The Mad Apprentice

by Django Wexler

  “But I’ll wait for you.” Isaac shook his head. “Alice, I’m sorry. I should have—”

  Torment peeled Alice’s mental grip apart, and the connection vanished. The swarmer was crushed into nonexistence, and Alice gave a full-throated scream as something like a hot poker plunged through her chest.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  “ALICE! ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

  “I’m okay,” Alice mumbled. Her skin was damp with sweat, and she felt suddenly cold. Her jaw clenched tight, making it hard to talk.

  “Can you sit up?”

  Alice nodded weakly, and with Soranna’s help she levered herself into a sitting position against the pile of books. The world spun wildly around her for a few moments. Soranna produced her little hip flask of water and offered Alice a drink, which she accepted gratefully. She could feel her muscles beginning to unclench.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing,” Soranna said, looking shy. “I . . . owe you. What happened?”

  “I found Isaac,” Alice said, handing the flask back. “And Dex. And I think I’ll be able to find Ellen as well. But Torment caught me.”

  “Torment?” Soranna looked confused, and Alice remembered she hadn’t explained about the labyrinth.

  “I’ll fill you in later,” Alice said. “Right now Dex and Isaac are holed up in a tower, and we need to get over there ourselves. Once we’re all together, we may stand a chance of finding Ellen without getting killed.” She certainly didn’t intend to try the stunt with the swarmers again. It wasn’t only phantom pain she felt when the little creatures died or were forcibly banished; some basic part of her, some energy, was being torn away. “Give me a minute, and I’ll see if I can find a path.”

  Soranna nodded. They passed a moment in silence. Alice was content to simply breathe.

  “You’re very brave,” the girl said, after a while. “It caused you so much pain, but you kept going.”

  “It’s not courage so much as stubbornness,” Alice said frankly. Her lips curled back from her teeth in a grim smile. “I don’t like to lose.”

  When Alice felt strong enough to walk, she got to her feet, and reached out again for the strange, slippery fabric of the labyrinth.

  Torment was surely watching her now. But—in spite of his boasts—he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Once she opened a path, they’d have a moment to slip through before the labyrinthine could interfere.

  “Take my hand,” Alice said. “And be ready to run when I say.”

  She put out her hand to Soranna and concentrated. After a moment, when the girl hadn’t moved, Alice looked back at her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “N . . . no,” Soranna said. She held out her hand to Alice, tentatively, like a small bird testing a perch. Alice grabbed her tight by the wrist and grinned at her surprised squeak.

  “Okay,” Alice said. “Follow me.”

  She reached out for the fabric of the labyrinth, ignoring a prickle of remembered pain. The Dragon is letting me use this power because it’s the only way to get past Torment. That means I’m the only one who can help the others. She found the spot where she’d left Isaac, and felt the tiny vibration that marked his presence in the nearby tower. A grip and a twist were all it took to bring here to there.

  Torment pounced, his mental grip prying at Alice’s hold, but she was already running up the last few stairs. Instead of emerging onto the roof of the tower, she and Soranna stepped up onto a distant bridge. Alice hurriedly let go of the connection, and she could almost hear Torment’s irritated snarl.

  Ahead of them was a doorway into a tower. Some sort of curtain blocked the entrance, a cross-hatched pattern of twisting green shoots like a spray of weeds. Light leaked out through the gaps, startlingly bright against the gloom of the fortress, and Alice guessed this was another place where a book had leaked into its environment. Hopefully it’s not as horrible as the last one.

  “Isaac said they were going to hide in there. Are you ready?”

  Soranna nodded. Alice stepped forward, one hand raised to push through the weeds. She felt the rich softness of soil and plants under her boots, and caught the nose-tickling scent of grass. Encouraged, she took another step, through the curtain, and promptly fell over.

  It was not really her fault. As she passed through the curtain, something very strange happened to down, shifting it ninety degrees. Alice, caught by surprise, lost her footing and ended up face-down in the dirt. Fortunately, instead of a stone floor, there was a bed of soft grass to break her fall, and she had just about recovered enough to stand up when Soranna came through, squeaked in surprise, and collapsed on top of her.

  Once the two girls had disentangled themselves and gotten on their feet, Alice got a chance to look around the tower. She had seen some strange things in the depths of Geryon’s library, but she had to admit that this beat most of them in terms of sheer impossible geometry. By now she was used to spaces much larger than the buildings that contained them, so it wasn’t a surprise to find a sun-drenched lawn inside a tower. What was more than a little startling was that the grass was growing—and Alice was standing—on the walls. It felt for all the world as though down was toward what had been sideways the moment before she stepped through the doorway.

  The lawn rolled away from her, grass neatly trimmed to a uniform length and groomed around a few small shrubs. It was like someone had taken a well-maintained park and rolled it into a tube, like a cigar. It was obvious that the direction of down changed with the floor, since the shrubs halfway up the curve of the wall stood just as straight as the grass under Alice’s feet. She couldn’t help following the ground with her eyes, fighting a dizzy sense of vertigo, to where it began to curve back. Directly overhead, a small brook burbled happily through a rocky watercourse, oblivious to the fact that it ought to have been raining directly down on Alice’s head.

  Alice found herself laughing as she looked about, in spite of the desperation of their circumstances. She wanted to run all the way around until she got to the brook, and look at Soranna standing upside down on the ceiling. She really wanted to see what would happen if she threw something high enough to reach the very center of the tube, halfway between the walls. Which direction would it fall?

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Soranna muttered. She glanced fearfully at the ceiling, with its upside-down stream. “Esau ought to have kept his books under better control. My master would never allow such foolishness.”

  “We just have to stay long enough to find Isaac and Dex,” Alice said. “Come on.”

  The doorway was easily visible, a rectangular depression in the turf covered by a mat of grassy roots. Satisfied she could find her way out again, she led Soranna across the grass, looking for a landmark.

  It didn’t take long to find one. In the middle distance, there was a commotion—Alice saw a group of large creatures gathered together, like a herd of sheep. In its midst was a small building, made of neat brown bricks and roofed with wooden shingles. It looked like the groundskeeper’s shed on a better class of golf course. As they approached, Alice caught first a chorus of angry honking sounds from the creatures outside, and then, distantly, the faint strains of a melody she recognized.

  “That’s the Siren,” Alice said. “Isaac uses her to put things to sleep. And if he’s using her, I think he’s in trouble.”

  “Those things do not look friendly,” Soranna said.

  Taking a closer look, Alice had to agree. They were about the size of horses, with fat turkey-like bodies covered in dark feathers, a pair of orange, scaly legs ending in big clawed toes, and two long, flexible necks, each ending in a bullet-shaped head with beady black eyes and a long, sharp beak. The neck and head feathers were a riot of green, blue, red, yellow, pink, and every other hue Alice could imagine.

  If she’d seen them in a
picture, Alice would have found the things beautiful and charming, if a bit silly-looking, but it took only a few moments of watching them to see that they had vicious tempers. Whenever two of them bumped against each other, the closer head on each would lash out with a nasty peck, sending blood and tufts of feathers flying. They honked and squawked constantly, ripping at the turf with their claws. The ground around the shack was already churned to mud. As best as Alice could tell, they were trying to get into the shack, slamming themselves against the brick walls and scraping at the mortar.

  “There are more of them on the other side,” Alice said. “Let’s circle around, I bet there’s a door.”

  Soranna nodded, and they worked their way in a broad circle, staying well clear of the flock. Alice found cover in a small cluster of shrubs about fifty yards away. A few of the birds had looked in her direction—having two heads, they could hardly help it—but they didn’t seem to notice her, being fully occupied in feuding with their fellows. On this side, the flock was much larger, and they were shoving and fighting to get close to a wooden door set into the brick.

  Alice could see the Siren, floating above the roof of the shack, translucent as a smudge of white smoke in the brilliant, sourceless daylight. The ghostly figure of a woman had her mouth open in continuous song, and Alice could hear a faint backwash of the melody, but its full force was directed down at the bird-things. As she watched, one of the creatures closest to the door wobbled and collapsed, and there were several lying on the ground already. But the Siren couldn’t seem to entrance more than a half dozen at once, and each time one of the things fell over, one on the ground would shake itself awake and surge to its feet.

  “Isaac is trying to hold them off,” Alice said. “But I don’t think it’s working very well.”

  The bird-things were considerably hampered by their constant infighting, but they’d already done quite a bit of damage to the door. Splinters flew every time one of them got the chance to rake the wood with its claws.

  “If they notice us, we haven’t got a chance,” Soranna said. “I doubt we can outrun them, and aside from in there, we haven’t got anywhere to hide. Can you fight that whole flock?”

  Alice shook her head. There had to be sixty or seventy of the big bird-things. “And Isaac doesn’t have enough power to put them all to sleep.”

  “Can you open a path in there?”

  “I don’t think so.” Alice felt for the fabric and tried, but it was somehow too close to rearrange space to her liking. Or maybe there were too many people—creatures—watching; at home in the library, she remembered the bookshelves always did their shifting behind her back. There was still a great deal she didn’t understand about the Dragon’s power. “It’s no good. Have you got anything?”

  “Nothing that would be useful against those creatures.” Soranna looked down at her hands. “As I said, I am not a . . . a fighter.”

  But Alice was staring at her thoughtfully. “You did something when that awful creature was coming after you, back on the other tower. I saw you step through a solid iron fence.”

  Soranna nodded. “The creature is known as the Geist. Summoning it is very difficult, but I can call on its power to pass through objects for a short time.”

  “How long?”

  “A few seconds, usually. A minute at the longest. I have to hold my breath, since my lungs won’t draw in any air while I’m intangible.”

  “A minute . . .” Alice stared at the honking, squabbling flock. “That might be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “I have an idea . . .”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SORANNA’S GAMBIT

  SORANNA WAS SHAKING HER head, nearly in tears. “I can’t do it.”

  “Come on,” Alice said urgently. “It’s not that far!”

  “If I trip, or . . . or anything, I’ll be torn to pieces!”

  “You won’t! How can you trip when you’re intangible?” Alice was actually curious how one could run while intangible, since running relied on one’s feet making contact with the ground. But she felt this was not the time to raise that question. “I know it’s not the best idea, but it’s all I’ve got right now. I’ll be right here if anything goes wrong.”

  “But we don’t need to,” Soranna said. “We can just escape. You can open a path to the exit book, and we can get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving while there’s anybody left to rescue,” Alice said, a bit more sternly than she intended. “I wouldn’t have left you.”

  “But I’m not . . . like you,” Soranna said. “If I’d been in your place, I would have left you behind. I’m not . . . brave, or—”

  “You can be,” Alice insisted. She looked back at the shack, where the door seemed to be on the verge of giving way. “Listen. We don’t have much time. If you’re not going to help me, I can’t make you, but then you’d better start running, because I’m going to have to try something stupid.”

  Soranna looked back toward the doorway where they’d come in, and for a moment Alice thought she really was going to bolt. Then, glancing back at the shack, she bit her lip.

  “All right.” Her voice was tiny. “I’ll try.”

  “You’ll be fine,” Alice said, with more confidence than she felt. “You remember what to tell them?”

  Soranna nodded. “To be ready to run in this direction when we see your distraction.”

  “Right. I’ll start a minute or so after you get through.”

  “Okay.” Soranna took a deep breath, stood up, and smiled shakily at Alice. “As you said, ‘Here goes nothing.’”

  Alice smiled back, and Soranna started jogging across the turf. Watching from the meager protection of the shrubs, Alice found her stomach churning. What if she really doesn’t make it? Soranna would be out there in the middle of a flock of vicious monsters, and it would be Alice’s fault. That thought was so terrifying that Alice nearly spoke up to call the girl back, but it was too late—shouting loud enough to get Soranna’s attention would attract the creatures.

  She’ll be fine. Alice, crouching, dug her fingers into the grass and gripped hard to keep her hands from trembling. She’ll be fine. She has to be.

  Soranna made it within a dozen yards of the flock before the first bird-thing noticed her. One of its heads snapped around, peering in her direction with the air of a nearsighted codger looking for his glasses. It let out a perturbed squawk, and although the shoving match at the door continued, a few of the creatures walked in Soranna’s direction, both heads bobbing pigeon-like in an alternating rhythm.

  The girl slowed as she approached them, and Alice’s heart flip-flopped. If she turned and fled now, it would be a disaster. The flock would stampede. Come on. You can do this! She was less than a hundred feet from the shack. Come on!

  Soranna took a deep breath and held it, cheeks bulging. Then, just as the first bird-thing came near, she started to run. The creature gave her a tentative jab with its beak, and shrieked with surprise as its head passed right through her, her form rippling around it like thick mist. Soranna darted forward, walking right through the bird-thing, which stumbled backward in confusion. All the nearest creatures went berserk, descending on Soranna in a storm of ripping claws and slashing beaks. Unable to touch her, they ended up slamming into one another, and half the flock dissolved into an enormous melee. Soranna was forgotten as they shoved, pecked, and honked, sometimes so violently that a single creature ended up attacking one of its own heads with the other.

  Alice lost track of Soranna in the confusion, and for a heart-stopping moment she thought the girl had tripped after all. Anyone lying in that field would be trampled under a hundred clawed feet, whether the bird-things were trying to do so or not. But, a moment later, she caught sight of Soranna at the entrance to the shack, ghosting through the sleeping bodies of the creatures there and then slipping into the door its
elf and out of view. Alice let out a long, shaky breath, unclenched her hands, and got to her feet.

  She made it. I knew she would make it. There were red marks on her palms from her fingernails. Now we just have to hope Isaac will listen. She thought he would. Isaac is pretty sensible when he’s not being an idiot.

  Alice counted to thirty, then dug in her pocket and came up with the last of her special acorns. She reached out for the brown thread that led to the tree-sprite, and gave it a solid tug.

  The creature popped into being, a short, elfin thing with smooth skin the color of a freshly budded leaf. Alice handed it the acorn, which it took with the gravity of someone accepting a sacrament. She pointed toward the flock, and echoed the command in her mind. The tree-sprite nodded and hurried out across the turf.

  Her count had reached sixty when the little creature stopped at the edge of the flock. It pressed the acorn against the ground, and through the thread Alice could feel the shivering explosion as the life energy inside poured out. Roots slammed through the soil, shouldering the grass aside in their haste, and a thin tree trunk sprouted upward. It thickened rapidly from the bottom up, like a flat fire hose filling out when the pressure is turned on, and blasted upward and outward, maturing in seconds into a mid-sized oak tree with long, leafy branches. The tree-sprite grabbed hold of one branch and let the growth pull it into the canopy. Bark from the tree slid across its tender green skin, flowing like water until it formed a suit of tough, leathery armor tipped with resin-hard claws.

  A few of the bird-things, on the edge of their melee, took note of this new intruder and veered off to investigate. Alice let them get close to the tree, honking curiously. Then, with a twitch of its claws where they were buried in the tree trunk, the tree-sprite brought a mighty oak limb around in a sweep that smashed two of the bird-things completely off their feet and sent them tumbling to the turf, whistling and shrieking with surprise and pain.