The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  “Are you planning a prison break, then?”

  Alice paused again. If stealing the book would be bad, freeing Isaac would be infinitely worse. But the way Geryon treated him . . . She winced as she remembered the casual way he’d ordered Mr. Black to hurt Isaac until he got what he wanted out of him, and how he’d locked away her voice.

  He’s a Reader, Ending had told her. He is cruel, because that is his nature.

  “For the moment,” Ashes said, interrupting her thoughts, “the question is moot. Geryon wants to see you.”

  Alice froze. “Now?”

  “When you’ve got a moment,” Ashes drawled. “You know how patient he is.”

  Alice knocked at the door to Geryon’s suite, and he answered it promptly. She was relieved to find that he seemed to be in a good mood, smiling genially.

  “Good morning, Alice,” he said. “I trust that a night’s rest has helped you recover from yesterday’s exertions.”

  “Yes, sir. I feel much better.”

  “Splendid.” Geryon stepped aside and waved her in, shutting the door behind her. “I’m sorry I had to treat you so roughly. Finding an agent of one of my enemies in my own library was a considerable shock to me, as you might imagine.”

  “Your enemies, sir?” Alice said. “I thought you said Anaxomander was a friend.”

  He chuckled. “I’m afraid that when you reach my age, child, the line between friends and foes becomes a little blurred. I have no quarrel with Anaxomander at the moment, certainly, but that doesn’t mean he would hesitate to strike me should the opportunity present itself and he saw a profit in it. That’s the way of things, with Readers. The only path to true friendship is endless vigilance.”

  “I see.” Alice hesitated. She was strongly tempted to tell what she knew about Mr. Black, regardless of Ashes’ warning, but she managed to hold back. I can always tell him later. Instead she said, “What about Isaac?”

  “The boy? What about him?”

  “What will happen to him?”

  “Oh, I’ll send him home eventually. His master and I will work out some sort of bargain.” Geryon’s face darkened momentarily. “Not before he tells me how he got into my library, of course.”

  Alice swallowed. “And . . . me?”

  “You?” Geryon pointed to the door to his sitting room, where two armchairs sat facing each other beside a hearth. There was a rich, warm scent of leather and old wood that reminded her of her father’s office back in New York. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not upset with me?”

  “Oh! No, of course not.” He gestured for her to sit, and took the opposite chair himself. “You couldn’t have known what the boy was up to. I imagine he spun you some fantastic story. Consider it a lesson—being a Reader means learning whom to trust, and unfortunately the answer is often ‘no one.’ No, as a matter of fact, you are progressing more quickly than I anticipated!”

  “Thank you, sir,” Alice said carefully.

  “That’s why I’ve called you here today,” Geryon said. “The time has come for your second trial.”

  “Trial?” Alice hesitated. “I thought you said I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Trial as in task or labor,” Geryon said. “For a Reader, it means entering a prison-book and binding the creature within it to your will. You have succeeded at the first trial, with the Swarm, and the first is always the most dangerous for a new Reader. Now, with that power behind you, you will confront another. And eventually a third, and so on, until your power is sufficient to bind anything you wish.”

  “Oh.” Alice looked around the study. “Now?”

  “Now,” Geryon confirmed. “Your duties will grow more dangerous, and you must be prepared. Anaxomander may be angry, and it’s possible . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “In any event, I have selected the book for you. It will not be easy, but you should be successful if you use what you have learned.”

  “But . . .” Alice hesitated. “If I go into a book, I won’t be able to come out again unless I kill whatever it is, right?”

  “Unless it submits to the binding of its own accord, correct.”

  “I’m not sure I want to kill anything,” Alice said. “Even monsters, if they’ve never done anything to me.”

  Geryon smiled thinly. “Poor child. I wish I could spare you this, I truly do. But believe me when I tell you it is the only way.”

  Ending’s voice seemed to rumble in her ear. His magic is based on cruelty and death.

  “Besides,” Geryon went on, “it’s not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can’t you? You’ve seen that with the Swarm.”

  Alice wanted to say that even if the prisoner couldn’t die, they could still feel pain. But Geryon had a determined expression, and after last night she was afraid to test him.

  “Are you allowed to tell me what’s in the book?” she asked.

  “Of course. It’s a variety of tree-sprite, though an uncommonly strong one. A vicious little thing, truth be told, but I have every confidence in you.” He picked up a thick, leather-bound volume from the floor beside the chair, apparently no different from those that lined the walls of the study. “Are you ready?”

  What would happen, Alice thought, if I said no? Nothing good. She nodded.

  “Something you may not know,” Geryon said, “is that anyone touching the prison-book here in the real world can look inside, once someone has opened the way. So I will be able to observe your performance.”

  As if fighting for my life wasn’t enough, I’m going to be graded as well.

  He held out the book, and she accepted it and settled back in the armchair, old leather creaking around her.

  “Good luck,” said Ashes, from under the chair.

  “Thanks,” Alice said. “Here goes nothing.”

  She opened the book. There was a moment of eye-twisting incomprehensibility, and then she read:

  Alice found herself on a grassy hill, overlooking a little valley with a stream . . .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE TREE-SPRITE

  ALICE FOUND HERSELF ON a grassy hill, overlooking a little valley with a stream that splashed and burbled through a racecourse of mossy rocks. She could see for miles in all directions, across rolling grassland spotted with small forests. Mountains, blued with distance, lined every horizon, as though she were standing at the bottom of an enormous basin. The air smelled sweet with growing things, and a warm sun beamed down from overhead.

  Long green-and-yellow grass stalks rustled all around her, reaching up under her dress to brush against her thighs. She brushed them away, wishing idly that she’d worn trousers, and turned in a careful circle. Not far away, on the highest point of the hill, there was an enormous willow tree so perfectly circular, it resembled an overturned bowl.

  That had to be where she was intended to go. Alice felt a brief, rebellious spark, and wondered what would happen if she turned her back on it, just walked out across the beckoning fields and never went anywhere near the tree. But Geryon was watching, and in any event he’d told her that the world of a prison-book wasn’t really real, only real enough to contain the prisoner. She wondered if she’d eventually walk into a painted backdrop, like an incautious actor on a movie set.

  Reaching out for the silver thread that led to the Swarm and keeping it firmly in her mental grip, Alice walked toward the tree.

  She reached the curtain of hanging leaves, and parted it with one hand. The inside was shadowy and quiet. The willow’s overhang had smothered the grass, leaving bare, hard earth underfoot, broken here and there by the knots and gnarls of the great tree’s branches. Overhead, the branches of the trees stretched in all directions.

  On one of those branches sat a . . . thing. When Geryon had said “tree-sprite,�
� Alice had pictured something that looked like Vespidian, only painted in delicate greens and browns instead of yellow and black. This was a different sort of being altogether, vaguely ape-like in shape and massively bulky, covered all over in thick, dry bark. It had no head, only a slight bulge above its shoulders that showed two deep-set eyes. Enormous, outsized arms ended in heavy, gnarled fingers tipped with ragged claws, and short but similarly massive legs sported long, finger-like toes. It really was made of wood, Alice saw—here and there along its barky surface, she could see thin, protruding twigs and even a few hanging leaves.

  It sat motionless for a while, glaring at her with its brilliant green eyes. Alice wasn’t quite sure what to do. She was supposed to kill the thing, Geryon had said, but she had never deliberately started a fight with anyone in her life, and hadn’t the least idea how to go about doing it. Instead she cleared her throat and held out her palms in what she hoped was a non-threatening manner.

  “Hello,” she said. “I’m Alice.”

  The tree-sprite made no reply, other than to shift slightly on its perch. Encouraged, Alice took a step closer.

  “Can you understand me? I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Well, she thought, it’s true. I don’t want to hurt anyone.

  The thing made a noise, halfway between a grunt and the dry sound of a dead branch snapping. Alice took another step forward, until she was almost underneath it, looking upward.

  “If you can understand me,” she said, “come down, and we can talk about things.”

  The tree-sprite leaped, swinging completely around the branch and hurling itself toward Alice with astonishing speed. It came at her face-first, arms extended, ragged-edged claws spread wide. Alice jumped backward just in time as it hit the ground with the force of a cannonball, rebounded neatly into another leap, and landed on its haunches a few feet away.

  Alice backed away, tugging hurriedly on the silver thread. A dozen swarmers popped into being in front of her, lining up like a football squad.

  “We don’t have to fight,” Alice said nervously. “If you would just listen to me . . .”

  Geryon’s voice suddenly filled her skull. “You can’t reason with it, Alice. If it could be talked to, it wouldn’t be in a prison-book in the first place.”

  The tree-sprite raised one hand to touch a low-hanging branch, as though preparing to fling itself back into the canopy. Alice, looking over her shoulder at the sound of rustling leaves, saw the willow fronds behind her twitch and reach inward as though pressed by a strong breeze, then spread out toward her like a mass of writhing tendrils. She gave an involuntary shriek and backpedaled, away from the sprite and the searching leaves, only to back into another hanging branch. The tree-sprite’s clawed fingers, nails now sunk smoothly into the bark of the branch, twitched as though they were manipulating a marionette, and the limb behind Alice twisted out of place with a mass of rustling, groaning sounds, curving around to embrace her.

  She quickly lost all desire to talk to the thing. She ducked away from the circling branch, and at a mental command the swarmers charged beak-first like a tiny squadron of lancers. They pecked the tree-sprite around the legs, ripping viciously at its wooden skin and tearing it away in strips. This appeared to bother the thing not at all, however, and it swept its free paw down to scatter the little creatures, grabbing one that was unable to get its beak free in time and hurling it against the trunk of the tree. Alice expected it to bounce, but instead it simply sank into the wooden surface as though into muddy ground, the wood rippling and closing over it. An instant later, she cried out with the little creature’s pain as it died, remorseless wood closing all around it with the strength of an industrial press.

  The rest of the swarmers closed in again, but the tree-sprite took hold of the branch with both hands and lifted itself off the ground and out of their reach. More tree limbs were bending inward, the perfect dome of the willow folding in on itself in a cacophony of tearing leaves and splintering twigs. Willow fronds spread out all around Alice, cutting her off in three directions and forcing her back toward the tree trunk. The ground under her feet writhed, roots shifting and groping as they tried to trip her.

  Alice ducked the flailing limbs and dodged backward, rapidly running out of room. The groping branches were clumsy and easy to avoid, but the willow fronds were much more agile. A look over her shoulder told her that she had only a couple of feet left before she came up against that deadly trunk, and a curtain of leaves surrounded her almost completely. It didn’t reach quite to the ground, though—

  There wasn’t time to think about it. She ran forward, feinting left, then right, then throwing herself to the ground in a roll that she hoped would take her past the curtain and out into the open. She felt a moment of exultation as she felt the leaves brush by her, straining but unable to reach. A bare instant later, her headlong tumble ended hard against a clump of roots that had risen in her path, sending a jolt of pain through her shoulder. She scrabbled to get over it, but the whole patch of dirt she lay on was rising, and before she could get past, she felt the willow fronds winding around her.

  Desperately, Alice called on the Swarm. First a dozen and then more of the little creatures popped into being, stabbing and slashing at the willow switches with their beaks, trying to hack their way to the knots that were already winding around Alice’s limbs. The sharpened edges of their beaks could cut the fronds, but for every one they severed, two more snaked into place. After a moment of confusion, the willow was fighting back, reaching out for the swarmers and wrapping around them or grabbing their legs. The swarmers tried to stay clear, surprisingly agile, but first one and then another were caught. The dangling fronds hurled them into the trunk of the tree, like a zookeeper flicking morsels into the mouth of a waiting lion, and their dying pain exploded in the back of Alice’s skull.

  In spite of her efforts, the willow branches had a solid hold around her waist, arms, and legs, and they lifted her into the air. The edges of the leaves, stiffened until they were as hard as glass, could cut like razors. They’d slashed her sleeves to ribbons and were threatening to do the same to her skin. Alice let the swarmers vanish and drew their thread inside herself, thickening her skin to the same rubbery consistency as theirs while the branches tightened their grip with bone-cracking strength.

  The tree-sprite itself approached, riding a twisting tree branch, one hand still buried in the wood and twitching as though the myriad limbs were extensions of its fingers. Its green eyes regarded her coldly as the thick ropes of twisting fronds tightened and the razor-leaves pressed tighter. She wondered if it was curious why she was still struggling; certainly anything made of ordinary flesh and blood would already have been crushed to a gooey paste. As it was, her Swarm-infused flesh resisted the pressure, but the tight press made it difficult to draw breath, and spots were already dancing in front of her eyes.

  After a long pause, the tree-sprite twitched its buried fingers, and the willow fronds responded. Alice found herself turning helplessly, branches groaning around her as she was pressed toward the thick tree-trunk. Even the Swarm’s power wouldn’t help her survive that, as several poor swarmers had already demonstrated. She struggled, but she might as well have been trying to push over a tree with her bare hands. The air was full of the sound of splintering bark and twigs as the branches bent nearly double, and she could smell the sweet tang of sap.

  If Geryon was going to rescue her at the last minute, she thought, surprisingly calm, then that minute was rapidly approaching. The trunk of the tree loomed in front of her, as menacing in its stolid immobility as the slavering jaw of a monster and just as deadly. She tried not to picture being fed into it, a little at a time—

  Geryon would let it happen, she realized. He would sit there, in his comfortable study, and let it happen. It would save him the trouble of dealing with her failure and erasing her memories. She felt a sudden, frantic rage, cutting through
the terror like a knife. No, she thought. I am not going to die. Not today.

  She pulled on the Swarm thread, as hard as she could. There was a pop, like the sound the swarmers made, but a hundred times louder.

  Alice became the Swarm.

  The willow fronds sprang apart, taken by surprise by a sudden lack of resistance, like a man leaning against a suddenly open door. Swarmers poured between the fronds, a cascade of them, dozens and dozens. They pattered and bounced on the root-gnarled ground like a strange, hard rain, rapidly righting themselves and huddling together into a nearly solid mass. When they moved, they ran in a bunch, parting to clear roots or flailing branches and flowing back together afterward, like a school of minnows.

  Alice had a hundred tiny hearts and two hundred legs, all moving at once. In the first instant, the pain of so many fragmented perceptions overwhelmed her, and she thought she would go mad. She wanted to back away, release the Swarm’s perceptions as she did when she peered through their eyes, but this time there was nowhere to go. She wanted to scream, but didn’t know how.

  It was that first instinct, the terrified desire to curl up into a ball until the horror went away, that saved her. The swarmers took over, flowing around the clumsy, reaching branches like a tide. She didn’t need to control the little bodies, like a puppeteer jerking their limbs about. The swarmers knew how to move, just as her human body knew how to walk or jump or run.

  No sooner had she gotten the hang of this than her perceptions resolved as well, snapping into place like a trompe l’oeil painting into its component parts. Alice realized in that moment that she had never really understood the Swarm. She’d thought of it as a pack of creatures, like a bunch of wolves running side by side, but it wasn’t like that at all. They were one creature in a hundred bodies, one mind—her mind. And those bodies knew how to use their multiple eyes, just as well as Alice’s own body could use her two. She could see all around her, see all sides of a branch as the swarmers split up to run past it. The sudden rush of understanding was such a glorious sensation, she forgot her pain completely.