The Palace of Glass (5 page)

—into a hard, narrow bed, moonlight painting a familiar pattern across the wall of her room near the top of Geryon's house.

She was breathing hard, heart slamming against her ribs. It was
cold
; she'd kicked the sheets and the blanket to the floor, and knocked her pillow aside. Her nightshirt was damp with sweat.

The same dream.
She'd had the dream, or something like it, every few nights since she'd come back from Esau's fortress. It made her want to yell in frustration.

I know, all right?
Father wouldn't want her to take revenge for his sake. She
knew
that, but the hot beast that roared inside her wouldn't let her rest.
What else am I supposed to do? Be his nice little apprentice, until . . . what? Until I'm grown up and I can get away from here?

She couldn't live like that.
Father would understand,
she wanted to shout at the dream.
He
would
understand.

Or if he wouldn't—well, he was dead, and it didn't matter anymore.

Alice got up and stalked across the room, through the long-eared shadows thrown by the pair of stuffed rabbits in the window that were all she had left of her father's house. Anger seethed and roiled inside her, and for a moment she felt like if she didn't yell she might explode. She stopped, breathing hard, and swallowed the feeling.
I can't afford to show it. Not yet.

Someday, though.

Little by little, her breathing calmed, and her heartbeat slowed. Alice picked up the sheets and blankets, remade the bed, and adjusted her pillow. She climbed back into the narrow bed, staring at the shadows of the rabbits for a moment, then closed her eyes.

Someday Geryon would understand just how badly he'd hurt her.

The next morning, Ashes was waiting outside her door.

“Geryon's off on his trip,” the cat said, slinking into her room and winding himself around Alice's ankles. “Mother says she's got something important she wants to talk to you about.”

“What is it?”

“Who knows?” Ashes yawned, showing his tiny white teeth. “Nobody tells me anything. But she said to bring a coat.”

MAKING YOUR OWN CHANCES

F
OR ONCE
,
A
LICE
DIDN'T
have to sneak off to meet Ending. She simply announced to Mr. Wurms that she was on Geryon's business, and the scholar accepted it with a grumble.

The whole estate felt different with the master away, as though a sound she'd never noticed had suddenly stopped. Everything still
worked
—the servants brought her breakfast and cleaned her room while she was out—but there was a feeling of living on borrowed time. Geryon's power suffused the Library, keeping its magic running day and night. Without that wellspring
of energy, everything was winding down, and sooner or later it would stop.

Alice had taken Ending's advice and dressed warm, in a fur-lined leather jacket, leather gloves, and thick trousers. It had been over eight months since she'd left her father's house, and many of the clothes she'd arrived with were either worn out or too small now. Fortunately, new additions to her wardrobe regularly materialized in the hallway outside her room. It was related to the invisible servants, she assumed—she couldn't imagine Geryon picking out clothes for a thirteen-year-old girl—but however the process worked, it had thoughtfully provided warmer garb as the days had grown cold.

Once she passed through the bronze door of the library, the air became warm and slightly stuffy, and she folded her coat over her arm. She chose a direction at random, and the first corner she turned brought her face-to-face with Ending.

“I hope you slept well.” Ending's voice was a deep rumble.

“Well enough,” Alice said irritably. Remnants of the dream still clung to her, like a spiderweb she couldn't quite brush off. “You heard about Geryon, I assume?”

“Of course. I felt him leave last night.” Ending bared
her teeth. “He told me I am to obey you in his stead.”

Alice smiled weakly, then shook her head. “Listen. Isaac told me something, while we were fighting the wasps. He overheard Anaxomander planning a conference of the old Readers, to investigate what happened at Esau's fortress. What if Geryon finds out what really happened?”

“A conference.” Ending's eyes narrowed. “The death of one of their own is the only thing that could stir the old Readers from their complacency.”

“They could find the magic mirror, couldn't they?”

“Without power, the memories would have faded by now. But if they question Torment himself . . .” Ending's tail flicked. “He was half-mad to begin with, and being dispersed and bound will not have improved matters. There's no way to know what he might tell them.”

“So what are we going to
do
?”

Light glinted on long ivory fangs as Ending bared her teeth. “Strike first.”

Alice blinked. “Strike?”

“Geryon's absence has given us a rare chance. I do not know if you are ready, but I think we must take the opportunity. It may not come again.”

Alice felt her pulse quicken. “What opportunity?”

“You asked if your ward would be any use against
Geryon, and I said it would not. He would see any such primitive trap well in advance, and in any case his power is sufficient to break it. But there
is
a trap subtle enough to catch even Geryon, and strong enough to hold him. It is a weapon, crafted by one Reader to use against another. Its maker is dead now, and I believe the others have forgotten that it exists. But I remember.” Ending's tail lashed. “It has been held beyond my reach. But if you can retrieve it . . .”

“We could trap Geryon?”

Ending nodded. “And keep him there until he agrees to our terms. But you must leave at once. Seven days may not be enough time, and if Geryon returns before you do, his suspicions will be aroused.”

“I'm ready,” Alice said. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

After a little more thought, Alice decided she wasn't
quite
ready. With her experience in Esau's fortress still painfully strong in her memory, she resolved to be more prepared this time. She didn't have a proper pack, but a little work with knots transformed a pair of sheets into an acceptable alternative. She filled them with food she thought would travel well, a few canteens of water, and an extra shirt and set of underthings.

In addition to her supplies, she took her camping knife, three of the magic acorns charged with life-energy that had proven so useful in Esau's fortress, and the thick sheets of parchment on which she'd Written her first ward. All this made for quite a bundle, and she shifted it experimentally across her back as she went out the kitchen door again and back into the library, sweating in her leather coat in spite of the cool air.

Ending met her just inside the door, amid a swarm of smaller cats that were her children and grandchildren. The labyrinthine looked Alice over.

“Good,” she said. “You will need this, as well.”

Another cat, a white-and-black one Alice hadn't seen before, padded up to her with something in its mouth. It was a pocket watch, dangling from a delicate silver chain. The cat set it down, yawned, and wandered off.

“What is it?” Alice said, picking the thing up. It was intricately carved, the cover inscribed with an hourglass surrounded by tiny gears and levers.

“Essentially what it appears to be,” Ending said. “Keeping track of time in other worlds can be a tricky business. This will tell you how long it has been here in the library.”

Alice found the catch and clicked the cover open. In addition to the usual hour, minute, and second hands, a
long, thin needle was just below the seven.
Days,
she realized.
Seven days until Geryon returns.

“You must be back before it reaches zero,” Ending said. “Or I will not be able to protect you from Geryon's wrath.”

“I will,” Alice said, snapping the watch shut and putting it in her innermost pocket.

“Let's go,” Ending said.

Alice fell into step alongside Ending, who hugged the bookshelves and managed to stay in their shadow. Brief flickers of light threw silver highlights across her dark fur.

“I will not pretend,” Ending said, after a moment, “that this journey will not be dangerous. I warned you our path would be difficult.”

“I know,” Alice said.

“I'm taking you to a portal-book that leads to a village of fire-sprites. They can be vicious creatures, but they have an agreement with Geryon. You should be able to secure their aid.”

“All right.”

“Elsewhere in their world is a wild portal, a rift between worlds not yet bound by a Reader's touch. The fire-sprites can show you the way there. What we need is on the other side.”

“What exactly am I looking for?”

“A book, of course,” Ending said. “The trap is in a book called
The Infinite Prison
. It is in a place called the Palace of Glass, somewhere beyond the wild portal.”

Alice was beginning to wish she'd brought a notebook. “And I just have to find this book and bring it back?”

Ending nodded, then looked up at her. Alice had been getting better at reading the labyrinthine's moods in the set of her huge eyes, and now she thought the cat looked uncertain.

“The Palace of Glass is a dangerous place,” Ending said. “It is said that anyone who goes there is driven mad, if they manage to return at all.”

“I'll be all right,” Alice said, forcing a smile. “Ashes always says I'm half-mad already.”

“You must be careful.”

They'd come to the back of the library, where clusters of shelves hid the portal- and prison-books. Passing among them, Alice smelled mowed grass, hot metal, and baking bread, and heard the roar of a crowd and strange, alien music.

Ending stopped. “This is where you'll find the book that will take you to the fire-sprites. You will probably want to remove your shoes and socks.”

An octagon of empty bookshelves stood in front of them. The cracks between them glowed red, and even from here, Alice could feel the heat rolling over her in great waves that ruffled her hair. She dropped her pack and shrugged off her coat, folding it over one arm, and knelt to untie her shoes.

“You're sure I'm going to need the coat?” she said. But when she straightened up, the labyrinthine's yellow eyes were nowhere to be seen.
Typical.

Alice picked up her pack again and pushed forward, edging gingerly into the crack between two of the shelves. It looked far too tight for her to squeeze
all the
way through, but somehow never quite narrowed enough to stop her, as though she were shrinking or the bookshelves were growing. She pushed through and emerged onto a wide, flat expanse of jagged black rock.

Her first breath was like being punched in the chest—the air was
hot,
and reeked of sulfur. She stumbled backward a step and felt a sharp pain in her bare foot. She'd cut it on a shard of black glass, one of thousands that littered the ground. She looked at the shoes in her hand and rolled her eyes.
Is this Ending's idea of a joke?

Alice pulled on the silver Swarm thread at the back of her mind, wrapping it tightly around herself. Her skin
toughened, becoming thick and rubbery, and when she stepped forward again, she felt the glass fragments
crunch
underfoot. The cut still hurt, but it wasn't bleeding badly, and Alice set her jaw and made her way forward.

At first she wasn't sure what she was looking at. The backs of the bookshelves were vast, dark monoliths now, soaring into the distance overhead. Black rock mounded into a small hill just ahead. On the other side of the hill, something glowed red-hot.

It wasn't until the surface of the glowing stuff shifted that Alice understood. The glow came from a lake of
lava
that filled the other half of the cluster, the hill of black rock pushing out above it like a promontory over the sea. With every step Alice took forward, the heat increased, as though she were climbing into an oven. At the top of the hill, she could see a boulder of the black glass—
obsidian,
her mind supplied—and atop that boulder, she was certain, there would be a book.

The ground underneath her was getting hot. Alice suddenly understood Ending's warning; the rubber soles of her shoes surely would have melted by now. Breathing was getting difficult. There was smoke coming off the lava, evil blue-gray stuff that smelled noxious.

When she reached the base of the little hill, Alice took a deep breath and held it, running the last few yards to the boulder. There was a book there, as she'd thought, a fat volume bound in black, cracking leather. Even with the Swarm's toughness, the scorching ground was painful, and she hopped from foot to foot while she flipped the cover open. The magical text crawled under her eyes for a moment, and then Alice read,

She found herself in a dark space, blessedly cool . . .