The cathedral was still deathly silent. Where was everyone? Assuming this was the place described in Lord Guantes’s reports, they must have put in considerable work to claim it as their headquarters.
She focused on immediate concerns. The first was to rip off the pendant around her neck. It was a single teardrop of cold black metal, inlaid with tiny lines of circuitry. She flung it into the shadows, unwilling to stay in contact with it a moment longer. But she kept the leather lace that held it—it was time to bind her wound. Leaving a trail of blood would be overdramatic, even for this world.
“Can you rip some of the flounces off this ridiculous petticoat under my dress?” she asked Catherine. “Good. Use that bit as a pad and wrap that section around my wrist. You can bind the lot with this.” She proffered up the leather lace, feeling a hint of satisfaction as she put it to a better use. “Now we need to find Vale and Kai. And Shan Yuan.”
“At least one of them is being held prisoner down in the archive, but I don’t know which one.”
“Okay. How do we get down there?”
“You can get in from a door in the cathedral’s outer wall, but there are guards patrolling outside,” Catherine said, “or we can use the stairs over there.” She nodded to a set of archways.
“Right,” Irene said. “Stairs it is, then. Next item on the adventurous-librarian job description, Catherine—rescuing prisoners. Workplace assessment time.”
The joke prompted a flicker of a smile from her apprentice, but it didn’t last. “I’m afraid,” Catherine said, her voice barely audible. “What if he tries to control me again—and I can’t stop him?”
“The important thing is to focus on a plan,” Irene said. “That way you have something to think about; besides, what’s the worst thing that could happen.”
“So has ‘mind control’ ever happened to you? Do you have a plan?” Her tone was surly and challenging, but Irene could hear the very real need for reassurance behind it.
“It goes a bit like this,” Irene said, as they walked towards the stairs. “The first step is, I’ll kill myself before I let him do that to me again. The second step is to say, Wait, it’d be much more practical to kill him rather than kill myself. And there you have it. A sensible plan based on logical choices.”
Catherine frowned. “But murdering my enemies won’t work every time.”
“True,” Irene agreed. “There’s a whole spectrum of other choices in this case. I’m sure you can think of a few. Blocking your ears, distracting Lord Guantes, whatever . . . But it’s important to hold on to at least one thing that you can do to save yourself. It’s much better than thinking you can’t do anything. Trust me on this one.”
“I’m not sure you’re good for my moral development,” Catherine muttered.
“I said I’d teach you to be a Librarian,” Irene replied. “Moral development is an optional extra—get down!”
The huge window at the far end of the cathedral shattered—coloured glass burst inwards like the petals of an exploding flower as a giant glowing object roared through. The almighty crash echoed through the building and from high above she heard bells, shaken by the impact. Irene knocked Catherine to the floor and covered her body with her own. She ignored the girl’s muffled cry of protest as she tried her best to shield her.
Glass fragments rained down, ricocheting off the stone paving to smash into ever-smaller pieces. The projectile that had come crashing through the window shot downwards, air screaming around it as some sort of braking system tried desperately to reduce its speed. It skimmed along the floor with a long, horrendous shriek, scraping a deep gouge in the beautiful dark marble. It spun and then juddered to a halt, coming to rest only about ten yards from the circle where Irene had been trapped.
Now that it was still, Irene could see it was a flying car of some sort. And it was on fire.
Well, she could do something about that at least. “Fires, extinguish!” she called, getting to her feet.
The flames went out like blown candles, leaving only wisps of smoke. Something inside the sealed air car beeped in a melancholy way. From outside, through the broken window, Irene could hear the whooping of sirens and the fierce ringing of alarms.
One of the air car’s doors swung open, and Kai came stumbling out. He brushed soot and broken glass from his face, coughing, then turned to drag Shan Yuan out of the car. The other dragon was staggering and looked on the verge of collapse, cradling his left arm across his chest. Kai himself had a bandaged arm and multiple scrapes, but he was alive. He was here.
Irene’s heart turned over, and the sudden lightness inside her made her feel as if all enemies could be defeated, all ends achieved. “I see you managed your own escape,” she said, giddy with happiness at the sight of him. “Good job.”
Kai jerked as he heard her voice, turning to where she stood in the shadows. Dragging Shan Yuan along like an inconvenient doll, he strode towards her, his pace steadier with every step. When he was close enough, he simply let Shan Yuan drop to the ground, lunging to take Irene in his arms. His grip was almost desperate, and for a moment they simply held each other—conscious of the other’s presence, the other’s life, knowing that in this moment the other was safe.
But mere moments, Irene remembered, were all that they had. She forced herself to let him go. “We’re on a deadline,” she said reluctantly. “We think Alberich will turn up at midnight. And there’s a prisoner below here—who must be Vale. We have to get him out of here before then.”
“He’s here too?” Kai’s hands lingered on her arms. Then he spotted the bandage on her wrist and snarled in anger. “Who did this to you?”
“I did it to myself, to get out of that circle. It’s not serious—”
“You always say that,” Kai sighed, subsiding.
“And you always fuss over me. We need to move. I’ll explain as we go.” She saw Kai and Catherine exchanging similar exasperated looks and made a mental note to discuss justifiable risks with them later. Because there was going to be a later. Oh yes.
Catherine was helping Shan Yuan to his feet. “I think you’ve sprained your shoulder,” she told him.
He looked down his nose at her and flexed his left arm with what looked like perfect equanimity. Irene identified this, with her practice at interpreting Kai’s moods, as hurting but unwilling to admit weakness. “Nothing serious,” he informed her. His words echoed Irene’s own, and she winced, but it was time to move on.
“Let’s go,” she urged them. Before Lord Guantes returned, before the guards outside came breaking in, before Alberich arrived . . . Why was she the only one who ever kept track of time during this sort of crisis?
With the ease of practice she squashed the unhelpful thought that the problem wasn’t timekeeping, it was getting repeatedly drawn into these crises in the first place.
The stairs were made of the same slick black marble as the floor, and red lights glowed ominously from the ceiling overhead. While the stairwell’s stonework was unexceptional, the experience still felt somehow organic—as though they were making their way deeper into a living creature. Cables ran along the ceiling throughout, placed as unobtrusively as possible, but clearly added fairly recently. Irene gave Kai a quiet update as they moved ever downwards, alert for guards and other dangers.
Passages at the bottom branched off in three directions. Serpentine and reptilian figures were carved into the walls, emerging from the stonework like creatures from an ancient sea. In an unexpected yet extremely welcome development, there were actually signs on the walls—in Spanish—complete with pointing arrows. Irene found herself smiling for the first time that night.
Everyone else had seen them. “It must be a trap,” Shan Yuan muttered.
“If this was a normal place of worship before the Guanteses took it over, they might not have troubled to remove the signs,” Kai contradicted him. “The question
is, which way do we want?” He indicated the three marked directions—crypt, relics, and archive.
Irene waved Catherine forward. “Does any of this look familiar to you?” she murmured, remembering how the first iteration of Lord Guantes had mentioned the “archive.”
“Yes. It’s the archive we want,” her student confirmed. She indicated the third direction, the one with dolphins arching sinuously within their carvings as if trying to break free from the wall.
The dolphin corridor took them through several bends, heading farther and farther down, and the stonework seemed older as they descended. The ornamentation must have been added later—it was in Gaudí’s distinctive style, like the cathedral above, but these dark stones predated Gaudí by centuries. The air was cold enough down here to raise goose bumps on Irene bare skin, but it also felt dead and dry. They could have been stepping into the past as they walked into the depths of the earth.
The corridor finally ended in a heavy iron-bound door—locked, as Irene found when she touched the handle. She gestured the others to stand back. “Door, unlock and open,” she told it.
Irene stared in delight as the door swung open and she saw what was on the other side. Common sense prodded at her to move, as she formed an easy target. But sheer relief held her in place as she stared at what might be their way out of this nightmare.
She wasn’t looking at a few worn books chained to lonely shelves. This archive was a full-scale, full-blooded, and thoroughly packed floor-to-ceiling library.
CHAPTER 23
Right,” Irene murmured, stepping aside so the others could see too. The archive was a blend of ancient and modern. Leather-bound books shared shelves with modern ledgers, and computer screens could be found everywhere. Signage indicated some unusual categories—theology, witchcraft, artificial intelligence, goetia, history, heresy, lives of the saints . . . Some shelves were made of stone, some of wood. Others seemed to be constructed from modern plastics, metal, or some other artificial extruded substance—these shelves resembled crystallised oil. Distant fans kept the air moving, a faint whisper on the edge of hearing. There were no other sounds and no sign of guards, dark ceremonies, or lurking nightmares.
She saw that the room was more than just a single space—it was a complex of spaces, separated by dark pillars like the ones in the cathedral’s nave. These pillars rose to the ceiling, where they branched out to form organic abstract shapes. Looking at them, Irene was reminded of the way tree roots wove around clearings in a forest. Clear white lamps, shaped like strange flowers, hung from the ceiling; they dropped between clusters of cables that had been fastened up there, well out of the way of the books and the floor. Irene couldn’t make out the far walls—but for all she could tell, this place extended the full length of the cathedral. Or even farther. It might have been modified to echo the structure above, and had been filled with computers as well as books, but this place was old, very old indeed.
She felt wary, her instincts prickling uneasily. This felt like home. It was far too good to be true. Something had to be wrong.
Irene pulled herself together and turned to Shan Yuan. “I’ll get you out of here.” This wasn’t his fight, and Kai would be relieved to have his brother out of danger. “Stand back from the door a moment—”
Shan Yuan’s eyes flared red, and he made a furious motion of negation with his good hand. “Don’t be ridiculous! Do you expect me to leave you here like this?”
Irene bit back Yes, actually, I do, because she could see this would only serve to provoke him. Instead she said, “Your Highness, it would be invaluable if someone knows where we are and what happened to us. I can’t send a Fae into the Library, Kai definitely wouldn’t go”—Kai nodded emphatically—“and Vale’s still a prisoner and we need to find him.”
Though not all of that was entirely true. Lord Guantes had said something that had given her a half-formed idea about how to finally get Catherine into the Library. But she was still waiting for it to crystallise, hopefully into a full-formed stroke of genius.
“It makes no strategic sense to send away a quarter of your strength while still in danger,” Shan Yuan declared. “I think you are more intelligent than that. Now, what are your plans?”
Irene glanced at Kai, but his face was troubled. Clearly he didn’t want to put his brother in danger—but he could see his brother’s point.
She was about to suggest they start their search for Vale, when a murmur came from deeper in the archive. It was a faint ripple of noise, perhaps speech. But it was modulated like conversation, rather than a yell for guards or worse. Irene pointed in the direction of the noise, then touched a finger to her lips to command silence. Kai nodded and gestured that he’d take the lead. Irene followed, with Catherine by her side and Shan Yuan at the rear.
As they edged past shelves filled with books and computer screens resembling blank reflecting mirrors, Irene was struck again by how abandoned this place felt. Lights burned—all night, apparently—and yet nobody was here to open the books or consult the computers. The Guanteses had cleared this place for their own purposes—and then left the books unread, the archive unused. If she hadn’t already been so on edge and so terrified, she’d have found this depressing.
The distant voices echoed again, whispering past stone columns like tree trunks. They formed an irritated point and counterpoint—statement, question, pause and response. Kai’s eyes narrowed as he listened with his superior dragon hearing, and he turned to mouth Vale at Irene.
The light had too cool a quality for comfort. It was certainly bright enough to see by but didn’t have the golden warmth of sunlight or lamplight. It illuminated their surroundings, picking out every individual book title, every angle of keyboard or screen, but it made Irene think of the light in a laboratory where infectious diseases lurked in sealed cabinets.
And then the voices came into focus.
“You are a distinct nuisance.” That was Lady Guantes. “You’ve attempted to escape five times now.”
“And I assure you I will try again.” Irene’s heart clenched with relief. That was Vale. “But since you refuse to explain your plans or your motivations, I must find my entertainment in other ways.”
“You’re supposed to be the great detective.” Metal clinked against metal. Irene gathered her skirts tight in her hands to stop them rustling as the group drew closer. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“I must confess there is one thing I don’t understand.”
“I’m sure there are quite a number of things you don’t understand.”
“Let us not treat each other as fools. We have, after all, been playing against each other for several weeks now—Madam Professor. You may have allowed your husband to take this role in public, but you were the one doing the planning. If either of us had been lacking in ability, our game would have finished a great deal sooner.”
Kai had come to a stop. Irene peered over his shoulder. The conversation was being held in a large open area ahead of them—well-lit, perhaps ten or fifteen yards across. There was no way to reach Vale and remain concealed.
“That’s true,” Lady Guantes said slowly. “So if we are so well matched, what is this one thing that remains obscure to the great detective Peregrine Vale?”
“Without wishing to insult you, madam, you have a talent for organisation which you have chosen to use for crime. Your abilities surpass those of other criminals I’ve matched wits with before. I will admit that our game has been a challenge—and one I’ve enjoyed. It drove me to act hastily—even unwisely—while attempting to bring you down.”
“Flattery won’t get me to free you,” Lady Guantes said.
“It was hardly meant as flattery,” Vale replied. “But it does beg a question. You could be an empress of crime, a genius coordinating your network across multiple worlds. But you insist on elevating your husband to this role, reanimating him instead of lettin
g him rest in peace. Why, in a situation where so many Fae would seize the moment, do you hesitate and draw back?”
Irene edged a little closer, enough to see more of the tableau. Vale was strapped hand and foot to a large table. It looked uncomfortably laboratory-like, in its stark cleanliness—with run-off drains for blood? Irene suppressed a shudder. Lady Guantes stood at the head end of the table, bending over Vale like a confessor giving a man his last rites. But instead of robes, she wore an iron-grey business suit and gloves. For some reason, they were mismatched, black on the left hand and grey on the right. Five computer tablets rested on gilded lecterns around the table, as if they were open books. Banked servers stood in the background, forming a coordinated circle of processing power.
Behind the pair, on the far side of the space, a door was set between two stone pillars. It was out of step with the décor and made from pale wood. Irene could see it was marked with the Language, but she was too far away to make out the writing. But she didn’t need to read it to recognize the threat it posed. Whatever it was, it was Alberich’s work—and that couldn’t be good.
Irene weighed their options. It was at least five yards from the nearest bookshelves to the table, and Lady Guantes was almost certainly armed. That would make a direct assault highly risky for Vale and his rescuer. The Language might work—but had Alberich set up protective wards? And Irene would need to take out the Fae near-immediately.
“I could dominate a network of worlds myself,” Lady Guantes was saying. “But my husband and I belong with one another, and we can achieve so much more together than apart. We nearly triggered a war between our kind and the dragons, after all . . . and I have learned much more since. So yes, I will pay any price to get him back, to beat death itself. To have him with me again—as he should be—will make it all worthwhile.”
“I suspected as much—and I appreciate your candour.” Vale took a deep breath. “Reconsider. Come back to London and forge your own path to glory. Take control of London’s underworld. Challenge me. Or if you truly want to test yourself, challenge my sister. But reconsider your current course of action.”
The Dark Archive (The Invisible Library Novel) Page 26
