The Mortal Word

by Genevieve Cogman

  The ether-lights on the walls had been turned up to full brightness, throwing the black and white of Kai’s evening dress into sharp relief and lingering on the battered collar and cuffs of Vale’s favourite dressing gown. Kai held up one of the letters to inspect its watermark. He sniffed it, and his nose wrinkled. “This one doesn’t give any names at the beginning or end,” he reported, “but it’s all about romance, the target has scarlet hair, and the writer has an unfortunate taste for sandalwood.”

  “Probably one of the Chisholm sisters,” Vale said, not looking up from the sheaf of invoices he was flicking through. “Put it on the pile to my right. If you’ve recovered from your journey, Winters, pull up a chair and lend us your assistance. Strongrock and I have made a start, but I would like to get these sorted and cleared before dawn to avoid any possible awkwardness.”

  “It’s always a sensible idea to get things neat and tidy,” Irene agreed. And to get rid of any compromising evidence before police can show up and search the place. She pulled the spare armchair up to the table and chose a few papers. “Was it an interesting night?” she asked Kai.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes life can be cruel. I had to stand on the roof while other people”—he caught Vale’s glance—“ah, acquired papers. If we have to do this again, I’d like to take a more equal share of the job.”

  “Such an event is highly unlikely,” Vale said firmly. “I do not descend to criminal actions—unless the cause is good and the action is absolutely necessary.”

  Kai and Irene exchanged a sidewards glance but had more sense than to disagree.

  Irene found herself relaxing as she looked through the documents. With her own duty put aside for the moment, she was among friends, and that was still a new enough experience that she wasn’t completely used to it.

  Over the last year or two, she had gradually become accustomed to the feeling that there were people in her life whom she could rely on. Whom she could trust. Even if one of them was the greatest detective in an alternate Victorian London, and the other was a somewhat-out-of-favour dragon prince in human form. Even if she was supposed to have parted ways with the dragon prince, rather than publicly associating with him. But this was her life now, a permanent assignment as Librarian-in-Residence to this world. It wasn’t what she’d planned.

  But plans rarely worked out.

  “Irene?” Kai asked, turning to look more closely at her. “Is something the matter?”

  She hesitated, trying to think of what to say. With a mental sigh she dismissed sentiment and got back to practicalities. “Metaphysics,” she said with a shrug, “and how we got to where we are now. Nothing important.”

  Carriage wheels creaked and came to a stop in the street outside, and Vale frowned. He rose and walked across to the first-floor window, drawing the edge of a curtain back to peer out. “A private carriage,” he reported. “Not the police, not even Singh. And not Lady Rotherhyde . . .”

  He paused, looking genuinely surprised. “Winters, I do believe it is your associate Bradamant. Why would she be looking for you at this hour?”

  Downstairs the doorbell rang.

  “I don’t know,” Irene said, jumping up from the table, “but I’d better go and find out. I apologise—”

  Vale shook his head. “Not important. But do go and see to her, before she rouses the housekeeper.”

  Kai half rose from his seat, but Irene gestured for him to stay put. “We’re not supposed to be associating, remember?” she reminded him.

  Kai snorted. “As if Bradamant’s going to believe that.” But he sat down again.

  Irene reflected on the virtues of plausible deniability as she ran down the stairs. Hopefully Bradamant wasn’t here in any sort of official capacity.

  The doorbell sounded again as Irene reached the entrance hall at the bottom of the stairs. She hurried to throw back the bolts and open the door.

  Bradamant had one hand raised to push the bell again, but she lowered it as she saw Irene. “Thank God you’re here,” she said. “I tried your lodgings first, but you weren’t there and you hadn’t left a note.”

  “I wasn’t expecting visitors,” Irene said, beckoning Bradamant inside and closing the door behind her. The other woman was muffled in a thick grey velvet mantle trimmed with ermine at the cuffs and collar—slightly out of period for the world and country in which they were both standing, but very warm, and certainly very stylish. Her black hair gleamed with tiny dewdrops from the fog. “Is there an emergency?”

  “There is,” Bradamant said. “But you’re not the only person I’m after.”

  Irene’s mind immediately went to Kai, and her heart sank. Was this some sort of formal separation demand? Had someone in authority decided to enforce a ban between them? “Oh?” she said, trying to control her pulse. “Who else?”

  “Vale.” Bradamant nodded towards the stairs. “I’m glad to see that he’s in. There’s been a murder, Irene. We need a detective, and a good one. Or things are going to be even worse than you can possibly imagine.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Who’s dead?” Irene demanded. “Is it someone I know?” She was tempted to add something about how she could in fact imagine pretty bad situations. But then she took another look at Bradamant’s face and decided—just this once—not to be sarcastic. Bradamant, normally one of the most cool and controlled Librarians Irene knew, was worried. Being witty could wait.

  Unless Bradamant gave her a genuine excuse to indulge.

  “No, you don’t know him,” Bradamant said quickly. “At least, I don’t think you’ve ever met him. It’s not a Librarian. It’s—look, can I just come upstairs and tell you and Vale both at once?”

  “Bring your colleague up here, Winters!” Vale called from his room. He’d obviously been listening.

  Irene gestured Bradamant towards the stairs. “You know the way, I think.” She locked the door, then followed Bradamant up the stairs and arrived in Vale’s room in time to see Vale and Kai hastily rearranging the chairs. A spare sheet had been thrown over the table, papers and all, in a vague attempt at plausible deniability.

  Bradamant gave Kai a cool glance. “And I suppose you just happened to be in the vicinity,” she said.

  Kai returned an equally frosty look, and Irene remembered that his protective instincts towards her involved a certain amount of antipathy towards Bradamant—even if she and Irene had technically agreed to be on polite terms now. “I’m visiting my friend Peregrine Vale,” he said. “Is there some sort of problem with that?”

  Vale regarded the two of them with an expression that was partly a plea for heaven to give him patience, but mostly a weary impatience for them to cut the chit-chat and get on to the gory details. “Madam Bradamant. Kindly take a seat. I perceive that you have recently come from another world where it happens to have been snowing.” He flung himself into his favourite armchair. “Strongrock, Winters, sit or not as you wish, but I believe the lady’s business is urgent.”

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good to ask to speak to you in private?” Bradamant said. “And how did you know about the snow?”

  “Very little good,” Vale replied. “And it would make me very curious about why you are trying to keep secrets from my colleagues. As to the snow, while your clothing has had time to dry, the marks on the hem of your dress indicate you have been walking through dirty snow, which left traces on the fabric as it dried.”

  Irene treasured a little spark of delight at the word colleagues, taking a seat in one of the spare armchairs. Kai dropped into another, leaning forward with interest.

  Bradamant turned her hands over in her lap. “Before we start,” she said, “what I have to tell you mustn’t go beyond the walls of this room. And I don’t mean the local newspapers. I’m talking about Fae, dragons, or even other Librarians—if they aren’t already involved.”

  “Involved in what?�
�� Irene asked. She’d always tried to stay out of Library politics, but a creeping feeling of doom was suggesting she should have paid more attention. What exactly had she managed to miss?

  Bradamant looked at the three of them—Vale, Irene, and Kai—then took a deep breath. “A peace conference has just started,” she said, the words spilling out too fast, as if she was trying to complete her statement before someone stopped her. Or as if she was afraid of what she was saying. “Between the dragons and the Fae. The Library’s playing mediator. And there might be a genuine chance of it working.”

  “And I suppose,” Vale said drily, “I’m to attend as a representative of humanity. Those mere common mortals who people the worlds.”

  “You must be joking,” Bradamant said, dropping all semblance of tact. “They barely listen to us. What makes you think they’re going to listen to ordinary humans? No, we need you there because the second negotiator on the dragon side has been murdered, and it looks as if the whole thing is going to fall apart. Vale, if you’ve ever felt you owed anything to the Library, if you have any regard for the safety of other worlds besides your own, then I’m begging you to come and help us. The Library can offer you whatever you want. But we need to know who did it, before someone starts a war.”

  There was dead silence in the room.

  Finally Irene said, “When the hell did this happen?” She saw Vale twitch at the vulgarity. “Please excuse my language,” she added hastily. “But seriously, how? It’s only been a few months since the Alberich drama.” That was the short way of putting it. It sounded better than since Alberich tried to destroy the Library, nearly killing all of us. And I can only hope that he’s dead and stays that way. “How on earth is all this supposed to have happened since then too, and how can you keep something like this hushed up?” The dragons and the Fae came from opposite ends of the universe and were creatures of order and chaos, respectively. The dragons embodied pure natural forces, and the Fae represented fictional narrative tropes—so they were polar opposites. And they didn’t just dislike each other—they loathed each other. Humans were caught in the middle—possessions to be protected, or playing pieces to be used in their games. While individuals from either side might be reasonable and occasionally willing to negotiate, the idea that the two sides might be willing to make peace was something that Irene had never even considered in her most spectacular daydreams.

  “What I want to know is how it could have happened at all!” Kai was as stiff as a carved statue in his chair. The colour had drained from his skin, leaving him paler than marble, and his fingers dug into the arms of the chair—as though he would break it apart in order to assert reality as he knew it. “And it is impossible that any of my kindred would consider peace with such beings as the Fae!”

  “These are both valid points,” Vale said. He settled back in his chair, calm with the ease of a man who didn’t have an immediate personal stake in the matter. Or perhaps he was simply allowing Irene and Kai to act as lightning rods and ask the questions he wouldn’t know to ask. While his voice was all smooth reason and logic, his eyes were hard and suspicious. “Maybe you should begin from the beginning. Assuming that we aren’t required on the spot immediately?”

  “We’ve got long enough for me to explain this to you,” Bradamant said. She folded her hands over each other, stilling their trembling, composing herself. “The scene of the murder’s being kept as untouched as possible. It did get disturbed when the victim was found but hasn’t been tampered with since then.”

  Kai swallowed, closing his eyes for a moment as though he didn’t want to ask, but it came out unwillingly. “Who is the victim?”

  It might be someone he knows, Irene realized. It might be a friend, or family . . . She reached across to touch his wrist for a moment, in a vain gesture of reassurance.

  “Lord Ren Shun,” Bradamant said. “He was a liegeman of—”

  Kai’s sharp hiss of indrawn breath cut her off. “He’s the sworn man of my lord uncle Ao Ji! What was he doing at an event such as this?”

  “Well, that’s part of the problem,” Bradamant said. “Your uncle is there too. He’s . . .” She looked as if she was remembering something extremely unsettling, and her hands clenched in her lap. “Deeply unhappy.”

  “My lord uncle has a temper,” Kai agreed, his tone as carefully neutral as Bradamant’s was carefully controlled. “But how could such an attack have happened?”

  “Perhaps if you were to permit Madam Bradamant to tell her story without interrupting, we’d find out,” Vale suggested. He was watching Bradamant from under half-closed eyelids, as if he suspected the whole story was an elaborate hoax.

  Irene might have agreed with Vale—after all, Bradamant had lied to both of them before—but this time she felt the other Librarian was telling the truth. Those hints of distress were a little too real to be faked. And she could guess why Bradamant was off balance. If she’d been anywhere near a dragon king who had lost his temper . . .

  She made her way over to where Vale kept the brandy, splashing some into four glasses, then returned to hand them round. Bradamant took her glass with a nod of thanks, but both Vale and Kai ignored theirs for the moment.

  Bradamant sipped the brandy and pulled her usual air of calm composure around her like the mantle she still wore. “From the beginning, then,” she said. “It all goes back to when Kai here was kidnapped by the Fae.”

  “In order to start a war between the dragons and Fae, I thought,” Vale said.

  “Yes,” Bradamant agreed, “but when the abduction went wrong, you could say that it galvanised those on both sides who hadn’t originally wanted one. A war, that is. When they saw just how close they’d come to being embroiled in a conflict, one that they really weren’t interested in, just because one dragon princeling had been seized by a pair of manipulators, a number of them reconsidered the status quo. It began to seem like a good idea to get a non-aggression pact up and running. Or so I’ve been told, you understand. I wasn’t actually involved in the early parts of this myself. I only found out about it two days ago.”

  Kai was still frowning. “And I didn’t hear anything about this when I was visiting my family—and that was less than a month ago.”

  “It must have been kept very secret, even within both sides,” Irene said. She considered. “Were the prime movers planning to spring a peace treaty on their allies as a fait accompli once it had been agreed, and hope that they’d go along with it?”

  Bradamant nodded. “Or at least the instigators hoped the allies in question wouldn’t object too strongly. And once one little peace agreement had been reached, more might have come in time. It was a very tentative bridge. But it was a bridge.”

  Vale nodded. “And when precisely did both sides approach each other? And when—and why—did they approach the Library?”

  “I don’t know exactly when contact was made,” Bradamant said, “but Fae and dragon representatives contacted the Library shortly after Alberich was destroyed—wanting us to act as mediators.”

  “You mean, once they’d seen that we were safely back on our feet and he wasn’t going to wipe us out in a ball of flaming debris?” Irene said wryly.

  Bradamant shrugged. “Consider their attitude to be a compliment to us—or rather you—for getting rid of him. Ultimately he was a danger to them as well as to us. Library power in the hands of someone who didn’t even pretend to neutrality? Not something that either the Fae or the dragons would sanction.” She must have seen the expression on Irene’s face. “No, I don’t trust either side myself, but what do you actually want us to do about it? Stand on our pride? Or accept the realpolitik and do whatever we can, with the goal being to establish a non-aggression pact which both sides would sign up to?”

  “You’re veering between peace treaty and non-aggression pact,” Vale commented. “Which would you say is more accurate?”

  Bradamant
paused, then shrugged. “It’s still being hammered out. I’d prefer the first one, but I’ll take whatever we can get. Lord Ren Shun was doing a lot of the negotiating. To be honest, he and the Fae second in command were getting on a lot better than the two principals.”

  Vale nodded. “A situation not unknown among human beings. Very well. And your Library was brought in as a neutral party?”

  “Exactly.” Bradamant sipped her brandy again. “I don’t know the full details—I haven’t been told the full details—but the original idea seems to have been that we organise the location and act as arbitrators. Both sides knew that if we swear to something in the Language, we have to keep our word. That way they could be sure that we’d stay neutral. And I think there are going to be clauses in the final agreement, involving us not ‘acquiring’ books from treaty signatories . . . which could be inconvenient. Anyhow, we ended up booking hotels in Paris, in a different world to this one.”

  “Hotels?” Vale queried.

  “Three hotels,” Bradamant said with a sigh. “One each for the two sides and a third one for negotiations to take place. Both sides refused to share a hotel. And this was as neutral a world as we could find.”

  “‘We’ booked hotels . . . ?” Kai said. “I thought you said that you’d only just come in on it.”

  Bradamant flushed but kept her tone level. “The senior Librarians organised them. I was using the collective ‘we.’ If I may continue?”

  Vale waved a lazy hand for her to go on.

  “So skipping over the background, which I can give you on the way there, the crime boils down to this. The second dragon negotiator, Ren Shun, went out yesterday evening—not telling anyone exactly where he was going. He was found the next morning, stabbed in the back in a conference room belonging to the negotiations hotel. The Fae were accused, of course.”