More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 4 - May 8, 2023
Sometimes undercover work as a Librarian involved posing as a rich socialite, and the Librarian in question got to stay at expensive hotels and country houses. All while wearing appropriately high fashion and dining off haute cuisine, probably on gold-edged plates. At other times, it involved spending months building an identity as a hardworking menial, sleeping in attics, wearing a plain grey woollen dress, and eating the same food as the boys. She could only hope that her next assignment wouldn’t involve endless porridge for breakfast.
Irene had been sent by the Library to this alternate world to obtain Midnight Requiems, the famous necromancer Balan Pestifer’s first published book.
no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared.
as a Librarian she had one big advantage that nobody else had—not necromancers, Fae, dragons, ordinary humans, or anyone. It was called the Language. Only Librarians could read it. Only Librarians could use it.
The only personal email in the whole batch was from her mother. A quick note, as quick and brief as Irene’s own email to her supervisor, to let Irene know that she and her father would be in Alternate G-337 for the next few months.
The Language updates were what she might have expected, given months of absence. No new grammar, but some new vocabulary, most of it world specific and dealing with concepts or items that hadn’t come to the Library before. A few adjectival redefinitions. A collected set of adverbs on the action of sleeping.
The more contributory material agents like Irene brought into the Library, the more the Language changed.
Still. There were compensations. Like being able to give orders to the world around you. But when she’d signed up for eternity, she hadn’t quite expected to spend most of it revising vocabulary lists.
This meant either that Coppelia didn’t want any argument and just wanted her out of the way and on the job, or that the mission was very urgent, or that there was something about Kai so dubious that he shouldn’t be seen in public.
Now, that was really bad. That could mean that Coppelia wasn’t prepared to put it in an email. Irene could smell politics, and she didn’t want to get involved with that at all.
He had the sort of beauty that instantly shifted him from a possible romance object to an absolute impossibility. Nobody got to spend time with people who looked like that outside the front pages of newspapers and glossy magazines.
Even his voice deserved admirers: low, precise, husky. His casual choice of words seemed more like affectation than actual carelessness.
Irene sat back and frowned at the screen. She was no conspiracy theorist, but if she had been, she could have constructed whole volumes based on that paragraph.
that world?” That was a reasonable question. 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. In this last case, the Library’s ownership of it would reinforce the Library’s links to the world from which the book originated.
By the time senior Librarians had become senior Librarians, they weren’t interested in anything less than rarities.
The question of why some books were unique and occurred only in specific worlds was one of the great imponderables,
She personally liked Coppelia, but words such as Machiavellian, efficiently unprincipled, and ice-hearted didn’t always go down well in conversations.
“Here’s my first suggestion to you as your new mentor, Kai. 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.”
“Get rid of the paper?” She laughed. “Kai, this is the Library. We never get rid of anything here. Ever.”
“Our destination is quarantined,” she said briskly. “It’s listed as having a high chaos infestation.” Which meant its risk factor went way beyond simply dangerous,
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.
“I thought—that is, we got told in basic orientation that the dragons always interfere if there’s a high chaos level. That they could bring a world back into line. That the worse it got, the more likely they were to interfere.”
“They have steam-level technology, though there was a side-note that recent ‘innovative advances’ had been made. The chaos infestation is taking the form of folklore-related supernatural manifestations, with occasional scientific aberrancy.”
Chaos made worlds act unreasonably. Things outside the natural order infested those worlds as a direct result.
No one knew exactly how or why chaos broke through into an alternate—or maybe that knowledge was above her pay grade.
It created things that worked by irrational laws. It infected worlds and it broke down natural principles.
We don’t know how many worlds there are, so we don’t know how many we lose to chaos.
“We’re splitting up. I want you to find out everything you can about the Liechtenstein ambassador, his embassy, and his involvement in the current situation. I’ll check out Wyndham’s place. We’ll meet at the hotel in Russell Square—eight o’clock at the latest. Find some way to get a message to me there if you’re delayed.”
She put her lips next to the lock and commanded in the Language, “Servants’ entry door-lock, sealed and closed, now open!”
But then there was Alberich. He’d left the Library five hundred years ago.
