She cried for a long time. When she stopped, she felt empty inside, hollowed out, but it was a good feeling. Like something she’d been bottling up, under pressure, had finally been allowed to escape. She felt lighter, and clean.
Alice rubbed her stinging eyes and mopped ineffectually at the mess she’d made of her father’s clothes. She stepped back, composing herself, and said, “Hello, Father. It’s good to see you.”
He smiled. He looked just as she remembered seeing him last, in a gray suit and his favorite battered hat, standing with his hands in his pockets while she waved from the shore.
“It’s good to see you too,” he said. “You’re looking well.”
“I’m not sure I am well,” Alice said. “I’m not sure—”
She stopped. She wasn’t sure of anything, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask, lest too close an examination disturb something and make her father vanish like a popped soap bubble. But she wanted to say—Are you dead? Am I dead? Is this a dream, or another book, or is this the boat that takes us to heaven?
Her father seemed to be able to read all this in her face. He’d always been able to do that. Alice had never been able to keep any secrets from him.
“Has it been hard?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alice whispered. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “It’s not all bad. But . . . I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you, Alice. More than anything. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” Alice said. “Of course I do.”
He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He went to the door and gave the handle a few spins, then pulled it open. Inside was a long corridor, with an elegant green carpet underfoot. Alice followed her father inside, and noticed the row of portholes that looked out over the walkway and the rail. Her father closed the door behind her and walked to the first of these, beckoning her to follow.
“You should see this,” he said.
Alice frowned. “But—”
“Shhh,” her father said. “Listen.”
A bit confused, Alice bent and put her face to the glass. Instead of a slightly distorted view of the outside of the ship, she found herself looking down into a richly appointed bedroom. She recognized it, after she got over the strange angle. She’d woken up there once before, after her encounter with the Swarm. In the bed, practically buried under thick covers, lay a girl with dark hair, freckles, and a delicate white scar on one cheek. She looked pale and exhausted, with dark circles under her closed eyes. Only the faintest trembling of the blankets indicated she was breathing. A gray cat lay beside her, pressed against her arm.
Alice looked back up at her father. “Is this—”
“Shh.” He indicated the porthole again, and she put her face back against it.
Geryon entered the room. He looked like he had been up all night, his face thin and drawn beneath his drooping whiskers. He went to the bedside and poked the cat, who raised his head and looked up at the old man reproachfully.
“Nothing,” Ashes said. “No change.”
“That counts as good news, under the circumstances,” Geryon said. He found a high-backed chair, dragged it to the bedside, and sat down heavily.
“How long, do you think?” Ashes asked. “Before she . . .”
“It’s hard to say,” Geryon said. “A considerable time, I should think. Maybe never. Having another Reader force himself into the book alongside you is a traumatic process, you know. Something so antithetical to the purpose of the book . . .” He sighed. “We shall see.”
“I’m surprised you bothered,” Ashes said. Alice imagined she could hear a hint of bitterness in the cat’s voice. “I mean, she failed your test.”
“I didn’t have much time to ponder it,” Geryon said. “It seemed better to keep my options open.”
“Options?” Ashes flicked his tail. “So you’re not going to make her forget?”
“I will wait,” Geryon said firmly, “upon events. But I will do what is necessary. A Reader cannot be . . . soft.”
“No,” Ashes muttered, almost too low to hear. “I suppose not.”
Alice looked up from the porthole at her father, then down at herself. “That’s me in there. So—who am I now? Where are we?”
He shrugged. “It’s not for me to say.”
“But . . .” Alice bit her lip experimentally. The pain felt real enough.
“Come on,” her father said.
He walked down the hallway a bit farther, stopping beside the next porthole. Alice looked at him curiously, then bent and put her eyes to the glass. Once again, the scene beyond was not the outside of the ship, but the interior of the room in Geryon’s suite. She was lower down now, closer to her—body, or whatever it was, lying on the bed. Geryon was gone, but Ashes was still there, climbing across her as he walked around in circles, looking for a comfortable spot. His tail lashed. Finally he settled down on her chest in his familiar Sphinx-like posture, staring down at her sleeping face. His paws kneaded gently at the blanket.
“Might be better for you if you never wake up,” he said. “You don’t know what happens when Geryon makes a Reader forget. What’s left over isn’t what you’d call bright. You’d be walking and talking, after a fashion, but alive? Maybe. I don’t know.”
There was a long pause. The cat laid his head across his paws, eyes hooded.
“I’d like the chance to apologize, though. Even if you wouldn’t remember it afterward. After all, if it weren’t for me taking you into the library, you’d never have gotten involved in this in the first place.” His tail flicked, irritated. “That’s just talk, though. You and I both know it isn’t true. Between Geryon and Mother, they’d have gotten to you, one way or the other. But it didn’t have to be me doing it.”
He sounded so miserable that Alice wanted to reach out for him and tell him it was all right. She tried, but her hand found only the wallpaper beside the porthole, and her body on the bed remained stubbornly inert.
The door swung open, and Emma entered, carrying a tray with a steaming bowl on it. Ashes’ head snapped up, then sank down again when he saw who the intruder was. Emma set her tray down on the side-table, then stood waiting, her eyes vacant.
“Go on,” Ashes said. “Get out of here. Go back to your room.”
Emma nodded politely and left without a word. Ashes sighed.
“You see?” he said. “Not very bright.”
Alice stepped away from the porthole and straightened up. The lump was back in her throat.
“Geryon wouldn’t really . . . destroy my memory, would he?” she asked her father.
Is that what happened to Emma? The thought that a normal, living girl could be turned into something like that filled Alice with a sudden, crawling horror.
“I know I didn’t kill that tree-sprite when he told me to, but it was just a helpless little thing.” She reflected and added, “All right, maybe not helpless. And maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do. But it felt right.”
“It was the right thing to do,” her father said. “Whether Geryon thinks so or not.”
Alice felt a warm rush of pleasure at his approval. “I thought so. But now he’s going to do something horrible to me.”
“You’ll find a way through,” he said. “You always do.”
Alice swallowed again. “Thanks.”
He smiled. “Come on. There’s one more to see.”
This time, the porthole looked out from just above the sleeping form on the bed. Alice could make out the door and the bookcases, along with a sofa and a couple of armchairs. Ashes was nowhere to be seen.
The gas lamps were out, and the only light came from the moon, which threw a pale square across the floor through a window. The rest of the room was in shadow. Alice
watched her body breathing, slowly but deeply, and thought it looked a bit better than it had through the last porthole.
A pair of yellow eyes opened in the darkest part of the room, cat-slitted and glowing faintly. Below them was the faintest gleam of ivory, as though of moonlight catching sharp, white teeth. After a moment, two more pairs of eyes joined them, one huge and round like a startled hare’s, the other faintly green with weird, horizontal pupils.
“This is the girl?” said a voice, reedy and whispering.
“Hmm,” said another voice, so deep and resonant, it made Alice’s teeth buzz, even through the glass. “She doesn’t look like much.”
“It’s not a matter of what she looks like.” The third voice was Ending’s dark, feminine purr. “She’s the one we’ve been waiting for.”
“So you say,” said the first voice. “And yet you plan to risk her against our brother?”
“It’s a good point,” the second voice said. “She is nowhere near strong enough. And Geryon has the Dragon. If he’s able to bind it . . .”
“I have been forced to . . . improvise,” Ending said. “Too many powers were on the trail of the Dragon. It will be safer under Geryon’s protection, and he is cautious to a fault. It will be some time before he dares make an attempt. But the girl learns rapidly. In a year, perhaps two, she will be strong enough to defeat our brother and bind him to our cause.”
“If she lives,” said the first voice.
“Hmmm,” said the second. “He’s right. If Geryon catches the scent, he will not let her survive.”
“She may not,” Ending admitted. “I’m doing my best. But if she does—”
“If she lives,” the second voice rumbled, “I’ll be ready.”
“Hmph,” the first voice said. “If she survives, then . . . we’ll see.”
Two pairs of eyes closed and vanished. Ending remained, two luminous yellow circles in the shadows.
“Perhaps I am a fool,” she said. “It has been such a long time. But . . .”
The eyes half closed.
“Good luck . . .”
Alice stepped back from the porthole. For some reason her heart was beating fast, and she looked up at her father for reassurance. He smiled, but she thought he looked a little sad.
“Who were those things?” she said. “Do you know?”
“You’d know better than I would,” he said.
Before she could ask him anything further, he was continuing down the corridor. Instead of another porthole, there was a door, identical to the one they’d come in by. Alice’s father gave the central wheel a few turns, grunting with the effort, and pulled it open a few inches. Beyond it was darkness, as heavy and complete as black velvet.
“We’re going in there?” Alice asked uncertainly.
“You are,” he said.
She thought about that for a while.
“I have to ask,” Alice said. “I know it’s—it doesn’t make any sense. But I have to ask.” She took a deep breath. “Are you dead?”
His expression went flat. “What do you think?”
Alice looked back along the corridor. She looked down at herself, in her father’s favorite dress, and up at him, just as she remembered. She ran a finger across her cheek, where the scar ought to be.
“I think . . .”
He cocked his head, waiting.
“I think this is a dream,” Alice said.
Her father smiled. “I always said you were the smart one in the family.”
Alice went on tiptoes and wrapped her arms around him, feeling his weight, his warmth, the familiar scent of his after-shave. She kissed his cheek softly, and he ruffled her hair in a way that made her feel like a little girl.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, Alice,” he said.
She smiled against his cheek. “I know.”
“And I believe in you. Whatever happens, I have faith that you’ll get through it.”
Alice nodded. Pulling herself away was cruelly hard. She brushed down her dress where it had gotten rumpled, wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeves, and turned to the doorway.
“Through here?” she said.
“Through there.”
There was nothing but blackness. And something else—barely audible—music? She could hardly be certain she’d heard it, but the tiny scraps she could make out sounded somehow familiar. A tune she’d heard once before, and forgotten.
She looked back at her father, at his smile, and tried to burn the image into her memory. If everything else faded, as dreams had a tendency to do, she wanted to keep this.
Then she turned away, blinking back tears, pulled open the door, and stepped into the darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SLEEPING BEAUTY
ALICE OPENED HER EYES.
She lay in the bed in the room in Geryon’s suite, covered in blankets up to her neck. The lamps were out, and the faint silver glow of moonlight outlined the sofa, the chairs, and bookcases.
Her hand came up automatically and brushed her cheek. There was a long, thin scar there.
She sat up carefully, expecting protests from her much-abused body. Somewhat to her surprise, she felt quite well. She was wearing a pair of sky-blue pajamas that were a bit too large for her. Alice threw back the blankets and wiggled her toes, which responded satisfactorily.
She closed her eyes and reached out for the Swarm. The thread was there as always, shining and silver, but it had been joined by another. This one was a deep brown in color, as though it were made of wood, but it bucked and twisted like a living thing. Experimentally, Alice took hold of it, and it thrashed in her mental grip for a while before settling down.
That must be the tree-sprite. Geryon must have come in to rescue me and killed the sprite himself. He’d never told her such a thing was possible, or that he could help her fight and bind a creature. He let me think I was going to die in there!
Opening her eyes again, she looked around the chamber. No one was in evidence, but that didn’t mean much. She cleared her throat and called softly.
“Ashes? Ending? Is anyone there?”
There was no answer. But music filled the air, very faintly, as though from a phonograph playing in a distant room. It was a simple, repetitive melody, and though Alice couldn’t quite place it, she found it maddeningly familiar.
She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. There was a bad moment as the world turned sickeningly around her, but she closed her eyes and counted to ten, and when she opened them again it had settled into more or less its usual orientation. She padded across the carpet in her bare feet to the door, which was closed but not locked.
On the other side of it she found Ashes, curled into a tight ball. She waited for him to acknowledge her, and when he didn’t, she gave him a tentative prod with her foot. Nothing happened.
“Ashes?” Alice bent over him, beginning to worry. “Are you all right?”
She lifted him off the floor entirely. His whiskers twitched, but he hung bonelessly from her hands like a stuffed animal, eyes still firmly closed.
Geryon must have done something to him, Alice thought. She hoped he wasn’t being punished for her sake.
She set the cat down carefully and looked around. She was in the main hall of Geryon’s private suite, a shelf-lined room with a couple of fantastical statues matching those in the main hall. Four doors opened off it, two on each side. Apart from the one she’d come out of, only one was open. The carpet by the doorway was blackened and stained with mud.
Something felt wrong. The proper thing to do was obviously retreat to the bedroom, bar the door, and wait for Geryon to deal with it. Instead, Alice padded forward, skirting the stained carpet, and shifted her mental grip to the Swarm thread, ready to yank swarmers into being all around her. Beside the doorway, she stop
ped for a moment to listen, but there was no sound except for the faint, frustrating music.
Finally, she leaned over and looked inside. She’d been expecting another bedroom, or perhaps a study, but this looked more like a vault. The carpet stopped abruptly, replaced with slate flagstones, and the walls were unpaneled oak set with iron braces. There were shelves built directly into the walls. Sitting on these, at intervals, were a number of small chests of various sizes and shapes, constructed of more or less outlandish materials.
Many were ordinary trunks, or fancy-looking leather-lined cases, but there were also metal lockboxes and elaborately carved all-wood carrying cases. A few looked as though they were made of glass, or transparent crystal, blurry contents barely visible. They were all locked, in some cases more than once. One case bore a complicated-looking set of dials that could be set to a combination of numbers, while another was wound about with an intricate chain of cut flowers.
In the center of all of this lay a creature roughly as long as Alice was tall, huddled in a heap. It was a bit like a dog and also quite a bit like a spider, with a mastiff’s build and a wild combination of scales and thick, wiry tufts of hair across its hide. Six long legs, heels tipped with vicious, bony spurs, lay tangled underneath it. Its head was flattened and disturbingly human-like, but with long, knife-like fangs and a lolling purple tongue.
It was also asleep, and apparently as unwakeable as Ashes, because something had happened to the glass casket just beside its head that probably had made quite a bit of noise. This had been one of the larger chests, complete with a glass padlock with visible brass inner workings. The glass lock must have been more formidable than it appeared, since whoever had broken into the chest had bypassed it by simply smashing through the top. Whatever had been inside the chest was gone. Spots and speckles of blood were all around the broken casket on the shelf and edging some of the jagged shards, making a trail to the doorway where Alice stood and out onto the carpet.
The Forbidden Library Page 18
