The Mad Apprentice Read online

  “Hello,” Alice said, keeping her voice calm.

  In spite of their familiarity, there was always something unnerving about Ending. For one thing, while Alice had never seen her in the light, the glimpses she’d caught of paws or tail hinted at a black cat the size of a tiger. But it was more than that—Alice had faced plenty of monsters, but even the ugliest didn’t match the sense of casual power Ending exuded. The library was her domain—in here she could see everything and be everywhere. Or at least she would like me to think so.

  “It looks like it may have worked this time,” she went on, when the cat didn’t say anything. “Unless they explode again.”

  “It feels right this time,” Ending said.

  “Still, better safe than sorry,” Alice muttered.

  She pulled the Swarm thread around herself, hardening her skin, and went over to the acorns. When she nudged one with her foot, it didn’t burst, so she bent down and picked it up. Tugging just a bit on the tree-sprite’s thread let her feel the power coiled inside it, enough raw energy to create a full-grown tree squished into a nut that fit in her pocket. Alice closed her hand around it and grinned. The tree-sprite was one of her most useful creatures, but only if there were trees about to work with. Now she could bring her trees with her.

  “Congratulations,” Ending said as Alice picked up the other two acorns. “I knew you would get it eventually.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Alice said politely.

  “Now you’ve got a trick Geryon doesn’t know about,” Ending said. “I’m sure that will come in handy.”

  The thought of Geryon, and their conversation this morning, instantly obliterated Alice’s good mood. It must have showed on her face, because Ending made a noise like “Hmm?” Her yellow eyes closed and vanished, appearing again in another patch of shadow close to Alice’s side.

  “What is it, child?” the cat purred. “Has something happened?”

  “No,” Alice said. “That’s just it. Nothing’s happened at all.” She hesitated, not sure if she should talk about it. But Ending had helped her capture Vespidian, and already knew most of the story. “I asked Geryon if he’d found out anything about what happened to my father.”

  “And he said nothing,” Ending said.

  “He said he’s looking into it. Asking the other old Readers.”

  Ending’s brief snort was eloquent. Alice’s cheeks heated.

  “You think he isn’t doing anything?” she said.

  “Whether he is or not is of little consequence. The Readers are as miserly with their information as they are with their magic, and they give up neither simply for the asking. Besides, does Geryon truly want to find out? Suppose he discovered who was involved—what then? Does he go to war with another Reader on your behalf?”

  Alice wasn’t sure what would happen then. If her father was alive, then she would go to war to get him back, if that was what it took. Just finding out the truth had seemed so difficult, she hadn’t thought much on what to do afterward.

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “He seems more interested in figuring out how Vespidian found me, and you and I already know the answer to that.”

  “And speak of the devil,” Ending said, then chuckled. “Our large friend has come to find you.”

  “Mr. Black?” Alice asked, surprised.

  “Yes.” Teeth gleamed as the cat yawned. “He’s looking for you.”

  “I’d better go,” Alice said.

  “Much as I’m tempted to keep the lummox wandering around for hours, you’re right.” Ending let out a low rumble. “Interesting. Geryon wants the library locked down and the defenses checked. Something serious must have happened.”

  Alice guessed that Ending had a mental link to communicate with Geryon, as she did with her own creatures. “Is something attacking us?”

  “Not yet. But whatever he wants you for . . .” Ending paused. “Be careful, child.”

  “I’m always careful.”

  “Be very careful. Now go and find Mr. Black before he gets frustrated and starts breaking things.”

  Alice nodded. She patted her pocket to reassure herself that the three acorns were still there, and hiked to the edge of the clearing, pushing through the jungle to one of the narrow gaps between the monolith/shelves. On the outside, she started walking back the way she’d come. Only a couple of turns later, she was back among the orderly shelves of the mundane library, and the next aisle she took led her directly to Mr. Wurms’ table.

  “I told you,” came Mr. Wurms’ voice, as dry and dusty as the old scholar himself. “I haven’t seen her.”

  “Daft girl,” Mr. Black rumbled. “Always wandering where she’s not wanted—”

  Alice stepped out from behind the shelves and cleared her throat, and they both turned to face her. Mr. Wurms worked at the intersection of two wide aisles, where he had a long trestle table piled high with books. Some of the stacks looked precarious, and most of them were covered with a thick layer of dust, as if they hadn’t been touched in a long time. Mr. Wurms himself was normally draped in dust too, bent over his table for days at a time, only his quill pen scritch-scritch-scritching through stacks of yellow paper.

  Mr. Black loomed next to the frail-looking scribe. He was tall and massively broad in the shoulders, and a wild mane of black hair, beard, and mustache gave his face a bestial appearance, with only his eyes visible. Those eyes narrowed when he saw Alice, and he shifted uncomfortably.

  Ever since Alice had confronted him, Mr. Black had tried to avoid her entirely. Since he mostly worked in the furnace room, that was not difficult. When she did run into him, she’d found his dark looks tempered with a touch of disbelief, as though he were surprised she’d kept her word about not betraying his part in the scheme to Geryon. If they had to talk, he gave her a wary respect, although she was under no illusion that he was truly friendly.

  “Miss Alice,” he said, in his deep rumble of a voice. “So you’re here after all.”

  “I haven’t seen you,” Mr. Wurms said querulously. “I’ve things that need fetching.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said. “I took a bit of a wrong turn.”

  Mr. Wurms sniffed, but it was hard to argue with that excuse. Unless Ending was paying you special attention, finding things even in the mundane side of the library wasn’t easy.

  “You’ll have to do your own fetching, or wait a bit longer,” Mr. Black said. “The girl’s to come to the house right away. Master’s orders.”

  Mr. Wurms gave the long-suffering sigh of the eternally put-upon, but raised no argument. Mr. Black beckoned, and Alice fell in beside him, having to take two hurried steps to match each of his long strides.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” she ventured, once they’d left Mr. Wurms behind.

  “Something dangerous,” Mr. Black said. “Master’s got all the wards turned up as high as they’ll go; that takes a lot of power.”

  “He didn’t tell you why?”

  “Nope.” She thought he was smiling, but it was hard to tell under his shaggy beard. “Lucky you, you get to find out.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  UNEXPECTED NEWS

  GERYON SAT IN HIS study, in one of four high-backed armchairs that faced one another in front of the fireplace. The muddy stain from where Alice had emerged from the swamp was gone.

  “Sorry to take so long, sir,” Alice said. “I was deep in the library, and it took Mr. Black some time to find me.” The huge servant had left her at the entrance to Geryon’s suite, muttering to himself as he retreated to his basement sanctuary.

  “Fortunately, we have a little time.” Geryon gestured for her to sit. She did, perching on the edge of one of the overstuffed seats, her feet not quite reaching the ground. “I’ve had some interesting news.”

  “News?” Her chest tightened for a moment.


  Geryon nodded. By this of course he meant news from his world, something that had happened among the Readers. Mere human happenings—that President Hoover had been assassinated, say, or that an earthquake had sunk Rhode Island into the sea—would not concern him. Has he heard something about Father? But his expression was all wrong for that, and she forced herself to be calm.

  “Indeed. The gravest kind.” Geryon paused. “One of my colleagues is dead.”

  Alice had picked up enough to have an idea of how serious this was. Geryon’s “colleagues” were the small group that Alice thought of as the old Readers at the top of the hierarchy of the magical world. They were all ancient—avoiding the perils of old age was apparently small potatoes for a sufficiently skilled Reader—and engaged in a complicated game of negotiation, alliance, and betrayal that stretched back through the centuries like a tangled spiderweb.

  Alice had devoted some thought to this, in the small hours of the night. She was a Reader too, which presumably meant she could live forever, the same as Geryon. It was a difficult concept to get her mind around. She had a hard enough time imagining herself at twenty, let alone two hundred or two thousand.

  In any case, the death of an old Reader was an event that would shake the delicate arrangement of relationships to its core. It was a given that he’d been killed, of course. There was no other way for an old Reader to die.

  “I . . . see.” In other circumstances, Alice might have asked if the dead man had been a friend of Geryon’s, but the old Readers did not have friends, only tools and allies. Instead, because it was the kind of thing he liked to hear, she said, “Does this affect us?”

  “Very much so, I’m afraid. The colleague I refer to is named Esau-of-the-Waters, and he has—had,” he corrected himself, “close ties to me and several other Readers of my acquaintance. And the manner of his death . . .”

  Esau-of-the-Waters? Alice sat up a little straighter, fighting hard to keep her expression neutral. Could that be a coincidence? Esau, as Vespidian’s master, had been her only remaining hope of finding out what happened. The thought that she might never know for certain if her father was truly dead filled her with panic. She clenched her fists until her knuckles went white.

  She couldn’t tell if Geryon noticed her agitation. He seemed distracted, scratching his cheek with one finger and then smoothing out the whiskers again. He paused for a long time, but Alice knew better than to prompt him.

  “The manner of his death,” the old Reader said again, “is disturbing. As best we can tell, he was murdered by his apprentice.” His eyes found hers, and a faint smile played at the corner of his mouth. “You seem shocked.”

  Alice took a deep breath and calmed herself with an effort. “It’s just hard to imagine, sir.”

  “Is it? It’s not without precedent. We try to choose our students carefully, but so few are born with the talent, and sometimes a Reader will take a chance on a . . . questionable individual. And, of course, even the most careful man tends to lower his guard around his own apprentices. But I must admit I was surprised to hear it in this case. Esau was a very careful man indeed.”

  “What happened to the apprentice?”

  “Ah, Alice. You have, as usual, gone straight to the heart of the matter. We believe the boy—his name is Jacob—is still hiding in Esau’s fortress. Or possibly he is trapped there, it’s not clear. Either way, he must be dealt with.” He broke off. “It can’t be pleasant for you to hear this, I know, but as one of us, you’ll have to face this kind of unpleasantness eventually. An apprentice who commits some offense is normally chastised by his own master, as he sees fit. But in a case like this one, it falls to the rest of us to administer . . . justice.”

  “I see, sir,” Alice said, though she didn’t, quite.

  “We must act together, to demonstrate solidarity of purpose. In such circumstances each Reader sends an apprentice to deal with the guilty party.”

  “You’re sending me to . . . deal with him?”

  Geryon’s lips tightened. “You will go to Esau’s fortress with a small group of apprentices from the other Readers who share an interest in the situation. You will find Jacob, apprehend him, and bring him back for judgment. If that can be accomplished without violence, so much the better. If not, you will do what you must.”

  Alice looked back at him, chewing her lip. It won’t be in a prison-book. We won’t have to kill him.

  What’s the difference? a dark part of her mind whispered. You know what the old Readers will do to him if you bring him back.

  But he did murder someone. It wasn’t like you could call the police to a Reader’s fortress. Someone has to do something.

  Geryon caught her expression, but misread the source of her hesitation.

  “Breaking into the fortress should not be too difficult,” he said. “There will be others in the group with more . . . experience, and whatever pacts and wards Esau created to defend his domain will not have survived his death. That is part of the problem, in fact. Like all of us, Esau accumulated a great many powerful books during his life, and without his defenses in place, they will gradually begin to run rampant in the labyrinth. The wayward apprentice must be removed so that we can send our servants to contain the mess.”

  “I understand, sir.” She wanted to ask more questions, but Geryon’s expression told her he would not be receptive. “When will I be going?”

  “This afternoon. Gather whatever you need.” He made a dismissive motion with one hand. “I will call you when the time comes.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Alice said to Ashes as they climbed the stairs toward her room, “is why he doesn’t go himself.”

  “The same reason he hardly ever leaves the house. He’s afraid of the other Readers. None of them trust the others farther than they can spit. Getting two of them in one place is the next best thing to starting a fight already. If you tried to gather five or six, there’d be nothing left but a smoking crater. That’s why they have apprentices.”

  Ashes rubbed his head against her ankle as she stopped in front of her door. “Look, no offense, but you’re pretty young as apprentices go. You’ve got a lot of talent, but there’ll be stronger kids than you in the group. You just need to go along for the ride.”

  Alice paused, with her hand on the latch. “Then why’s he sending me at all?”

  “To keep an eye on the others, of course.” Ashes sniffed. “And maybe to make sure you’re properly scared, in case you ever get ideas about trying what Jacob did. But it’s not justice that they’re mostly concerned with, it’s division of the loot. All you apprentices are mostly there to watch one another and make sure nobody tries to sneak anything out.”

  It took a moment for Alice to process this. Her head was still spinning, and she shook it to try and clear some of the cobwebs.

  “Wait here. I’ve got to change.”

  Ashes, obedient for once, curled up against the opposite wall. Alice shut the door behind her and leaned against it, trying to make sense of things.

  Her little room hadn’t changed much since she’d first arrived. The two stuffed rabbits, all she had left of the old house where she’d lived with her father, still kept their silent vigil on the windowsill. She went over and pulled one of them into her lap.

  She could refuse to go, she supposed, but Geryon would punish her—she wasn’t quite sure how; she’d never truly made him angry, but her imagination could supply particulars all too readily—and the wayward apprentice, Jacob, would be hunted down anyway.

  And, though it made her uncomfortable to be part of a . . . a posse, like in some cinema Western, she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t want to go. There may be something in Esau’s fortress that can tell me the truth about my father. Some record, or one of his creatures. This could be my only chance.

  Once the Readers had divvied up his treasures, like the creditors who’d swooped i
n on her father’s house after his ship went down, she’d never be able to find what she was looking for.

  But what if we do find Jacob, and somehow it’s up to me to fight him? If he attacked her, she supposed she would fight back. But she wasn’t certain she could attack a person if he just refused to come with her. Could I stand by and watch while someone else does it? Isn’t that just as bad?

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it than Geryon was saying. It was all very well to say Jacob had murdered his master, but how? In spite of what Geryon had said, it was hard to picture someone like Esau—who’d lived for God-knows-how-long by virtue of caution and paranoia—lowering his guard enough for a mere apprentice to get the advantage of him. And why would Jacob do it? He had to know what the other old Readers would do to him.

  I can talk to Jacob, she decided. Perhaps he’s mad. Or perhaps he had a good reason, and he can explain things to Geryon and the others. And if I can get him alone, maybe he can answer my questions too.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CAVE OF DOORS

  ALICE DRESSED IN HER usual outfit for expeditions: sturdy, boyish trousers, a belt hung with handy pouches, and a coat suitable for rugged outdoor work. She stuffed the pouches with a few things she’d found useful in emergencies: matches, bandages, extra socks, and the three special acorns from the library. Lastly, she added a knife, in a leather sheath on her hip. She thought of this as a tool, rather than a weapon. If she ever were inclined to kill someone, Alice reflected, these days she hardly needed a knife to do it.

  Ashes swung his tail approvingly as she emerged, circling around her feet and brushing against her ankles.

  “You look like a proper little wildcat now,” he said. “Remember the night we met? Sneaking into the library in your nightshirt and one slipper?”

  Alice didn’t dignify that with a response. She headed for the stairs, and Ashes padded along behind her. Truthfully, though, she did feel—competent, perhaps? Even a little dangerous. The threads hummed at the back of her mind, tense with latent power. Look out, world. She grinned, feeling suddenly ridiculous, and shook her head.