The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library Novel)

by Genevieve Cogman

He tugged again. Irene released the bag, keeping hold of the strap, letting him tug at it. She dropped into a semi-squat, balancing on her left heel, then brought her right leg out in a straight wide pivot. It caught him off balance and he fell to the ground with a curse.

  She straightened again smoothly, pulling her bag back against her body, and picked up one of the flimsy restaurant chairs. It was of dubious quality, and as her antagonist tried to get up, it broke very thoroughly when it slammed into his body.

  He staggered back. She picked up another chair.

  Outside there were more explosions. Inside, people were gasping and pointing at her and the pseudo-waiter.

  Irene tried to decide whether it was more important to maintain her cover as a helplessly feminine secretary or to beat the bag-snatcher over the head with the chair and take him prisoner. After all, he wasn’t definitely involved with any larger conspiracies and might simply be a petty thief . . .

  The hell with it. She brought the chair down on his head, and he went backwards like a sack of potatoes.

  She dropped the remnants of the chair and put her free hand to her chest, hyperventilating. “I—,” she gasped. “I come here on holiday, and this man, this thief tries to snatch my bag, and nobody tries to help me. Not a single person comes to a helpless woman’s defence . . .”

  “My dear Miss Winters, I am so sorry.” Vale had stepped back into the restaurant, sheathing his sword. “I do regret that you should have suffered assault at the hands of some hooligan—”

  He looked at the face of the prostrate man and blinked.

  “Do I understand that this man assaulted you?”

  “He attempted to snatch my bag,” Irene said, sniffling a little. “I—I simply reacted on instinct—”

  “You.” Vale snapped his fingers, and two of the waiters responded. “Have this man taken to the nearest prison at once.”

  It’s good to be an earl and a noted detective, Irene reminded herself, a little wistfully.

  Kai walked into the restaurant, brushing ashes and powder off his jacket. “Well, that seems to be—Irene! That is, Miss Winters! What happened?” He glanced warily from Irene to Vale and back to Irene again, clearly wondering if the whole thing had been some sort of diversion.

  Irene pointed a finger at the man being dragged off by the waiters. “That person attempted to grab my bag. I resisted.”

  “I suggest we return to our table at once,” Vale said, lowering his voice. “This merely confirms my suspicions.”

  Five minutes later, they were round the table again. The steak had gone cold, but the wine was still drinkable. The general buzz of conversation had resumed its former level. Irene was surprised at how quickly people seemed to have forgotten the centipede attack. It implied that such things were common, which wasn’t a comforting thought.

  “Forgive me my earlier discretion,” Vale said. “And thank you for your assistance, Mr. Strongrock. But this attack on Miss Winters only proves what I suspected.”

  “And what is that?” Kai demanded, turning towards Vale. Irene had the impression that he was slightly miffed that she hadn’t asked about his valiant conduct vis-à-vis the centipede’s tail. She made a note to get the full details at some point—when a valuable contact wasn’t engaged in sharing useful information.

  “That your investigations into the Fair Folk have been noted.” Vale leaned forward. “I observed your questions at the embassy, Mr. Strongrock. And now a man whom I know to be a Fae agent tries to steal Miss Winters’s handbag. Am I wrong to suspect a link?”

  Kai threw Irene a frantic glance. She gave him a slight nod.

  “You are not wrong, sir,” Kai said firmly. “There is a link.”

  “I thought as much!” Vale glanced between them. “In that case, we are investigating the same matter—though possibly from different directions. I, too, am concerned with the Fair Folk, Mr. Strongrock. With the recent thefts of occult material. And with Belphegor.”

  “Belphegor?” Irene gasped. “The mysterious cat burglar?”

  “Indeed.” Vale’s brows drew together. “I have suspicions as to her identity. And what is more, I believe that all these things are connected. Even though you are both visitors to our city . . .” He let the sentence trail away, as though expecting to be challenged on his deductions, then continued. “Even though you haven’t been here long, the newspapers have been blatant about the thefts. You can hardly open a paper without seeing a new headline. Let me be frank: is this what you are investigating?”

  Irene caught Kai’s eye and gave him a very slight nod. She suspected that Vale would pick up on this, but she hoped that he’d interpret it as a suggestion rather than the order that it was.

  “You are correct,” Kai said.

  “Then I suggest we combine forces. My card.” He flipped out a silver card-case, selected a card from it, and slid it across the table to Kai. “Please call on me tomorrow morning, when we can talk more privately. Your associate is also welcome, of course.” He gave Irene a dry nod, which made her wonder just how much he had guessed. “Thank you for your time and assistance.”

  Vale rose. Kai and Irene rose too. There was a quick confusion of bows and curtseys, followed by Vale striding off, the waiter hurrying after him with hat and cloak.

  Kai and Irene sat back down.

  “I’m sorry,” Kai said. “I didn’t see him following me earlier at all.”

  “Don’t worry,” Irene said. “I suspect he’s rarely spotted. But I think he could be a very useful contact.”

  Kai perked up. “So we got lucky?”

  “It happens,” Irene said. “From time to time. Now, finish your wine and tell me about the centipede.”

  She was already working out a list of things that she needed to ask Kai later, in private. But for the moment, the centipede would do.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Right,” Irene said as they finished their coffee. “We have to assume that our cover’s blown.”

  “Because of Vale?” Kai asked.

  “No.” Irene tilted the cup, staring at the dregs. “The man who tried to snatch my purse. If he’s working for the Fae, I can only think he saw me at Lord Wyndham’s house. And if that’s the case, then he knows my face, he probably knows my hotel, and now he knows you as well. We need to break our trail.”

  “But all our things are in the hotel room!” Kai said. “All the clothes we bought—”

  “How many did you buy?”

  Kai tried to meet her gaze, but his eyes wandered down to his coffee cup. “I was just setting up several possible identities, in case we needed to move among different circles of society,” he said, unconvincingly.

  Irene patted his hand. “Don’t worry. In that case, they’ll be sure we’ll return, and you’ll have tied up some of their resources.”

  Kai sighed.

  “So,” Irene said briskly. “Standard measures.” These were taught in the Library alongside languages and research but were rather harder to practise inside the Library’s boundaries. But Kai’s personal experience should mean he was good at this sort of thing. “We’ll leave here separately; I’ll go first and draw off anyone obvious. They may only have a single watcher. You go to the hotel room, pick up our papers and our cash supply, then leave via the back of the hotel. Do your best to lose any followers. Meet me in front of . . .” She considered, then checked her new clock-work watch. There was no point wearing something electronic when she might have to take it into the Library. “Holborn Tube station at eleven o’clock. That should be busy enough to throw off any watchers. Damn. I’m never sure whether I prefer worlds that have invented mobile phone equivalents or not.”

  “It’d make communication easier,” Kai said.

  “But it would make it easier to track us too,” Irene said. “And would empower anyone who’s trying to catch up with us. All right, are you okay wit
h those instructions?”

  Kai nodded. “What do I do if you don’t turn up at Holborn?”

  “Contact Dominic,” Irene said. “He’ll put you in touch with Coppelia, and she’ll work out what to do next. But I don’t expect that to be necessary.”

  Kai nodded. He picked up his coffee cup and tilted it sadly, looking at the dregs in the bottom. “We’re not doing very well so far, are we?”

  Irene blinked. “What? Where do you get that idea?”

  “Well, the book’s been stolen, enemies are tracking us, we’re having to abandon our base—”

  “Get that out of your head right this minute,” Irene said. “Did you expect us to just be able to waltz in and pick it up?”

  Kai shrugged. “I had sort of got the idea that it would be appropriate for an assignment involving a novice like me.”

  Irene leaned forward in her chair. “Point one: the Library never has enough people to be able to give novices ‘easy’ assignments. Never expect an assignment to be ‘easy.’ Point two: yes, the manuscript has been stolen, but we already have several leads to follow, including an appointment to meet a famous detective.” The thought made her smile. Perhaps sometimes wishes did come true. “Point three: it’s not a base; it’s a hotel room. Point four: the fact that we are being tracked is a lead in itself and means we can use them to work backwards to find the book. And point five: we’ve an invitation to attend a ball at the Liechtenstein Embassy, which ought to be very interesting.”

  Kai stiffened. “We’ve got what?”

  “See you at Holborn,” Irene said, rising and collecting her bag.

  There was indeed someone waiting outside the restaurant. She spotted him while checking her reflection in a shop window. The glare of the actinic street lamps made them better mirrors than the fly-specked piece of glass in the hotel room. Small loss. The tail was an average-looking type, with a cheap bowler hat and a frock-coat frayed at lapels and elbows. He also wasn’t very good at being inconspicuous. Maybe that was usually the job of the colleague who’d tried to snatch her bag.

  At the next street corner, she managed a surreptitious glance back while waiting to cross the road and saw him murmuring into cupped hands. He opened them, and something buzzed out, circling his head before zooming upwards in a clock-work clatter of wings.

  Two streets later, he’d rather obviously acquired reinforcements. She stopped to check her hat in another shop window and caught another glimpse of him, clearly gesturing to three newcomers and pointing in her direction.

  Irene jabbed a hat-pin back into place viciously and considered how best to lose them. This London was laid out like most Londons, and she was on the edge of Soho. It’d be easy enough to lose followers there, but a woman on her own would attract the wrong sort of attention, and it might take too long for her to extract herself inconspicuously. A department store might work, but if they had any sense they’d put watchers at front and back before searching for her inside. Also now there were at least four of them, and there could be others she hadn’t spotted. The Tube itself was a possibility, but she hadn’t investigated it yet. And while the crowds might let her hide herself from her pursuers, they’d also be ideal cover for an “accident” or kidnapping. She was halfway to Piccadilly by now too, so she needed to start turning back if she was to meet Kai comfortably by Holborn at eleven.

  Hm. Wait. Covent Garden usually had a market of some sort in most alternate Londons, whether it was selling flowers or curios or simply a tourist trap. Even if there weren’t many stalls open at this time of night, it should still be busy enough for her to lose her pursuers. That should do the trick.

  Irene should have expected it: Covent Garden market was a technology extravaganza. Stalls teetered on collapsible legs and sprayed rays of light from dangling ether lamps. The path between them was a constantly shifting maze as each stall manoeuvred for yet more space on its automated feet, bouncing and jarring against the ones next to it. Much like Covent Gardens she’d seen elsewhere, there were several open yards, and a central area with a high glass roof and several banks of permanent shops. Pavement cafés added their own influxes of shoppers to the area, and regular jets of steam came shooting out of the sewer gratings and manholes.

  She put on a burst of speed as she entered the crowd, before the men following her could get any closer. She then allowed herself to be drawn into a whirlpool of spectators orbiting a display of mechanical exsanguinators. (She decided that the little jabbing steel needles weren’t specifically unpleasant in themselves, but the oiliness from the self-slathering antiseptics somehow made the whole thing inexpressibly gruesome. It was something about the way that it glistened under the electric flares.)

  There were as many women here as men, but the real difference was between those she suspected were genuine artisans and engineers and everyone else. The former had neat equipment cases tucked under their arms or chained to their wrists. The latter included wanderers on the lookout for an interesting bargain, slumming members of the upper classes, and fascinated onlookers. The women all wore scarves or veils against the sooty fog, just as Irene did, concealing anything from just their mouths to their entire faces. Many of the men had wound mufflers around the lower parts of their faces in a similar way. It gave the whole place a very seedy feeling, akin to a market for Victorian bank robbers, a shady shoppery for shady people.

  Nearby, bustling market stalls touted portable notebooks with self-adhesive toolsets, and she spotted pocket watches with built-in lasers (she nearly bought one for Kai). Then there were Constructa-Kit automata, followed by freshly fried doughnuts and self-tattooing kits—Just add ink!), then shawls with attached portable heating units, then—

  It hit her like a whiplash across her back, throwing her to her knees on the dirty pavement. She could feel every inch of her Library tattoo burning, feel it mapped out across her back as clearly as if she could see it. The world shivered around her. She tasted bile in her mouth and struggled not to throw up.

  The words were everywhere. She could see them on the newspaper stands, swimming up through the whiteness to crawl across the paper. She could see them on the back of the paperback novel the man in front of her had tucked into his pocket, on the crudely printed advertisements fluttering from every stall, and on the receipts the woman to her left was checking. They printed themselves on everything legible in a spreading circle around her.

  BEWARE ALBERICH

  People were calling out and swearing in surprise and alarm, blaming the engineers and stall-holders for some sort of experimental side-effect (and what that said about this place, Irene reflected in some distracted corner of her mind, didn’t bear thinking about). In some cases shoppers were shaking the affected items in the hopes that the words would fall off. Some hope. Irene had never before been the victim of an urgent message from the Library, but she knew the words would be permanently burned in. It was a shocking thing to do to printed media, which was why it was saved for only the most desperate purposes. Members of the public could read them, but at least no one would know what the words meant.

  If Alberich was involved in this, then the warning was definitely desperate and necessary.

  She pulled herself together with an effort that set her teeth on edge and glanced over her shoulder to check on the men who’d been following her. Damn. They were closing fast. They must have decided to pick her up now rather than risk losing her.

  Irene allowed herself a vicious smile. Pester an agent of the Library, would they? Hassle her when she’d just received an urgent message? Get in her way? Oh, they were going to regret that.

  She waited for a breathless half-minute, until the shifting patterns of moving stalls closed up behind her, blocking her pursuers. They’d open again in a moment, of course . . .

  She spat out in the Language, loud enough for it to carry, “Clock-work legs on moving stalls, seize up and halt, hold and be still!”
<
br />   “I beg your pardon?” the man next to her said. “Were you speaking to me—” He cut off as, in a widening circle within range of Irene’s voice, the moving stalls all came stuttering to a halt, jointed legs going abruptly rigid and stopping where they were. The general swirl of people and stalls was thrown into sudden and shocking confusion, far more dramatic than the earlier printing incident. People who’d been preparing to zig suddenly found themselves forced to zag. Piles of goods teetered on the edges of stalls and were barely saved from sliding off—or not saved, in quite a few cases, adding to the general uproar.

  Before anyone could come to awkward conclusions about the centre of the circle, Irene darted forward and elbowed her way past several complaining clots of shoppers. She could hear the grinding whir of gears and levers struggling with disobedient mechanical legs. The flow of people carried her forward out of her cul-de-sac, leaving her pursuers trapped behind the barricade of frozen stalls (and, she hoped, being trampled underfoot by angry shoppers). Irene headed for the nearest opening in the maze of tables, then from there to an alleyway. After a bit of rearrangement to veil and jacket, it was out onto the main street again—heading back and round towards Holborn. With nobody following her this time.

  With each step the reality of the message from the Library sank more deeply into her guts. Beware Alberich. Beware Alberich. Beware Alberich.

  She didn’t need this. She really didn’t need this. She was already in the middle of a complicated mission, with a trainee to handle on top of it all. She’d given Kai an optimistic summary to keep his spirits up, but that didn’t mean that anything was going to be easy.

  And now this.

  Alberich was a figure out of nightmare. He was the one Librarian who’d betrayed the Library and got away with it and was still somewhere out there. His true name was long since lost, and only his chosen name as a Librarian was remembered. He’d sold out to chaos. He’d betrayed the other Librarians who’d been working with him. And he was still alive. Somehow, in spite of age and time and the course of years that would afflict any Librarian who lived outside the Library, he was still alive.