‘Oh no we won’t,’ Irene said hastily, before Zayanna could make that bad idea any worse. ‘Besides, you can’t be a Librarian.’
‘I think that’s very prejudiced of you all.’ The passage was now so narrow they were forced to walk in single file, though Irene kept her grip on Zayanna’s hand. ‘Why can’t I steal books too?’
Irene considered and rejected all the arguments that started There’s more to it than just stealing books. ‘Because you’d have to swear yourself to the Library,’ she said. ‘Permanently, full-time, life and death. Would you actually do that, Zayanna?’
Zayanna laughed, but there was something a little forced about the sound, and Irene couldn’t see her face. ‘How true, darling! I’m just a frivolous, self-obsessed little mayfly. How well you know me.’
Part of Irene wanted to kick herself for saying the wrong thing, while depending on Zayanna to lead her to Alberich’s sphere. Another part felt unreasonably guilty. She’s admitted to working for Alberich and against us, to trying to kill me and Kai, and I’m embarrassed because I hurt her feelings. This is neither logical nor intelligent. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Whether or not Zayanna deserved an apology, it felt like a good idea to give one. She couldn’t afford to have the other woman turn against her now. ‘I know you were just doing your job. And I’m sorry for branding you. It was the only way I could think of to save your life.’
Zayanna rubbed at the angry burn on her neck. ‘Try and be more artistic about it next time, darling. That’s all I ask.’
For a while they walked in silence. Irene wanted to go faster, but Zayanna was the one setting the pace. The Fae’s steps had grown slower, and she forced herself forward as though she was struggling against a high wind. The air was thick and close, like the end of summer, full of dust and smelling of dry grass and overripe fruits. Zayanna’s face was marked with sweat, and she pushed her hair back from her face with her free hand, muttering a curse.
‘Can I help?’ Irene asked, breaking the silence.
‘No.’ Zayanna sounded as if she was in the middle of running a marathon. ‘Told you it was going to be difficult to bring someone else along. Just keep on walking. Keep on going.’
The walls on either side were red-brick now, and the two women had to turn sideways to squeeze between them. Beyond the walls Irene thought she could hear the sounds of machinery, great pumping presses and turning gears.
Zayanna stopped, and Irene went up on her toes, peering over her shoulder to see what lay ahead. She saw a small door set into the wall, unobtrusive and constructed of plain metal, looking positively unimportant. An incongruous letter-flap was set into it.
‘Ah,’ Zayanna said. ‘Here we are.’ She opened the door before Irene could stop her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was something of an anticlimax to find the space beyond the door full of bricks. They were cemented in place, and even dusted with cobwebs in places. For all that Irene could tell, the doorway might have been bricked up for decades.
‘It wasn’t like that before,’ Zayanna said. She tilted her head to look at it from another angle, but that didn’t make the bricks miraculously disappear.
‘Is this where anyone trying to get to this sphere would arrive?’ Irene asked. ‘Or is it just that you used this door last time, and so you came here again?’
‘Not exactly, darling.’ Zayanna rubbed her nose thoughtfully. ‘It’s more as if this sphere is like a carriage in motion, and we’re running alongside and trying to jump on, and this is the point where you can scramble into the carriage from the road. I know that’s a really bad simile – or is it a metaphor?’
‘It’s a simile,’ Irene said, glad of a question she could actually answer. ‘You said “like”.’
‘Simile, right,’ Zayanna said. ‘But that’s basically how it is. This is how anyone would get in, if they tried to reach it the way I just did. It does look rather as if Alberich doesn’t want visitors.’ Implicit in her tone was a suggestion that perhaps now that she and Irene had made the effort, they could turn around and leave, with honour satisfied.
‘And the letterbox? Was that there before?’
Zayanna nodded. ‘It was there so we could pass urgent information to him.’
‘Like what I was doing – yes, quite. And it’s a reasonable supposition that he wouldn’t want Librarians getting in here, either,’ Irene said, thinking out loud. ‘So if I were him, I’d booby-trap it against someone using the Language, in case one of us told the bricks to get out of the way.’
‘He’s not really giving us much of a chance,’ Zayanna said unhelpfully. ‘How are we supposed to get in there?’
‘But he doesn’t want us getting in there . . .’ Irene started, then paused. Alberich had hijacked a high-chaos world. In high-chaos worlds, stories came true. No narrative would ever finish with And so the protagonist shut himself up in a convenient castle until his plan came to fruition – tale over. He could brick up doors and lay traps, but in any classic story the intruder would eventually enter the castle. ‘Are we in a high-chaos area at the moment, ourselves?’
Zayanna wobbled her hand. ‘Fairly. Quite a bit. Not as much as Venice was, but more than that world you were living in. There’s a strong gradient between this sphere we’re in at the moment and the one through that door.’
‘Do you think we could get through the wall at any point other than that door?’ Irene asked.
‘No.’ Zayanna was quite definite. ‘At least, not by any way I know.’
Irene nodded. ‘All right. We need to stand well back.’
Zayanna looked alarmed but interested. ‘What are you going to do, darling?’
‘Substitute brute force for caution.’ Irene had a nasty feeling that trying to use the Language directly on the barrier might set off some sort of trap. It was the logical thing to set up, if one was expecting Librarian intrusions. And there would no doubt be alarms. But if she could hit fast enough, and hard enough, then perhaps that would work. She stepped back and focused. ‘Bricks from the walls on either side of me, smash open the brick wall blocking that doorway!’
Using the Language in a higher-chaos world had benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, the Language worked more easily and more powerfully. But on the negative side, Irene had to sacrifice a corresponding amount of energy. It was like shoving a weighted trolley downhill: once it started to roll, it really went. But it was that much harder to steer or stop, and the first shove came at a cost.
The walls on either side groaned. Moss and dust fell from them as they shuddered in place, pattering down on the narrow passage where Irene and Zayanna stood. Then, with a rolling thunder of crashes, bricks flew through the air like bullets, slamming into the wall that filled the doorway. The first few shattered on it, but the successive pounding impacts of brick after brick drove cracks into the wall. Powdered cement drifted down and mingled with red brick-dust in a choking cloud that made both Irene and Zayanna cover their faces.
It took half a minute of constant pounding for the wall filling the door to crumble. Finally, a brick went through it like a bullet through a pane of glass, leaving cracks in all directions; then more followed, widening the gap and landing on the other side of the doorway with booming thuds that echoed over the crashing of brickwork. More and more bricks zoomed through, till the doorway was denuded of its barrier, with only fragments of cement and broken brick lining it like the edge of a jigsaw. Finally they stopped.
‘Now!’ Irene coughed, her voice betraying her in the dusty air. She caught Zayanna’s arm and dragged her forward, stumbling over fragments of brick to the doorway. Fear caught at her, trying to slow her pace. What if she’d made a mistake? What if passing through would mean instant and horrific death? What if Alberich was waiting on the other side?
Well, if he was, he’d just received a faceful of bricks. She gritted her teeth and pulled Zayanna along with her, stepping through the doorway.
Nothing went boom or splat. Irene was
still alive and moving freely. She decided to call her mission a total success so far.
The room on the other side was unexpectedly large. Globes of crystal on the distant walls cast a pale light, which filtered down through the clouds of brick dust to illuminate shelves of books. The floor under Irene’s feet was dark wood, aged and polished. The place could easily have been a room from the Library itself. She guessed that was the point. In the distance, a clock was ticking, a low steady pulse of noise in the heavy silence.
There were three passageways leading out of the room. ‘Which one do we want?’ Irene asked Zayanna.
‘No idea, darling,’ Zayanna said. ‘Pick one at random?’
Irene tossed a mental coin and chose the right-hand passage. It opened almost immediately into a smaller room: this one had floor-level exits, but also a curving oak staircase which went up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Again, the walls were covered with bookshelves.
She managed to resist the temptation to examine them, reminding herself that the priority was getting away from the entrance before any security came. But several rooms later (two to the left, up one, three to the right, forward two) she finally gave way and paused for just a moment to look at the titles. She frowned at what she saw. ‘These don’t make any sense. They’re not in any language I know. They’re in the English alphabet, but I don’t recognize it. Zayanna, do you know what language this is?’
Irene pulled out one of the thick volumes for Zayanna to inspect. It was bound in dark-blue leather and was heavy in her hands, and while the pages seemed clean and stable enough, there was an after-smell that made Irene wrinkle her nose. It wasn’t quite a proper stink that could be pointed to and complained about. It was the sort of faint odour that might come from a piece of decaying food somewhere in one’s home, which couldn’t be precisely tracked down, but which would slowly infiltrate the entire place. It suggested unwholesomeness.
Zayanna gave the book a cursory glance. ‘Nothing I know, darling. Perhaps it’s code?’
Irene scanned a few more books, but they all contained the same jumbles of letters. They weren’t in the Language. They weren’t in any language Irene knew, either. She wasn’t even sure they were in a proper language at all. ‘Is this a real library,’ she said, her voice quiet in the echoing room, ‘or is this just the stageset of a library?’
‘Does it make a difference?’
‘I don’t know.’ But one worrying thought in particular nagged at Irene. If this wasn’t a real library – if all the books it contained were simply garbage – then would she actually be able to create a passage from it to the Library itself, to fetch help? That would be singularly unhelpful.
‘This place is like a beehive,’ she said. ‘It’s three-dimensional.’
‘Buildings usually are,’ Zayanna pointed out.
‘I mean, in the sense that all the rooms we’ve been through so far have exits up and down, as well as on the same level,’ Irene explained. ‘And all the rooms we’ve been through so far seem to be more or less the same. Was it that way when you were here?’
‘The important stuff was further in,’ Zayanna said. ‘I didn’t see much of it, but there was a big open area, absolutely huge, and a pattern in the centre with a clock – and lots of stairs. One of the others did ask about it, but he never got an answer. But this bit here, where we are at the moment, was different then. It wasn’t so . . .’ She waved a hand. ‘So definite.’
Irene tried to work out what that meant. ‘Has this place become less chaotic since you were last here?’
‘Yes, that’s it exactly!’ Zayanna said. ‘It’s being much more stable now. I wonder why.’
Irene was also wondering why, among quite a number of other things: the most important and puzzling of which being why they were still safe. There was no sign of anyone chasing them so far, and the lack of alarms or pursuit was getting on her nerves. It made no sense for them to have been able to penetrate this place so easily. Paranoia suggested that Alberich was watching the entire place, could see every movement they made, and was merely waiting for the right moment to strike.
The problem with paranoia was that if you let it rule all your decisions, then you would miss some perfectly good opportunities. Irene reviewed her priorities. She’d identified Alberich’s hideout, and she knew his plan. The next step was to open a passage to reach the Library and bring back the metaphorical heavy artillery.
‘This will do as well as anywhere else,’ she said, more to herself than Zayanna. She walked along to the closest door and reached out to touch the handle, focusing her will. This was where things either went perfectly right or horribly wrong. ‘Open to the Library.’
The words in the Language shook the air, and the door trembled on its hinges. The wood of the frame creaked, bending and straining against itself, and Irene felt the connection forming. It sucked at her strength like an open wound, but it was there, practically within her grasp. Just a little further, just a little nearer . . .
All the doors in the room slammed open. The handle Irene was holding jerked loose from her hand. Zayanna pulled Irene back just before the door could hit her. The forming link was broken now, snapped like a piece of overstretched string. All the lights in the room flared up and then guttered to a dim glow. Irene had the impression of a dozen eyes turning themselves in her direction.
Nobody else had entered the room. Nobody at all. But a shadow drew itself across the wall in a dark stretch of overly-long limbs and a crooked neck, a shadow cast by a person who wasn’t there, and the sound of feet echoed from a long way away. Where the shadow touched them, the books turned white and green with decay, rotting where they stood on the shelves.
‘Ahhhhhhh . . .’ a voice whispered, thick and dank. ‘Now tell me, Ray, why is it that a thing’s always in the last place you look?’
‘The malice of inanimate objects,’ Irene answered. Her mouth was dry and the words stuck in her throat. From best-possible outcome to worst-case scenario, all in the space of a few seconds. She wanted to scream like a child that it wasn’t fair. ‘Is that Alberich?’
‘Who else would it be?’ The shadow reached out towards her, two-dimensional across the floor, its fingers lengthening into claws. Irene and Zayanna stepped hastily away from it. When the shadow drew back again, the wood of the floor was thick with mould.
‘You could be one of his servants.’ Irene’s mouth was running on automatic while she tried to think of a productive next step. There was always the tried-and-tested option of run away in any convenient direction, but common sense indicated that would be a short-term solution. She needed something better. ‘But if you are Alberich, then where are you? Where’s your body?’
‘Always so many questions, Ray.’ Alberich’s laughter dripped through the room as if it was a physical entity, mingling with the ticking of the distant clock. ‘It’s one of the things I like about you.’
‘And yet you hardly ever answer them.’
‘I can put myself into all sorts of containers. Skins, bodies, libraries . . .’ The shadow leaned away from the wall, spreading its arms across the floor towards Irene and Zayanna. The dark limbs curved around them on the floor to join at the far side, making a circle a few yards across, with Zayanna and Irene in the middle.
‘You took your time answering when I came knocking on your door.’ Irene mentally reviewed all the words in the Language that she knew for shadow. Though would Alberich have taken this form, if she could affect it? He knew the capabilities of the Language as well as she did. Probably even better.
‘It can take me a little while to focus. We’re almost at midnight, there’s hardly any time left for games. You two are like tiny moths, fluttering through my library and just as hard to catch.’ The shadows on the floor deepened, swirling closer to their feet. ‘But that ends here—’
Irene had been waiting for this. ‘Light, strong and clear!’ she shouted, shielding her eyes with her hand against the sudden dazzle, as all the lamp
s on the wall instantly blazed as bright as high noon.
But the shadow didn’t vanish. It was a black stain on the wall and floor, as flat and two-dimensional as dried ink, but it was still there, even in the multi-directional glare of the lamps. And it was still seeping towards them, only a foot away now. Alberich’s glutinous laughter dribbled from the walls again. ‘Silly child. Did you really suppose I wouldn’t think of that?’
Panic jump-started Irene’s imagination. So what if she was about to demand something impossible? That shadow was already impossible in the first place. She really hoped the universe agreed with her. ‘Floor, hold that bodiless shadow!’
The entire room shook, and the distant clock’s ticking jarred for a moment like a stuck record. Books went tumbling from the shelves in a cascade of crashes. A spike of pain twisted in Irene’s head, the premonition of what was clearly going to be an appalling headache, assuming she survived the next few minutes. A trickle of blood ran from her nose – but the shadow had stopped in its tracks. Pulling herself together, she threw herself into a jump across the ring of darkness. Her heel came down on its far edge, and wood crumbled into mouldy dust under her foot.
Irene slipped and fell to her hands and knees, but scrabbled to her feet again as she felt the floor tremble under her fingers. She might have held the shadow back for a moment, but there was no way that could last. Zayanna had made the leap more elegantly than Irene, and was already through the nearest door. Irene ran after her.
‘Which way?’ Zayanna demanded, her eyes wide with panic. The room was like the one they’d just left, except that the books were bound in purple leather. There was a door at each compass point, and a curving stairway running up and down. ‘This is all your fault!’
Irene couldn’t really argue with that statement. She’d been wondering how long it would be before Zayanna brought it up. She decided to focus on the first question, even if she didn’t really have an answer. ‘Try going up,’ she suggested, taking the lead and heading up the staircase. Her feet hammered loudly on the wooden stairs: neither of them was willing to sacrifice speed for stealth.
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