The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel)

by Genevieve Cogman

  “Yes!” Kai exulted.

  And the cab went over into the river.

  CHAPTER 13

  The carriage did not sink elegantly into the water like a dying swan: it hit the surface of the river with a rattling crash that threw Irene into Kai, and Kai into Vale, and Vale into the wall of the carriage.

  Force equals mass times acceleration, Irene thought dizzily. She should be thinking of a way out of this, but her thoughts cowered like frightened rabbits. She didn’t want to think.

  The carriage tumbled as it began to sink, rolling over as the river tugged at it. The three of them automatically grabbed handles and benches, wedging themselves into corners until the vehicle came to a jolting stop on its side. Black Thames water covered the windows, not entirely cutting off all light, but making it only barely possible for the three of them to see one another.

  “The usual protocol in these cases is to wait until we are fully submerged, then open a window to equalize the water pressure and swim up to the surface,” Vale stated. Irene could hear the sheer control in his voice, over the creaking of the carriage and the slow trickling sound of water. “But if that person has sealed the carriage, given that I could not break the window earlier, this tactic would be ineffective.”

  Right. She had to explain to Vale about Alberich. She owed him an explanation about a great many things now. But what was the point, if they were just going to die? Well, it did remove the need for justifications. Yet there were other ways of dodging that sort of thing, and she was avoiding the subject again. And the water was pressing down, and they were all going to die . . .

  He doesn’t just want us dead. He wants us dying in fear, in the dark, and slowly. This isn’t just wanting to get us out of the way, so he can work undisturbed. It’s malice, pure and simple.

  She had been afraid. She had been so very afraid that she’d been cringing in the corner, unwilling to speak, let alone act. But now something else woke in her.

  I will not tolerate this.

  “Then we’re just going to have to find a way to break it,” Irene said. She forced herself to lean forward. “What one man can do, another can undo.” Saying the words made them possible, gave her strength.

  “But you can’t touch his magic!” Kai said. “When it infected you before it nearly killed you!”

  She wished that she had time to think this through calmly, to plan, to consider. “Wait,” she said, pulling the glove off her damaged hand and pointing her fingers at the window. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Would you care to explain?” Vale invited tensely.

  “I was attacked by the same forces he used earlier,” Irene said. She could feel the cold water soaking into her slippers and stockings, curling up around her ankles. “If I can identify them and expel them, it should break the binding, and we can swim out of here.”

  “Very good.” Vale eased himself farther back in his seat. Perhaps it was only the dim light that made Irene think that he was trying to position himself as far away from her as possible. She’d sort things out later. She’d explain things later. Right now she just had to make sure there would be a later.

  Irene held her fingers a fraction of an inch away from the window and focused away from the water, the darkness, the two men in the carriage with her, and into a world where language structured reality.

  It was a fact that Alberich controlled and used chaotic forces. The chaotic forces must therefore be discrete and identifiable. But she had no words in the Language for these forces, and she could control only what she could name or describe.

  However, she could name and describe herself.

  It wasn’t a thing that the Librarians did very often. Oh, certainly if you had a broken left arm you could try saying, My left tibia is in fact not fractured but perfectly whole. But while your tibia might obey, your muscles would still be torn and any wound would still be open. Unless you could name every single thing that required naming, you would probably end up with a partly healed wound that would be more trouble than letting it heal in the normal way. While some Librarians went in for that level of detail, and were very sought after, Irene was not one of them.

  But a person, especially a Librarian, could be named and described holistically as a single entity. She bore the Library’s mark on her flesh, and her name was in the Language. If she could enforce that strongly enough, deliberately enough, there would be no space for the chaos forces inside her. Without that to contend with, she could finally access her full powers as a Librarian.

  This was not something she’d ever tried. Then again, she’d never been infested to this degree before. Only imminent death would force her to play with dangerous, untested, theoretical techniques; otherwise, maybe she’d have thought of this earlier.

  Her life was far too full of learning experiences.

  Before she could lose her nerve, she shaped the words with her lips, barely audible, speaking in the Language. “I am Irene: I am a Librarian: I am a servant of the Library.”

  Her brand burned across her back as she enforced her will. But she felt curiously distanced from the pain, as though she could shrug it away and wish it gone. In a flash of insight, she realized that would be disastrous. What she felt in her was the conflict between self-definition and the contamination. She couldn’t afford to ignore it. She had to embrace it.

  But it hurt. She heard her breath catch, the sound strange in her ears.

  “Irene?” Kai said, his voice concerned. It was too dark to see him now.

  With a racking surge, like vomit after eating spoilt food, the chaos power came jolting out of her. She tried not to think of the buffet earlier that evening (salmon, mussels, crab, soup, little prawns in sauce) and failed. The power spilled from her hand, boiling off her fingers in waves of shadow that rippled in the air—and like any living thing, it looked for shelter, for something like itself.

  It jumped for the window, arcing through the narrow span of air, and crackled into the glass. Irene had just enough time to wonder if she should jump away from the window, when it broke.

  Not just the window.

  The whole carriage came apart. First the window, splintering into shards of glass; then sections of the carriage were toppling away from one another like a badly glued model. She barely had time to feel the splinters of glass in her arm before the water came in like a hammer-blow. And, surprisingly clearly in the near darkness, she saw Kai’s face looking strangely decisive. His mouth was moving; he was saying something—

  She had several seconds of thrashing panic before she realized that she could breathe.

  The three of them were drifting along together at the bottom of the river, enclosed in a long, continuous coil of dark water. It was a flexing, shifting, visible current in the river, separate from the rest of the water. It even felt cleaner. The shattered remnants of the carriage were already invisible in the shifting mud of the bottom, some distance behind them. Above, through the surface of the water, street lamps glimmered in hazy balls of white and orange. Kai floated a few strides ahead of herself and Vale, moving at the same pace as they were. He was saying something, but the river water filled her ears and she couldn’t hear him.

  Vale grasped at her sleeve. He mouthed something that was probably What is going on, Miss Winters?

  On the positive side, Irene reassured herself, he must be feeling more composed if he was back to calling her Miss Winters. She shrugged as obviously as she could, gesturing soothingly. It is all under control, she mouthed back.

  Vale didn’t look as if he believed her, which was a shame, because she was now sure that things actually were back under control. To the extent that the three of them weren’t about to drown, at least.

  No, the real problem was something else entirely. Now she was sure what Kai really was. A river spirit might have changed himself to water to save them, and a nature spirit of some other type might have c
ajoled or persuaded the river to help them, but only one sort of being would give orders to a river.

  Kai was a dragon. What the hell was she supposed to do about that?

  And he’d chosen to reveal himself in order to save them. Not himself: he would presumably have managed quite comfortably on his own. But them. Her and Vale. It was a commitment on Kai’s part that made her worry whether she would be able to answer it. She didn’t like commitments to other people. They could get . . . messy.

  The tumbling rush of the current veered towards the far bank and then lifted the three of them out of the water itself, rising in an arc of dark water. They were placed on the dock-side, deposited as lightly as driftwood. A couple of beggars who’d been nursing their hands over a small fire just sat there, looking at the three of them numbly as the water sloshed over the pavement and ebbed back to the river again.

  A curl of the river still held itself aloft, curving towards where Kai stood. It wasn’t quite like a serpent: the head had features something like a human and something like a dragon (yes, that again). There was also something of the lion, mane wet and draggled with weeds and dirt. Its eyes gleamed as yellow as fog-lamps, burning under heavy brows. This spirit was as polluted as the water itself, its body entwined with fragments of garbage and long streaks of filth. A heavy smell of oil and weed clung to it, wafting thickly along the dock.

  Kai faced it and gave a small, precise inclination of his head. “Your service is acknowledged,” he said firmly. “Return with my thanks and the thanks of my family.”

  The river spirit bowed its head in a long fluctuation that rippled along its body, then reared up and crashed back into the river in a spray of black water. The eyes were the last thing to vanish beneath the surface of the river, disappearing slowly rather than simply closing, visible for a long moment under the dark water.

  Vale took a step forward. “What was that?” he demanded, shocked. “What did you do? What is it that you have brought into my London, sir?”

  Kai turned with a snarl, his eyes an inhuman shade of blue, as fierce and dangerous as gas flames. “What it was, sir, was—”

  “Was under my orders,” Irene said, stepping between them. She couldn’t allow this to degenerate into a shouting match. And more than that, she could sense something archaic and furious within Kai, the dragon under the human skin now very close to the surface. She had to divert it now, give him familiar channels to work in, and give Vale a target—herself—whom he simply couldn’t shout down without shattering his own rules of custom and propriety. She regarded Vale firmly, refusing to show him an inch of fear or terror or even, she hoped, nervousness. “I have promised you more information, sir, and you shall have it, but I suggest we return to your lodgings first. Mr. Strongrock acted on my instructions to protect and save us all.” It was a fairly small lie, really only a half lie as lies went, because Kai had certainly known she would want him to protect all of them. “And this is no time for us to be arguing, when we are all fighting a greater enemy.”

  Vale regarded her for a moment, then granted her a small nod, nearly the mirror image of Kai’s own salutation to the river spirit. “Very well, Miss Winters. We shall return to my lodgings. I can only have faith in you, I suppose, as I have done before.”

  That stung. As no doubt it was meant to. She smiled as sweetly as she could, then turned to Kai. “We can talk later,” she said softly, “or we can talk now, but either way, I know what you are, and it doesn’t matter.”

  “You think very highly of yourself,” Kai answered, equally quietly, but far more deadly, “if you believe that it doesn’t matter.”

  This was very different from handling Vale. There she had needed to hide her fear to convince him to wait for information. Here, with Kai, she needed to show her control and dispassion or—she could feel it in her bones—she would lose him to his true nature.

  She couldn’t afford that. She had a responsibility to the Library. And she had a responsibility to him.

  “Are you still my student?” she asked him directly. “Am I still your mentor?” Nothing more than that. The bond of loyalty and the bond of trust. Anything else was something that they would have to work out later.

  He looked at her, and something inhuman seethed behind his eyes. “Do you think you can command me?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she spoke in the Language.

  The word hung in the air between them. Then Kai closed his eyes and reopened them, and now they were a human blue, sharp but no longer alien. “Then I believe I am still under your orders,” he said, and he managed a very small smile.

  “Miss Winters, Mr. Strongrock, over here!” Vale called. He had walked to where the dock ended and the houses began and had somehow managed to conjure up a carriage. As Irene followed Kai across to the carriage, struggling with her soaked skirts and cloak, she couldn’t help but notice that Kai was perfectly dry. It didn’t seem fair. But it was a comforting, small thing on which to concentrate. She could be aggravated by something simple, rather than floundering in terror at what she had just faced down.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I would appreciate that explanation, Miss Winters,” Vale said as he refilled their teacups.

  There had been hot baths and bandaging of injuries. Even Kai, untouched by the dirty water of the Thames, needed to clean himself after the exertions of the reception and its accompanying alligator blood. As for Vale and Irene, they were soaked and filthy. The driver had been muttering audibly about getting his carriage cleaned, even after a very generous tip from Vale.

  Irene would gladly have soaked for a few more hours, but she hadn’t felt it safe to leave Vale and Kai alone to talk for too long. Kai’s temper was still touchy, and Vale might ask a question that was more dangerous than he realized. With a virtuous feeling of self-sacrifice, she’d dragged herself out of the hip-bath that she’d been allotted, wrapped herself up in the heavy flannel dressing-gown Vale had lent her, turbaned her hair in a towel, and gone out to join the others in Vale’s study for tea and interrogation.

  (She hadn’t asked why Vale had a spare woman’s dressing-gown in his wardrobe. Presumably specifically for female victims of crime who’d had a drenching. However, she didn’t think it belonged to any close female associate of Vale’s. For one thing, it clearly hadn’t been used for months, and for another, any female trying to be flirtatious would not choose a dressing-gown made of heavy flannel. For a third thing, Vale hadn’t offered her any other female clothing. And Vale hadn’t given her the sort of attention that even the politest of men might give a soaked wet woman in dripping clothing. He’d bustled her off towards the hot tub as briskly as the matron from her old boarding-school. Not that she wanted him to give her that sort of attention, anyhow . . .)

  Irene sipped her tea. Milk. Two lumps of sugar—suitable for people suffering from shock. “I should warn you that it is a little, ah, far-fetched,” she said, trying to think how best to explain it, or, failing all else, lie about it.

  Vale shrugged. His dressing-gown was red and black silk. His hair was still damp, combed into position, and gleaming darkly in the light from the lamps. “I can hardly object until I have heard it.” Somewhere amidst the confusion he had found time to rearrange his books, after the disorder Irene had inflicted on them, and neat piles of half-sorted literature sat around his chair like patient children.

  Kai sipped his own tea (no milk, no sugar, black and brooding) and watched the two of them. There was still that feeling of distance about him. He was wearing what was obviously Vale’s second-best dressing-gown—the same colours and design, but more worn on the elbows, and with small burn holes marring the embroidery of the cuffs. His mouth was pinched in stubborn lines.

  “Mr. Strongrock and I are agents of a library,” Irene started. “It is often known as the Invisible Library among those who have heard of it, as it’s hidden from most.”

  “A reasonable eno
ugh name,” Vale granted. “Where is it based? I would hardly think that it could be London.” Since I have never heard of it, he didn’t bother to add.

  “Ah. Now, this would be the implausible bit,” Irene said. “Are you familiar with the concept of alternate worlds?”

  Vale put down his cup, his regard assessing rather than outright disbelieving. “The theory has been mooted by some of the more metaphysically inclined philosophers and scientists. While I do not necessarily believe in it, I must admit that it has a certain quality of inherent satisfaction. That is, to paraphrase—it ‘makes sense’ that possible fulcrum points in history have created alternate worlds where things might have been different.”

  Irene nodded. That way of looking at it would do for the moment. “I and Mr. Strongrock are agents of a library which exists between the alternate worlds. Our task is to collect books for the Library from all those worlds, to preserve them.” She glanced meaningfully at his crowded bookshelves. “You must admit that to a keen reader—like yourself, or like me—that also would ‘make sense.’”

  “Mm. Your argument would appeal to any bibliophile, Miss Winters. Should I take it that you are here in pursuit of a particular book?”

  Irene nodded again. “The copy of Grimm that Lord Wyndham had before his death. But it seems that we aren’t the only people after it.”

  Vale hesitated for a long moment. “Very well. I can postulate an interdimensional library hunting down rare books. I can accept the agents of that library having unusual powers.” He glanced at Kai. “Once one accepts the basic concept as possible, today’s events become—well, not entirely inexplicable. I have a great many questions, but one query in particular intrigues me, and I trust that you can give me a solid answer to it. Why should you be looking for Grimms’ Fairy Tales? Why not the latest scientific advances?”