The Palace of Glass (26 page)

“Then run!”

They ran. The Ouroborean pushed itself off of the bookshelf and followed, its loping stride closing the
gap between
them with terrifying speed. Alice stopped at the next intersection to grab the shelf on one side and pull it down in an avalanche of books and dust. The Ouroborean stumbled as the heavy shelf slammed into its shoulder, and it brought one massive fist around in a blow that cracked the shelf in half and sent splinters of wood flying. Dex handed Alice a pair of dagger-length spears, and Alice sent them zipping over the wreckage just as the thing got up, snapping its head back as they sank in where its eyes ought to be.

“Keep going!” Alice said as the creature climbed over the wrecked shelf. “Left! Around that corner!”

Dex was panting, and the dust-choked air burned Alice's throat. They were in the back of the library now, dodging between clusters of bookshelves, each its own
tiny world with a portal- or prison-book in the center. Alice pointed to one.

“In here!” Alice shouted. “Squeeze between the shelves!”

She hit the gap at a run, scraping her shoulder on the wood, feeling the familiar queasy stretching as she went from the library to the strange space where the book's world had leaked through. From the inside, the bookshelves were enormous stone monoliths, so tall, they blocked out the sky, ringing a clearing and a small pond, surrounded by dense jungle. This was where Alice left her acorns to charge with energy, in the raging torrent of raw living power that leaked from the book sitting by the side of the pond.

“Head that way,” Alice said. “Over toward the waterfall.”

Dex nodded. Alice paused in the center of the clearing, listening to the distant hooting of strange birds, the crash of water, and the buzz of insects. She waited.

It didn't take long. One of the stone monoliths shook, shifted, and began to fall outward, making a sound like a collapsing mountain. The Ouroborean stood in the gap, where it had pulled a bookshelf over, and now the place where the two worlds met was a raw, eye-twisting wound that made Alice look away.

“You think you can hide from me?”

The tree-sprite popped into being at her call, a slim, green-skinned creature only half her size. At her mental direction, it scampered into the jungle, growing a thick layer of bark over itself like armor as it scrambled up one of the swaying trees. Moments later, branches twisted like living things and lashed out at the Ouroborean as it came on through the underbrush. They wrapped around it, squeezing hard enough to crack granite, pulling its limbs in opposite directions in an effort to tear it apart.

But wherever it touched the monster, the vegetation started to wither. All around, death spread, first through the grass and then into the foliage. Tree trunks toppled, pitted and rotten, and the Ouroborean easily ripped free of the dying husks. The tree-sprite fell back, sending more trees into the fray, but it was obviously a losing battle.

Keep it here as long as you can,
Alice told the tree-sprite. She grabbed the portal-book—she couldn't bear to leave it to be devoured—and squeezed past the great stones to emerge between shelves in the library. Dex grabbed her hand and they ran together, while behind them the jungle
snapped
and
cracked
as it died.

ROLLING THE DICE

A
LICE FELT THE
TREE-SPRITE
get sucked into the Ouroborean's bottomless maw. She stumbled, and only Dex's grip kept her on her feet as a wave of light-headedness swept over her.

Nearly there.
Michael was waiting by the shelves, guarding the portal to the fire-sprite's world. To Alice's surprise, so was Jen. The girl looked a little wobbly, but she was on her feet. There was no sign of Isaac.

“He's not back yet?” Alice said.

“Not yet,” Michael said, fumbling for his glasses. “How far behind is it?”

“Not far, I fear,” said Dex, letting go of Alice and
turning to face the direction they'd come. Her caryatid armor flashed into existence again.

“We can't keep running forever,” Alice said, setting the book down. She felt like she was about to drop, and her legs had turned to jelly. “We'll have to make a stand.” She looked at Jen. “Isaac was supposed to take you through with him.”

“That's what he told me,” she said, setting her jaw stubbornly. “I told him he could shove it.”

Alice hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “Don't use magic directly on the Ouroborean. And don't let your creatures get caught; they'll just get sucked in.”

“That's what Michael told me.” Jen grinned shakily and raised her hands. Her fingers lengthened, hooking into hard, pointed claws.

“It's coming,” Dex said.

Alice looked one more time at the shelves where Isaac had gone, then turned back to the shadows of the library. The Ouroborean emerged from them, a deeper darkness threaded with a web of silver. It was still changing shape, growing even taller and longer-limbed, slowly losing the last vestiges of a human form. Its head was a mere lump on its shoulders, and its hands no
longer had fingers. The static buzz of its voice rang in her ears.

“I will not be stopped,” it roared. “Not this time.”

Fighting Torment, Alice had been terrified and in pain, but looking at the Ouroborean she felt something worse, something close to despair. Torment, for all his size and power, had been a living, breathing creature. He'd bled when she'd wounded him. The Ouroborean was like a machine, an engine woven of magic, a trip-hammer that would pound away, over and over, until something broke.

Or until
it
does.

She looked over her shoulder again.
Come on, Isaac.

“We are not so different, Alice Creighton. I will eat my fill.” The Ouroborean stalked closer. “And then I will have my revenge on those cowards who locked me away. You know how it feels to want revenge.”

I'm not like you. And I'm not a coward.
There was no time left.
We have to try.
Which meant, probably, that they would all be killed. She thought of Ellen's dead face, smoke pouring from her eyes and mouth, and swallowed hard.

“Dex,” she said. “Go on the right. Jen and Michael, the left. Just try to keep it from grabbing me—”

The light reflecting off the flagstones took on an
orange-yellow tone. A voice like a crackling fire said, “And where do you want me?”

“Flicker!” Alice turned to see the fire-sprite emerging from the narrow crack between the bookshelves. Actinia was just behind him, his blue-tinted hair flaring to white at the tips. They both carried long black spears. “Pyros sent you to help?”

“Pyros said it was too dangerous,” Actinia said. “But we came anyway.”

“And when
I
heard there was a fight to be had,” another voice said, “I followed.”

From between two other shelves, Helga emerged, with Erdrodr on her heels. The older ice giant was just as Alice had last seen her, but Erdrodr had donned battle gear similar to her mother's, and carried a two-handed ax.

“We were at the fire-sprite village,” Erdrodr said, “talking about trade. Then Isaac turned up.”

Isaac squeezed through last of all, the edges of his coat scorched from his passage through the heat of the portal chamber. He sighed with relief at the sight of Alice. “I wasn't sure we'd made it in time.”

“
Just
in time.” Alice turned back to face the Ouroborean, who had paused to assess these new arrivals. “You told them the plan?”

“Keep it off of you,” Flicker said.

“It doesn't
look
so dangerous,” Helga said, unshipping first one massive ax, then another. She gave them a twirl between her fingers.

“It doesn't look like much of anything,” Erdrodr said. “Not even worth sketching.”

“You think this gives you a chance?” The Ouroborean's laugh was like a screech of radio noise. It approached, and Alice and her friends sprang forward to meet it.

Helga took the lead, shouting a war cry, her enormous strides outdistancing the others. She skidded to a halt just in front of the Ouroborean, planting her heel and letting her momentum pull her into a spin, putting all the force behind the swing of one of her massive axes. It caught the Ouroborean just below the shoulder, slicing entirely through its arm and biting deep into its torso. The severed limb fell away, evaporating like black mist before it hit the ground.

The Ouroborean brought its other arm around, a roundhouse blow aimed at Helga, only to find Erdrodr intercepting it with an overhead swing of her own ax. This one cut the creature's other arm off at the elbow, leaving it to flail hopelessly with the stump. Flicker and
Actinia circled behind her, spears at the ready, while Michael and Jen went around in the other direction.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing, Sister Alice?” Dex said.

“No,” Alice said, and darted forward, dodging Helga's oversized feet.

Dex stayed by her side as she closed in, their heads only reaching the Ouroborean's waist. She put her arms around one of its legs, holding her own wrist, squeezing with all of Spike's strength to keep herself in place. Then she closed her eyes, and looked at it the way she'd looked at her own spells while Writing.

Down, down, down—

She felt the Ouroborean moving underneath her, a mesh of magical filaments in the crude shape of a living thing. She could feel what it felt, and she understood why it shrugged off blows and weapons. The shape was just a shape, a physical incarnation
of
the spell, but
not
the spell. It could be whatever it needed to be.

“Watch and learn, Reader.” The buzzing voice resonated through Alice's skull.

The creature's severed shoulders rippled, and two new limbs emerged from each, as long and flexible as tentacles. A pair of them reached for Erdrodr; she chopped
one
of them out of the way, but the other wrapped around her waist. The two fire-sprites rushed forward, skewering the tentacle with their spears, and the ice giant girl wriggled free. Two more tentacles reached for Helga, but her flashing ax blades cut them in half.

In the shadow-world of Writing, Alice tore at the structure of the Ouroborean, ripping the spell to pieces. It shredded in her mental grasp, no more substantial than cobweb, and it took her a moment to realize that she wasn't making any progress. The Ouroborean was intricate, interlaced with itself a thousand times over, and the pieces she ripped away were drawn back into alignment as though they'd never been torn.

“A fine effort,” the Ouroborean buzzed. “But if the Readers could have destroyed me, don't you think they would have, long ago?”

Ripples spread from the creature's shoulders to its back, and more tentacles burst forth. Five, ten, twenty ribbons of darkness curving through the air, trying to get at Alice.

Her friends stood in their way, hacking and slashing and stabbing. Black mist flew around Helga, and Erdrodr severed tentacle after tentacle while Flicker and Actinia watched Alice's back. Michael's silver darts and Isaac's
slashing blades of ice harried the twisting limbs, and Jen leaped onto the creature's back to slash the tentacles off at their roots with her claws. Dex stood directly in front of Alice, her swords intercepting anything that got too close.

“Your friends are persistent,” the creature said. Alice felt its structure twist and shift. “But you have led them to their deaths.”

Alice wanted to shout a warning, but that would mean returning her attention to the real world, and she didn't dare. She ripped at the structure of the spell, searching desperately for a way to hurt the Ouroborean faster than it rebuilt itself, bits of wrecked magic floating all around her.

More tentacles sprouted, and their tips were as sharp and hard as spears.

The Ouroborean redoubled its attack, slashing and stabbing instead of trying to grab. Helga's axes rang, ice blade against solid darkness. Erdrodr grunted and went to her knees, thick white blood flowing from a slash on her thigh, and Flicker and Actinia fought side by side with whirling spears, knocking back the creature's attacks as she limped away. Jen jumped clear of the thing's hide just before two tentacles skewered her, and she landed in front of Michael, deflecting another pair of attacks with
her claws. Isaac ducked and dodged, and spear points glanced off Dex's armor with a metallic shriek as she slashed the tentacles away with her swords.

“Erdrodr!” Helga struggled to fight free and reach her daughter, but the Ouroborean's onslaught wouldn't let up. Ever more tentacles sprouted, hundreds of them, looping over and around until they blotted out the rest of the library in twisting, weaving darkness. They were all coming for Alice, to stab her, slice her, tear her apart for the temerity of what she was trying to do.

“I will drink all your lives,” the creature buzzed, “and I will save you for last, Alice Creighton, so that you can watch all the others—”

Come on, come on.
Alice felt tears leak from between her eyelids.
There has to be
something
! If you can make a spell, you have to be able to un-make it.
But it was so
complicated
. Just trying to trace the flows of power made her head throb, one branch twisting and looping around the next, complex and interwoven, like—

—a labyrinth
.

She let her tight grip on the spell go, letting her mind roam over its complex framework. Power flowed, and she flowed with it, from one junction to the next, through corridors and rooms. Something tingled, an echo of what
she felt when she touched the fabric of the library.
There has to be somewhere that it all comes together. Even the most complicated maze has—

Someone screamed, and then choked off abruptly. Alice's heart double-thumped.

—a center.

She had it. A single junction, no different from any of the others. But all the flows united there.
This has to be it.
Alice reached down and tore it away.

“What?” the Ouroborean roared.

This time, the damage didn't repair itself. It spread, blocks tumbling, dominoes falling, a house of cards coming down. The intricate network collapsed, slowly at first but building speed as it went. Alice pulled herself back to reality, opened her eyes, and released her grip.

“Not possible!” The creature's voice rose to a frantic, buzzing shriek. “No
Reader
can destroy
me
! You—”

The Ouroborean had frozen in place, the silver thread woven through its black body flaring bright white. One of its tentacles had impaled Helga through the midsection, her hands gripping it where it punched into her stomach and came out her back. Erdrodr was screaming.

“Alice Creighton!” the Ouroborean wailed. “What
are
you?”