The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  “That makes sense.” Isaac sounded as though he wished it didn’t. “Those little . . . things of yours—”

  “I call them swarmers.”

  “Right. Can they fight, do you think?”

  “I haven’t tried,” Alice said. “Except for poking Mr. Black in the ankle.”

  “Have you tried using them internally?”

  She shook her head. “Geryon mentioned that, but I don’t really know what it means.”

  “If you pull the creature into yourself, rather than out into the world, you can take on some aspect of it. Even turn yourself into it entirely, if you’re good enough.”

  Turn myself into a swarmer? Alice was dubious. It wouldn’t be big enough. Where would the rest of me go?

  “I don’t think we’ve covered that in my training.” She shifted uncomfortably. “What about you? Is that lizard-fish good for anything?”

  “I can use it to breathe underwater,” Isaac said. “But no, not for fighting.”

  “What about—”

  “I think this is it,” he interrupted, reaching in front of her and tapping the map. “That group there, you see it?”

  Alice did see it. A set of ancient bookcases stood in a hexagon, their wooden shelves cracking or rotted away entirely. Light spilled out of the cracks between them, a pale, cold radiance that looked like moonlight. Alice and Isaac walked up to it, and Alice waved her hand experimentally in one of the beams and watched her fingers make huge shadows on the floor.

  “Want me to go through first?” Isaac said. “To make sure it’s safe?”

  Alice snorted. She shoved her fingers into the crack between the shelves and pushed, wedging herself little by little into a space that seemed much too small to hold her. As before, she had the feeling the bookcases were bulging out, creating a passage just wide enough for her to pass through. When she thought too hard about that, it made her nervous, so she just kept moving.

  From the inside, the ring of shelves looked like enormous monoliths, giant slabs of rock arranged in a circle around a grassy glade. Alice stepped from between two of them, out of a passage full of clammy mist, and found herself standing in bright moonlight under a starry sky. The glade was much larger than the group of shelves had looked from the outside, but after everything she’d seen in the library, Alice was hardly surprised by that now.

  Ashes said the books . . . leak. That they make a little bit of our world into a little bit of theirs. If that was true, then the world on the other side of this book was a reasonably pleasant one. The moon gave more than enough light to see, and a refreshing breeze rustled the long, silver grass, blowing away the dust-and-paper smell of the library and replacing it with the smell of soil and growing things.

  In the center of the glade was a small, weathered stone pedestal, a bit like a sundial without the point in the middle. Alice looked over her shoulder and found Isaac emerging from the mist, brushing a few clinging drops of moisture off the sleeves of his coat.

  “No guards so far,” she said. “At least that I can see.”

  “They wouldn’t be out here,” Isaac said. “We’re still inside the library, even if it doesn’t look like it. This is still part of Ending’s labyrinth. If the Dragon book is here, it’s somewhere inside another book—that’d be the only way to hide it.”

  “The best place to hide a book is inside another book?” Alice shook her head. “Sometimes this business makes my eyes cross.”

  Isaac smiled. They walked to the middle of the glade and found that there was indeed a book resting on the little pedestal. It was a large, thin volume, with a green canvas cover that was stained and worn ragged in places. If there had been a printed title, it had long since faded away.

  Isaac stepped forward and laid a hand on it. He closed his eyes and cocked his head, as though he was listening to something.

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s a portal-book, not a prison-book.”

  “What does that mean?” Alice said.

  “It means there’s a matching book on the other side, so we can come back without any special conditions.” He frowned. “But I can’t tell anything about where it leads, except that I don’t think it’s on Earth.”

  “Only one way to find out, then. How do we go through together?”

  “Hold my hand.”

  Alice took Isaac’s hand in her own gingerly. The sleeve of his coat flopped over and rested on her arm. They stepped forward, and with his free hand Isaac flipped the book open to the first page. Alice saw the same confusing mass of characters that she had when she’d opened The Swarm, and then, as before, they twisted before her eyes into recognizable letters. She read:

  Alice stood hand in hand with Isaac on a windswept, moonlit plain that stretched as far as the eye could see . . .

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE LONELY COTTAGE

  ALICE STOOD HAND IN hand with Isaac on a windswept, moonlit plain that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. The grass dipped and bowed in waves, like the movement of an ocean. In front of them, rising out of the sea of grass, was a rocky hill, with a path on one side that looped laboriously back and forth several times. A small stone cottage with a peaked wooden roof stood at the top, with a curl of white smoke drifting lazily up from the chimney.

  All in all, it was not nearly as bad as Alice had been expecting. She gave a little sigh of relief.

  “Would you mind letting go of my hand?” Isaac said. “If you squeeze any harder, I might lose a finger.”

  Alice let his hand drop, cheeks burning, and fumbled furiously with the map. This time, she discovered, it was prepared to fold up along the crease and open again to display their new surroundings. Apart from the outline of the hill and the cottage, it was mostly blank. The green line led up the switchback path and ended in a green dot somewhere inside the house.

  “It’s in there,” Alice said. “Or the map thinks it is, anyway.”

  “At least we won’t have any trouble finding our way back.” Isaac gestured behind them, and Alice looked over her shoulder. Another pedestal, twin to the one in the library, held an identical-looking book. It stood out amid the grass, the only feature for hundreds of yards in any direction.

  “All right,” Alice said. “So do we just go up and knock on the front door?”

  “You’re the one who told me we should expect something nasty,” Isaac said.

  That was true. But there was something inexplicably cozy about the cottage. A big mound of firewood was stacked against one wall and an empty straw basket hung upside down beside the door. It had the look of a place where people lived, full of little repairs and small touches to make their lives easier.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe if we . . . explain?”

  “If there’s someone in there guarding the book, they’re not going to just give it up for the asking,” Isaac said.

  “Let’s get a closer look,” Alice said. “We can hide in those rocks.”

  The moon was bright enough that it was easy to see their way up the switchback path, but they were both breathing hard by the time they got to the top. Alice was secretly pleased to see that Isaac seemed to be having a harder time than she was. They knelt behind a pile of loose stones, and while Isaac panted to get his breath back, Alice summoned a single swarmer and regarded it critically. Its dark hair would make it hard to detect, as long as it kept to the shadows, and she thought it would be able to approach the cottage unnoticed.

  A moment later, the rickety front door opened, casting a merry rectangle of firelight across the silver grass. It was followed by a splash as someone emptied a pot into the dirt. Alice saw a figure outlined in the doorway—human-shaped, but even in that brief glimpse, recognizably not human—but after a moment it stepped away, leaving the entrance clear.

  There’s no percentage in hanging about. Alice’s li
p curled in a smile even as her heart gave a little lurch. She signaled Isaac to be quiet, then closed her eyes and slipped into the swarmer’s senses. It sped from their hiding place to the cottage door, then peeked around the door frame and looked inside.

  The cottage consisted of a single large room. The stone walls were mostly covered with colorful cloths, and a patchwork of overlapping rugs on the floor that gave the whole place a warmer feel than the outside. A pair of wooden benches sat in front of a massive stone fireplace where a steady blaze crackled. Against one wall, looking somewhat out of place, was a heavy-looking chest bound with leather straps, like something a pirate would keep his treasure in.

  The creature Alice had glimpsed sat in front of the fire, at work with a needle and thread. The swarmer leaned forward for a better view, and Alice felt her breath catch in her throat. The thing was slender and graceful, with pale mauve skin and a thin, elfin build. In place of hair a velvety river of thin purple strands ran from the crown of its head, in a tight bunch down the back of its neck, and then spread broadly across its shoulders like a fall of silky hair. It wore only a pair of ragged shorts, held up by a bit of twine wound around and around its waist.

  He—Alice decided the creature must be male, based on his attire, though his skin was as smooth and hairless as a porcelain doll—had his face to the fire, concentrating on his work, and Alice took the opportunity to run the swarmer around the door frame and take shelter in a convenient pile of kindling. One of the sticks snapped under its feet, and the creature looked up. His face was the least human part of him, a perfectly symmetrical oval with a lipless slash of a mouth, a tiny button nose, and two enormous eyes the color of amethysts, with huge, owl-like pupils. They sparkled in the firelight as though they were made of crystal.

  Alice made the swarmer stand stock-still amid the kindling. There was another one of the creatures sitting on the floor in front of the fire. This one was much smaller, half the size of the other, but it looked less like a child than a reproduction in miniature, down to every detail but the color of its skin, hair, and eyes, which were shades of sapphire blue.

  The small one made a sort of hissing squeak, and to Alice’s surprise the larger one spoke. His voice had a lilting, musical tone.

  What he said was, “Hungry, are you? And why not, with a third log burned and Mah-Li not yet returned. I warn you, though, all the lamb is gone, and all the squirrel as well. We’re down to lizards, and not very fat ones at that.”

  The little creature made a complaining sort of noise.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” the other one said. “I wasn’t the one who made the bargain. ‘It’s a place to hide until all this blows over,’ Mah-Li said, ‘and it won’t be for long, anyway. You and I should know better than anyone that the Readers always get what they want in the end.’ And here we are, stalking lizards in the long grass instead of proper food.” He gave a very human-sounding sigh. “Do you want the lizard?”

  The little one nodded. The other put his stitching down, got up, and crossed the room to a corner where a number of barrels sat. On the way he passed the big chest, and gave it a reflexive, resentful kick.

  “What could be worth the bother,” he muttered, “that’s what I want to know. Eating lizards, indeed. Oh, for the old days.” He lifted the a lid off of one of the barrels, peered down, then bent over to reach inside.

  A moment later the creature screeched, and a remarkable thing happened. The purple stuff he had in place of hair, thick fibers like threads of yarn, all went rigid at once. Violet spikes suddenly jutted out from his skull, a foot or more, and a crest of them encircled his shoulders, making him look a bit like an agitated purple porcupine. That comparison was more than merely casual—even from floor level across the room, Alice could see that the spines came to wickedly sharp points.

  He muttered something that sounded impolite, groped further in the barrel, and came up with a droopy-looking green lizard about as long as his arm. He held it around the neck with thumb and forefinger, and though it thrashed and scrabbled desperately at the air, it couldn’t make any progress. The creature glared at the lizard with his huge purple eyes.

  “It bit me! Stupid vicious thing. Here.”

  The creature tossed the lizard across the room, and the little one picked it out of the air with impossible grace. His tiny mouth turned upward in a smile, and then as Alice watched in horror the smile spread, wider and wider, until it split the thing’s head almost in half. In the light of the fire, Alice could clearly see hundreds of teeth like little needles, row on row of them, and a long, nimble blue tongue. The small creature crammed the lizard into his maw whole, ignoring its terrified scratching, and bit down on it so hard, the swarmer’s ears could hear the crunch.

  Isaac tugged on her sleeve, back at her real body. She ought to be telling him what she could see, but she found herself rendered temporarily speechless, watching in awful fascination as the little creature slurped up the lizard’s tail that stuck out of his mouth like a stray noodle. His jaw worked from side to side for a moment, and then he spat something small and white onto the hearth. It was a tiny bone, licked clean of flesh, and it was rapidly follow by another and another, a rain of neat white vertebrae rolling across the stone.

  “Alice!” Isaac hissed.

  Alice let the swarmer’s senses go and opened her eyes. She found her heart was hammering fast. “I think,” she said, a little shakily, “we may not want to try explaining.”

  Isaac grabbed her shoulder and jerked her around to face the path. Standing there was another one of the creatures, green skin silvered by the moonlight, regarding them with his huge, sparkling eyes. He had a dead sheep in one hand, dangling it by its hind legs over his shoulder.

  “I think,” Isaac said hoarsely, “we’re in trouble.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DINNER

  HUMANS,” SAID THE GREEN-SKINNED creature. He let go of the sheep, and the carcass thumped to the ground. “Honest to goodness humans!”

  He took a step closer, and a wave ran through the spines on his back, as though they were rippling in the wind. Isaac edged between the thing and Alice, and raised his hands, palms out.

  “Wait,” Alice said, voice only a little shaky. “Listen. We don’t have to—”

  “Do you have any idea how long it’s been,” the thing said, “since I’ve tasted a human?”

  His thin mouth spread across his face in a horrible grin, jaw hinging open to reveal row after row of needle teeth with a flickering green tongue lurking at the back.

  “Run!” Isaac shouted. The air was suddenly full of the sharp scent of new-fallen snow as a cold wind rose from nowhere. “Alice, run!”

  “What?” Alice scrambled up the pile of rocks. “But—”

  Tiny shreds of white ice, like bits of torn cloud, sprayed from Isaac’s hands and blasted the green-skinned creature full in the face. The thing gave a whistling shriek and spun aside, graceful as a dancer, his spiny mane extended and quivering. Isaac shifted his aim, ice blasting from his hand like water from a fire hose as frost formed across the rocks underneath him. But the creature was too fast. He ducked low, then sprang into the air like a cricket, clearing Isaac’s head in a standing jump and landing behind him in an easy crouch. Before he could turn, he grabbed Isaac around the elbows, dragging his arms back and pinioning them painfully behind him.

  “Now, now. That’s enough of that,” the creature said, needle-fanged mouth still gaping wide. Looking over his shoulder for Alice, he added, “And you had better keep still, if you want your friend’s arms to stay attached.”

  But the rocks were empty. Alice was gone.

  =

  She’d crossed the little clearing, diving behind the sheltering bulk of the woodpile, and waited for a count of five before risking a peek to see if the creature was following. It took her a moment to find him, aided by a human-sounding shout of pa
in. The creature had Isaac by both arms, twisted at an uncomfortable angle, and he used this grip to force Isaac to stumble toward the cottage or dislocate his own shoulder.

  Alice found her mouth hanging open for a moment as she realized the sheer depths of Isaac’s stupidity. When he’d said “Run!” she’d assumed that he had some sort of a plan, that he was going to get away from the awful thing himself with one of his bound creatures. Now it dawned on her that he’d had no idea what he was doing, and he’d told her to escape out of some kind of misplaced chivalrous impulse.

  “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” Alice muttered. If she hadn’t been running, she could have helped. She fought down a flush of shame in her cheeks; from an outsider’s point of view, it would look very much like she’d taken off at the first sign of danger and left him to fend for himself. I assumed he was being sensible. How was I supposed to know he was so stupid?

  The creature frog-marched Isaac through the door, and Alice considered her options. She had to rescue him, obviously. It would serve him right if he got his head bitten off, but that wouldn’t get her any closer to the book they’d come to find. And he did help me with Mr. Black. But if the creatures were going to eat him—and, judging by the fate of the lizard, they liked their meat raw—she didn’t have much time.

  She realized she still had the Swarm thread in her mental grip, which meant that her swarmer was still in place in the pile of kindling. Hurriedly she slipped back into its senses, and saw that all three of the creatures were now clustered excitedly around Isaac, who was backed against their table. The little one was hopping from one foot to the other in excitement, while the purple one leaned over him and ran his long, thin tongue over his teeth.

  “

  A human,” he said. “A real, live, human. I must say, Mah-Li, you never cease to surprise me.”

  “Serendipity, Sah-To,” said the green one, who Alice guessed was Mah-Li. “He was hiding just outside the cottage. Probably lost, poor thing.”