The Masked City

by Genevieve Cogman

  Irene caught up her skirts and stampeded down the stairs after him. He was standing in the doorway, an envelope and paper held carefully between his fingers. A sandy-haired messenger boy in a hotel uniform was cringing in front of him, clearly wishing he’d got away faster. ‘This fellow has news.’

  ‘What news?’ Irene demanded.

  ‘Tell us where you got this note.’ Vale’s hands were tight with tension, the lines of his knuckles and tendons showing - but he held the paper delicately, his fingertips barely brushing the edge.

  The messenger boy wetted his lips nervously. ‘I work at the Savoy, sir. Gentleman guest there wanted it delivered to you.’

  Vale nodded. ‘His name and appearance?’

  ‘He didn’t give his name, sir,’ the boy said. Vale bit back a sigh. ‘He was a gentleman, though. Had a beard.’

  Vale sighed. ‘Very well. Here.’ He fished out a half-crown and tossed it to the boy. ‘For your time and effort. You may go.’

  ‘Should we be letting him walk away?’ Irene queried softly as the boy dashed off.

  ‘I can find him if I need to,’ Vale said confidently. ‘You saw how that uniform fitted him exactly? It was his own, not some stolen disguise. And the five buttons on his sleeve? He’s one of the senior boys at the Savoy, with a possible promotion to valet in the near future. His gloves were clean this morning, and his shoes were freshly polished. But he wasn’t able to give us any description, besides that the fellow had a beard and acted like a gentleman, which is probably why he’s still at the messenger-boy level. A higher-ranking employee would be expected to notice more than that, even if he didn’t talk about it.’

  Irene nodded. ‘What’s in the letter?’ she asked.

  Vale held it so that she could see it. ‘Don’t touch it,’ he advised her. ‘I am still examining it.’

  It was clearly expensive paper. The slanting italic handwriting was in black ink:

  Kai has returned to his own family. Make no attempt to see him again. This is the only warning that will be given.

  Vale held it up to the light. ‘No watermark,’ he said. ‘The same paper as the envelope. I need better light to examine these.’ He was already heading up the stairs again to his room.

  Irene followed. ‘It’s a fake of some sort,’ she said. ‘It cannot possibly be from his family.’

  ‘Oh? You are certain of that?’

  ‘Absolutely. I saw one of his family’s messages earlier. It was on a scroll, and in Chinese. Nothing like this. And if one of his people had come to collect Kai, it wouldn’t have been done by abduction.’ She could imagine Kai arguing, but she couldn’t imagine him being beaten to the ground and carried off by force. ‘Besides, you already said that you had evidence of Fae magic being used in his kidnapping. No self-respecting dragon would cooperate with the Fae. And most of all …’

  ‘Yes?’ Vale murmured. He’d thrown himself down in front of his laboratory table and was examining the letter and envelope with a magnifying glass.

  Irene was pacing the room now, thinking it through. ‘If this had truly been the action of a dragon - perhaps one who felt that Kai was demeaning himself by associating with human beings, with us …’ More than that. Being our friend. ‘Any dragon who sincerely held those opinions wouldn’t bother to send messages. To you or me.’ She wondered if there would be a matching letter at her lodgings. There wasn’t time to go and check. ‘We would be beneath their notice.’

  Vale didn’t look up from his scrutiny of the envelope. ‘Do all of them have that opinion then?’ His tone was academic, but there was something in the way he tilted his head that suggested a similar pride and hauteur of his own.

  Of course, he’s an Earl. And an Englishman. And, most of all, the greatest detective in London. How could merely being a dragon compare to any of that?

  ‘I once met one who did. But he was courteous about it. There was a degree of, I suppose …’ She looked for the right words as she sat down. ‘Noblesse oblige. One does not cause unnecessary distress to lesser beings.’

  ‘How fortunate for us.’ Vale spun his chair around. ‘No watermark.’ He repeated his earlier comment. ‘Extremely high-quality paper, but not possible to identify it without further investigation. The handwriting is not one that I recognize. Added to that, I would not claim to be one of those people who reads character through handwriting, but the style is somewhat cramped and muted. I would suggest that the writer was attempting to disguise his or her usual script. The envelope was not sealed, so there is no clue to be obtained there. Your thoughts?’

  ‘My thoughts are more on the content than the context.’ Irene reached out for the letter, and Vale passed it to her. ‘And on the end result. Even if we weren’t aware Kai had been kidnapped, then we certainly would realize something was dubious when we received this. I think it’s a deniable red flag.’

  ‘A red flag?’ Vale queried.

  ‘An attempt to alert us that something is wrong, without the person in question admitting to giving us a warning.’

  ‘Ah.’ Vale nodded. ‘Lord Silver, yes. With that rather obvious dispatch of the letter via a bearded man, to point us in that direction.’

  Irene nodded as well. Her shoulders were cramped with tension. She mentally reviewed possible leads. They’d squeezed everything dry for the moment. Which meant that she could finally act. ‘We need to move,’ she said. ‘I need to enquire at the Library, and to see if I can contact Kai’s uncle, if they have a way to locate him. And you—’

  ‘Will get onto the Guantes, of course.’ Vale rose to his feet, offering her a hand to help her rise. ‘And Lord Silver, while I’m at it. If the fellow is up to something, then I’ll know about it. Where should we meet?’

  ‘They’ll probably be watching my lodgings,’ Irene said with regret. ‘And they must be watching here as well.’ She frowned as her thoughts came together. ‘If Kai was intercepted at your front door, then they are certainly watching here, and they may be aware that we are both here now and comparing notes.’

  ‘Oh, without a doubt,’ Vale agreed. ‘However, our going in different directions should help somewhat - will you be able to reach a nearby library, do you think?’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ Irene said firmly. There was a thread of satisfaction that he didn’t assume he’d need to escort her to deal with any trouble, or offer to do so. Earned respect from him was something she truly valued. ‘I don’t know how long I may be. I know it’s urgent. But if it’s difficult to reach Kai’s uncle … Should I look for you at Scotland Yard?’

  For a moment Vale frowned, then nodded. ‘Go to Singh. He remembers you.’ Irene remembered him, too. Inspector Singh, probably Vale’s closest ally among London’s police. ‘If I have any messages, I’ll leave them with him, and you can do the same.’

  He was still holding her hand. In fact he seemed to have forgotten that he was doing so. ‘Do be careful, Winters,’ he said. ‘Our enemies seem well prepared. If it were possible for me to accompany you, I would—’

  ‘But what you can find out here is more important,’ Irene interrupted. She would dearly have liked to have him at her back, and damn the rules about bringing strangers into the Library. But what she had said was true. They needed to know what the Guantes had been up to here. ‘And there’s no time to waste. I’m relying on you.’

  His smile was thin, but present. ‘Then we had better not keep Strongrock waiting.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Irene was almost surprised, and somewhat disappointed, when nobody tried to kidnap her on the way to the British Library. If someone had tried to kidnap her, at least she’d have had more of an idea what was going on.

  But there were no mysterious hansom cabs waiting to whisk her off to an unknown location, no masked thugs dragging her into back-alleys, nothing at all remotely useful. It left her in a bad temper as she stalked through the rooms to the main Library portal.

  The Traverse to the Library opened from a minor storeroom, one that used t
o be an office, and luckily there were no visitors around to see her entering. It was the work of moments to lock the door behind her using the Language, and she hurried across to the Traverse door. It looked like a store cupboard, and to any other user it would be just a store cupboard. But it was permanently linked to a specific door in the Library, and Irene had the linguistic key.

  ‘Open to the Library,’ she said, and felt the connection form as her words rolled on the air. She pulled the door open and quickly stepped through.

  The heavy iron-barred door on the Library side clanged shut behind her. On the other side there were still posters hanging on rails around the door, proclaiming: HIGH CHAOS INFESTATION, ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY and KEEP CALM AND STAY OUT. Irene frowned at the HIGH on the first poster. Last time she’d been through this entrance, a few months back, it had only been standard chaos infestation.

  If this was tied to Kai’s disappearance … She hoped not.

  Someone had been using the room to stockpile other books, and beside the packed shelves there were stacks of yellow-backed paperbacks all over the floor. Irene had to pull in her skirts to avoid toppling the piles as she made her way to the exit.

  The closest computer room was a couple of doors along to her left. It was empty at the moment, so she threw herself down in the chair and logged on, dashing off a quick email to Coppelia: Kai vanished. Dubious circumstances. Request immediate meeting. Irene.

  The answer came within five minutes. She’d only just looked up Dragons, negotiations with, but hadn’t progressed much further. The message read: Rapid shift transfer authorized. First turning on left, three floors up, transfer word is Coherent. Coppelia.

  Irene logged off, hoisted her skirts to her knees and began to run. Rapid shifts called for high-energy expenditure and weren’t held open for long. The fact that Coppelia had seen fit to authorize one was disturbing in itself.

  Three flights of stairs later, the walls were covered with Art Deco wallpaper, making the shift-transfer cabinet blatantly obvious stylistically. Its door was heavy oak and looked very out of place between a couple of plaster statuettes of robed women. And it was just large enough for one person and a pile of books.

  She stepped inside and closed the door. There were no lights. There was no sound. There was only the smell of dust. She reached out to either side to brace herself against the walls.

  ‘Coherent,’ she said in the Language.

  The cabinet shook around her, like a dumb-waiter cupboard being yanked at high speed in several directions. She shut her eyes, concentrating on not throwing up.

  With a thump, the cabinet arrived. Irene took a moment to catch her breath, before pushing open the door and stepping out into the well-lit room beyond.

  It was Coppelia’s private study, familiar from many hours spent there as Coppelia’s personal student and assistant. The focus of the room was the large mahogany desk, which curved round in a wide U, allowing a full range of documents to be shuffled over its surface. The walls were full of bookshelves, naturally - but several Slavic ikons in heavy gold and wood hung from them here and there, breaking up the expanse. Irene noticed it was night outside, and the study lights blazed through the bow window, harshly lighting the snowscape beyond. The usual extra chairs had been removed from the room, meaning that Coppelia sat in the only chair, behind her desk.

  Standing before her, Irene wondered if she was meant to feel like a schoolgirl reporting to a teacher, or possibly a penitent reporting to an inquisitor. Whichever way, she suspected that she was meant to feel nervous.

  Coppelia herself looked almost as controlled as usual. A crimson coif shrouded her head, and only the edges of her white hair were visible at her forehead. Today she was in a stark sleeveless robe of smooth, dark-brown velvet that left the full length of her carved-wood left arm visible. It was the same shade of sallow oak as her natural right arm, but an entirely different texture - all joints and clockwork. ‘A poor report,’ she said, with a faint wheeze. ‘Unless you really don’t know any more than you’ve told me.’

  ‘I deliberately gave you only the bare bones,’ Irene said resolutely. ‘Given the importance of the situation, I assumed you’d want to hear the rest in person.’

  ‘As opposed to sending a detailed email that anyone could read, is that it?’ Coppelia enquired.

  ‘You’re making that assumption,’ Irene replied. ‘I didn’t.’ Coppelia had chosen to leave Kai’s controversial dragon heritage mostly undiscussed the last time they met. But Irene wasn’t sure if it was in fact known by everyone at the appropriate level, or still genuinely confidential.

  Coppelia raised her flesh-and-blood hand to rub at her forehead. ‘Tell me what you know, then.’

  Irene ran over the details quickly. She had to mention Vale’s involvement, of course. But Coppelia already knew about Vale, and that he knew an uncomfortably large amount about the Library. Coppelia nodded slightly at a few points - the invitation from Kai’s family, the warning from Lord Silver, the Guantes, and Vale’s comments on the letter (also supposedly from Kai’s family) - but otherwise she was silent as she listened.

  Finally she commented: ‘Dubious circumstances. I can hardly argue with that definition. Your thoughts?’

  ‘The letter’s a fake,’ Irene said frankly. ‘It’s not just the format. I would expect more style if it was from Kai’s people. From what he’s said of them, they’re royalty. Royalty does not send piddling little “Make no attempt to see him again” warning notes. They either wouldn’t bother with the commoners at all, or they’d sweep by and graciously inform us that we will be deprived of his presence. So it’s not even very good misdirection.’

  ‘And yet you’re here,’ Coppelia remarked. ‘And you’re asking about his family. If you’re so sure that it’s misdirection, why bother?’

  ‘Because we need to find him,’ Irene said. She folded her hands behind her back, hiding her clenched fists. ‘If Vale can trace the Guantes, or whoever they are, that’s good. But if not, then how do we track him? He’s my responsibility.’ The words hung in the air like a promise. ‘And since he was kidnapped while under my protection, his family may hold us responsible.’

  Coppelia steepled her fingers, flesh against wood. ‘It’s true that the Library has absolutely no wish to enter into a feud with Kai’s kin,’ she agreed. ‘And a dragon’s revenge is a serious business. Hurricanes, storms, tidal waves, earthquakes … I witnessed a world being destroyed in such a way and was barely able to escape. So what do you want from me?’

  Irene put aside some deeply unpleasant mental images. This was taking too long. ‘I need anything that we have on Lord Guantes that isn’t in the public records. And I’m assuming the Library knows more about Kai’s family than I do. Is there any chance the abduction could be their doing?’ A thought struck her. ‘Or the doing of someone connected to them? A rival faction? Or an over-enthusiastic servant?’

  ‘Hmm. A pertinent question. Nine out of ten.’ Coppelia considered, not taking her fierce eyes off Irene. Irene didn’t dare look away. ‘It is unlikely that his direct family would abduct him or leave a note to say he’d left. It would probably be beneath them. However, any royal family does have subordinates, junior relations, and in general people who would take on “Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?” suggestions with too much enthusiasm. One of them could have … And there are factions among the dragons. Not all of them support the royalty.’

  Irene sighed. Yet another uncertainty. ‘So I can’t be sure of their involvement.’

  ‘No,’ Coppelia said. ‘You can’t. Or rather, we can’t. And no, we don’t have any secret back-channels that we can use to ask about it, on behalf of the Library, either.’

  Irene tilted her head slightly. ‘On behalf of the Library, perhaps not, but how about from a private perspective? Isn’t there anyone out there who knows someone who knows someone, who could ask …’ She let the phrase trail off hopefully.

  Coppelia shook her head, a definite no,
but she also looked wary. Clearly there was someone who knew someone who knew someone else out there, even if they couldn’t handle this particular issue.

  ‘Of course there isn’t,’ Irene agreed bitterly. She could see where this was going. ‘Even if someone did have access to the dragons, they’d be too high-ranking within the Library to act alone. And the Library can’t be drawn into this?’

  Coppelia spread her hands. ‘Precisely. There’s only one person in this situation who can ask …’

  ‘All right. All right.’ Irene saw Coppelia’s eyes narrow at her tone and she tried to calm down. ‘All right. It has to be me.’ Who puts her head into the dragon’s mouth. And who will take the blame if it goes wrong. ‘But I would like to ask a question first. A general question, before I get down to specifics.’

  ‘You can certainly ask,’ Coppelia said carefully. ‘If I don’t answer, then it isn’t because I want to cause you further difficulty.’

  Irene nodded. ‘In the widest of terms then - why bring Kai into the Library? Seriously. You knew what Kai was. Why take him in as a trainee at all? And why assign him to me?’

  This was a conversation that should have been held behind shuttered windows or heavy velvet curtains. It felt wrong to be having it so openly. Wrong, and far too exposed.

  Coppelia looked down at the desk. ‘There have been other young dragons here before Kai,’ she said slowly. ‘None as highly born, but - well, it has happened, and it is politely ignored when it does happen. Even if the people brokering a placement may have thought their deception remained hidden. There are hidden protocols. There are understandings. No dragon has yet chosen to remain and take vows as a Librarian. To be honest with you, I doubt Kai will, either. It will not be in his nature.’

  Irene nodded, accepting the words. ‘But why me?’

  Coppelia hesitated, then nodded to herself. ‘Because,’ she said in the Language, necessarily speaking truth, ‘we thought it would be best for both of you.’ She dropped back into English, looking up at Irene again. ‘And that’s all I will tell you for now.’