The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel)

by Genevieve Cogman

  Kai looked down at his clothing. “Like this?” he asked.

  “You’ll have to claim to be barbarian visitors from Canada,” Dominic said cheerfully. “I do have some clothing for emergencies, but under the circumstances you can pass for students until you can buy some clothing that fits you better. You’ll just need some overcoats until you can get to a shop.” He stood up, brushing his hands together again. “I’ll be back in a moment. Don’t fret.”

  “Thank you,” Irene said, suppressing a sigh of relief, but he was already out the door. Perhaps his quick exit was due to embarrassment. Helping visiting Librarians maintain a low profile was supposed to be part of the Librarian-in-Residence’s job, after all. It usually involved a little more than “here’s an overcoat and there’s the nearest shop.” She considered prospective excuses for the shopkeeper. I’m terribly sorry, but we just had all our luggage stolen while disembarking from the ocean liner . . .

  Kai stretched and looked around restlessly. “Do you suppose barbarian Canadians wear jeans?”

  “I hope female Canadian barbarians wear trousers,” Irene said drily. “They’re easier to run in.”

  Kai turned to face her. “Have you ever seen a really bad chaos infestation?” he asked.

  “No,” she said quietly. “Only mild ones. But I’ve heard things. I knew someone who went into one, once. I saw some of his reports.”

  There’s something addictive about it, he’d written. The world itself seems so much more logical and plausible. There’s a feeling that everything makes sense, and I know this is only because the world itself is shaping to fit the gestalt, but you wouldn’t believe how comfortable it makes me feel.

  Kai snapped his fingers in front of her face, and she blinked at him. “Ahem. You could at least share with me, rather than sit there and brood about it and figure that you’re protecting me or something.”

  “You do rate yourself highly,” Irene said, trying not to feel irritated. “All right. You remember the stages of infestation? Affective, intuitive, assumptive, and conglomerative?”

  Kai nodded. “From what you and Dominic were saying, this world is affective going on intuitive, right? So the theory suggests it’s being warped, and it would then reach the stage where things tend to fall into narrative patterns. So instead of natural order prevailing, events start taking on the kind of rhythm or logic you might find in fiction or fairy tales. Which could be terrifying. But it must be hard to spot, surely, as even in order-based worlds fact can prove stranger than fiction . . . It isn’t fully there yet, is it?”

  “No. And that’s interesting. It makes me think that Dominic’s got a point with his theory that order is being asserted. I wish I understood more of it.” Irene pushed away from the desk and began to wander round the room, staring absently at the various glass display-cases. “Now, if a world could be stalled at this point, so it didn’t head further into chaos, it’d be useful to know how it’s done. We don’t know how many worlds there are, so we don’t know how many we lose to chaos. But we lose enough that we do know about. And the dragons aren’t interested in talking to us about how they do whatever it is that they do.”

  Kai coughed. “Just like we aren’t interested in talking to them about how we do what we do?”

  Irene turned to look at him. Witheringly, she hoped. “Do you think you’re the first person to have made that argument?”

  “Course not.” He shrugged. “Fact remains, though. We don’t talk.”

  “I met one once,” Irene said.

  “What did you talk about?”

  “He complimented me on my literary taste.”

  Kai blinked. “Doesn’t sound like a life-threatening sort of conversation.”

  Irene shrugged. “Well, he was the one who got the scroll we were both after. You see, there was this—” She saw him glance away. “Oh, never mind.”

  There was this room full of fabulous woods and bone, and I’d been escorted there by a couple of servants, and I was honestly afraid that I was going to be killed. I’d trespassed on his private property. I’d negotiated with one of his barons for that scroll without realizing it. I’d been dropped in the deep end and I was sinking fast.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Kai said unconvincingly.

  He looked almost human. He had scales in the hollows of his cheeks and on the backs of his hands, as fine as feathers or hair. He had claws, manicured to a mother-of-pearl sheen. He had horns. His eyes were like gems in his face. His skin was the colour of fire, and yet it seemed natural; my own skin was blotchy and dull in comparison.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Irene said. “He let me go.”

  He discussed the poems in the scroll. He complimented me on my taste. He explained that he did not expect to see me or any other representative of the Library in that area again. I nodded and bowed and thanked him for his kindness.

  “Just like that?”

  No language that I knew had any words to describe him.

  Irene tried to look nonchalant. “As I said, he approved of my literary taste.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Irene was buttoning herself into a jacket and long skirt while Kai sat outside the dressing-room on a rickety chair and read through the dossiers. The cheap clothing shop Dominic had directed them to was certainly cheap, very definitely cheap, and had little that could be said for it other than the fact that it was cheap. If they were going to infiltrate high society, they’d need better clothing. And costumes that didn’t rely on heavy overcoats.

  “These lists don’t make any sense,” Kai complained. “They say the same thing on both sides of the page.”

  Of course, he was looking at the Language vocabulary pages. Since he wasn’t a Librarian, he’d be seeing his native language instead of the Language. “Yes,” Irene agreed, “they would, to you. Should I be surprised that you’re trying to read them?” She arranged her blouse’s neckline so its ruffles sat above her jacket collar and opened the dressing-room door to join him.

  “Can’t blame me for trying,” Kai said cheerfully. He looked her up and down. “Are you going to wear the hair-piece? Most of the women we’ve seen so far wear their hair longer than yours.”

  Irene looked unenthusiastically at the tattered partial wig that lay on the table like a mangy dark squirrel. “Wearing that thing’s going to cause more problems than going without,” she decided. “I’ll be counter-fashionable. Let’s just be grateful that corsets aren’t required wear any longer.”

  “Why should I be grateful?” Kai asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Because you don’t have to deal with me while I’m wearing one,” Irene said flatly. “Now, give me a summary on what you’ve just been reading. Think of it as—”

  There was a crash from the street and the sound of screaming. She turned to look at the window. Some sort of huge wind was blowing the smog outside into long grey veils, ripping through the sky like claws.

  “As?” Kai asked. He came to his feet in a single neat bound, assuming a smooth attitude of superiority and lack of distraction.

  “Imminent disaster takes priority over on-the-job testing,” Irene said. “Let’s see what’s going on out there.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kai made it down the stairs and outside first, and promptly stopped dead, face turned up to gawk at the sky like everyone else in the street. Irene, a step behind, looked up as well.

  Five zeppelins hung in the foggy sky, their propellers cutting through the clouds. While all displayed the same dark blue and red livery, one was much larger than the vessels that had taken up positions around it. This particular zeppelin trailed glittering, somewhat tawdry, gold streamers and flaunted a coat of arms on its side.

  Irene strained her eyes, but she couldn’t make it out. “Kai,” she muttered, “can you see the design painted on that airship?”

  Kai raised his hand to sh
ield his eyes and squinted. “There’s an eagle top left, in black and white on gold. Top right is a green crown on diagonal black and gold stripes. Bottom left is a vertically divided shield in red and white. And bottom right is some sort of harpy, again in black and white on gold. A hunting horn is right at the very bottom, with a horizontally divided shield in red and gold in the middle.”

  Irene frowned, trying to remember her heraldry. She’d been to a few places where it had been important, but surely something that crowded would have stuck in her mind . . . Oh, wait, that was it. “It sounds,” she said slowly, “like Liechtenstein.”

  “I thought that didn’t exist,” Kai said blankly.

  “Course it does!” a newspaper seller scolded. He was perched on a battered stool next to his newspapers and a dramatic board that declared, MURDERER STALKS LONDON. “Best zeppelin builders in the world, ain’t they?”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Irene said. “My friend’s from Canada and he doesn’t know much about Europe.”

  “Oh. Oh well, then.” The old man nodded as if it made perfect sense. “Wanna buy a paper, love? Got all the news on the horrible murder of Lord Wyndham.”

  “Pay the man, Kai,” Irene directed, and picked up one of the papers. It was thin, coarse paper, with thick black ink that threatened to come off on her gloves.

  Kai handed over a few of Dominic’s coins. “Have they made an arrest yet?” he asked.

  “Naaah.” The old man leaned forward and tapped the side of his nose, glancing at the zeppelins. “But you know what they say?”

  “That the Liechtensteinians were involved?” Irene guessed, pointing with the rolled-up paper at the zeppelins above.

  “Well. I mean. Makes sense, dunnit. What with them turning up like this so soon after that lord died, and all. And they do say that their ambassador was Lord Wyndham’s friend. Very personal friend, if you take my meaning.” The old man winked. “And they’re saying as how he was also his arch-rival and that they were”—he paused to check the front page of his newspaper—“constantly intriguing against each other in the most diabolical manner.”

  “Is the ambassador a vampire too?” Irene asked. It would be totally inappropriate of her to use Kai as bait, if the ambassador’s tastes ran that way. That was the sort of thing Bradamant would do, she reminded herself.

  “Naaah. Where’ve you been spending your time, love? Nah, he’s one of them Fair Folk, see. Always has to have artists draw his picture in the papers, ’cause none of them cameras will work on him, not even the stuff them geniuses make.”

  “Fair Folk,” Irene said, a cold feeling gripping the pit of her stomach. This was bad news.

  Chaos liked (if liking was quite the word) to manifest into a world where it could take advantage of illogical laws. Vampires and werewolves were particularly vulnerable to chaos. After all, strictly speaking, why should werewolves be allergic to silver, or vampires to garlic, or sticky rice, or a dozen other things? And as for the reasoning behind vampires rising three days after death, or behind most of Dracula—anyhow, the point was that chaos used creatures that obeyed illogical laws logically. Fae or fairies or elves or youkai or whatever they were called were among its favourite agents. Some of them were even living pieces of chaos, slipped sideways into various worlds and taking form from human dreams and stories. If there were Fair Folk manifesting in this world and being accepted by the population, then she needed to know. Dominic had made a note in the briefing about Liechtenstein being a “potential chaos portal” but hadn’t gone into details. She wished that he had. Liechtenstein could be the nexus of all the chaos in this world, if it had perhaps been weakened by too many supernatural or Fae living there, though at this point she could only speculate. However, that would make any agents operating from Liechtenstein particularly suspect.

  “Right,” she said briskly, taking a few steps out of the old man’s earshot and gesturing Kai over with a wave of the newspaper. “We’re splitting up. I want you to find out everything you can about the Liechtenstein ambassador, his embassy, and his involvement in the current situation. I’ll check out Wyndham’s place. We’ll meet at the hotel in Russell Square—eight o’clock at the latest. Find some way to get a message to me there if you’re delayed.”

  “Wait,” Kai said slowly. “You’re just sending me off, like that?”

  “Of course,” Irene said firmly and tried to ignore her slight feelings of disquiet. “You were already competent when the Library recruited you. It won’t do either of us any good for me to keep you under my thumb all the time.” And it’ll drive me up the wall and onto the ceiling if I have to constantly operate with someone looking over my shoulder. “We need information as fast as possible. I’m relying on you. Do you have any problems with this?”

  He looked at her for a moment, then put his right fist to his left shoulder and gave her a formal bow. “You may rely on me to do my share of the work.”

  “Excellent.” She smiled at him. “Then I’ll be seeing you in a few hours.”

  He smiled back, his face surprisingly warm for a moment, then turned and headed briskly down the street, shoulders squared for action.

  She’d known him for only a few hours, but there was something reliable about him. And she had to admit that the way that he’d said he’d do “his share” of the work was a well-balanced way of putting it. No attempts to do her share as well as his own, no trying to wriggle out of it . . .

  Was she actually starting to like him? It wouldn’t be hard. Kai was likeable. She’d enjoy sharing a mission with someone she liked. It’d make a nice change.

  Irene drew her veil partly across her face to shield her mouth and nose from the smoke and steam in the air. Most of the other women in the street wore veils across the lower parts of their faces too, ranging from filmy drifts of silk for the better off to thick wads of cotton or linen for the poor. Men wore their scarves drawn up over their mouths. She wondered what they did in summer.

  She scanned the newspaper’s front page.

  LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN WYNDHAM MURDER CASE, it read.

  Our correspondent informs us that the police have made great progress and expect an arrest at any moment.

  So the odds were that the police were still baffled. Good. It’d be difficult to extract the target document from a police station, if they did manage to catch the cat burglar and lock her up.

  Irene rolled the newspaper up, scanning the street. The local type of taxi-cab was black and small and seemed to be a combination of old-fashioned hansom carriage and electric car. With some determined waving she managed to signal one over, and directed the driver to take her to the Hyde Park Corner Underground railway station, a couple of streets away from Lord Wyndham’s residence.

  Her target was in an expensive street, with marble frontages and clean-scrubbed gutters, unusual in this grime-stained London. The place stood dark and empty, in contrast to the houses on either side, both already lit up against the afternoon dimness. With practised experience, Irene made her way round to the servants’ entrance at the back.

  It was locked.

  She flicked a quick glance behind her. Although this back alley was far more active than the wide front street, nobody was currently in view—or, more important, within earshot—of her. She put her lips next to the lock and commanded in the Language, “Servants’ entry door-lock, sealed and closed, now open!”

  The tumblers of the lock shivered and clicked open with gratifying vigour. The door shuddered and the latch came undone, letting the door swing open into a dark passage.

  Irene walked through the servants’ corridors into the main part of the house. The marks of the police search were obvious: drawers still hung open; there were piles of discarded linen and clothing everywhere and dirty boot marks on the luxurious crimson carpets. The place hadn’t been tidied, either, after the “rude interruption” to the dinner party. Dirty plates and
glasses were piled in stacks or left lying on polished tables, and ashtrays were full to overflowing with discarded cigar and cigarette ends.

  Despite searching with a certain horrified curiosity, she couldn’t find any secret torture chambers or rooms containing strange vampiric devices. She did find that the books displayed prominently in every chamber had been dusted, but the spines were pristine and uncreased. They had the sad, untouched air of literature paraded for display purposes but never actually used.

  It was profoundly depressing.

  Wyndham’s study was a large room with far too much pseudo-Degas artwork on the walls; a whole dozen pictures of women in ballet skirts showing off their legs. Thick crimson curtains matched the thick crimson carpet and the dark wood panelling. Her footsteps were silent.

  The heavy oak desk was bare of papers, and all the drawers were locked. She could open them later if she had to. A deep score mark marred the desk’s surface. Probably from the removal of Wyndham’s head. Bloodstains had soaked into the wood, spilling outwards from the line of the cut. She didn’t think they’d come out. The big chair behind the desk (ebony with black leather cushions—how vulgar) had been pushed over at some point. It had been repositioned but had clearly been lying long enough to leave a dent in the plush carpet.

  Blood had soaked into the carpet too, but it was barely visible, a slightly darker brown amid the rich, thick crimson.

  The glass display-case in the corner could have held the Grimm book, Irene decided. For one thing, the case was sealed with all manner of complicated locks, catches, and alarms. For another thing, it was now empty.

  Irene turned thoughtfully, looking around the room. Wyndham was the sort of man who would have needed a safe, and where better to keep it than in his study. She would have bet money on it. Now she just had to try to find it.