Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(4)
Rushing from the cottage, Elsa lifted her skirt and ran along a narrow path that followed the creek upstream and out of the valley. There was a shortcut halfway up, a little-used trail so steep Elsa had to grab at tree trunks to lever herself or crawl on all fours over the rocks, but every step was familiar and she could fly up the slope much faster than a stranger might.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. The interlopers didn’t know Veldana like she did, and carrying Jumi’s weight would slow them down, but they had a whole hour’s head start. They might have already reached the Edgemist—they might be dialing their portal device for the return trip even now.
The Edgemist … of course! The disturbance she’d observed had had nothing to do with a fault in her mother’s alterations to the worldbook. These invaders must have opened a portal while Veldana was still adjusting to the expansions—even a single person coming through at the wrong time would be enough mass to destabilize the Edgemist temporarily.
Elsa flushed hot with panic and guilt. If only she had thought of that explanation before, there might have been time to prepare, time to fend them off. How could she have been so stupid?
She scrambled up the last section of the slope, and then it was a straight shot through the forest to reach the Edgemist. She took it at a run, her legs burning, the hard leather pouches that hung from her belt banging against her thighs. The forest opened up into a narrow strip of meadow separating the trees from the Edgemist, and Elsa stumbled to a stop. Her breath still hitching, she fished the portal device from its belt pouch.
Elsa knew the coordinates for Earth by heart, and she twisted the little brass knobs to the correct settings. The memory rose, unbidden, of the first time Jumi had let her work the portal device—she had been six, and the device had felt unwieldy in her small hands, requiring all her concentration. But she’d had plenty of practice since then, and despite the superior attitudes of European scriptologists like Montaigne, Elsa had taken to the science as if she were born for it. By now the controls were so familiar, she could have dialed the settings with her eyes closed.
The coordinates set, Elsa flipped the stiff brass switch in the center with her thumb. A small black dot appeared in the Edgemist before her, the mist spiraling around it as if it were the eye of a storm. The black eye irised open until it was an oval portal wide and tall enough to admit a person, and Elsa lunged in.
The insides of portals weren’t, strictly speaking, existent places, and that was precisely how it felt to be there—as if one no longer existed. It was freezing cold and perfectly dark in a way that felt like the concepts of temperature and light were absent. Elsa knew to keep walking, even though there was nothing to walk on, and nothing to walk toward, and then it was over as suddenly as it had begun.
She stepped through into a room full of light and smoke, the portal automatically closing behind her. Elsa covered her face with her sleeve for the second time that day—Montaigne’s shelves of worldbooks were burning. The thieves must have set fire to the study after they’d come through.
A surge of terror flooded her veins. The Veldana worldbook was hidden here, and if the book was destroyed, so was the world. Coughing, she ran to the blank wall where the worldbook’s secret chamber lay hidden. Elsa pressed her palms against the wall the way she’d seen her mother do so many times, but the chamber refused to open for her. She screamed her frustration and slammed her palms against the wall again, but it was useless—the chamber was designed to open only for Jumi, and Jumi was gone.
Elsa struggled to rein in her racing thoughts. Other books—other worlds—were burning as she wasted time standing there. She should at least try to save what she could. Turning to run for the shelves, Elsa tripped over something on the floor and stumbled. It was a body: portly, middle-aged, lying facedown in a pool of blood. Charles Montaigne, Veldana’s original creator. The abductors were also, apparently, murderers.
Elsa stared in shock. Jumi had found him infuriating, and had been careful to never leave Elsa alone with him, but murder still seemed an extreme solution.
A waft of smoke scraped at her lungs and sent her into a fit of coughing. Time was of the essence. The flames consuming the bookshelves had jumped to the curtains of the nearest window and were tentatively starting to crawl across the wooden floor. Elsa scanned the shelves for the familiar spine of the Veldana worldbook, in case it was outside the wall vault, but she didn’t find it. So she went to the shelf with the lowest flames. Squinting against the heat, she pulled down the least scorched of the volumes—the ones that might not be damaged beyond repair. She rescued another mildly blackened volume from the floor near Montaigne’s body and fled, her arms full, her lungs scoured with smoke, from the house.
Out on the street, Elsa was surprised to see that a small crowd of Montaigne’s neighbors had gathered. Evening was falling over Paris, yellow gaslight from the streetlamps pooling along the cobblestones. The smoke from the fire cast a gray blot against the dark violet of the sky. Elsa stumbled down the front steps and dropped her armful of books in the street, then nearly went down with them as a coughing fit overtook her. Her lungs felt scorched dry, as if the fire had gotten inside her, and the damp evening air provided no relief.
She turned to run back in and rescue another armload of books, but someone grabbed her and held her back.
“You can’t, miss! The house is lost,” the man said.
She struggled and kicked. “You don’t understand. The worlds are burning!”