The Lost Plot

by Genevieve Cogman

  And would you prevent him from trying to save his daughter? a voice as cold and firm as Kai’s own father’s said at the back of his mind. Would you deny him the right to make amends for his mistakes?

  Then Evariste came barrelling back through the door, pushed Kai out of the way, and slammed it shut. “Library designation B-349, French nineteenth-century science fiction,” he reported. “In case you need to tell Irene. Now can we get out of here?”

  The fire alarm was still whooping in the background, but Kai spared a moment to look over the other books that Judge Pemberton had included in his bequest. “Here,” he said, selecting a few of them. “You carry these. I may need my hands free.”

  “Why the hell are we taking The Dream of the Red Chamber?” Evariste asked. “Light reading, if we get stuck on the subway?”

  “No, in case we get stopped by some of Qing Song’s minions who can’t read Chinese,” Kai said cheerfully.

  “Oh. Right. Hey, that’s not a bad thought.” Evariste paused. “Though if we’re going to be throwing them away anyhow, why not take The Investiture of the Gods . . . ?”

  “Because I like The Investiture of the Gods,” Kai said firmly, “and I don’t like The Dream of the Red Chamber.”

  “Typical dragon idealisation of heroes and divinities in order to justify divine mandate,” Evariste muttered under his breath. “Let’s try to find a bag on our way out of here, okay? Rather than carrying these around like little babies in my arms for the rest of the day.”

  “Right,” Kai agreed.

  The place was already deserted as they made their way out through the blank white twisting corridors, past cupboards groaning with the weight of their contents, and crates as yet unsorted. Kai turned his head from side to side, listening, but the constant shriek of the fire alarm drowned out any lesser sounds. In the distance, with a sense other than hearing, he could feel the slow pulse of the rivers that cut through the city of New York. But they were too far away to be of any use.

  He and Evariste passed the desk where the clerk had been sitting—he must have been the one who sounded the alarm—and came to the elevator just as the alarm cut off.

  The elevator wasn’t working.

  Kai eyed the stairwell next to it. It would make too convenient an ambush.

  “Damn safety regulations and turning off the elevators during fire alarms,” Evariste muttered. “What do we do if they’re waiting at the top of the stairs?”

  Kai considered. “There are multiple stairs up to the ground-level from the basement, right?” When Evariste nodded, he went on. “So they can’t have people waiting at the top of all of them.”

  “Want to bet?” Evariste asked sourly.

  “Pull yourself together!” Kai tried to will backbone into Evariste. “We got in here, we secured the target book—we can do this. If we can just get up to the ground-floor, we don’t have to worry about the main entrance. There are plenty of windows.”

  “I thought you were supposed to have military training,” Evariste snapped back. “We can’t fight our way upstairs past opponents with guns when we aren’t even armed. It’s just stupid. We’ll get shot! The Language doesn’t stop bullets!”

  “Who told you I’d had military training?” Kai asked, diverted.

  “Don’t all dragons? Qing Song was all about this battle and that battle—”

  “Hey there,” a voice called down to them from higher up the stairs.

  Kai turned to look, stepping between Evariste and the stairwell. There were two men on a landing, where the stairs bent back on themselves to ascend to the ground-floor. Both of them were openly carrying tommy guns. But the guns weren’t actually pointed at Kai and Evariste—yet. That was something.

  “That’s right,” the man who’d spoken earlier said. “Now put your hands on your heads, boys, and come up the stairs in single file. Don’t give us any trouble, and we won’t give you any.”

  “What about these books?” Evariste asked, jerking his chin towards the four volumes in his arms.

  The first speaker paused, frowning, trying to work out how to handle this breach in what was clearly a Standard Speech to Kidnap Victims.

  His fellow sighed. “You don’t put your hands on your head. You hang on to your books. Your friend does put his hands on his head. Now can we get the hell on with this before the boss loses his temper?”

  Kai raised his hands slowly, turning to Evariste. “Are you sure we’re the people these men are looking for?” he said meaningfully.

  “I was about to say that,” Evariste muttered. More loudly, he said in the Language, “You men with the guns perceive that we are not the people you’re looking for, and that we’re just terrified bystanders who should be allowed to leave.”

  The gangsters both frowned; then the second one waved them up the stairs with his gun. “Just keep on going and don’t hang around,” he instructed them in a friendly but casually menacing way. “What’s going on here ain’t none of your business.”

  “Absolutely,” Kai agreed. He caught Evariste’s elbow, surreptitiously supporting the other man as they headed up the stairs. “Can’t you go any faster?” he hissed.

  “Maybe if I wasn’t carrying several large, heavy books . . .” Evariste muttered back.

  They passed the two gangsters and hurried up to the ground floor.

  “This is bad. I don’t know how they tracked us here.” Evariste looked round, orienting himself, then nodded to the left. “Through that way, to the Great Hall, and the exit. Try to act natural—”

  “Stop!” came a yell from behind them.

  Footsteps came running from the direction of the Great Hall, loud on the marble. Kai and Evariste made a hasty diversion to their right, past Egyptian sarcophagi and clay models of tomb entrances, followed by the echoing yells of their pursuers.

  “How many—people—has he got hunting me?” Evariste panted.

  “Too many,” Kai grunted. They swung into a wide room whose north wall was covered with slanting windows. What looked like a genuine sandstone Egyptian temple entrance was erected in the middle. Unfortunately the gunmen in front of the window were of a much more recent vintage. Their tommy guns gleamed under the strong museum lights.

  “Let’s not do anything too hasty,” one of them said. He shifted his gun so that it was pointing at the floor in front of Kai and Evariste. “Now, you boys have had a good run. I can respect that. But I only need one of you. So in the interests of both of you staying alive, how about we have a little agreement of no more funny business?”

  “When you say you only need one of us,” Kai asked in a tone of academic interest, “do you mean that either of us would do, or is it a case of you only want a specific one of us, and the other is unfortunately expendable?”

  “You’ve got it,” the gangster said. “I only need Mr. Evariste Jones over there. So if Jones wants you to stay alive . . .” He shrugged meaningfully at Kai.

  “Be careful what Jones says, boss,” someone called from behind them. It sounded like the man they’d passed on the stairs. “He can do some sort of hoodoo with his voice.”

  That provoked stirring and mumbles among the assembled gunmen, but unfortunately it didn’t convince any of them to point their guns elsewhere.

  Kai scanned the room. Their position wasn’t good. They were too far away from the sandstone edifice to take cover behind it. While the windowed north wall offered certain possibilities, the glass looked too thick for a man to break through it easily. And Evariste couldn’t deploy the Language faster than a speeding bullet.

  Fortunately he had a plan.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “As long as you’re real careful with your hands and don’t try anything stupid,” the leader said.

  Kai ignored the way Evariste was looking at him—somewhere between desperate hope that Kai could sort th
is out and disbelief that Kai would choose this moment to have a cigarette—and reached carefully into an inner pocket of his suit. While he didn’t normally smoke, he’d collected a cigarette-case and lighter while he and Irene were equipping themselves last night at the department store. One never knew when such things might be useful. “Thanks,” he said. “My nerves are a bit on edge. And would you mind if my friend here puts his books down before we go along with you? No need to crowd the car.”

  The leader cocked his head to one side. “That’s not the way we’re playing it, fellow. The way I was told it, we’re to bring in Jones and his books. Half the city’s been looking for them, so I don’t think we’ll be letting him take a rain check with them now.” It sounded as if Kai was much more expendable than the books.

  “The city’s full of readers,” Kai said to Evariste. He flicked the lighter open and touched the flame to the cigarette. “Who’d have thought so many people would want a copy of”—and he switched to Chinese—“be ready to break the glass window when I tell you.”

  Evariste kept a straight face, but his eyes lightened. “It’s the New York education system,” he said. “I hear it’s the finest in the world.”

  Kai nodded. Then he dropped the cigarette to the floor, caught Evariste’s shoulder to pull the armful of books within reach, and held the lighter flame to them, a fraction of an inch from setting fire to the volumes. “Lower the guns,” he said calmly. “Everyone. Or the books go up in smoke. And then you have to explain that to your boss.”

  A dozen gun-barrels pointed directly at him. “Try it and you’re dead,” the leader snapped.

  “What are you doing?” Evariste struggled in Kai’s grip, trying to pull away from the naked flame. “You can’t do that!”

  “Can and will.” Kai put all the command that he’d learned at his father’s court into his voice, all the firmness and certainty of royal blood. “Back away. All of you. Or you’ll have the man but not the book, and Qing Song will have all your heads.”

  “We’re not working for him,” the leader sneered. “You might want to check the facts before raising on a hand like that.”

  Kai blinked. “Jin Zhi, then.” He kept the lighter flame steady.

  The leader shrugged. “Never heard of him. We work for Lucky George.”

  Kai wasted a moment wondering exactly why the local crime boss had joined the hunt. “Nevertheless,” he said, “if you don’t want the books going up in smoke, you’ll stand back.” He took a pace sideways himself, dragging Evariste with him, moving towards the shelter of one of the sandstone arches.

  “You can’t get out of here.” The leader made a surreptitious signal in the direction of the men behind Kai and Evariste, and they started to close in. “The boss ain’t going to be happy about this. And when George ain’t happy, nobody’s happy.”

  “Then we’ve all got a problem, because if we don’t walk out of here, then my boss is going to be unhappy,” Kai said. Another couple of sideways steps. They were almost under the curve of the arch now. “Bosses. Go figure.” A final step. “But you’ve got a point.”

  “So you’re going to stop being a wise guy?” the leader said suspiciously.

  “Now,” Kai said out of the side of his mouth to Evariste.

  Evariste had been waiting for the word. “Glass, break!” he shouted.

  At the same moment Kai dropped the lighter and swept them both to the floor, rolling on top of Evariste. Dragons were less vulnerable than humans were. He could only hope it was enough.

  He had a moment to tense in anticipation of incoming bullets. Then the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows shattered, with so huge a noise of fracturing panes and crashing shards that it drowned out all attempts at conscious thought. Kai flung his arms over his head, trying to block out the sound. Fragments of glass fell around him or ricocheted off the floor, bouncing like lethal raindrops. A few pieces sliced across his clothing and skin, drawing blood from his hands and neck. He felt Evariste shuddering underneath him, trapped and helpless—and, a few seconds later, he heard the screaming of the gangsters who had survived.

  When Kai raised his head, he saw that a number of them hadn’t.

  But if human thieves were stupid enough to endanger his life, then a clean straightforward death was a moderate, reasonable response. Every dragon he knew would agree. Even Irene would be practical about it. Probably.

  Though he had to admit, looking around, that the sheer scale of this was somewhat . . . excessive.

  “Up, now,” he said, pulling Evariste to his feet and scooping up a volume that had gone astray. “Come on!”

  Evariste pressed his knuckles to his mouth hard as he looked around the room—the broken glass everywhere, the fallen bodies, the blood, the men struggling to stand and failing—and the colour drained from his face. “I didn’t . . .” he began, and then stopped, as if uncertain what he wanted to deny.

  There wasn’t time for this. But Kai couldn’t bring himself to ignore the pain that was so evident in the other man’s face. “You didn’t cause this,” he said. “You didn’t escalate this. Our job is to stop it, here and now, and to save your daughter. You want me to blame the other dragons? Fine. Qing Song has touched things off that he can’t control. Help me stop them from getting worse. Help me to keep your Library safe.” He met Evariste’s eyes. “Please.”

  Evariste took a deep breath and nodded.

  The two of them stumbled out through the empty lattice of window frames, into the evening shadows of Central Park beyond. “We need a cab,” Kai said. “Then we need to contact Irene . . .”

  “If we can.” Evariste had pulled himself together. “What if George has got her too?”

  Kai showed his teeth. “Then that is going to be very unfortunate for George.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The balcony was solid stone, faced with the same marble as the rest of the hotel. And it had heavy wrought-iron interlaced railings, to stop any theoretical suicides from stepping over the edge.

  On the whole, Irene felt that climbing down the exterior of the hotel was slightly preferable to staying inside. Exactly how much so was arguable.

  When she peered over the edge, she could see there was another balcony directly beneath this one. It was just a question of getting from here to there. No worse, on a theoretical level, than the sort of maths problems one did at school, involving vectors, angles, and distances. On a practical level, there was the issue of slipping and falling to one’s death.

  She’d always known that a strong capacity for self-deception and ignoring unpleasant realities had to be useful somewhere.

  Irene kicked off her shoes and leaned over the edge to toss them onto the balcony below. Then she clambered over the iron railing.

  The sound of Fifth Avenue below her came throbbing upwards, threatening to break her concentration. The honking of car horns and the screeching of tyres, the buzz of voices, even distant threads of music from clubs or radios, as far away as birdsong . . .

  Inside the suite, a wolf’s howl was cut short by two quick gunshots.

  Irene swallowed, her throat very dry. First floor. Visualize this as the first floor. She lowered herself to a crouch against the outside of the railings, working her hands down as close as possible to the edge of the balcony. Then she took a deep breath and slid her feet loose, letting her body drop free, to dangle by her hands above Fifth Avenue.

  The floor of the next balcony down was about three yards away, at a rough terrified guess. And of course she was hanging outside its scope, rather than it being a straight drop down. This was the sort of thing Kai was so much better at than she was.

  A yell came from the balcony she’d just vacated. “She’s not here! She must have jumped!”

  “No, wait,” came another voice, unhelpfully observant. “I see her hands, she’s hanging on—”

  No time left. Irene swung
her body forward, fear massing in her stomach, then back again as if she were exercising on the apparatus in a gym—she never could remember all the gadgets, was it ropes or rings or parallel bars?—then forward again. And before anyone above her could grab her hands, she let go and dropped.

  It was one of those falls that lasted long enough for Irene to envisage everything going wrong, and at the same time had her hitting the balcony before she could think twice. She hit the floor with a jolt and let herself roll forward, bringing her arms up to cover her head. Then she smashed through the apartment’s full-length windows with a crash of breaking glass, loud enough to have been heard on the balcony above.

  The room she’d just invaded had the lights on and blazing, but there was nobody actually in it. A shriek came from the bathroom. “Help! Help! Thieves!”

  Irene would have shouted back something reassuring, but she couldn’t speak. And in any case, she had trouble thinking of anything that would be reassuring under these circumstances. She staggered to her feet, shook broken glass off her dress and coat, and retrieved her shoes. Time to run and keep on running.

  There was nobody in the corridor outside, and for a moment Irene thought that she’d made it free and clear. Then she heard the howling of wolves.

  Elevator or stairs? It was a gamble. The sight of the elevator door opening ahead of her made her decision clear. She ran for it, pushing past the hotel guests emerging from it, and shouldered her way in. There was nobody in there except a thin young hotel page, barely out of his teens, all cap and buttons and Adam’s apple, who gave her a hopeful smile. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  Down, Irene gestured. In case it wasn’t quite clear enough, she pointed urgently at the big lever next to where the page was standing.

  “No need to worry, ma’am,” the young man said helpfully as he reached for one of the two levers next to him. Irene dredged her memory for the current state of elevator technology—one lever for the doors, the other for up or down. “We have some of the best elevators in all New York here—” He broke off at the sound of screams and howls. “Holy Mother of God, the wolves are loose!”