The zeppelin rocked, throwing Irene off her feet. Something whirred and chittered like locusts in the air outside. Kai grabbed her round the waist, catching hold of a hanging strap with his free hand. Vale managed to balance himself against the far wall. “What’s going on?” he shouted in Mrs. Jenkins’s direction.
“We’re under attack,” Mrs. Jenkins snapped back. She didn’t look away from the controls. Her right hand was locked into the middle of a brass-and-pewter orrery, and her left hand was pulling at a range of levers. She tugged at something that looked like an organ stop and frowned when it wouldn’t respond. “Trouble to starboard!”
Irene and the others crowded to the window.
“I can’t see anything,” Irene said. The only things in sight were rooftops and smog.
“There!” Vale declared, pointing a finger. “See that vapour trail?”
“Something small,” Kai said, leaning over Irene’s shoulder. “But I can’t sense any Fae interference.”
“You forget the Iron Brotherhood,” Vale interrupted. “They have their agents after us too.”
“Hang on!” Mrs. Jenkins called from the cockpit. The zeppelin lurched again, dragging sideways in a painful, ungainly movement that shook the cabin like a dice cup. Irene and the two men clung to handholds. Lengths of rope that hadn’t been strapped to the walls swung out and flailed in the air, and an unsecured teacup bounced from wall to wall, leaving a trail of cold tea droplets.
“There he is!” Vale exclaimed. A man had flown into view. He was strapped into some sort of mobile helicopter unit that whirred its tarnished blades dangerously close to his head, and he was wearing an oil-smeared leather helmet and overalls. In one hand he held a heavy pistol, with a cable running from it to something strapped to his lower back. He bobbed in the air, steadying the pistol with his free hand as he tried to line up a shot.
“Is there some way we can shoot back?” Kai asked, reverting to smooth competence.
“Over here.” Vale leapt into the cockpit and wrenched at a panel above Mrs. Jenkins’s head. She ignored him, concentrating on steering the zeppelin. “The weapons are kept here on museum vehicles—ah, here they are.”
He pulled out a brace of pistols, tossing one to Kai and another to Irene, who wasn’t too confident about popping off shots at a flying target. “Isn’t there anything larger on board?” she asked. “A flare pistol or something?”
Vale spared his attention from smashing a window to give her a sharp look. “Really, Miss Winters! A flare pistol on a zeppelin? I thought you were more sensible than that.”
“It’s not something I’ve ever studied,” Irene muttered, and decided to keep any other bright ideas to herself for the moment. Kai and Vale were both shooting out the window and could certainly do so without her assistance. She staggered forward to the cockpit. “How much further to the library, Mrs. Jenkins?”
“Almost at it,” Mrs. Jenkins said bluntly, “but it’s not going to be a rat’s ass of use, because we can’t land with that maniac out there firing at us. I don’t know what sort of stories you’ve heard about what zeppelins can and can’t do, miss, but I need to hover while someone throws us a line and makes us secure. And that’s what we call, in aviator parlance, a ‘sitting target.’ So I hope your friends are good shots, or I’m going to be making altitude and heading north until we lose him. Can’t risk crashing with the streets this busy.”
Vale shouldered over to grab Irene’s arm. Apparently their shots had all gone wide. “Miss Winters, can your abilities be of use here?”
Irene shook her head. “I can’t affect him or his gear. They can’t hear me.”
Vale stared at her. “Hear you?”
“The Language only works on the universe if the universe can hear it,” Irene snapped. She was sure that she’d explained this to him earlier. Perhaps she hadn’t. “I can affect this zeppelin, but I don’t see what good that would be—”
Vale suddenly snapped his fingers. “I do! Mrs. Jenkins, bring us in to above the British Library, right now, if you please. And be ready for an abrupt descent.”
“What are we trying?” Kai asked, looking round from the window.
“I wouldn’t mind knowing that myself,” Mrs. Jenkins said. The zeppelin wheeled to the left, throwing them all off balance again. “We’re three hundred yards off, coming in at forty-five miles an hour, and the landing roof’s only fifty yards long.”
“On my word, Miss Winters,” Vale instructed, “tell all the structural components of the zeppelin to increase their weight by fifty per cent. Mrs. Jenkins, you are to deploy landing flaps.” He checked his watch.
Another burst of chittering sounded outside. “Damn,” Mrs. Jenkins commented. “I hate those things.”
“Which things?” Irene asked, frantically trying to remember vocabulary for zeppelin parts.
“Seed ammunition,” Mrs. Jenkins said, adjusting the organ-stop controls. “They chew right through an airbag. Stand by for rapid braking.”
“Now!” Vale declared.
“All zeppelin structure parts, increase your weight by a half again!” Irene shouted, projecting her voice to ensure it would carry through both cabin and cockpit. She didn’t want half the struts deciding to stay their original weight, making the whole thing break up in mid-air. Imagination could supply too many images, and none of them good.
Mrs. Jenkins slammed down half a dozen of the organ stops simultaneously using her left hand and forearm and threw herself back in her seat.
The zeppelin shuddered, leather straining and metal creaking, and the whirling motors outside howled in near-human agony. Kai had dropped his gun and was hanging on to the straps with one hand and Irene with the other, and Irene couldn’t complain. Vale had tucked his elbow through a strap and was watching the view through the shattered window with keen curiosity.
They were sinking in the air, dragged down as if someone were hauling the craft’s mooring rope from below, but they were still moving forward. The braking flaps were working, but, Irene thought, maybe not fast enough.
“Should I make it heavier?” she shouted at Vale, her voice barely carrying above the howling of the air and the tortured noise of the metal struts.
Vale shook his head in clear negation.
It was at times like this that Irene really wished she believed in prayer. Sudden death was easy to cope with, seeing as you had no time to ponder. But their impending crash and burn over the British Library was leaving too much time for dread, with an inevitable fiery doom at the end. Every second seemed to stretch out into an eternal moment of panic.
Then the zeppelin settled on solid ground with a thump that threw Irene entirely onto Kai, knocked Mrs. Jenkins back in her seat, and made Vale drop his watch. Irene could vaguely hear screams and shouts outside. Hopefully anyone who was standing on the roof had had the sense to run away.
With a muffled curse, Mrs. Jenkins started throwing switches. The hum of the motors began to slow as they shut down one by one. Suddenly the zeppelin was absurdly quiet after all the earlier noise, with only the cabin’s creaks and groans as an eerie backdrop.
“Thank you,” Vale said. “Excellent piloting. I will be mentioning your conduct to your superior.”
Mrs. Jenkins looked at him for a long moment, then picked up a rag and wiped her goggles with it. “You’ll find the exit to your right,” she said flatly.
Kai released Irene and went to open the zeppelin door. Irene saw it coming, but it was too fast for the Language to stop it. The man in his mini-copter was hovering there, levelling his gun to shoot directly through the open door at the people in the cabin. At Kai standing there with his back half-turned.
She didn’t have time to speak, but she did have time to move. She threw herself at Kai, and the two of them went sprawling on the floor together, Kai’s mouth open in shock, as a whirring mass of silver flecks sliced thr
ough the air where he had been standing. The metal pieces sliced into the leather and wooden parts of the structure, chewing long gashes into them, and ricocheted off the metal struts, leaving long silver scars against the dark oiled surfaces. A couple of them sliced along Irene’s left arm, cutting through the cloth of her sleeve and drawing blood.
Vale went down on one knee, snatched up Kai’s pistol from where it had fallen, and fired.
There was a long, dwindling scream and a distant crash. Irene looked down at Kai’s face for a moment. He was looking up at her with that lost, puppy-like look again, as if she had somehow perfectly filled a hole in his personal universe. It was no doubt immensely flattering, but she didn’t have time for that. She didn’t have time to tell him that she trusted him, or that he could trust her. She didn’t have time for the immense feeling of gratitude that he was safe—or for anything except finding the book, stopping Alberich, and saving Bradamant. She had to finish the job, or all their efforts and the danger she’d put people in would be wasted. And she couldn’t waste time indulging herself with personal feelings. Even if she wanted to.
“All right?” she said briskly, pulling herself to her knees. “Good. Come on.”
Vale offered his hand and pulled her to her feet. “Good reflexes, Miss Winters.”
“Good shooting, Mr. Vale,” she replied. “Thank you. Now, let’s find that book.”
CHAPTER 20
There were several guards on the roof who would have liked to discuss their crash landing and the ensuing gun-fire. But Vale simply strode past, and Irene and Kai marched along in his wake. Their commanding poise was spoiled a little by Kai’s sidelong glances whenever he thought her back was turned. What did he expect from her?
“Through here,” Vale said, pointing at a door in one of the smaller battlements circling the landing area. Beyond that bulged the wide, curved glass roof of what must be the Reading Room. Irene hadn’t had time to admire it in this alternate, but she’d seen versions of it in other Londons, and she shuddered to think how close they’d come to landing on it. Though surely in a world of airships and personal helicopters, the curators must have taken some sort of precautions against things or people crashing through it from above?
She really hoped so. She’d seen too many glass pyramids and domed roofs and huge chandeliers that were just accidents waiting to happen.
Vale had a few quick words with the guard, who flung the door open and practically saluted them through. And then they were inside, and out of the wind, and surrounded by comforting walls and walls of books. The rich, delightful smell of old paper, leather, and ink permeated the place, washing away the pettier odours of blood and oil and smog.
Irene felt a desperate surge of nostalgia for her Library. Her life was more than just airship chases, cyborg alligator attacks, and hanging out with this alternate universe’s nearest analogue to Sherlock Holmes. She was a Librarian, and the deepest, most fundamental part of her life involved a love of books. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to shut the rest of the world out and have nothing to worry about except the next page of whatever she was reading.
“Which way is Aubrey’s office?” Vale demanded.
Irene frowned, trying to remember the route. “Third floor,” she said, “along from the south stairs, two rooms east, then one south, then east again. I think that most of the stuff along there was European history.”
“This way,” Vale said, leading the way down a gallery of drawings and prints. “Do you have a strategy?”
A couple of men looked up disapprovingly from their sketchbooks at the noise. Their faces were full of We are far too polite to say so, but really you shouldn’t be making any noise at all.
Irene ignored them. “Get the book,” she said to Vale. “Secure this building against Alberich. My invoking the Library won’t keep Bradamant out, so she’ll be safe once she gets here. I’ll contact my central authority for direct assistance.”
Vale raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to tackle the fellow directly?”
Irene couldn’t meet his gaze. “I’d lose,” she said.
“This language of yours—,” Vale started.
“I’d find it very hard to believe that other Librarians haven’t tried that against him already,” Irene snapped before she could help herself. “And confrontations with Alberich generally end with him sending parts of their internal organs back to the Library. In neatly wrapped parcels. Someone said that they can tell it’s a parcel from Alberich because he always folds the paper in the same way.”
“Miss Winters, just because this fellow has reached the status of an urban legend . . .”
“He’s more than that,” Kai said urgently. Their footsteps were loud in the stairwell. “You were there last night, Vale. He sealed us in the carriage and put a block on it which even I couldn’t undo.” There was an unconscious arrogance to his voice. “And Aubrey, the Librarian stationed here previously. He would have been more experienced than Irene—no insult, Irene, but—”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Irene said with a shrug, surreptitiously flexing her hands and trying to decide how fully recovered she was. For the moment she was functional, if damaged. “You’re quite right. He wouldn’t have been stationed in an alternate like this unless he was competent, and he was older and more experienced than I am.”
“It’s this floor,” Vale said. They came out of the stairwell into a room blazingly full of painted hieroglyphics, icons, and crosses with pointy end bits—Coptic, Irene decided. The light was artificial, presumably to spare the papyri from natural sunlight, but the colours leapt at them in a riot of gold, red, and turquoise. “Straight ahead, then left. And may I suggest that Mr. Aubrey had no warning that Alberich was coming. Presumably if he had done, then he could have secured himself and called for help from the Library, just as you intend to do?”
She didn’t want to hear this.
Casual strollers saw them coming and stepped out of the way. A couple of elderly ladies muttered something condemnatory about young people these days, as Irene strained to listen.
Irene knew that this was displacement behaviour, as the last thing she wanted to do was listen to Vale talking about tackling Alberich. Playing chess matches against masters who were certain to defeat you was one thing: you learnt about chess, and you didn’t die in the process. Getting into a fight with someone who would kill you (messily) failed to teach you anything useful, unless reincarnation was genuine, and you did die in the process. It was hard enough to have to consider how important the book might be to this world. She could think only in small steps. If Alberich wanted the book, that meant it was important, possibly even vital, to this world, and he mustn’t have it . . .
She was also trying to ignore Kai’s sympathetic glances from behind Vale’s back. Maybe there was a whole genre of literature written by dragons for dragons about how they sensibly stayed out of fights that they couldn’t hope to win and flew away to do something very important somewhere else. Or maybe it was a bad idea to be distracting herself quite so thoroughly when they were almost at Aubrey’s office.
“We can’t possibly know how Aubrey tried to handle Alberich,” she finally said. “I believe the Aubrey I met was simply Alberich disguised. I never even met the real man. All I know is that I am not going to get into a fight which I can’t win, when there are alternatives.”
Vale nodded towards the exit. “Through that way, then straight on for the next seven rooms, then turn left. Very well. I accept your judgement. Can you fetch help rapidly?”
Irene was glad she could agree. “From what I’ve heard, the main problem is that my superiors rarely know where Alberich is. If they can actually pinpoint him to this world, then they can take steps—”
Vale cut in, and Irene realized it was a sign of his urgency that he’d actually interrupt. “Miss Winters! A little logic, if you please. They already know he is in this worl
d, as they warned you about him.”
Something in Irene’s stomach went cold. “Oh,” she said. She hadn’t thought that through. “Maybe—maybe they just suspected he was here but had no actual proof . . .”
Vale didn’t say anything, but then again, he didn’t need to, as Irene could feel the shallowness of her reasoning. Oh, it was fashionable among Librarians of her age to impute dubious motives to their seniors. She’d heard the gossip—They’d use us as bait if they thought it was necessary. They edit the information they give us. They’d sacrifice us to get their hands on a text. But that didn’t mean they believed it. At the bottom of her heart, Irene had faith in her superiors.
Genuine doubt was worse than fashionable adolescent doubt had ever been.
“And possibly I’ve been misinformed,” she said, forcing firmness into her voice. “Can we at least assess the situation before we start assuming the worst?”
“As you wish,” Vale said, in tones stating, I know perfectly well you aren’t going to stop thinking about it now. “But why wouldn’t he be in his office, though we might wish him elsewhere?”
“The automaton attack at the museum,” Kai suggested. “If that was him, and if he expected to find the book there, wouldn’t he be on the spot to collect it?”
Vale rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “That assumes that he was responsible for the automaton attack. And it would be rather overly controlling, wouldn’t you say, to be there in person if he could command underlings . . .”
“He did try to drown us in person,” Kai answered. “Isn’t that the sort of thing that people usually have their subordinates do?”
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