“True, true.” Vale’s frown lightened. “If that should be so, let us by all means take advantage of it. And if not, well, I believe we may have the advantage in that he will not be expecting us. In either case, surprise and speed are our best option.” He looked around at the vast quantity of rather dull Romano-Celtic objects in the room, noting, “And I do believe we are almost there.”
“We should clear the area,” Kai said firmly.
“We can’t without raising the alarm,” Irene pointed out. If Alberich was in the immediate area, he’d react to something like fire alarms going off, security guards clearing the area, or any sort of disturbance involving people running round shrieking. And people always ended up running round shrieking. It was a law of nature or something. She wondered whether she could use the Language to pre-warn them as to whether Alberich was in his office. Nothing came to mind. “I think we’ll just have to knock on the door and play innocent.”
“Hm. I believe it might work,” Vale agreed. “He has no reason to believe you have penetrated his imposture. I will hold back and be ready with my gun.”
Irene tried to think of how this plan might go wrong.
Alberich couldn’t have laid any sort of kill-everyone-who-touches-the-door spell on his office door (assuming that such a spell existed, something about which she had no clue whatsoever). That would be too likely to slaughter innocent British Library staff and visiting children. So that was positive. What he might have done—what she would have done if she knew how—would be to set a ward against Language use. Again, she had no idea whether it was possible, but she would assume for the moment that it was. So she should avoid the Language for the moment.
This bit of paranoid planning had helped her stroll through a number of Dark Ages exhibits without looking as panicked as she felt. Now, at last, their goal was through some last cases, then directly on the left.
Irene took a deep breath. She gathered her determination, smiled blandly at Kai and Vale, then strolled forward. She tried to ignore the grandfather with a complaining brat to her right and the students over by the archway ahead. Possible witnesses also included the woman squinting near-sightedly at a display card, who did look vaguely familiar—maybe she’d seen her before when she came here last time—oh dear, she was procrastinating again, wasn’t she?
Why couldn’t this be the sort of story where she kicked the door down and burst in with a loaded gun? Probably because it was a heavy door, she was in long skirts, and she didn’t have a loaded gun.
Plastering her best look of sincere concern and gullibility on her face, she knocked on the door.
No answer.
She knocked again. A couple of the bystanders glanced across, then turned back to whatever they’d been doing.
Still no answer.
“Cover me,” Kai said in a low voice. He stepped forward, fishing a thin metal probe out of an inner pocket. He tapped it against the door-knob as Irene shielded him from view. She glanced around but nobody was paying them any attention—except for Vale, who was hanging back and ostensibly ignoring them.
The tapping having drawn no visible reaction, Kai tried the handle. It didn’t move, so he bent over and began picking the lock. Clearly his time as a juvenile criminal hadn’t been a total fiction.
Irene spread out her skirts and turned to watch the room, a smile pinned to her face. No, nothing going on here, absolutely normal. My friend here likes to stare into locks and wiggle bits of metal round in them; he does it every day and twice on Sundays . . .
A moment later Kai was tapping her on the shoulder with a cool look of superiority.
Irene gave him a nod and tried the door. It didn’t explode.
This is good. I’m already ahead of the game.
She turned the handle and walked into the room. A quick glance around showed that it looked just as they had left it the last time. No sign of anyone. Nobody hiding under tables. Nobody hiding behind the door. No Alberich.
She breathed out a sigh of relief that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and stepped aside so that Kai could come in. Vale followed a few seconds later, closing the door behind him.
Irene cast around, looking for anything that resembled an in-tray. Score! There was a blatantly obvious one on Aubrey’s desk. She remembered it having been tidy when they first arrived, but it was now crowded with papers and oddments. She quickly sorted through it, and the packet with the Natural History Museum’s address on the back (RETURN TO SENDER) was the seventh item. It was an unobtrusive package in plain brown paper.
“Paper knife,” she said, extending one hand.
Vale slapped a knife handle into her palm. It was elegant, made in ivory or whalebone, and had no doubt contributed to the extinction of at least one endangered species. It was also nice and sharp.
Irene sliced through the twine and unfolded the wrappings. Inside were a book and an envelope. The book’s title was Kinder und Hausmärchen. Children’s and Household Tales, she translated automatically, and breathed a sigh of relief. She flipped the book open to check the publication date: 1812. Better and better. Now, what was the definite proof that Bradamant had mentioned?
She turned to the index. There were eighty-eight stories listed. The eighty-seventh was titled, in German, “The Story of the Stone from the Tower of Babel.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s the one,” she said.
“Yes!” Kai said exultantly, and slammed his palm down on the desk. “We’ve got it!”
“What does the letter say?” Vale asked.
Irene put the book down again for the moment and opened the envelope. Thoughts of letter bombs came a few seconds too late. With a sigh, she shook the letter gently onto the desk. No bombs. Good.
Kai leaned across to read over her shoulder, then paused, tilting his head.
A fraction of a second later, Irene heard it as well. Screams. Screams, and a horrid sort of rustling with a nightmarish familiarity to it.
She thrust the letter into her jacket. There would be time to read it later.
The door slammed open with a heavy boom, and a woman ran in, looking round desperately. She had been amongst the browsers outside, but now looked panicked and in a state of disarray. “Where’s the way out?” she gasped.
Behind her, through the open door, Irene could see more people running in all directions, but ultimately all in the direction of away. There was a spreading tide of something silver oozing across the floor in a horrible stop-motion way. It would reach a row of cases, and then it was suddenly crawling round the foundations of the next row. The noise it was making, a fierce, hungry rustling and skritching, echoed in the large room, underpinning the shouting. Further back, the silver flood was oozing over ominously shaped lumps on the floor, covering them so densely that she couldn’t see the colour of clothing, hair, or skin.
“Silverfish!” the woman screamed at them. “Get out of here now!”
The oncoming menace had nearly reached the chamber door.
Irene was an intelligent, self-possessed, practical woman. (Or, at least, that was how she would describe herself on a performance review to any senior Librarian.) She yelped in panic and scrambled on top of the desk, pulling her skirts up and crouching there in horror. She desperately tried to remember if the Language had vocabulary for silverfish or instantly lethal insecticide and, if so, what it was.
Kai swept across the room in a motion almost as smooth as the approaching silverfish. He picked up the screaming woman and tossed her up onto the table beside Irene before joining them. Vale leapt onto a chair.
“You said you were here to do something about the silverfish!” the woman screamed at Kai. “Why didn’t you get rid of them?”
Irene remembered her now. She’d been here when they were looking for Aubrey and found his skin instead. They’d fobbed her off with a story about insect infestation. M
arvellous. She hated dramatic irony. “Can they eat wood?” she asked.
“You’re the exterminators—you tell me,” the woman snapped.
“Silverfish eat anything starch based,” Vale informed them from his chair. “Glue, bookbindings, papers, carpet, clothing, tapestries . . . I imagine theoretically they could eat wood.”
“If they don’t crawl up here first,” Kai said, leaning over the edge of the table to look down at the floor. The silverfish weren’t actually trying to crawl vertically up the table legs yet, but Irene wasn’t going to wait for empirical evidence. More and more of them were now flooding into the room, crawling over one another on the floor in a thick, seething mass of unhealthy silver.
Something at the back of Irene’s mind was trying to get her attention. It wasn’t the silverfish. It wasn’t the woman next to her. It was the way that she could see a newspaper on top of a display-case, and it was moving. Without the aid of silverfish, it was actually shifting itself, millimetre by millimetre, across the top of the glass, in a light, rustling drift . . .
“Vale!” she gasped. “Could this be triggered by subsonic frequencies? Do you have knowledge of such things?” She gestured at the swarming creatures covering the floor.
Vale caught her meaning. “Possible,” he said. He frowned at the silverfish as though they weren’t starting to crawl up the legs of his chair. “Though any frequency that could provoke those creatures would surely also have some sort of effect on humans. Causing panic, perhaps—”
“Oh, I’m definitely panicking,” the woman said, with a little half-hysterical catch in her voice. “And they’re still coming in here, they keep on coming—”
“Right,” Irene said, trying to keep her voice calm, deliberately not thinking about the insects crawling up inside her skirts and on her and . . . She swallowed. “Right. They keep on coming in here. If there’s a subsonic generator somewhere, then it must be either driving them or luring them in here.”
“Heaven and earth,” Kai swore with violent emphasis. “It must have been keyed to our opening the door—look at the timing of it!”
“But if it was linked to the door, how did it—” Irene started to say, and at the same moment Vale pointed at the door’s hinges. “There!” he snapped. “That wire. It follows the skirting and leads to the cupboard in that corner. And they’re swarming more thickly around it . . .”
Irene could barely see any traces of a wire, but she was prepared to trust Vale’s eyes. The dark wood cupboard was set back into the corner of the room, and the silverfish were writhing around its base. They’d swarmed up to a foot off the floor, and now that she was paying attention, they were perceptibly more heavily concentrated there.
“That’ll do,” she muttered. Luckily, there was enough detailing on that particular piece of furniture for her to be precise. She’d meant to avoid Language usage in case of booby-traps, but she was prepared to be flexible. Any booby-traps would just have to look after themselves. She raised her voice. “Oak-leaf-handle cupboard doors. Unlock and open.”
The cupboard doors sprang open, swinging wide and ripping out bolts at both top and bottom. Inside the cupboard was an intricate tangle of machinery and wires, barely visible under the silverfish that were pouring over it like scaly water. Lights on it glinted, and something was humming.
“That’s it!” Vale said.
“Kai—,” Irene began.
“Already there,” Kai said. He leapt from the table towards the cupboard. The silverfish crunched under his shoes as he hit the floor. Then he was already spinning, body turning gracefully as he launched into a high-flying kick. His leading foot crashed into the twisted machinery with a resounding thud and tinkle.
The humming stopped.
Silverfish all over the room paused, then began to pour away. Some trickled down through imperceptible cracks in the flooring and skirting-boards. Others flowed out through the door again, scattering in all directions as soon as they could. A few still lurked around the machine, all trying to squirm underneath it and only about half of them succeeding. Kai hopped on one foot, trying to extract his other foot from the mangled device. He was swearing in what Irene assumed were words well-brought-up dragons used when they didn’t want to shock lesser creatures.
“I was about to say, please hit it with a chair,” Irene said as the hissing of moving silverfish died away to leave them in relative quiet. “But thank you. Thank you very much. Nice work.” The book lay safely in Dominic Aubrey’s in-tray, untouched, unharmed. It hadn’t been eaten. So much for Alberich’s final gambit.
“Is that normally how you perform exterminations?” the woman asked. She wasn’t showing any sign of getting down from the table yet. To be fair, neither was Irene.
“I think they’re in my shoes,” Kai said in tones of deep disgust.
Vale cautiously stepped down from his chair. The few remaining silverfish took no interest in him. He walked gingerly over to Irene’s table and offered her a hand down.
“Nicely done, Miss Winters.”
“Thank you for noticing the wire,” Irene replied. She took his hand and eased her way off the table, trying not to show too much leg in the process. She was going to enjoy being back in an alternate world where trousers were regular wear for women. “Do you think that means—” She was about to continue, that Alberich is elsewhere, and he left this trap, when she noticed the meaningful glance Vale was giving over her shoulder. Oh. Of course. The woman. The sooner they could get her out of here, the better. “Ah, thank you,” she concluded.
“A trap for us?” Kai said softly as she joined him.
“Plausible,” Irene agreed, also keeping her voice down. Vale and the woman were murmuring to each other, so they shouldn’t be overheard. “A bit careless, though. It’d be bound to draw attention here, to this room. Unless it was a delaying action.”
“It was a delaying action,” the woman said.
Kai and Irene turned to look.
Both she and Vale were now wedged against the table, and Vale had an odd rigidity to his posture. His eyes were furious, but his body was entirely still, hands raised as if he’d just been helping the woman down and hadn’t got round to lowering them. The woman had a knife to his throat. It didn’t look elegant, but it did look brutally efficient. And maybe sharp enough to remove someone’s skin.
“Door, close,” the woman said. The room and cupboard doors both slammed shut. “There. Now we should have a few minutes uninterrupted.”
Irene could feel her heart thudding painfully in her chest. “You’re Alberich?” she said tentatively.
“Yes,” the woman said. “Our fourth meeting. And I hope that you are paying attention this time. Because if you do not do exactly as I tell you, then your friend will die.” She paused. “That is, he will die first, and with you watching.”
CHAPTER 21
“We’re listening,” Irene said. She kept her hands still, avoiding anything that could be taken as provocation to slit Vale’s throat. “Please go on.”
She hadn’t realized that a change of skin could be quite so all-encompassing. She (no, he) spoke with a woman’s voice, and it was quite different from the voice Irene had heard from inside their ill-fated cab. It was also different again from Aubrey’s voice. Was he transplanting the vocal cords too? No, probably just a consequence of the entire magic transferral of skin, however that worked. It would be so helpful if she could see anything unusual in his (or her) appearance. But there was nothing at all.
“I’m willing to make concessions,” Alberich said. “You aren’t all necessarily going to die. Be sensible about this, and we can all walk away.”
Irene did her best to smile in response. Somehow I don’t believe you. “I’m interested in staying alive,” she said. “So’s Kai. Aren’t you, Kai?”
“Let Vale go and we can talk,” Kai snarled. There was something in his voice that
Irene hadn’t heard before. For want of a better word, it sounded like possessiveness. A draconic emotion?
“Silence, boy,” Alberich said. He very deliberately moved the knife in a fraction of an inch, and a trickle of blood ran down Vale’s neck to mark his white collar. “Stay where you are, don’t try to jump me, and let your superior do the talking. Well. Do you have the book, Irene?”
Surely he’d noticed the book in the in-tray? If he hadn’t, then she wasn’t going to draw his attention to it. “I can get hold of it,” she offered. “Is that the price?”
“I want more than that.” There was a glitter behind his eyes, and that she would recognize if she ever saw it again. A rapacious hunger, an endless emptiness that would never be filled, with all the madness that went with it. “I have a number of questions. You can even sit down, if you like.”
“We’d really rather stand,” Irene said quickly.
“Suit yourself.” His lips curved in a smile that was somehow more a man’s than a woman’s. “Shall I go through the usual literary conventions? First I tell you that you’ve been told slanders about me, and you nod understandingly while not believing a word of it. Then I promise that you can go free if you hand over the book, and you lie and give me a forged copy. Then I kill you.” He shrugged. The knife stayed in place. “Or shall we break from the usual tropes and actually do something different? Something that might mean you survive this?”
Irene thought about how many other Librarians must have been in this position. There was a reason why he was an urban legend.
Though if they all get killed, who comes back to tell the stories? an irritating part of her mind pointed out. She ignored it.
“I don’t see how you can use both the Language and Fae magic,” she blurted out, her mouth running on automatic while she tried to think. It wasn’t hard to sound vaguely admiring, even if he’d see right through it.
“I’ll give you that one for free,” Alberich said generously, and Irene mentally lowered the odds on him letting them live even further. “Once a person can use the Language, that can’t be taken away. I’ve learnt to use chaos since then. It involves a certain amount of personal redefinition. Difficult, but not impossible. One doesn’t have to die. Something to take into account in your future career, perhaps? There are far more opportunities open to you than you might think.”
The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel) Page 27