The Invisible Library (23 page)

Right. She had to explain to Vale about Alberich. She owed him an explanation about a great many things now. But what was the point, if they were just going to die – well, it did remove
the need for justifications. Yet there were other ways of dodging that sort of thing, and she was avoiding the subject again. And the water was pressing down, and they were all going to die . .
.

He doesn’t just want us dead. He wants us dying in fear, in the dark, and slowly. This isn’t just wanting to get us out of the way, so he can work undisturbed. It’s malice,
pure and simple.

She had been afraid. She had been so very afraid that she’d been cringing in the corner, unwilling to speak, let alone act. But now something else woke in her.

I will not tolerate this.

‘Then we’re just going to have to find a way to break it,’ Irene said. She forced herself to lean forward. ‘What one man can do another can undo.’ Saying the words
made them possible, gave her strength.

‘But you can’t touch his magic!’ Kai said. ‘When it infected you before it nearly killed you!’

She wished that she had time to think this through calmly, to plan, to consider. ‘Wait,’ she said, pulling the glove off her damaged hand and pointing her fingers at the window.
‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘Would you care to explain?’ Vale invited tensely.

‘I was attacked by the same forces he used earlier,’ Irene said. She could feel the cold water soaking into her slippers and stockings, curling up around her ankles. ‘If I can
identify them and expel them, it should break the binding, and we can swim out of here.’

‘Very good.’ Vale eased himself further back in his seat. Perhaps it was only the dim light that made Irene think that he was trying to position himself as far away from her as
possible. She’d sort things out later. She’d explain things later. Right now she just had to make sure there would
be
a later.

Irene held her fingers a fraction of an inch away from the window and focused – away from the water, the darkness, the two men in the carriage with her, and into a world where language
structured reality.

It was a fact that Alberich controlled and used chaotic forces. The chaotic forces must therefore be discrete and identifiable. But she had no words in the Language for these forces, and she
could only control what she could name or describe.

However, she could name and describe
herself
.

It wasn’t a thing that the Librarians did very often. Oh, certainly if you had a broken left arm you could try saying, ‘
My left tibia is in fact not fractured but perfectly
whole
.’ But while your tibia might obey, your muscles would still be torn and any wound would still be open. Unless you could name every single thing that required naming, you would
probably end up with a partly healed wound that would be more trouble than letting it heal in the normal way. While some Librarians went in for that level of detail, and were very sought-after,
Irene was not one of them.

But a person, especially a Librarian, could be named and described holistically as a single entity. She bore the Library’s mark on her flesh, and her name was in the Language. If she could
enforce that strongly enough, deliberately enough, there would be no space for the chaos forces inside her. Without that to contend with, she could finally access her full powers as a
Librarian.

This was not something she’d ever tried. Then again, she’d never been infested to this degree before. Only imminent death would force her to play with dangerous, untested,
theoretical techniques, otherwise maybe she’d have thought of this earlier.

Her life was far too full of learning experiences.

Before she could lose her nerve, she shaped the words with her lips, barely audible, speaking in the Language. ‘
I am Irene: I am a Librarian: I am a servant of the
Library.
’

Her brand burned across her back as she enforced her will. But she felt curiously distanced from the pain, as though she could shrug it away and wish it gone. In a flash of insight, she realized
that would be disastrous. What she felt in her was the conflict between self-definition and the contamination. She couldn’t afford to ignore it. She had to embrace it.

But it
hurt
. She heard her breath catch, the sound strange in her ears.

‘Irene?’ Kai said, his voice concerned. It was too dark to see him now.

With a racking surge, like vomit after eating spoiled food, the chaos power came jolting out of her. She tried not to think of the buffet earlier that evening (salmon, mussels, crab, soup,
little prawns in sauce) and failed. It spilled from her hand, boiling off her fingers in waves of shadow that rippled in the air – and like any living thing, it looked for shelter, for
something like itself.

It jumped for the window, arcing through the narrow span of air, and crackled into the glass. Irene had just enough time to wonder if she should jump away from the window, when it broke.

Not just the window.

The whole carriage came apart. First the window, splintering into shards of glass, then sections of the carriage were toppling away from each other like a badly glued model. She barely had time
to feel the splinters of glass in her arm before the water came in like a hammerblow. And, surprisingly clearly in the near-darkness, she saw Kai’s face looking strangely decisive. His mouth
was moving, he was saying something –

She had several seconds of thrashing panic before she realized that she could breathe.

The three of them were drifting along together at the bottom of the river, enclosed in a long continuous coil of dark water. It was a flexing shifting
visible
current in the river,
separate from the rest of the water. It even felt cleaner. The shattered remnants of the carriage were already invisible in the shifting mud of the bottom, some distance behind them. Above, through
the surface of the water, streetlamps glimmered in hazy balls of white and orange. Kai floated a few paces ahead of herself and Vale, moving at the same pace as them. He was saying something, but
the river water filled her ears and she couldn’t hear him.

Vale grasped at her sleeve. He mouthed something that was probably
What is going on, Miss Winters?

On the positive side, Irene reassured herself, he must be feeling more composed if he was back to calling her Miss Winters. She shrugged as obviously as she could, gesturing soothingly.
It is
all under control,
she mouthed back.

Vale didn’t look as if he believed her, which was a shame, because she was now sure that things actually were back under control. To the extent that the three of them weren’t about
to drown, at least.

No, the real problem was something else entirely. Now she was sure what Kai really was. A river-spirit might have changed himself to water to save them, and a nature-spirit of some other type
might have cajoled or persuaded the river to help them, but only one sort of being would give orders to a river.

Kai was a dragon. What the hell was she supposed to do about that?

And he’d chosen to reveal himself in order to save them. Not himself: he would presumably have managed quite comfortably on his own. But them. Her and Vale. It was a commitment on
Kai’s part that made her worry whether she would be able to answer it. She didn’t like commitments to other people. They could get . . . messy.

The tumbling rush of the current veered towards the far bank, and then lifted the three of them out of the water itself, rising in an arc of dark water. They were placed on the dockside,
deposited as lightly as driftwood. A couple of beggars who’d been nursing their hands over a small fire just sat there, looking at the three of them numbly as the water sloshed over the
pavement and ebbed back to the river again.

A curl of the river still held itself aloft, curving towards where Kai stood. It wasn’t quite like a serpent: the head had features something like a human and something like a dragon (yes,
that again). There was also something of the lion, mane wet and draggled with weeds and dirt. Its eyes gleamed yellow as fog lamps, burning under heavy brows. This spirit was as polluted as the
water itself, its body entwined with fragments of garbage and long streaks of filth. A heavy smell of oil and weed clung to it, wafting thickly along the dock.

Kai faced it and gave a small, precise inclination of his head. ‘Your service is acknowledged,’ he said firmly. ‘Return with my thanks and the thanks of my family.’

The river-spirit bowed its head in a long fluctuation that rippled along its body, then reared up and crashed back into the river in a spray of black water. The eyes were the last thing to
vanish beneath the surface of the river, disappearing slowly rather than simply closing, visible for a long moment under the dark water.

Vale took a step forward. ‘What was that?’ he demanded, shocked. ‘What did you
do
? What is it that you have brought into my London, sir?’

Kai turned with a snarl, his eyes an inhuman shade of blue, as fierce and dangerous as gas flames. ‘What it was, sir, was—’

‘Was under my orders,’ Irene said, stepping between them. She couldn’t allow this to degenerate into a shouting match. And more than that, she could sense something archaic and
furious within Kai, the dragon under the human skin now very close to the surface. She had to divert it now, give him familiar channels to work in, and give Vale a target – herself –
who he simply couldn’t shout down without shattering his own rules of custom and propriety. She regarded Vale firmly, refusing to show him an inch of fear or terror or even, she hoped,
nervousness. ‘I have promised you more information, sir, and you shall have it, but I suggest we return to your lodgings first. Mr Strongrock acted on my instructions to
protect
and
save
us all.’ It was a fairly small lie, really only a half-lie as lies went, because Kai had certainly known she would want him to protect all of them. ‘And this is no time for
us to be arguing, when we are all fighting a greater enemy.’

Vale regarded her for a moment, then granted her a small nod, nearly the mirror-image of Kai’s own salutation to the river-spirit. ‘Very well, Miss Winters. We shall return to my
lodgings. I can only have faith in you, I suppose, as I have done before.’

That stung. As no doubt it was meant to. She smiled as sweetly as she could, then turned to Kai. ‘We can talk later,’ she said softly, ‘or we can talk now, but either way, I
know what you are, and it doesn’t matter.’

‘You think very highly of yourself,’ Kai answered, equally quietly, but far more deadly, ‘if you believe that it doesn’t matter.’

This was very different to handling Vale. There she had needed to hide her fear to convince him to wait for information. Here, with Kai, she needed to show her control and dispassion or, she
could feel it in her bones, she would lose him to his true nature.

She couldn’t afford that. She had a responsibility to the Library. And she had a responsibility to him.

‘Are you still my student?’ she asked him directly. ‘Am I still your mentor?’ Nothing more than that. The bond of loyalty, and the bond of trust. Anything else was
something that they would have to work out later.

He looked at her, and something inhuman seethed behind his eyes. ‘Do you think you can command me?’

‘
Yes
,
’ she said, and she spoke in the Language.

The word hung in the air between them. Then Kai closed his eyes, and reopened them, and now they were a human blue, sharp but no longer alien. ‘Then I believe I am still under your
orders,’ he said, and he managed a very small smile.

‘Miss Winters, Mr Strongrock, over here!’ Vale called. He had walked to where the dock ended and the houses began, and had somehow managed to conjure up a carriage. As Irene followed
Kai across to the carriage, struggling with her soaked skirts and cloak, she couldn’t help but notice that Kai was perfectly dry. It didn’t seem fair. But it was a comforting, small
thing on which to concentrate. She could be aggravated by something simple, rather than floundering in terror at what she had just faced down.