The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  Ashes sounded annoyed. “Yes, a plan! For getting out of here.”

  “I don’t even know where here is,” Alice said. “How could I possibly have a plan?”

  “It’s no good trying to keep up the act now,” Ashes said. “You’re one of them, obviously. A Reader. Very clever of you to have Geryon go around telling everyone you’re his half-wit niece.”

  “I have no idea what he tells people,” Alice said, a bit testily. “And I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t have a plan. You told me the book would only give me a headache!”

  “I didn’t think you could Read it!” Alice could hear the capital letter. “Isaac was only making a joke!”

  “If you explain it to me,” Alice retorted, “maybe I’ll start laughing.”

  She reached out to the closest wall. The bricks felt real enough under her fingers, with rounded corners and ancient, flaking mortar. She ran a hand along the glowing moss and found her skin coated with flakes of dust that shimmered a brief, brilliant green and then faded. She could see now that each of the four doorways led to a narrow corridor with a low ceiling and a central gutter full of a few inches of stagnant, fetid water.

  “It feels like a sewer,” she said aloud. “I saw pictures of the New York sewers in a book once. Are there sewers under the library?”

  She could see Ashes staring at her, two brilliant rings in the darkness. His yellow eyes were tinged with green in the glow from the walls.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” the cat said. “You don’t know what’s happened.”

  “No! For the last time, you . . . stupid cat, I don’t know anything!”

  “Well.” Ashes blinked and paced around in a circle, tail whipping. “I should probably tell you, then, that we’re definitely going to die.”

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Die?” Alice said. “What do you mean?”

  “Expire. Cease. End. Shuffle off this mortal coil. I assume you’re familiar with the concept. Although at this point I suppose I shouldn’t assume you’re familiar with anything.”

  “Ashes,” Alice said, in a tone of extremely strained patience. “Where are we?”

  He sighed, which was an odd sound to hear from a cat. “We’re inside the book, of course. The one you Read. The Swarm.”

  Alice laughed. “You’re not serious.”

  “Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to hear the answers,” Ashes said. He swished his tail, offended, and started off down one of the corridors. Alice, feeling the first thrills of fear, hurried after him.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “We’re inside the book. How did we get here?”

  “You brought us,” the cat says. “You have the gift, apparently. You’re a Reader.”

  “I’ve read a lot of books,” Alice said, “and nothing like this has ever happened.”

  Ashes sniffed. “It doesn’t work with just any book, obviously. This is one of Geryon’s. It’s special. This particular kind of volume is called a prison-book, because it’s what Readers use to lock up all sorts of nastiness.”

  “Nastiness?” Alice looked over her shoulder, but saw only darkness. “There’s something in here with us, you mean?”

  “Of course. The Swarm, presumably.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How should I know?” Ashes said. His voice was strained. “I just know that if Geryon shoved it in a prison-book, it probably isn’t friendly!”

  Alice thought about that for a moment. The corridor they were following bent slowly to the right, so that their original room quickly passed out of view. More strips of moss glowed on the walls, and here and there iron fittings of no obvious purpose were hammered between the bricks, weeping long, rusty stains.

  “So,” Alice said eventually, “how do we get out?”

  “I thought you’d get around to that,” Ashes said. “There are at least two ways out of a prison-book. Another Reader on the outside can pop you out again, if he knows the book well enough.”

  “Could Isaac do that?”

  “Maybe with a year’s study,” Ashes said. “And a good deal more power than he’s got.”

  “What’s the other way?”

  “You find the prisoner,” Ashes said, “and kill it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the way the prison-books are written,” Ashes said. “The Reader goes into the prison book, conquers the prisoner, and the book lets him out. Or her out, in this case.”

  “But,” Alice said, “I don’t want to kill anything.”

  “Unless the Swarm is something you can argue to death, I doubt it’s going to matter. The Reader is supposed to be prepared for this kind of thing, with magic fire and silver swords and so forth. Normally you don’t just wander into a prison-book in your nightshirt and carpet slippers.”

  “I haven’t even got carpet slippers,” Alice reminded him. The bricks underfoot were worn with years and slimy with damp, but the occasional sharp corner still scraped painfully against her bare feet. “So what are we going to do?”

  “I suppose I could try to kill the prisoner,” Ashes said, “but if it was something I could kill, I doubt it would be locked up. I’m only half cat, after all. So when we find it, it will probably kill us.”

  “You don’t seem too upset at the prospect,” Alice said. “If you’re half cat, have you got four and a half lives?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Ashes snapped. “And I’m absolutely terrified.” There was a long pause. Alice swallowed hard. The cat looked back at her, eyes glowing yellow green, and sniffed. “It just wouldn’t do to show fear in front of any human, Reader or not. Mother would skin me alive if she heard about it.”

  Ashes padded on, and Alice hurried after him. They walked for a moment in silence down the apparently endless corridor.

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as that,” Alice said slowly. “Maybe the prisoner is something we can . . . talk to, or—”

  “Shh,” Ashes said.

  “It’s not impossible,” Alice protested. “You can’t just assume—”

  “I mean be quiet,” the cat hissed. “I hear something coming.”

  Alice stopped. Ashes was nearly invisible in the gloom, a gray-on-black shadow, but her eyes had adapted surprisingly quickly to the faint green glow. Ahead was another arched doorway, with some sort of room beyond it. From that direction she could hear a faint, fast sound, tik-tik-tik-tik, like a small dog running across marble. Something scurried out of the doorway in their direction, low and fast. Alice looked around for Ashes, uncertainly, but the cat had vanished.

  In a few moments the thing entered the nearest pool of light. It was about the size of a large rat, but it put her more in mind of a bird, though admittedly the oddest-looking bird she’d ever seen. It stood on two bird-like legs, covered in dark fur or feathers except for splay-toed feet. A roughly oval body was angled forward, like a picture she’d once seen of an ostrich, but there was no neck, no head, and no wings, not even vestigial ones. Two black eyes glittered above a long, pointed beak that looked as sharp as a sewing needle.

  The tik-tik-tik noise came from the claws on its feet, which blurred in a rapid, pigeon-like gait. It stopped a few yards away, body tilted so it could look up at her, and made a short, interrogative quirk.

  Alice couldn’t help laughing. After all the dire pronouncements from Ashes, fear had begun to settle somewhere deep in her gut. But this little thing, while certainly odd, looked more like a creature you’d shoo out of the basement than any kind of a threat.

  It might even be tame, she decided. Certainly it didn’t seem afraid of her. She crouched slowly and beckoned to it.

  “Come here. That’s right. I’m not going to hurt you.” Reflecting, she added, “If you can talk, I’d appreciate if you’d tell me now, before I make myself look foolish.”

>   The thing didn’t seem inclined to talk. It did venture forward, however, a few feet at a time, veering slightly from side to side as though to study her from new angles. Eventually it came within arm’s reach, and Alice extended a hand in case it wanted to sniff. She managed to keep herself from starting when it darted forward, all in a rush, and hopped into the hollow of her palm. Its claws were painful pinpricks, but they didn’t break the skin. It quirked again.

  “You are friendly, aren’t you?” Alice said. She lifted the little creature to look it in the eyes. It was surprisingly heavy, like a little lead weight, not bird-like at all. It settled back on its haunches, claws flexing. “What are you called, I wonder. You don’t belong to any genus I can think of, that’s for certain.”

  The little thing shifted its weight. Then, when it was close enough that it could nearly touch her nose with its beak, it lunged.

  Alice had a split second of warning from the pressure of its claws on her palm. Some instinct made her jerk her head backward, so the little creature’s needle-sharp beak missed spearing her eye and instead scored a line across the cheek just beneath it. Alice gave a screech and tried to back away, up against the tunnel wall, but the thing’s jump had landed it on her nightshirt and it clung to the fabric for all it was worth.

  It lunged again, this time at her shoulder, and the pointed beak went through shirt and skin like they were gauze and nipped at her flesh. When it pulled back, blood welled, and the beak parted to reveal a long, black tongue, skinny as a snake’s, that darted out to lap delicately at the wound.

  Shaking her arm only made it grip tighter, but Alice finally got a hold of the thing with her other hand and pulled. It came free with a rip of fabric, and she could feel it squirming under her fingers. She hurled it at the wall, as hard she could, and it tucked in its legs and bounced like a softball. For a moment it lay still, and she thought she’d killed it, but its legs shot out again and scrabbled at the floor until it righted itself. It stared at her again, with another quirk, and this time it didn’t sound nearly so friendly. Alice, one hand on the wall for support, felt a bloody tear dribbling down her cheek and wondered if she should run.

  Before she could decide, something else moved in the darkness. Ashes, a blur of gray fur on the pounce, hit the thing and bowled it over, trapping it between his paws before it could get back to its feet. Ignoring its scrabbling claws, he sank his teeth into the little creature and gave it the quick shake cats give mice to break their necks. This failed to produce the desired effect, but the squirming thing was quite helpless, and Ashes turned to face Alice triumphantly.

  “I’ve got it!” His voice was not, she noted, impeded in any way by having a mouthful of squirming bird-thing. “Pfeh! It tastes like coal.” He shook it again, and the thing gave a high-pitched quirk. “Have you got something heavy we could drop on it, perhaps?”

  A few moments earlier, Alice wouldn’t have entertained the idea; now, cheek and shoulder burning, she would have gladly bashed the little terror with a poker.

  “Maybe I can get one of these bricks loose,” she muttered. “Or else—”

  She paused. Ashes, intent on his prey, was batting it playfully with his paws without releasing his stranglehold. Underneath the frantic quirks, though, she could hear something else, almost like the sounds of rain on a tin roof.

  Tik. Tik. Tik-tik. Tik-tik-tik.

  Tiktiktiktiktiktiktik—

  “Ashes, let it go,” Alice breathed.

  “But—”

  “Run!”

  She took to her heels. Ashes, relinquishing his prize, followed. A few moments later, small creatures filled the passage, the staccato tiks of their claws on the brickwork merging into a rising crescendo.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TRAPPED!

  ALICE POUNDED DOWN THE tunnel as fast as she had ever run in her life. She skidded back into the room with four doors, and looked frantically from one to the other, uncertain. The tik-tik-tik echoed off the bricks and seemed to come from every direction at once.

  Deciding that one door was as good as another, she took off straight ahead, into another corridor. More halls branched off from it at random intervals, with no sign of anything solid she could put between herself and the approaching swarm.

  Rounding a corner into a four-way intersection, she turned left and drew up short at the sound of quirking. A pair of the little creatures sidled out to block the path, so Alice backed up and ran down the opposite corridor. It split into a T-junction a dozen yards on, and from one of the arms she heard the scrape of claws on stone. She took the other way, heart slamming against her ribs and breath rattling in her chest.

  “They’re herding us,” said Ashes, who apparently had no trouble running and speaking at the same time.

  “Herding?” Alice gasped.

  “Pushing us toward something,” Ashes said. “Probably a dead end.”

  Alice had a sudden image of turning down a corridor and finding nothing but a blank wall ahead of her, then turning back to find the exit full of tiny, beady eyes. She pictured them coming at her, all in a rush, covering her in a carpet of vicious claws, needle-beaks pecking—

  She tasted bile at the back of her throat, and gritted her teeth. There had to be a way out, somewhere.

  At the next intersection, she stopped to listen. Ashes, halfway to the opposite tunnel, skidded to a halt and looked back at her.

  “Are you—”

  “Shh!” After a moment, she closed her eyes. “Do you hear water?”

  “Yes,” the cat said. “That way.” He gestured with his head. “Which is all the more reason to go the other way—”

  “Come on.”

  Alice ran toward the sound, and after an instant’s hesitation Ashes followed.

  “But,” he said, “I can hear them coming this way!”

  “Just keep going!”

  They turned a corner and found a small platoon of swarmers blocking their path. The little bird-things looked taken aback to find their prey rushing at them, and Alice took advantage of their hesitation to bull through. Her foot came down heavily on one of them, bouncing it to one side as though she’d stepped on a tennis ball. She stumbled sideways, hit the brick wall hard enough to scrape her palms, but spun away from it and kept running. Another swarmer managed a wild stab as she went past, and she felt a bloom of pain at her ankle.

  Then she was past them, and the skitter of claws behind her was almost drowned under the clearly audible rush of water. She turned another corner and saw—praise God—a door, a rusted iron bulkhead of the kind one might find on a steamship, half-open and with the sound of water coming from beyond it. Alice slid sideways through the gap, and Ashes bounded through right behind her. Once he was through, she put her back to the door. For a horrible moment it resisted, and she thought her weight wouldn’t be enough. Then it swung a few inches, rusty hinges shrieking at the abuse, and stuttered through the rest of its arc until it hit the metal doorframe with a clang. Something in the mechanism clicked.

  Alice leaned against the door, panting. She thought her lungs would collapse. After a moment her legs gave way, and she slid down the rough surface of the iron until she was sitting on the slimy brick floor.

  “Are you all right?” said Ashes.

  Alice was too busy gulping air to reply for a while. Taking stock, she found herself a mass of cuts, scrapes, and bruises. Her cheek was smeared with blood, and she’d skinned her palms badly when she’d hit the wall.

  When she could spare the breath to speak, she said, “I’m alive, I think. What about you?”

  “I’m filthy,” Ashes said. “And I think one of them may have nipped off a bit of my tail.”

  Alice closed her eyes and blew out a long breath. All her limbs felt shaky, but she managed to climb to her feet and look around.

  The results of her survey were disappointing. She’d been
hoping for a barrier she could put between herself and the Swarm, and she’d found one, but the space on this side was barely larger than a closet and there were no other exits. In one corner was the source of the sound of rushing water: A fat pipe on the ceiling gushed a continuous torrent into a brick basin, which drained away through a cast-iron grating. Alice gave this last a long look, but even if she’d been able to remove the rusty grate, the hole was too narrow for her to squeeze into.

  A hollow bong filled the room for a moment, making her jump. It was repeated a moment later, then twice more, and when she put a hand on the door she could feel it reverberating from the impacts. She pictured the corridor outside filling with swarmers, hurling themselves into the air like living missiles, hammering at the portal . . .

  She gave it a tug, and it seemed secure. The bangs continued, but Alice breathed a little easier.

  “I hate to say this,” Ashes commented, “but our situation has not materially improved.”

  Alice gave the door a bang. “This seems like an improvement to me.”

  “Only if you intend to remain here until you starve to death.” The cat, in the corner farthest from the falling torrent of water, bent and began to lick his fur. “And while I might be able to survive for some time by eating your corpse, in the end the same applies to me.”

  Alice closed her eyes and gave a hysterical giggle. “Who says you get to eat me, and not the other way around?”

  “It’s only logical, given our relative sizes,” Ashes said, still grooming. “I’d be barely a mouthful.”

  Alice took a deep breath for the first time in what felt like hours.

  “Nobody is eating anybody,” she said. “We’ll just have to think of something.”

  A short while later, after a detailed examination of the room, she had the beginnings of a plan.