The Fall of the Readers

by Django Wexler

  “I have seen bad times,” the old man said, and she believed it. Every year of them was graven on his face. “Wars, disease, famine. My second son, her father”—he nodded at the child—“died in the Great War. Her mother in the Spanish Influenza epidemic. But even that was something I could understand. This is like a bad dream come to life.”

  “Where will you go?” she said.

  “My brother has a house in the country. I hope to find him there.” He grimaced, then shook his head. “I have food, for the three of us, but it is barely enough. I can spare perhaps a little bread—”

  “What?” Alice blinked, aware that neither she nor Isaac was carrying obvious supplies. “No! No, it’s fine. We have a camp up ahead. Plenty of food.”

  The old man was silent for a moment. Alice got the sense that he knew she was lying about something, but decided not to press the point.

  “If we keep on this road,” she said, “can we get close to that mountain?” She pointed to their objective.

  The man looked, then nodded. “But there is nothing there. Just woods and rocks. And . . .” He hesitated. “It is a bad place. Superstition, I would have said a month ago. No such thing as monsters. Now, though . . . best to stay away.”

  “We have friends we need to meet,” Alice improvised. “But thank you. And thank you for offering food.”

  He nodded. “If you change your mind, there would be room for you at my brother’s house.”

  “Thank you.” Alice caught Isaac’s eye. “We’d better move on while it’s still light.”

  “You wouldn’t catch a cat offering up his last mouse when he was starving,” Ashes muttered as they passed on.

  “Shh,” Alice said, but a bit too late. She could hear a piping voice behind them.

  “Her cat talked, Grandpa! It talked—”

  She and Isaac walked a little faster, until they were out of sight. Alice glared at Ashes, who licked his fur nonchalantly.

  “Anyway,” she said, “it’s a human thing. You probably wouldn’t understand.”

  “He seemed so hopeless,” Isaac said.

  “They have it worse than we do,” Alice said. “At least we know what we’re up against. They’re just like . . . ants, after somebody’s turned the ant farm upside down.” She hated the metaphor at once—describing humans as ants was something Geryon would have done. “The world has changed and they don’t even know why.”

  Isaac was silent for a while. “You’re right,” he said eventually. “That is worse.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE MOUTH OF HADES

  AS THEY APPROACHED, ALICE could feel the magic protecting the portal, faint but distinct in the non-magical landscape, like a single musical note in a silent room. She followed the feeling, and eventually, they found themselves walking down a narrow gully, paralleling a small, ice-cold stream. Up ahead, the water disappeared into a cluster of enormous boulders.

  “That must be the cave,” Alice said.

  “You said there was a ward protecting it,” Isaac said, looking around. “I feel something, but . . .”

  “I think that’s just to keep normal humans away. It makes them want to ignore this place.” She could feel the shape of the spell in the air. “Geryon said there was a guardian, though.”

  “There’s always a guardian,” Ashes said. “Readers love nothing more than sticking a horrible monster in front of anything someone else might want.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for any horrible monsters,” Alice said.

  Amid the jumble of rocks, there was a narrow passage. They had to squeeze through, one at a time, and the stream water splashed icy cold over Alice’s bare feet. Inside, the passage widened into a corridor, and she stamped to get her blood flowing as Isaac wriggled through. She pulled on the devilfish thread, and her hands began to glow, pushing back the dark.

  There was more magic in the air here, Alice could feel it. Written somewhere inside were wards to keep the tunnel standing, free of cave-ins and erosion. This place was old, like the arch outside Anaxomander’s study. From what Geryon had said, it had been here at least since the Readers struck their bargain with the labyrinthine, and probably longer than that. Thousands of years.

  “There’s something on the walls,” Isaac said.

  Alice raised her hand, and saw that he was right. Someone had painted figures there, in crude, bold colors, washed out in the devilfish’s weird green light. There was a line of them, marching into a cave and down a passage into a swirl of darkness.

  “Charming,” Ashes said. “Can we move on? I’ve had enough of caves to last a lifetime.”

  There was only one path. It sloped gently downward, and Alice felt like it was getting warmer with each step. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, like long fangs, almost brushing her shoulders.

  Finally, there was a light ahead, an orange glow like a distant bonfire. It got brighter as they went, so Alice let the devilfish’s glow fade. The corridor widened out, becoming a large, round space, with the source of the light at one end.

  A wild portal. It looked like a curtain in the air, translucent and constantly in motion. Now and then it would flatten out, offering a glimpse into roaring fire or pitch darkness.

  In front of the portal, a huge shape was huddled in on itself. It stirred, and a dog’s head rose up. Dark narrow eyes turned toward her. It was big, she realized, bigger even than the giant wolf Torment.

  “I think we’ve found the guardian,” Isaac said.

  Two more heads rose up, their gazes following the first. The three necks came together, into a single broad-shouldered body.

  Ashes arched his back, hissing, then took off in a gray streak.

  “I’d say we have,” Alice said.

  The three-headed dog leaped to its feet, and the cavern suddenly rang with its enormous, earth-shattering barks. Then the barks abruptly cut off, and the huge thing was advancing toward them. Each head growled, three deep rumbles that combined into a weird tri-tone sound, like an airplane droning overhead. Alice looked at Isaac and shouted, “The Siren! Use the Siren!”

  “It’s too big—” he started.

  “Just do it!”

  Isaac nodded, and the ghostly figure of the Siren appeared in front of him, a female figure dressed in long, flowing robes and almost completely transparent. She spread her arms and began to sing as Alice covered her ears, and the effect was immediate. All three heads snapped around, staring at the ethereal creature. The three muzzles began to droop, eyes closing.

  “It’s working,” Isaac said, his voice still tinny. “How did you know?”

  “The legend,” Alice said. When he looked back at her blankly, she recalled he probably hadn’t studied Greek mythology. “A hero named Orpheus goes down into the underworld, and he has to get past a three-headed dog. He puts it to sleep with music. I thought—”

  The left head was sound asleep, eyes closed. But the center one suddenly perked up, following the sound of Alice’s voice, and began growling again. The right head followed suit.

  “That’s not good,” Isaac said.

  “Keep the Siren singing,” Alice said. “I think it’s working. I’ll distract them.”

  Before he could reply, she ran forward. The huge dog crouched, working itself into a pounce, and her sudden movement caught it off guard. Alice pulled on the Swarm thread and Spike’s strength and toughness, and ran straight at the enormous thing. Its jaws opened wide, and she was hit with a blast of warm breath and the smell of rotting meat. She almost choked, and jumped sideways as the huge jaws came down, big enough that it could have swallowed her whole.

  “Alice!” Isaac shouted.

  “I’m fine!” She dodged to the left, and gave the dog a solid whack on the shin to make sure she held its interest. The right head was looking seriously drowsy, though the center was still wide-awake. “Keep on it!�
�� She scrambled underneath the beast, and it tried clumsily to follow her.

  “Come on, ugly!” Alice said, grinning. Can’t catch me, can you? She ran straight at it, ducking past its legs and passing directly underneath it again. The dog might not be fast enough to get its jaws around her, but it was smarter than she’d given it credit for, and when she went underneath it, it simply sat down, flopping to the ground with a great whuff. Alice was flattened, buried in rolls of warm, hairy skin.

  Alice scrambled sideways on her back, pushing folds of skin out of the way, trying to get clear of the dog’s bulk. She got her head and arms out from underneath it and took a desperate breath. It had half rolled onto its side now, twisting to get at her. The one head that wasn’t asleep came in for a bite, with Alice’s legs still trapped. Two huge canine teeth, each as long as a sword, came together almost delicately to pin Alice between them. She put a hand on each one and pushed, throwing all of Spike’s strength into keeping the jaws open. All she could see was the inside of the dog’s mouth, enormous, yellowing teeth and a flat, red tongue almost as big as she was. A wave of slobber drenched her, and her arms began to tremble with the effort of holding firm.

  All at once, the pressure loosened. The dog’s enormous head rolled to one side, away from Alice, and she let go of its teeth. Its eyes, heavy-lidded, stared at her for a moment, and then it gave a long canine sigh and fell asleep.

  It took Alice a few minutes to get herself out from under the thing, while huge doggy snores echoed around the cavern. Isaac hurried over, Ashes pacing at his heels. When Isaac saw she was all right, he smiled a little teasingly.

  “Did the old story say anything about Orpheus getting sat on?” he said.

  “Or drooled on?” Ashes said, and shuddered.

  Alice rolled her eyes. “Oh, hush. It worked, didn’t it?”

  Ashes eyed her drool-soaked clothes. “A fate worse than death.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE BONEYARD

  I WAS READY TO SPRING into action, of course,” Ashes said as they walked over to the portal. “A cat can take on a dog any day, even if it does have three heads.”

  “Come on,” Isaac said. “That thing could have used you for a toothpick.”

  “It’s not about size.” The cat sniffed. “It’s about strength of mind. Dogs fundamentally don’t have it.”

  “You can fight the next giant dog we find, then,” Alice said.

  “On second thought,” Ashes said, “that sort of thing is probably beneath me.”

  They stood in front of the wild portal, Ashes once again on Alice’s shoulder. Isaac looked nervous.

  “I’ve used one of these before,” Alice assured him. “You just walk through it.”

  “The other side doesn’t look very pleasant.”

  “Geryon did say people used to think it was the underworld,” Alice admitted.

  “And how are we supposed to find the portal back? It could be miles away, right?”

  “My theory is that we’ll ask someone,” Alice said. “That’s what I did when I was looking for the Palace of Glass.”

  “What if there’s no one to ask?” Isaac said.

  “Then we’ll—”

  “Figure something out,” Ashes supplied. “Right? Let’s go, before our canine friend wakes up.”

  Alice nodded. She took hold of Isaac’s hand again, and they stepped forward. As before, the passage had some of the same feeling of using a portal-book, but instead of being orderly and organized, the power rose and fell around them like a whirlwind. It passed by in an instant, and they were standing on gray, powdery sand.

  Ahead of them, stretching as far as the eye could see, was a landscape out of a nightmare. Huge fires burned everywhere, flames the size of buildings leaping up from cracks in the ground and licking into the sky. Above was darkness, no sun or even any stars, so the only light came from the shifting, uneven glow of the fires. Spread across the ashen ground were piles of gigantic bones. Ribs and skulls, leg-bones and vertebrae. The skulls were larger than cars, the rib cages as big as houses. They were all black, streaked with a rusty red at the edges.

  Things were moving among the bones, small groups of man-sized creatures. At first Alice had a hard time making them out—they moved strangely, and the flames were often visible through them. After a moment, she realized that this was because they were skeletons, their bones the same black as the bones littering the ground, but stuck together in roughly humanoid shapes. What they were doing was less clear. It looked almost like they were dancing, a mad, skeletal caper across the blasted landscape in groups of a dozen or more, moving without apparent plan or purpose but somehow staying together.

  Ashes cleared his throat.

  “Well,” he said. “Finding the portal back should be easy. We’ll just ask the nearest dancing skeleton, shall we?”

  For the moment, they decided to find a place to rest.

  They picked their way out among the bones, giving a wide berth to the chasms that spat fire and the nearest bands of skeletons. More cliffs of black rock dotted the landscape, and Alice headed for a sheltered nook where they were unlikely to be seen.

  As they walked, she discovered that the rusty red spots on the bones were, in fact, rust. Touching the giant remains revealed that they were made of iron, or something like it, although Alice had no idea if that meant they were actually parts to some enormous machine or left over from a monstrous creature with a metal skeleton. Or, for that matter, if they were ever covered in flesh at all. The dancing skeletons seem to manage without. She remembered Flicker’s world, with its wheeling sky and no sun, and reminded herself not to make assumptions.

  They had to duck under some of the iron bones to reach the cliff face, but with a tangle of broken ribs and half a jawbone shielding them from view, Alice felt reasonably secure. She sat down heavily on the gray sand, and Isaac slumped against the rock with a sigh. Ashes looked dubiously at the ground, then carefully jumped from Alice’s shoulder to her lap and settled down.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said.

  “You can say that again,” Ashes said.

  “You didn’t even walk anywhere!” Isaac said to the cat. “I wish I had somebody I could ride on.”

  Alice grinned, and scratched Ashes behind the ears. He rolled over and rubbed his head against her knee. Her eyes drifted closed.

  “Alice?” Isaac said.

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you going to do if we win? If this First banishes the labyrinthine, and we get the others out. What then?”

  Alice kept her eyes closed. She felt a pain in her chest, just behind her breastbone, and for a moment it was hard to breathe. She did her best to keep it out of her voice.

  “I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “Have you?”

  “A little. The world will be changed, won’t it? The magical world, and the human world.”

  “It will. And they’re both the same world, especially now. There’s no pretending otherwise anymore.”

  “I think people are going to need help,” he said. “Humans and magical creatures are going to have to work together, like we did at Geryon’s house.”

  She nodded. “That’s going to be hard for both sides.”

  “We can help them, though. We might be the only ones who can.” He sounded a little excited by the prospect. “You and I—and the others—we’ll have to make sure they talk to each other instead of fighting.”

  He’s changed. When Isaac had first come to Geryon’s estate, breaking in to steal the Dragon book, he hadn’t cared much about anything except himself and his master’s orders. But that’s not quite right, either. He’d worked with her when they’d been trapped in the Dragon’s book. And he’d helped her in Esau’s fortress. He’s always had a good heart. He just needed to learn to open it.

  “Yes,” she said, f
orcing a smile despite the lump in her throat. “I think that’s exactly what we should do.”

  “Have there always been paintings on that wall?” Isaac said.

  Alice, who’d managed to doze off, blinked and sat up. Ashes was sound asleep in her lap. She followed Isaac’s pointing finger, and in the rising and falling light of the flames, she saw that the black cliff behind them had a crude drawing scrawled across it in bright ochre pigment—upside-down V shapes that Alice assumed were supposed to be mountains and a standing woman with long, straight hair and a dress that hung to the ground. She was barely more than a stick figure, but the artist had captured astonishing detail in only a few lines. The face was particularly expressive. In the slightest twist of paint, the artist had captured a raised eyebrow and a faintly mocking smile.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, frowning. “We were tired when we got here, but I think we’d have noticed that. How did it get there?”

  “I’m not sure,” Isaac said. “It was there when I turned around.”

  “She looks like she’s watching us,” Alice said bemusedly.

  “I hope not,” Isaac said. “She doesn’t look very friendly.”

  Something moved on the surface of the rock. As Alice watched, words scrawled themselves across the stone, stroke by stroke, as though an unseen painter were hard at work. The characters were unfamiliar, but as usual the meaning came through. It said:

  “YOU DON’T LOOK SO GOOD YOURSELF.”

  “Um,” Isaac said, taking a step away from the wall. “Okay. Alice?”

  The figure was changing, too, very slightly. She uncrossed her arms, and the smile on her face widened. She didn’t move smoothly, but rather in small jerks, as though she were being rapidly erased and redrawn several times a second. It looked a bit like the stutter of a malfunctioning film projector.

  Alice got to her feet, tipping Ashes to the ground with a sleepy yowl of protest. She turned to face the rock and said, “Can you hear us?”