Read The Palace of Glass Online
Authors: Django Wexler
What's he so sensitive for, anyway?
she thought as she got out her knife to cut the rest of the roll free.
It's not as though he volunteered to help. All he ever tells me is “be careful.”
Anger pulsed, hot and bright, and her lip twisted. Isaac had been the first other apprentice she'd met, her first real friend; they'd fought the Dragon and survived the terrors of Esau's fortress together.
But he still thinks he needs to protect me.
“Alice!” Isaac's voice came from outside. At the same time, she felt a surge of alarm from the tree-sprite, who was still on guard in the maple tree.
“Be right there!” she shouted back, sheathing the knife. “Are they coming?”
“I think so,” Isaac said. “But you'd better get out here.”
THE CENTURY FRUIT
W
HAT
IS
THAT THING
?”
Isaac said.
“It looks like a daddy longlegs,” Alice said.
“With about a hundred wasps riding it,” Isaac said.
They stood atop the stone wall, looking toward the three setting suns. Here and there, a wasp was visible in the grass, but they were all still, watching the progress of the gargantuan spider. Eight long, multi-jointed legs the size of steel girders supported a gray oval body, flecked with tiny black spots like hundreds of eyes. As Isaac had said, dozens of wasps were clinging to the bottom of the thing, which was considerably taller than the courtyard walls. It moved slowly but inexorably, and every footfall shook the rocks like distant thunder.
“If that many get inside the walls, we're not going to be able to keep them away from the flower,” Isaac said. His earlier peevishness, Alice was glad to see, had been forgotten in the face of this new threat.
“Yeah,” Alice said. “I think we have to try and stop it before it gets here.”
“How? All we can reach are its feet. You don't have anything that can fly, do you?”
Alice shook her head, then looked at him speculatively. “Not exactly. But I might have an idea . . .”
It took a few moments to explain the plan, and a few more for Isaac to admit that he didn't have anything better. They slithered down from the wall into the grass outside the courtyard, Alice dragging her flyswatter behind her.
“Can't you clean that thing off, at least?” Isaac said. “It's covered in wasp goo.”
“We're both covered in wasp goo,” Alice said. “Get on with it.”
Isaac sighed and thrust his hands in his pockets. He closed his eyes, and his form began to change. He grew slimmer, and color drained out of him, like he was becoming a black-and-white sketch of himself. Finally his features softened and changed, and instead of a boy standing
in front of Alice, it was the snowy figure of the iceling.
“Here,” Alice said, setting the flyswatter down.
“I can't help but feel this is a bit undignified,” he said, his voice like a winter wind.
“You sound like Ashes,” Alice said. “Hurry up. Some of those wasps are taking an interest.”
Isaac squatted on the wide end of the flyswatter, hugging his knees, and flurries of ice and snow sprang up around him. The lines of his body blurred, melting into one another, rounding off the edges and filling in the gaps with snow. In a few seconds he had become, essentially, a snowball. Alice tried hard to stifle a giggle.
“I heard that,” Isaac said, his wind-voice whistling from nowhere.
“Sorry.”
“Just don't miss.”
Alice nodded, called on Spike's strength, and lifted the flyswatter, careful not to tip Isaac off. She hefted it, feeling the weight of his snow-body, and turned to face the oncoming spider-thing. A loud drone nearby indicated that several wasps were getting close, but she focused on the length of wood in her hands.
Here goes nothing.
She ran forward a few steps, picking up momentum,
and swung the flyswatter over her shoulder with all of Spike's strength, like a lacrosse player chucking a ball into a net. Isaac soared into the air, gleaming in the light of the three setting suns, and Alice held her breath as he started to descend. She couldn't help an excited shout when the snowball impacted squarely on the side of the lumbering behemoth, a good thirty feet above the ground, smashing against it in a spray of snow.
The snow shifted, briefly flickering through the shape of a boy in a long, tattered coat before changing again into something long and lizard-like. The salamander was a brilliant, glowing crimson, red-hot claws digging into the side of the giant daddy longlegs, mouth gaping wide to spew liquid fire over the wasps that clung to the huge beast.
Then Alice's attention was drawn by more immediate problems. Half a dozen wasps were closing in on her, and she wrapped herself in the Swarm again just in time to let a stinger glance off her side. The wasps clustered in, buzzing furiously, and for a few minutes she had to devote her full attention to the fight, dodging and swinging and smashing the vicious insects into goo.
She looked up again as she fought her way clear. One of the spider's legs, as thick as a telephone pole, had been severed near the base, and it crashed to the ground in a
cloud of dust. Isaac, still a salamander, went to work on the next leg. The wasps tried to rush him, but when they got close, he raised his head and breathed a cloud of fire, sending them falling away engulfed in flames.
The second leg went just as the insects tried again. This time, one of them dodged the billowing flames and got a grip on Isaac's back. He bucked, trying to dislodge it, but it clung tenaciously. The spider groaned, six remaining legs splayed, but it had lost its balance. It started to tip, falling with the slow inevitability of a great tree coming down.
Oh, no.
Isaac, fully occupied with the wasp, didn't notice the collapse of the spider until it was too late. His claws scrabbled at its hide but couldn't hold on, and he started to slip.
Alice moved fast. She hurled her flyswatter aside, splattering one last wasp, and pulled the Swarm thread around her. Her body dissolved into hundreds of tiny, rubbery swarmers, bouncing through the grass. A kaleidoscope of images whirled around her, the world as seen through hundreds of beady little eyes, but Alice was used to this by now. She kept herself together in a single pack, racing over the ground toward the collapsing spider, trying to gauge the distance.
Isaac lost his grip and fell. He was shifting back into
a boy, but he didn't have time for another transformation. He didn't have anything like the Swarm, Alice knew, something to toughen his body or soften the landing. She pushed herself, tiny legs blurring, flowing around roots and rocks like a stream.
She got her tiny bodies underneath him just before he hit the ground. Isaac landed heavily on the swarmers and
bounced
back into the air, arms windmilling wildly, before landing again in the dirt a few feet away. Alice let the Swarm thread go, drawing herself back together, and found herself sitting in the grass. Her boots stood back by the wall where she'd left them. Try as she might, her transformations always left her footwear behind.
“Are you okay?” she said, hurrying over to Isaac in her socks. But he was already sitting up, rubbing his head.
“I think so.” He winced, and gingerly touched the top of his skull. “I'm going to have quite a bump, though.”
“Next time,” Alice said, “I'll make sure to bind some sort of pillow-monster.”
Behind them, the mammoth spider hit the ground in a spray of dirt and grass.
The wasps had evidently decided they'd met their match, because they didn't bother the two apprentices on their
way back to the wall. Alice retrieved her boots as they went.
In the central hut, the huge flower had only one petal still closed, curled tightly at its very center.
“Thanks,” Isaac said. “Did I say thanks?”
“Several times,” Alice said.
“Sorry.”
“Look,” Alice said. “It's opening.”
The last petal quivered, and with a slow sigh unrolled itself. The sweet scent of the flower filled the room. In the center of the mass of white-and-purple petals, six purple fruits, each about the size of an apple, hung from a long, drooping stem.
“That's it?” Isaac said. “That's what we came for?”
“Looks like it.” Alice frowned. “There are supposed to be eight.”
“That's what my master told me.” Isaac reached in, carefully, and tapped one of the fruits with his finger. “Maybe it's not a good batch or something.”
“There's three for each of us, anyway,” Alice said. She grabbed one of the fruits and tugged. It came free of the stem with hardly any effort. “That'll have to be enough for Geryon.”
Isaac nodded, and collected his own fruits, stuffing
them deep into the pockets of his coat. The flower was already wilting by the time they'd stripped the plant bare, purple leaves shriveling into brown gunk.
“I guess that's it,” Isaac said.
“I guess.” Alice held the three fruits awkwardly in one hand. “Where's your portal-book?”
“That way.” Isaac pointed.
“Mine is this way,” Alice said. “So. I'll see you some other time.”
“Yeah.”
There was a moment of awkward silence.
“I really am sorry I snapped at you,” Alice said.
“You told me already,” Isaac said.
“Iâ” Alice shook her head, not sure what to say. When she was with Isaac, her anger at Geryon seemed a little more distant, but the prospect of going back made it flare up again.
“I get it,” Isaac said. “Justâ”
“Be careful?” Alice finished for him.
“Yeah.” He shifted uncomfortably. “There's something else. I shouldn't tell you this.”
“What is it?”
“I overheard my master talking to some of his servants. He's calling a conference of all the Readers. I think they
want to get to the bottom of what happened with Esau and Torment.”
“Do you think they have a way to find out?” Alice said.
Alice, Isaac, and the other apprentices had been assigned by their masters to investigate the murder of the Reader Esau. When she'd returned, she'd mostly told Geryon the truth: Esau had been killed by his apprentice, Jacob, at the urging of the mad labyrinthine Torment, whom she and her fellow apprentices had defeated. She'd left out the fact that they'd only survived with help from the Dragonâa creature she'd bound from a prison-book that even Geryon couldn't controlâand of course what she'd discovered at the end, in the magic mirror hidden in Torment's storeroom.
If Geryon finds out I know he killed my father, who knows what he'd do to me.
“I don't know. But you should ask Ending.” Isaac sighed. “I still don't know if we can trust a labyrinthine, but you're right. She's the best ally we have, and you're the one who's in the most danger. I worry about you.”
Alice smiled, and her heart gave a little flip-flop, like a landed fish. “Thanks.”
“I'd better go.” He was blushing, just a little, as he turned away.
Geryon's study faded into view around her, the portal-book on one of his side tables snapping itself shut. Geryon was waiting for her in his ancient, fraying chair. His desk was a mess, as always, covered with scraps of paper and bowls of the concoctions he used for Writing and binding his books.
“Welcome back, Alice,” he said. “Your mission was a success, I trust?”
Alice was suddenly aware of what a state she was in. Her clothes hung ragged and torn, and her skin and hair were liberally smeared with dirt, blood, and wasp goo.
“Yes, sir,” Alice said.
Geryon himself wore the same ratty, stained robe he always did. With his flyaway hair and fantastic, out-of-control sideburns, he cut an almost comical figure, if you ignored the cold, hard set of his eyes. Alice forced herself to meet his gaze, and not to flinch. She couldn't believe she'd ever thought of trusting this man. Disgust and hatred burned furiously inside her, and she had to fight to keep her expression neutral. His words scraped across her ears, and every moment that she had to pretend to be calm felt like holding back the tide.