‘And the subject of the theft?’ Irene enquired delicately.
‘A book,’ Vale said. ‘It was a family journal – that is, not a printed work, but a collection of handwritten notes and studies, herbal references and fairy tales.’
‘Fairy tales,’ Kai said slowly.
Vale nodded. ‘You will see why I am intrigued by Lord Wyndham’s murder and the disappearance of his book. Taken in conjunction with certain other thefts which have taken place, it suggests a culmination of events. None of the other thefts have involved murder. And as for the explosion last night beneath the Opera—’
‘What?’ Irene said, coming upright.
‘Ah, you wouldn’t have read the morning paper yet,’ Vale said. ‘The incident bears the hallmarks of secret society activity. A number of cellars were collapsed, but the foundations seem to be undamaged. The police have not requested my assistance – ’ Irene could almost hear the unspoken yet – ‘so I can only make do with the public reports.’
‘But what makes you think this is connected with the thefts?’ Kai asked.
‘Two things,’ Vale said. ‘Firstly, the timing. It took place the very night after the airships arrived in convoy from Liechtenstein. I do not think that I need to remind you about that.’ He looked up from his contemplation of his fingers. ‘And secondly . . .’ He hesitated again before continuing. ‘My family was involved with a certain society, and they believe it was connected with the loss of their book. The same group met beneath the Opera.’
‘You’re being very careful not to name that society, Mr Vale,’ Irene commented.
‘Indeed I am,’ Vale said.
‘Are they connected to the Fair Folk?’ she probed.
Vale laughed, a surprised bark of a laugh. ‘My dear Miss Winters! Show me a society that isn’t connected to the Fair Folk. I suppose you could say no more than most of them.’
‘And its connection to Liechtenstein?’ she continued.
‘Ah. Now here we come to the nub of the problem.’ Vale frowned. ‘I should probably have offered you tea. I do apologize. I always forget that sort of thing. But in any case, from what I’ve heard, the Liechtenstein Fair Folk are very definitely not affiliated with – well, let us call them the Society. So the Ambassador’s arrival, just before the Society was targeted in this way, is notable for its timing.’
‘You think he caused the explosion?’ Kai asked. ‘Or the Society? Or were they the targets of the explosion?’
‘Possible.’ Vale waved a hand. ‘Possible. Certainly it is worthy of further investigation. And now, Miss Winters, Mr Strongrock, since I have done my part and told you why I am involved in all of this, I ask you to do the same.’ He leaned forward in his chair, his eyes hooded, and Irene wondered how much of what he’d said had been a carefully constructed bluff. Trust me. I’ve told you everything. Really I have. Now it’s your turn. ‘If we are to progress, then there must be some trust on both sides.’
Irene held up her good hand before Kai could speak. ‘Before that, Mr Vale, I’d like the answer to one more question.’
‘Within reason, I am at your disposal,’ Vale said.
‘Why do you feel that you can trust us?’ she asked. Certainly she’d like to cooperate with him. It would make matters much easier; it might even make success in this mission possible, as opposed to out of the question. But it might also be a trap.
He might even be Alberich. How could she tell? The very thought made her swallow, and made her bandaged hand throb and twinge again.
‘That is a fair question,’ Vale allowed. ‘I will be honest with you. I do have a few gifts from my family heritage. One of them is – well, not exactly prognostication, but an ability to tell when something is going to be important in my future. I have used it to advantage in a number of my cases, though I do not discuss it with the public. When I met Mr Strongrock the other day, I knew, in a way which I fear I cannot describe to you, that he was going to be closely involved with me in the near future. I had the same sensation upon meeting you, Miss Winters. On assessment of your characters, I choose to assume that you will be my allies rather than my enemies. I hope that you will not disappoint me.’
Irene glanced at Kai for a moment. He shrugged neutrally. But it wasn’t as if it was his decision, in any case; this wasn’t a democracy and he wasn’t an equal partner. The decision, the risks and the potential for disaster were all hers.
Vale’s story hung together and made sense, which was more than one could usually expect of events. More than that, Irene had the feeling that she could trust him. She wanted to trust him. (Should that in itself make her suspicious?) And there was nothing that said they had to tell him everything. And this was only a single mission, after all. They could leave this entire alternate behind them, and he’d have no way to follow them. There wouldn’t be any repercussions afterwards. And, well – if he had been Alberich, then they’d already be dead. Just like Dominic Aubrey.
She made her decision, and leaned forward to offer her good hand. ‘Mr Vale, I am grateful for what you have said. I believe we can cooperate.’
Vale smiled briefly, and clasped her hand. ‘Thank you. Then perhaps you can tell me about yourselves?’
Irene glanced at Kai. ‘You have already made it clear that you believe we’re not English.’
‘Indeed not,’ Vale said crisply. ‘Nor are you Canadians.’
‘Ah,’ Irene said, and quickly rephrased her next statement. ‘We are representatives of – a Society. You will understand if we don’t name it, I hope.’
Vale’s smile was a little bitter. ‘If you can vouch for its good intentions, that will be sufficient.’
‘I can vouch for its non-interference,’ Irene said scrupulously. ‘We’re after one thing: the book that was stolen from Lord Wyndham’s house. We arrived here with the intention of purchasing it,’ well, that would have been one option, ‘only to find the man, ah, vampire, murdered, and the book stolen. Now we want to recover it. If together we can discover the truth behind the book thefts, the murder, and the explosion, well, that would surely be the best of all possible ends.’ And, she thought privately, the Library might be interested in those other books as well. Except for the one from Vale’s family. That one they could afford to give back, and he’d appreciate it.
‘And your enemy?’ Vale gestured at Irene’s bandaged hand.
‘We only have his name,’ Irene said. It was probably safe enough to give that. ‘Alberich.’
Vale shook his head. ‘I know no player in London by that name. But for the moment, yes: I think we can work together.’
‘Excuse me,’ Kai said. Irene turned to look up at him. He was clearly holding himself in check with a great effort. ‘May I speak to Miss Winters alone for a moment?’
‘Certainly,’ Vale said. He rose from his chair. ‘I will have some tea fetched. That is – your Society does drink tea?’
‘Always,’ Irene said.
CHAPTER NINE
‘This is a bad idea,’ Kai said as soon as the door had closed behind Vale.
‘I am listening,’ Irene said as she began to pick at her bandage, ‘and I am paying attention, and if I do scream, it’s because my hand is in worse condition than I thought. Go on.’
‘Why do you trust him?’ Kai demanded.
‘I don’t.’ Irene didn’t look up from the tightly wrapped bandages. ‘Not totally. But I think he’s telling the truth about his family and about his gift. I’m not sure he trusts us, either.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ Kai said. ‘How can we possibly trust someone who’d betray their family?’
Irene let the bandages be and looked across at him. He had clenched his fists in his lap so tightly that she could see all the bones of the hand, and the blue veins up the inside of his wrist, clear beneath his pale, pale skin. ‘We don’t know the whole of that,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what they may have done to drive him away. If—’
‘But he left them!’ Kai was nearly shouting
. He controlled himself with an effort, rising to stand in front of Irene. ‘He admitted as much. If he really disagreed with them, then he should have stayed with them and tried to change them from the inside. To just leave them, to walk out on them, to disobey his own parents – how can that possibly be justified?’
Irene looked down at her hand again, partly to think, partly so that Kai shouldn’t see her own expression. Didn’t he realize how much he was giving away about himself? Or did he just not care? That sort of openness was, in its way . . . intoxicating. ‘I hardly ever see my own parents,’ she said, and wondered at the quietness of her own voice.
‘But you haven’t defied them or deserted them.’ Kai dropped to his knees, looking up into her face. ‘You’ve followed their tradition. They were Librarians and so are you. I’m not saying that he should love his family, not if they really were malicious, but he shouldn’t have left them. You can’t trust a man who’d do that.’
‘I’m not saying we should trust him,’ Irene said. ‘I’m saying that we need to work with him.’ She felt very cold, and she wasn’t sure if it was because of her hand, or the earlier shock, or her own words. ‘To serve the Library, I would work with murderers, or thieves, or revolutionaries, or traitors, or anyone who will give me what I need. Do you understand me, Kai? This is important.’ She reached out with her unwounded hand to touch the side of his face. ‘I am sealed to the Library. I can make my own choices to some extent – but at the end of the day, bringing back the book the Library wants is my duty and my honour, and that is all there is to it.’
‘Have you ever been forced to choose between the Library and your honour?’ Kai demanded.
‘Kai,’ Irene said, ‘the Library is my honour. And if you seal yourself to it, then it’ll be yours too.’ She could feel herself smiling grimly. ‘But you’ve already told me that you don’t have any living family, haven’t you? So it’s not a choice you’ll ever have to make.’
Kai didn’t even flinch at that, he simply glared at her. ‘You’re confusing the issue. There ought to be a way of finding our book that doesn’t involve allying ourselves with an honourless, family-betraying creature like this. Irene, please. Walk out now and tell him no. We don’t need this kind of help.’
Irene tried to think of a way to make him understand. Perhaps she was being too abstract in an attempt to make him comprehend this specific case – but, damn it all, he was going to have to face tough moral choices himself some day. If he really wanted to be a Librarian. If he survived.
‘Leaving aside the question of his personal honour,’ she said, ‘we’re not in a good situation. Dominic Aubrey’s dead. There’s an enemy in the city, quite possibly Alberich, and maybe others too. We’re cut off from a direct retreat, and though I may be able to open a way back—’
‘May?’ Kai broke in. ‘What do you mean, may?’
Irene raised her bandaged hand. ‘I mean that I may be chaos-contaminated. I need to find out. It should get better in a few days, but at the moment I may not be able to open a way to the Library. It would keep me out in the same way that it’d keep out anything chaos-tainted. So we don’t have a convenient escape route.’
‘Oh,’ Kai said. He bit his lip.
She was actually far less certain than she was willing to admit about how long it might take for her to access the Library again. It wasn’t something that had happened to her before. She knew the theory, but this was her first case of actual contamination. Thinking about it made her feel ill. She wanted peace and quiet and a chance to actually look at her hand, plus a small library where she could run some tests.
Unfortunately, what she had here and now was a nervous and highly principled subordinate to reassure. It wasn’t a leader’s place to cast oneself trembling on a junior’s shoulder and confess uncertainty. It wasn’t even a leader’s place to suggest that they might be in an indefensible position and should be grateful for any allies that they could get. It was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions.
A leader’s job was a crock of shit.
This was becoming one of Irene’s least favourite missions ever. And that included the one with the evil dwarves under Belgium (what was it about Belgium?), and the one requiring a cartload of carved amber plaques to be shipped across Russia. Or even the one with the cat burglar.
‘Would it help if we could find out more about his family?’ she offered. ‘If we find out that they’re not as bad as he’s painting, we can re-evaluate how much we trust him.’
Kai shook his head decisively. ‘That makes no difference. We should reject his offer of help.’
‘That,’ Irene said quietly, ‘is not an option.’
They looked at each other for a moment. Kai’s lips were drawn together, his eyes darkly furious as he stood there, glaring down at her. In that moment, there was something almost inhuman about him, something fiercer – more elemental, perhaps. For the first time, she thought he might actually disobey her.
In the end, he was the first to drop his eyes. ‘As you command,’ he said. But I don’t approve of it was unspoken and unnecessary.
Irene had met other Librarians who tried to manage their subordinates using shallow gender tactics. Bradamant, for one. She hadn’t liked it. She wasn’t going to try to sugarcoat this for Kai by softening now or by fluttering her eyelashes at him. ‘Did you bring our stuff along when you got me out of the British Library?’ she asked.
‘I did,’ Kai answered stiffly. ‘Both your document case and the jar with the . . . the skin.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Irene said. ‘It must have been difficult to handle both them and me.’
Kai shrugged, but she had the feeling that he was pleased. ‘I found a larger suitcase in the room, and I managed to get the jar and your document case in it. Do we tell Vale about those?’
‘No,’ Irene said quickly. ‘That he doesn’t need to know. Did anything else happen while you were getting me out of there? People following us, attacks, whatever?’
‘Nothing worth mentioning,’ Kai said smugly. ‘I wrapped your face in your veil and propped you against my shoulder and got my arm round your waist, and sort of steered you, and I kept on telling you how you shouldn’t have had so much gin last night. Nobody looked at us twice.’
‘Very prompt thinking,’ Irene said drily. ‘Well done. Good job. And good selection of a place to hole up.’
‘If I’d known then what I know now . . .’ Kai muttered, but not quite as sullenly as before.
‘You did the best you could on the information you had,’ Irene said. She started peeling off the bandage again.
‘Are you sure it’s safe to do that?’ Kai asked. ‘You don’t want it to get infected.’
‘I just want to see how bad it is . . .’ A chunk of bandage fell back to reveal a layer of ointment-soaked dressing. Bits of raw skin showed at the edges, red and oozing. A twinge of pain ran through her hand, and Irene suppressed a wince. ‘All right,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Who saw to this?’
‘I did,’ Kai said. ‘That trap took the skin off your hand as neatly as if – well, as if it was a glove being peeled off.’ He went down on one knee and took her hand in his, winding the bandage round it again. ‘Vale gave me some antiseptics and bandages, and I set some healing spells on it, but try not to use it too much.’ His touch was careful and precise, his fingers dry and hot when they brushed her wrist. ‘Normally I’d say that you can take the bandages off in a couple of days, but I don’t know about chaos contamination.’
‘I can check that easily enough,’ Irene said confidently. ‘This room has enough books in it for me to try asserting basic resonance.’
Kai glanced around at the heavily shelved walls. ‘You don’t need to be in a real library for that?’
Irene shrugged, then grimaced in pain as the movement twisted her hand in Kai’s hold. ‘Sorry,’ she said, as
he gave her a disapproving look. ‘Not exactly. I’d need to be in a real library to open a passage, but a single room of books is enough for me to reaffirm my links. Of course, it has to be a lot of books . . .’ She smiled for a moment, remembering the smell of old celluloid and dustless air. ‘Actually, any significant store of knowledge or fiction can be made to function. I did it in a film storage section once, an archive of old television programmes. Not a single book in sight, all film reels and computer data, but the similarity in purpose and function was enough.’
‘Go on.’ Kai leaned forward eagerly. ‘Do it.’
‘All right.’ Irene was nervous, now that it actually came down to it. She’d spoken glibly enough about contamination, and while she knew the theory on the subject – it’ll wear off, just be sensible and avoid further exposure and stay away from the Library until you’re clear – she’d never actually experienced it herself. ‘You may want to stand away from the walls.’
‘I’m nowhere near the walls,’ Kai pointed out.
‘Oh. Right.’ Irene swallowed. ‘Okay.’
She took a deep breath, wetted her dry lips, and invoked the Library by her name and by her rank as Librarian, speaking the words in the Language which described it. Unlike nouns or other parts of speech, words that described the Library or the Language themselves were among the few parts of the Language that never changed.
The bandages covering her hand burst into flame. The shelves on the walls shuddered and groaned, wrenching from side to side and creaking like living trees in a winter storm, and books tumbled to crash on the floor. Tossed-aside newspapers and piles of notes rustled and moved, crawling along the floor in fractions of an inch, writhing away from her like crushed moths. The fountain pen on the desk jolted and rolled across the open notebook where it had been balanced, trailing ink behind it in a dark wet line.
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