Lord Guantes was practically preening himself. If he’d been a peacock, he would have been spreading his tail to be admired. “I don’t like to see talent wasted, my dear.” He patted her shoulder, but his eyes were on Irene, watching for her reaction.
“Aren’t you grateful to Lady Guantes as well?” Irene asked innocently.
“I don’t think she really understands my role yet,” Catherine said. She glanced uncertainly at Lord Guantes, clearly wanting to take her cue from him.
A shadow of discontent drifted across Lord Guantes’s face. “My beloved wife will come to appreciate you in time, Catherine. You simply need to be patient.”
Very interesting. “I hope that I’ll have the chance to see Lady Guantes again before I . . . well, before anything happens,” Irene said.
“Why?” Lord Guantes asked curiously. “Have the two of you formed some sort of secret bond while I wasn’t around? Do you send each other letters in code and meet up to drink tea on alternate Fridays?”
“Absolutely not,” Irene said hastily. “No, I just wanted to apologise. They do say that a person should try to apologise to everyone they’ve offended before they die . . . and I’m not going to survive this, am I?”
“Let’s discuss that later,” Lord Guantes said, in tones that suggested he’d enjoy it rather more than Irene would. “But why do you feel the need to apologise to her?”
“For killing you.”
His expression froze. There was a momentary blankness behind his eyes—normally so keen and dominating. It was as if a record player had jumped a notch, missing a note in the music. “In case you haven’t noticed, Miss Winters, I’m not dead.”
“Lord Guantes is dead,” Irene argued, watching his reaction like an angler playing a fish. If she could reawaken this body’s previous personality, its true identity . . . “Tell me, how good is your memory of yesterday? Or the day before?”
Lord Guantes flicked his gloved fingers in casual dismissal. “You make no sense.”
“Did Lady Guantes tell you something to explain any discrepancies?” Irene asked. “Do you ever catch her looking at you as though you were her latest specimen in a zoological breeding programme? Tell me—” She tried to put her will into the Language and make it work. “Tell me who you really are!”
But her words fell flat, drained by the circle that surrounded her. It was the sense of her words, rather than any power behind them, that made anger flare in his eyes. He stepped forward, raising his hand as though about to slap her, or something equally petty.
But then he stopped, his foot a few inches away from the circle. “Your petty lies are no threat to me,” he declared.
“Can’t you cross the circle?” Irene asked sympathetically. “How irritating for you.”
Lord Guantes pulled himself together, but his voice lacked the perfect composure of a few minutes before. “You’re insulting me while chained and on your knees, in a pitiful attempt to assert your superiority. Are you trying to keep up your spirits in the face of impending doom, Miss Winters, or is this merely stupidity?”
Irene looked around at the shadowy cathedral, the glowing windows, and the dark heights above her. “I wouldn’t want to judge based on appearances,” she said. “And I’m certainly afraid of Alberich. But not of you.” A petty insult, but if he took the lure . . .
This time he nearly did cross the circle. His toe was on the very brink before he realized what he was doing and drew back, composing himself with icy fury. “You, my dear, are going to be Alberich’s new body. A grand fate indeed.”
“I’m aware of his habits of skinning people and donning their skin to masquerade as them,” Irene said, trying to sound as bored as possible, though her panic rose. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
“Apparently you damaged his original body so much that it’s unusable. So that option’s no longer open to him. I don’t suppose you’d care to explain how you did it?”
“Fire,” Irene said, “carefully applied and in the highest possible quantity. That damages most things.”
“How tediously obvious. Well, the good news for you—dear me, that should probably be bad news—is that he is still very much alive.”
“I knew that already,” Irene said flatly. If she could just goad him one step farther, one inch closer . . . “I saw him at the People’s Palace. He explained how he was using your wife—and you.”
“I think you’ll find that we are using him,” Lord Guantes retorted smugly. “He can project a hologram of himself to another world, but only once a direct link has been forged to that world. And he can’t sustain it for very long. It’s much easier if he can inhabit a host in that world. Previously he’s been using this computer system.” He gestured at the Sagrada Familia around them. “But what he really needs is a human nervous system. One that’s stronger than normal flesh and bone. He needs a Librarian.”
“What fun,” Irene said, her throat dry as sand. It explained why he’d wanted her alive, at least. “Tell me, will I be aware of this miraculous process, once it starts? Or will my own mind simply be wiped out, just like that?” She snapped her fingers.
“I wouldn’t know.” Lord Guantes was enjoying himself now. “Previous human subjects managed to scream, but they didn’t last long. With you, we’re hoping for something more permanent.”
“He’s hoping, you mean,” Irene corrected him, feeling sick. Nightmarish images surged uncontrollably through her imagination—her mind being sponged away as Alberich took possession of her body. Or worse, her remaining conscious and screaming as he took up residence inside her, but unable to do anything about it. “It’s his project. You’re . . . just following orders.”
His gloved hands curled into fists. “Shall I tell you what’s happened to your friends? They’re prisoners, just like you. The dragon—no, make that both dragons—may be useful political hostages. I don’t know where the second one came from. Do you go round collecting them?”
“They’re like buses. You wait for one, and then half a dozen turn up at once.”
“I can only hope and trust that your ill-judged sense of humour is painfully scoured from your mind when Alberich takes possession of you,” Lord Guantes said.
Fae think in narrative patterns, Irene reminded herself. For him, this is a story where he’s the main protagonist and his enemies come to a satisfying end. This isn’t a story which has a happy ending for me—unless I can change the plot. But I’m not sure that I can.
“What about Vale?” she asked, trying to muster some hope. At least Kai was alive, and Shan Yuan was with him. Maybe they could find a way out of here, or at least be traded back to their father in return for some concession.
She tried not to think about Alberich confronting Kai while wearing her body: how it might feel, and what he might do. But the image wouldn’t go away.
“My wife has some use for the detective,” Lord Guantes said. “I haven’t bothered to ask for details.”
Irene didn’t like to think about Vale’s fate either.
Lord Guantes must have seen the despair in her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Precisely. All three of you are going to be used or destroyed. You most of all. Was it really worth it, Miss Winters? You could have been my valued servant—maybe even, in time, a friend. But now look at you.” His gesture took in the surroundings, her restraints, her helplessness. “You chose to refuse me. You chose to defy me. Consider exactly how far you have fallen, Miss Winters, and—”
A cell phone’s buzz interrupted him. “Excuse me one moment,” he said, and extracted it from a pocket.
His brows drew together in a frown. “What? Of course not,” he said, in answer to some unheard question. “I left strict instructions . . .”
He paused to glare suspiciously at Irene. She shrugged innocently.
The voice on the phone yammered something incoherent. The w
ords might be inaudible, but the tone was very much one of rising panic.
“I’m coming,” Lord Guantes snapped. “Hold off any direct action until I’m there.” He jammed the phone back into his pocket and turned to Catherine. “Accompany me—no, wait. Stay here. Keep an eye on Miss Winters. Make sure she doesn’t try anything.”
“You seem very certain that she’ll obey you,” Irene noted.
Scarlet light reflected from the windows, adding a gleam to Lord Guantes’s eyes. “She’s given me everything but her true name,” he said, “and even that’s only a matter of time. I hold her far more strongly than you ever could. Just try to persuade her. I look forward to seeing your face when I return, and you’ve failed . . . assuming that Alberich hasn’t claimed you first.”
He swept out of the cathedral with an air of smug triumph, and the door slammed shut behind him. It echoed with a distant boom, underscoring his words with an air of finality. Irene could have done without it.
She weighed her odds. High-chaos worlds made it likely that narratives would follow standard patterns and stories would come true. There were two main narratives here, and unfortunately, depending on one’s point of view, both were equally plausible. Heroine persuades acolyte to break free from evil versus Villainess fails to lure devotee into disobeying orders.
But she had to try something. Not just because her own life and soul were at stake, but because she’d promised to protect Catherine. And because Catherine didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserved what Lord Guantes had done to her.
“Catherine, are you permitted to speak to me?” she asked experimentally.
“I haven’t been told not to,” Catherine said sunnily. “What would you like to talk about?”
“Do you realize that Lord Guantes has affected your mind?”
“He only did it because he cares about me—and he respects me,” Catherine said. “He’s just helping me see things more clearly.”
“But do you remember he and his wife were trying to kill both of us, before?”
Catherine shrugged. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
“But what about the peace treaty, and their attempts to destroy it?” Irene tried. “And just a few days ago, Lord Guantes had you poisoned.”
Catherine sighed. “Like I said, everyone makes mistakes. If you’d done the sensible thing in the first place, they wouldn’t have tried to kill you.”
“Just what would the ‘sensible thing’ have been?”
“Obeying Lord Guantes’s wishes, of course,” Catherine said, in tones that suggested nothing could be simpler. “It was very rude of you to try to kill him.”
“Catherine, you dropped a book on him. From a great height.”
“I’ve apologised for that, and he’s forgiven me. I feel much better about my future now.”
“And how do you feel about our futures—where Kai, Vale, and I are prisoners, or worse?”
“You never really cared about me anyhow,” Catherine said, still composed, still smiling. “You were just using me.”
“What precisely was I using you for?”
“You wanted to seduce my uncle.”
Irene just looked at Catherine for a moment, speechless. Then she started laughing hysterically, the breath coming out of her in thick hiccupping gasps that she couldn’t stop. “I wanted to seduce him?”
“Stop that!” Catherine stormed forward, nearly to the edge of the circle. “How dare you laugh at me like that? I know perfectly well that he’s right.”
Irene forced herself to stop laughing, sensing a tiny opportunity at last. It seemed Catherine was far more vulnerable to emotions than swayed by facts. “I see Lord Guantes isn’t bothering to tell you the truth. Perhaps he doesn’t trust you as much as you think.”
Catherine jerked up her chin in a familiar stubborn gesture that gave Irene a surge of hope. “I’m his loyal and faithful servant. I don’t need him to tell me every little thing, just to make me feel more secure.”
“So tell me, what next?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after horrible things have happened to me and I’m out of the picture—” Ah, sweet euphemisms, what would we do without you? “What then? Will you trot around behind Lord Guantes for the rest of your life? Or will you be locked away with his books, permanently, wherever they are? I thought you wanted to explore different librarian archetypes, to see which you wanted to be?”
“I’ll do what he wants,” Catherine said stubbornly. “He knows best.”
“And what about your uncle?” Irene left the question hanging, pregnant with possibility.
“I’ll just leave him alone. Lord Guantes says that’s the best thing to do. Lord Guantes says that he isn’t going to be drawn into petty feuds. Lord Guantes says—”
“Lord Guantes will probably have you kill your uncle yourself,” Irene interrupted. “He and your uncle hate each other, you know this—and you’d be the perfect assassin. Why would your uncle ever suspect you? A few more words dropped into your shell-like little ear, and you’ll cut your uncle’s throat with a smile.”
“That’s not true.” Catherine was nearly shouting now. “He wouldn’t make me do anything like that.”
“Catherine, sweetheart, darling, if you stay with Lord Guantes for much longer, you won’t just do it, you’ll thank him for the opportunity.” Irene saw that fragmentary uncertainty in Catherine’s eyes again and pressed further. “And what next? Lord Guantes isn’t the sort of person who likes to share. You’ll never leave his private book collection again. You’ll spend the rest of your life fossilizing there with nothing new to read, nothing new to do. Is that really how you see your future?”
“He’s giving me what I’ve always wanted,” Catherine answered, the words a little too automatic, too programmed. “Of course I’m grateful.”
“Except that it isn’t what you want, is it?” Irene pulled at her chains, leaning forward for emphasis as if that would help her words penetrate. “You told me how you wanted to be a librarian, Catherine. But there’s more to that than just sitting on a pile of books in some private archive, isn’t there?”
Catherine raised a gloved fist in protest. “Shut up!”
“Come on, Catherine, listen to me.” Irene wished she could use the Language, but she had nothing but her own voice now and her understanding of the girl facing her. “We both know what you told me, what you confessed to me, because you trusted me. You wanted to work in a library built to store and preserve books and knowledge. And you wanted to share that knowledge. You wanted to be right there at the heart of it, helping people find books they could love. Or information they really needed. And as part of all this, you’d go out to find new books, new stories, to make the library even better. You must have imagined what that would feel like. Finding a new book which nobody who visited had ever read before. Sharing it with new readers. You’d have felt the library itself accepting you, knowing you were a crucial part of how it worked.”
“SHUT UP!” Catherine screamed, anger and bitterness turning her face ugly.
“You’re going to be something different now, though. Lord Guantes will never give you that. What he means by ‘librarian’ isn’t what you mean. He doesn’t love books the way you and I do—he’ll never understand. You’ll grow old behind locked doors, never leaving his private collection, never reading anything new. But you’ll be happy. He won’t let you be anything else.”
“You’d do it too . . .” Tears were leaking from the corners of Catherine’s eyes, trickling down her face. She brushed them away with one gloved hand. “Don’t . . . don’t try and act as if you’re somehow better than me—”
“I have absolutely no delusions about myself,” Irene said flatly. “The Library steals books and keeps them for itself—but it does share them. Eventually. And by holding books for different worlds, it keeps those worlds stable. Tha
t way, their people can read stories and dream about them—without being forced into either living them or having to do without those stories. And I have free will. You won’t. Your dreams are going to rot away, inch by inch and moment by moment. Then someday you won’t even remember what you meant by ‘librarian’ and everything that went with it. Maybe you’ll be happier that way. I don’t know. I’ll be dead, after all. But what about you, Catherine? Some people would say that was worse than death.”
Catherine pushed both gloved hands against her face, rubbing at her eyes, her whole body trembling. “I—I want—I don’t want that—please, Irene, help me—”
“Catherine.” Irene lowered her voice, but the acoustics of the cathedral meant that it still carried down the long aisle and into the vaults. She could feel success or failure poised on a knife-edge. There would be failure, utter failure, if this thin connection between her and the Fae girl snapped. This is a church and I’m literally arguing to save her soul. If anyone’s listening, help me . . . “Catherine, I’m here. I’m here. The Library’s here. I’m not going to let you go. Just listen to me. You can say no.”
“But he won’t let me.” Her voice rose in despair. “I can’t—can’t—make him let go of me.”
Irene had to find some way to break the psychic control that Lord Guantes still exerted over Catherine. She didn’t wear anything as obvious as Irene’s chains, but there was indeed a controlling leash around the Fae’s mind. Then a thought came to Irene like a gift, an image—a symbol. “Catherine. Take off your gloves.”
Catherine shook her head repeatedly, a few tendrils of tightly bound hair fluttering around her face. But her hands were moving, fingers struggling as she began to claw at one glove’s buttons.
“You can do it,” Irene encouraged her, heart in mouth. “You’re strong enough to say no to me. You can say no to Lord Guantes. Just keep on pushing . . .”
The Dark Archive (The Invisible Library Novel) Page 23
