The Invisible Library (17 page)

‘This is a bad idea,’ Kai said as soon as the door had closed behind Vale.

‘I am listening,’ Irene said as she began to pick at her bandage, ‘and I am paying attention, and if I do scream, it’s because my hand is in worse condition than I
thought. Go on.’

‘Why do you trust him?’ Kai demanded.

‘I don’t.’ Irene didn’t look up from the tightly wrapped bandages. ‘Not totally. But I think he’s telling the truth about his family and about his gift.
I’m not sure he trusts
us
, either.’

‘And that’s another thing,’ Kai said. ‘How can we possibly trust someone who’d betray their family?’

Irene let the bandages be and looked across at him. He had clenched his fists in his lap so tightly that she could see all the bones of the hand, and the blue veins up the inside of his wrist,
clear beneath his pale, pale skin. ‘We don’t know the whole of that,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what they may have done to drive him away. If—’

‘But he left them!’ Kai was nearly shouting. He controlled himself with an effort, rising to stand in front of Irene. ‘He admitted as much. If he really disagreed with them,
then he should have stayed with them and tried to change them from the inside. To just leave them, to walk out on them, to disobey his own parents – how can that possibly be
justified?’

Irene looked down at her hand again, partly to think, partly so that Kai shouldn’t see her own expression. Didn’t he realize how much he was giving away about himself? Or did he just
not care? That sort of openness was, in its way . . . intoxicating. ‘I hardly ever see my own parents,’ she said, and wondered at the quietness of her own voice.

‘But you haven’t defied them or deserted them.’ Kai dropped to his knees, looking up into her face. ‘You’ve followed their tradition. They were Librarians and so
are you. I’m not saying that he should
love
his family, not if they really were malicious, but he shouldn’t have left them. You can’t trust a man who’d do
that.’

‘I’m not saying we should trust him,’ Irene said. ‘I’m saying that we need to work with him.’ She felt very cold, and she wasn’t sure if it was because
of her hand, or the earlier shock, or her own words. ‘To serve the Library, I would work with murderers, or thieves, or revolutionaries, or traitors, or anyone who will give me what I need.
Do you understand me, Kai? This is important.’ She reached out with her unwounded hand to touch the side of his face. ‘I am sealed to the Library. I can make my own choices to some
extent – but at the end of the day, bringing back the book the Library wants is my duty and my honour, and that is all there is to it.’

‘Have you ever been forced to choose between the Library and your honour?’ Kai demanded.

‘Kai,’ Irene said, ‘the Library
is
my honour. And if you seal yourself to it, then it’ll be yours too.’ She could feel herself smiling grimly. ‘But
you’ve already told me that you don’t have any living family, haven’t you? So it’s not a choice you’ll ever have to make.’

Kai didn’t even flinch at that, he simply glared at her. ‘You’re confusing the issue. There ought to be a way of finding our book that doesn’t involve allying ourselves
with an honourless, family-betraying creature like this. Irene, please. Walk out now and tell him no. We don’t need this kind of help.’

Irene tried to think of a way to make him understand. Perhaps she was being too abstract in an attempt to make him comprehend this specific case – but, damn it all, he was going to have to
face tough moral choices himself some day. If he really wanted to be a Librarian. If he survived.

‘Leaving aside the question of his personal honour,’ she said, ‘we’re not in a good situation. Dominic Aubrey’s dead. There’s an enemy in the city, quite
possibly Alberich, and maybe others too. We’re cut off from a direct retreat, and though I may be able to open a way back—’

‘May?’ Kai broke in. ‘What do you mean, may?’

Irene raised her bandaged hand. ‘I mean that I may be chaos-contaminated. I need to find out. It should get better in a few days, but at the moment I may not be able to open a way to the
Library. It would keep me out in the same way that it’d keep out anything chaos-tainted. So we don’t have a convenient escape route.’

‘Oh,’ Kai said. He bit his lip.

She was actually far less certain than she was willing to admit about how long it might take for her to access the Library again. It wasn’t something that had happened to her before. She
knew the theory, but this was her first case of actual contamination. Thinking about it made her feel ill. She wanted peace and quiet and a chance to actually look at her hand, plus a small library
where she could run some tests.

Unfortunately, what she had here and now was a nervous and highly principled subordinate to reassure. It wasn’t a leader’s place to cast oneself trembling on a junior’s
shoulder and confess uncertainty. It wasn’t even a leader’s place to suggest that they might be in an indefensible position and should be grateful for any allies that they could get. It
was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions.

A leader’s job was a crock of shit.

This was becoming one of Irene’s least favourite missions ever. And that included the one with the evil dwarves under Belgium (what was it about Belgium?), and the one requiring a cartload
of carved amber plaques to be shipped across Russia. Or even the one with the cat burglar.

‘Would it help if we could find out more about his family?’ she offered. ‘If we find out that they’re not as bad as he’s painting, we can re-evaluate how much we
trust him.’

Kai shook his head decisively. ‘That makes no difference. We should reject his offer of help.’

‘That,’ Irene said quietly, ‘is not an option.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Kai’s lips were drawn together, his eyes darkly furious as he stood there, glaring down at her. In that moment, there was something almost inhuman
about him, something fiercer – more elemental, perhaps. For the first time, she thought he might actually disobey her.

In the end, he was the first to drop his eyes. ‘As you command,’ he said.
But I don’t approve of it
was unspoken and unnecessary.

Irene had met other Librarians who tried to manage their subordinates using shallow gender tactics. Bradamant, for one. She hadn’t liked it. She wasn’t going to try to sugarcoat this
for Kai by softening now or by fluttering her eyelashes at him. ‘Did you bring our stuff along when you got me out of the British Library?’ she asked.

‘I did,’ Kai answered stiffly. ‘Both your document case and the jar with the . . . the skin.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Irene said. ‘It must have been difficult to handle both them and me.’

Kai shrugged, but she had the feeling that he was pleased. ‘I found a larger suitcase in the room, and I managed to get the jar and your document case in it. Do we tell Vale about
those
?’

‘No,’ Irene said quickly. ‘That he doesn’t need to know. Did anything else happen while you were getting me out of there? People following us, attacks,
whatever?’

‘Nothing worth mentioning,’ Kai said smugly. ‘I wrapped your face in your veil and propped you against my shoulder and got my arm round your waist, and sort of steered you, and
I kept on telling you how you shouldn’t have had so much gin last night. Nobody looked at us twice.’

‘Very prompt thinking,’ Irene said drily. ‘Well done. Good job. And good selection of a place to hole up.’

‘If I’d known then what I know now . . .’ Kai muttered, but not quite as sullenly as before.

‘You did the best you could on the information you had,’ Irene said. She started peeling off the bandage again.

‘Are you sure it’s safe to do that?’ Kai asked. ‘You don’t want it to get infected.’

‘I just want to see how bad it is . . .’ A chunk of bandage fell back to reveal a layer of ointment-soaked dressing. Bits of raw skin showed at the edges, red and oozing. A twinge of
pain ran through her hand, and Irene suppressed a wince. ‘All right,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Who saw to this?’

‘I did,’ Kai said. ‘That trap took the skin off your hand as neatly as if – well, as if it was a glove being peeled off.’ He went down on one knee and took her hand
in his, winding the bandage round it again. ‘Vale gave me some antiseptics and bandages, and I set some healing spells on it, but try not to use it too much.’ His touch was careful and
precise, his fingers dry and hot when they brushed her wrist. ‘Normally I’d say that you can take the bandages off in a couple of days, but I don’t know about chaos
contamination.’

‘I can check that easily enough,’ Irene said confidently. ‘This room has enough books in it for me to try asserting basic resonance.’

Kai glanced around at the heavily shelved walls. ‘You don’t need to be in a real library for that?’

Irene shrugged, then grimaced in pain as the movement twisted her hand in Kai’s hold. ‘Sorry,’ she said, as he gave her a disapproving look. ‘Not exactly. I’d need
to be in a real library to open a passage, but a single room of books is enough for me to reaffirm my links. Of course, it has to be a lot of books . . .’ She smiled for a moment, remembering
the smell of old celluloid and dustless air. ‘Actually, any significant store of knowledge or fiction can be made to function. I did it in a film storage section once, an archive of old
television programmes. Not a single book in sight, all film reels and computer data, but the similarity in purpose and function was enough.’

‘Go on.’ Kai leaned forward eagerly. ‘Do it.’

‘All right.’ Irene was nervous, now that it actually came down to it. She’d spoken glibly enough about contamination, and while she knew the theory on the subject –
it’ll wear off, just be sensible and avoid further exposure and stay away from the Library until you’re clear – she’d never actually experienced it herself. ‘You may
want to stand away from the walls.’

‘I’m nowhere near the walls,’ Kai pointed out.

‘Oh. Right.’ Irene swallowed. ‘Okay.’

She took a deep breath, wetted her dry lips, and invoked the Library by her name and by her rank as Librarian, speaking the words in the Language which described it. Unlike nouns or other parts
of speech, words that described the Library or the Language themselves were among the few parts of the Language that never changed.

The bandages covering her hand burst into flame. The shelves on the walls shuddered and groaned, wrenching from side to side and creaking like living trees in a winter storm, and books tumbled
to crash on the floor. Tossed-aside newspapers and piles of notes rustled and moved, crawling along the floor in fractions of an inch, writhing away from her like crushed moths. The fountain pen on
the desk jolted and rolled across the open notebook where it had been balanced, trailing ink behind it in a dark wet line.

‘What the devil!’ Vale burst in, carrying an enamelled tea-tray. ‘What do you think you’re doing—’

‘Excuse me,’ Kai snapped, grabbing the blue and white milk jug off the tray. He caught Irene’s wrist in his other hand, and shoved her blazing bandaged hand into the jug,
flames and all.

There was a hiss and a gout of steam, and her hand went out.

‘Thank you,’ Irene said, trying to get her breathing stable again. Her hand ached as if it had been stung by wasps all over and then left to get sunburned. ‘I’m so sorry
about the milk, but I take my tea black anyway . . .’ She was conscious that she was babbling, but she had to say something to try to explain things, and besides, her hand
hurt
.

‘My books!’ Vale exclaimed in horror, looking around the room. ‘My notes! My – my – ’ He stood there, tea-tray shaking in his hands, glaring down at her in
fury. ‘Miss Winters,
kindly explain yourself
!’

Irene considered a number of things. She considered fainting. She considered claiming that it was a magical attack. She considered just giving up on Vale and walking out of the door. She also,
with a pang of regret, considered how she’d feel if it had been
her
books all over the floor. Finally, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Vale. I was trying something and it went
wrong.’

Vale set down his tray on the nearest bit of uncluttered table with an audible thump and tinkle. ‘Something. Went. Wrong,’ he said coldly.

‘Yes,’ Irene said. She pulled her hand out of the jug. It dripped milk. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

Vale tapped his fingers against the surface of the tray. ‘May I ask if something is going to go “wrong” again in the near future?’

‘I think it very unlikely,’ Irene said hopefully. ‘I’m terribly sorry. Could I have some clean bandages, please?’

Vale stared at her.

‘I’ve never seen her do it before,’ Kai put in. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Simply an accident,’ Irene agreed. ‘I truly am extremely sorry.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ Vale spat out. ‘Very well. Bandages.’

He slammed the door behind him as he left the room.

‘What does that mean?’ Kai demanded. ‘The books! The papers!’

‘It means I’m contaminated after all,’ Irene said quickly and quietly. ‘We can’t get into the Library until I’m clear. And I can’t use the Language
reliably.’

Kai stared at her. ‘You’re being awfully calm about this.’

‘Having your hand catch fire puts things into perspective . . .’ Irene said. Any words would do, anything that kept her from panicking. She couldn’t afford to panic. She was
contaminated with chaos,
sick
with the stuff, and she could only hope that she was right, that it would go away in time. But now, she had to hold together and be in charge. ‘. . . I
find that it distracts me.’

Kai just looked at her for a few seconds longer, then turned to glare at the door. ‘I don’t believe Vale swallowed that.’

‘I’d say it’s fairly conclusive proof that he needs our help badly,’ Irene said.

Vale stalked back in with a basin of water and some bandages. ‘Far be it from me to criticize,’ he said, ‘but setting the afflicted body part on fire is not a usual form of
treatment for an injured hand. Though I hear that milk is high in calcium.’