Page 34 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)

The Banished Book

Jacques sniffed in disgust. “That sounds like poetry,” he said.

“Don’t you like poets?” said Christopher.

“Well, I ate one once, so in that sense, yes. In the traditional sense, not at all. I find rhyme insulting.”

“What do you think it means?” said Anya.

“I hate riddles,” said Jacques. “Why not just say what you mean and save time for important things.”

“Such as?” said Christopher. He was smiling.

“Food. And burning the topmost towers of ancient cities.”

“Listen—read it again, Christopher,” said Anya as Irian and Nighthand came near. When he had, she struck the window seat with satisfaction. “It says pearls ! We need pearls !”

“Grand,” said Christopher. “I’ll just get the necklace I wear to formal dinners, then, shall I?”

“Pearls!” Nighthand said. “Would teeth work? You know, pearly whites? I could pull a few out—I’m not particularly using the ones at the back.”

Anya leaped up, grabbing the paper and pen. “We need to search the palace for pearls!”

“Wait!” called the harpy. “That notebook is mine. If you wish to take it, you must leave something in exchange.”

“What do I need to give?” said Anya.

“A book,” said Aellope. “Everything that leaves here must be exchanged for a book. Or blood.”

“Blood,” said Nighthand, drawing his knife and rolling back his sleeve, “is easily done. How much?”

“Wait!” The thought struck Anya just in time. “I’ve got a book. I can’t read it anyway. You’re welcome to it.”

She pulled the book from her pocket. The black snakeskin book she had taken from her uncle’s study, with the runes stamped across the cover. It had not been improved by its sojourn in the bath with her, but the ink had not run.

The harpy flew down to inspect it. Then she gave a terrible cry, more bird than human. She rocketed upward, her wings knocking down books and flasks of ink, which fell with a cacophony around them.

“What is it?” Anya called. “What’s wrong?”

When the harpy flew down again, her feathered chest was heaving.

“Tell me where you got that book.”

Anya decided to be honest. “From my uncle. I stole it, actually.”

“That book is a dark thing. It was banished from the Archipelago centuries ago.”

“Banished?” asked Irian.

“It is a book of poisons. It has death in it.” She gestured with her great tipped wing at the book. “My dragonic is only adequate—but the jaculus will be able to read it.”

Christopher turned to the tiny dragon. “Jacques? Can you read this?”

Jacques shuddered. “I will not.”

“Please. It might be important. For the dragons, Jacques. For Sarkany.”

Jacques huffed a great cloud of black smoke, but he flew to land next to the book. “Its title is…” He hesitated. “It is written in an ancient dialect, but I think it is this: Cursed Substance: Distillments to Slay Even the Dragon. ”

Understanding came to Anya and Christopher together.

“Anya!”

“This is the book!”

“This is where your uncle—”

“Found the poison. Yes!”

The dragon was turning pages with his teeth now, feverishly. There was disgust in his face, deeper with every page. Then he halted.

“Listen! Hebenon, or dragonsbane. The only poison against which dragons have no defense. ” He turned to Christopher. “This is the book that has caused the death of Sarkany? And the fallen dragons across the islands, my comrades—this book has caused their ruin?”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall destroy it! I cannot burn it, but I can—” And he made to tear it with his teeth.

“Jacques! Stop!” said Irian. “It is not the book, Jacques. It’s not knowledge itself that is evil. Knowledge can bring ruin on nothing. It is what men choose to do with it that you should fear. Please—keep reading. What is the poison made of? We need to know.”

“Terrible things.” Haltingly, the jaculus read the ingredients. “A fillet of snake. The toe of a frog…Fur shaved from the back of a bat. Tongue of a kludde. Eye of the chimaera. The eggshell and blood of a newborn gagana, killed in the first minute of its life…”

Anya cried out at that. Koo gave a caw of dismay, and she held him close to her breast and thought of the soldier hunting the egg. Claude must, then, have been brewing a batch of the poison. Koo would have been killed for it.

She kissed his wings, his head. She whispered to him, “It’s one more reason to bring us to revenge.”

Jacques kept reading. “The poison, if drunk, will kill instantly. It is otherwise harmless to the touch, yet beware—no ointment nor soap will cleanse it from your vestments nor hair.”

Anya nodded. She remembered the stain on her grandfather’s clothes, his beard.

“Tell me,” said Irian to the harpy, “when you say it was banished—by whom? How?”

“The book was too dangerous. It was not safe in the hands of any Archipelagian, human or creature. A man—a mathematician called Anstruther Magus—carried it away to the Outerlands, some hundreds of years back. It was believed to be lost. How it returned here I do not know—”

“Wait!” Anya fished inside the book for the square of paper. “There’s this, too! EST HIC LIBER MUSEI METROPOLITANI ARTIUM . I don’t know what it means.”

“Ah.” The harpy looked balefully at the paper. She narrowed her canny eyes. “I do,” she said. “It’s Latin. It means the book ended by being kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the city of New York in the nation of America. In the Outerlands.”

“Then my uncle must have stolen it from the museum!” said Anya. “Dr. Ferrara told me there’s a waybetween that opens in New York.”

“It would seem so.” The harpy inclined her head. “The museum should be more careful with their property. If I caught a thief, I would—”

But Jacques interrupted her with a low cry. “An antidote!” He stood upon a page of small glyphs and symbols. “There is an antidote!” His tiny claws scratched at the paper in his excitement. “ A counteraction to the dragonsbane. And this here—here!”

“What?”

“It tells: the antidote may be taken before or after the poison. Before! A prophylactic, a prevention! There is a great deal of detail here…about blood, and sleep. Something about a…woodfrog, I think—but the ink has blurred. But this is it!”

Christopher turned to Anya, instantly radiant. “Anya! We can do it right now!”

But Anya frowned. “Right now? But what good is that? My grandfather is dead. Sarkany is dead. It’s too late.”

“No, you don’t understand! Anya—we could make the antidote. We could get it to every dragon in the Archipelago!”

“But we don’t have time to do that. We have to find pearls. I have to make the loquillan work. My father—”

“But I came here for the dragons. I’m a guardian. The dragons are my duty.”

“But we don’t have time ! Christopher!” She wanted to shake him. “My father needs me!”

“And if Christopher does not act, hundreds more dragons may die,” said Jacques. “Your father is one man!”

“But the dragons—” said Anya.

“The dragons are an ancient folk,” said Christopher softly. “They know things we’ll never know, Anya—they’ve seen things we will never see. If we lost the dragons…it’s like losing a whole country, a whole continent.”

“A man, to a dragon, is an ant.” Jacques looked at her, unblinking.

“And their gold—if the dragon gold falls into the hands of one man, your whole world is at risk.” He breathed hard, and smoke curled from his mouth.

“You remember Arach’s words. Thousands of years ago, we saw what happened when men hoarded gold.

The dragons, in disgust, took action. They took the gold unto themselves—by fire, when necessary—and kept it there. ”

Anya spread her hands. “I know. I do know! But my father is… mine. ” She had no way of explaining. “I love him! I love him more than anything in the world! He’s everything to me! So I owe him every-thing I can give.”

“Because he’s a king?” said Jacques.

“No! I hate kings! Because he’s my father! Because I love him! That’s enough of a reason! Because I swore I would.” Swore to save him; swore revenge; swore so many things, for a small body in a large world.

Christopher and Anya looked at each other, dismayed by their sudden division. Come hard up against the problem at the very heart of humanity—there was so much need in the world, and so little time, and nobody eternal—Anya glared.

Nighthand put down the book he was reading, titled Berserkers Through the Ages: A History in Havoc, with a thump. He cleared his throat. Because he did nothing quietly, the noise was like a kettledrum.

“If you’re finished?”

They stared at him, neither with much warmth.

“As great as your joint intellect undoubtedly is, may I point out you are both spectacularly wrong? And fools. You two face the same problem. Christopher—Anya needs to halt her uncle. The life of her father, whom she loves beyond reckoning, depends on it. Her uncle is murdering the great dragons—so you, too, need him stopped. Christopher needs to save the dragons. He has flown on the back of a great dragon; they are part of his soul now. Anya—the dragons are the Archipelago’s custodians of gold, which you urgently need to keep from your uncle’s hands—so you, too, need the dragons saved.

” He looked at them. “Now, are you going to understand? Or do I need to compose it into a multipart opera?”

Irian spoke low. “He’s right. You won’t get far without one another. It’s how we edge forward, humanity: each with the other.”

Anya and Christopher stared at each other. “Both, then? Together?” said Christopher.

“Both,” said Anya. “And together.”

Before they could speak further, the harpy, who had been watching with shrewd and unimpressed eyes, flew to a bookshelf.

“Ahem.”

She perched high, high on the tallest shelf, sixty feet up. “Read this.” She selected a book, flipped with her talons to a specific page, and then knocked the book to the floor. Anya jumped out of the way just in time.

It was an illustrated book of sea creatures. It was open at O , for Oyster . There was a painting of a fat round pearl.

“There are oysterlings, sometimes-often,” said Ratwin, “at the bottoms of the garden, in the lagooning. But there is other things there too—eatsing, chewsings things—so’s you’d have to be careful like.”

“Christopher,” said Anya. “You begin the antidote. I’m going oyster catching.”