Chapter 13
There I was. Flying. On a dragon. Flying, those great green wings beating steadily to either side of me, the wind raking through my hair as Emily Bronte’s brooding moors fell away beneath us.
At first I saw villages dotting the landscape below, white-ribbon strips of road, distant towns sketching the horizon .
. . And then it all seemed to fade away somehow, and we were flying over a vast, undulating landscape stretching out changelessly in all directions.
Not ocean; the ripples below were ivory pale.
Not sand; the lines were too straight to be dunes.
Then the entire landscape folded beneath us, rolling over like an endless wave, and I realized it was a page turning.
A page in the book of the world, or the book between worlds, or the book that held all the worlds.
“Margin-traveling,” the Librarian said beneath me, her smoky-pitched voice carrying through the wind without any difficulty at all since it was now resonating through the cavern of a huge scaly chest, “takes considerably longer in dragon form.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Um. Okay, still adjusting.
This is—it’s a lot.” And I was still devoting a fair amount of effort to not falling off here.
In fantasy novels it always seems easy: heroine leaps onto dragon’s back and up up up and away she goes, long locks billowing picturesquely in the wind.
But my hair kept getting in my mouth, my thighs were near to cramping I was gripping so hard with my knees, and I was hanging on to two ridges of her neck crest for dear life as I tried my best not to drop the green tablet wedged under one arm. “What happens if I fall off?”
“Try not to do that.”
“Gotcha.” My sweaty palms slipped on her neck crest, and I swallowed. “Is there any chance you can, ah, smooth out this ride?”
“Sure, let me just downshift into third,” she snorted but let her wings go wide, sending us from a swooping climb into a soaring glide, and I began to breathe a little easier.
I let go long enough to slip the tablet into the reticule still looped miraculously over one wrist, and realized the green scales flexing under me were softer than I expected—not horn or chitin but that hard, pebbled, slightly jeweled-looking leather used for seriously expensive bookbinding.
I leaned down to touch the wing crest anchored under my foot, and it felt like a book spine: hard but flexible.
Her claws and scale tips glittered gold like a book’s gilt edges, and it wasn’t hide stretching thin and iridescent between her wing joints, it was vellum, like an ancient illuminated manuscript.
“Because you’re not just any dragon,” I breathed. “You’re a book dragon.”
The Librarian snorted out a small black cloud that I realized wasn’t smoke but ink. Of course it was. “Where do you think the expression bookworm comes from?”
Bookworm. Bookwyrm? I remembered some of her very first words to me when I asked if the term Librarian was a title or a calling: I’ve been petitioning the Library Board to change it to Book Dragon. “How long have you been able to do this?”
“The Library grants dragon privileges after the first hundred years or so.”
“The Library, not the—the Board?”
“Yes.” A brief pause. “The Board regards it as a waste of resources.”
Another flap of her vellum wings, another long soar. Below us, a vast page turned over again—I could just about see the shadows of words tossing and turning on its surface like waves. Did paragraphs make up the tides here in this in-between margin space? Did words make up the rivulets and eddies?
“We aren’t going back for the Patron in Wuthering Heights, are we?” It wasn’t really a question.
“No. I don’t believe she’s in danger. I think you were right, Miss Watson. The cards were turned from a warning system into a trap. The goal was not to threaten my Patrons, but to exhaust me in my efforts to protect them.”
I should have been pleased to be proved right; pleased that my instincts had panned out.
Instead, I gulped down another wave of fear.
It’s not pleasant, finding yourself mid-adventure and realizing your Gandalf figure had the wrong plan all along.
Gandalf, Aslan, Glinda, they’re supposed to have all the answers—here mine was admitting she didn’t.
“Where are we going now?” I ventured.
“The Library. I’ll need to recover. This”—a ripple down the glossy sequined leather of her long spined neck—“it takes a lot out of me.”
“If I ask why, will you tell me to ask the Library Board?” I said, attempting a joke.
“There is a lot right now I would like to ask the Library Board,” she said grimly.
And we flew on over an endless parchment sea.
I don’t know what I was expecting the Astral Library to look like from the outside—a spired castle on a crag?
A sprawling palace stretching endlessly into this limbo of astral pages?
—but I had no chance to see it. As soon as the Librarian began to glide downward as if toward a landing, the cloud appeared.
A flutter of red dots swirling below like a blood-mist whirlpool, hiding the Library from view.
“Shit, are we—” I began.
“Hang on,” the Librarian said, and I barely had time to clamp my hands around her neck spines and my body along her back when she let out another bone-ripping roar and screamed straight for the center of that ominous scarlet flock.
I saw her hiss out another black cloud, a fine mist of ink that boiled and spat like acid wherever it touched red card stock, and for a moment I saw the thronged cards flutter back and thought we’d blast straight through to safety.
But they swirled back with a vengeance, slicing and stabbing as badly as before—only there were so many more of them now than the cloud that had trapped us out on the Bronte moors.
The Librarian threw herself into a corkscrew of a dive, whirling, snapping, biting, spitting her poison ink, down down down, and I just hung on for dear life.
I saw the cloud of cards divide, arrowing in long streamers on either side of us like a line of tracer bullets, aiming for her wings.
I saw the taut vellum webbing pierced in a thousand places, saw the wind rip through—her left wing tore all at once, no longer knifing the air but fluttering brokenly through it, and we slewed sideways.
One of the Library’s long emerald-green windows loomed, and I buried my head in her scaled back an instant before we hit.
A shrieking splinter of astral glass, jewel shards exploding outward in all directions, and then the dragon and I impacted the floor in the center of the Library like a nuclear cloud blooming skyward.
Her lashing tail whipped the massive oak counter to splinters; one flailing wing sent the bronze globe flying.
All around me the books were screaming, taking off toward the vaulted ceiling.
I lost my grip and tumbled down the length of her slashed, ruined wing, which she somehow managed to curve under me so I skidded across the floor rather than smashing headfirst into it.
The moment I was down, her wing wrenched free and the dragon lurched upright, still roaring her rage toward the broken window.
The bloodred wave was re-forming outside, readying to come through, and one card nipped between the jagged green edges and went straight for the dragon’s eyes.
Her jaws snapped. Not fast enough. I saw the razor flick of the red edge as it knocked her glasses aside and sliced across her left eye.
“No,” I screamed, “no—” And as I scrambled upright I swung Beau’s hand-embroidered reticule with the tablet inside and swatted that little red fucker right out of the air.
I stamped on it, felt it wriggling under my shoe like an eel, reached down regardless of those sharp edges and tore it into scarlet confetti.
I could feel the Librarian’s shadow on my back as she drew herself up, dragging one ruined wing, shrinking, dwindling.
Barely a heartbeat passed before the juddering flail of wings and teeth and tail resolved itself back into the form of the little old woman in her green cardigan.
Standing there snarling—one arm hanging useless and one eye a well of blood—up at the broken window with the scarlet cloud a hair from flying through.
She inhaled all the way down through her entire body to her toes, as she brought her finger to her lips.
roared the Librarian.
The entire Library seemed to leap. Every window went dark at once; every book flew from its shelf.
Half the volumes hurled themselves to the floor, piling into a circular wall around the Librarian and me; the other half flung themselves against the broken window and sealed it behind a barricade of leather and paper.
The clock gave a tremendous clang and I heard a sound in my bones like a massive gate swinging shut.
And then a silence in the shattered space, like nothing I’d ever heard in my life.
“Well,” said the Librarian, finger dropping from her lips. “That should hold ’em awhile.”
A flicker of movement caught my eye at the head of the stairs to my right, but I didn’t have time to look—I barely had time to catch the Librarian as she swayed and fell.
“Ma’am—!” It was more of a controlled collapse than a smooth lowering to the ground.
I barely managed to stop her head from cracking against the hardwood floor, my knees hitting the boards a second later.
“Oh God—” Her eye was slashed to bloodied ruin; her arm was clearly broken.
She was covered in cuts and gashes, bleeding everywhere. “Lie still, let me—”
“Get off.” She still managed to sound irritated, swatting me as I tried to wipe the blood from her wounded eye.
“We need to stop this bleeding.”
“Just let me rest. The Library will take care of me. It’ll just—take—a while . . .”
“Uh, Alix?” A voice behind me, a voice I knew, but I could not look away from the Librarian, not for anything.
“Who is doing this?” I cried, trying to mop at the blood flowing down her face. “Who?”
And then there came the extremely prosaic sound of a machine spitting out pages.
Dazed, I looked around till my eyes found the book-drop slot where the first red card had come winnowing out, a harbinger of doom.
It was now spitting out flyers, one after the other, like an industrial copy machine.
Already they covered the floor like snow.
I climbed over the waist-high book wall and picked one up.
The same flyer I’d seen on and off for the last two days, usually crumpled up and sailing into the wastebasket.
ANNUAL BOARD MEETING: TWO DAYS!
For the first time I read the block of text below the title.
Three years ago, the Library Board voted in toto to request a detailed report as to the proposed restructure of the Astral Library bylaws.
We have not at this date received your report or any other response to our communiqués as far as this aforementioned restructure, or Bullet Points 3a–12c of the last Library Board Annual Meeting (see minutes), and request immediate deputization of all acquired facts and figures in advance of the next Annual Board Meeting or else more stringent measures and/or involuntary retirement options will be deemed necessary in the essential modernization of the ALBM (Astral Library Business Model) . . .
It went on and on, an entire page of bureaucrat-speak that made my eyes cross. “What does this mean?”
The Librarian’s voice was barely a thread issuing from her battered lips. “It means they must have passed a vote on those stringent measures.”
“Who’s they?” I nearly shrieked.
“The Library Board.” She was clearly sliding fast into unconsciousness, falling headlong off the cliff, but she got the words out. “They’ve been trying for years to take the Library away from me by bureaucratic means. Now I’m guessing they’ve decided to employ involuntary retirement options.”
“What?” I cried, gripping her hand. “What?” But there was no answer, and behind me I heard that diffident, familiar voice again.
“Alix?”
I scrambled to my feet, whipping around.
The Programmer—the Gallerist—I’d forgotten all about them after they’d departed with the last batch of Patrons to hide in paintings and games.
Please let them have come back. Because I could really use a calming, centuries-old presence here to tell me what the ever-loving fuck I was supposed to do next.
But the figure standing hesitantly at the head of the sweeping staircase wasn’t the Gallerist or the Programmer.
It was a living, breathing, broad-shouldered fashion plate in a skintight claret-colored frock coat, impeccably tied cravat, breeches, and tall boots, silk top hat and elaborate silver-mounted walking stick in one gloved hand.
“Alix?” said Beau.