The Mad Apprentice

by Django Wexler

  “Time for another plan, I think!” Ashes shouted.

  The dinosaur shook the ragged ends of the tree branches off itself and glared at Alice with small, dark eyes. Alice stared back at it for a moment, then turned and ran.

  “What are you doing?” Ashes shouted.

  “Thinking!” Alice shouted back.

  “Think faster!”

  Branches whipped at her face, but her Swarm-toughened skin kept her from feeling the impacts. She was more concerned about tripping on the slippery, muddy ground. The dinosaur was pounding along behind her, and rubber skin wouldn’t help if it got her with those horns.

  In a straightaway, the race would have been no contest. In spite of its stubby legs, the horned monster’s tremendous strength could generate a considerable turn of speed, and if it was getting tired at all, it didn’t show. Alice was already winded, and she only stayed ahead by ducking and dodging around bushes and past tree trunks, leaping lightly over narrow puddles and splashing through larger ones. The dinosaur skidded back and forth in her wake like a car trying to drive on a sheet of ice, legs kicking up sprays of goopy mud.

  Think faster. She might be able to grow a tree to the size and thickness it would need to capture the thing, but that would take time she didn’t have. Besides, Ashes might get hurt. I need something quicker—

  The sound of running water came from ahead of her. It was the stream she’d crossed earlier, a clear, deep channel amidst the brackish standing water of the swamp. At the sight of it, she put her head down and summoned a burst of speed, breaking between a couple of trees with the dinosaur still right on her tail.

  When she reached the bank, Alice jumped, aiming for a nice big pool created by a fallen log and hoping desperately she wasn’t about to break her leg against a rock. She hit the water with a mighty splash, the sound of which almost drowned out Ashes’ plaintive cries.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no, I don’t like this plan, think harder, Aliiiiiice—”

  Then she was underwater. The stream was as warm as bathwater, and tasted faintly of sulfur and dirt. The pool was only just deeper than Alice was tall, and swimming in all her clothes was harder than she’d expected. She fought through the clanging dimness, waiting—

  The dinosaur followed her in, only moments later. She wasn’t sure if it had wanted to or not, but it had been moving far too quickly to stop itself on the muddy ground, so it had ended up in the stream whatever its intention. It thrashed and wriggled, only a few feet away from her, surrounded by a froth of white water and bubbles.

  The very first time Alice had ever fought a creature, she’d managed to trap it in deep water until it drowned. It was immediately obvious, though, that this was not going to be an exact reprise of that victory. The dinosaur righted itself quickly, and unlike the swarmers, it could swim, if only in a clumsy dog paddle. The water wasn’t deep enough or wide enough for Alice to hide for long.

  Fortunately, Alice had no intention of hiding. She had acquired a few tricks since that first night, and now she reached for the deep blue thread that led to the last creature she’d conquered. Letting the Swarm thread go, she wrapped the devilfish thread around herself, over and over until its power flooded through her body and she began to change.

  There was a nauseating moment of fluidity between forms, but then her new body settled into place. She’d become an enormous, vicious-looking fish with a broad, fan-shaped tail and hundreds of tiny needle-sharp teeth. Patches of scales on her flanks glowed, turning the pool into a weird, flickering nightmare of shadow and unearthly green radiance, but the dinosaur was easily visible as it paddled toward shore. With a flick of her tail, Alice-the-fish surged forward, her jaw opening wide.

  The dinosaur heard her coming, and lowered its horns in her direction, but in this form Alice was far more agile in the water. She darted easily around the clumsy thing and went for its shoulder, farther back than it could twist its head to snap at her. The strength in the devilfish’s jaw was immense, and it felt like the easiest thing in the world to drive those hundreds of teeth through tough, scaly skin and into muscle. Blood filled Alice’s mouth; had she still been a girl, she would have gagged, but to the fish, the taste was heavenly.

  Instead of ripping and tearing, as a real fish might have, Alice pulled. The dinosaur was a clumsy swimmer, and though it thrashed its legs, it was unable to resist being drawn back and down into the center of the pool until its head was completely underwater. Once she had it there, there was nothing to do but wait for it to give in. The creature’s struggles became increasingly frantic, but Alice felt nothing but comfortable, warm water sluicing easily through her gills.

  Submit, she thought at the dinosaur, extending her will. Submit. She could escape the prison-book by killing the prisoner, but she didn’t like to do that if she didn’t have to, even if it was only a dumb animal. Even the stupidest creatures, she’d found, could understand the concept of dominance.

  Eventually, the dinosaur got the message. She could feel its resistance collapse, the essence of its spirit twining out into a thread that would be forever linked to her. As it did, the world began to fade away as the magic of the prison-book recognized that she’d accomplished her task and sent her back to where she’d come from.

  When reality snapped back, for a horrible moment she was drowning, choking, flopping wildly in a strange, alien environment. Hurriedly, she unwrapped the devilfish thread. A moment later, she was a girl again, lying on her back and gasping for breath, dripping muddy water onto Geryon’s study rug.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE WAY FORWARD

  “WELL DONE,” SAID GERYON. He was at his desk, writing something, and he didn’t look up.

  It took Alice a moment to gather enough breath to sit up. Being a fish left her feeling a bit wobbly, and she had to concentrate to remember how her hands and feet worked. By the time she’d gotten a hold of herself, Geryon had laid his pen carefully aside and turned around.

  “Are you all right?” His voice was devoid of sympathy. As ever, Geryon could have passed for a jolly old grandpa—shabby, ink-stained clothes, flyaway gray hair and wild, bushy sideburns—except for his eyes. They were dark, exacting, and intelligent, forever the eyes of a master sitting in judgment. Geryon had helped Alice—saved her, really, from the fairy Vespidian and the other agents of the old Readers who wanted to kidnap her—but when she met his gaze, it reminded her that he was not in any sense her friend.

  “I’m fine, sir,” Alice said. “Just winded.” She looked around. “Ashes? Are you okay?”

  There was no answer, and Alice had a moment of worry. Ashes had probably gone into the stream along with the dinosaur, but she hadn’t seen him when she’d dragged the creature under. He must have gotten away. Cats can swim, right?

  Then she heard a long, low, growl, and sighted a dark shape huddled under one of the leather armchairs. Alice bent to peer beneath it, and a paw swiped out, nearly catching her on the nose.

  “Alice!” Ashes spat, furious. “How is it every time we go on one of these expeditions I end up getting wet? You’re doing it on purpose!”

  “Nothing else occurred to me at the time,” Alice said. “It’s not like I didn’t get soaked too.”

  “It’s different for you fur-less apes!” Ashes squirmed out from under the chair. Alice had to admit he made for a pathetic sight, his sodden fur clumped in tufts and his tail still dripping. He began furiously licking one paw. “Blech! I’ll be tasting mud for a week!”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said.

  “No you’re not. You’re already thinking how you can dunk me again!”

  Ashes shook himself and stalked out the door. It is impossible for a soaked cat to stalk with any degree of dignity, but Alice held her chuckle until he was gone. Even Geryon’s face was touched with a fleeting smile.

  “I think your punishment was effective, sir,” Alice said. “Although
it might have been a bit harsh.”

  “Chastising Ashes was a secondary concern,” Geryon said. “There will always be times when you must worry about defending others, in addition to yourself. I thought the experience would prove valuable.”

  Alice swallowed and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “You have the creature’s thread?”

  “Yes, sir.” Alice could feel it, a twisting cord the color of yellowed ivory, at the back of her mind with the others.

  “Can you summon its power?”

  She was tired from the fight, but Alice took hold of the dinosaur’s thread and wrapped it around herself. It required considerable strength.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent. How do you feel?”

  Looking down at herself, Alice could see nothing obvious had changed. She raised her hand, then took a cautious step.

  “As though I were almost weightless, sir.”

  “It is your strength that has increased. Try lifting the chair.”

  She took hold of the armchair, a heavy wood-and-leather thing that looked like it dated from the previous century. Ordinarily, just pushing it across the floor would have been hard, but she was delighted to find that it came easily off the ground in her grip, as though it were made of straw. It creaked as she held it over her head in one hand, shedding dust everywhere.

  “Very good,” Geryon said. “The enhancements of the body are crude tricks, but essential. A Reader should never be balked in a task by mere physical barriers. Let the thread go.”

  “Yes, sir.” Alice put the chair down and let the dinosaur’s power slip away. She felt as though she’d suddenly put on a lead coat.

  “A word of warning. Lifting things is all well and good, but running and jumping with amplified strength take a bit of practice. I encourage you to experiment, but do so carefully.”

  Alice wondered how high she could jump, with the dinosaur’s power coiled in her legs, and resolved to try it at the first opportunity. If I have something soft to land on. “Yes, sir.”

  “That will be all. You may have the rest of the day free.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Geryon waved her away, already turning back to his writing. Alice left the study, still dripping muddy water, and headed straight for the bath. Ashes was right—there were definitely advantages to being human, and not having to lick herself clean was one of them.

  It had been six months since Mr. Black, Geryon’s right-hand man, had picked her up at the train station in his ancient Model T. She’d arrived at the Library alone in a world that had started fraying dangerously at the edges. She’d gotten hold of a loose thread, that night she’d first seen Vespidian threatening her father. When she’d given it a tug, to her surprise and horror, the whole fabric of normality had crumbled to bits like rotten cloth. Underneath was . . . something else.

  She’d started working in the endless magical library, guarded by a giant black cat who seemed to be made out of shadows. She’d learned to do magic, and she’d nearly died, twice. It was amazing how anything—even the Library, with its talking cats and invisible servants—could become routine. Even when your whole world had come to pieces, eventually it all came down to what you had to get done today before bedtime, and tomorrow, and the next day.

  Every morning now, she had a brief chat with her master, and he would set the day’s task for her. Sometimes it was basic work: gathering scraps of magic from the books for Mr. Wurms or fetching and carrying things the scholar needed. Other times, Geryon would interest himself in her training, watching her practice with her summoned creatures or showing her some trick. Alice got the sense she was doing well in this regard; Geryon seemed pleased, at least, and she had no other yardstick by which to gauge her progress.

  More rarely, the old Reader would send her on what he called “errands,” through one of the many portal-books in the wild back reaches of the library. For the most part these involved picking up or dropping off packages. Alice had gotten the sense, talking to Ashes, that there was a kind of highly paranoid economy among the old Readers. They would agree to trade one book or artifact for another, but the actual exchange couldn’t be done in any of their libraries, since no Reader would risk visiting another in the seat of his power. It had to be done on neutral ground, somewhere out in one of the book-worlds. Other times, Geryon would send her just to look at something, and report back what she had found. She was never sure which of these tasks were things he really needed, and which were simply tests, so she applied herself diligently to all of them.

  As a result, she had now been to more worlds than she could easily count. Some of them were ordinary, with forests and hills and grasslands, with only an extra moon or strange stars overhead to show her that she wasn’t on Earth somewhere. Others were strange—blasted expanses of black rock, a forest of trees carved from marble, down to the smallest detail, a world of solid clouds and great, arching vines connecting them.

  Alice was still determined to discover what had really happened to her father, but with no obvious leads to pursue, she’d had to make a longer-term plan. His disappearance had to be tied in with the world of the Readers, somehow, and so she threw herself into learning everything she could of their strange society and the powers they wielded. It was the sort of plan he would have approved of: When you aren’t sure what to do, you ought to gather as much information as you can.

  She wondered, though, if he would have approved of her work with Geryon. She wasn’t sure she approved of it. Going into prison-books to force the creatures inside to submit to her—or killing them if they refused—still felt wrong somehow, though since her moment of defiance in the world of the tree-sprite, Geryon had not tested her against anything remotely intelligent or human-looking. “He is a Reader,” Ending had said of Geryon. “His magic is based on cruelty and death.” She half suspected her father would agree.

  But this is the way forward. Emma, Geryon’s mindless, obedient maidservant with her vacant eyes, was always there to remind Alice of the only other way out.

  She hadn’t had an afternoon off in a while. She thought about trying to catch up on her reading—there was a small and rather eclectic collection of books she’d borrowed from the library on her desk—but the sight of the sun pouring through her window changed her mind. She shrugged into a light jacket and went downstairs.

  Pittsburgh’s summer had been hot but brief, and now, at the end of October, fall was well enough along that it wasn’t unusual to find frost on her windowpane in the morning. Now and again, though, the forces of the departing season seemed to rally for a last effort, and you got days like this one, with perfect golden autumn afternoons, just chilly enough to put red in your cheeks. A line of clouds darkened the sky to the west, suggesting the break in the weather wouldn’t last, but for now it felt just right.

  Alice wandered across the lawn that separated the Library mansion from the library building proper, which seemed like a good enough place to practice. She grabbed the dinosaur’s thread and pulled it toward her, testing how much strain it put on her mental grip. More, she decided, than any of the creatures she had bound so far, but to her surprise it was well within the limits of her strength. Geryon had said her power would grow with practice, but this was the first time she’d realized it was actually happening.

  The dinosaur appeared beside her and made a noise that was half rumble and half honk, like a goose with a sore throat. Alice walked around it, giving it a leisurely inspection like a field marshal looking over his troops, then sent it walking toward the trees. Like most of the creatures she met, it was considerably more appealing when it wasn’t trying to kill her. In spite of its size—Alice thought she might be able to ride it, although probably not for long—it had an endearingly doglike quality about it.

  Spike, Alice decided. I think I will call him Spike. Though, for all she knew, Spike was a girl; she had no idea how one coul
d tell, with dinosaurs.

  She sent him rushing about, short tail swishing, getting a feel for how fast he could move and turn. Then, with a bit of hesitation, she turned him loose, ordering him to charge straight at the trunk of a great old oak on the other side of the clearing.

  The results were spectacular. Spike’s stubby legs got him up to full speed surprisingly quickly, and he lowered his head with its four horns and bony crest just before impact, slamming against the wood with an explosion of splinters and torn bark. Spike bounced back a foot and shook his head, slightly dazed from the blow, but the tree gave a tremendous crack and split where the dinosaur had struck it. The crown of the oak tipped sideways to lean drunkenly against its neighbor and the canopy shuffled and shed a torrent of yellow and brown leaves.

  “I’m not sure Master Geryon would appreciate you destroying the foliage,” said Ashes.

  Alice looked around until she found him, lying on his back on a thick tree branch at the edge of the forest, soaking up the setting sun and looking at her, upside down.

  “I needed some room to practice,” Alice said. Plus, though she’d never say it aloud, these days sometimes she just wanted to break something. She let Spike vanish with a loud pop and reached for the tree-sprite thread. “Besides, I can fix it.”

  “It’s so hard to resist playing with a new toy.”

  Alice glared at him, a little embarrassed, because that was exactly what she had been doing. She didn’t like to think of her creatures that way, though. Her father had always taught her that living creatures were to be respected, and they weren’t toys. They’re more like . . . pets.

  But she didn’t know how to explain that to what was, after all, a cat, so she just walked over to the broken tree and put her hand on the trunk. The tree-sprite’s power flowed through it, animating the splintered fibers and knitting them back together, and with a great creaking and groaning, the top half of the oak lifted back in position. More leaves fell, spiraling madly to the ground.