Dragon Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 3)

by Cedar Sanderson

  The light, I discovered in what felt like morning to me, did not change. It was the same hue, the same brightness, as it had been however many hours before when I entered the terrarium. My watch, when I checked it, was not working. I ate perfunctorily, and explored my little sanctuary. Other than the birds, there were frogs, at least one newt, and brightly-colored fish in the stream. The trees were perhaps double my height, no more, and from the depth of the soil, this whole system had been functional for a considerable amount of time. It wasn’t jungle-thick, simply because there wasn’t that sort of environment. It reminded me of some park-like forests I had been in, pruned and maintained not by hands but growth patterns.

  What I did not find was any sign of Bella-dragon having visited. Even if she was able to fly, which I didn’t doubt she could supplement by magic, there wasn’t room. The roof tapered, the further up it went, into almost a cone. Nor were there signs of claws digging into the clay bank of the stream and grassy stretch between it and the door.

  So I had found a reasonable sanctuary. I risked a tiny fire, not for warmth, but to make warm food, and something else. If I was going to venture out of here to find the Hall of Statues – a necessary task – and try to find the Charter, I would need a way to find it again. The day – or however long – before wandering in a circle had been discouraging.

  It was possible there was more than one of these inside gardens in the Library. It was certainly large enough to hold many of them. I wasn’t going to risk that. So I made charcoal sticks, for marking the walls. Before I ventured out, I slept again. I was worn thin from the excitement, and there would be time to recuperate. Always sleep when you can, because there will be times when you can’t.

  I left the terrarium and discovered that although the light in it was unchanging, the windows in the corridor were showing a night sky. As I had done the day before, I moved slowly, stopping to listen often. I was in no rush, and had no desire to stumble upon Bella unawares. I marked a doorway, one of many that lined the corridor, each with two tall narrow windows in between them, and went in to see what books were in this section.

  The Library did not house only books, I discovered. This room was full of art. Some was wrapped in muslin bags, brittle with age, and stacked on low shelves. Others hung on the walls. I scanned the room, noting that the style was largely that of the human Renaissance period, and retreated to the main corridor again.

  As I did, I casually glanced at the mark I’d made on the wall. It was gone. I checked the other side, wondering if I’d already forgotten where I’d made it, with the stress I was under. Still nothing. The light creamy stone was flawless. I took the charcoal stick I was holding and made another mark, then stood and watched.

  As though it were melting backward into the stone, it dissolved and disappeared, leaving no trace of the stain. I did it again, and again, the wall cleaned itself.

  I went back to the terrarium, where, comfortingly, the scrape I’d made in the duff for my bed, and the fire-ring of stones were just as I had left them. I rekindled the fire for comfort and a pot of coffee, then sat staring into the flames. I was more than a little shaken, and I needed to think.

  The Library was not alive. If it were, Bella-dragon could not have created and sustained that nest. However…

  I tried to think like an alien, long-dead librarian. What were features I would look for in a massive installation created for the sole purpose of collecting intellectual artifacts from at least two realms, and holding them essentially in stasis for eons?

  The self-cleaning might be why the whole building was saturated with magic. Or that might simply be a pleasant by-product of preserving the collection itself. No wonder Bella had trouble with getting it organized, the Library itself was resisting that.

  Now, how the heck was I going to explore without getting lost? Marks in the dusty floor, the only place the Library seemed to allow a mess. That might work, unless Bella came along and wiped them out. And that brought another thought to mind. If I were able to find the Charter, which seemed like a slimmer possibility with every accumulating event, would I be allowed to remove it?

  I slept, and ate, and repeated this pattern until I was bored enough to start contemplating something, anything. I was going to go crazy if I had to sit here until help arrived. I was also still doubtful that they would be able to reach me. I’d had no fewer than three identical messages from Alger before they stopped. Which didn’t mean he’d sent all of them, or that he hadn’t sent more. I was going to go crazy simply from doubting anything and everything that seemed real around me.

  I spent some of the endless terrarium day catching a bird. I’d never been good at this magical skill of hitching a ride in an animal mind, but it was worth a try. Perhaps the Library would enhance my abilities. It seemed to magnify magic.

  I steered the tiny thing around the terrarium roof, and brought it back to land on my finger. I wasn’t trying to completely control it, I didn’t know how to be a bird. I was just giving it some nudges, impulses to do as I wished.

  Feeling triumphant that finally, something was going according to plan, I opened the door and let it out in the Library corridor. Then I made myself comfortable on the grass, closed my eyes, and followed the bird’s vision. It was rather confused, poor thing, and I helpfully sent it down to the far end of the corridor, in the other direction than I had come when I found the terrarium.

  By using the bird, I hoped to either avoid Bella-dragon’s notice, or if it were seen, to escape by being smaller and more agile than myself. The bird flew unerringly to the end of the corridor and then out, into another huge hall. Not, to my disappointment, the statuary hall. This one was echoingly empty. It was designed similarly to the lobby we’d entered, and had parqueted floors, but it was…

  Ah! There, that looked like an orchestra pit. This seemed to be a ballroom, on a vast scale. Whatever the librarians had looked like, I thought I could safely say that they had been larger than any human or Fae. I could feel the little bird falter, and sent it a picture of home, then let it return. I would not be so cruel to kill it on my errands.

  It had been roughly four days, perhaps five, since we had walked into the Library and Bella became her dragon self. I had not seen her since I fled that first day, and now I was about to go back to the statuary room. It seemed logical that it was on the opposite end of the corridor from the ballroom. I decided to sleep, eat, and scout with a different bird after that cycle. The constant light was messing with my sense of time, and I felt disoriented. I needed to get out of here.

  In the ‘morning’ I did just what I’d planned, and it was anticlimactic to send the little bird swooping over the huge statues, dwarfing the feathered steed my awareness rode in. I’d gotten my bearings, finally. I had the bird land on the same tree-framed doorway where Ian had directed me to the dragon’s lair, and we listened. There was a faint noise, then another, but she was not close. I hesitated.

  I wanted to see her, and the eggs that were our children, but I didn’t want to disturb her and frighten her with the bird. Nor could I risk her following it back to me. I sent the bird the signal to return home, and opened my eyes. Laying on the grass looking up at the endless sunshine, I felt the hope I’d been nurturing slipping a little.

  It was possible that Bella’s mind was forever gone. This place was stranger than anything I had encountered before, Underhill or Above. It could be possible that nothing would ever bring her back to me. And the children? I got to my feet to let the bird back in. I didn’t know.

  The Charter

  One thing I’d learned early in life was how to not think too much about things I couldn’t change. Long periods of illness had oddly helped me later, when I had to stake out a suspected magic-user above. Waiting was annoying, but part of life. While I waited to find out if Bella could be restored, and our children live normal lives, I would turn my attention to something else.

  Namely, retrieving the Charter. I had more than a little curiosity about what i
t said, with Dionaea wanting it, and Lavendar, and Lady Laenven. It had been lost for longer than my lifetime, why was it so important now? I paced on the grassy area, noting ruefully that I had worn a path already. I was impacting the delicate terrarium. I decided to spend the next day exploring.

  Since marking the walls would not work, I would mark the floors. I would also recheck my first mark before getting too far, just in case. I still had no idea how, or even if, the rooms were organized, but I had decided that if I could find a room full of Fae books from the right era, then I’d be on the right track. Before I curled up for a sleep period, could hardly call it a night’s sleep when there was no night here, I went out and made my mark in the dust.

  The corridor was dimly lit when I exited the terrarium. Perhaps my body was right in telling me it was morning. I didn’t look forward to trying to return to anything like a routine, when we got home again. I walked slowly toward the distant ballroom, past the room where I had gotten the scare of the disappearing charcoal mark, and, kneeling, checked where I had earlier made a mark in the floor only inches from the wall. It was less likely to be disturbed, there. Too close, and the wall might play its tricks again. To my relief, the mark was still clearly there.

  I could safely enter the hallway. Some doors off the corridor only led to a single room, others, like this one, to many. I counted four doors, with a pretty bow window at the end of the hall. It was arranged as a place to read, with an age-brittle cushion lying on the bench formed by the window. Outside the window, only the glowing mist of the Third Plane was visible.

  The presence of the cushion led me to believe that Bella-dragon had not been here, collecting for her nest. I had an irrational urge to put the cushion in the corridor, where she would find it. I stood there staring at it for a long time, then I picked it up gingerly, hoping it wouldn’t just fall apart, and carried it out, laying it in the center where she couldn’t miss it.

  The four rooms were relatively small, but I could still tell hours had passed in my inspection, as my stomach was clear on this subject. Time had passed. I paused in the hall before emerging into the corridor. The cushion lay forlornly in the dust. I decided I would eat a handful of my diminishing stash of pemmican rather than returning to the terrarium, and continued to the next hall.

  The next room I entered was far more interesting than stacks of dusty books and scrolls. It was another very large room, and full of low tables and benches. Low to me, that is, after so much time adjusting to the Library scale. On the tables were games, in mammoth scale. The chessmen were fully waist-high to me. Carved in almost abstract shapes, they disappointed me when I inspected them. I had been hoping for a clue to the librarian’s identity. Nearby, a vast game of Go was laid out, with the oldest version of 17 grid squares. I ventured past it, to another table with something I didn’t recognize laid out on it. I jumped up on the bench, and looked down at the arrangement of rough stone pieces. It took me a minute before I recognized the arrangement. It looked familiar because I had seen it many times.

  This game board held Stonehenge, or something like enough I could tell what it was. Amused, I looked at the stack of pieces nearby, either discarded, or not yet played, who could tell? Reluctantly, I left the room, knowing that I had to keep moving if I were not to be discovered. On to the next hallway. I looked back, to the cushion. Well, at least this would give me warning if she came nearby.

  The next door led to a single room. I stepped in, realized it was another art storage area, and almost walked out again. A face on the wall caught my eye. This room was dim, with no windows, and I didn’t quite believe what I had seen. Carefully, I conjured an elf globe and held it up, revealing a familiar countenance.

  I walked carefully around the room looking at the portraits that hung there. Several were of the first woman, the one I knew. One was her, with her family gathered around her, and I stood there longest, looking at it. I remembered this painting. I had seen it before.

  I knew now I was in the right place. Portraits of Mab meant that this was where the Fae were chronicled. I had last seen this painting of the revered Queen hanging in Elleria, when I was still a very small child. I had never seen it after my father’s death. I extinguished the elfglobe and stood in the twilight room, thinking. Perhaps Alger had brought it here, how else could it have gotten from my family home, abandoned not long after my father’s death? Elleria had been all but vacant for a hundred years and more. This might have been his way of protecting the art and books which had been left to rot with neglect.

  I wouldn’t blame him if that was what he had done. I did wish he’d told me. I turned toward the corridor, still lost in thought. I was walking out when something stopped me. My subconscious, honed by days of listening carefully, pinged in alarm, and I threw myself to one side, hugging the wall by the door.

  Footsteps. Soft swishing of the dragging tail, and the tick, tick, of claws on the stone floor of the corridor. Bella was out there. I was almost tempted to step out, to talk to her and see if she had regained her senses. But I had no retreat, if she was insensate. I stayed still, almost not breathing.

  She kept going. I was fortunate that she was not a scent hunter. With those huge eyes, I would categorize the dragons like herself and her grandfather as sight-hunters. They would no doubt be able to catch the slightest movement from a great distance away in flight, like an eagle. So I would stay out of sight, like a mouse. I waited several minutes after all sounds had faded away, to be sure she was gone. Only then, cautiously, did I put my head out, to look.

  She had taken the cushion. I felt oddly pleased by that. It was a little thing, not really providing for her and the eggs, but still. I did worry about what she was living on. Other than the little birds and fishes in the terrarium, which would hardly be a snack, I had seen no signs of life in the Library.

  When I ventured back out into the corridor, I felt exhausted, as though I had just run a race. All this hiding was hard work. One more hallway, and then I could retreat for rest. I was still excited over the discovery of the Fae art. I slipped along the wall, bent and made a mark, and then went into the dark hallway.

  Here, I discovered that unlike the other places, there had been activity. The hall was long, and curved gradually out of sight. Bella’s tracks were visible on the floor. I would have to hurry, and be careful. This, then, was the Fae wing of the library, and it was where she came. For what purpose, I didn’t know, but it gave me a flicker of hope that she remembered. This was her place, and she might still come back to me.

  I went into the first rooms and discovered that they were neatly organized. I realized after a few minutes of looking at shelves that I was smiling. This room showed all the signs of having been the recipient of my loving wife’s tender care and organization. Furthermore, the Library had allowed it. However, this place held mostly volumes on magic, not history.

  The next room held more recent history. I was tempted to look for volumes on my own past, just to see if they existed, but I didn’t have time. I went on to the next room. Here, I thought, I would find the thing I was looking for. The problem was that I didn’t know what it looked like. Was it a book? Or a single scrolled document? There were both, and this room was large. I felt my earlier euphoria draining away.

  With some hesitation, I set a ward at the doorway. It was not enough to stop her, if she returned, but it would give me some time to hide in the stacks. There were enough shelves and bins in this room to keep me out of sight. She hadn’t gotten this far in her quest to tidy the Library. Then I started to look at books.

  If there was a pattern to the way they were shelved, it wasn’t obvious to me. Volumes that were written for no other purpose than to chronicle long-forgotten Council meetings were shelved alongside scholarly treatises on the trade with Humans, and how to conceal magic in that realm. I put that book on a table, for later reading. It was very interesting, as a precursor to the troubles that created my job a millennia later. That, and it was hard to read. It woul
d take me some time to puzzle it out.

  My stomach started to accuse me of having my throat cut and not telling it. I wondered if I would have to leave and come back after a good night’s sleep. If Bella knew I was here, in the library, would she look for me? I didn’t know. I’d taken a risk with the cushion, but it had been irrationally happy-making.

  I pulled the last of my pemmican out and gnawed on it. One thing about nospace, the dried meat and fruit mixture didn’t really dry out, more than it was when packaged. I washed it down with water, and kept going through the old books. Fae had developed bookmaking to a high art, using a combination of magic and more mundane methods to preserve their records far earlier than humans had picked up the same methods.

  I almost didn’t recognize it when I picked it up. The cover didn’t look right. Most of what I’d been handling was bound with thinly slabbed wood that had been covered in intricately tooled leather. Like I said, works of art. This one had been badly broken, like someone had dropped and rolled on it. I held it up into the light, and closer to my face. It had a strange odor, and there were foul stains on it. Dried blood? Curious, I carried it over to a table, and laid it flat, carefully opening it.

  There was no title or fancy heading. The first page simply stated the opening premise of the charter. I scanned the faded script. This was going to take a little time. Byrne could probably read it at a glance, I was going to have to take it back to my refuge and keep it safe while I puzzled it out.

  I picked up the two books, and dropped the wards. A peek into the hall showed no motion, and I moved cautiously out. This was going to drive me crazy. No way to fight back, just wait, hide, and not sleep worth a damn. The lack of darkness was getting to me.