The Mad Apprentice

by Django Wexler

  The steps were too steep for Alice to ascend comfortably, and her legs were soon burning with the effort. She tugged on Spike’s thread for extra strength, and adopted a kind of bounding gait, leaping off each step in turn and bouncing to the next. Dex, following behind, laughed delightedly at the sight, but Soranna was unable to keep up. She looked so miserable that Alice slowed her pace again.

  After three floors, passing three more piles of books, they reached a level with a doorway opposite the one they’d come in by. Garret, glancing through, reported that it led to another staircase that wound around the outside of the tower and ended in a walkway. He led the way through, and if climbing with a sheer drop on one side bothered him, he gave no sign of it. Alice herself kept one hand flat against the stone wall of the tower, for all the good that would do, and determinedly did not look down.

  Now that she had some sense of the scale of the towers, Alice wondered how long it would take them to get to the dome at the center. It might be miles, even if we could go in a straight line! She hoped some of the others had brought more in the way of provisions than she had.

  At the top of the staircase, just as Garret had said, the path leveled out into a long bridge stretching across to another tower. From this angle, climbing up from underneath, Alice could see there was nothing supporting the thin stone as it crossed the gap, no pillars or buttresses underneath. She supposed it must be held up by magic, but that didn’t make her feel much better, especially once she remembered that Esau’s spells would be coming undone now that he was dead. It doesn’t seem like a very sensible method of construction to me.

  Garret apparently didn’t share her misgivings. He started out across the bridge without waiting for the others. Isaac followed, and Alice was hurrying to catch up when someone behind her started screaming.

  She turned. Dex and Soranna were a few steps down. Beyond them, coming around the curve of the tower, was something very unpleasant indeed. It reminded Alice of an ant, except this creature was as big as a horse. Four glittering, multifaceted eyes topped a black round head, above a pair of pinching mandibles as long as Alice’s arm.

  Eight multijointed legs moved it along with a constant click-click of chitinous armor. It was too broad to use the stairway, but it didn’t need to. The thing clung to the side of the tower like an ordinary ant scrambling up a kitchen cabinet, as though the law of gravity simply didn’t apply. The rearmost of its three body segments ended in a long tail that curled back over its head, tipped with another pair of pincers.

  Dex ran up the stairs as fast as her legs would carry her. She reached the screaming Soranna and gave her a shove to get her moving.

  “Run!” Dex shouted. “Across the bridge!”

  Garret’s head appeared over the edge of the stone walkway. “What is going—” At the sight of the thing, he swore. “Get behind me! I’ll handle this.”

  “No!” Dex said, reaching a level with Alice. “Run!”

  Alice had been pulling on her threads: the Swarm for protection and Spike to give her the strength to rip the ant-thing off the tower. As Dex passed her, though, she saw the head of another of the ant-things emerge around the curve of the tower, then another. There was a whole herd of them in pursuit. She heard Garret swear again.

  “Keep going!” he shouted. “Get across!”

  Dex hustled Soranna up onto the bridge, and Alice backpedaled up the last few steps just as the ant-thing reached them. Its tail whipped forward, and Alice ducked, the pincers clacking over her head. It lunged at her again, but she sidestepped and gave it a shove with all of Spike’s strength. The thing staggered, but its rear legs remained stuck to the tower.

  More ants were swarming over the stairway and clinging to the tower wall. Alice backed onto the bridge, and risked a glance over her shoulder. Dex and Soranna had not yet caught up to Ellen and Isaac, who were almost halfway across the bridge. Garret had turned back, darkness gathering around his hands like black smoke.

  Another ant-thing reared up in front of her, tail swiping. This time Alice avoided the pincers and got her hands around the tail itself, hauling back and yanking the creature off its feet. All eight legs writhed as it tried to right itself, but she didn’t give it a chance to get up. Swinging it by the tail like a rock on a string, she gave it a mighty heave off the edge of the bridge and watched it fall twisting into the abyss.

  Garret came up beside her as more creatures climbed onto the bridge, clinging to the sides like ants crossing a stick.

  “Go on,” he said. “Catch up with the others.”

  “I can help—”

  “I’ll handle it,” Garret said. As Alice watched, he slashed one hand through the air, and a thin curtain of shadow struck the leading creature and sliced clean through it. The two twitching halves collapsed on the walkway, oozing something black and vile, and slowly slid over the side. But the other creatures continued their advance. Garret raised his hands in front of his face, like a boxer, and barked a laugh.

  Alice, after a moment’s hesitation, kept running. Horrible sounds came from behind her, the cracks of breaking chitin and the soft whoosh of slashing shadow blades, mixed with Garret’s taunts. She had almost caught up with Dex and Soranna when a sharp click-clack of armor-plated limbs warned her that something had gone wrong.

  Two ant-things had gotten in front of them, bypassing Garret by climbing along the underside of the bridge. The two girls stumbled to a halt, and Dex ducked nimbly under a lashing tail, but Soranna wasn’t quite so agile. A pair of pincers closed around her waist, seizing her in an iron grip and lifting her completely off the ground. She gave a high, piercing wail.

  “Soranna!” Alice shouted.

  She ran toward the creature, but was blocked by another ant-thing. Alice grabbed its pincers, holding them apart with all the force of Spike’s strength. Ahead, another creature had cornered Dex, who was slashing at it with two swords that shimmered like silvery moonlight. The monster holding Soranna was retreating with its prize, back over the side of the bridge.

  “Garret!” Alice shouted, hands trembling with the effort of keeping the ant-thing’s pincers apart. “Do something!”

  “What?”

  Garret turned, saw Soranna disappearing over the edge of the bridge, and moved fast, sending out a wave of shadow that cut the creature in half. The front part crashed to the stone, but the rear, already half over the edge of the bridge, wobbled drunkenly on collapsing legs. Then, tail still clutching Soranna, it toppled and started to fall.

  Time seemed to slow down, the girl’s terrified scream telescoping into a thin whine. Alice didn’t waste her breath with shouting. She ducked from between the ant-thing’s mandibles, letting them snap closed where her head had been, and ran for the edge of the bridge. At the same time, she dug in her pocket and pulled out one of the three acorns. As Soranna went over the edge, Alice tossed the acorn to the ground, pulled on the tree-sprite’s thread with all the mental strength she could muster, and jumped.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FREEFALL

  THE ACORN SPROUTED AS soon as her power touched it, like a wound-up jack-in-the-box released at last. White-green tendrils surged in all directions, growing with manic speed. One of them caught up with Alice as she jumped, wrapping around her ankle and growing along with her as she fell.

  Below her, Soranna was struggling free of the pincers of the dead ant-thing. Alice pressed her arms in and made herself as narrow as possible, like a diver, until she was close enough to the girl to grab her arm. Alice pulled her away from the creature and into a tight embrace, then closed her eyes and sent her attention back up the slender thread of root.

  As they fell, fast-growing tendrils sprouted in the other direction, scrabbling for purchase between the tight-packed stones. Tiny blind rootlets pushed their way into the cracks, desperately digging in. Alice made the root holding her ankle slow its growth and begin to thicken
, taking up the strain of her weight. But slowly. Slowly! Too much would snap it. And even the Swarm isn’t going to save us from this fall. Tough skin or no, we’d just be a smear on the rocks . . .

  She banished the thought and concentrated. Her descent began to slow, but she could feel the fibers of the newborn tree groaning in protest. Up at the top, where it held on to the bridge, the roots started to slip and tear free. Alice’s stomach lurched. It’s not going to hold! She tightened her grip on Soranna. Come on, come on! The long root creaked. Almost there—

  All movement stopped. Alice cautiously opened one eye.

  She and Soranna hung from the end of the root, twisting gently in the soft wind. Below, there was only the darkness of the bottomless abyss. Alice could feel the root still growing, twining its way between the rocks to solidify its hold, but something else had kept it from breaking free, right at the end. Holding Soranna carefully, she looked upward. Far above, a face was visible over the edge of the bridge, holding on to the root with both hands. It was too small to make out features, but the poof of hair was unmistakable. Dex.

  Alice let out a long breath and looked down at Soranna. The girl was no longer screaming; in fact, she’d fainted, lolling in Alice’s arms like a dead weight. And, under the circumstances, I can’t say that I blame her.

  Even with Spike’s strength, she couldn’t climb the vine while holding on to Soranna. Instead, she directed it to grow around them both and pull them up. This was a slow process, as the energy she’d stuffed into the acorn was beginning to run out, and by the time they had made it back to the edge of the bridge the fight was over. Ant-things scattered in pieces across the path. Dex helped her up, and between the two of them they managed to lift Soranna back onto solid ground. Garret slung the unconscious girl over his shoulders, and they hurried across the bridge to the next tower, where Isaac and Ellen were waiting.

  “Come on. This is exactly what we were expecting. Something got loose from a book, that’s all.”

  “I have to disagree, Brother Garret. What are the chances such a creature would attack us at the first tower we reach? This was a deliberate ambush.”

  “Then those things were placed here before Esau died, and they haven’t wandered off yet. It’s still no reason to panic.”

  They were sitting cross-legged in a small circle, trying to decide what to do next. The heart-stopping terror of the fall was slowly unfreezing in Alice’s chest, giving way to a bubbling anger.

  “No reason to panic?” she said. “Soranna could have died.”

  “We’ll have to take better care of her,” Garret said, glancing at where Soranna lay stretched out on the floor. “I don’t know what she’s doing here, to be honest. She’s too young for a job like this.”

  “This was supposed to be simple,” Alice said.

  “Dex is right,” Isaac said. “That was a deliberate ambush.”

  The others all turned to him, startled. Alice didn’t think he’d said more than three words on the whole journey thus far. Now he shifted uncomfortably in the depths of his tattered trench coat. “That was just the first tower. If the wards have disappeared, are we going to run into something like that on every bridge?”

  “I can handle it,” Garret insisted. “We wouldn’t have been in any danger there if we’d stayed in a proper group.”

  Ellen, uncharacteristically quiet, had been sitting with her chin in her hands while her halo flickered gently overhead. She suddenly got to her feet, glancing down at the still-unconscious Soranna and then over to Garret.

  “Come with me for a minute,” she said to him. “We need to talk.”

  Dex sighed and leaned back on her elbows as the two older apprentices circled the mound of books on the floor until they were out of sight.

  “What are they doing?” Alice said.

  “Deciding,” Dex said. “Brother Garret and Sister Ellen will confer and do as they think best.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair. Don’t the rest of us get a choice?”

  “Only whether to follow or return home,” Dex said. “Unless you wish to strike out on your own.”

  Alice looked over at Isaac for support, but he was gone, slouching off in the other direction with his coat flapping behind him. What is wrong with him, anyway? Alice took a deep breath, fighting her exasperation. She shuffled over to Soranna to make sure she was still breathing comfortably, then looked up at Dex.

  “I don’t think I’ve thanked you,” Alice said. “For grabbing the root when I went over.”

  Dex smiled ruefully. “I am not certain my small weight contributed much to the rescue. But when I saw what you were doing, I could not simply stand idle.”

  “It’s more than Garret did,” Alice said. “He was going to let Soranna fall!”

  “Do not be too hard on Brother Garret,” Dex said. “I imagine he had a great deal on his mind at the time. And not every master gives his apprentices the education that yours has.”

  Alice sat up a little straighter. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “The True Way, as the Most Favored instructed me, teaches that everyone who bears the great gift is sacred and precious. If it had been in my power, I would have done as you did. But some of the masters misguidedly teach their apprentices that others of their kind are to be regarded as rivals. Enemies. They would not weep at a reduction in their number.”

  “What?” Alice looked down at the sleeping Soranna. “That’s crazy. She’s just a little kid.”

  “She is not much younger than you, I think. I do not know her story, but I am afraid it is not a happy one.” She shook her head. “Brother Garret may be correct in one respect, however. I am not sure she should be here with us.”

  There was a moment of silence. Alice swallowed, and ventured, “What about Isaac? Do you know him at all?”

  Dex shook her head. “I have not had the privilege of working with Brother Isaac, but he seems to know you—”

  Soranna moaned, and Dex hurried to her side, digging a canteen out of a pocket in her robe.

  There’s an easier way to answer that question. Alice left Dex to care for Soranna and went in search of Isaac. He hadn’t gone far. She spotted him sitting halfway up the stairs to the next floor, huddled under his ratty greatcoat. As she approached, he looked up at her briefly, then hung his head again. It was hard to tell in the torchlight, but she thought that his eyes looked red. Has he been crying?

  “Are you all right?” he said, after a long pause. His voice was dull.

  “Fine,” Alice said.

  “Good.” He lapsed into silence again, letting it stretch on and on until Alice shifted uncomfortably.

  “Are you?” When he didn’t answer, she shook her head. “Honestly, Isaac, what’s wrong with you? I thought that after what we went through, you and I were . . .” Friends? A friend wouldn’t have stolen the book.

  He said nothing. Alice ground her teeth.

  “Look,” she said eventually. “If you’re afraid that I’m angry with you, then you shouldn’t worry. Not that I don’t have a reason to be angry, and I reserve the right to be angry at a future date, but I think we have to get through this first. Don’t you?”

  “Alice . . .”

  “Yes?” It sounded too eager, and Alice cursed herself for letting excitement run away with her.

  “Please don’t talk to me anymore.”

  “What?”

  She was stunned. Before she could recover, Garret was calling their names from below. Isaac got to his feet and slouched past her, refusing to meet her eye.

  Alice followed Isaac down the stairs, fuming, and found all the others gathered round. Soranna was sitting up, and was accepting a few swallows of water from Dex’s canteen. Garret was smiling, but Ellen still wore her characteristic scowl.

  “How is she?” Garret said to Dex.

  “Awake,” Dex said. �
�I do not believe she was badly injured, but she has had a considerable shock.”

  “I’m fine,” Soranna said. Her voice was soft and trembling.

  “Okay.” Garret clapped his hands. “We’re going on, at least for now. But we’re going to take more precautions. I’ll take the lead, Ellen will bring up the rear, and we’ll stay close. No more ambushes like last time.”

  “Wait.” Alice bristled. “Why do you get to make the decision?”

  Ellen rolled her eyes. “If you don’t feel up to it, you’re welcome to go home by yourself.” She looked at Isaac. “That goes for you too. Though you’re on your own explaining things to your masters.”

  “What about Soranna?” Alice said. “One of us could take her back to the portal—”

  “No,” Soranna said, faintly but distinctly. “I will stay with you.”

  Garret laughed. “At least she’s showing some spirit.” Alice glared daggers at him, which he ignored. “There’s a bridge two floors up from here that leads closer to the center dome. If Sora can walk, we’ll get started.”

  “Soranna,” Soranna muttered, but Garret was already turning away.

  Alice and Dex helped Soranna to her feet. The girl was a little wobbly at first, and Alice remained by her side as Garret led the way up the spiral stair around the tower. Isaac followed Ellen, still refusing to meet Alice’s eye.

  “You saved me,” Soranna said, after a while. “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you do that? Risk yourself for me? I’m . . .” She gestured down at herself, then shook her head.

  “I don’t . . .” Alice didn’t know what to say. What does she mean, why? When someone was in trouble, you helped them, if you possibly could. “I couldn’t have just let you fall.”

  “You could have.”