The Invisible Library (37 page)

She turned the handle and walked into the room. A quick glance around showed that it looked just as they had left it the last time. No sign of anyone. Nobody hiding under tables. Nobody hiding
behind the door. No Alberich.

She breathed out a sigh of relief which she hadn’t realized that she’d been holding, and stepped aside so that Kai could come in. Vale followed a few seconds later, closing the door
behind him.

Irene cast around, looking for anything that resembled an in-tray. Score! There was a blatantly obvious one on Aubrey’s desk. She remembered it having been tidy when they first arrived,
but it was now crowded with papers and oddments. She quickly sorted through it, and the packet with the Natural History Museum’s address on the back (return to sender) was the seventh item.
It was an unobtrusive package in plain brown paper.

‘Paper knife,’ she said, extending one hand.

Vale slapped a knife handle into her palm. It was elegant, made in ivory or whalebone, and had no doubt contributed to the extinction of at least one endangered species. It was also nice and
sharp.

Irene sliced through the twine and unfolded the wrappings. Inside was a book and an envelope. The book’s title was
Kinder und Hausmärchen. Children’s and Household Tales
,
she translated automatically, and breathed a sigh of relief. She flipped the book open to check the publication date: 1812. Better and better. Now what was the definite proof that Bradamant had
mentioned?

She turned to the index. There were eighty-eight stories listed. The eighty-seventh was titled, in German,
The Story of the Stone from the Tower of Babel
.

She breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It’s the one,’ she said.

‘Yes!’ Kai said exultantly, and slammed his palm down on the desk. ‘We’ve got it!’

‘What does the letter say?’ Vale asked.

Irene put the book down again for the moment and opened the envelope. Thoughts of letter bombs came a few seconds too late. With a sigh, she shook the letter gently onto the desk. No bombs.
Good.

Kai leaned across to read over her shoulder, then paused, tilting his head.

A fraction of a second later, Irene heard it as well. Screams. Screams, and a horrid sort of rustling with a nightmarish familiarity to it.

She thrust the letter into her jacket. There would be time to read it later.

The door slammed open with a heavy boom, and a woman ran in, looking round desperately. She had been amongst the browsers outside, but now looked panicked and in a state of disarray.
‘Where’s the way out?’ she gasped.

Behind her, through the open door, Irene could see more people running in all directions, but ultimately all in the direction of
away
. There was a spreading tide of something silver
oozing across the floor in a horrible stop-motion way. It would reach a row of cases, and then it was suddenly crawling round the foundations of the next row. The noise it was making, a fierce
hungry rustling and skritching, echoed in the large room, underpinning the shouting. Further back, the silver flood was oozing over ominously shaped lumps on the floor, covering them so densely
that she couldn’t see the colour of clothing, hair or skin.

‘Silverfish!’ the woman screamed at them. ‘Get out of here now!’

The oncoming menace had nearly reached the chamber door.

Irene was an intelligent, self-possessed, practical woman. (Or at least, that was how she would describe herself on a performance review to any senior Librarian.) She yelped in panic and
scrambled on top of the desk, pulling her skirts up and crouching there in horror. She desperately tried to remember if the Language had vocabulary for
silverfish
or
instantly lethal
insecticide
and, if so, what it was.

Kai swept across the room in a motion almost as smooth as the approaching silverfish. He picked up the screaming woman, and tossed her up onto the table beside Irene before joining them. Vale
leapt onto a chair.

‘You said you were here to do something about the silverfish!’ the woman screamed at Kai. ‘Why didn’t you get rid of them?’

Irene remembered her now. She’d been here when they were looking for Aubrey and found his skin instead. They’d fobbed her off with a story about insect infestation. Marvellous. She
hated dramatic irony. ‘Can they eat wood?’ she asked.

‘You’re the exterminators, you tell me,’ the woman snapped.

‘Silverfish eat anything starch-based,’ Vale informed them from his chair. ‘Glue, book bindings, papers, carpet, clothing, tapestries . . . I imagine theoretically they could
eat wood.’

‘If they don’t crawl up here first,’ Kai said, leaning over the edge of the table to look down at the floor. The silverfish weren’t actually trying to crawl vertically up
the table legs yet, but Irene wasn’t going to wait for empirical evidence. More and more of them were now flooding into the room, crawling over each other on the floor in a thick seething
mass of unhealthy silver.

Something at the back of Irene’s mind was trying to get her attention. It wasn’t the silverfish. It wasn’t the woman next to her. It was the way that she could see a newspaper
on top of a display case, and it was
moving
. Without the aid of silverfish, it was actually shifting itself, millimetre by millimetre, across the top of the glass, in a light rustling drift
. . .

‘Vale!’ she gasped. ‘Could this be triggered by subsonic frequencies? Do you have knowledge of such things?’ She gestured at the swarming creatures covering the
floor.

Vale caught her meaning. ‘Possible,’ he said. He frowned at the silverfish as though they weren’t starting to crawl up the legs of his chair. ‘Though any frequency that
could provoke those creatures would surely also have some sort of effect on humans. Causing panic, perhaps—’

‘Oh, I’m definitely panicking,’ the woman said, with a little half-hysterical catch in her voice. ‘And they’re still coming in here, they keep on coming –
’

‘Right,’ Irene said, trying to keep her voice calm, deliberately not thinking about the insects crawling up inside her skirts and on her and . . . She swallowed. ‘Right. They
keep on coming
in here
. If there’s a subsonic generator somewhere then it must be either driving them or luring them in here.’

‘Heaven and earth,’ Kai swore with violent emphasis. ‘It must have been keyed to our opening the door – look at the timing of it!’

‘But if it was linked to the door, how did it—’ Irene started to say, and at the same moment Vale pointed at the door’s hinges. ‘There!’ he snapped.
‘That wire. It follows the skirting and leads to the cupboard in that corner. And they’re swarming more thickly around it . . .’

Irene could barely see any traces of a wire, but she was prepared to trust Vale’s eyes. The dark-wood cupboard was set back into the corner of the room and the silverfish were writhing
around its base. They’d swarmed up to a foot off the floor, and now that she was paying attention, they were perceptibly more heavily concentrated there.

‘That’ll do,’ she muttered. Luckily, there was enough detailing on that particular piece of furniture for her to be precise. She’d meant to avoid Language usage in case
of booby-traps, but she was prepared to be flexible. Any booby-traps would just have to look after themselves. She raised her voice. ‘
Oak-leaf-handle cupboard doors. Unlock and
open.
’

The cupboard doors sprang open, swinging wide and ripping out bolts at both top and bottom. Inside the cupboard was an intricate tangle of machinery and wires, barely visible under the
silverfish which were pouring over it like scaly water. Lights on it glinted and something was humming.

‘That’s it!’ Vale said.

‘Kai—’ Irene began.

‘Already there,’ Kai said. He leapt from the table towards the cupboard. The silverfish crunched under his shoes as he hit the floor. Then he was already spinning, body turning
gracefully as he launched into a high flying kick. His leading foot crashed into the twisted machinery with a resounding thud and tinkle.

The humming stopped.

Silverfish all over the room paused, then began to pour
away
. Some trickled down through imperceptible cracks in the flooring and skirting-boards. Others flowed out through the door
again, scattering in all directions as soon as they could. A few still lurked around the machine, all trying to squirm underneath it and only about half of them succeeding. Kai hopped on one foot,
trying to extract his other foot from the mangled device. He was swearing in what Irene assumed were words well-brought-up dragons used when they didn’t want to shock lesser creatures.

‘I was about to say, please hit it with a chair,’ Irene said as the hissing of moving silverfish died away to leave them in relative quiet. ‘But thank you. Thank you very much.
Nice work.’ The book lay safely in Dominic Aubrey’s in-tray, untouched, unharmed. It hadn’t been eaten. So much for Alberich’s final gambit.

‘Is that normally how you perform exterminations?’ the woman asked. She wasn’t showing any sign of getting down from the table yet. To be fair, neither was Irene.

‘I think they’re in my shoes,’ Kai said in tones of deep disgust.

Vale cautiously stepped down from his chair. The few remaining silverfish took no interest in him. He walked gingerly over to Irene’s table, and offered her a hand down. ‘Nicely
done, Miss Winters.’

‘Thank you for noticing the wire,’ Irene replied. She took his hand and eased her way off the table, trying not to show too much leg in the process. She was going to enjoy being back
in an alternate world where trousers were regular wear for women. ‘Do you think that means – ’ She was about to continue,
that Alberich is elsewhere, and he left this trap
,
when she noticed the meaningful glance Vale was giving over her shoulder. Oh. Of course. The woman. The sooner they could get her out of here, the better. – ‘Ah, thank you,’ she
concluded.

‘A trap for us?’ Kai said softly as she joined him.

‘Plausible,’ Irene agreed, also keeping her voice down. Vale and the woman were murmuring to each other, so they shouldn’t be overheard. ‘A bit careless, though.
It’d be bound to draw attention here, to this room. Unless it was a delaying action.’

‘It was a delaying action,’ the woman said.

Kai and Irene turned to look.

Both she and Vale were now wedged against the table, and Vale had an odd rigidity to his posture. His eyes were furious, but his body was entirely still, hands raised as if he’d just been
helping the woman down and hadn’t got round to lowering them. The woman had a knife to his throat. It didn’t look elegant, but it did look brutally efficient. And maybe sharp enough to
remove someone’s skin.

‘
Door, close,
’ the woman said. The room and cupboard doors both slammed shut. ‘There. Now we should have a few minutes uninterrupted.’

Irene could feel her heart thudding painfully in her chest. ‘You’re Alberich?’ she said tentatively.

‘Yes,’ the woman said. ‘Our fourth meeting. And I hope that you are paying attention this time. Because if you do not do
exactly
as I tell you, then your friend will
die.’ She paused. ‘That is, he will die
first
, and with you watching.’

‘We’re listening,’ Irene said. She kept her hands still, avoiding anything that could be taken as provocation to slit Vale’s throat. ‘Please go
on.’

She hadn’t realized that a change of skin could be quite so all-encompassing. She (no,
he
) spoke with a woman’s voice, and it was quite different from the voice she’d
heard from inside their ill-fated cab. It was also different again from Aubrey’s voice. Was he transplanting the vocal cords too? No, probably just a consequence of the entire magic
transferral of skin, however that worked. It would be so helpful if she could see anything unusual in his (or her) appearance. But there was nothing at all.

‘I’m willing to make concessions,’ Alberich said. ‘You aren’t all necessarily going to die. Be sensible about this, and we can all walk away.’

Irene did her best to smile in response.
Somehow I don’t believe you
. ‘I’m interested in staying alive,’ she said. ‘So’s Kai. Aren’t you,
Kai?’