The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel)

by Genevieve Cogman

  “Does this happen often at these balls?” Kai asked. He seemed half-fascinated by the chaos, half-appalled by it. There were enough screaming, fleeing waiters and partygoers that the alligators weren’t going to reach them for at least a few minutes. Hopefully Bradamant could take care of herself.

  The elder Miss Retrograde clicked her tongue. “People should know what to expect at a party thrown by Lord Silver,” she said. “Now—what is going on over there?”

  The headlong escape was curdling in its tracks, as people came running back into the room. Over the hubbub, Irene could hear yelling about the outer doors being locked.

  “This smells planned,” Kai remarked.

  “It is,” Irene said. “The Iron Brotherhood?”

  “It has their stink,” the elder Miss Retrograde sniffed. “Did you notice the cold iron on the alligators’ claws? The easiest way to deflect Fae sorcery. I’m afraid we can’t expect anything from Lord Silver tonight.”

  “Won’t his subordinates be trying to rescue him?” Kai asked. He cast a thoughtful glance at the weapons hanging on the wall.

  The elder Miss Retrograde twitched a ruffled shoulder. “A couple of them may, but I can almost guarantee that the rest will be thinking about promotion, so will take care not to rescue anyone until it’s too late. Are either of you two young people skilled with alligators? Do they teach alligator training in Canada?”

  “Let me try something,” Irene said, stepping forward.

  An alligator turned its head and upper body. One rolling eye focused on her.

  Irene swallowed. This was not a time to give in to the roiling fear that churned in her stomach. This was not a time to consider that all she knew about alligators came from reading Rudyard Kipling. (Or had those been crocodiles?) This was the time to remember that she was a Librarian and that she had a responsibility to protect Kai.

  She suppressed the urge to cross her fingers, raised her hand and pointed it at the nearest alligator, and commanded it in the Language to lock its legs and stay still.

  It nearly worked.

  The words were clear in her mouth, but something in the air, or still lingering in her body, twisted them and wrenched them out of focus. She felt the marks on her hand reopen under the bandages and saw traces of scarlet start to seep up through her glove.

  The alligator’s legs locked: that much worked. It squinted at her with a reptilian look of cold hatred as it skidded on the polished floor and came sliding right at her, gliding like a doom-laden missile with huge (and getting huger by the minute) jaws.

  There was something hypnotic about those jaws. She should have been fleeing, but the sight held her until she thought that she could count every one of the approaching teeth.

  “Hell,” Kai said, and caught her by the waist, tossing her up onto the nearby table. Irene managed to catch herself with her good hand, pulling her skirts away from a steaming tureen of soup as the alligator went sliding by under the table. The white tablecloth rippled as the alligator went under one side and came out on the other, continuing its skid along the highly polished floor until it crashed nose first into the wall. It lay there, opening and closing its mouth and rolling from side to side, tail thrashing, apparently unable to flex its legs.

  “I’m afraid it’s not working properly,” Irene informed Kai.

  “Well, that much is obvious!” Kai offered the elder Miss Retrograde his arm. “Madam, if you’d kindly get up on the table—”

  “And what are you going to do, young man?” the woman demanded.

  Irene could tell what Kai wanted to do. It was evident in the set of his shoulders, the tension of his face. One of the most important aspects of command is not giving orders that won’t be obeyed, she reminded herself. “Get a sword down from the wall, Kai,” she said. “Find Vale, help him if he needs it. Do what you can to sort this out. I’ll take care of myself.”

  Kai raised his head, and there was a dangerous gladness in his eyes. “Do you really mean that?” he asked.

  “I am perfectly capable of staying out of the way of a few alligators,” Irene said coolly. Especially if she stayed up on the table, but it would spoil the statement to add that. “I don’t think they can climb.”

  “I hope not.” The elder Miss Retrograde rapped Kai on the shoulder. “I’ll take that assistance, young man. You two can tell me why you’re pretending to be Canadian later.”

  Kai put one hand under the elder Miss Retrograde’s elbow, bent to put the other under her shoe, and boosted her up on the table with barely a sign of effort. “Later,” he promised, and ran. He was heading for a low-hanging banner that dangled temptingly near a pair of ornate sabres hanging eight feet up.

  Elsewhere around the room, Irene could see other men and women climbing on the tables, some of which had given way in the process. It was sheer luck that there had been only a few people left in their corner of the room, and so the tables were comparatively unoccupied. This was apparently not one of those alternate worlds where the British Empire mandated a tradition of women and children first. It was a case of survival of the fittest, and alligators take the hindmost.

  From her vantage point she looked around, finally sighting Bradamant. She was athletically swinging herself onto a free table and tossing a platter of mussels into the jaws of the pursuing alligator in one smooth motion. The alligator paused, grunting and shaking its head, as Bradamant smoothed her skirts and looked around.

  Irene’s and Bradamant’s eyes met. For a moment they looked at each other across the room; then Bradamant turned away with a jerk of her head and a little smile. She scanned the crowd, clearly looking for someone else. Irene swallowed bile. Was she still so preoccupied by Bradamant that she had to look for where she was first and be sure that she was safe? Interest in a fellow Librarian’s welfare only went so far.

  And where was Vale? With a pang of guilt she scanned the crowd for him too, finally managing to catch sight of him. He’d been backed into a corner by two alligators and was defending himself with a silver tray as best he could. Of course, he would have had to leave his sword-stick at the door. It didn’t look good.

  “Kai!” Irene turned to find him. He’d managed to climb up the banner, almost high enough to reach the sabres. “Help Vale! Over there!”

  Judging by his frown, Kai could see Vale struggling even better than she could. He clamped the banner between his legs, reached up with both hands, and grabbed the hilts of both sabres; then he simply let go. The sabres came free from their brackets with a shriek of metal, and Kai fell the eight feet to the ground, twisting smoothly in mid-air to land on both feet.

  “Vale!” he shouted, loud enough to be heard over the screaming mob. “Here!” People backed away from him at his shout, and he tossed one of the blades in a high arc through the air; it spun above the crowd in a shimmer of steel. Vale snatched it out of the air, the throw perfectly weighted to slap the hilt into his hand. Then he sheared the metal contraption off a lunging alligator’s skull with one vicious slice.

  Irene let out a breath, unaware that she’d stopped breathing. Apparently both Kai and Vale possessed previously unappreciated keen fighting reflexes. Taking down a giant robot centipede seemed comparatively simple in retrospect.

  Kai shouted something in a Chinese dialect that Irene didn’t recognize, perhaps a battle cry or a curse, and leapt into the fight. He impaled one alligator, closing its jaws with a single sabre thrust just before the creature could bite into a waiter.

  Irene sidled farther along the table and tried to think of a plan. The alligators weren’t showing any interest in the piles of spilled food that littered the floor. And while she wasn’t an expert on reptilian psychology, animals would normally go for an abundance of convenient meals rather than armed dinner guests. Whether in the grip of a feeding frenzy or not. So maybe the buzzing metal things bolted onto their heads were controlling their behaviour
—a theory that seemed borne out from observation of Vale’s former aggressor.

  The alligator that had been de-metal-objected by Vale had retreated and was currently wandering around in a dazed way. That was promising. If they could de-weaponize all the alligators, then they’d have . . . well, they’d have a mob of normal alligators. Which wasn’t much, but it would be something. Especially as neither Fae magic nor the Language was working. Bradamant, however . . .

  Irene sprinted along her table, skirts in hand. Bradamant was a table and an alligator-infested stretch of floor away. The table wasn’t a problem. The chunk of floor was—and there were people dying out there.

  She just didn’t have time to think about that. It was clear to her left. Clear to her right.

  “Stay up here!” an elderly gentleman sputtered behind her. “Dash it, girl, don’t go committing suicide! Wait just a minute and the police will be here—”

  No. She couldn’t wait. She tried to rationalize why, as really all the screaming, shooting, and sounds of ripping flesh were irrelevant to her mission to get the book—to her duty as a Librarian. She could just stay put. But as she tried to shut out all the unimportant noises, she found herself already acting. She swung away from the man and dropped onto the floor, running for the other table.

  A man was lying under it, tumbled across a fold of fallen white cloth. He was bleeding freely, which meant that he was still alive.

  Irene pulled herself up onto the table, vaguely conscious that her skirt was fouled with blood and salmon.

  “Bradamant!” she called, pitching her voice to carry above the noise.

  “Yes?” Bradamant came stalking down the table, brushing aside other men and women by sheer force of personality. Her hair was still perfect, and her gown was stained only at the very edges. “I hope you have something useful to say.”

  Irene forced down her hostility. “I do. I have an idea, but I’m having problems with the Language. I need your help.” For a moment she wondered if Bradamant was going to put conditions on that help, but the other woman barely hesitated.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  Irene pointed up at the chandelier—the elegant, huge, electric-lit chandelier. “The things on the alligators’ heads are specific and discrete. Use the Language to call electricity down into them. Even if it doesn’t kill them, it’ll wreck their control systems.”

  Bradamant turned her head to follow Irene’s gesture. “It might also kill some of the guests if they’re in contact,” she said neutrally.

  Irene hadn’t thought of that. It took only a moment to imagine Vale or Kai with their blades in an alligator. “So be precise in your language!” she snapped. “Or do you want me to find the vocabulary for you?”

  Bradamant sniffed. “I don’t think that I will need your help for that endeavour.” Her tone suggested Irene’s total incompetence would render any assistance worthless.

  Irene should have let her get on with it, but a sudden thought struck her. “When did you come through from the Library?”

  “We have no time for this discussion,” Bradamant declared. “Stand back and let me work.”

  Irene stepped back and scanned the crowd as Bradamant prepared. Silver was easiest to spot. He’d found an ornate pike and was busy impaling an alligator with it, gullet to tail. Vale and Kai were back to back, surrounded by half a dozen alligators. No one else was being targeted so heavily. She couldn’t recall anything from Dominic Aubrey’s notes about the Iron Brotherhood. They were fairly obviously anti-Fae, what with shoeing their alligators with cold iron and staging the attack here and now. But she wouldn’t have thought that made them anti-Vale. Quite the opposite, really: Vale clearly had no particular liking for the Fae, and his attendance here was adversarial rather than friendly towards Silver. Were the alligators being somehow specifically directed? Or were they simply attacking those people who offered the most resistance?

  Irene turned back to Bradamant as the other Librarian called out a crisp string of orders in the Language. Fortunately the people around her were too preoccupied by the alligators to pay much attention.

  The chandelier trembled where it hung, then shattered, prisms chiming and blowing apart in puffs of crystal dust. Electricity forked down in visible arcs of lightning, targeting the alligators’ electronic attachments. The reptiles spasmed and thrashed, tails sweeping in wide curves as their jaws opened and closed on empty air.

  Irene watched in relief as Vale and Kai dodged the alligators that had been surrounding them. “Nicely done,” she said to Bradamant.

  Bradamant sniffed, somehow managing to suggest that the words Of course were simply beneath her. “I can’t see why you didn’t do it yourself,” she said.

  “Chaos contamination,” Irene replied reluctantly. The alligators were slowing their thrashing now, their wild spasms becoming mere squirming wriggles. “The door to the Library was sabotaged on this side. We think it must have been Alberich—”

  “Wait.” Bradamant grabbed her shoulder. Some of the high colour drained from her face. “Alberich is here?”

  “Yes,” Irene said bluntly. “Didn’t you get notified?”

  The expression on Bradamant’s face spoke for itself. Belatedly, Irene put two and two together. “You’re here without authorization, aren’t you? You came here even though this is a quarantined world and it was my mission—”

  “And I just saved you and your student from getting eaten by alligators,” Bradamant snapped. “You owe me. I want the precise details about Alberich being here. Now.”

  “So why did you come here anyhow?” Irene asked, ignoring the demand, as she checked that there was still enough chaos to cover their conversation. She and Bradamant weren’t the only people staying up on the tables. A lot of other people were waiting to be absolutely sure that the alligators were dead before they came down to ground level again. “To this party, that is. Not just to this alternate.”

  Bradamant was silent for a moment. There might even have been a trace of shame in her eyes, but Irene wasn’t sure if it was shame at having stolen another Librarian’s mission or just embarrassment at being caught. Finally she said, “I needed to investigate the Iron Brotherhood.”

  “Congratulations,” Irene said, and jerked her head in the direction of the alligators. “You found them. Were they supposed to meet you here, or was it just a happy coincidence?”

  “You’re very insolent tonight,” Bradamant said softly, dangerously.

  “Oh, don’t you think that I have reason?” Irene had enough control to keep her voice down, but not enough to keep back her words. “If you have anything, anything to do with this piece of bloody lunacy—”

  “I’d have thought that Alberich was more important than collateral civilian casualties,” Bradamant said. Her eyes glittered. “Shouldn’t you be briefing me on that rather than wasting time on those people?”

  “Did you have anything to do with this?” Irene repeated.

  “No,” Bradamant said. “If that helps you answer my question.”

  Irene glanced at the dying alligators again. She didn’t trust Bradamant, but she couldn’t refuse to warn her.

  “Yesterday I was told to beware of Alberich, a direct communication from the Library. This morning Kai and I went to talk with Dominic Aubrey, at our Library entrance point. We didn’t find him there, but we found his skin rolled up in a jar of vinegar, and a chaos trap on the door to the Library itself.”

  Bradamant blinked slowly. “Dominic Aubrey is dead? Actually dead?”

  “Yes,” Irene said. “Well, probably. Given the alternatives. When did you get here? Did you see him when you came through? If we can pin down when Alberich killed him and trapped the door—”

  “Irene!” Kai and Vale had converged on them unexpectedly. Vale had several cuts, but Kai was elegantly unruffled. He offered his hands to Irene. “If you’d like
a hand down—and Bradamant, of course . . .”

  “Of course,” Bradamant said in suddenly sweetened tones. She stepped past Irene, hips swinging, and placed her hands in Kai’s, letting him assist her down.

  Kai threw a martyred glance over Bradamant’s shoulder at Irene. It said, more clearly than words, I couldn’t possibly leave her to fall into the remains of the herring, could I?

  Irene sighed. She set her chin, sat down on the edge of the table, and swung off it to stand on the floor. Her gown was already ruined anyhow. “I’m glad to see that both you gentlemen are safe and well,” she said flatly. She could feel Vale’s measuring stare on her, Kai, and Bradamant and tried to ignore it. There was no reason whatever for her to have any feelings on the subject at all.

  The doors slammed open. A squad of men in vaguely military uniforms came barrelling through, rifles shouldered. They were led by a dark-skinned man with a turban and beard and moustache, his uniform differentiated by a wide green sash. They pointed their guns at the alligators and began to riddle them with bullets, ignoring the fact that the poor reptiles were now barely moving.

  “Ah,” Silver said from behind Irene’s shoulder, “the police at last. Inspector Singh is as vigorous as ever.” He took Irene’s hand between his. “My dearest girl, you are wounded.”

  Irene was conscious of both Kai and Vale staring at Silver in a distinctly freezing way. She wished that she could just have had even five minutes to get some answers out of them and Bradamant before Silver had turned up. “A scratch,” she said quickly, gingerly trying to slide her hand out of his grasp. “Sir, no doubt Inspector Singh will want to speak to you . . .”

  “And you must introduce me to your beautiful friend,” Silver said, his eyes on Bradamant, his grip on Irene’s hand painfully firm.

  Irene glanced at Bradamant. Bradamant gave a small nod of agreement, her lips curling in a sweet smile.