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“No, go up the stairs,” Wistala said, pointing at the nearby stairwell.
“But the master,” Widow Lessup said.
Wistala closed her jaws on his seat back and, neck muscles straining, lifted him through the hole.
“Should have thought of this years ago,” Rainfall said from the library.
Wistala climbed up and through the hole.
“If we’re to die, I’m glad it’s here, Wistala,” Rainfall said. “Remember when I’d read to you from—”
“Always. But we’re not dead yet,” she said, looking down into the grand staircase, where smoldering barbarians were setting wood alight.
Widow Lessup ran through the door and shut it behind her. Below, they heard doors breaking, crockery smashing, and assorted calls in tongues perhaps only Rainfall understood.
“May For have the sense to keep them in the tunnel until this is all over,” Widow Lessup said.
“I wish you’d gone along,” Rainfall said.
“Me? Crawl through all those cobwebs? I’d rather be stripped and carried off by the Hordes of Hesstur out there than breathe spider sacs.”
Wistala looked at the desk, nosed open a drawer.
“Whatever are you doing there, Tala?” Rainfall said.
“Your cord-and-seal cutter, there, the short sharp blade. Let’s have it.”
Widow Lessup ran for it. “Are we to slit each other’s throats? This is just like that play . . . ummm, the one with the old tyrant king and the three children . . .”
“No. I need my wings. It’s a bit early, but I can move them a little, even though they’re still encased. I may be able to fly.”
“How does a knife—?” Rainfall said. “Oh.”
“Widow Lessup,” Wistala said, pointing to the twin lines of raised scales on her back. “You’ll have to do it. Hard and fast, parallel to my fringe, like you’re dressing a goat.”
Rainfall grasped her by the hand and pointed.
“Oh, I don’t know—”
“Fast!” Wistala said. “But not too deep. Cut the skin along the stretch marks—that’s probably the way it would open naturally.”
Widow Lessup took a deep breath. . . .
The first one hurt. The second one hurt even more, because she still had the pain of the first lining her back. Wistala tried to ignore the pain, and concentrated on the crashing sounds on the floor below. She also smelled smoke.
She extended her bloody wings as far as she could in the library, marveling at their form. They seemed a bit undersize compared with her mother’s, but then they weren’t fully grown yet, as she was in the middle of her final drakka growth spurt.
“I take it you’re going to go up and out?” Rainfall said, looking at the crystal cupola.
Wistala plunged her head through the hole in the library floor, as though she were going for a fish through an ice hole. She locked her jaws over the head of a barbarian running with an armful of stolen linens through the corridor below, pulled him up, and flung him skyward and through the glass, which mostly shattered outward from the force with which he was thrown.
Widow Lessup sighed. “It was such a pretty thing. Why must pretty things always be smashed?”
Wistala reared up on her saa and, using the scales on her sii, smashed away the remaining bits of glass. She took a deep breath and roared out her pain and anger into the night: “Let all who would burn these books know that there is an Agent of Librarians here. Enter to curses and peril!”
“You’ll have to leave that wondrous chair behind,” Wistala said. “I’m not sure I can carry you and it, as well.”
“Take Widow Lessup first,” Rainfall said.
