She heard his footsteps upstairs, and the thump of the attic trapdoor swinging down from the ceiling, followed by the banging of cases and trunks being shifted round. It was far too easy to imagine huge, heaving cobwebbed nests of giant spiders in the attic. She forced herself to focus on her immediate surroundings – and look, the spider that had been crawling around by the light switch was emerging again and picking its way down the wall. There were other little twitches and barely visible movements coming from the darkest corners of the hall. The light had been so bright and welcome a moment ago. But now it merely threw possible hiding places for spiders into stark relief. And there were far too many of them. Irene was abruptly very grateful that she was in boots and trousers.
‘I’d almost prefer to be back in a burning building with the troops outside,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Sorry?’ Kai came thundering down the stairs, banging the suitcase he was carrying against the balustrade posts in his haste. Irene winced as she saw another twitching clot of shadow drop from under the stair rail and scuttle for cover. ‘Any problems?’
‘Not now,’ she said with relief. She took the case from him and opened it, placing it on the floor in front of them. ‘Get ready to brace me.’
Kai simply nodded.
Irene took a deep breath, filling her lungs, then shouted in the Language, her voice loud enough to be heard throughout their lodgings, ‘Spiders, come here and get into the suitcase on the floor!’
The loose command structure of the sentence, and the fact that she was attempting to exert her will on living beings – if not humans – made her sway at the sudden drain of energy. Kai, with the expertise of both warning and experience, caught her with an arm around her shoulders, and held her upright against him as the shadowy corners of their lodgings came to life.
Spiders as big as the first one came scuttling from the folds of coats hanging in the hat stands, dropping from the upper corners of the ceiling, and levering themselves out from behind the shabby pictures that hung in the hallway. A couple of dozen of them came in a wave down the stairs, heaving and jerking along in a mincing eight-legged gait that was too fast for peace of mind. Irene watched as they clambered into her suitcase, forming a hairy, seething mat across the interior, climbing over each other and waving their legs in the air. A few normal spiders had joined the rush and ran round inside rather pathetically, tiny in comparison to their bigger cousins.
She gave it ten seconds after the last spider had climbed in, then kicked the lid closed and sat firmly on it, snapping the catches shut.
‘We could throw it on a bonfire,’ Kai suggested. ‘No, wait, they might get out when the case burns. Perhaps if we throw it in the Thames?’
‘Kai,’ Irene said firmly. ‘I’m surprised at you. This is a valid route for investigation. We don’t simply want to destroy them – first we want to find out everything we can about them. But before that, I am going through this place with another suitcase. I’ll use the Language to hatch any hidden eggs and make absolutely sure we’ve found them all.’
Kai evidently hadn’t thought about the possibility of eggs. He shuddered and glared down at the suitcase. ‘Disgusting creatures. How do you suppose they got into the house?’
‘We won’t know till we’ve checked,’ Irene said, brushing herself off. ‘Could be a broken window, or a hole in the roof. It could be . . .’ She looked at the front door. ‘Well, it would be incredibly blatant, but you could just about push them through the letterbox, if they cooperated.’
‘At least it’ll interest Vale,’ Kai said with resignation, as they went to find another suitcase.
The all-night pet shop down the road was an upper-class one, gleaming with up-to-date chrome and high-power lamps, and little steam-powered climate systems hissed along the rows of tanks and cages. It was complete with pedigree puppies, Persian kittens, glass tanks full of brightly coloured and probably incompatible fish, and a proprietor who didn’t want to serve them. She was stick-insect thin, with straw-pale hair the same shade as the blond ferret ripping toys apart in a cage behind her, and was dressed in spotless dark blue with heavy leather bracers on her forearms.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to be helpful,’ she protested icily, ‘but I’m afraid I really don’t understand what you could possibly want with a humble establishment like my own, which only serves the most refined of clients.’
‘We have two suitcases full of giant spiders,’ Irene said pleasantly. She’d taken ten minutes to change into proper clothing for this alternate world and get rid of most of the ash, so she knew that she looked like a respectable woman, if not a stinking rich one. ‘We need an expert’s opinion.’
The proprietor raised her near-invisible eyebrows. ‘Madam, I realize that a lot of spiders may seem large to you—’
‘Eight inches to a foot across.’ Kai stepped forward, giving the woman his most serious and winning look. Irene wasn’t normally a supporter of the ‘go persuade people through your good looks’ school of thought, mostly because she didn’t have the sort of looks that one needed to make it work, but she could appreciate it when it was being done to help her.
The proprietor hesitated. It might have been because Kai was handsome, well dressed and charming. Or it might have been because however much he tried to play it down, he inevitably came across as someone from an aristocratic background, with more money than he knew what to do with. ‘Well, I suppose I could take a look at them. Perhaps a consultation fee . . .’
‘Of course,’ Kai said, with casual disdain for precise amounts. ‘Do you have a glass tank or something similar, which we can release them into?’
The proprietor signalled an assistant to fetch a large glass tank. Kai took the smaller suitcase and laid it inside the tank. It held the few stragglers that they’d found, plus some tiny specimens that Irene had forced to hatch early, and which she still eyed with suspicion, small as they were. Kai snapped open the catches, but left the suitcase lid down. ‘When I open it,’ he said, ‘please stand ready to close the tank lid, and make sure that nothing has a chance to get out.’
To Irene’s relief, the proprietor nodded professionally. ‘Let’s have a look,’ she said.
Kai flipped the suitcase lid back, pulling his hand and arm out of the tank in the same motion. Spiders came spilling out of the suitcase in a drift of waving legs and heaving balloon-like bodies the size of tennis balls. With an astonished curse, hastily cut short, the assistant brought the tank lid down firmly and slid the bolt shut.
The proprietor pursed her lips. ‘Why, I do believe – can it be?’ She leaned closer to the tank, nearly squashing her thin nose against the glass.
The spiders swarmed inside the tank, dashing up and down on the sandy bottom and running up the interior glass walls. Irene felt something squishy bump against her leg, and nearly jumped away in automatic reaction, before she realized it was a bystander moving closer to peer in fascination.
‘How splendid,’ the proprietor exclaimed. ‘Pelinobius muticus! A king baboon spider! Dozens of them – an entire breeding colony!’ Irene didn’t need to be a mindreader to see the little signals tipping over in the woman’s head and pointing to EXCLUSIVE SUPPLIER and HUGE PROFIT. ‘Are you intending to bring them onto the market yourself, sir?’
Kai glanced at Irene. Irene stepped forward. ‘Not exactly, madam—’
‘Miss Chester,’ the woman said, with a narrow-lipped smile which tried to look friendly and failed.
‘Miss Chester,’ Irene said, ‘we recently had a crate of bananas delivered, a gift from a friend in Brazil.’ Did they grow bananas in Brazil? She’d forgotten her basic school geography and national products, let alone whatever they were in this alternate world. ‘We honestly didn’t expect to find these, um . . .’
‘Pelinobius muticus,’ Miss Chester said, pronouncing it very clearly to make sure that Irene got it right.
Irene liked being underestimated. It made people less likely to suspect that she was lyin
g. ‘We just didn’t have the resources to take care of them ourselves,’ she said. She tried to look like a woman who might actually like spiders, rather than one who preferred the drown-them-in-a-vat-of-acid option. ‘If you feel that you can give them a good home, then perhaps . . .’
‘I’m sure that we can come to an arrangement,’ Miss Chester said, her smile growing toothier.
‘It would have looked suspicious if we hadn’t bargained,’ Irene said later. They were in a cab and were finally on their way to Vale’s rooms.
‘You don’t think it looked suspicious anyhow?’ Kai queried drily. ‘Two people showing up with suitcases full of giant killer spiders—’
‘Pelinobius muticus,’ Irene said. ‘I wrote down the details. We can ask Vale about them.’
Kai brooded, leaning back and folding his arms. ‘Irene . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m concerned.’
‘Well, that’s quite understandable. Someone did probably just try to kill us.’ Not to mention the gate going up in flames. But were the two connected?
‘And while we did survive . . .’
Dragons yet again proved themselves masters of the obvious. Irene nodded, waiting for him to continue.
Kai seemed to be looking for the right words to finish his sentence. Finally he said, ‘Should we reconsider our mission here?’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, we could move to a more protected environment.’
Oh. Another attempt to bring her under the draconic wing. However, he had a point about people trying to kill them. After two near-death events in one day, it wasn’t paranoia, it was simple caution. ‘I admit that the evidence shows that they – whoever they are – know where we live,’ Irene said. ‘And I also admit that doesn’t make me particularly comfortable. However, I wouldn’t call them very efficient murderers.’
‘You want an efficient murderer?’
‘Heavens, no,’ Irene said. ‘Give me an inefficient murderer any day. I’d far rather have someone trying to kill me by shoving spiders through my letterbox than by hiring a sniper with a laser-sighted rifle or setting fire to our lodgings.’ Actually verbalizing the thought cheered her up. But she was by no means as insouciant as her words suggested. Dead was still dead, whether the killer was exotic, professional or amateur. Getting killed was incredibly easy. Anyone could do it. Staying safe and alive was much harder.
Kai’s mouth twitched and he began to smile, finally relaxing. ‘You have a point there. I hadn’t thought of it that way.’
‘Not that I want to have someone trying to kill me,’ Irene hastily added. ‘But, you know, given the choice . . .’
The cab rolled to a stop and the driver called down from his perch, ‘We’re here, madam, sir. Will you be wanting me to wait?’
‘No, thank you,’ Kai said. He paid off the driver while Irene clambered out of the cab, already regretting her return to long skirts. One really didn’t appreciate trousers until one wasn’t wearing them any more.
The two of them looked up at Vale’s windows, as the cab rattled off into the fog, its ether-lamps glaring eyes that vanished into the darkness. A dim light showed round the edges of Vale’s curtains.
‘At least he’s in,’ Irene said. From time to time she regretted this world’s lack of convenient mass communication. ‘It’d be annoying if he’d been out on a case.’
Nobody answered Kai’s knock, but Irene didn’t have to use the Language to coax the door open. Kai already had a key. He led the way up the stairs. Irene followed. She reassured her slight flickerings of nervousness – why didn’t anyone answer? was anything wrong? – by reminding herself that it was coming on to eight o’clock at night. Vale’s housekeeper might well be out. Vale himself would recognize their footsteps, and he might in any case be several miles deep in experiments or research.
‘Vale—’ Kai began, opening the door at the head of the stairs. Then he stopped in his tracks.
‘What?’ Irene demanded, ducking under Kai’s arm to see what was going on.
Vale’s rooms were in as much of a state of controlled clutter as usual. His scrapbooks and files were organized neatly, scrupulously tidy and alphabetical, but other than that, the place was full of stuff. Laboratory equipment was strewn over the main table, with several crumb-dusted plates perched beside the test-tubes. Boxes filled the corners of the room, piled on top of each other in a desperate attempt to use all the limited space available. Various relics from past or current cases lay along the mantelpiece, or fought for space on the bookshelves. The ether-lamps were turned to half-strength, leaving the room in dimly flickering light, and the fire had burned down to embers. Newspapers littered the chairs and floor, as if they had been frantically rifled through and discarded page by page.
Vale himself lay on the sofa. He was a tall man – but, sprawled as he was, he’d lost all his usual grace and was a lanky tangle of limbs. One arm was half-thrown across his face. He was only semi-dressed, in a dressing gown over shirt and trousers, and clearly had not been planning to go out.
He didn’t react to their words. He didn’t even move.
It was astonishing how pure nightmare could quite literally put ice in one’s veins. An attack on us, now an attack on Vale, too . . . She and Kai were both moving across the room in the same moment, without even having to say anything. The only reason Kai reached Vale first was that he’d entered the room first.
Kai grabbed for Vale’s wrist, fingers clasping it tightly, then sighed in relief. ‘There’s a pulse,’ he reported. ‘But it’s slow.’
The wave of relief that hit Irene was so strong she could taste it. ‘Thank god,’ she said. ‘But why . . .’
An answer came to mind. It wasn’t a pretty one. She took Vale’s wrist from Kai and peeled back his sleeve, checking his forearm. She wasn’t entirely surprised by what she found. It did, after all, go with the territory of being London’s greatest detective, in a world where stories could come true and life too often followed narrative. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to the needle marks.
Kai bit back an oath. ‘But he said—’ he began, then stopped short.
‘What did he say?’ Irene asked softly. She checked Vale’s pulse herself. It was slow but steady.
Kai turned and walked across to turn up the lights. ‘He said that he didn’t use it any more.’ He didn’t look at Irene.
‘When did he say that?’
‘A few months ago. It wasn’t long after we met, the three of us. I, you see . . .’ Kai was nearly stuttering in his attempts to find an explanation. She hadn’t heard that speech pattern in him before. ‘I found the syringe and the drug—’
‘Which drug?’
‘Morphine.’ Kai turned back to her. ‘Irene, I swear, he said he’d only used it occasionally, and not at all now that his practice had become more interesting. I don’t know why he’d be taking it now.’ His face showed something of the panic of a child who’d found out that a fundamental pillar of his world was no longer solid. ‘Could someone else have forced it on him?’
It was certainly possible. It just wasn’t very likely. ‘I suppose we won’t know until we can ask him.’ Irene laid Vale’s arm back across his body, and brushed his dark hair back from his face. His skin was hot under her fingers. So human. So fragile. And if someone was trying to kill her, then was he a target, too?
She had to find a way to protect them – all of them. And she had to talk to her superiors, urgently. The time for professional detachment was over.
It would have been a perfect trap, the cold unpleasant voice at the back of her mind pointed out. Incapacitate Vale, arrange a bomb or something similar, and expect Irene and Kai to run into the danger zone the moment they saw him lying there. It was a very good thing that the attempted murderer or murderers, whoever they were, didn’t have Irene’s own imagination.
She had to say something to Kai. ‘We’re staying here tonight, of course.’
‘Would it be safer to take him
to our lodgings?’ Kai asked. ‘Or to somewhere else defensible?’
She gave him a few mental points for not actually saying such as Li Ming’s establishment out loud. ‘I can set up defences here,’ she said. ‘Library wards. And we can sit up and watch for spiders together.’ She also needed to discover what had driven Vale back to his drugs. Under the circumstances, information was the best weapon she could have.
Kai eyed the room dubiously, obviously imagining how many places a spider could hide itself. ‘I suppose it might be better,’ he said unenthusiastically. ‘I’ll put him in his bed. It’ll be better than leaving him on the sofa. He might catch a cold.’
Which is of course a profoundly serious issue, when compared to shooting up with morphine. But Irene nodded. ‘Check the bed first. We should be careful.’
‘We can’t go on like this!’ Kai burst out.
‘No.’ Irene fought down the whirl of fury in her stomach. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action . . . ‘No, we can’t. We are not required to act like sitting ducks, just waiting to be shot at. We aren’t being laid-back about this, Kai – we’re putting up defences and finding out what the hell is going on. We also need more information . . .’ She wasn’t sure who or what she was angriest with: the mysterious murderer, Vale for the drugs, or the whole day for being such a roller-coaster of near-failure. ‘And we don’t know that this, here,’ she gestured at the unconscious Vale, ‘is specifically due to us.’
‘It’s very coincidental if it isn’t,’ Kai said. But his temper had cooled a little. He bent down and swung Vale up in his arms, carrying the man easily. Vale didn’t stir, as loose-jointed as a strung doll, his eyes closed in fathoms-deep slumber.
I wish I knew more about the effects of morphine, Irene thought. Oh well, it was probably in one of Vale’s own reference books. She could look it up while she was waiting.
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