HEALERS HAD A VEXING way of ordering people to rest and focus on healing when that was the very last thing they wanted to do. Allory spent a few hours fretting and growing more and more annoyed at her instinct for docile obedience. Thoroughly infuriating. Yaarah suggested she was nothing but a well brought-up little Fae. Clearly not so well brought-up as to fail to picture plucking a few of his precious whiskers for that comment. Wickedness incarnate!
After that, he left to go hunting, leaving her alone. Even the whiskered one needed to eat – nasty bloody meat, in his case. Yuck!
Time to stage a rebellion?
Well, a rebellion that involved flouting her orders insofar as to abscond to the library unescorted. True bravery. A real heroine in the making.
The library area of the Pixies’ warm and unfailingly creative caverns was a veritable warren of gorgeous, flower-filled tunnels leading to clusters of storage pools. She turned a bemused expression upon Sub-Under-Librarian Apprentice Garobixi, whom she wished to co-opt into her dastardly scheme, over his inept attempts to distract her from her purpose.
“Might I … insist? Possibly?” she inquired falteringly.
“Oh, quiver my dust,” he stuttered even more nervously than her, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles as his brilliant green hair leaped into a sculptural form resembling an exploding volcano. Probably mirrored what was going on in his visibly palpitating heart. “I quite forgot. Well, Allory Fae … I’m sorry, I do get so very anxious around girls. Please forgive me.”
“You’re my hero.”
“Dust of my ancestors!” he gasped, breaking into a visible sweat. “You don’t demand much, do you?”
She had never met anyone who could compete with her for wallflower status. She frowned, making the young Pixie shrink back with a low moan. Was she this preposterous? The comparison did not sit well with her. Besides, it was unkind. She knew what it was to be the socially inept Faeling in the cocoon.
Lowering her voice to the tiniest peep, she said, “Where are the books, Garobixi?”
“Books? Only those Human klutzes use books.”
“Scrolls?”
“Perfloeeuy-dust,” he scoffed meekly. “Inferior technology.”
Glancing about the cavern he had led her to, a grotto some thirty feet in diameter, Allory tried to work out exactly how this place constituted a library. Soft light emanating from sunken pools of something that was not quite liquid nor quite dust lit the fanciful streamers of umber crystal trumpet flowers threading their way across the ceiling. One or two visibly grew before her eyes. Beside the pools stood hundreds of crystal jars and buckets containing a similar substance in every conceivable colour, all gleaming with the same soft, undeniably magical light. Only, she did not understand it in the slightest. This was Pixie magic. It was as far from her grasp as Middlesun stood above her head.
Reaching out, she touched his knee, bobbing on its bed of pixels not too far from her nose. Clasping her hands to her chest, she cooed, “Oh, the magic of Pixies is far, far more wonderful than anything I’ve ever imagined. I do wish I had someone to show me how it all works.”
“That would be most advisable, aye,” Garobixi agreed, bobbing his head and glancing over his shoulder at the same time. No-one rushed to his rescue. Distressing, clearly.
Allory tried again. “I really need a clever Pixie to … ah, read the dust, for me?”
“We should find one at once. Aye. Excellent idea.”
He tried to edge away, but his pixels appeared to disobey, keeping him right where he was.
“All I wanted to do was to find out about the Sentinel Trees –” she batted her eyelashes shamelessly, trying not to bite a hole in her tongue meantime “– but I’m just so very, very tiny, I can’t even see over the rim of one of these buckets. It would take a big, strong Pixie to show me how everything works. Pleeeeeeeasssseee?”
“I should … I should go find one. Big and strong, as you’ve wisely pointed out.”
“Please, Garobixi? Could you just try –”
“Help! Save my dust! I … I was j-j-just leaving,” he puffed, still failing to marshal his pixels to move in any definite direction apart from in a slow spin. “You’ll have to find someone else. I can’t possibly –”
“Garobixi!”
To her shock as much as his, a tiny discharge of power leaped out of her body, sending his pixels scattering for cover. Garobixi landed upon his ample behind with a soft thump and a sob of the uttermost horror. She gaped at the spectacle, her ears burning with shame.
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What just happened? What did I do?
“You … pint-sized tyrant,” he sniffed, his lower lip trembling. “Did you have to?”
Allory wanted to apologise, she really did. “Have to do what?” she heard herself snarl in a decent impression of a certain Felidragon in one of his frequent huffs.
“Bully my future children.”
“Bully your – what? I am not a bully! You take that back!” Livid now, and uncaring of what kind of madness had just co-opted her personality into displaying real anger, Allory launched into the air, her wing-clusters kicking into action despite a deep ache behind her shoulder. Bad idea. “All I wanted was a story. One story. About trees! Is that too much to ask? Now, will you or will you not shake your dust and the dust of your entire ancestral tree, if that’s what it takes, to show this Faerie just a smidgen of courtesy and read her a story?”
“W-W-Well, it’s not exactly reading, so to speak –”
“Whatever you call it! Ouch …”
With a yelp of pain as her underused, much-abused muscles seized up, she pitched into his lap. Garobixi caught her in his hands at once, wafted up a small troop of pixels and commanded them to massage her shoulders and back.
Twenty seconds later, she discovered she could purr like Yaarah, too. The cramp abated. With a wriggle of pleasure, she cried, “Ooh, that’s absolutely marvellous. How did you do that?”
“Well, I say … I was sort of reading up on Faerie treatment the other day, a dust record of physiotherapy techniques applied to the smaller Fae species, see?” he explained, adjusting his spectacles fussily. “Wing-cramp is a common aftereffect following serious injury. How’s that? Jolly good result, dare I suggest?”
Lightly, she stepped up onto his arm and used that as a platform to stand on her tiptoes and brush her lips against his cheek. “Garobixi, you are a hero.”
Green as he was, the Pixie turned pinker than any self-respecting Hyperdragon. He also changed hairstyles at least a dozen times, which was as many unintelligible sentences as he managed to start and not complete meantime.
Toe-tingler. Did I just do that to another person?
Gathering the dust of his future children beneath him, the Sub-Under-Librarian Apprentice took her over to the pools to show her how each contained what he called a well of memory records imprinted with a great deal of data. The jars and buckets acted like keys, allowing one to access, arrange and recall certain subjects or topics with great accuracy but rather less speed.
Dust needed to be encouraged to behave. It was not always tractable or predictable, much like Pixies themselves, Allory mused privately. Or, as logic combined with a smidgen of actual truth might demand, Faerie girls who did not know who they were anymore.
She looked on with lively interest as Garobixi mixed up a multi-coloured, shimmering concoction of this neither dust nor quite liquid substance into a new bucket and poured it carefully into two of the deep dust-pools, murmuring, “Horpus corpus never raucous, stir in space both deep and capacious; bring to this Pixie more and more, tales and knowledge of uttermost yore.” The pool flickered and suddenly turned a deep shade of purple, as if colour had wiped across it in the blink of an eye. Pushing up the sleeves of his silver robe, the Pixie added, “It’s a tough one. Let’s give it this in addition: oomphus lumifus memory trumifus, strength of dust now porous forthus … ah, rousing this ancient dustus … no – I say, dusts’ sakes! Get back. Watch out!”
Ducking a tendril of dust which had reared up to strike at him like a russet cobra, while sheltering Allory one-handed, he slapped up a screen of pixels with the other, screeching, “Dustus bustus, downus mustus!”
The snakelike extrusion of dust collapsed and sucked away into the pool once more. Shiver. Supplied with blazing eyes and a mouth, that could easily count for one of her worst nightmares. Maybe it was a preserved or magically enhanced nightmare? Could Pixie dust do that?
“Bad dust?” she quavered eventually.
Being a Pixie Librarian required battle readiness? Suggids! Who could have imagined?
“That’s never happened before,” he said, mopping his forehead with a large silver handkerchief he produced from his pocket. It could have furnished ten Faerie cocoons with tablecloths. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was a trap and a rather nasty one –”
A shrilling bell drowned out his words. The din and clangour echoed through the underground tunnels, smashing around in the close quarters to deafen them.
Allory clapped her hands over her ears. “What’s –”
“Alarm! We don’t get many.” Rushing toward the grotto’s entryway, the rotund Pixie touched a couple of crystals on the side in a coded sequence. Gleaming, crimson-flashing pixels leaped into an orderly screen across the tunnel, acting like bars. “We’ll be safe down here.”
Wrong side of the bars, mind. Pair of criminals skulking about together.
She inquired, “Safe from the dust monster, too?”
“I have matters of a fusty, musty and dusty nature fully under control,” he declared.
Her eyes brightened upon him. When he blushed again under her scrutiny, she murmured, “And what do the girl Pixies say about this Garobixi I’ve just discovered, I wonder? For my part, I am impressed and grateful for your able protection.”
After turning various colours of the rainbow and changing hairstyles at least five times, he finally managed to bring himself to say, “I think they’d say something like, ‘Gather your dust, Garobixi, and finish the job you started.’ So, this record does not want to be easily read? We shall trick it. I have a few ideas, a little fusty interference that might lead us to pinpoint the precise elements of the dust-network – that’s like the neural nature of your brain – which has been compromised.”
“Could we identify the intruder?” she asked.
“The saboteur?” He clapped his hands together, raising a small puff of lime green dust. “Never a dull moment around you, is there, Allory Fae? Excellent thinking. Give me some dust.”
She eyed his upraised hand. “Eh?”
“You slap it. It’s a gesture of teamwork, friendship and celebration.”
They exchanged hand-slaps.
She surreptitiously dusted her hand on her semaloon skirt after.
Pulling up a bucket of pure white Pixie dust, he set about planning his attack upon the recalcitrant historical records. Meantime, Allory wondered what could possibly have gone wrong out there. No sight or sound of any trouble, was there? Since Garobixi appeared to be brimming with wholly unexpected confidence, she turned her attention to what he was doing.
By all appearances, this Pixie Librarian meant business.