The Palace of Glass by Django Wexler Page A

range of hills stretching off in both directions. Facing the other way, a row of jagged mountain peaks were visible only as blots against the stars, reminding Alice uncomfortably of the bowl of mountains surrounding Esau’s fortress. In between was a dusty plain, scattered with a few rocks and the occasional glint of a frozen-over stream.
    Not dust, she realized as they started walking.
Ash.
The stuff was pale gray and as light as powder, puffingaround their feet when they moved and leaving a clear trail of footprints behind them. Here and there, wind tugged it up into tiny ash-devils, gray whirlwinds that danced around them like playful spirits.
    Flicker led the way with confidence, sighting down his spear at the distant shapes of the mountains to get his bearings. His long, glowing hair was a beacon, throwing red and yellow light all around them, like a pool of life amid a gray, dead emptiness.
    After a while, to break the silence as much as anything else, she said, “Why
do
you come up here, if there’s nothing to see?”
    â€œIt must look stupid to you,” Flicker said. “You can walk through a book into any world you like, and I have to scrape and crawl to get
here
.” He waved a hand at the bleak landscape. “It wasn’t always like this.”
    â€œYou . . . remember?”
    Flicker’s lip twisted. “That’s right. My spark made sure of it. I look out at this and I remember a time when the Heartfire was so strong, rivers of molten rock ran across the land, and my people lived under the stars.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œEvery year, it gets a little weaker, a little cooler. Everyyear we move down a little farther. Every year there are fewer of us. Eventually, there’ll be nothing left but ash. I used to think there might be something else to find if we looked up instead of down.”
    â€œDoes Pyros know about this?” Alice said.
    â€œOf course. Everyone knows. But they’d rather not think about it. Pyros says we can trust the
Readers
to help us.”
    â€œA Reader
could
help you,” Alice said cautiously. “If you could use the portal-book, you could find a new home.”
    â€œAnd what would we have to pay for it?” Flicker waved again at the dead world. “My spark told me that it was the Readers who caused all of this in the first place! That the Heartfire began to weaken when they locked away the portals in their books and their libraries.”
    â€œDo you believe that?”
    â€œI have no idea. But I know what happened to my spark. Your precious master wrote him into a prison-book, and traded him to some other Reader like a pretty stone.”
    Oh.
Alice fell into silence. Pyros had said that Flicker’s spark was gone, and she’d wondered if he’d been killed by the bluechill or another monster.
But Geryon took him.
In spite of the sprite’s vicious tone, she felt a sudden kinship with Flicker.
Does Geryon haunt his nightmares too?
    Flicker was clearly fuming, his hair brighter than normal and laced with yellow and white. Alice waited a few minutes, trudging carefully across the monotonous landscape, before she spoke again.
    â€œNot every Reader is like Geryon.”
    â€œOh no?” Flicker turned on his heel, eyes blazing like twin stars. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me that
you’re
one of the good ones?”
    â€œI . . .” The image of her father’s sad, disappointed face flashed through her mind, and she willed it away. “I
try
to be. I’ve never trapped anyone in a prison-book.”
    â€œYou’ve used prison-books, though. You’ve bound creatures.”
    â€œOnly animals. Beasts. Not people.”
Except the tree-sprite. But I refused to kill it! And the Dragon. But that’s different!
    â€œThat makes it better? You’d take someone like Ishi and trap him in a prison forever, just for your own power, and