The Fall of the Readers

by Django Wexler

  “Okay,” she said, coming back around the boulder. A hint of a blush was visible in Isaac’s face, even by devilfish light, but she ignored it. “Have you used the portal to your master’s fortress before? Do you know where it leads?”

  He nodded. “It’s a small room at the end of a long passage toward the main stairs.”

  “It was,” Ashes pointed out, scrambling back up to Alice’s shoulder. “The whole place will be covered in Decay’s labyrinth by now.”

  “This is going to be tricky,” Alice said. “You’ll have to describe where we want to go, and I’ll try to find it. Do you know where the Dragon’s book is kept?”

  “I think so. There’s a room near Anaxomander’s study where I was never allowed. I don’t even know how to open the door.”

  “We’ll—”

  “Figure it out?” said Ashes and Isaac together, sharing a smile.

  “Exactly,” Alice said. “You’re getting the hang of this.”

  The small, square book on the boulder labeled Anaxomander pulled them in, and Alice found herself blinking in sudden light. They were still underground, but the walls were shot through with veins of multifaceted crystal that glowed from within, a soft white light that refracted into a rainbow of colors. The air was frigid, and Alice’s breath puffed into white clouds of steam.

  “Brr,” Ashes said, huddling closer to Alice’s neck. “This is not a good place for cats.”

  “Where are we?” Alice said. “In the world, I mean.”

  “Greenland,” Isaac said. “We’re underneath a glacier. It’s like a river of ice.”

  Alice reached out and touched one of the glowing crystal veins. It was ice, cold enough that she snatched her hand back at once. “No wonder it’s freezing in here.”

  Isaac pulled his huge, battered coat around himself a little tighter. “You get used to it.”

  “This place looked a lot warmer when I saw you in the bath,” Alice muttered.

  “There’s a hot spring,” Isaac said, then frowned. “When were you watching me in the bath?”

  “Never mind,” Alice said. She could feel the labyrinth spreading through here, not yet as strong as Ending’s but growing rapidly. “Lead the way. I’ll tell you if I feel anything change.”

  Isaac nodded. He led them to a huge, gloomy spiral staircase, winding away in both directions around a central pillar made entirely of mirror-smooth ice.

  “Down leads to the master—I mean, to Anaxomander’s rooms, and mine,” Isaac said quietly. “Up leads to the library.”

  “Down it is, then,” Alice said, then froze. The fabric of the labyrinth gave an unmistakable vibration. “Something’s coming!”

  “Decay?” Isaac said. “Has he found us already?”

  “I don’t think so.” Alice furrowed her brow. “It feels smaller, not like a labyrinthine. There’s three of them, coming down the stairs.”

  “Velnebs,” Isaac said. “Let me try to talk to them.”

  “Who?”

  “Servants, sort of.” He turned to face the stairs to the library, then looked over his shoulder. “They can be a little . . . odd.”

  “At this point, I don’t even know what counts as odd,” Alice said quietly.

  The creature that came around the curve of the stairway was almost humanoid, with four limbs and a head in roughly the right places, but it gave the impression of having been assembled wrong. Arms and legs both ended in wide, grasping hands with long, slender fingers, which it used to cling to the ceiling and skitter along it with the agility of a spider. It wore a ragged linen tunic and belt, through which the arch of its spine was clearly visible, but its head appeared to be on backward, grinning down at Alice right side up even though the rest of the creature was upside down. And the grin was disturbing, too wide, showing big flat teeth like a row of tombstones between a ragged mustache and a bristly beard.

  Two more of the things came behind the first, also clinging to the ceiling, another with a beard and one female with long, thin hair that hung in a wispy cloud around her upside-down face. When Isaac waved at then, they came to a halt, almost directly above him.

  “Alarm door the of aware made was one this,” the leader said. “Returning be would Isaac Master realize not did ones these.”

  Alice blinked.

  “Did I miss something?” Ashes said.

  “They can get a little mixed up when their heads are back to front,” Isaac whispered. He raised his voice. “It’s, uh, good to be home. Is everything all right?”

  “Alarmed most been have ones these,” the velneb said. “Wishes ones’ these to responds longer no it and, library the beyond expanding is space-twist the.”

  “He says the labyrinth is expanding, and it’s turned against them,” Isaac said.

  “You can understand them?” Alice said.

  “You get used to it,” he said again.

  “Do you think they’ll help us?” Alice said quietly. “If they think you’re still working for Anaxomander . . .”

  “I think so,” Isaac said. He raised his voice. “Can you come down here, please? I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you.”

  “Isaac Master, course of,” the velneb said.

  Alice had been expecting it to creep down the wall, but it simply released its grip on the stone and dropped. Something strange happened to its limbs as it fell, the bones and joints shifting in a way that made her stomach turn, so that when it hit the ground with all four hands splayed, it was roughly the right way up. Its head, however, was still reversed, hair hanging in strings from its scalp and beard pointing at the ceiling.

  “Um,” Isaac said, and put his hands in front of his face, making a twisting motion.

  “Apologies my.” The velneb’s head revolved slowly clockwise with a series of gristly pops and cracks that made Alice wince. When it had turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, it gave them its tombstone grin again. “Is that better, Master Isaac?”

  “Much.”

  “Wish I could do that,” Ashes said, in Alice’s ear. “It’d be handy for grooming.”

  “Do you know when Master Anaxomander will be returning?” the velneb said. “He must be informed that the library has gone awry.”

  “I think he’ll be back . . . soon,” Isaac said, glancing sidelong at Alice. “But he’s sent me to look into things while he’s away. I’ve got some business to take care of downstairs, and then we’re going to need a portal to . . .”

  “Greece,” Alice prompted. “Near Athens.”

  “Right,” Isaac said. “Greece.”

  The female velneb looked down at them suspiciously. “Master our serve doesn’t she and, Reader a she’s,” she said. “Another of apprentice the be must she.”

  “She’s with me,” Isaac said hastily. “We’re on assignment together.”

  The velneb in front of them bowed its head. “These ones would be glad to serve, Master Isaac. This one knows just the book. But getting to it with the library in chaos may be difficult.”

  “Ashes,” Alice hissed. “Can you go with them? Guide them through the labyrinth?”

  “Me?” The cat sounded shocked.

  “The sooner the book is ready, the sooner we can get out of here,” she said.

  “A fair point,” Ashes said, staring at the velneb, who gazed back grinning and wide-eyed. “You won’t take too long, will you?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE DOMAIN OF DECAY

  AFTER REPEATED ASSURANCES THAT they’d be as quick as possible, Alice and Isaac left Ashes clinging to the back of a velneb as it scrambled back up the wall and spidered along the ceiling toward the library. Isaac and Alice went in the opposite direction, down the dished stone steps, into the lower levels of Anaxomander’s fortress. The labyrinth was weaker here, but Alice kept a grip on the fabric nonetheless, watching f
or unexpected detours.

  “You grew up here?” she said, looking around as they descended. It certainly seemed like a gloomy place, the washed-out glow from the ice making everything look as pale as milk.

  He nodded. “It must seem strange to you, when you grew up with humans.”

  “Everything seems a little strange to me,” Alice said.

  “It wasn’t bad, though,” Isaac said. “I never thought it was, anyway, while Evander was here. Master—Anaxomander, I mean, took us out through the books pretty regularly, to other worlds and even to spend time among the humans. We might have to live in the real world one day, he told us.”

  His voice had a hitch in it, and she could understand why. Evander had been his foster brother, a fellow apprentice, until Anaxomander had cold-bloodedly traded him to Esau as though he were nothing but livestock. Isaac had later watched him die at the hands of Torment, Esau’s rogue labyrinthine, after being driven mad.

  “Sorry,” Alice said quietly. “I didn’t think.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t want to have to avoid talking about him, just because of what happened at the end.” He took a deep breath. “That would be like losing him all over again.” He looked around. “We used to race up and down this staircase, you know. Once I used the iceling to make a slide, but he said that was cheating.”

  He stopped in front of a carved stone arch larger and more impressive than the rest. It looked ancient, the blocks rounded and uneven, like something out of the ruins of a lost civilization.

  “Anaxomander told me once that he never built this part of the fortress,” Isaac said, looking up at it. “Something else lived here, something very old.”

  “Older than him?” Something about the space and the chill made Alice feel like whispering, as though she were in a church.

  “Older than humans, he said.” Isaac shuddered. “I used to dream about it coming back and finding us here.”

  Alice stepped forward, breath puffing ahead of her. Isaac followed.

  “So what are we looking for?” she said.

  Isaac pointed. “That door leads to his study. Just beyond it.”

  Alice didn’t see anything that looked like a door, just a sheet of ice rippling from ceiling to floor, as though a waterfall had frozen in mid-torrent.

  “You’re sure?” Alice said. “It doesn’t look like there’s a way to open it.”

  “I’ve seen him coming out,” Isaac said, putting his hand against the cold surface. “It just sort of bends aside for him.”

  “Can you melt it with the salamander?”

  “Probably, but it would take forever. Look how thick it is.”

  “What about the iceling? It lets you control ice, doesn’t it?”

  “Snow, really.”

  “Ice is just a lot of snow packed together really tight,” Alice reasoned. “Give it a try.”

  Isaac nodded slowly. Alice felt power humming through him as he took hold of his thread, a kind of shiver in the air all around them. He glared at the wall of ice, eyes narrowed.

  “Not working?” Alice said.

  “There’s . . . something there,” Isaac said. “I can’t quite get a grip on it.”

  “Maybe—”

  “Give me a minute.” He gritted his teeth. “I can do this. I’ve just got to—push a little—”

  There was a noise like whuff, and everything went white. Alice took a step backward in panic, instinctively reaching for the Swarm thread. The air was full of stinging, blinding crystals. “Isaac? Are you okay?

  Isaac was laughing, she realized. The whiteness was snow, which had blasted outward from the wall of ice to fill the corridor with a miniature blizzard, and was now cascading down all around them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That caught me by surprise. I could feel it giving, and when I pushed, it just . . . went. Hang on.”

  He turned away and made a gesture with his hands, as though parting a curtain. The drifting snow leaped out of the way, swirling past them, revealing a doorway and a darkened room beyond.

  “Perfect!” Alice said with a grin. “You’re amazing.”

  Isaac flushed again, rubbing the back of his head. “I . . . uh . . . thanks.”

  He looked like he wanted to say something more, but Alice was already stepping into the room, calling the devilfish’s glow to her hands. It looked a bit like Geryon’s vault, though instead of being locked in chests, some of the books were trapped in blocks of ice. Others were simply piled to one side, including a familiar volume bound in weathered snakeskin. Its cover read The Dragon.

  “You were right!” she said, snatching it up and toppling the pile in her haste. A thrill went through her when she touched it, the Dragon thread in her mind vibrating in sympathy. “Thank you, Isaac. I know I haven’t explained everything.”

  “I trust you, Alice,” he said from the doorway. “You’ve always been right so far.”

  A dry hiss of a voice spoke up from behind him.

  “That,” it said, “remains to be seen.”

  Isaac spun around, but something long and pitch-black was already crawling across him. Alice remembered the centipede in the Great Labyrinth, each glossy black segment of its body bigger than her head, a pair of pincers at one end that would easily have fit around her waist. Its legs moved in eerie unison, ripples of motion passing down the length of its body, making soft click-click-click sounds. It wound its way up Isaac’s leg and across his chest, huge head pausing at his throat, while the rest of its length trailed off into the corridor. Isaac had gone very still.

  “If I bite this boy, Miss Creighton, he will die, very quickly and in a great deal of pain.” A pair of long fangs hovered above Isaac’s neck. “Believe me, the results are not pleasant to look on. If you value his life, I would not do anything rash.”

  Alice realized she’d raised her hands and grabbed her threads, automatically. She met Isaac’s gaze, and found him wide-eyed, but not panicked. That’s something. She lowered her hands and let out a breath.

  “Decay, is it?” she said.

  “Indeed.” The centipede shifted its body with a chorus of clicks. “I must admit I was skeptical of this project, but you have proven to be everything Ending claimed you would be.”

  “Let him go,” Alice said. “I’m the one you want.”

  “I think he will be useful to ensure your good behavior. Clearly Ending’s prison was not sufficient, but it’s not a mistake we plan to make again.” Decay shifted again. “She sends her regards, by the way. She informed me that she’d belatedly discovered the two of you passed through her domain, and that you might be paying me a visit.”

  “You sound almost like you trust her.” Alice forced a smirk. “I would have thought you’d know better after so long.”

  “Very clever, Miss Creighton. Divide and conquer, is it? But we know that game better than anyone.” Decay’s multifaceted eyes shone with dozens of pinprick glows in the light of Alice’s hands. “The labyrinthine are finished working with the Readers.”

  “You might be,” Alice said. “There are others—”

  “This is tiresome. Come along, or the boy will suffer.”

  “All right!” Alice held up her hands. “You can’t begrudge me the attempt. It’s just like the time I had to fight that giant wasp.”

  To Decay, this probably made no sense. To Isaac, she hoped, it would be a message. Just like when we fought the giant wasps. At which time she’d hurled him high into the air, after he’d transformed into . . .

  She saw from his eyes that he’d got it. She felt the power flow, and then his body was dissolving, flesh disintegrating into drifting snow as he transformed into the iceling.

  Decay was fast, but not fast enough. His fangs clamped down harmlessly into the soft snow of Isaac’s new body, smoky, greenish poison spurting uselessly. At the same time, Alice charged
, pulling on Spike’s thread for strength. Her punch was unscientific but delivered with enthusiasm, slamming the black centipede across the corridor.

  “Go, Isaac!” she shouted. “Back to the library!”

  “But—”

  “I’m right behind you!”

  Isaac whirled down the corridor like the snow devil he currently was. Before Alice could follow, Decay had recovered, his coiled body filling the doorway. She went at him again, one fist raised, the Dragon book tucked under her arm. This time, he dodged her blow, and darted forward to wrap himself around her. The sensation of his legs pricking all over her skin made her want to scream. But she’d expected this, too—as he coiled tighter, she wrapped herself in the Swarm thread, pulling on it until her body fell apart into a pile of black, furry swarmers. These bounced and rolled all over the corridor, slipping through Decay’s writhing grip as he crashed unceremoniously to the ground. As he thrashed to right himself, Alice got moving, tiny legs a blur as she sped down the corridor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HUNTED

  THE SWARMERS FLOWED TOGETHER as soon as they passed through the ancient doorway, turning back into a girl with a book under her arm. Isaac was already coalescing out of the storm of snow he’d become. She caught him by the arm, still running, stray flakes landing all around her.

  “Are you okay—” he began.

  “Later!” she panted. “Run!”

  They ran, sticking tight to the central, icy pillar as they rounded the spiral staircase. Isaac was puffing beside her, already short on breath, and she was fighting a stitch in her side. She could call on Spike for strength, but that wouldn’t make it any easier to breathe. The stairs were steep, like running up the side of a mountain.