All the worlds for her own. Of course she wasn’t going to take the bargain. Of course she could never be his minion and slave. But the thought of the pure irresponsibility of doing precisely as she wanted, with the power to do it . . .
“The second choice is for you to put the book down and walk away.” He was watching her closely through the stolen eyes of the woman whom he’d killed. “Your elders won’t blame you. They know my quality, my power. They’ll consider that you did the sensible thing. I might even agree with them.”
She gave a little jerk of her head in acknowledgement.
“And the third choice . . .” Alberich shrugged. “You would regret putting me to that trouble.”
Irene swallowed. Her imagination was functional and thus troublesome. It was now giving her unpleasant ideas about what Alberich might do if he actually exerted himself. If he viewed killing and skinning someone as merely regular business, what would he consider extra effort? Half-formed images nauseated her, and she swallowed back bile. She barely managed to keep her voice steady. “I think that’s only two choices, though.”
“Is it?” Alberich murmured.
“I have the suspicion that there’s only one way I walk out of here alive.”
“Well, true,” Alberich admitted, “but the second option would be comparatively painless for you. My word on it.”
“Can I ask—”
“No.” His eyes narrowed. “I think you’re playing for time, Ray. I need your decision now. I’ll throw your friend in as a signing bonus, but I want your decision in five seconds.”
Four. Three.
If she swore herself to him in the Language, she’d be bound for life. He wasn’t stupid. He was the sort of person who’d have prepared the wording in advance. There would be no loop-holes.
Two.
Perhaps people said he’d killed Librarians because nobody had ever come back. But maybe they’d all joined him. She could be joining a secret group who were going to change reality and make the universe a better place.
One.
Maybe someone who went round skinning and killing people (order as yet unspecified) was not concerned with making the universe a better place. Just a thought.
Zero.
“Ray . . .” Alberich said. He had a hopeful sort of smile on his face, as if he genuinely wanted her to say yes.
He probably did.
She was about to die.
What she needed was a miracle.
What she got was a dragon.
CHAPTER 22
Irene had always assumed, when she’d read about dragons roaring, that the descriptions were figurative or at least hyperbolic. She’d thought that phrases like shook the earth referred to the awe in which dragons were held. Naturally the world around them would be sundered by their fury. What else should one expect from dragons?
But the physical world wasn’t shaken by a dragon’s roar. Reality itself trembled.
“What the devil!” Alberich swore, the words at odds with his prim female persona. His hand visibly tensed on the knife at Vale’s neck, and Irene knew with a sickening dread that he was about to slash the detective’s throat open purely on reflex. Then his eyes narrowed in thought. “Too simple. Ray. By my will and by your name, you can neither speak nor move.”
It wasn’t the Language, it had nothing of the Language’s command, but his words had their own power, and Fae magic hung in them like chains. Irene was pinned in place like a butterfly, her brand burning on her back as the Library’s power fought his command. She was conscious of everything around her—the crushed insects, her hurried breathing, the trickle of blood on Vale’s neck, Alberich’s calculating eyes—and none of it was any use. There hadn’t been time to invoke the Library and force him out of the room as she’d planned. She’d been as shaken as he was by Kai’s roar; he’d just recovered faster. It made her feel stupidly embarrassed, but she had to remind herself that this wasn’t a marks-will-be-awarded situation; it was a he’s about to kill you situation.
But for all her fury, she couldn’t move a muscle.
“A pity,” Alberich said. “I was really quite impressed with you. Bradamant was efficient but not remotely as perceptive. I’m afraid you’ve run out of time to decide, if there’s a dragon in the picture, but rest assured that I will remember you fondly.”
The door slammed open, and Alberich’s eyes widened as he saw who it was. He opened his mouth to speak, but three bullets in rapid succession hit him in the centre of the forehead. It was as neat and quick as a sewing-machine’s needle rapping down again and again. He staggered back from Vale, arms flailing as his skirts churned around his legs. He grasped weakly at the table, but no blood ran from the open wounds.
“Vale and Irene, move freely!” Bradamant shouted in the Language. “And get away from him!” she added in English. “I don’t know if that’s killed him.”
“It hasn’t,” Alberich said. “Gun, explode.”
Bradamant threw the gun aside just in time. It came apart in mid-air in a burst of metal and fire. She ducked at the same moment, moving for cover. Vale threw himself to one side as Alberich gestured. But a ripple of air tore into Vale and flung him into one of the display-cases, which shattered in a burst of glass. There was an ugly cracking noise.
Vale didn’t get up again.
“I really shouldn’t give people so much time to decide,” Alberich said. He ignored Irene as she stood, frozen. His Fae magic still held her, wrapped in chains around her name and spirit. “Bradamant, my dear, would you like to make a deal for the lives of your friends?”
“Only a fool would make a deal with you,” Bradamant snapped. She’d taken cover behind a large free-standing cabinet.
“Accurate but impertinent.” The holes in Alberich’s forehead were bloodless and unnaturally dark, with neither flesh nor bone visible. He raised his hand, palm towards Bradamant. “The greater lords of the Fae don’t manifest in their true form in the physical worlds. Do you know why?”
“Their chaos is too great,” Bradamant answered, her tone as sharp as if she was being questioned in class. “They would unmake a world.”
“Exactly,” Alberich purred. “And you wouldn’t want that.” The very air began to shudder around his hand. It smoked as if his flesh was liquid nitrogen, cold enough to burn a hole in reality. “And to prevent that manifestation, I only need one of you with your skin intact . . .”
Irene breathed. He hadn’t forbidden her to do that. And she was not going to accept the binding he had set on her. She was a Librarian, and while that made her the Library’s servant, it was also a protection. The Language was her freedom. Bradamant had told her to move freely. She could not allow . . .
and her brand was a weight across her back, a heavy burden, trying to force her to her knees
. . . she would not . . .
white-hot iron, searing into her
. . . permit him to do this. She refused to submit. Even if he was a monster, something that had killed greater Librarians than herself, she was not going to accept his binding.
Irene opened her mouth. The tiny movement of parting her lips seemed to take years as she watched dark fire blossom around Alberich’s hand. She sought for something to distract him, to give her time to invoke the Library. And it came to her in a burst of inspiration. “Jennifer Mooney’s skin! Get off that body now!”
And it did. In rags and tatters, like a piece of clothing being ripped apart along the seams. The flame around Alberich’s hand died, and he opened his mouth wide in a howl of pain. The dress disintegrated, falling apart like the pale fragments of skin. What lay behind it was so painful to Irene’s eyes that she had to turn and shield them with her hand. Behind the stolen skin, Alberich was a living hole into some place or universe that should not exist on any human plane. In that brief moment she had seen living muscle, tendon, and blood—but
also colours and masses that left burning spaces on her retinas. She’d seen things moving that bent the light around them and shifting structures that made no sense. All her reality suddenly seemed as fragile as a curtain someone was about to rip through at any moment. Irene was aware that she was screaming, and she could hear Bradamant crying out as well. Yet behind it all was Alberich, his voice higher than any human’s normal pitch, screaming in pure rage and pain.
So that’s why he has to wear a skin, her thoughts rattled, as though the words could form a chain to sanity, link by link. So that’s why he has to wear a skin . . .
Alberich turned and pointed at her, and reality warped in the wake of his gesture. The wooden floor rotted under her feet, and mouths opened in it to gulp at dead silverfish and bite at her ankles. Thick knots of webbing dropped from the ceiling, full of spiders and drifting ash.
“They’ll come for you,” Alberich whispered. His voice had changed again; no longer female, or the voice of Aubrey, but something else. Something that hummed like the keys of an out-of-tune piano, just missing normal human harmonies to strike out a more painful music.
“You’ve hurt me and I’ll hurt you in turn. I’ll give you to the White Singers and the Fallen Towers . . .”
A fold of spider-web fell across Irene’s face, and the sheer horror of having to drag it away, feeling the spiders begin to crawl into her hair, somehow yanked her back into sanity. Her horror turned from something alien and bone deep into more mundane human disgust. She needed a moment to speak the Library’s name and so invoke it. That had been the plan. Minimal and pitiful as it was, that had been the plan. But Alberich would know it the moment she began, and she had his full attention. She’d never get the word out.
Bradamant was screaming. No help from that quarter. And Vale was unconscious. She hoped. Better unconscious than dead.
Glass cracked and splinters from another display-case ripped into her dress, distorting into glass singing birds with bright claws and edged beaks. She flung her arm up to shield her face, and a glass bird lashed at her hand, thrashing wings leaving deep scratches. Blood ran like ink down her arm.
Of course. A language was far more than the spoken word, after all.
She clamped her hands shut around the squirming bird and fell to her knees. She could hear herself screaming in agony as the thing sliced into her palm and fingers, but it seemed somehow distant. The impossibilities around her were far more real and visceral than the pain. She dimly wondered if she was destroying her hand. Again. But set against her life, or her sanity, then the choice was clear.
Through her tangled, cobwebbed hair she saw Alberich raise his hand, perhaps to call up more horrors or deliver the death blow.
Alberich could have stopped her if she’d tried to speak. He ignored it when she drove the squirming bird into the soupy wood of the floor, as she scraped it along to create a long, blood-filled cut. He merely laughed as more debris came raining down on her shoulders from the now-unstable ceiling. But she needed an excuse to explain her actions. Something he would expect her to try.
Irene raised both hands, pointing the bloody glass bird at him. “Floor!” she screamed in the Language. “Swallow Alberich!”
The heaving mass of rotten wood surged round his feet, but he remained above it as if walking on water. “Let’s try that the other way around, shall we?” He laughed at her. “Go down and drown in it!”
She was already on her knees. She felt the wood slurp upwards around her legs like thick mud, sliding up to her thighs. It didn’t soak through the skirts of her gown like water, but pressed against her like hungry lips. She had a moment of panic—what would happen if her idea didn’t work? She let herself scream and, driven by the energy of that terror, sliced the glass bird into the remaining floor. And again and again, as she sank farther into the wood, as if she were trying to save herself. Her blood spattered onto the scored lines as the wood closed around her waist. The bird’s marks stood clear in the slowly oozing floor. Maybe because it was written in the Language, or just because it had to work or she was worse than dead.
“Beg me and I’ll save you,” Alberich said gleefully. “Beg me and I’ll make you my favoured student, my own sweet child—”
The cobwebbing covered her eyes now. She was working blind. But some things she knew even in the dark.
“No,” she said, and cut the final line into place. The symbol representing the Library itself showed clearly in the rippling wood between them.
The Library didn’t arrive like a roaring dragon or waves of chaos. But there was a light in the room that hadn’t been there before, more penetrating and clearer than the fluttering gas lamps. The spider-webs that had clung to her face and shoulders flaked away as fine dust. The Library’s authority pulsed through the room in a steady whisper, like pages turned in slow motion, and stability followed. The floor was now firm where Irene knelt on it, and the glass in her hand was sharp, but it wasn’t a living bird. The light even muted the horror of Alberich’s form, turning it to something seen as if through dull glass, retreating farther and farther away . . .
He was actually slowly withdrawing. The Library’s presence was driving him back, and though its touch felt welcoming to her, like a feeling of home, it was forcing Alberich away. And if the sounds he was making were any judge, his expulsion was pure agony.
He hadn’t quite finished with her yet, though. Blackness flared in his eyes and his open mouth. “You call this a victory, Ray?”
And then his back touched the wall, and he started moving through it. The wall thinned to translucency around him as he struggled, partly immersed, like amber around a prehistoric insect.
Then, as they watched, Alberich’s back arched, and he screamed—but this was on a different scale from anything they’d heard so far. Irene felt her heart lurch in unwanted sympathy as she saw the punishment that he was suffering. Alberich was crucified between the reality of the Library and the barrier that Kai had created outside, a squirming thing of chaos trapped between two surfaces of reality.
Irene realized that she hadn’t the remotest idea what would happen next. She didn’t know. She didn’t care as long as it got him away from here. There was no place for that sort of unreality in this world. It was abhorrent. What had he done to himself to become this? What sort of bargains had he struck?
“Release me . . . ,” Alberich choked out. Blood drooled from his mouth. “You can’t trust the dragons—they’ll turn on you as well—release me and I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Bradamant spat. She was pulling herself up off the floor, her dress in shreds, leaning on the wreckage of a chair to support herself. “Do you really think we’d let you go now?”
Thank you for so helpfully stating the obvious, Irene thought, but she managed to keep it to herself. She simply shook her head. A slow-burning flame of something that might be hope was kindling inside her. What they’d done had hurt Alberich. It had frightened him.
They might actually win.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d assumed they’d already lost.
“You’ll regret this,” Alberich whispered in the Language.
The light increased, and he decreased in proportion, fading back and away from them like a disappearing stain. His last scream rang through the room, shattering the remaining glass and throwing books from the shelves.
Irene caught a last glimpse of his face, a human face livid with rage, as he vanished.
“Irene!” Bradamant was suddenly there, and Irene had lost a few moments of time. She’d been watching Alberich vanish and now Bradamant had an arm round her shoulder and was making her sit down. Vale—hadn’t Vale been unconscious?—was fussing over her hands. “Irene, listen, I promise I won’t take it,” Bradamant was saying. “I will give you my word in the Language right now, if you like, and Vale is here too as witness. If you let go of that book it will make it
a lot easier for us to take care of your hands. Irene, please, listen to me, say something to me here . . .”
The door burst open. Again. “Irene!” That was Kai shouting. Irene could only hope that no civilians were close enough to hear it. “Bradamant! What have you done to her?”
Plus ten for genuine concern for my welfare, Irene decided, minus several thousand for perception.
“Please,” Vale said wearily. “It was that Alberich person. Your plan worked perfectly, but I’m afraid that Miss Winters is in shock. If you would just help us persuade her to relax, so that we can bandage her hands—I have some brandy here.”
“Don’t waste that on my hands,” Irene mumbled. She hadn’t even realized that she’d picked the book up. She let Bradamant ease it out from under her arm. “I need a drink.”
“Miss Winters!” Vale exclaimed.
“Make that two healthy drinks. I’m in shock. Give me brandy.”
“But your hands,” Vale protested. “They need immediate care.”
Irene didn’t want to look, but she forced herself. There were deep cuts across both palms and the insides of her fingers. Flaps of skin hung loose, and she thought she could see bone. She looked away before she embarrassed herself by throwing up. The skirt of her dress was wet with her blood. She must be in shock, or it would be hurting even more than it already did. She’d never hurt herself this badly. She wasn’t even sure if it could be fixed. “There are people in the Library who can deal with this,” she said firmly, desperately praying that she wasn’t lying to herself.
Her words came spilling out, quick and professional, a distraction from the reality of her hands. She could hear the forced lightness of her tone. Her speech sounded as if it were coming to her from a great distance, like the chirping of little birds very far away. “Mr. Vale, thank you for your assistance, and I’m sorry that you were dragged into this. Bradamant, please can you check the door—the inner door, the Library ingress—for any traps?”
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