Irene smiled at Bradamant, making the expression as bland as possible. “Now, why would I want to do something like that?”
The other woman sniffed, composing herself. She studied her fingernails. “I take it that you are going to be stupid, then.”
“You may take it as you wish,” Irene said. “But I am not giving you my mission, and I am not giving you my student, and if I were the sort of person who kept pet rats, I would not give you my rat. Clear?”
“Very,” Bradamant said coldly. She swept a spare swathe of fabric around her shoulders in a loosely elegant motion. “Do not expect me to be nice to you when I have to clear up your mess later.”
“Oh,” Irene murmured, “I’d never expect that.”
Bradamant turned without another word. Her footsteps rang on the iron bridge as she vanished into the dark corridor beyond, then faded into a heavier tapping of high heels on wooden floor, then into silence.
“An explanation would be nice,” Kai said quietly. But he didn’t try to whisper and his voice echoed in the stillness.
“It would,” Irene agreed. She frowned at the dark corridor. “I wish I knew whether that was personal or political.”
“You sounded as if you had personal history. Big-time.”
“We don’t get on,” Irene said briefly. “We never have. She gets the job done, but she’s got a reputation. You wouldn’t want to work with her.” She began to walk towards the corridor.
“Irene,” Kai said, and it surprised her in some indefinable way that he’d call her by name like that. “I get it that you don’t like her—”
“I don’t like her at all,” Irene cut in, keeping her steps calm and measured with an effort, not letting herself walk away from the conversation. “I don’t want my personal and very strong dislike of her to cause me to slander someone who is an efficient, competent, even admired Librarian.”
Kai whistled. “You really don’t like her.”
“We dislike each other enough that she might have staged that whole little scene purely as a whim and in order to mess with me,” Irene continued. “Except that it’d have taken a singularly unlikely set of coincidences for her to have found out that I was on a mission and to be here to intercept me. Which means politics.” She stalked into the dark corridor, still a pace ahead of Kai.
“So who’s her supervisor?”
“Kostchei.”
“Oh.” Kai was quiet for a few steps. “Him. You know, I always kind of thought that was a bit of a dramatic name for him to choose, even for here.”
Irene shrugged, glad of the change of subject. It was true that Russian fairy-tale villains weren’t the most obvious name choice. But then again her own choice of “Irene” had hardly been dictated by logic. At least “the Undying,” the epithet usually attached to the name Kostchei, was fairly accurate for a Librarian who’d made it to his age. “When we were students, some people spent hours trying to pick what they’d call themselves after they’d been initiated. They’d go round saying, ‘How about this one?’ or ‘Do you think Mnemosyne sounds all right, or is it too obvious?’ or ‘I like Arachne. Do you think it suits me?’”
Kai snorted a laugh.
They walked on together, passing room after room of stockpiled books. While there were faster (and non-linear) ways to get around the Library, Irene would have needed authorization from a senior Librarian to use them. In the absence of such shortcuts, all she and Kai could do was walk and watch out for landmarks. Finally the corridor opened out into a small room whose dominant feature was the iron-barred door on the opposite wall. The walls were covered with full bookshelves, but sections of the books were overlaid with large posters that announced statements such as CHAOS INFESTATION, ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY, KEEP CALM AND STAY OUT AND THIS MEANS YOU.
Kai settled his fists on his hips and looked at the posters.
“Tell me,” he said, “are there some people round here who can’t take a hint?”
“You tell me,” Irene said. “Given some of the people you’ve probably met here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out Coppelia’s mission briefing.
“Before we go any further,” Kai said, more seriously, “what about Kostchei and Bradamant? Do you think she’s working for him?”
Irene tugged at her earlobe. We may be overheard. When Kai didn’t seem to take the hint, she tugged at it more obviously.
“Or do you think—”
“I’d rather do my thinking through on the other side,” she snapped. So much for Kai’s potential streetwise criminality and any ability to take hints. “Let’s get a briefing from the Librarian there first before we come to any conclusions.”
Kai’s shoulders slumped. “Sure,” he said flatly. “As you say.”
Irene resolved to apologize later—well, to some extent—and turned to slap the mission briefing against the door. The solid metal rang softly, like a distant bell, then re-echoed again, chiming back until the room was full of distant harmonies.
Kai edged closer, apparently willing to drop the sulks for a moment. “What would’ve happened if that had been faked?”
“It wouldn’t have sounded half as nice,” Irene replied. She tucked the briefing back into her pocket, then reached down to turn the door-handle. It moved easily, swinging open to let her and Kai through into another room full of books, glass cases, and flaring gas lamps.
The room had the indefinable air of all museum collections, somehow simultaneously fascinating yet forlorn. Manuscripts lay beneath glass cases, the gold leaf on their illuminations and illustrations gleaming in the gaslight. A single document was spread out on a desk in the centre of the room, next to a modern-looking notepad and pen. The high arched ceiling had cobwebs in the corners, and dust lurked in the crevices of the panelled walls. Next to the Library entrance was a rattletrap machine, all clock-work and gears and sparking wires, with a primitive-looking printer mechanism and vacuum tubes attached.
Kai looked around the room. “Do we ring a bell or anything?”
“We probably don’t need to,” Irene said. She closed the door behind them and heard it audibly lock itself. “I imagine Mr. Aubrey has already been alerted. Librarians watching fixed Traverses like this one don’t leave them unguarded.”
There was a ping. Several vacuum tubes on the mechanical contraption lit up and the printer juddered into motion, spitting out a long paper tape, letter by letter.
Kai picked it up and looked at it. “‘Welcome,’” he read out. “‘Please make yourselves comfortable and I will be with you—’”
The printer came to a halt with a grinding, permanent sort of noise.
“Shortly, I hope,” Irene said.
“This is cool.” Kai began to wander round the manuscripts, peering at them. “Look, this one says it’s an original of Keats’s Lamia, though I’m not sure what it’s doing in Classical Manuscripts in that case—”
“That would be because I’m cross-referencing it with the Plutarch material.” The door at the far end of the room had swung open to reveal a middle-aged, dark-skinned man.
“Good day. I’m Dominic Aubrey. The action of seeing you is a pleasure,” he added in the Language.
“The action of conversing with you is a pleasure,” Irene replied. “I’m Irene. This is Kai. We’re here about the 1812 Grimm manuscript.” She was conscious of Kai frowning and remembered from her pre-initiation days how strange the Language could sound. Listeners who weren’t trained in it heard it in their native language, but with a certain unplaceable accent. Librarians, of course, heard it for what it was, which made it an ideal tool for cross-checks and passwords and countersigns. Like this.
Dominic Aubrey nodded. “I’d invite you to take a seat, but there’s only one chair. Please lean wherever suits you.” He fiddled nervously with his glasses, pushing them back up on the bridge of his nose, then brushed at his coat. H
e was in what looked like vaguely Victorian-period garb from the most common timelines. His regalia included the standard white shirt and stiff collar, with a black frock-coat, waistcoat, and trousers. His straight hair was tied back in a crisp tail, reaching halfway down between his shoulder-blades. “The situation has, um, developed a bit since I last sent in a report.”
Irene leaned against the edge of the desk, making an effort not to look condemnatory, judgemental, or recriminatory. However much she might feel it. “I quite understand. This is a chaos-infested world, after all. Perhaps if you’d give us the briefing from the beginning?” She glanced at Kai, and he nodded in acceptance, waiting for her to take the lead.
“All right.” Dominic sat down in his chair, folded his arms, and leaned forward. “I originally found out about the Grimm first edition after the death of Edward Bonhomme, when it came into circulation. He was a local property owner and bibliophile. Owned a nice selection of slums and made a very good profit out of them, and put the money into his books. Unfortunately, he was a hoarder of the worst sort. Never invited anyone round, never even let anyone look at his books, just kept them all locked away and gloated over them. You know the sort?”
“I’ve had to visit a few people like that,” Irene agreed. “Anything suspicious about his death?”
Dominic shrugged. “He fell down stairs, broke his neck, and was found by the housekeeper in the morning. He was in his eighties, bought the cheapest candles on the market, and the stair carpet was threadbare. A lot of people did quite well out of his death, but none of them seem to have had a significant motive. The police treated it as an accident and it was left as such.”
Irene nodded. “So, the book?”
“It went up for auction after Bonhomme’s death, with some others of his collection. The money was to endow a scholarship in his name at Oxford. Typical post-death snobbery.” He sighed. “Anyhow. Word got round fast and the bidding went up very quickly. It was bought by Lord Wyndham. He’s—he was, rather—more of a general collector of expensive trifles than an actual bibliophile, but the price on the book and the society interest made it something he wanted for his collection. And he got it.”
“He was, you say.” Irene had a growing feeling of doom.
“Ah yes. Precisely. Someone staked him a couple of days ago.”
“Staked.”
“He was a vampire. They used the traditional methods, you know. A stake through the heart, cutting off the head, inserting garlic in the mouth . . . though, to be fair, leaving his head impaled on the railings outside the front door, where all his party guests could see it, could be considered a little extreme.”
“And the book then went missing, right?”
“Yes!” Dominic said brightly. “How did you guess?”
Kai raised a hand. “Excuse me. Are vampires considered a normal part of society here?”
“Mm, well.” Dominic held up a finger. “Being a vampire or werewolf isn’t illegal in itself. Assaulting or murdering someone due to vampiric or werewolf urges is . . . As ever, having lots of money helps ease the rules. Lord Wyndham had a great deal of money.”
Irene nodded. “So he was murdered—staked, that is—at his party, and someone stole the book?”
“The plot thickens.” Dominic raised his finger again. “A notorious cat burglar was observed escaping from the mansion that evening. Now, while she’s never been known to kill anyone before, it seems a bit of a coincidence that she should just happen to be burgling the house on the same night Lord Wyndham was murdered.”
Irene nodded. “She was seen escaping, you say?”
“Dramatically. She leapt from the roof of the house to catch a ladder dangling from a passing zeppelin.”
“Wait. Zeppelins?”
“It’s part of the scientific ethos of this place. Zeppelins, death rays—they haven’t quite got those working properly yet, though—and other instruments of destruction. Also they have biomutations, clockwork technology, electrical health-care spas . . .”
Irene glanced at Kai. He was wearing an expression combining acute interest with admiring attention. “I told you I dislike chaos infestations?” she asked. “This is why.”
“But zeppelins are neat,” Kai protested. “We couldn’t have any in my old alternate because of the pollution, but I guess they’d be kind of cool. Up there in the sky, tossed by the winds, driving across the curve of the world with the lands and seas spread out beneath you . . .”
“Falling a very long way down,” Irene added.
He just looked at her.
“I do apologize,” she said hastily to Dominic. “Please go on. Tell us about this cat burglar.”
“They call her Belphegor,” Dominic said. He seemed more amused than annoyed by their interruptions. “She’s tall. Very tall. Apparently she wears a black leather cat-suit and a golden mask.”
“Any details on the mask?”
“I think people are usually too busy looking at the black leather cat-suit.”
Irene sighed. “So we have an incredibly glamorous female cat burglar who slinks around in a black leather cat-suit, who kills vampires in her spare time?”
“I’ll tackle her,” Kai said enthusiastically.
Irene raised an eyebrow. “How do you know that I don’t want to tackle her?”
“Do you?”
“Involvements with glamorous female cat burglars never end up well.”
“And you’ve had some?”
“One,” Irene said, and hoped that she wasn’t blushing too badly.
“Oh, you’re that Irene,” Dominic said in tones of surprise. “I remember Coppelia telling me about it now. Didn’t you end up having some sort of showdown in the middle of a reception and—”
Irene held up a hand. “Could we possibly concentrate on the current problem? Please?”
“It’s a pleasure to see that you’re taking to this so cheerfully,” Dominic remarked. “Now, some junior Librarians would be running for the Traverse at this point and trying to ditch the job. But not you. No, I can see you’re up for the task and all eager to go.” He smiled toothily.
Irene took a deep breath. “I’m looking on it as a challenge,” she said blandly. And I’m damned if I’m going to let Bradamant manage this instead of me.
Kai raised a hand. “May I ask a question?”
“Please do,” Dominic said.
“Do you have any sort of dossiers about this place that we can read up on?”
Dominic nodded. “I’ve a rough set of notes on current affairs, history, geography, all of that. I’ve also set up some spare identities, both male and female, for when I have Librarians visiting. I’ll sign over a couple of these to you, together with funding and so on. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hang you out to dry. I just wanted to see how you’d react to the situation.”
“Frankly,” Irene said, “it sounds like a penny dreadful.”
“Frankly,” Dominic said, “it is.”
Irene sighed. “Well. So Lord Wyndham is dead, and not even undead any longer. The book is presumed stolen by the cat burglar Belphegor, and there is more, I take it?”
“Not much,” Dominic said apologetically. “All this was only a couple of days ago, you understand. The newspapers are still buzzing about it. In fact, if you want to be researching the story for your cover . . .”
“Good point,” Irene agreed. “What’s the gender situation here?”
“Women are generally accepted in most trades, except as serving soldiers in the army. They often end up in engineering divisions there. Nothing unusual about a female reporter, though they often end up with the high-society and scandal pages. So that’ll be entirely appropriate.”
“So is there magic?”
“Not per se,” Dominic said slowly, “though we have vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures and so on.
I’ve got a theory that the weird technology of this place is actually a structural evolution of what would elsewhere have manifested as directed magic, but I can’t prove it.”
Irene nodded. “Do you have any theories about the lack of draconic interference?”
Dominic snorted. “Typical bureaucratic miscomprehension in summarizing my reports. The dragons don’t intervene here because they don’t need to. There may be a high level of chaos infestation, but there are also a lot of natural spirits inherent to the local order buzzing around the place—metaphorically speaking, that is—and they seem to be acting as a counterweight. In fact,” he said enthusiastically, “I think we have grounds here for an entire study on how a high level of magic in a world responds to a chaos infestation by working in nonchaotic ways. So, the natural order is reinforced via technology with weird science, and also strengthened supernaturally. The latter happens via a hierarchical structure of guardian spirits and fundamental reinforcement—”
“But you can’t get the funding for it?” Irene said sympathetically, before he could get any further.
Dominic slumped. “Philistines,” he muttered.
Kai raised his hand again. “So, theoretically, would these local spirits be a useful source of information? I mean, I’ve been stuck in the Library for the last five years; I know the theory, but not how you go about it in practice . . .”
“Good thinking,” Irene said, but then she saw Dominic frowning. “Why, is there a problem?”
“They can be dangerous,” Dominic said. He fussed with his glasses again. “I wouldn’t recommend it as a primary option. To be frank, I haven’t had much chance to investigate things myself—my cover, you know. There’s only so much that I can get away with as head of Classical Manuscripts. You’ll probably be able to find out more at ground level.”
Irene nodded. “We’ll keep it as a fall-back option, then. Do you have any local Language updates that I should be aware of?”
“I’ve put them in the briefing,” Dominic promised. “There aren’t many, though. The vocab is all fairly generic. A vampire’s a vampire as you’d expect, fangs and all, etcetera. Actually, if you want to wait here, I’ll go and fetch the documentation, and then the two of you can slip out and get to work.”
The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel) Page 5