The Invisible Library

by Cogman, Genevieve

  Kai perked up. ‘So we got lucky?’

  ‘It happens,’ Irene said. ‘From time to time. Now finish your wine and tell me about the centipede.’

  She was already working out a list of things that she needed to ask Kai later, in private. But for the moment, the centipede would do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘Right,’ Irene said as they finished their coffee. ‘We have to assume that our cover’s blown.’

  ‘Because of Vale?’ Kai asked.

  ‘No.’ Irene tilted the cup, staring at the dregs. ‘The man who tried to snatch my purse. If he’s working for the Fae, I can only think he saw me at Lord Wyndham’s house. And if that’s the case, then he knows my face, he probably knows my hotel, and now he knows you as well. We need to break our trail.’

  ‘But all our things are in the hotel room!’ Kai said. ‘All the clothes we bought—’

  ‘How many did you buy?’

  Kai tried to meet her gaze, but his eyes wandered down to his coffee cup. ‘I was just setting up several possible identities, in case we needed to move among different circles of society,’ he said, unconvincingly.

  Irene patted his hand. ‘Don’t worry. In that case, they’ll be sure we’ll return, and you’ll have tied up some of their resources.’

  Kai sighed.

  ‘So,’ Irene said briskly. ‘Standard measures.’ These were taught in the Library alongside languages and research, but were rather harder to practise inside the Library’s boundaries. But Kai’s personal experience should mean he was good at this sort of thing. ‘We’ll leave here separately; I’ll go first, and draw off anyone obvious. They may only have a single watcher. You go to the hotel room, pick up our papers and our cash supply, then leave via the back of the hotel. Do your best to lose any followers. Meet me in front of . . .’ she considered, then checked her new clockwork watch. There was no point wearing something electronic when she might have to take it into the Library. ‘Holborn Tube station at eleven o’clock. That should be busy enough to throw off any watchers. Damn. I’m never sure whether I prefer worlds that have invented mobile phone equivalents or not.’

  ‘It’d make communication easier,’ Kai said.

  ‘But it would make it easier to track us, too,’ Irene said. ‘And would empower anyone who’s trying to catch up with us. All right, are you okay with those instructions?’

  Kai nodded. ‘What do I do if you don’t turn up at Holborn?’

  ‘Contact Dominic,’ Irene said. ‘He’ll put you in touch with Coppelia, and she’ll work out what to do next. But I don’t expect that to be necessary.’

  Kai nodded. He picked up his coffee cup, and tilted it sadly, looking at the dregs in the bottom. ‘We’re not doing very well so far, are we?’

  Irene blinked. ‘What? Where do you get that idea?’

  ‘Well, the book’s been stolen, enemies are tracking us, we’re having to abandon our base—’

  ‘Get that out of your head right this minute,’ Irene said. ‘Did you expect us to just be able to waltz in and pick it up?’

  Kai shrugged. ‘I had sort of got the idea that it would be appropriate for an assignment involving a novice like me.’

  Irene leaned forward in her chair. ‘Point one: the Library never has enough people to be able to give novices “easy” assignments. Never expect an assignment to be “easy”. Point two: yes, the manuscript has been stolen, but we already have several leads to follow, including an appointment to meet a famous detective.’ The thought made her smile. Perhaps sometimes wishes did come true. ‘Point three: it’s not a base, it’s a hotel room. Point four: the fact that we are being tracked is a lead in itself, and means we can use them to work backwards to find the book. And point five: we’ve an invitation to attend a ball at the Liechtenstein Embassy, which ought to be very interesting.’

  Kai stiffened. ‘We’ve got what?’

  ‘See you at Holborn,’ Irene said, rising and collecting her bag.

  There was indeed someone waiting outside the restaurant. She spotted him while checking her reflection in a shop window. The glare of the actinic streetlamps made them better mirrors than the flyspecked piece of glass in the hotel room. Small loss. The tail was an average-looking type, with a cheap bowler hat and a frock coat frayed at lapels and elbows. He also wasn’t very good at being inconspicuous. Maybe that was usually the job of the colleague who’d tried to snatch her bag.

  At the next street corner, she managed a surreptitious glance back while waiting to cross the road, and saw him murmuring into cupped hands. He opened them, and something buzzed out, circling his head before zooming upwards in a clockwork clatter of wings.

  Two streets later, he’d rather obviously acquired reinforcements. She stopped to check her hat in another shop window, and caught another glimpse of him, clearly gesturing to three newcomers and pointing in her direction.

  Irene jabbed a hatpin back into place viciously, and considered how best to lose them. This London was laid out like most Londons, and she was on the edge of Soho. It’d be easy enough to lose followers there, but a woman on her own would attract the wrong sort of attention, and it might take too long for her to extract herself inconspicuously. A department store might work, but if they had any sense they’d put watchers at front and back before searching for her inside. Also now there were at least four of them, and there could be others that she hadn’t spotted. The Tube itself was a possibility, but she hadn’t investigated it yet. And while the crowds might let her hide herself from her pursuers, they’d also be ideal cover for an ‘accident’ or kidnapping. She was halfway to Piccadilly by now, too, so she needed to start turning back if she was to meet Kai comfortably by Holborn at eleven.

  Hm. Wait. Covent Garden usually had a market of some sort in most alternate Londons, whether it was selling flowers or curios or simply a tourist trap. Even if there weren’t many stalls open at this time of night, it should still be busy enough for her to lose her pursuers. That should do the trick.

  Irene should have expected it: Covent Garden market was a technology extravaganza. Stalls teetered on collapsible legs and sprayed rays of light from dangling ether-lamps. The path between them was a constantly shifting maze as each stall manoeuvred for yet more space on its automated feet, bouncing and jarring against the ones next to it. Much like Covent Gardens she’d seen elsewhere, there were several open yards, and a central area with a high glass roof and several banks of permanent shops. Pavement cafes added their own influxes of shoppers to the area, and regular jets of steam came shooting out of the sewer gratings and manholes.

  She put on a burst of speed as she entered the crowd, before the men following her could get any closer. She then allowed herself to be drawn into a whirlpool of spectators orbiting a display of mechanical exsanguinators. (She decided that the little jabbing steel needles weren’t specifically unpleasant in themselves, but the oiliness from the self-slathering antiseptics somehow made the whole thing inexpressibly gruesome. It was something about the way that it glistened under the electric flares.)

  There were as many women here as men, but the real difference was between those she suspected were genuine artisans and engineers and everyone else. The former had neat equipment cases tucked under their arms or chained to their wrists. The latter included wanderers on the lookout for an interesting bargain, slumming upper classes or fascinated onlookers. The women all wore scarves or veils against the sooty fog, just as Irene did, concealing anything from just their mouth to their entire face. Many of the men had wound mufflers around the lower part of their faces in a similar way. It gave the whole place a very seedy feeling, akin to a market for Victorian bank-robbers, a shady shoppery for shady people.

  Nearby, bustling market stalls touted portable notebooks with self-adhesive toolsets, and she spotted pocket watches with built-in lasers (she nearly bought one for Kai). Then there were Constructa-Kit automata, followed by freshly fried doughnuts and self-tattooing kits (just add ink!), then shawls with att
ached portable heating units, then—

  It hit her like a whiplash across her back, throwing her to her knees on the dirty pavement. She could feel every inch of her Library tattoo burning, feel it mapped out across her back as clearly as if she could see it. The world shivered around her. She tasted bile in her mouth, and struggled not to throw up.

  The words were everywhere. She could see them on the newspaper stands, swimming up through the whiteness to crawl across the paper. She could see them on the back of the paperback novel which the man in front of her had tucked into his pocket, on the crudely printed advertisements fluttering from every stall and on the receipts which the woman to her left was checking. They printed themselves on everything legible in a spreading circle around her.

  BEWARE ALBERICH

  People were calling out and swearing in surprise and alarm, blaming the engineers and stallholders for some sort of experimental side-effect (and what that said about this place, Irene reflected in some distracted corner of her mind, didn’t bear thinking about). In some cases shoppers were shaking the affected items in the hopes that the words would fall off. Some hope. Irene had never before been the victim of an urgent message from the Library, but she knew the words would be permanently burned in. It was a shocking thing to do to printed media, which was why it was only saved for the most desperate purposes. Members of the public could read them, but at least no one would know what the words meant.

  If Alberich was involved in this, then the warning was definitely desperate and necessary.

  She pulled herself together with an effort that set her teeth on edge, and glanced over her shoulder to check on the men who’d been following her. Damn. They were closing fast. They must have decided to pick her up now rather than risk losing her.

  Irene allowed herself a vicious smile. Pester an agent of the Library, would they? Hassle her when she’d just received an urgent message? Get in her way? Oh, they were going to regret that.

  She waited for a breathless half-minute until the shifting patterns of moving stalls closed up behind her, blocking her pursuers. They’d open again in a moment, of course . . .

  She spat out in the Language, loud enough for it to carry, ‘Clockwork legs on moving stalls, seize up and halt, hold and be still!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ the man next to her said. ‘Were you speaking to me—’ He cut off as, in a widening circle within range of Irene’s voice, the moving stalls all came stuttering to a halt, jointed legs going abruptly rigid and stopping where they were. The general swirl of people and stalls was thrown into sudden and shocking confusion, far more dramatic than the earlier printing incident. People who’d been preparing to zig suddenly found themselves forced to zag. Piles of goods teetered on the edges of stalls and were barely saved from sliding off – or not saved, in quite a few cases, adding to the general uproar.

  Before anyone could come to awkward conclusions about the centre of the circle, Irene darted forward and elbowed her way past several complaining clots of shoppers. She could hear the grinding whir of gears and levers struggling with disobedient mechanical legs. The flow of people carried her forward out of her cul-de-sac, leaving her pursuers trapped behind the barricade of frozen stalls (and, she hoped, being trampled underfoot by angry shoppers). Irene headed for the nearest opening in the maze of tables, then from there to an alleyway. After a bit of rearrangement to veil and jacket, it was out onto the main street again – heading back and round towards Holborn. With nobody following her this time.

  With each step the reality of the message from the Library sank more deeply into her guts. Beware Alberich. Beware Alberich. Beware Alberich.

  She didn’t need this. She really didn’t need this. She was already in the middle of a complicated mission, with a trainee to handle on top of it all. She’d given Kai an optimistic summary to keep his spirits up, but that didn’t mean that anything was going to be easy.

  And now this.

  Alberich was a figure out of nightmare. He was the one Librarian who’d betrayed the Library, got away with it and was still somewhere out there. His true name was long since lost, and only his chosen name as a Librarian was remembered. He’d sold out to chaos. He’d betrayed the other Librarians who’d been working with him. And he was still alive. Somehow, in spite of age and time and the course of years that would afflict any Librarian who lived outside the Library, he was still alive.

  Irene found herself shivering. She pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, and tried to rein her thoughts back from a train of needlessly baroque images. Stupid thoughts. After all, it wasn’t as if Alberich was on her trail at this very moment . . .

  . . . was it?

  The message from the Library couldn’t have been faked. It must have been sent by one of the senior Librarians, probably Coppelia. It wouldn’t have been sent unless things were urgent, which meant that she had to assume that Alberich was in the area. Worst-case scenario.

  She glanced back into a shop window. Nobody seemed to be following her.

  She needed to talk to Dominic, urgently, but the British Library would be shut at this time of night. He’d be at home – the address being somewhere in the papers Kai was safeguarding. Tomorrow morning would be easier. For the moment, she and Kai had to find a new hotel and go undercover.

  Irene wanted to go very deeply undercover. She wanted to go so deeply undercover that it’d take an automated steam-shovel to excavate her out of it. She also had to decide how much to tell Kai. It was too dangerous to leave him in the dark, not to mention simply unfair, but at the same time she didn’t want to panic him. After all, look how panicked she was herself. One panicked person was quite enough. Two would be overkill.

  Possibly he’d be ignorant enough not to realize just how bad the situation might be. Possibly he wouldn’t have heard the horror stories that had been traded round in quiet alcoves about some of the things that Alberich had done.

  And possibly, Irene decided, as she came into sight of Holborn Tube station and saw Kai loitering under a streetlamp, pigs would fly – which would at least mean bacon for breakfast. Oh well. Hotel first. Dramatic explanations later.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I don’t want to complain or anything,’ Kai said, ‘but we’re currently holed up in a cheap hotel.’

  ‘We are,’ Irene agreed. She sat down and began to work her buttoned boots off, with a sigh of relief.

  ‘This place isn’t just cheap, it’s filthy!’ Kai gestured round at the tatty yellow wallpaper, the dirt-streaked window, the threadbare counterpane on the double bed, the sallow mirror on the rickety dresser. ‘You can’t seriously expect us to—’

  ‘Kai,’ Irene said firmly. ‘You’re spoilt. What happened to the shady but useful background? What happened to being a cool street runner who could handle that sort of thing? Have five years in the Library really softened you up that much?’

  Kai looked around, and his nose wrinkled. ‘Yes,’ he finally said. ‘They have.’ He sat down on the very edge of the bed. ‘Is this much deep cover really necessary? Couldn’t we, you know, go and hide out at the most expensive hotel in town and claim we’re Canadians?’

  ‘No,’ Irene said. She removed one boot and started to work on the other. ‘Deep cover. For the moment, I want us untraceable. We’ll clean up tomorrow and find a nicer place.’

  ‘Is something the matter?’

  Irene pulled off the second boot. ‘Oof.’ She had to tell him; it wouldn’t be safe to keep him ignorant. ‘There is a potential problem,’ she admitted slowly. ‘I don’t know that it’s an immediate issue.’

  Kai just looked at her.

  ‘I had an urgent message from the Library.’ The next few words were difficult to say, and even more difficult to keep calm and reasonable. ‘It warned me to beware Alberich. You can pour me some of that brandy now.’

  Kai’s hand halted halfway to the brandy bottle, on Irene’s list of essential supplies. ‘Wait,’ he said slowly. ‘When you say Alberich, do
you mean the one who’s supposed to be . . .’ He trailed off, leaving it hanging. And, Irene noted to her displeasure, not pouring her brandy either.

  ‘No,’ Irene said. ‘I don’t mean the one who’s supposed to be. I mean the one who is. Not that I’ve ever met him, and with any luck we won’t have to, and this is just a precaution.’ She hoped. ‘Now can I have that brandy?’

  ‘He’s real?’ Kai said. Still no brandy.

  ‘He’s recorded in the Library. How could he not be real?’

  Kai looked blank. ‘He could be fictional?’

  Irene gritted her teeth. ‘No. He was formally marked for the Library, given the initiation and everything. That’s why he can’t go back there. It’d know he was there. But it proves that he is real, that he’s not some sort of urban legend like the thing about the pipes and the tentacle monster.’ That had been one of the popular ones when she was a trainee. The logic was that if rooms of the Library could be connected by the plumbing, then there was some sort of dark central cistern with a huge tentacle monster living in it which ate old Librarians. And of course it was all covered up by order from on high . . . She and other trainees had spent several hopeful hours rapping on pipes and trying to pass messages or find tentacles. ‘Brandy?’ she finished.

  Kai finally remembered to get up and open the bottle. He splashed a bare quarter-inch into a battered china cup, and offered it to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Irene said, and knocked it back in one gulp, then offered the cup for a refill. ‘A bit more this time, please.’

  Kai stared at her. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘It’s been a busy evening,’ Irene said. ‘And I’m going to be sitting up for the next few hours studying the local Language listings that Dominic gave us. You can get some sleep.’

  ‘But we ought to tell Dominic at once! After all, if Alberich’s here, it proves how important the book is! And we should warn Dominic—’