Page 27 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)
Palace of Refuge
Christopher was eager to go, but they needed Naravirala, and the power and speed of her wings.
“I’ll go and seek her,” said Nighthand.
“And I,” said Irian, “will show you the creatures in our care. I want you to understand this place, both of you.”
She took a plate with a baked fish on it and led them down a corridor lined with paintings. Everything was impeccably clean, though here and there they saw a bite taken out of a tapestry.
“Come in,” Irian said. “This was the ballroom.”
The walls of the room were studded with amber, and a grand piano stood in the far corner. Lumbering across the floorboards came a vast eagle, the size of a small hippopotamus.
“This one got lost. He’s very, very young.” His wings, Anya could see, were tufty, but as long and wide as a dining table, and his eyes disproportionately huge.
Christopher laughed, and Anya laughed too, in sheer delight: he was a miraculous thing, at once enormous and so freshly arrived to the world.
“A roc,” said Gallia. “A fellow bird.”
“Mine!” Koo half flew, half tumbled off Anya’s shoulder, tottering on his eager silver claws toward the immense eagle head. Anya scooped him up; she suspected he might look, to the roc, like food.
Jacques snorted. “This immensity is a baby? It is most uncouth.”
Irian nodded. “They grow big enough to carry an elephant in their claws.”
“And he’s just…living here?” said Anya. She thought of the formality and tradition of Argen Castle, and then of this: the beauty of the place and its new residents.
“Exactly that.” Irian smiled. “As I said, the palace is built of sphinx stone.”
“And we couldn’t understands it,” said Ratwin. “Because no sphinx would ever— nevers-evers-whethers —give stone for the frippery palace of a rich and spoiled, gone-off dignitary.”
“So I looked into its history—”
“I helpeds,” said Ratwin. “I have three doctorates of philosophies.”
“Ratwin.”
“Fine. I sharpened the pencilings with my teeths.”
“And we discovered that this place was once a school. It was founded by one of the last scholar-kings, more than one and a half thousand years ago. It has an ancient heart.”
“Although,” said Ratwin, “it has no libraries. There was one onces, and it was legendary-famous. But we can’t find it. It’s been vanished into mythical-nothing.”
“Really, Ratwin?” said Christopher. He looked skeptical.
Irian shrugged. “It’s true that there’s no library.
The Palace of Glimt used to hold some of the most valuable books in the Archipelago; there was a diamond-studded book that was said to be worth more than a dragon’s hoard.
But we can find no trace of it. I think they must have just sold all the books. ”
“I heards,” said Ratwin, “that the library was not sold but hiddens, underground, or in the sky, or in a magical cupboard.”
Christopher and Irian exchanged looks. “Ratatoskas are not the most reliable narrators, though,” said Irian.
Christopher traced the etchings on the bricks with his fingertips. “Can you read Sphinx? What does this say?”
“It’s a history of Glimouria,” said Irian. “It stretches all the way across the wall and up the tower.” She smiled at Anya’s expression. “I know; the sphinx stones are remarkable. They have life and desires of their own. And so we wanted to restore the palace to something worthy of them.”
“I once,” said Ratwin, “ates a sphinx stone. It mades my dungs to emerge in the shape of mathematical symbols.”
Irian laughed. She approached the roc, wiped the sleep from its eye, and pushed back its eyelid.
“I am a scientist of nature by training; my business is the parliament of the nonhuman. So we have given the place over to the creatures. I hope later we will expand it to include another kind of protection…” But she broke off, and smiled.
The roc gave an eager nip at Irian’s fingers with a beak as large as a dustpan. Irian rolled the baked fish into a ball, and dropped it into the bird’s gaping mouth. Anya was reminded of feeding Koo.
“We are a refuge,” said Irian, “where injured and orphaned creatures, elderly or outcast creatures, come to rest.” She ran her hand along the roc’s feathers. “Good. Warm and dry.”
“And it lives in the ballroom?” said Christopher.
Irian nodded. “Of course. And there are many, many others.”
“What else is here?” asked Anya.
“We have a cluster of elderly kankos from Caruta in the music room, and a twrch tryth in the morning room. The whole islet is theirs—the forest and stream to the side of the house, the fruit orchard, and the formal gardens behind, which stretch right down to the edge of the lagoon.
“Look,” she said, and she threw open the double doors to stone steps leading to the great sweeping lawn, and beyond it the ocean. “You see?”
The lawn had run wild, and was ringed with a great riot of early flowers—musk roses, joy-of-the-ground, eglantine. And across the lawn, untroubled, walked a pure gold unicorn foal.
Anya gasped. She turned, and saw astonishments all around.
An ancient carbuncle, its shining fur half molted, lay curled on a windowsill, pressed against the warmth of the sphinx stones.
A woolly borometz grazed among daisies. A cawing made Anya look up, and Gallia flapped her wings in awe as they saw at the same time a phoenix, roosting in the branches of a tree.
Its golden feathers were flecked with white.
Koo flew up to the branch to land beside it and bent his golden beak to the phoenix’s. “Mine,” he croaked.
“She’s getting old,” said Irian. “She’ll be laying her egg and rebirthing herself before the year’s out. And look! The kankos have found you, Christopher.”
They came to Christopher: a cluster of twin-tailed minute foxes. They licked at his hands, and his fingers glowed luminescent with kanko saliva.
“Still got the old pull for living things, I see,” said Irian.
Christopher laughed. “It’s got stronger, I think, since I came here last. My friends at home call me the Disney princess, because a pigeon tried to nest on my desk at school.”
Anya looked blank. “The what princess?”
“Never mind. Outerlands joke. Irian, how do the creatures get here? How do they know to come?”
“Can’t you guess?”
A smile the size of Lithia crossed Christopher’s face. “Ratwin.”
“Preciselies,” said the ratatoska. “Myselfs. And the other ratatoskas. We sends out the messages, that there is a place for them. We guides them here.”
“There’s a gilled antelope in the water,” said Irian. “It lost its herd. We’ll find it another when it’s older. And a shachi—a big fish with the head of a tiger. It’s tiny, but it won’t be small forever, so take care if you go paddling.”
“A shachi ?” said Christopher. “But they’re dark creatures, aren’t they?”
“It’s a very young one. Recently orphaned.”
There was a sudden clatter of alarmed birds, and Nighthand came striding from the forest, the immense bulk of the sphinx pacing beside him. She had blood on her jaws. Two warriors, Anya thought. She almost expected the trees to trumpet, to herald their arrival.
“I was just telling our guests, we welcome all creatures who seek us out,” said Irian, “but—”
“No we don’t!” said Nighthand. “I drew the line at manticores.”
Naravirala gave a bark of the closest thing a sphinx will give to laughter.
Irian bowed. “Naravirala. It’s an honor to have you here.”
Naravirala flicked her tail in what might, perhaps, have been pleasure, but she wasted no time. “Are you ready to fly? I have eaten, and my wound is healed—or healed enough for this. And I have not long. I must return to my clan.”
“May I ask a question?” said Irian. “Why did you choose to involve yourself in this search for the dragons’ killer? The sphinxes and dragons are not generally friends.”
Naravirala looked Irian up and down, and up again.
“It was fear. Wise fear. It is true we are not allies, the dragons and the sphinxes. But that which can destroy dragons could destroy the whole Archipelago, and I fear it. I cannot myself approach the dragons: they would kill me. I have doubted whether it is right, to send a boy and a girl child where you and I cannot go. But it seems there is no choice, and so I will carry them onward.”
She looked toward Christopher, and toward Anya. Her wings were already unfurled, ready to fly.