Dragonbreath #8

by Ursula Vernon

  “I like tofu,” said Suki. “You just have to cook it right.”

  “Urggh,” said Danny. “Let’s not stop for a snack.”

  They walked down the far side of the waffle mountain. There was a small bubbling lake of yogurt, with a beach made out of some kind of wet grainy stuff.

  “Tabouli,” said Suki. “It’s an acquired taste. I’ve never wanted to acquire it.”

  The baku grabbed Danny’s arm and pointed.

  On the far side of the tabouli beach, past a log-jam of giant bean sprouts, rose a dripping honeycomb.

  “Wasp sign!” said Danny. “Good job!”

  “Do wasps make honey? I thought bees made honey.”

  The baku shrugged. “Mrrp?”

  “I think some wasps make honey.” Danny wished Wendell were here again—he’d definitely know. “Can’t hurt to check it out.”

  The honeycomb was much stickier than the syrup. Golden honey oozed out of it and glittered on the ground.

  “I don’t know why he’d be having nightmares about this,” said Danny. “This looks awesome!”

  “Maybe dreams don’t work like that,” said Suki. “I mean, for all we know, this is like . . . like the prop department in a theater. Whenever there’s a dream about food, they pull it out of here. So it’s not that he’s having specific dreams about this stuff, this is just where all the food dreams end up.”

  “Wow.” Danny had to think about that one. “So, like . . . there could be all kinds of different storerooms! You could keep scenery in one and costumes and pirate ships and cars—”

  “Boxes for those dreams where you’re trying to pack—” said Suki.

  “—apartments for the monsters to live in—”

  They walked around the honeycomb. On the far side, there was a small door, and in the middle was the wasp symbol from the first door.

  “Jackpot!” said Danny. He reached for the knob and took a last look around the strange health-food landscape. “Say, Suki . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Assuming you’re right about there being different places dream stuff is stored . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I wonder if we can find where they keep all the weapons and stuff . . .”

  The wasp door led into a . . . well, Danny supposed you’d call it a library. Maybe.

  Calling this building a library was kind of like calling the Ultimate Mecha-Fighter Newt 9000 with Kung-Fu Grip and Bullet Launching Action a doll. You could make a case, but you’d really be missing the point.

  “Whoa,” said Danny.

  “It’s like a cathedral,” said Suki.

  The baku hummed happily and doused the light in its tail.

  This was a temple to books. There were bookcases in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Sunbeams streamed between the shelves and motes of dust danced in them.

  Suki took down a book near them and opened it up. “The vampire squid,” she read, “despite its fearsome appearance, is a shy creature that shoots phosphorescent mucus to escape predators.”

  It was a testimony to Suki’s academic skills that she could say “phosphorescent” without stumbling over it. Danny would have required four or five tries and possibly a running start.

  It was. When they emerged into the main body of the library, there were staircases every which way, leading up to other floors and down into the depths. Walkways crisscrossed over their heads. Even the pillars holding up the ceiling seemed to be made of books.

  Small, hooded figures walked between the bookcases. They didn’t look threatening. When one walked by, it lifted its hood, revealing a pale reptile face, and whispered “Shhhhh. . . .” before walking on.

  “How are we going to find a wasp door in this?” whispered Danny, discouraged. The dragon was willing to defy death for Wendell, fight off hordes of savage enemies, navigate landscapes of health food and horror . . . but going to the library was something else. You could tell this wasn’t the sort of library that had kids’ books and a comic book section. This reminded him of the law library that his mother sometimes went to. There was nothing fun going on there. You checked fun at the door.

  Suki tugged on the frill of gills around her head. “Hmm. You know . . . this is Wendell we’re talking about. I think I have an idea.”

  The salamander strode confidently into the center of the library, up to a hooded librarian. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can you tell me where the card catalog is?”

  The librarian turned and slowly pushed back its hood. It was very pale and had a black frill. Its eyes were dark and seemed to swim with stars.

  “We’re looking for a book on wasps,” said Suki.

  The card catalog was the size of an eighteen-wheeler. They had to trudge around it to get to the W’s, and then Suki needed a footstool to be able to reach it.

  “You know, they have all this on computers now,” said Danny, leaning against the V’s.

  “I know that and you know that . . .” said Suki, flipping cards. “Wendell says card catalogs don’t crash. He’s got strong opinions on library organization and believes that you should always leave a hard-copy backup.”

  “Seriously?” said Danny. “Is this the sort of thing you talk about in your love letters?”

  “They’re not love letters. And you should hear him talk about the Dewey Decimal System.”

  “I have,” said Danny. “Believe me.”

  “W . . . W . . . War . . . Wards . . .Warps . . . Washing machines . . . Washington . . . Aha! Wasps!”

  She scribbled the shelf numbers on a scrap of paper and scrambled down.

  There were signposts on the pillars, with arrows. Suki consulted one, then strode off into the depths of the library. Danny followed, stopping to wake up the baku along the way.

  They reached a large section of bookcases that ran clear to the ceiling. They were set so close together that the kids could only walk single file between them.

  Suki ran her finger over a row of bindings. “Wasps . . . let’s see . . . The Time I Stepped on a Bee and It Stung Me—”

  “I remember that,” said Danny.

  “His memories are all jumbled up in here with facts,” Suki complained. “It’s not as organized as it could be. Facts About Honey is next to The Time We Stayed Up Late and Watched Revenge of the Killer Bees from Jupiter.”

  Danny also remembered that, and was about to offer his review—the killer bees had been the best actors in the movie—when he heard somebody shouting.

  It was such a shocking sound in the library that both Suki and the baku jumped, and even Danny might have twitched a little.

  “Keep looking,” said Danny. “I’ll go check.”

  He hurried to the end of the bookcase and peered out.

  There was a monster in the library.

  It was tall and shaggy and had horns. It glared grimly down at a horde of tiny librarians, who were shushing it for all they were worth.

  “Out of my way!” it roared. “There are intruders in the dreamlands! We have story problems for them!”

  “SHHHHHH!” whispered the librarians.

  “I’ll not be shushed, ye pestilent book-botherers! Stand aside!”

  “SHHHHHH!” hissed the librarians, even louder.

  Danny hunched down, trying to hide behind a few large books sticking out from the shelves. A title caught his eye—Reasons Suki Is Awesome.

  “Oh, good grief,” muttered Danny.

  The volume next to it was twice as thick and titled Reasons That I Will Die of Shame if Suki Ever Finds Out I Like Her.

  Occasionally Danny wondered how Wendell managed to keep it together long enough to function at all.

  A second monster stomped into the library. It was wide and hairy an
d had enormous hooves that clopped on the stone floor. “They’re in here somewhere!” it yelled.

  “I know!” shouted the first monster.

  A third monster joined them. This one looked like a buffalo carrying a battle-ax. “Any luck?” it yelled.

  Danny thought the librarians were going to faint, but they were made of sterner stuff. Two of them crouched down and lifted a third on their shoulders. It braced its feet, cupped its hands to its mouth, and shouted:

  “Quiet in the library, please!”

  Danny didn’t stick around to see how the monsters reacted. He ran back down the line of shelves. “Suki! There are monsters in the library! I think we need to go, now!” (He decided not to mention the books.)

  “I can’t find it!” said Suki. “I thought there would be a book here that could show us, or maybe one that would activate a secret door—you know, like in the movies! But I can’t find anything useful!”

  Danny looked around wildly. He could hear the monsters clomping around, less than fifty feet away. How long would the librarians be able to hold them?

  “Get these runts out of my way!” bellowed one of the monsters. “The dreamlands must be protected from intruders!”

  “We will crush their bones and then give them pop quizzes!” cried the monster beside it.

  The baku jumped frantically up and down and pointed.

  Danny and Suki followed its pointing finger up . . . and up . . .

  Near the ceiling, in the middle of the row of books, was one marked with the wasp sign.

  “Oh, crud,” said Suki. “One of us is going to have to climb.”

  The clomp-clomp-clomp of the monsters’ hooves was getting closer.

  “I’ll do it.” Danny pushed up his sleeves. “It’s a big bookcase. It’s practically like a ladder.”

  “Right,” said Suki. “We’ll . . . um . . . guard your back.”

  The baku rolled its eyes.

  The first few shelves were easy. Then Danny ran into a set of encyclopedias that came right over the edge of the shelf and didn’t leave him any handholds. He had to inch sideways to the next bookcase and go up that one instead until he passed the treacherous tomes.

  The clomping hooves came nearer and nearer . . . and stopped.

  “They’re over here, boss!” yelled the buffalo-shaped monster.

  Danny lunged up the bookcase, his heart pounding. His fingers closed over a copy of That Time the Grasshopper Jumped in My Eye When I Was Three and sent it spinning to the ground.

  The monsters were too big to fit in the narrow lane between the bookcases. One of them tried and got its shoulders stuck. The buffalo lowered its head and pawed at the ground.

  “Tear the bookcase apart!” ordered the one in charge.

  The buffalo monster charged at a bookcase. Books exploded in a whirl of pages. The shock went down the line of bookcases and Danny’s perch shook violently. One of his feet slipped. He grabbed at The Time I Stepped on a Bee and Had to Go to the Emergency Room for support.

  “Danny!” yelled Suki. And then: “Stop that, you stupid monster! You can’t do that to books!”

  The monster did not seem to agree. It hit the bookcase again, and there was a groan as the wood started to give way. Shelves splintered.

  The buffalo looked vaguely confused. Apparently people did not yell at it often.

  Danny got both his feet under him again and practically jumped the rest of the way up the bookcase. He could see the wasp-sign book clearly now. It was stuck between Theory of Colony Collapse Syndrome and Macro Insect Photography Through the Ages.

  The monster with the battle-ax swung and hit the weakened bookcase. It collapsed slowly. Books slid off in a waterfall of paper.

  “Catch!” yelled Danny, and dropped the wasp book.

  Suki caught it and flipped it open. Danny turned back to the bookcase and began climbing down as fast as he could. Every blow of the battle-ax shook him until his teeth rattled.

  “Are there directions?” he shouted. “What do we do?”

  “Actually . . .” said Suki, sounding very strange, “it’s . . . stairs.”

  “What?”

  The bookcases shook again. Danny looked over, saw the monsters less than a dozen feet away, and decided that climbing was overrated when falling was so much faster. He pushed off from the shelves and jumped.

  He landed on the baku. It snorted in its sleep, but didn’t wake up.

  Suki looked up at him. Her face was alight with amazement. “Look at it!” she said, and held the book out to him.

  There were no words. Instead, there was a square cut out in the middle of the book, which led to a staircase. Leading down.

  “It’s like three inches thick,” said Suki. “I’m holding the bottom. But look—you can stick your hand in—they’re real stairs! It goes somewhere else, through the book!”

  The next bookcase collapsed. A blizzard of pages fell around them.

  “It’s impossible!” said Suki. “It’s unnatural! It’s weird!”

  “Good enough for me!” said Danny. He grabbed the baku’s arm, shook it awake, and jumped into the book feet-first.

  They were real stairs. They were stone and they went down quite a long way.

  They were also extremely slippery, and Danny’s leap caused him to skid down two steps and nearly land on his tail, but he caught himself in time. The baku yawned and padded along behind him, and Suki jumped in afterward.

  “I wish we could close the book behind us,” she said. “What if the monsters follow us?”

  “Do you think they can fit?” It had been a big book, but not that big.

  “Who knows?”

  There was a clopping, straining sound. Somebody had managed to fit a leg into the book. A giant hoof scrabbled for purchase on the stairs.

  “Or, y’know, we could run,” said Suki.

  That was one of the things Danny liked about Suki. She was always practical about things like this.

  They hurried down the steps as quickly as they could. They couldn’t quite run—the steps were too slick—but they jogged.

  There was a second clomp. Danny glanced back and saw most of the lower half of a monster at the top of the stairs. It seemed to have a hard time getting its shoulders through.

  “You know,” said Suki as they jogged, “my mom watches this show called My Dream Wedding. It’s one of her favorites.”

  “. . . okay . . .” said Danny, wondering where this was going. “Sounds lame.”

  “Oh, you have no idea. It’s crazy. People spend, like, a year’s salary so the bride can ride down the aisle on a white donkey or something. And they close out every week with the bride gushing about how this was just like a dream, it was all so dreamy, it was her dream come true . . .”

  The baku snickered.

  “Exactly,” said Suki, nodding to the little creature. “The next time I see one of those, I’m gonna say ‘What, your wedding was like running down a staircase inside a book while monsters chase you, looking for a giant wasp?’”

  The monster had gotten one arm into the book and was trying to haul the rest of itself through the hole. Grunting and swearing echoed down the stone steps after them.

  There was something oddly familiar about the arm.

  “I am getting a little worried that this staircase has been going on for a long time and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere,” said Suki, before Danny could place it.

  They reached a broad landing. The stairs turned sharply to the right and continued on, apparently forever.

  “GOT IT!” roared the monster at the top of the stairs. Danny couldn’t see it anymore, but the rattle of hooves on stone sounded like gunfire in the tight stairwell.

  “This would be an awesome time for
a wasp door,” said Danny, to no one in particular.

  “Agreed,” said Suki. The baku nodded.

  A wasp door did not materialize. The stairs cut sharply to the left. The baku slipped on a step and bounced down nearly a dozen steps.

  “He fell asleep in mid-fall?” asked Suki in disbelief.

  “Guess the green tea’s wearing off.”

  They shook the baku awake. It didn’t seem to have been bruised at all. It rolled to its feet, mrrping cheerfully, and resumed jogging down the stairs.

  “Intruders!” roared the monster behind them. “I hear you! You violate the sanctity of the dreamlands! I want your lunch money!”

  Danny remembered where he’d seen an arm like that before.

  He leaned back at the next landing and his worst fears were confirmed. The monster did have hooves and horns, and it was very tall . . . and it also looked a lot like the school bully, Big Eddy.

  Suki and Danny exchanged glances and put on an extra burst of speed. The monster sounded much closer than was comfortable.

  “It’s Big Eddy, isn’t it?” asked Suki.

  “Wendell’s pretty scared of him,” said Danny. “I guess it’s not surprising that he’s a monster in Wendell’s brain . . .”

  “THERE WILL BE QUIZZES!” screamed the Big Eddy bison-thing.

  “We’re here to help!” yelled Danny over his shoulder. “We’re Wendell’s frien—”

  And then he had to stop and dive for Suki’s tail, because the stairs had ended abruptly.

  At the top of a cliff.

  It was a very tall cliff. Danny couldn’t see the bottom of it. Clouds drifted by, shockingly white on a gloomy gray sky.

  “I hate cliffs,” said Suki, dangling over the abyss. “Really. Ever since that thing with the ninjas and the volcano, I have not been a fan.”