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great military thinker Clausewitz: no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared.
They would never be able to follow her here. She was in the Library. Not just any library, but the Library. High shelves rose on either side, too high and full of books for her to see what lay beyond.
The books on the shelves were printed, and some of them looked more modern than any from the alternate she had just left, but that in itself proved nothing.
That was the whole point of the Library—as far as she’d been taught, anyway. It wasn’t about a higher mission to save worlds. It was about finding unique works of fiction and saving them in a place out of time and space.
And if there were rumours that the Library did have a deeper purpose—well, there were always so many rumours, and she had missions to complete. She could wait for more answers. She had time.
All you knew was that you’d end up in the Library—although there were horror stories about people who’d spent years finding their way back up from some of the catacombs where the really old data was stored.
Research had been done, research was being done, and, Irene suspected, research would still be being done in a hundred years. Technology wasn’t the only failure, either. Magical forms of communication were useless too, and the side effects tended to be even more painful. Or so she’d heard. She hadn’t tried. She liked her brains inside her skull where they belonged.
There were three basic reasons why Librarians were sent out to alternates to find specific books: because the book was important to a senior Librarian, because the book would have an effect on the Language, or because the book was specific and unique to that alternate world.
The Library runs on conspiracy theory. Admit nothing, deny everything, then find out what’s going on and publish a paper on the subject. It’s not as if they can stop you doing that.”
If a magically active world was quarantined, that meant it had been corrupted by chaotic forces. Its magic had tipped just too far the wrong way in the balance between order and disorder. As Kai would have been told, chaos corrupting ordered worlds was an age-old and potentially lethal hazard for Library operatives. And it went against everything that the Library represented, as
A high level of chaos would mean that they could expect to meet the Fae, creatures of chaos and magic, who were able to take form and cause disorder on such a corrupted world. And that was never good news.
“You can expect to find vampires. Werewolves. Fictional creations that go bump in the night. You might also find their technology working in unexpected ways.”
unreasonably. Things outside the natural order infested those worlds as a direct result. Vampires, werewolves, faerie, mutations, superheroes, impossible devices . . . She could cope with some spirits and magic, where both operated by a set of rules and were natural phenomena within their worlds. The alternate she’d just come from had very organized magic, and while she hadn’t actually practised it, it had at least made sense. She hoped that she could cope with dragons too. Again, they were natural to the order of all the linked worlds, a part of their structure rather than actively working to
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The room had the indefinable air of all museum collections, somehow simultaneously fascinating yet forlorn.
“He was a vampire. They used the traditional methods, you know. A stake through the heart, cutting off the head, inserting garlic in the mouth . . . though, to be fair, leaving his head impaled on the railings outside the front door, where all his party guests could see it, could be considered a little extreme.”
“Wait. Zeppelins?” “It’s part of the scientific ethos of this place. Zeppelins, death rays—they haven’t quite got those working properly yet, though—and other instruments of destruction. Also they have biomutations, clockwork technology, electrical health-care spas . . .” Irene glanced at Kai. He was wearing an expression combining acute interest with admiring attention. “I told you I dislike chaos infestations?” she asked. “This is why.” “But zeppelins are neat,”
Irene sighed. “Well. So Lord Wyndham is dead, and not even undead any longer. The book is presumed stolen by the cat burglar Belphegor, and there is more, I take it?”
You remember the stages of infestation? Affective, intuitive, assumptive, and conglomerative?”
don’t mean to pry,” Kai said unconvincingly. He looked almost human. He had scales in the hollows of his cheeks and on the backs of his hands, as fine as feathers or hair. He had claws, manicured to a mother-of-pearl sheen. He had horns. His eyes were like gems in his face. His skin was the colour of fire, and yet it seemed natural; my own skin was blotchy and dull in comparison. “There isn’t much to tell,” Irene said. “He let me go.” He discussed the poems in the scroll. He complimented me on my taste. He explained that he did not expect to see me or any other representative of the Library in
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“Those creatures—we had something like them in the alternate that I came from. Pervasive thieves, wasters, destroyers—they make their way into society and tear it apart. They destabilize reality. They’re tools of chaos. They are chaos. You can’t expect me to approve of things like that.”
“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.”
Then there were Constructa-Kit automata, followed by freshly fried doughnuts and self-tattooing kits—Just add ink!),
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
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.
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.
Irene wanted to go very deeply undercover. She wanted to go so deeply undercover that it’d take an automated steam shovel to excavate her out of it. She also had to decide how much to tell Kai.
he’s not some sort of urban legend like the thing about the pipes and the tentacle monster.” That had been one of the popular ones when she was a trainee. The logic was that if rooms of the Library could be connected by the plumbing, then there was some sort of dark central cistern with a huge tentacle monster living in it that ate old Librarians. And of course it was all covered up by order from on high . . . She and other trainees had spent several hopeful hours rapping on pipes and trying to pass messages or find tentacles.
Memories were as important as books and almost as important as proper indexing.
It was a leader’s job to project a calm mastery of the situation, while also encouraging subordinates to develop decision-making skills. Assuming that they made the right decisions. A leader’s job was a crock of shit.
“Have no fear!” Silver shouted, leaping onto a convenient table, bestriding a centrepiece of oysters. “The powers of my kind shall scourge these creatures back to the slime from which they crawled—” Amazing grammar in a crisis, Irene couldn’t help noticing. “Behold!” Silver raised his hand. Fire flared round his fingers dramatically, then leapt to strike the alligators in burning orange whips. It fizzled. There was no other word for it. The flames drooped and went out as if they’d been doused with cold water, leaving the alligators to rumble forward undeterred.
“Quick!” she snapped at Kai. “Help Miss Retrograde—” “The elder Miss Retrograde, if you please, young lady,” the older woman said, rising to her feet. “I knew I should have brought my pistol with me.”
I love this lady!
am perfectly capable of staying out of the way of a few alligators,” Irene said coolly. Especially if she stayed up on the table, but it would spoil the statement to add that. “I don’t think they can climb.” “I hope not.” The elder Miss Retrograde rapped Kai on the shoulder.
Irene turned back to Bradamant as the other Librarian called out a crisp string of orders in the Language. Fortunately the people around her were too preoccupied by the alligators to pay much attention.
“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.
“To save books,” Irene said firmly. The words were so automatic that she didn’t even need to think about them. She’d spent all her life with the idea. But the words had never sounded hollow to her before. She made herself focus on the familiar justification. “To save created works. In time, if their original alternate loses them, we can give them back copies, so that they aren’t lost. And in the meantime, the Library exists and endures.”
“And I know that the idea of an evil rogue Librarian must sound like some kind of rumour. The sort of rumour which gets passed down through the years to frighten the novices. But there were stories about things happening to people one actually knew.”
“You wouldn’t want to have any witnesses to illegal actions on your part, would you?” “Illegal actions?” Silver turned to his manservant. “Johnson! Have I committed any illegal actions?” Johnson checked his watch. “Not within the last three minutes, sir.” Silver turned back to Vale. “There you have it. Rest assured that I am not at the moment committing any illegal actions.
Irene felt a desperate surge of nostalgia for her Library. Her life was more than just airship chases, cyborg alligator attacks, and hanging out with this alternate universe’s nearest analogue to Sherlock Holmes.
Right now, she wanted nothing more than to shut the rest of the world out and have nothing to worry about except the next page of whatever she was reading.
What she needed was a miracle. What she got was a dragon.
don't we all
Irene had always assumed, when she’d read about dragons roaring, that the descriptions were figurative or at least hyperbolic. She’d thought that phrases like shook the earth referred to the awe in which dragons were held. Naturally the world around them would be sundered by their fury. What else should one expect from dragons? But the physical world wasn’t shaken by a dragon’s roar. Reality itself trembled.
