Vault of Shadows (37 page)

With that he returned the crystal egg to his pocket and very slowly, very deliberately turned his back on her.

He did not see her face, but her screams of rage filled his ears and the threats she made—or perhaps they were promises—struck his back like a rain of arrows. Milo fled the alcove and went searching for his friends.

His heart was breaking and he had never in his life felt more wretched. The images Queen Mab had showed him
of Mom and Dad were like nails driven into his heart. Had he just condemned them to horrible deaths? Had he done that?

“I'm sorry, Dad,” he said as he broke into a run. “I'm sorry, Mom.”

He ran as hard as he could through the winding aisles of the Impossible Library. All the time, he wondered where the Heir of Gadfellyn Hall was and if he knew what was happening.

And if he cared at all.

M
ilo rounded a corner and skidded to a stop, understanding all at once why his friends hadn't managed to find him.

Something else had found them.

The queen of the
Aes Sídhe
had not lied or even exaggerated. She'd said that her champion was coming for her.

And here he was, in all his hideous reality.

The Huntsman.

The door to the library hung open and shattered, dangling from one twisted hinge. The Huntsman stood just inside the room, filling it with an overwhelming presence. The others stared in shock.

“Give me what you stole,” said the monster.

Mook roared like a stone lion and swept Shark and Evangelyne out of the way as he stepped forward to put himself between them and death. The Huntsman did not retreat from the stone boy. Instead he smiled.

“Ah,” said the Huntsman with a trace of amusement, “how gallant. The Colossus of Louisiana.” He ran his fingers over the steel augmentation that had been surgically
attached to him to repair the damage from Mook's fist. “I have you to thank for this,” he said to Mook. “And make no mistake, I will crush you to sand, and fire you into space.” He smiled. “Oh yes, I know what would happen to a rock elemental if you were unable to build a new body from the stones of this Earth. You'd die out there, and your debris would float forever in the vast nothingness of space.”

He laughed, and it was the coldest, cruelest sound Milo had ever heard. It rumbled through the air, colliding with the rows of books, making the dust on the floor twitch and dance. It hurt Milo's ears to hear it, and to know that this was a cruel promise and not simply an empty threat. Mook and Oakenayl could make an infinite number of new bodies as long as some part of them was able to touch the Earth. That was why Milo had thought them so brave to accompany him when he'd snuck aboard the Huntsman's red ship.

Mook, for his part, did not waver. He was as steadfast as the rock that made up his body. He slammed his fists together so hard that jagged splinters of stone flew through the air.

“Mook!”
he bellowed.

“Whatever,” said the Huntsman, unimpressed. “Give me what you stole and you may live past this hour. Refuse me and I will drag you into space, you pile of useless rock, and cast you adrift far, far from this Earth.”

“Yeah?” growled Shark. “Well, eat this!”

He snapped off three quick shots with his pulse pistol,
filling the aisle with intense azure light. The Huntsman must have guessed this attack was coming, because before Shark had finished raising his gun, the monster had whipped something from a hidden sheath and held it before him. The blasts from the pulse pistol hit what looked like a spike of white-hot fire, and the blue force bolts exploded, showering the books on either side of the Huntsman. The books immediately caught fire.

The Huntsman laughed.

He stood there holding a flaming dagger with a long, narrow blade. It was not a steel blade covered in something flammable, but a blade of living fire. The glow of it gave the Huntsman a strange blue-white radiance.

“Oh, great,” muttered Shark, backing up, “he has a freaking
light saber.
”

But it wasn't that. It wasn't anything from old books or movies from before the invasion. No, Milo knew exactly what this was. It was the thing that the Huntsman had used to steal the life force from Lizabeth.

It was a firedirk.

“Necromancer,”
snarled Evangelyne, and she loaded that one word with bottomless hatred and contempt. “Defiler! Despoiler. Slayer of the innocent.”

The Huntsman laughed aloud and even offered her a mocking half-bow.

“All of those things, little girl, and so much more. It is nice to be recognized for one's accomplishments.”

“You killed my friend,” said Milo in a voice he barely
recognized as his own. “You killed Lizabeth.”

“Killed her? Of course I killed her.” The Huntsman shrugged. “Who cares? What is she to me but a means to an end? She was a worthless and unimportant nothing, and only in the act of dying did her life have any meaning.”

“You
murdered
her.”

He nodded. “As I will murder each one of you. Surely you understand that it must happen that way. You stole something from me and you stole something from the Swarm. Those are unforgivable crimes. I can't even consider mercy because you're young and stupid and don't understand what you've done. And do you know why? Because I've been inside your mind, as you were in mine. I know that you are capable of grasping the enormity of your sins.”

“Sins?” snapped Evangelyne. “You dare speak of sins to us?”

He straightened and sneered. “And why should I not, you filthy little mongrel? What are you?
Nothing.
What am I?” He took a heavy, threatening step toward them, while on either side of him precious books withered and died inside their wreaths of flame.
“I am a god!”

The heat from the burning books washed down the aisle toward Milo. The flames were spreading, killing more of the books and sending dense smoke up to the ceiling. In his mind Milo heard voices crying out in fear and pain, as if the characters in all those books were caught in the flame. Burning and dying.

The Huntsman had used the word “sins,” and in truth Milo had never much considered what that meant. He believed in God and prayed every night that the Swarm would leave and the world would be saved, but it didn't go much deeper than that for him. Concepts like sin never much mattered except on a general scale. Some of the adults in his camp talked about the sins of the Dissosterin, but it had always seemed like another word for crime or wrong or evil.

Now, in a fragment of a second as the Huntsman's proclamation echoed through the smoke and dust in this impossible place, the word “sin” took on a new meaning for Milo.

He understood what it was, what it meant. It was not exactly a religious understanding for him. It was more a glimpse into the sheer depth of the importance of things. The Swarm had wanted to conquer the world and exploit it for any resources they could steal. They were not evil, just as a disease, however destructive, was not evil. Milo understood that. The Huntsman, he knew,
was
evil. He reveled in destruction and he fed on pain. Before, when they'd fought him on the hive ship, Milo had thought he understood the full scope of that evil.

He was wrong.

There were depths and dimensions to it he hadn't understood before. Or maybe it was that he hadn't been
able
to grasp it before. Not before Lizzie.

Evil went so much deeper and was so much darker
than Milo had ever understood. Evil wasn't just about destroying things. No, it was about
having
them. Owning them. Controlling and using them.

The Huntsman had craved magical power, but the path he'd chosen was the most vile imaginable. Necromancy. Magic and knowledge that were only possible through the pain and death of innocents. Could there be a worse crime? A worse sin?

No.

Milo had no intention of charging at the Huntsman. It was the furthest thing from his mind. It was a stupid and suicidal thing to do.

But it was what he did.

He ran straight at him, his slingshot empty, his eyes half blind with red rage, murder in his heart. He gathered every ounce of strength he possessed and swung a punch at the monster before him.

And the Huntsman swatted him away as if he were nothing.

There was a burst of blinding pain and then Milo felt himself flying. He slammed into the wall of burning books. It felt exactly like what it was. Intense heat, choking clouds of smoke, fiery ash, and the humiliation of being discarded like a piece of trash. Milo dropped to his knees.

Then he realized that his clothes were on fire.

So was his hair.

He screamed in pain and rolled away from the
Huntsman, trying to snuff out the flames on the carpet. Then something landed heavily on him. He felt slick, scaly skin and sharp little claws, and all at once the intensity of the burn was gone.

“Iskiel!”
gasped Milo as the fire salamander drank in the flames and even the burning heat from Milo's skin. Then the creature turned and belched it out again, shooting it like a stream of napalm at the Huntsman.

This time the monster did not laugh or deflect the attack with the firedirk. The flames engulfed him and drove him back, and a terrible roar of agony tore itself from the Huntsman's throat. The firedirk fell from his hands as the Huntsman beat at flames that caught on his insect armor and the patches of human hair that still clung to his misshapen head.

“At him!”
yelled Evangelyne, and instantly the wolf was racing forward, snarling, white teeth flashing. Shark tried for a shot, but the wolf was in the way. So he and Mook ran after her.

The Huntsman reeled away from them, and between his howls of pain he cried out in the clicking, inhuman language of the Swarm. There was an instant response from across the library, and the doorway blew inward off its hinges. Milo looked up, and watched in horror as a squad of shocktroopers poured in through the smoke.

“W
atch out!” screamed Milo, but everyone already saw that things had gone from bad to much, much worse.

Shark flung himself behind a couch, snapping off wild shots with his pulse pistol. There were so many of the 'troopers that it was impossible to miss. Three of them went flying backward, their chests exploding, lifelights instantly going from a bright green to fragments of lightless black.

Their corpses knocked down several of the alien warriors, but other 'troopers returned fire and soon the library was filled with blue lightning. Chairs and paintings exploded in clouds of splinters. Rich tapestries on the walls turned into sheets of flame.

And the books . . .

The ancient paper and parchment of the books caught fire. Each book screamed as it burned, and the cries filled the place with a nightmare din that threatened to break Milo's mind.

The Impossible Library was dying.

They were killing it. The Swarm and the Orphan Army. Each was inflicting cruel damage on the world's last repository of books.

It was hateful and hurtful and Milo saw no way to stop it.

He fumbled for his slingshot as he struggled to his feet, loaded it, and ran into the smoke. Aiming at every lifelight he saw. Firing, reloading, firing. Seeing those awful green lights explode, seeing misshapen bodies fall.

A gray form leaped past him, and Milo pivoted as Evangelyne struck the Huntsman with her front paws just as the killer was reaching with his metal hand for the fallen firedirk. The werewolf's claws raked the Huntsman's armor, leaving deep parallel gouges. With a snarl of fury, the Huntsman shoved her away and snatched up his weapon. Then he bore down on her, raising the weapon to strike.

Milo loosed a ball bearing from ten feet away. Not at the Huntsman's face or lifelight, but at the back of his alien hand. There was a heavy
clang
as metal struck metal, and once again the magical dagger went flying. The very tip of the blade cut a burning line across Evangelyne's cheek, and the wolf yelped in pain.

Across the room, Mook had picked up a heavy oak mission table and was using it as a shield as he rammed into the 'troopers. Their pulse blasts blew chunks off it, but the rock boy was too close and moving with too much momentum for them to stop him in time. The burning oak crushed them back; then Mook released it, cocked a mighty fist, and punched all the way through one and into the unlucky aliens behind it. Green blood splashed high on the walls of books.

Shark was down on the ground, using a smaller table for cover as he fired a steady stream of shots at the legs of the 'troopers. Already a bunch of them had fallen, and Killer—the tiniest and least dangerous of the orphans—darted in and out, biting alien faces, scratching insect eyes with his tiny claws. Doing his part.

Evangelyne lunged once more at the Huntsman and drove him back, and the two fell into the flaming wall of books, vanishing inside a cloud of smoke and sparks. Then she went flying across the room, hurled with savage force by the Huntsman. She vanished into a wall of fiery smoke, but Milo heard her strike something solid. There was no yelp or cry. Only silence and stillness.

Grinning at his victory, the Huntsman looked around, spotted his firedirk, and reached for it. As he snatched it up he turned to Milo, a wicked smile on his face.

“And now, boy, let's see if your life force is pure enough to free my queen from her prison. How would that be? To die so that the queen of all the dark faeries can join me in our conquest of all of space and time. Do you think you will rest easy in your grave knowing how thoroughly you have failed those who counted on you?”

Milo scuttled away, tossing a small table down between him and the advancing Huntsman. A stack of books fell too and slid across the floor on their leather covers. The Huntsman kicked them out of his way.

“Where is the Heart of Darkness?” demanded the monster. “You know where it is, don't you, boy? Tell me
now and I may even let you live. Would you like that? You can be my pet, like a monkey on a chain.”