself from his arm and hobbled around to the side of his head. She considered the dead eye lodged in a tumorous skull.

This would not be pleasant work.

SHE’D HAD NO TOOLS, just Walter’s own limp claws. By the time it was done, her skirts were tacky with blood, her fingers trembled, and her hands felt as if they’d never be clean again. But a sphere about the size of a grapefruit and the color of bone sat heavy in the palm of her hand. It was completely smooth and was translucent in sections. Not an actual eye, but… something else.

That was the problem with defeating the gatekeeper: no one was left to explain how to open the gate.

Claire turned it over in her hands. She hobbled up to this pillar and that, pressing the white surface against random stones. Hoping something would happen. Nothing did, and the urgency to get back merged with injury and exhaustion to eat at what patience she had left for analysis.

“Hell and harpies.” She had just pulled away from another pillar in disgust when light hit the orb as she held it up. Claire blinked and squinted as she held the sphere in front of her.

The courtyard transformed. Through the eye, the world became a wash of milky shadows, but it also became a world of doors. Claire turned a slow circle. Everywhere she looked, narrow gates lined the walls. And the pillars—the pillars. Each pillar held a series of tiny, physically impossible doors that hinged off the pillar like wheel spokes off an axle.